The Book of M (15 page)

“You just should have given—you shouldn't have fought—” Wright stammered in the background.

“Naz,” Rojan murmured.

“Pressure,” Naz repeated.

“Naz,” Rojan said again, lips trembling.

Naz turned around to follow her sister's unsteady gaze. Wright was clutching the bag, staring in horror at what he'd done. The bow and quiver were on the ground at his feet, arrows scattered all around.

Wright and Naz both realized he was unarmed at the same time. They lunged, grappling in the dirt—and Wright miscalculated again that they were still much too close to use the bow.

But Naz knew. She used just an arrow.

AFTER THAT, SHE AND ROJAN MOVED MUCH SLOWER. TO WALK
carrying all the bags and propping her sister up was hard. They stopped a lot, because Naz was so delirious from trying not to sleep so she could keep watch with her bow, and because Rojan was so weak. They went back to not making fires.

They never made it to New Orleans. Washington, D.C., was as far as they got.

ORY CROSSED ROOSEVELT BRIDGE AN HOUR AFTER WAKING.
Almost to D.C. Almost to Max.

But when he reached the other side of the long, silent walk, he didn't recognize anything at all. Washington, D.C., looked nothing like Washington, D.C., anymore.

What remained was a city that had been lit on fire down to the last crevice and then doused with winter death. Black scorch marks covered everything. The roads, the earth, the sides of buildings, the roofs were all the same burnt darkness. And from the sky, a perpetual rain fell, a kind of freezing drizzle that felt heavier than water as it settled on him. The city would have glimmered, charred onyx overlaid with diamond, if not for the dark gray clouds that trapped all light.

He was a tourist at the end of the world.

JUST BEYOND THE KENNEDY CENTER, THERE WAS A GROUP OF
women camped out in what once had been a luxury apartment complex's ground-level garage. The door was either gone or rolled up, and they were standing at the edge of it, chatting quietly as they adjusted the blankets draped over their shoulders for warmth. Three shadows, four pairs of feet. The shadowless one was huddled with them, describing something that caused the rest of them to nod thoughtfully. She was short and wiry, with wild hair so red it was almost orange. In another lifetime, it would have been beautiful. Now all Ory could think was that it made her a target.

One of them said something, and they all laughed. Three shadows.
This might be it,
he thought nervously.
They might have seen Max.
They might remember.
The fabric under his armpits was so damp he could feel it squelch.

Ory made sure the knife was pushed as far back on his belt as possible, out of view, and the barrels of the shotgun—the
thunderstorm
—were cracked open to show they were empty.
Here goes nothing,
he thought as he stood up.

“Hello,” he called. “I don't mean any harm. I'm looking for my wife. Her name . . .”

That was when the small, sharp rock whizzed past his right temple.

Ory ducked. The next rock hit the ground just in front of him and splintered against the concrete.

No, no, no, this was not right at all. A searing burn erupted on his shoulder, and a tiny section of his shirt folded open to expose a sharp crimson split. The blood began to ooze. Ory snapped his arms up in front of his face for protection as he scrambled back. The two women in the front were pulling stones filed into barbs from purses strapped to their waists, flinging them with deadly aim as the other two scrambled for heavier weapons deeper in the garage. The shadowless one cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. “Mike! Jim! Intruder at the front!” Another rock struck the ground next to Ory's boot, and then he heard what could only have been the rev of a motorcycle engine from somewhere deeper in the crumbling complex.

He turned and sprinted with all he had.

WHEN HE COULDN'T HEAR THE GASOLINE ROAR ANYMORE,
Ory crawled into the first hovel he could find and poked gingerly at his shoulder. The slice was deep, but he hoped it didn't need stitches. He didn't have stitches anyway. He tried to squeeze the two sides of skin together over the meat beneath, but they peeled back open like eyelids over a red, swollen eye.

He chose another street, but it didn't matter. The few other people he found were the same.

Rocks, hammers, axes, tree branches shaved down into spears
and clubs. People were terrified Ory wanted to steal their food or kill them, and others couldn't remember whether they knew him or were afraid of him. They either ran him off or stared at him in silent terror until he gave up. One old woman with no shadow finally offered him a dried fish she'd caught in the Potomac.

“How many days?” he asked between ravenous bites.

“Nine,” she said. She smiled. “I should go now, in case I forget I gave you that.”

Ory finished and licked his fingers clean of the pungent oil. His stomach was already cramping from what was his first real food in days. “You haven't seen a woman, have you?” he asked her as she turned to leave. “I have her photograph.”

“Honey, I can't even remember my own name anymore,” she said. “I hope you find her.”

“Me too,” Ory said. “I think she headed east from here. We used to live near Dupont Circle before.”

“Oh, no,” the old woman scolded. She took hold of his face. “Don't go deeper in. Bad things, very bad things. You stay on the coast, like the rest of us. Better yet, into Arlington, or farther. That's what the young ones are doing.” She shook her head. “If your dear went into the city, you won't find her. You likely won't come back either.”

“What bad things?” Ory asked. But her face went blank, then twisted in fear. He left before she could attack him for the fish.

THE CLOSER TO THEIR APARTMENT ORY DREW, THE LOUDER
the streets became. He started to see snatches of movement. Smoke. Dust billowing from damaged buildings. Fresh blood. Screams down long alleyways. And shadowless, running across intersections between breaks of eerie silence. Running in straight lines.

Ory had seen a lot of people run in his early scouting days, before they all vanished. There was a difference between someone who was running
next
to someone, coincidentally in the same direction, and someone who was running
with
them. He watched the streets
nervously. It wasn't like in Arlington. These shadowless ran like they knew where they were going—and like they were going there together. Straight lines, sharp turns. He didn't know what to make of it. He just knew it could be nothing good.

“I'm coming, Max,” Ory whispered. He was almost there. On the side of the next building, in red dye of some kind, the words
The One Who Gathers
gleamed. He turned the corner at a sprint. Home.

I FOUND ANOTHER DRAWING YESTERDAY, AT AN
OTHER ABANDONED
camp. It looks like it's by the same artist as the one who drew the signs at the school in Oakton. I feel like I'm on the right track, Ory. I don't know to what yet, but the right track to something. This one—this one was the strangest of all.

The first thing I noticed were the ashes. They were from a campfire that had been put out earlier that morning, I realized as I squatted over it. All around, bare spots on the ground, where people had slept. Then I saw the drawing. Just behind the camp, on a section of the sidewalk that was still mostly intact, there was a painted shadow on the cement. A shadow, and no person. It looks even stranger than a person with no shadow.

I stood above it, in the exact same position—one arm raised as if talking, the other on my hip—and stared. I stood there for hours like that. It was such an odd thing to do. I didn't even feel particularly connected, like some part of me that was missing felt whole again. I wanted to so badly, Ory, but I just didn't. Instead, it was eerie, like putting on clothes that aren't yours, or going with it when someone at a crowded party mishears your name and calls you something slightly different for the rest of the loud, buzzing night.

Maybe I didn't feel anything because it wasn't a drawing of my own shadow. It was of the blue-eyed man's.

THE NEXT DAY, WHEN DR. ZADEH BROUGHT THE AMNESIAC
back to Maharashtra Regional Hospital for another session, Dr. Avanthikar's assistants were printing reams and reams of zigzagging lines on graph paper. Brain waves, he figured when she stepped away from supervising them long enough to embrace him warmly and shake Dr. Zadeh's hand.

“So much data,” she said to them. “Hopefully there's good news hiding inside it. You did a great job. Hemu hasn't had the patience to talk to someone for that length of time since before he was admitted.”

“They understand each other.” Dr. Zadeh smiled.

“I think he just feels comfortable,” the amnesiac said. “We've both forgotten some things. We're equals. Maybe, even, friends.”

“Oh, that reminds me—
one
sandwich,” Dr. Avanthikar said, wagging a finger at him. She'd heard them yesterday when the amnesiac promised to bring Hemu the American snack to try, and had decided to allow it. “One.”

Her tone made him happy. It wasn't the tone of a doctor assessing a patient's nutrition. It was the tone of a mother allowing her son to bend the rules because she loved him. She cared about Hemu as much as Dr. Zadeh cared about the amnesiac. “Got it,” he smiled. “One sandwich.”

She winked and opened the door to Hemu's room to show him in. From the couch, Hemu stared at Dr. Avanthikar for so long as she patiently reintroduced the two of them and stuck wire sensor pads on their heads again to hook them back up to their machines, the amnesiac was afraid he'd forgotten everything that happened
yesterday. But when she finally left the room and the low hum told him they'd started monitoring, Hemu smiled.

“I thought you might not remember me,” the amnesiac confessed.

“Oh, I remember you,” he said. “I just don't know who she was, who came with you.”

“She's a doctor,” the amnesiac replied. “Here to help you.” He tried not to think about her in there, sitting in the room behind the one where they were, listening. If she'd been hurt when she heard Hemu's words. “But how are you today? How do you feel?”

“I'm all right,” he replied. “I did a lot of thinking last night. About what you said, that you'd remember for me whatever I can tell you. At first I wasn't sure I was going to talk about this with you, but I think I should. We haven't known each other long, and I know our afflictions aren't the same, but I think you'll be more likely to understand than anyone. I think you're the best person to tell.”

The amnesiac put his hand up. “I'm honored to hear anything you want to share. But we have plenty of time, Hemu. I don't want you to feel pressured to share personal things with me until you feel comfortable. The Indian government granted me permission to work with your doctors for a full month, with the possibility of extension if necessary, even. We—”

“That doesn't mean we actually
have
a month,” Hemu interrupted. He shrugged. “You know?”

He did know. The amnesiac looked down, unable to meet Hemu's eyes. “I hope we have more time than that.”

“Me too,” Hemu said. “But in case we don't, there's something very important, something I've been working on since I was brought here—ever since I realized I'd started forgetting things. I want you to help me remember it.” He drew in a long breath. “Gajarajan Guruvayur Kesavan.”

The amnesiac simply nodded, intimidated by the number of syllables. “Another god?” he asked at last.

Hemu shook his head, expression intensely serious. The wires hung
like a headdress from him. “Guruvayur Kesavan was an elephant. Gajarajan—the king of elephants. He lived at Guruvayur Temple, in Kerala.”

The amnesiac tried to keep all the terms straight. “Do they worship the sun god Surya at Guru—Guruvayur Temple?” he guessed hopefully.

“No,” Hemu said. He turned around and patted the cushions of his couch. “Guruvayur Temple is dedicated to the worship of Vishnu, in the form of Krishna. His eighth and final form,” he explained absently, checking beneath another cushion.

“There are a lot of names in the Rigveda,” the amnesiac sighed.

“No, forget the Rigveda for now. This isn't ancient lore. Gajarajan was real—a real, living, breathing elephant. From the 1970s! I'm not talking about classical Hindu legends—I'm talking about research. Modern scientific research.
My
research.”

“
Your
research?” the amnesiac repeated, but Hemu was distracted.

“Where is it?” he mumbled, picking up the pillows to see if anything was beneath them. “Hello?” he called. The amnesiac could see Hemu was working back through what he'd just explained about Dr. Avanthikar, while he still remembered it. “Doctor—with the silver hair?”

After a moment, the door opened. Dr. Avanthikar's head poked into the room, braid swinging from over her shoulder. “You left it in your sleeping room.” An aide appeared behind her in the doorway, evidently having had gone to retrieve the thing Hemu had been looking for. “Here it is.” She crossed the room to them, something tucked under her arm.

He felt sad to see her then. “Thank you, Dr. Avanthikar,” the amnesiac said, using her name. He wanted to somehow apologize, for bringing out the fact that Hemu had forgotten her overnight.

“It's all right,” she said to him gently, and smiled. She understood what he was trying to do. She handed Hemu a three-ring binder, nearly stuffed, and went back to the observation room. Tiny corners
of mismatched paper stuck out from every angle, pages Hemu had torn out from elsewhere and pasted in.

When they were alone again, Hemu set the book down gently on the table between them, faceup. “Yes, my research. Everything I've been able to collect. The—” He had lost her name again. “The woman lets me; she thinks it's good for me to work on something. Are you ready?”

The amnesiac nodded. Hemu had enjoyed telling him about the god of the sun, but this was something very different from the Rigveda, he could tell. It was no mythological story. It was far more important to him.

Hemu opened the cover as if it was an antique. “This is Gajarajan. Most holy of all elephants in India.” On the first page, a cutout photograph of an elephant stared back at them, a huge, dark gray face framed by a fan of equally dark ears. It was much darker than the concept of elephants had been in the amnesiac's mind—this one looked almost black, as if carved out of charcoal. At the center, the long line of its broad forehead and muscular hanging trunk were a hundred shades lighter, like it had dipped its face and long nose into a puddle of pale satin paint.

“Oh,” the amnesiac said, transfixed. There was something almost human about its expression, the expectant posture of its head. Its black eyes were gigantic. They stared not past the camera, at whoever had been taking the picture, but directly into the lens—as if the creature understood the concept of a photograph.

“Majestic, isn't he,” Hemu said. He turned the book back to himself, to smile lovingly at Gajarajan's photo. “Did you know that the word that means a group of elephants together is
memory
?” he asked. “A memory of elephants.”

“An elephant never forgets,” the amnesiac said automatically. It was a thing people said, he realized. He wondered how he knew that. He turned and glanced at the opaque glass of the observation window for a moment, hoping Dr. Zadeh was watching them from the other
side. He'd know to write that down if he saw the look—had the amnesiac ever actually seen an elephant before?

Hemu turned a few more pages. Gajarajan danced between them, dark eyes, pale curled trunk. “Not only that,” he continued. “Did you know they have the same memory?”

“Like, if two elephants experience something together?” the amnesiac asked.

Hemu shook his head. “One elephant experiences something, and another remembers it.”

The amnesiac lost a beat, and then decided to say what he'd heard Dr. Zadeh say, when he knew one of his Alzheimer's patients had mixed something up. “I see,” he finally replied.

Hemu snorted and started flipping through his book again. “I didn't forget this,” he insisted. “This is not one of those things, there's documented—” He stopped suddenly at an old article. “Here.”

It was a story about Gajarajan from the 1950s, when the elephant was middle-aged. According to the clipping, he'd been born a wild elephant. But when he was a calf, hunters separated him from his family at a river crossing and kidnapped him. It was common practice at the time for nobles to gift elephants to Hindu temples, the article continued, where they would live within the grounds and be magnificently decorated to perform in rituals and parades. The royal family of Nilambur offered the young Gajarajan—named only Kesavan then—to Guruvayur Temple.

Decades after, when Gajarajan had become one of the most famous elephants in India for his almost uncanny devotion to his religious duties, several of his still-wild siblings were captured by poachers for their ivory. Before they could be killed, the locals, who kept informal watch over Gajarajan's remaining family to honor him, ran the men off with machetes. The attacks had become more and more frequent, and the locals decided the only way to keep the rest of Gajarajan's family safe would be to move them to a protected elephant sanctuary, hundreds of kilometers away. It was at this sanctuary that one of
Gajarajan's sisters, who had been born a few years
after
his capture and donation to Guruvayur Temple, met an American volunteer biologist who eventually taught her to paint after watching her scratch around in the dirt with sticks.

Gajarajan's sister painted every Friday when the biologist came to the sanctuary and brought her another canvas and more cans of paint. Almost all of his sister's creations were portraits of the biologist, who had long brown hair and wore a metal prosthetic leg from her left knee down—she had been born without her foreleg and foot.

Later that year, the Guruvayur priests began renovating their temple in preparation for an upcoming holiday. Gajarajan was put into the inner courtyard so they could repair part of his enclosure. According to the article, Gajarajan wandered around placidly as usual, gently examining the tools and tarps lying ready for use. But when he came upon a crate that contained paintbrushes, his mood suddenly changed. Gajarajan seized one with his trunk and then stepped on the paint cans until they puckered under his massive weight, bending open. By the time the priests noticed what had happened, Gajarajan was already halfway finished. On the concrete wall nearest to him, he'd used the paint meant to freshen up the pillars and the roofs to create a messy but unmistakable picture of a woman—with brown hair and one silver leg.

“Impossible,” the amnesiac said, looking up from the article.

“Isn't it?” Hemu asked. “Gajarajan never left the temple after he was captured as a calf. He never met the biologist—non-Hindus aren't allowed on the temple grounds. No one showed him the—the—” He had forgotten the word for
sister,
as he had also forgotten his own brothers. “—the other elephant's art.”

The amnesiac gave Hemu back the book. He didn't know what to say. Something was sparking in the back of his mind, like a tiny shock. Electrical impulses on synapses, Dr. Zadeh always said. It felt like more than that though. The Rigveda stories an entire country knew, the legend of Surya and his wife and her shadow, Gajarajan,
his herd, their paintings. The shock trailed off somewhere deep when he tried to follow. Everything Hemu said—about the gods, about this elephant's urban legend—always drifted off, fragmented, incomplete. But the chatter wasn't aimless, any which way. He was talking in circles, around and around a thing he knew was important but couldn't reach.

“It's probably impossible to have amnesia, as an elephant. The other elephants would remember for you,” Hemu said to himself. He touched the picture of Gajarajan. “Too bad we're human.”

The amnesiac watched Hemu's face. Perhaps on the doctor's screens, their brains looked identical, blobs of color firing randomly on black backgrounds, but inside the room they were not the same at all. He had to deal only with having forgotten—he never had to live the actual forgetting.

“Hemu, are you afraid?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” Hemu said.

The amnesiac tried to smile. “Don't be. I know it's not much comfort, but I—I mean, I'm doing all right. You will, too.”

Hemu shook his head, eyes wide. “You don't get it, though.” His voice was so quiet, almost just breath. The sensors glued to their heads could see electrical pulses but not know the exact words. The amnesiac realized Hemu didn't want the others to hear. He looked around quickly—for microphones, for cameras—as the young man leaned near. “It's not the same thing,” Hemu whispered.

“Why?”

“Because you forgot everything on accident.”

There was a moment when the amnesiac expected the door to crash open and the aides to run in, but nothing happened. It felt as though he had become lighter, or gravity had become infinitesimally weaker. He leaned in too, as close as he could. “What do you mean, on accident?” he asked. “You didn't?”

Hemu's eyes searched the amnesiac's desperately. “After your shadow is gone, there's a pull,” he said.

“What pull?”

“To
forget
.”

All the air had left the room. “The loss of your shadow makes you forget,” the amnesiac said slowly, reiterating what Dr. Avanthikar had said. That was what the research group and all its consultants had posited so far—there was some correlation there, even though no one knew what.

Hemu shook his head. “No, no, I don't think so. Not really.” He looked down at the couch, where nothing else sat on it with him. “It just makes it
possible
. But you don't
have
to. An elephant who has had its chains cut off doesn't
have
to leave its temple.”