The Book of M (29 page)

“It doesn't matter,” Ory said. “You got the book.” The book was Paul. Not that. That had never been.

“Book,” he repeated.

Ory took it from where it lay beside Imanuel, still wrapped in a tattered plastic bag he must have brought from the Iowa to protect it. There was so much blood Ory could barely see. He pressed his hand to Imanuel's neck to try to stanch the place he thought the enraged, throbbing flood was leaving his body, but it didn't help. The wounds were too deep. He tried to pick Imanuel up, but Imanuel was too weak to help him lift. They sank back to the floor as the Reds began to crowd around them.

“Go,” Imanuel said, but Ory shook his head. The Reds converged. He couldn't move. He couldn't leave Imanuel.

Suddenly Ahmadi was there, slapping his face, trying to bring him out of his shock. Ory looked up to see Malik hoisting up the other side of Imanuel's limp, pallid body. They'd broken the General's order, too. They had come.

“Retreat!” The world snapped back into focus as Malik shouted the command at him, over and over. “Retreat!” Ory's feet were somehow already obeying before he'd even understood the words, running as they carried Imanuel together toward the open doors. Behind, he could hear the blunt punch of arrow shafts through flesh as Ahmadi killed the Reds that followed, one after another.

“I can't stop the bleeding!” Ory yelled to Malik. His fingers scrambled at Imanuel's neck. He could feel Imanuel feebly trying to guide him with his own hands, to show him where to push to stop the blood from pouring out of him.
He's so calm,
Ory thought hysterically as he tried to choke the hot, syrupy liquid without cutting off Imanuel's air.
How can he be so calm?

Most of the walls were on fire then, cracking in the sweltering heat. Rocks split against the floor around their feet as the Reds hurled them. Ory wanted to cover his head, but there was no way. He just kept running as fast as he could without dropping Imanuel, praying that nothing would land on them.

“Ory . . .” Imanuel coughed. “The book—”

“I still have it,” Ory yelled, to make sure Imanuel could hear him. “I have it, don't worry!”

He did have it, just barely, pinched between his biceps and rib as he tried to keep it there and support Imanuel's slackening weight. If Ory dropped him, the Reds would be on them before they could pick him up again. If he dropped the book, they'd lose it forever. Malik would never let them stop for it.

As if he could read Ory's mind, Imanuel's hands grew tighter around his wrist. “If you can't—carry both,” he managed to choke out. “Take. Book.”

TWO MONTHS AFTER DR. ZADEH WAS KILLED, SOMEONE IN
New Orleans forgot that the electrical grid had been destroyed in the initial, panicked riots, and the power in the city suddenly came back—although the system wasn't quite the same as before. This time, instead of a generator in a factory, the wires just met and shot off in a tangle into the sky, to retrieve energy from passing storms, so no one had to service them. Inconsistent, but at least functional. Apparently far more than most cities had. According to the old man the amnesiac rescued from the abandoned bus station he'd chosen to die in, both San Diego and Oklahoma City now
hopped
—portions of the cities from single buildings, roads, neighborhoods, to entire zip codes rose between inches and several stories into the air at random times, then settled again. It was probably someone's terror of earthquakes that brought it about. The old man had left California after his son slipped during a
hop
and fell to his death. If only the shadowless could have forgotten that seismic movement existed, instead of that cities couldn't jump in defense.

“Are you the leader here?” the old man asked him, lifting his bald, leathered head from the pillow. He coughed weakly.

“Of New Orleans, or of this facility?”

“You should think about the hurricanes,” the old man continued, ignoring the question. “Something should be done about the hurricanes before the season hits. Don't wait until one is already here.”

The amnesiac watched him shiver through his fever as he slept in one of the many empty beds, trying to imagine all the fantastical iterations a hurricane could evolve into, all the twisted interpretations
of human desire to stop a deadly storm that there were, both possible and impossible. The old man's breath was fluttering, uneven.

“Is he going to die?” Buddy asked.

The amnesiac turned and looked at the young shadowless in the doorway from his place beside the old man. “I think so,” he said. “Probably before morning. He's very weak.”

Buddy pushed an unruly shock of hair off his forehead. The amnesiac had found him a month ago—it was more dangerous now, but he still tried to continue Dr. Zadeh's work, when he could. “Such a shame.” He sighed. “Still has his shadow and everything.”

“You're doing well, though.”

“Yeah,” Buddy said. But it wasn't really an answer—just a noncommittal sound one would make to fill their turn in a conversation they weren't really listening to. He was still staring longingly at the thin, dark copy of the old man's bony arm where it lay, draped over the sheet.

It had been a long time since they'd had another shadow in the assisted-living facility besides the amnesiac's own. Everyone but him had either died or lost theirs. It was strange, to share all the blank space on the walls with the old man's withered silhouette.

“Such a shame,” Buddy murmured again absently.

“Buddy,” the amnesiac said. “Buddy.”

“Yeah?”

“Where are the others?”

For a moment, the amnesiac thought he was going to say,
What others?
But Buddy finally blinked, pulling himself out of his trance. “The rain. Marie said from the clouds that she thinks a storm isn't far off. She said we can't wait any longer. We have to go into the storage basement now.”

THEY STOOD IN THE SMALL CENTER COURTYARD, LOOKING UP
into the roiling, sinking sky.

“See? When they look like that, a hurricane is a day out, maybe less,” Marie said as she lowered the finger she'd been pointing. They no longer called her Nurse Marie—just Marie—because she was not a nurse. Not since she had forgotten she was one, when her shadow left, too. She was chewing on the corner of her lip as she pointed, because she was proud she still remembered how to read the clouds, and was trying not to smile.

The rest of the shadowless stood behind them, all twenty. “Can you tell how bad it'll be?” the amnesiac asked her.

“Bad, I think,” she said. “Maybe not quite Katrina bad, but bad.”

“Who's Katrina?” Buddy asked.

Marie flexed her wrist so her palm flashed at him, as if to gently scoot away the question. The shadowless at the facility had started to do that among themselves when one had forgotten something that wasn't worth explaining. A kind of gentle shorthand to mean,
Don't worry about it, it doesn't matter.

“How much time do we have?” the amnesiac asked.

“None,” Curly said. He pulled his namesake into a stumpy ponytail and bound it to keep the strands away from his face. “By the time we finish moving all the food and supplies into the storage basement to wait this out, it'll practically be here.”

“Wait it out,” Marie sighed. “If it's a hurricane, fine. But it might not be a hurricane, once it reaches us. It might be the memory of one.”

“I know,” the amnesiac said quietly. “But what else can we do?”

“Will it be . . . It?” Buddy asked. “The end?”

“We survived the riots,” he replied. He put a hand on Buddy's shoulder. “And the exterminators. And starvation. A lot of things.”

“Yeah, but those—” Buddy frowned, struggling for words. The amnesiac tried to judge whether it was fear or shadowlessness that was making it difficult, but he couldn't tell. He wished Dr. Zadeh was still with them. “Those things were new. No one could forget them because they hadn't existed before. A hurricane is different.”

“Okay, enough. It's bad. But it's still coming. We need to take
care of what we
can
do before we sit around and worry about what we
can't,
” Downtown said. Not her real name, of course—only where they had found her. She thought the nickname would tell her more about herself than whatever her real name had been, and so it stuck. More and more of the shadowless had started renaming themselves like that, to remind themselves of the most important things.

“Okay,” the amnesiac said. “Let's do this quickly. Food, water, blankets, clothes, medicine. I'll get our patient files. Go in groups. Everyone remind everyone what you're all doing. Like we practiced—keep reminding!”

“Keep reminding!” Buddy crowed. Everyone splintered into small groups of three or four, darting off down different hallways. “Food, main hall!” Marie called as her group scrambled toward the cafeteria—the items they needed to retrieve, and the place to take them. “Food, main hall!” the person behind her repeated.

“Blankets, main hall!” Downtown's voice echoed from another corridor. Each person repeated their team's phrase after the one in front of them said it, a circular chorus. As they all vanished into the assisted-living facility's other wings, the words blurred until it sounded more like a song being played from far away.

In Dr. Zadeh's darkened office, his research lay in neat stacks on his desk. The amnesiac took his leather bag from the hook on the back of the door and began to file the folders into it.
DOWNTOWN (F), NURSE MARIE (F), CURLY (M), BUDDY (M)
. The handwritten labels flicked past as he slid each bundle into place. Some of the files were thicker than others; some had only one sheet. It depended on at what point they had found each shadowless—how much they had left that he or Dr. Zadeh could record as potential data. Research for a cure that would never be finished now, but at least they could use them as a record of who each of them had once been. They'd never be able to recover what Downtown's real name was, but at least her file could tell her that she hated carrots and was forty-three years old.

At the bottom, the oldest file, far thicker than the rest. The am
nesiac's eyes caught on the label. It had once said one thing, then been scratched out and rewritten, then scratched out and rewritten again, until there was almost no room. He smiled and shook his head. Dr. Zadeh had tried earnestly to keep up with whatever nickname for the amnesiac had come into fashion among the Alzheimer's residents, and then later the shadowless patients, until finally he'd run out of white space on his tiny label, and given up in an exasperated sputter of tiny capital letters. The amnesiac read his cramped scrawl and smiled, but it was not a happy smile. He felt his shoulders slump. He put the file into the leather bag and sat down in the doctor's dusty chair.

GAJARAJAN (M)
.

For a few minutes, it felt like Dr. Zadeh might walk through the door again at any moment. Then it felt like the amnesiac had been sitting there wishing he could see him one more time for years.

Finally he stood up and went to the far corner, where a much smaller table sat by a window. A heavy binder rested atop it. The amnesiac had kept working on his own research at least, even if he couldn't complete Dr. Zadeh's. His copy of Hemu's notebook was probably four times as thick now as when Hemu's doctor had first gifted it to him.

He didn't mean to, but it was hard to resist. He found his fingers flipping through the familiar pages, articles and snippets he knew backward and forward. In the middle, he stopped on a torn-out scene from an old play.
Peter Pan,
written in 1904 by a man named J. M. Barrie.

MRS. DARLING
(
making sure that MICHAEL does not hear
)
.
The first time was a week ago. It was Nana's night out, and I had been drowsing here by the fire when suddenly I felt a draught, as if the window were open. I looked round and I saw that boy—in the room.

MR. DARLING.
In the room?

MRS. DARLING.
I screamed. Just then Nana came back and she at once sprang at him. The boy leapt for the window. She pulled down the sash quickly, but was too late to catch him.

MR. DARLING
(
who knows he would not have been too late
)
.
I thought so!

MRS. DARLING.
Wait. The boy escaped, but his shadow had not time to get out; down came the window and cut it clean off.

MR. DARLING
(
heavily
)
.
Mary, Mary, why didn't you keep that shadow?

MRS. DARLING
(
scoring
)
.
I did. I rolled it up, George; and here it is.

She produces it from a drawer. They unroll and examine the flimsy thing, which is not more material than a puff of smoke, and if let go would probably float into the ceiling without discolouring it. Yet it has human shape.

. . .

MR. DARLING.
It is nobody I know, but he does look a scoundrel.

MRS. DARLING.
I think he comes back to get his shadow, George.

“A scoundrel.” The amnesiac smiled. He knew why Hemu had saved this clipping among the rest of his far more serious, desperate research, as silly and unhelpful as it was—because it was so charming. If only shadows were actual objects that could be touched or rolled up in drawers like pieces of paper. The amnesiac sighed. If only it was all that simple.

He closed the binder before he read any more, lest he lose track of time. The pale, solemn face on the cover stared back at him, dark eyes hovering over the long, hanging trunk. He put it on top and zipped up the leather bag as he ducked out.

“
WATER, MAIN HALL.” THE FAINT MUSIC REACHED THE AMNESIAC
as he passed the main room again, on the way to the infirmary. “Water, main hall . . .” Thunder shattered outside, booming through the facility, and a few startled screams chirped down the hallways.

“Good job, everyone!” the amnesiac yelled as loudly as he could. “Do as much as you can, and get to the main hall quickly!”

“Food, main hall!” He heard Marie shout back, trying to spur herself and her teammates on.

“Infirmary, main hall,” he said to himself, turning into the tiled room with a row of beds. “Old man, time to go.”

“Water,” the old man whispered.

“We have plenty. But we have to go downstairs to get it. Can you walk?”

The old man blinked dazedly. “I think I'm dying,” he finally said. “Too much. Pushed too hard.”

The amnesiac hefted the leather bag higher onto his shoulder. The old man was fairly tall, but weighed almost nothing now. “Can you sit?” he asked. “If you can sit, I think I can get you into a position where I can carry you.”

The old man tried to sit. He struggled up onto his elbows, arms shivering. Bravely he grasped the side of the bed with one skeletal hand and pulled.

“Easy,” the amnesiac said. He looped one arm through each of the leather bag's short straps, so it was stuck against the front of him like a backpack worn on the wrong side. “I'm going to gently lay you over my back. Ready?”

“Maybe you should just leave me here,” the old man said. “I don't think it'll be long.”

“Trust me, you don't want to be up here,” the amnesiac said. The rain had started to thrash the roof overhead. “If you're going to die tonight, you want to go in a dry, warm place, with someone sitting next to you. I've done this a lot here. Seen people off. It's better to go in company—even if you only met them yesterday.”

“You're a good man,” he wheezed.

“Maybe.” The amnesiac shrugged. “I don't remember.”

IN THE MAIN HALLWAY, ALL THE GROUPS HAD CONVERGED,
each carrying or dragging boxes. The storm hurled rain against the east wall, startling them all into a crouch for a moment. The amnesiac counted quickly. “Everyone's here. Okay, let's go. Basement!”

“Basement! Basement!” They all revised the chant. Marie held a wooden torch she'd made and lit somewhere, to help them through the dark hallways. Boxes began to scrape across the floor, out toward the central atrium garden, where the storm doors to the basement were. Just as the amnesiac turned to follow last, something banged against the front lobby door.

“Shit!” he gasped. He stumbled, recovered, barely keeping the old man on his back. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.