The Book of M Read online

  Naz often wondered now what happened to all of them. The telescopes. It would be strange to find them again someday, if any of them were still standing in this new world changed. Survivors would come upon them in their silent domed houses and look through their tiny glass eyepieces and think they were magic. Sometimes science seemed like magic. To watch Hemu Joshi live and breathe without his shadow was like watching magic.

  There were attempts to turn his mystery into science, of course. And actually, there was some science to it. It was an obscure astronomy fact, but Naz had learned it from her sister. It turned out that actually, in a few countries, shadows disappearing happened every single year on a specific date.

  It sounded impossible, but it was just physics. It had to do with the angle of the sun and the seasons—the lands between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and sometime in late spring to early summer, to be exact. “No matter where you live, you always think of the sun as directly above you at noon each day, but that isn’t actually true,” Rojan had explained to her once, when she still lived in Tehran. Naz had tried to explain it to her coach and teammates as they watched Hemu on TV—the looks on their faces had made her laugh. But it was true. The earth was too big and too curved. Even though it looked like it, the sun was actually never exactly overhead. Except in India, on a certain day in mid-May.

  Or as the locals called it, Zero Shadow Day.

  The most insane, unbelievable thing, and it happened every year. Rojan had always wanted to visit. Zero Shadow Day had become a small festival there over the decades, celebrated on successive days as the earth tilted each dawn to position a different city directly under the sun—complete with basic astronomy lessons, parades, and kite flying. Every year just before noon, huge crowds would flock to open squares in the markets to wait for the moment that the sun was so exactly poised above them that their shadows would disappear for a few stunning seconds. Teachers encouraged kids to place various objects in the street—flashlights, basketballs, cricket bats—to see if they could outsmart the sun. They never could. Under the rolling hum of hand drums and sitars, as the earth and sun became perfectly aligned, all the shadows in the city and beneath the people slowly would shrink to tiny little dark specks on the ground, vanish, and then come back as the earth rotated on and away. Always.

  A perfectly scientific explanation.

  There just wasn’t any scientific explanation as to why after that brief window, everyone else who was outdoors on that day watched the dark shape of themselves flicker back into form from the tips of their heels, while Hemu Joshi stayed shadowless and free. No explanation but magic.

  So for three magical days, the entire world watched Hemu Joshi dance around untethered to the earth, captivated by the un-understandable beauty of it. Magic. Flights and hotels were monstrously overbooked, people were sleeping in restaurants and on the streets, television channels played his clips endlessly, poetry was written about him. He even appeared to Naz in her dreams. Scientists went wild, but not a single one could prove exactly what was going on. And the day after Hemu’s shadow disappeared, news broke that it had also happened to a group of eightysomething people in Mumbai during the celebration of their own successive Zero Shadow Day festival. The news started calling them the Angels of Mumbai. It didn’t sound silly at all. And then a day after that, the third day, it happened to a group of fifteen in Ahmednagar, and a group of twelve in Nashik . . .

  The reports kept coming in late into that third evening, as more and more scattered cases across the state of Maharashtra were reported, family after family, village after village. It was like watching a miracle. When she heard about the Angels of Mumbai, Naz actually thought that they were all about to transcend into some kind of higher existence. And as ridiculous as that kind of statement sounded when uttered out loud, the world was so in awe that she didn’t feel self-conscious. Not even a little. She was standing wrapped in a towel in her bathroom, dripping everywhere, waving her arms around and declaring it to one of her teammates and the toilet while she brushed her teeth, and she didn’t feel silly or dramatic in the slightest. That’s how taken the world was with it.

  Then on the fourth day, it all started to go horribly wrong.

  HEMU JOSHI HAD PROBABLY BEEN FORGETTING THINGS SINCE the first moment of Zero Shadow Day, but it wasn’t apparent until the morning of that fourth day.

  The morning that the bad news broke, Naz got up early and turned on the TV so she could watch Hemu while she fried some eggs for breakfast. The sizzle from the skillet garbled the reporter’s voice-over, but the view was familiar. Since Zero Shadow Day, Hemu had been living exactly where he was first spotted—outdoors in the center of the Mandai market—disappearing only to quickly change clothes or go to the bathroom. There had been such a desperate outcry on that first night when he tried to go home to sleep that his two brothers had given in and dragged some bedding out and down the crowded, winding streets to him. Now the three of them camped in the center of the breezy, fluttering textiles aisle. By the middle of that first night, so many people had brought them blankets and other offerings of fruit and silk that their little patch of dusty concrete looked like some kind of ridiculous sultan’s love chamber.

  Something was strange, though. Since Naz had turned on the TV, only Hemu’s brothers had been on the screen, instead of Hemu. She glanced away to give the eggs a good push with her spatula, and when she turned back, she realized they looked concerned this time, not friendly. One of them was shouting, “No cameras!” The other brother reached toward the cameraman, and the screen went dark as his hand grabbed the lens and yanked it down toward the ground.

  “What you just saw was our most recent footage of Vinay and Rahul Joshi, Hemu Joshi’s brothers, taken just minutes ago.” The screen abruptly cut back to a sharp-shouldered, severe news anchor. “Since five this morning India Standard Time, Joshi’s family has refused the media access to Joshi after he was found wandering through the business district of Pune, apparently disoriented and—”

  Naz turned off the burner, leaving the eggs half-done and still translucent in the pan, and went to get her laptop. By the time the yolks had hardened into a yellowy mess, she had pieced together what happened. When the news crews woke up and turned the cameras back on at dawn, they realized Hemu wasn’t sleeping beside Vinay and Rahul anymore. They woke the brothers, and the two of them went home to see if Hemu was there, but he wasn’t. A search was mounted, and that’s when they found Hemu stumbling around the opposite end of the market, confused and agitated. He was shouting at the crowd that he didn’t want to be followed and he was sick of the news crews, which was understandable. But then his brothers pushed to the front of the mass, and that’s when the strangest thing happened: Hemu didn’t recognize them at all.

  Most of the news crews were still obsessed with getting a shot of Hemu, the man who had captured the attention of billions. But there was a second-rate team from some American gossip channel in Nashik—attempting to drum up interest in a group of twelve children they were trying and failing to dub the Nashik Cherubs, a terrible rip-off of the Angels of Mumbai—who turned this from a curiosity to a tragedy.

  Their cameraman and reporter started sending video back to their little news studio in Los Angeles, but within minutes it was all over the international networks: the Nashik Cherubs were also starting to forget things.

  Orlando Zhang

  ORY TOOK THE NOTE OFF THE REMINGTON. 4—Max can’t touch the gun.

  The shells were in a box on the floor of their closet, like a pile of discarded body parts. He loaded the gun, then in pairs he fed the rest into the pockets of his pants until the box was empty. Then he grabbed all three of his moth-eaten sweaters and put them on one over the other, and covered them with the red Elk Cliffs Resort—STAFF windbreaker he’d found in the housekeeping office. Max’s clothes were still there in neat piles, but it looked as though some were missing. A shirt or two. Maybe she had seen the stack on her way out of the shelter and still
been clearheaded enough to take some. Ory hoped that’s what had happened. There was no blood anywhere, nor signs of struggle, so he had to believe that she had left by herself and not as someone’s hostage. All he had to do then was find her. Find her fast.

  Next was supplies. Matches, first-aid kit, flashlight. Again, some of it seemed like it was missing. He was sure they’d collected more boxes of matches than what was in the drawer. Maybe they hadn’t. Or maybe Max had forgotten the exact number they owned and thus changed it, the way she had with the color of the knife handle. Ory stood there at the useless sink, cabinet drawer open, staring at a pair of scissors and the blank space beside it where he could have sworn they kept a spare. It was hard to tell.

  Last, a photograph of Max.

  In the floorboards by his side of the bed, he’d carved a simple trapdoor. He pulled his old wallet out and gently wiped the dust off. One debit card, one credit card, four dollar bills, a gym membership card, and his driver’s license.

  Ory eased the license out of the plastic window. If the Forgetting ever happened to him, this would be his tape recorder, he thought. Name, date of birth, height, weight, a tiny photograph of his face. It wouldn’t tell him anything he really needed to know, like that Max was his wife and he would step in front of a bus for her, that they had no children, that they met at a football game he almost didn’t go to and then almost left early from, that he was absurdly good at skiing, or that he was secretly terrified of bees. But it would at least tell him his name. And it also was a shield for the thing that really mattered. A wallet-size photograph of Max.

  It was from the night before Paul and Imanuel’s wedding—after the shadows had disappeared in India, Brazil, and Panama, but before it had gone much further than that. That evening the guests all had been in the hotel ballroom just downstairs from where he was standing now, eating chocolates and drinking champagne. Paul and Imanuel had opened some of the gifts early, and one of them had been a Polaroid instant camera that produced tiny, refrigerator-magnet-sized instant photos.

  The camera was passed around as the party got later, and when Ory got ahold of it, he took a picture of Max. She had been standing right at the open French doors that led out into the courtyard, but the light from inside was bright enough that when she turned to look at him as he said, “Excuse me, ma’am,” her face was bathed in a yellow glow that made her eyes shimmer. “Blue,” he said. He snapped it just as the smile had started to spread across her lips.

  One of the other women pulled her away to gossip about something before it was done developing, so Ory stood there in the night air just outside the doors, shaking the film lightly, peeking every few seconds to see if it had finished. By the time he found her again and she pressed another flute of Dom Pérignon into his hands and whispered in his ear, breath hot, her voice light with a hint of buzz, “You are not going to believe what Imanuel just told me about the second groomsman,” she’d forgotten he’d taken a picture of her at all.

  Ory slid the photo back in and put his driver’s license securely on top of it. Even though she was all done up, hair pulled into a messy bun and makeup on, Max still looked almost the same, and it would do for showing people he passed, if he ever passed anyone, to ask if they’d seen a woman who looked like this. Assuming they could remember how to speak, or anything they’d seen at all.

  Back in the main room, the paper that had been taped to the inside of their door since the beginning caught his eye again. There was one rule he and Max had made, long before she’d lost her shadow and they had made the rest of them. Rule Zero, they had started calling it after they’d written the list. He pulled it down and crumpled it into a withered ball. There was no way Max could not have seen it when she left. What did that mean? How much had she forgotten?

  They’d made Rule Zero when they became the only ones left at the hotel. For months there had been no electricity, no running water, then no radio. Then finally there were no other guests. They couldn’t avoid the conversation about it any longer.

  “It’s not fair,” Max had said. “If it was me that went missing, you’d come after me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Ory replied. It didn’t even sound believable to him.

  “Yes, you would,” Max argued. “Besides, it’s different. You go out all day, and I stay here most of the time. If I disappeared, it would be because I lost my shadow and forgot to stay, so of course you shouldn’t follow then!”

  “Don’t—” He grimaced. It felt like tempting fate to ever mention the possibility it could happen to either of them.

  “I only meant, if you were the one who didn’t come home, it would probably be because you were injured somewhere and needed my help.”

  “I’ll make sure to get killed, then, so there’s nothing to come help.”

  “Ory,” Max said, her voice horribly small.

  The silence settled between them, heavy. “Sorry,” he finally murmured.

  They looked down at dinner—one plastic bag of potato chips. What he’d found the last time he’d gone out.

  “I just can’t,” Max said. “It would be one thing if one of us forgot. But if you go missing while you’re out looking for food, I’m going to go to where you said you went and try to find you.”

  “That’s not the deal,” Ory said.

  “That’s as good as you’re going to get,” she shot back. “I’ll give you that if one of us forgets, the other doesn’t go after. I can’t do any more than that. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Ory finally said. He used paper from the abandoned guest book—wrote the rule in silence and hung it up. You never go after the other person if they forget. They didn’t speak for the rest of the evening.

  It was the best they could do, but it wasn’t enough. Over the next few weeks, Ory stopped telling Max where he went to scavenge for scraps each day, or if she refused to let him out the door without an answer, lied so blatantly she knew it was so. Eventually she stopped asking, because she knew what he was doing.

  Later that night, after they’d made Rule Zero, Ory used a tiny bit of the precious soap they had left. The shelter had contained boxes and boxes of surplus inventory, back when it was Elk Cliffs Resort, and in the early days they’d squandered it. Bathing whenever they liked, washing their hair at least once a day. It made things still feel normal. They realized too late that what had looked like an endless supply in the housekeeping closets actually wasn’t. They now had two hundred toothbrushes left, but no more toothpaste. Nine hundred towels, but barely any body wash. Now they were trying to stretch what was left, bathing only every few days, and only washing the essential areas. He dipped his finger into the plastic container and tried to scrape every millimeter of excess back in. Only what was needed. He reached down, away from his face and hair, and worked the slippery cleansing film over his testicles. He pulled back the foreskin, trying to spread the soap upward, working painstakingly to scrub away the vague, inescapable musk.

  Max was already in bed when he toweled off after his bucket bath and slipped into the darkness of the bedroom. He crawled in next to her, naked, self-conscious. Her breathing echoed softly in the darkness. When soap was infinite before, bathing never used to mean anything. It didn’t reveal things one didn’t want announced so clearly. But now, with so little left, and bathwater from rain that they were collecting in buckets on the roof, it somehow became shameful. There was no subtlety in a world without soap. No room to pretend what one desperately needed and what one could skip tonight, no big deal, only if you feel like it, too.

  Ory touched her back, under the tickling puff of her hair, and his fingers brushed against a T-shirt. Max rolled over, pulling him into a lazy hug, and he felt her realize he was nude and still damp mid-embrace—her arms paused for an instant, legs half-entwined with his own, her body recalibrating with dawning understanding. Ory withered, but he dug around clumsily for the bottom hem of her shirt anyway, trailed his hands upward inside of it until he felt the silken, heavy curve of her breasts.


  She drew him closer and took hold of his slackening stiffness with one hand. Her fingers wrapped around firmly, and she pressed her other hand over his own on her breast through the fabric.

  He tried to forget. The soap. Being the only ones left. Rule Zero. Everything. Her hands moved, warm, pulling him toward her.

  He couldn’t.

  BEFORE SUNRISE, ORY WAS PACKED AND READY TO HEAD OUT to search for Max. His head had stopped bleeding. He sat on the edge of the bed waiting for first light, too tense to sleep. If only, Ory thought to himself. If only. If only he’d come home three hours earlier. If only he hadn’t chased the rabbit. If only he hadn’t gone to Broad Street again. If only. Max would still be here.

  He picked up the ball of paper with Rule Zero on it from the floor and crumpled it further, crushing it until it had compacted into something the size of a walnut. It had looked the same as all the rest of the rules when he’d written it, hanging mutely around the abandoned hotel in their relevant places. You never go after the other person if they forget. But the rule was always meant to apply only to Ory. Never the other way around. This—now—this was not how Rule Zero was supposed to play out, not the way things were supposed to happen. This was not an unfortunate scouting accident. It was his fault. His fault that he didn’t return home in time to stop Max from leaving because she had forgotten she was supposed to stay.

  Ory surveyed the shelter for the last time. The more he thought about it, the more sure he was that none of it made much sense. Max knew how dangerous it was out there, so the fact that she was gone likely meant that the Forgetting had accelerated, that she was starting to bleed memories like a sieve losing sand. That much was clear. But from the early cases they’d all seen, before the TV networks and the internet went down, it was usually terrifying. Victims were panicked and sometimes violent because they couldn’t figure out what was happening or where they were, or even who they were, but still had a grasp on other far-flung parts of their minds.