The Book of M (47 page)

ORY WAS SURPRISED TO SEE THAT THE ENTRANCE TO THE
sanctuary had no door.

“I guess I'd just assumed,” he said to Gajarajan. They were standing inside the first great hall, all of Ory and half of him. Gajarajan's body remained outside, on the other side of the altar. Over the top of the wall, draped like thin black tulle and then trailing across the ground to where it sat upright against the entrance beside Ory, was his shadow. “Usually places where humans live have doors.”

Gajarajan considered. “I suppose the places where elephants live don't,” he said, and ruffled his ears. “There are only two doors in the entire sanctuary.” For a moment, he continued to ponder the idea in silence. Then the shape of his massive head angled slightly more toward Ory, the curved tusks disappearing as they turned from semi-profile into straight on. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked gently. “Yes,” Ory lied, and tried to smile, but he just felt ill. It seemed clammy inside the great hall, nothing like the sweltering heat outside.
Keep it together,
he reminded himself, and forced his teeth to stop chattering. His fingers found and squeezed the square outline of his wallet through his trouser pocket for strength, where the fossil of Max's photograph lay tucked inside. He still had it, even after so many months and miles—although it had long faded beyond anything recognizable. He'd crossed states, fought in wars, fallen into moving lakes, and now it was no more than a gray slip of paper with a vague, human-shaped smudge at the center. Almost as if it had slowly become a portrait of Max's shadow rather than of her.

“I can imagine this is . . . an intense moment,” Gajarajan finally said. “To be able to meet your wife again.”

Ory managed to nod. “Were you married before?”

“No,” the shadow said. “Not really.”

Ory looked down. It had seemed like a strange choice of words, but then he realized it wasn't at all.
Not really
had in fact meant
yes
. “I'm sorry,” he replied.

“Don't be. I don't remember.” Gajarajan shrugged softly, such a subtle and human gesture.

Ory didn't know if he'd ever get used to seeing it. It had taken him forever to be able to look at a person with no shadow. Now there was a shadow that moved all on its own.

“I'm going to get you settled first, and make sure you're comfortable and prepared,” Ory realized Gajarajan was saying. “Then we'll bring Max in.”

“How is she doing?” he blurted out.

“Very well,” Gajarajan replied. “The body was in bad shape when it arrived. Dehydrated, exhausted. It was very difficult, the rejoining—you know how dangerous it can be. I didn't know if it was going to take. But it did. Now she's healthy, happy—and ready to meet you again. She remembers you.”

Ory did his best to nod. It seemed beyond believable—that the single shadowless Gajarajan had been able to save out of all of them so far was Max—
his
Max. He was still too afraid to fully believe it.

“Please, after you,” Gajarajan said, and gestured to the other end of the first hall, his dark arm sweeping across the wall. “I'm coming too, don't worry.”

As they walked, the shadowless sitting on mats in little clusters looked up at Gajarajan, then Ory. Some seemed to have no idea who he was, or had known and forgotten, but a few must have heard the news. “Congratulations,” they said softly, with a happiness that was almost more like awe.
They found each other, after all this, in the end.
He could see what it meant to them, what they were watching happen.
She remembers again. It worked. It's possible after all.

At the end of the first great hall was a corridor, and then a door.

“One,” Gajarajan said, meaning
the first of the only two doors.

Ory nodded as he looked at it. What would it be like to live in a place where you had to walk this far before you hit a barrier? He had imagined that when you became shadowless, there were hundreds more doors, not fewer.

Gajarajan's shadowy arm slithered across the face of the wood. “The second door is just inside. It leads into the second great hall.”

“What's this, then?” Ory asked as the first door started to move, the shadow's dark, two-dimensional outline impossibly pushing the three-dimensional thing open.

“The visiting room,” Gajarajan said.

In the small space, there were four chairs around a simple wooden table. Max's tape recorder was in the center of its bare surface.

“Oh, God,” Ory said.

“It's the same one,” Gajarajan confirmed.

“The same one,” he repeated, entranced. He clenched his fists to stop himself from leaping at it. “Can I hold it?”

“Of course,” Gajarajan said. “It belongs to you and Max.”

For a moment, Ory didn't move. Then he did. He sat down first, and gently touched the cool plastic. Then he realized it had no shadow beneath it. “Does it—?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Gajarajan said softly. “It doesn't play. I had to use them—the recordings. To form her shadow into the right shape. Otherwise it would have been just a rectangle, hardly the form of a woman at all.” He paused. “At the time she arrived, I didn't know what had happened. Who you were, if you were still out there . . . My first obligation was to Max. To restore her memories, as completely as I was able.”

“No, that . . .” Ory nodded. “That was the right thing to do.”

Gajarajan shifted on the wall, edging closer. “It might be best to leave it on the table during the reintroduction,” he added kindly. “As an object you both share.”

Ory nodded again and pulled his hands back into his lap. “Yes,
that's a good idea,” he heard himself say. He looked up at the second door, the one on the other side of the room. It was far, far heavier. It almost seemed as if it wasn't made of wood, but another material entirely.

“That one can be opened only from this side, the outside,” Gajarajan said when he saw Ory studying it. “A good friend remembered that a long time ago.” He draped himself across the chair next to Ory, sitting without needing to pull it out first. He had left the one directly across empty, Ory noticed. For Max. “I didn't want it that way, but it's for the best, for everyone's protection. Taking and rejoining a shadow can be . . . complicated. If something goes wrong, it would be very bad if a shadow or shadowless could let themselves out.”

“How do you get in and out then?” Ory asked.

Gajarajan pointed up, at the ceiling. “There's an opening in the roof in the room. I stretch up the outside wall and then reflect down through there.”

Ory nodded numbly. It occurred to him again just how far away from his physical body they were.

“I . . .” Gajarajan paused. His chest was on the back of the chair and his head on the wall behind it. “I just want to apologize for how long it took me to realize that you were the Ory in the recordings.” He lifted his great ears against the surface of the wall, in a gesture of helplessness. “I really had no idea. I'm so sorry.”

“It's all right,” Ory stammered. It was too late to be angry. “She's here now.”

“She is,” Gajarajan nodded.

The shadow stood, and Ory braced himself when it vanished. Gajarajan had to check on Max one more time, to make sure she was also ready for him to open the door that was separating them. Ory waited in agonizing silence, trying to decide if it had been fifteen seconds or fifteen hours. She was just feet away from him. He couldn't stop straining to catch any hint of sound in the silence. He tried to figure out what he would say. Would he introduce himself again, or greet her
as he always had? Should he shake her hand? Hug her? Could he kiss her—if she wanted? Would he have the courage? The time passed by in a garbled blur.

Then suddenly Gajarajan was back, in one instant darkly reflected against the far wall, ears ruffled with excitement.
Max was ready.
Ory trembled. It was really happening. He was already crying.

He watched the elephant reach for the second door that only opened from this side. Across the front, Ory realized there were letters burned into it, in all capitals.
SHADOWS INSIDE
, it said. A stamp in the shape of an elephant's face—wide ears, twin tusks, long, drooping trunk—was seared after.

“Are you ready to meet Max again?” Gajarajan asked.

“
BREATHE, MAX,” GAJARAJAN SAID. THAT WAS ALSO THE FIRST
thing I understood once I began to remember English again, as soon as I recognized my name. I tried to breathe, and nodded at him as he hovered beside me on the wall. He had come in through the roof to make sure I was ready first, and then would go back the other way around to open the door that could be opened only from the other side. To unite me with you again, Ory.

“I'm breathing,” I said. Gajarajan draped his trunk over my shoulder to reassure me and seemed to smile.

The sanctuary is a good place. I like it here. I've learned about how it is outside in the city, gardens and horses and bicycles and people, and I want to see it. But I also want to be able to come back here, to the second hall. Once you leave, you can never come back here, though. You can lose your shadow only once. That's what Gajarajan says.

He started telling me about you as soon as I'd remembered enough words to have a true conversation. He played me the tape. My tape. The recorder was so old and beaten up that the sound came out faint and tinny, so I had to strain to hear it. Gajarajan and I would wait until it was night, after all the other shadowless in the first great hall had gone to sleep and the city was quiet again, and listen. It was so damaged it almost didn't sound like me, but just enough. I could make out a woman speaking, a soft high voice, and understand most of her words.

“All my memories were in here?” I had asked in the beginning.

“Yes,” he nodded. “You made this before you forgot everything. When we found you, you were carrying it in one hand, holding tight. You kept your memories.”

That's what all the other shadowless like to say, he told me. That I “kept my memories” even though I lost my shadow. You, the shelter in Arlington, leaving home, the caravan, the terrible kidnapping by Transcendence, the last lucid moments of my journey south. How badly I wanted to make it here, to see if all the rumors were true. It's a strange thing to think about—my memories. That I still had them even though I didn't know I had them.

I shouldn't complain. Most shadowless come here with absolutely nothing, or lose what little they do have left soon after. And so few of us arrive bringing with us something that means more than the shade from an empty bottle, a piece of trash. To find a shadow that will match a person is much more difficult than it seems. Another thing from nature might be too strong or different, and a useless object might be too weak. And even if it does match approximately, nothing comes with it. No recollection. That was the only trouble with the books you brought, Gajarajan told me. The shape and size were just about right, but the memories are of invented characters, not real humans. They aren't like my recorder. The shadowless would be made into
new
people—not old ones.

That's why my shadow was the one that finally worked. Gajarajan has been able to separate many shadows, and even reattach some of them to the shadowless, but they never stuck, or not all the way. They didn't
fit.
So far I'm the only patient whose shadow has
.

And then, just yesterday, he told me that you had come to New Orleans, too. Against all odds, you didn't disappear when I forgot you, and you found me again. Maybe it was because of this tape recorder after all. Because you were inside the whole time.

“Gajarajan really made that for you?” the young shadowless girl beside me asked. She was staring at my shadow as it lay flat across the floor behind me, the same way she had been since Gajarajan brought her here early this morning. At its long arms, its slender waist, the floating cloud of tightly wound curls springing in all directions from its head.

“He really did,” I said.

She continued to stare, transfixed. She had dusky skin, and the same soft, buoyant afro that matched the shape of my own shadow's, when I looked at them both in front of me. “Did it hurt?”

“I don't remember.” I smiled. I crouched down next to where she was sitting on the edge of what would become her bed now, since I would leave the sanctuary, and my shadow copied. Perfectly bound, perfectly in sync. “But I don't think so.”

“Vienna fought together with your husband against a great danger—more than once. She's a good friend of his,” Gajarajan said, sliding across the wall to where we were.

“I am?” she asked.

“You are,” Gajarajan said. “I hope to be able to help you remember soon.”

I smiled again as I looked at her.
Vienna.
I don't know how many other shadowless you know, Ory, but here was at least one then. At least you were friends with one other like me. I hoped that would help make it less strange, if you
did
think it was strange. “I look forward to seeing you again, Vienna,” I said.

Vienna shook my hand. My shadow shook hands with nothing. “Me too. Remind me—if it works, if I meet you again, remind me how we met so I can know.”

I memorized her face. It was easy, burned into my brain in an instant. Gajarajan had taught me techniques to boost memory, once my new shadow took. Letter games, patterns, rhymes. He learned them himself a long time ago from a wise old man he called Dr. Zadeh. His own teacher, he'd said. Now that I can make memories again, Gajarajan thinks that I actually remember new things better than someone who never lost their shadow in the first place.

“It's time for me to take Max outside now, to meet her husband,” Gajarajan said then to Vienna. My heart began to thunder. “I'll be back soon, and we'll talk more about how we'll find you a new shadow.” His ears ruffled, and I had the impression he'd winked at
her. “It shouldn't hurt,” he added, answering her previous question. “I promise. I'm getting better at this. I learned a lot from Max.”

“It'll be over before you know it,” I added to reassure her, although it was a lie.

Most of the rejoining was just fragments to me. Moments out of place and time that played like damaged film, stuttering and without sound. But enough to know that it had not been easy for Gajarajan. Not easy at all. It had been harder to join the tape recorder's shadow to me than any other shadow he'd ever tried on another shadowless before, including even the alligator's. He'd had to fight it onto me, as if it hadn't wanted to be joined to something new. Later, Gajarajan told me he'd never had something resist that hard before. But the shadows he tried before had been made of birds and mice and trees and rocks—never something that was partly made from a human. And never something that contained so many memories.

It didn't matter. It had worked. I remembered. And I hoped it would be smooth for Vienna, but even if it went as roughly for her as it had for me, she would say the same as I would—that it was still worth it in the end. To remember who I was. I gladly would have suffered far worse to have my name back once more. To have you again.

“In the meantime, why don't you think about anything you might still have with you that has great meaning to you?” Gajarajan said to her. “It's all right if you don't remember. But if you do have anything, that might be a good place to start.”

Vienna worked something out of her collar and held it up. A locket on a tarnished chain. “Maybe this?” she asked. Inside were two badly weathered faces, a woman with short hair and a gentle smile and a man with a serious face. They both looked just like her. “My mother and father.” She pointed to the photographs. “When we lost her, he gave it to me. I don't remember her name. But I remember that this was hers.”

Gajarajan drew closer, flickering from the wall to the floor so he could glide right up to her to see. “That might do very well,” he
mused. “Let's look closer at it when I return.” He was back on the wall, beside me, trunk curving into a smooth arc. Waiting for me.

Breathe, Max,
I thought. I made my way across the hall, hand trailing along the familiar walls that had once felt like the extent of the entire world to me. Before I had remembered there were other things out there.

Then we were in front of the door that could be opened only from the other side. Gajarajan hovered, facing me at the same height. Through the dark shape of his ears and head, I could make out the marks that had been written or carved or burned on its surface since he had began trying to replace our shadows more than two years ago. There were signs of fear and rage, grooves from claws or teeth, places where fire or some other corrosive thing had touched, but there were also beautiful things, too. Simple shapes, words, drawings of houses or people or flowers, as memories had come back to the others, bit by bit. I wondered what it must have been like to forget everything twice, once the shadows could no longer be made to cooperate. Or remember, but the wrong things. That you once could fly rather than that you once were someone's wife.

I suddenly felt afraid. I jammed my hand into my pocket, but the tape recorder wasn't there.

“Ory has it, Max,” Gajarajan said. “He'll give it back to you.”

“I know,” I replied. I remembered. I was only nervous.

“We don't have to open the door until you're ready.”

I nodded. “Is he also nervous?”

Gajarajan laughed. “Yes, he's very nervous. He loves you very much.”

It seems strange to me, that I can love you too when in a way I've never met you. But I do. I feel it as surely as I know myself. I tried to imagine both of us together again, doing a thing I can now remember that we had done, but something was off. I could see you there in my mind, dressed in a tuxedo at Paul and Imanuel's wedding, but not myself.

“Max?” Gajarajan said softly.

I smiled as calmly as I could. “I'm ready.”

Gajarajan disappeared.
Breathe, Max,
I said to myself.
Max, Max, Max.

Then from the other side, the door opened.

A MAN WITH BEAUTIFUL DARK EYES AND BLACK HAIR WAS
seated at the only table in the room, staring at the tape recorder in the center. As the door swung open, he jerked upright. Our gazes met, and he gasped, the upward movement of his body out of the chair stopped short.

“Ory,” I said. It was you. I knew it beyond doubt. I could finally see you again, all of you, instead of simply remembering. Everything was happening so fast. You were the man from the tapes. My husband. The man I had loved, and loved now. The man who knew all my memories, too. Ory.

But you did not say Max in return.

“
You,
” you whispered in shock, and I realized then that something was wrong. There was no joy in the tone of that word. Only horror.

Then you called me by another name.

Ursula.