The Book of M (48 page)

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I'VE LEARNED SINCE LEAVING
the sanctuary is that people's original shadows look just like them.

I didn't know it was strange that mine didn't resemble me perfectly. The only other shadow I'd ever seen before I left the second great hall was Gajarajan's, and it didn't look human at all, even though he said that his body was. I didn't even know to notice whether your own matched you or not, Ory, in the moment that I met you again.

At first it was hard for me to understand why you had flinched so violently when you finally saw mine, after all the shouting and confusion passed—why out of the whole terrible accident,
that
had finally been the thing that made you fall to your knees and wail.

Now I understand, though. Mine doesn't look like me because it looks like Max. Because it's made of her memories.

“How is it?” Malik asked from above.

I stepped back and surveyed his handiwork. In front of me, the gigantic face of an elephant painted all in black loomed. The ears and tusks were wide, the trunk held up, like an inviting hand. The eyes were two pristine white diamonds, narrowed in thoughtful consideration. “It looks good,” I said at last, nodding. “It looks very good.”

“Now I just have to do it to the other side, and then again on the other two carriages.” He sighed.

“Be glad Gajarajan's an elephant, and not a porcupine. You'd be painting for a week,” I said as lightly as I could, but I was still looking at the huge dark shape glistening on the side of the old Iowan wagon. At Malik, holding a wide bristle brush in his hand, painting the side of a vehicle. It was like watching echoes.

“Hey,” he said. I looked up. His concern that the similarity might have dredged up painful memories was clear across his face.

I smiled to allay his fear before he could ask. It was all right. It really was. It wasn't an unfortunate coincidence—I had been the one who had given Malik the idea to paint the carriage. “You finish this one, and I'll start on the second,” I offered, picking up his spare brush. He handed me the jar of paint, and I dipped the thick bristles into the dark liquid and stirred slowly, watching it swirl like tar. I had no memories of painting—there was nothing on the recorder that said I'd done it myself—but I'd watched Malik closely as he'd worked. It seemed easy enough.

Wherever we had finally lost the RV, I hoped it was still in one piece. Zachary wouldn't know the difference, because a painting didn't know if it was whole or damaged the way a human did, but I hoped anyway that he was still untouched, immortalized perfectly across the side of the vehicle, as vibrant and ornate as the moment he became it. I hoped other shadowless would see it as they passed, and he would point the way for them, too.

As Malik and I waited for both carriages to dry, we sat on the grass, splitting an apple between us that the head volunteer at the communal garden had given him earlier. He finished his half in two bites, but I ate much more slowly, savoring the crisp sweetness. Partway through, I realized he was watching me.

“Is there anything you need help with?” he asked. “I mean, I know there's nothing I can do that will ever—help with the big thing.”

There's nothing I can do that will ever help Ory see you as Max
is what he meant. Sometimes it almost feels like you're the one who lost your memory, not me.

I tried to shrug nonchalantly. There was nothing
I
could do either that would ever help you see me as Max. No one can help you—except you.

“But maybe something else,” Malik continued. “You're doing so much for me. I want to repay you, if I can.”

I dropped the apple core on the grass beside me and nudged some dirt over it with my boot. “Actually, there's one thing,” I said. It was a small thing, a little silly. I had meant to do it alone the day before, but my nerve had failed. I want someone to be with me all the time now, I've realized. Everything had seemed so clear at first, that I was me and understood the world, but after what happened in the sanctuary's visitation room, I don't trust myself anymore. I want another human to explain the new things, to reassure me I'm right about the old ones—or even to just prove to me by their presence that I really do exist.

I wanted someone to be there for this, too. Someone who could tell me if I was doing it correctly, reassure me that what I can recall myself knowing how to do is real. Someone who is not you. Because even though you're always the person I think of automatically in every situation, I'm not the one who you do.

“Anything,” Malik said.

I smiled. “Could you show me how to read a map? I want to make sure I really do remember how, before tomorrow.”

IT'S STRANGE NOT TO HAVE THE RECORDER ANYMORE.

I let you keep it, even though there's nothing left on the empty, shadowless tapes. What remains of the little machine is yours. It was the least I could give you, Ory. I can't imagine what it must have felt like for you to sit across a table from a person who accompanied your wife on a journey for the last few months of her life and not be able to ask that woman a single question about what she was like toward the end, or how it finally happened, because she thought she
was
her.

You did tell me how you had known my name, though. Once the screaming had stopped.

Your hair has grown out
was the first thing you'd said.

You said that when you first met me in Arlington, Virginia—when I was Ursula, not Max—it was short. Buzzed almost to the skull. Over the journey it must have grown longer and longer, and I had
either not cared or not had time to cut it, and then forgot entirely. By the time I showed up in New Orleans, it was probably a soft downy mess, almost to my chin. Just different enough that Gajarajan might not have realized as he listened to Max's garbled, faded audio logs that I was the woman with a shaved head who appeared in almost all of the entries—not the woman speaking.

The shadow had flickered then, on the wall beside us. He said he hadn't realized I was not Max, but also confessed something else—that even if he had, he wouldn't have cared. He would have tried to give me her shadow anyway.

That was the end of the meeting. I didn't see you again for days. And even then when I did, from across Carondelet Street just as dusk was falling, we didn't speak. We didn't speak for a long time.

AFTER GAJARAJAN LET ME LEAVE, I WENT AWAY FROM THE
sanctuary, straight into the city. I got as lost as I could. I wanted to be far away from you and him. Somehow Davidia found me, and convinced me to let her get me a room to live in, and assign a shadowed survivor who could watch over me until I understood how life outside the second great hall worked. I didn't want Gajarajan's help, but I knew what he'd told the captain to do was right. I didn't even know where to find food. I let her enlist a neighbor or two to help so it didn't have to be the elephant, flashing up onto walls beside me to check in, reminding me what he'd done.

Weeks passed. I was free but purposeless. I had no job, knew no one, understood nothing about this new place. I spent every other afternoon in the neighborhood just beneath Gajarajan's hill, among the half-finished houses that the retired soldiers from your army were busy renovating. We were always needing more and more room, they said.

It was clear that you still didn't want to speak to me. I respected that. I understood, as painful and lonely as it was. I would never corner you on the street and beg to finish whatever we'd started in the visitor's room of the sanctuary. But I also couldn't just leave it com
pletely. Each time I went to that neighborhood facing the bottom of Gajarajan's hill, I waited behind the houses and watched. All I wanted was just to see you again.

I finally did. And I also saw someone else. A woman with golden skin and long black hair—standing in the middle of the road, as if also waiting for you to come down from Gajarajan's altar. You'd been having so many meetings with him lately. About me? About something else? I didn't know. You and she both stiffened when your eyes met, and I saw your body slow, but you continued to walk until you were just in front of her. You spoke in a way that was both fierce and gentle. You didn't touch her or smile. But there was a familiarity there, in the way you mirrored each other, one shifting closer by just microns when the other exhaled, then repeating in the other direction. Like magnets—constant.

That must be Ahmadi,
I realized.

You were on speaking terms again, at least. Beyond that, it wasn't clear. And I didn't want to know.

“Are you . . . her?” a man leaning against a ladder, hammer in hand, asked.
Are you Max?

“Who are you?” I replied.

He cleared his throat, chastened. “I'm sorry. Always too curious, Malik used to say. I came with them, from the Iowa. My name's Original Smith,” he said. “Well, that's less important now—Smith Dos passed away a while ago. But there are still two of us, I guess. The other's Smith Tres.”

I looked at the ground. His shadow appeared the same as he did, an outline of his form as perfect as your own was to you. I didn't understand. “There are multiple versions of you, too?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Original Smith said. “We're all different people. We just happen to share the same name. That's all.”

I WENT HOME TO MY ROOM IN HOUSE 55 AND DIDN'T GO BACK
to the district near the base of the sanctuary's hill for a long time.
As much as I could, I wanted to avoid seeing you and Ahmadi again. Not so much for your sake, but more for hers and mine. I felt a sort of kinship with her, even though we'd never met. She was just as innocent as I was in all of this. And I was sure she was afraid there would be a terrible, inescapable triangle among us, regardless of who you chose. So I stayed away, even though it didn't really matter. There still was a triangle—her, you, and Max. Not me, but the other Max. The first one.

During the days I wandered, speaking only to other shadowless, afraid of the looks the shadowed ones gave me. They all knew. Horror, revulsion, pity at what had happened to me shone in their eyes. I wanted to blame the elephant. It was his doing. But the more days I spent outside, watching New Orleans, I realized that although what had happened was his fault, it also wasn't. It might have crossed Gajarajan's mind to consider the likelihood that the tapes belonged to me versus the chance that I might have taken or been given them from someone else, but when he ultimately chose to try and save my life, there was no scheming in the decision. It was just a terrible condition of his nature, that Gajarajan doesn't understand why it would matter to whom the tapes had truly belonged. Elephants don't see it the same way people do, and especially neither do shadows. He didn't realize that it makes a difference to humans if the body is the same or not—not just the mind.

What happened was a mistake, but it was also a success. It
had
worked, despite the unintentional pain. The reason Gajarajan had failed to do it again after me was because he only understood the
what—
not the
why.

Some time later, I heard that you had also realized the same thing.

Gajarajan had discovered that he had to use something that already contained human memories inside of it to create a shadow of sufficient depth and strength that would agree to be attached to a person. That was why everything else he'd ever tried had failed—a sparrow, a car engine, a chandelier, a brick. Only the tape recorder had succeeded. But the reason for its success was also the reason for its failure.

Gajarajan didn't understand what memories mean to humans—only how to restore them. You understand what they mean, but not how to make them. Together, you both can be wise enough.

You and your army turned out to be the key Gajarajan had been seeking after all. In all of New Orleans, there is only one thing that both contains human memories and also carried no danger of re-creating my accident. Your books.

It's not as good as bringing back a body's original memories, but that's impossible now—Gajarajan has proven that the result could be far worse than simply losing someone forever. The next best thing is to give a shadowless
some
memories, so they can have some concept of self to start from. But because the shadow will now be made from a past that never existed, because the source of the shadow has never been alive in the real world, there will be no chance of discovering later that the memories are an accidental perversion of nature—a recycling of a person already in existence.

It made me happy to hear that Gajarajan had accepted human help. That no one else would ever have to accidentally suffer. New Orleans would still be New Orleans, a house would still be a house, the sun would still be the sun. No one would ever become someone else by mistake. No one else would ever lose someone twice.

Once the library was moved into the sanctuary, Vienna would be the first shadowless to receive this new kind of shadow. You saved her just in time, I heard from Gajarajan later, when I finally visited again. He was planning to use the locket that she had offered—an innocent move on his part that might have turned her into a remnant of her own mother instead of herself. It made me shudder to think of what that would have done to Malik. She will never be Vienna again now, but she also will never be something far, far worse.

THE DAY I HEARD FROM THE SHADOWLESS AT THE COMMUNAL
garden that a shadow from a book had taken to her and had stayed, I was both exhilarated and in despair. I wanted for no one else to ever
suffer what I'd suffered, least of all Vienna—but now that you and Gajarajan had found the key, now that the books worked, I would be the only one. The only one who was a copy of someone else instead of something original.

That night, alone in my room, I caught myself holding a block of handmade soap given to me in my rations, talking to myself. Holding it as if one of my fingers was on a button, angling the end slightly toward my face as though it had been a speaker.