Читать книгу: «The Book of M», страница 2

“I’m fine,” he finally said.

“I know,” Max said. She turned back to the table—she’d found the canteen. “I won’t forget until you get home. Promise.”

It meant nothing. It wasn’t in her power to promise it anymore. They both smiled anyway. The old stainless steel container clinked as Max filled it up from the bucket of boiled water they kept for drinking. She screwed the lid on and handed it to Ory.

He took it slowly from her. “Okay, they’re a little shaky,” he confessed.

Max laughed as he stuffed it into his pack. Her head was tossed back, lips grinning. For an instant she was frozen in profile, as if painted into the moment. There, standing in front of the table—but nothing draped against the wall, nothing spread across the floor.

He wouldn’t have thought it would make a difference, but to watch a person move around and cast no shadow anywhere became terrifying after a while. There was a strange weightlessness to it. As if they weren’t actually there.

“Blue,” Ory finally said.

“Fifty-two,” Max replied.

He looked back down at his pack before she could see the relief on his face. Did it hurt or warm her that he checked so often? Did she think it was because he loved her or because he didn’t trust her any longer? There was no way to believe either answer. Ory reached into his pack, fingers searching until he felt it. “There’s something I want to talk about, before I go.”

She turned to face him, eyes focusing on what rested in his grip. An old-school tape recorder.

“Ory,” Max started tiredly. “Not again.”

“Please, Max,” he begged. He pushed the recorder into her hands. She held it stiffly in her long, dark fingers, as if it were a dead bird.

“We already talked about this,” she replied at last. “I thought we’d agreed.”

“Let’s just try it. We have to try.” They looked at each other. “The deer,” Ory said. Meaning, it was getting worse. That now they knew she would start to forget bigger things.

The corner of the tape recorder glinted dully in her palm. Ory could just barely see the red REC button on the side. He had thought, before it finally drove them apart, that her forgetting might bring them closer together. But every day was more and more strange. Every argument had become a horrible calculation: Was it worth it? How many hours would they lose to awkward silence in the aftermath?

“Okay,” Max finally said. “Yeah. Who knows. Maybe it’ll work.”

They both looked at the little machine in silence. At last, she awkwardly tried to jam it into the too-small pocket of her coat.

“Oh, one more thing,” Ory added. He dug around in the front zipper of his bag until he found the long, thin coil. It was a loop of stainless steel cable, from god knows what dilapidated graveyard of a hardware store. There was a sturdy notch on one side of the recorder’s plastic body to connect a safety loop—he threaded the cord through there and secured the clip. When he finished, the little machine hung like a necklace just below the swell of her chest, at a perfect length to lift up and record and to be tucked safely away underneath a shirt.

Max wrapped her arms around Ory and buried her forehead in his shoulder. They swayed.

“Wait, let me turn it on …” She was smiling. Her thumb pressed the stiff REC button, and she held the machine up to his mouth. “Okay, say it now,” she whispered.

“Blue,” Ory said awkwardly, shy at being recorded, but with feeling.

“Fifty-two,” Max replied when she’d pulled it close to her lips. She clicked it off and let it drop back down on the cord, still holding him. Ory held her back.

He thought at first she was cold and was using his body heat to warm herself up like she always did in the mornings, but that wasn’t what she wanted.

“I won’t be able to explore very far if I don’t—” he started.

“Who cares,” she cut him off as she pried open his belt. There was a new desperation to her movements. Before she’d finished stripping it off him, Ory knew he didn’t care anymore either.

The deer. Would the recorder actually make a difference? The color of the knife handle. Had he given it to Max because he still had hope, or because he had none?

He felt something rip as she pulled: a hem, a belt loop. The sound burned into his brain, and he played it again in his head, to remember the popping tear of the thread, what it sounded like when she knew it was him, and he was the one she wanted. “Blue,” he whispered again.

“Fuck me already,” Max hissed. She pulled the tape recorder over her head and tossed it onto the pile of discarded clothes.

It was all right. They could have secrets from each other, for the short time they had left to have secrets. She had agreed to try the tape recorder. Ory didn’t have to admit to her that his determination to keep her whole was more for himself than for her, that he was afraid she would be no different from the rest of the shadowless—that she would also love the strange magic of her amnesia more than him, and stop fighting to remember. She didn’t have to tell him if she believed it, too.

ORLANDO ZHANG

THEIR HOTEL, WHICH THEY DIDN’T CALL A HOTEL ANYMORE, because it wasn’t really so much a hotel as it was a “shelter,” was built on a high peak in the center of Great Falls National Park, overlooking Arlington and the other suburbs of northern Virginia. It meant Ory had to hike down every time he went to the city. But it also meant anyone from the city would have to hike up to it. He passed the wooden post where he’d long ago removed the sign that used to point the way. ELK CLIFFS RESORT—300 M, it once had read.

When the last radio signals went quiet, Ory had made some renovations to the shelter, so it wasn’t obvious from the outside that anyone lived there. He taped up all but one of the windows with cardboard to hide his and Max’s movements, and then did the same to some of the other deserted guest rooms in the building, so their own would not stand out to anyone from the outside, if anyone ever came so close. He dragged broken furniture into the front yard, bent fence posts, burned fire marks into the exterior walls. Any food they did find, he kept on the ground floor, in the abandoned ballroom where they’d once watched the sparkling color and whirl of Paul and Imanuel’s wedding, eternal years ago. They would lose it all if someone found them, but maybe that would be all they would lose, he reasoned. He killed a rat he caught in the basement, smeared its blood over the wood floor in the entryway, and let it stain—one word from the oldest language that was always understood.

It worked, for a time. For two years, they survived that way. Some days Ory even felt safe. But that all had ended last week, when Max lost her shadow.

When they’d finally stopped crying, they made one last change. They came up with a set of rules about things that could be dangerous for Max to do, once she forgot more. “If,” Ory had insisted, not once, but Max just shook her head. “Once,” she repeated. She’d gone to get the last of their scrap paper because Ory had refused to move.

Max didn’t need them yet, but it was better to begin practicing earlier rather than later, she’d said. So they’d already know what to do once—if—the time came. After they’d finished writing, she carefully folded and tore the paper into strips and had Ory tape each rule near the place where she’d need it—the front door, the guest kitchenette, and so on. That way, in case she forgot that they had made rules in the first place, she’d still see them before doing something she didn’t want to do.

They knew it wasn’t perfect, but it was the best they could come up with. They didn’t know what else to do.

MAX AND ORY’S RULES

1—Max doesn’t leave the shelter without Ory.

2—Max can use the small knives to prepare food unsupervised, but not the fire.

3—Max can never answer the door.

Max still knew him, knew his voice, but Ory always carried a key when he left, and had hidden another in the courtyard, inside a false rock he’d scavenged from a deserted housing goods store. He didn’t want to ever get into the habit of knocking and asking her to let him in, no matter how tired or injured he was or how much he was carrying. Because even though it was fine now, later it wouldn’t be. Because later, she might remember that he lived with her, but not that no one else did. That everyone else had left the mountain and the hotel a long time ago. Later, if he was out looking for food and Max was alone, it would be too dangerous to ask her to remember that she let one person in every evening when he came home—Ory—but not another.

4—Max can’t touch the gun.

Just in case.

That one made him sick to think about. He didn’t want to write it down. It felt like betraying her somehow—as if his believing that she’d forget who he was would somehow cause it to happen.

Max made him write it anyway. Just in case.

ALL OF THAT MATTERED LESS NOW. THE windows, the blood, Ory never asking her to let him inside instead of using a key. But in the early days, it might have saved their lives. The streets were in constant flux then, changed one way from a bad memory and then changed again from another. Ory’d had to check every direction through a pair of binoculars before he could move a step, for fear of being ambushed by shadowed men or mauled by terrified shadowless. But now there were no shadowed ones left, because they’d turned into shadowless, and almost no shadowless either, because they couldn’t remember that they should stay. Now everything was always still. Nothing moved, nothing made noise, nothing changed. There was no one left to change it. Shops became lonely graveyards, houses became monuments.

There were very few places he was ever worried about running into another living soul anymore. But Broad Street, where he was heading, was one of them.

When Ory reached the Falls Church neighborhood, he began to jog. He did not follow the roads. Instead, he cut through abandoned backyards in a straight line between the shelter and Broad Street, to make up for the late start. Most of the houses had no fences, and when they did, the wood was long since rotted. Even though he’d stayed in bed with Max for another half hour after they’d finished making love, there would still be enough time to search, Ory reasoned. He pried apart a pair of sagging planks and slipped through into a ruin of tall grass. There was still plenty of time. And even if there wasn’t, it had still been worth it. I need to make Max more presents, he thought. Or—maybe it was just that he was in such a good mood after the sex that the joke struck him as funny instead of horrible—he could just keep giving her the same present over and over, and she’d love it every time.

Don’t laugh at that, Ory scolded himself. That’s terrible. You’re a terrible person. But he did anyway. Quietly.

Twenty minutes later, he was a cul-de-sac away from Broad Street.

MAX HAD BANNED EITHER OF THEM FROM GOING BACK TO Broad Street again after the last time they’d searched there, more than a year past. It also had been the last time they’d run into another person.

Ory stayed crouched in the undergrowth and watched the weathered row of apartments that lined the infamous road. Beyond the empty stretch of grass and across the asphalt, nothing gave itself away.

The person they’d met that day had been a shadowless, only a few weeks gone. The man had remembered just enough to know it was bad not to have a shadow, but didn’t remember how it worked. He tried to take Ory’s.

Ory shuddered at the sudden memory of sharp, dirty carbon steel against his skin. The shadowless had been a firefighter before the world ended, still in his giant flame-retardant coat when they had seen him wandering around. His coat, his helmet, his boots—and his metal fireman’s axe, gripped tightly in his right hand.

Neither Ory nor Max were doctors, back when there were jobs. It was pure luck that he hadn’t lost the arm or died.

They’d argued about it a few times before, but Max won after that. Abundant as Broad Street was, Ory promised her that he wouldn’t go again. No matter how desperate, how starving.