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 amnesiac’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.