The amnesiac wondered if his shadow was blind the way he was now. Or could it always see, even though he no longer could, and never would again? He wondered if he’d know it now if his shadow ever left—would he feel it immediately, or would he wander around for some unknowable amount of time without it before someone else noticed and told him?
The amnesiac imagined it as it would be on the wall behind him, in the same posture, listening to the same conversation in companionable silence. Dr. Avanthikar was arguing with Marie now, debating the statistical probability of leaving and dying versus staying and dying. Downtown was calling for a vote. The amnesiac took a deep breath, imagined his shadow doing the same. Its charcoal outline expanding and contracting. That is, if Curly had gotten the flashlight back on again—if there was any light to see it by, or if it was still pitch-dark. There was no way for him to know at all.
Whatever the hurricane morphed into would probably destroy New Orleans and kill them, but there was something else, too. He could feel it. Something else was growing—or coming. The Gajarajan book in his hands was comfortingly heavy. He slowly turned the pages, sliding his fingers in and easing each leaf over. Just like Surya and Chhaya’s story, he knew what article, what picture, what scribbled notes from his old friend were beneath his palm every time he set it down. Pieces of Peter Pan; clippings about Hemu Joshi from The Maharashtra Times; mathematics; astronomy; entries from Hemu’s own fractured, desperate diary; more excerpts from the Rigveda; and most of all, by far—photographs of the great elephant himself at Guruvayur temple, and stories of its incredible, inexplicable feats of memory. Hundreds of these pages, read over and over until they were memorized, compared to a handful of notecards about the amnesiac’s former life that he’d lost long ago and never cared about anyway. He knew Gajarajan more intimately than he would ever know his old self. It almost felt like he was more elephant than man.
Eventually, the amnesiac realized he was barely listening to the others. He was being drawn in by something else, a subtle feeling he’d not noticed that he actually had noticed at first, and then all of a sudden did. It was like waking up from a dream about the ocean and realizing you were floating in water.
Something was happening.
“Dr. Avanthikar,” he murmured, but she didn’t hear him. She kept talking. “Dr. Avanthikar,” he repeated, still sitting, facing whichever way he’d been positioned when he was helped to the floor. “Doctor.”
“No, you need rest, not—” she started, but when she finally turned to face him, everything dropped. Her voice, the anger, whatever the rest of them had been arguing about.
“I don’t know,” the amnesiac said at last. He didn’t know. There was a feeling, but without his eyes, every sensation was nonsense. But Dr. Avanthikar was still frozen in place, still completely silent. The other shadowless weren’t speaking anymore either. In the whole room, almost no one breathed.
If it had been only that he had become shadowless, they would have moved by now. They would have come over to console him. They were long used to seeing shadows disappear. But something was different. The seconds crawled by. They remained paralyzed by their sight. “What should I do?” the amnesiac finally asked.
“Nothing,” Dr. Avanthikar said. He heard her take a small step forward. No one else moved. The amnesiac did nothing. He waited. The air in the room felt almost solid. “It’s okay,” Dr. Avanthikar said softly.
“What?”
But she wasn’t speaking to him, he realized. “It’s okay,” she said again.
“Yes,” he agreed, trying to sound convincing. The wall behind him where his shadow was smoothly stretched felt as though it had expanded to contain everything in the world. “It’s okay.” The amnesiac tried to hold as still as he could.
“Did you see that?” Dr. Avanthikar gasped. She was beyond realizing he couldn’t have. Something had gripped her, gripped them all—terror or wonder. “Did you see?” she whispered. She couldn’t say anything else. They all waited, bound in place, staring.
And then it came again. The sensation that he had turned his head to look around when he had not moved at all.
“Did you see?” Dr. Avanthikar whispered again, close to madness.
A voice that did not come from the amnesiac’s mouth, but sounded very much the same, said, “I know how we can stop the hurricane.”
Orlando Zhang
THE NOON SUN WAS SWELTERING, AND THERE WASN’T A cloud in the sky. On horseback, Malik reached up to take his newly made bow off his shoulder and hook it on the saddle instead, but when his bare fingers touched the hammered metal tips that kept the string in place, he cursed and let go on instinct. The bow slid off his shoulders and smacked the dirt.
“Damnit!” he growled. “It’s hotter than hell!”