The remembering of the two great halls was finished in a day, and a week after, the first shadowless began to appear, drawn by what they had felt happen. In trickles at first. And then once they had seen him—a strangely shaped shadow who moved and talked to them as the human to whom it was attached sat motionless and silent on the bricks before it, the trickles turned into streams. Then rivers. Then oceans. Shadowed survivors began to leave—hope buoyed by so many arriving shadowless they hadn’t realized had clung to life so long—to try to find their own shadowless relatives wherever they had lived before the Forgetting began and bring them back to the amnesiac.
When the tide of newcomers began to include shadowed and shadowless from other cities, not just New Orleans, because they had heard about the shadow who had a body, not a body who had a shadow, that was when he became sure of what had to be done to save them.
A shadowless could still learn new things—and they could keep it for a while, whatever it was that they learned. An hour, if they were weak—or perhaps a day, a week, if they were strong. But much beyond that, it wouldn’t stick. Nothing would stick without a shadow. That was everyone’s mistake so long ago, when it was only Hemu Joshi; they were trying to make memories to give him a shadow again. It was the other way around—they needed to give him a shadow to make memories.
Stating a thing doesn’t mean it becomes easy, however. Or even fathomable, according to Dr. Avanthikar. She agreed with the concept, but had no idea how to proceed—because the dark halves of the shadowless were gone forever. One could not create something from nothing.
But that wasn’t the end of hope. There was more to it than that.
The shadow led both his body and Dr. Avanthikar inside the first great hall, and sat them down facing each other in the center of the smooth floor. His body’s hand obediently placed a twig between them on the floor.
“Pick up its shadow,” he said to Dr. Avanthikar.
But she could not do it. It was impossible—a human cannot touch a shadow. If she puts a hand on it, tries to grip it in her fingers, the shadow will simply slip away, both under and over at once. Only a shadow can touch a shadow. Only a shadow who understands what it’s doing, and is not simply mimicking.
Slowly the shadow reached out to what Dr. Avanthikar had tried to touch and failed, and took hold of the little twig by its silhouette—not its crisp wooden form—and pulled. Beside him, he could feel his body shudder with the effort. It was not easy, to ask a thing to give up its shadow. He felt the world sigh as he strained. It was like ripping apart something that was never meant to be two pieces—something that didn’t understand where the line it was supposed to break across lay.
“My God,” Dr. Avanthikar said, transfixed. She picked up the newly shadowless stick and stared at it. Then she reached out and ran her fingers through its separated twin, perched stiffly in his own dark, untouchable palm. Her flesh slipped through both his shape and the dark copy of the twig as easily as before, a hand through smoke.
He smiled as he watched her marvel. He thought of Hemu’s notebook again. Of Peter Pan—of when poor young Peter found his missing shadow in a chest of drawers, and thought all his problems were solved.
For the longest time, the shadow thought Hemu had included the excerpts because he was simply wishing for something that could never be—that he might be able to find his own again, somehow. The outright magic of the idea never meshed with the rest of his fevered research; even the rumors surrounding the elephant Gajarajan’s almost mystical powers of memory still had grains of truth in them—there were photographs of the actual animal, interviews with people who had seen him, worked with him. Peter Pan was written as a children’s story.
It took until his awakening for the shadow to finally understand what Hemu had also begun to grasp himself, before his death. Not that one’s own shadow could be found again, because those were gone forever—but that they were far more tangible than anyone had realized, if the right hands touched them. And if that was true, then so was this: a shadow from something else might be able to be used in place of a missing one.
He set the ownerless little shadow down on the dusty brick floor. It lay still, lonely.
“Can you do it?” Dr. Avanthikar asked, no more than a whisper. “Can you bind it to something else?” She clutched the mutilated twig.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think so.”
They began to try. And fail.
The problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough shadows to use. It was that there were too many, and all of them wrong. The shadow of a sparrow would cure a shadowless, but it drove them mad, urging them to the tops of trees or buildings while the rest chased after to save them, until they finally managed to leap into the air—and then fall, flightless. A tree’s shadow would not take at all, and then could not be given back to the tree. The branches withered within weeks, mournful. A rock’s shadow made a human catatonic, even though they could then learn and remember. The shadow of a house gave them great, aching pain all throughout their bones, until they begged it to be stripped off again.