The station tried to cut away, but they weren’t fast enough. Several guests in the ballroom screamed as the shadowless man on-screen snapped to a halt, frozen upright for one lingering instant, and then crumpled to the ground.
The news anchor materialized on-screen again, looking disoriented and unprepared, stumbling through a statement that was being fed to him through his earpiece. “We want to apologize for that graphic video clip . . . It was not our intention to air such an upsetting image . . . Unfortunately the nature of live news sometimes . . .”
“Holy shit, Ory,” Max murmured, her whole body tense. “Do we know anyone in Boston? Do you have friends or family there?” People had started arguing now, some calling for calm, others shouting across the room to each other for any new information they could dig up on their phones. Someone had a laptop out and was connecting it to Elk Cliffs’s Wi-Fi.
“I don’t think so,” Ory said, but his head was swimming. He felt dizzy.
“This is really bad,” Max kept saying. “This is really, really bad.”
Ory tried to refute that, to be the strong, steady one who would keep them both anchored, but he couldn’t find the words. The TV was back on the helicopter camera hovering over Boston city limits, the body of the fallen shadowless man still in the street, this time pixelated into an indiscernible mass. Ory couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like even in death, his shadow hadn’t returned. The thought sent a chill through him.
The National Guard were still shoulder to shoulder, a wall across the road. They looked shaken, as if they were clinging to one another instead of forming a blockade. One was holding a black body bag in his hands, gun strapped back across his shoulders, but he was held by orders in the line, unable to go forward and lay it over the dead man, in case whatever was causing the Forgetting was transmissible through the air. The soldiers suddenly tensed, and guns rose from their downward angle to point straight forward with agonizing dread. More shadowless were approaching. Some running, some screaming, some silent.
This time the station didn’t waste any time. The screen cut back to the anchor at the desk, who was scrambling through freshly scribbled papers and a blaring earpiece, trying not to listen for the sound of impending gunfire through the tiny speaker. Mid-speech he stammered. A long, horrible pause. He closed his eyes involuntarily. Then he opened them and kept going.
Ory glanced around the room and swallowed hard, to try to calm himself down, and looked back at the screen. Then he heard the anchor say something about Denver. He pulled Max closer, wrapped his arms around her, and squeezed with everything he had as the news cut to a reporter in Colorado. Someone had begun to sob.
“Hey,” he said as he crushed her into the hug. The shocked, rising hum of too many voices at once echoed off the stone walls of the ballroom. Shouts and ring tones blended into an eerie, doomed musical harmony. He wanted to say something comforting, to sound like he was there for her, to make it feel like it was all going to be okay soon, but the fear had numbed his mind. “Blue,” he finally managed, no more than a whisper.
“Fifty-two,” she whispered back.
I CAN’T REALLY AVOID IT ANY LONGER, I GUESS. NOT TALKING about it isn’t going to change that it happened, so I might as well say something before I forget how it went. I don’t know if I believe you yet, Ory. If recording things will really make a difference at all. But if it does—well, I don’t really know what are the most important things to get down on tape yet, so I figure I should probably just say everything I can think of. Including this.
So. The day I lost my shadow.
It was two weeks ago now. Which is a pretty long time for me to still remember as much as I do, judging by past cases. Everyone’s different, though, they say. Hemu Joshi started losing his memories so quickly, just a few days in, but there were reports of some people in Mumbai who took a month to forget anything significant. I think the longest one I ever heard about before the electricity went out was about a month and a half. So hopefully I’m more toward that side of the average. These past two weeks have felt like a year, in some ways. To have a month and a half left before it all goes, it might feel like an eternity.
This is strange, talking to myself and you like this. Especially since I’m not there with you anymore. I have a confession: I actually wasn’t going to use the tape recorder, even though I promised you I would. But then I got out here, alone, and I just—it feels good to talk. It makes me feel real still.
I know I’m the one who left and that you’ll never hear this, but before I start, I want to say, just in case: Ory, if you’re listening to this—somehow, some way—it didn’t hurt. So don’t worry about that part, at least. I hardly felt it.