“Marion—” I said in the moment before Gabe, a T-shirt wrapped around his face, pulled the door shut on her and locked it. Her eyes jerked up to mine for a single instant. There was something terrifying in them, a desperate ferocity to hang on to that name. “Marion,” I said again, leaning against the smooth, silent wood on the outside of the door.
I never told you what I did during those three long days, Ory, while the camp debated what to do. Not because I wanted to hide it from you, but because you would’ve convinced yourself that I had been “contaminated,” but been too afraid to say anything, because you’d never be able to consign me to the same fate. I just didn’t want you to worry.
“What’s your name?” I asked quietly through the door.
“Marion,” Marion replied, slightly muffled. I imagined her sitting in the same position as me.
“Where are you?”
“The honeymoon suite, I think,” she said.
I laughed despite the grim situation. It came out like a snort.
“Going okay so far, I guess,” she continued after a few minutes. “It’s only been a day, though.”
“A day and a night,” I countered.
“How are the others doing?” she asked hesitantly.
I chewed my lip.
“Max,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t visited. Their rooms are all too close together. Easier to be seen.”
“Is there a guard?”
“Sort of. Just Gabe, at the main door. I keep coming in the back, through a door in the lounge. No one else wants to get too close, so no one’s really checking the inside of the building.”
I imagined her mulling it over on her side of the door. Wondering why I was just inches away from her then. “So you don’t know if . . . if any of them have lost their shadows yet.” It was both a question and a wish, that they were still all right.
I left and found you after a short while, so you didn’t notice I’d been gone, but I was back with her after dinner, saying I was going to help the cooking crew with the washing-up at the river.
Do you know what’s a horrible, dehumanizing thing to have to do, Ory? To wait for someone to squish food so flat it can fit through the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor, and then eat it off the carpet like that, licking the dirty, shoe-stained fibers.
“I don’t know how to get you water,” I said helplessly.
“It’s okay,” Marion murmured after a long time. “There was—in the bathroom.”
I closed my eyes in shame. She was having to drink from the toilet. We sat for what seemed like an hour in silence.
“What’s your name?” I asked at last.
“I still remember, Max,” she said. She shifted. I heard her try to swallow and barely succeed, the dry sides of her throat sticking together. “Do you think they’re hoping to starve or dehydrate us to death? Is that the plan?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I think everyone’s just too afraid that if they open the doors, you’ll all run out and . . . touch them or something. That you wouldn’t cooperate and stay back. We’re just trying to figure out what to do.”
Marion sighed, long and slow. “Did you see me when we all first realized it had happened?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I wasn’t there.”
I heard her change position again on her side of the carpet. I realized that I couldn’t see anything shift through the tiny gap under the door. It was so strange. My senses went numb from the confusion. It was like hearing one person say something while watching someone else move her lips.
“Oh,” Marion finally said.
“What?”
“What’s this place called?” she asked. “I forgot.”
By the end of the next day, Marion wasn’t talking much, weak from the dehydration. Whatever was in the porcelain bowl must have been long finished, and it was just so hot, without the air conditioning and being unable to open the safety catches on the windows. The day was bright, but when I crept into the empty hall, I was dripping wet. She was dying of thirst, and it was raining, but only outside her side of the building. I tried to stop thinking about what it might mean. I tried not to think about it at all. And I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t; they’d know I was sneaking in.
I just wanted to fix her arm—that was the only thing about it all that could be fixed. I felt like it was my fault for not saving her. I was the reason Marion was here. I had been her friend. I had introduced her to Paul and Imanuel once you and I had gotten serious, trying to combine our social circles. I had begged her to take the flight, to see all of us again after so many years. But I didn’t know how to bring her shadow back or stop her from forgetting. The room was starting to smell faintly of shit, from whatever corner she was relieving herself in. When she did speak, it was a strange mix of piercing detail and huge vague swaths. She recalled one of her two names—her first but not her last. She remembered that we were at a wedding but not where it was or who had gotten married, that I was her friend but not what my name was.
“Why am I in here?” she asked again for the third time.
“You’re . . . sick,” was all I could think of to say.