“Sick,” she repeated. I heard her shift again, saw nothing move on the floor. “I don’t feel well.”
I didn’t tell her it was because she was dehydrating to death. “They promised to make a decision by the morning,” I offered. “To figure something out by the third day.”
“It’s been two days?” she asked. I tried to remember how it was reported to have been with Hemu Joshi. She seemed to be forgetting much faster than he had.
The last time I visited her, at dawn on the third day, I was surprised to hear her already awake.
“Do I know you?” she asked as I sat down.
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
We both waited awhile, until it felt normal for me to be sitting there again. “My name is Max,” I finally told her.
“Max . . . ,” she said to herself, as if rolling the word around in her mouth. I felt cold as I sat there. She really didn’t remember me at all.
“Marion.” I scooted closer and dropped my voice.
“What is a Marion?”
We sat in silence for a long time. “What’s it like? To forget everything?” I asked softly. “Are you afraid?”
She settled against the door. “Maybe I was,” she said. “But now I’m not. Now it just feels . . . simple. It probably seems terrible, but it’s not. I just . . . At first I was angry. But every day I forget more. Maybe I’ll forget so much I won’t remember what I’ve lost, or that I’ve lost anything at all. You can’t miss what you don’t know you had, can you?”
Do you remember Hallie? I wanted to ask her. Do you remember your daughter? Your husband? “Do you know what karma is?” I finally whispered.
“No,” she answered.
When I left her and sneaked back outside through the rear lounge door, the sun was so strong it felt like the grass was curling under my shoes. I came around the corner and tried to look like I’d been strolling through the trees this whole time. When I reached the patchwork lawn of blankets, I saw you walking toward me. Thank God. I started to jog. If you were outside, instead of in the ballroom, that could only mean one thing. You all had figured something out. You were going to do something to help Marion and the rest of the third scouting party. Your shoulders jumped in surprise when you saw me, and I started to smile with relief, but then I saw the look in your eyes.
I argued, but no one listened. Not even you. It had taken your group three days to decide what to do, but actually I think all of you had known what was going to happen from the first moment. It just took you three days to rationalize it into something that would let us face one another every morning thereafter.
The One Who Gathers
THE NURSE LEANED DOWN AGAIN, HOLDING THE COFFEEPOT out to him.
“No, thank you,” the amnesiac said.
“I will have more, though,” Dr. Zadeh cut in, and raised his mug. He rubbed his face slowly, as if trying to stretch it into a different shape. “Jet lag.” He smiled, and she nodded sympathetically as she refilled his drink. Overhead, the central air conditioning clicked on, blasting the waiting room with icy wind. When they’d stepped off the plane, the air in Pune had been as warm and thickly humid as it was at home in New Orleans, but everywhere they’d gone since—the private government car sent to retrieve them, their five-star hotel, the car again to bring them to Maharashtra Regional Hospital, the now-quarantined psychiatric ward—was almost arctic cold. He just wanted to go outside and look. All the colors. The movement. Pune was so much more alive than the antiseptic, manicured courtyard of his assisted-living facility.
“Did I like coffee?” the amnesiac asked when the nurse had moved away.
“I don’t know. That wasn’t information I could find from your records or emails.”
The amnesiac took another testing sip of the steaming dark liquid.
“Maybe Charlotte will be able to tell you?” Dr. Zadeh tried tentatively.
The amnesiac shrugged. He would ask her when they were back, but he didn’t know if it mattered. For this new him, the taste made his tongue curl. “I don’t like it now,” he said. “Would that mean I didn’t like it before?”
“Sometimes.” Dr. Zadeh nodded. “It can.”
He most likely did not like coffee before. He would add this fact to his flash cards.
“Plenty of people don’t like it,” Dr. Zadeh continued, in case he was feeling excluded from some societal ritual. “They just drink it so as not to feel like a truck ran over them.” He took another sip. “Like right now.”
“I feel fine,” the amnesiac replied.
“Now that’s weird,” he said.
They laughed. The amnesiac couldn’t stay angry at him. He had no one else in the whole world.
“Why me?” he finally asked. Dr. Zadeh glanced up. “Why was I chosen to meet Hemu Joshi?”