“Oh,” the amnesiac blinked. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I’m sorry, Hemu. We were late leaving to get here this morning—it completely slipped my mind.”
Hemu waved it off. “I shouldn’t even have asked. Don’t trouble yourself with it.”
“I promised I would,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
Hemu slid his elephant research notebook carefully onto the low table so he could settle more comfortably on the couch. The amnesiac sat in the chair facing him and waited patiently for the aides to attach the cables to his own forehead again so they would match each other. “So what have they instructed us to speak about today?” Hemu asked. “More Gajarajan?”
“Unfortunately, no,” the amnesiac said. “They’re hoping for more of a . . . focused approach now. They want us to talk about anything about your past.”
Hemu nodded, resigned. They sat for a moment.
“You know what the worst part is,” he started. The amnesiac looked up. “Is forgetting something, but remembering that you’ve forgotten it.” He toyed with the hem of his tunic. “It’s almost better to both forget a thing and also forget you’ve forgotten it. Maybe not better. But kinder.”
The amnesiac sighed. “I’m sorry we have to do this,” he said.
“It’s all right. I know you’re only trying to help. This just always shows me exactly what it is I’ve lost.” He took a breath. “Did you have any family that you didn’t remember you had?”
The amnesiac thought about Charlotte. “Not really,” he said. “No siblings. I apparently never knew my father, and my mother died a few years before the accident.”
Hemu squinted, thinking. “I have a mother,” he said. “I do remember that word, what it means. Just not who she is.”
“Dr. Zadeh told me that my mother’s name was Anne,” the amnesiac said.
“The doctors say they keep telling me what mine is named, too. But I just can’t hold it.”
“It’s not your fault,” the amnesiac said.
“So they all keep saying,” Hemu sighed.
“Do you remember the last time you saw her?” the amnesiac continued. “I mean, I know you don’t, I just meant—maybe we could try to work backward.” He felt absurdly underqualified. Surely his own team had tried this countless times. “I see Dr. Zadeh—my doctor—do that with his other patients, sometimes,” he finished lamely.
“I do remember cameras,” Hemu said. “A lot of cameras. It was so bright. Every time one would finish its blinding flash, another one would be starting. All I could see was white.” He peeled back his lips and made the sound of a hundred shutters clicking: chh chh chh chh chh chh chh. “The police were trying to help me into a van, to get me away from them. I wanted to close my eyes and just let them push me toward the back doors and into a seat.”
“Oh, this is when they took you from the spice market and brought you here,” the amnesiac said.
“The what?” Hemu asked, looking at the amnesiac mid-thought, face puzzled.
“The spice market.”
“What market?”
“The—what was it called—the Mandai,” the amnesiac tried. “The spice market. Where you were when you lost your shadow.”
Hemu’s dark eyes grew distant, as if he was gazing somewhere far away. He was trying to recall it, the amnesiac realized.
“I don’t remember,” Hemu finally said.
A few minutes later, there was a metal clang on the other side of the door, from inside of the observation room. A chair falling as someone stood up out of it too quickly, maybe. The amnesiac glanced over, but the door didn’t open.
Then someone cried out “Mandai!” The wall muffled it somewhat, but the word was clear enough. “Mandai! Mandai!”
They both stared at the door. Suddenly everyone was screaming. “What’s going on?” Hemu asked fearfully.
“I don’t know,” the amnesiac said. He ripped the cables off his head. “Stay here,” he called over the alarms he’d triggered, and ran across the room. He shoved the door to the observation office open. Dr. Zadeh dashed forward to stop who he thought would be Hemu, but then realized it was only the amnesiac. The shadowless was still sitting where he’d been left, staring confusedly at them. Inside, the aides were shouting and pointing at a TV playing the news. Dr. Avanthikar had her silver head in her hands. There was an aerial shot of a completely empty street on the screen. No shops or buildings lining the sides, not even paint on the asphalt to denote traffic lines. A crowd had begun to swarm at its edges. “What’s going on?” the amnesiac cried to her over the alarms.