A teenager, about nineteen perhaps. Not that tall, and painfully skinny from weeks of starvation, with a tousle of silky dark hair and a few faint freckles on his pale, scared face. He’d been digging around in the long-emptied garbage bins in the alley behind the assisted-living facility, searching for something edible. The noise was what had drawn them to him. The amnesiac, Dr. Zadeh, and Nurse Marie stood blocking the only way out of the narrow, dead-end street with their bodies long before he heard them there.
“Easy,” the amnesiac said when the shadowless finally turned around, then started, movements swift and compact like a cornered animal. The amnesiac glanced at Dr. Zadeh, who was trying to stand in a posture that both appeared as unthreatening as possible and also covered as much of the alley as possible. “Do you remember English?” he continued. “You understand what I’m saying?”
The shadowless flinched. His hands were curled into defensive claws. The amnesiac felt the weight of the kitchen knife on his belt in its crudely fashioned plastic and duct tape scabbard. He’d practiced reaching for the handle and whipping it out several times before they went outside. He didn’t want to have to be good with a blade—but he did want to be good with a blade. Just in case.
“You look hungry,” Dr. Zadeh said. The amnesiac saw recognition register in the boy’s eyes. The meaning of that word, the hope. “What’s your name?”
The shadowless stared at them. Slowly the hands uncurled. His eyes shimmered, tears like mirrors. “I don’t remember,” he moaned.
“That’s all right,” Dr. Zadeh smiled. “How about we give you one? Your name is Michael,” he said.
“Michael,” the shadowless repeated. “Michael,” he said again more fiercely, in the familiar tone the amnesiac had heard so many times. A desperation not just to cling to something, but to have something to cling to in the first place.
“Michael, we’re friends,” Dr. Zadeh continued. “We’re here to help you. I’m a doctor. You can call me Dr. Zadeh.”
“What kind of doctor?”
“A neurologist,” he said, not expecting the term to mean anything anymore to Michael. The amnesiac could see from his expression that it didn’t. “I work on the brain.” He pointed to the side of his head, at his temple. “My specialty is memories.”
The word hung in the air between all of them like a physical thing. Memories. The amnesiac watched Michael take a step toward them, as if to move into the aura of those lingering syllables.
“You can make me remember?” he asked with terrifying desperation.
No, the amnesiac wanted to say. How much had Michael forgotten? he wondered. What magic had he already done? “We can try,” he said instead.
MICHAEL SETTLED IN, AND THE AMNESIAC BEGAN TEACHING him the same Alzheimer’s memory exercises Dr. Zadeh had taught him when he’d first arrived. It was mostly useless, but they had to start somewhere. There was a process, a scientific process, Dr. Zadeh insisted as he tried to finish his experimental treatment plan. If they were going to find the cure, they had to do it right. They needed patients, and they needed a process.
“We don’t even know the cause of shadowlessness,” the amnesiac had argued. “How can you develop a treatment plan if we don’t even know the cause?”
“That’s what will make us fail, right there,” Dr. Zadeh said. He pointed at him.
The amnesiac stared back, confused. “What?” he finally asked.
“Doubt,” Dr. Zadeh replied.
The amnesiac wasn’t sure what he believed, but he put that aside. He didn’t argue against the doctor’s plan after that. He did everything he was asked, everything he could, to keep the patients safe. New Orleans had been shadowless for almost a month by then. Once the Forgetting reached the city limits, he had helped Dr. Zadeh remove all the signs on their facility—the metal address numbers on the front wall, Dr. Zadeh’s name plaque by the door, the information board that was posted on the roof. Anything that would tell someone who still remembered how to read that a doctor could be inside, that there might be medicine or food as well. They added locks to doors and boarded up windows. Now the assisted-living facility looked no different from the rest of the ruined structures that surrounded it.
Once they were confident the building was secure and inconspicious, Dr. Zadeh, the amnesiac, and Nurse Marie sneaked out a few more times to look for more shadowless to admit to the assisted-living facility, growing bolder, going farther into the city each time. Some listened, some ran. When they started taking Michael with them, always holding Nurse Marie’s hand so he didn’t wander off, they became much better at persuading other shadowless to trust them. The amnesiac started bringing food when they went out looking—both as a gesture of good faith and as a way to stop the shadowless from fleeing immediately, before any of them could get a full sentence out.
Even when the power went down across New Orleans and the riots broke out, Dr. Zadeh refused to give up. Even when the police finally left their posts around the city one by one, and bodies in the streets—shadowed and shadowless alike—became more and more common, he pressed on.
“How many more patients do we need?” the amnesiac asked him one night, after they’d rationed out dinner for everyone.