The Book of M. Peng Shepherd
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.
“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 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