The Book of M. Peng Shepherd

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СКАЧАТЬ the rest into the pockets of his pants until the box was empty. Then he grabbed all three of his moth-eaten sweaters and put them on one over the other, and covered them with the red Elk Cliffs Resort—STAFF windbreaker he’d found in the housekeeping office. Max’s clothes were still there in neat piles, but it looked as though some were missing. A shirt or two. Maybe she had seen the stack on her way out of the shelter and still been clearheaded enough to take some. Ory hoped that’s what had happened. There was no blood anywhere, nor signs of struggle, so he had to believe that she had left by herself and not as someone’s hostage. All he had to do then was find her. Find her fast.

      Next was supplies. Matches, first-aid kit, flashlight. Again, some of it seemed like it was missing. He was sure they’d collected more boxes of matches than what was in the drawer. Maybe they hadn’t. Or maybe Max had forgotten the exact number they owned and thus changed it, the way she had with the color of the knife handle. Ory stood there at the useless sink, cabinet drawer open, staring at a pair of scissors and the blank space beside it where he could have sworn they kept a spare. It was hard to tell.

      Last, a photograph of Max.

      In the floorboards by his side of the bed, he’d carved a simple trapdoor. He pulled his old wallet out and gently wiped the dust off. One debit card, one credit card, four dollar bills, a gym membership card, and his driver’s license.

      Ory eased the license out of the plastic window. If the Forgetting ever happened to him, this would be his tape recorder, he thought. Name, date of birth, height, weight, a tiny photograph of his face. It wouldn’t tell him anything he really needed to know, like that Max was his wife and he would step in front of a bus for her, that they had no children, that they met at a football game he almost didn’t go to and then almost left early from, that he was absurdly good at skiing, or that he was secretly terrified of bees. But it would at least tell him his name. And it also was a shield for the thing that really mattered. A wallet-size photograph of Max.

      It was from the night before Paul and Imanuel’s wedding—after the shadows had disappeared in India, Brazil, and Panama, but before it had gone much further than that. That evening the guests all had been in the hotel ballroom just downstairs from where he was standing now, eating chocolates and drinking champagne. Paul and Imanuel had opened some of the gifts early, and one of them had been a Polaroid instant camera that produced tiny, refrigerator-magnet-sized instant photos.

      The camera was passed around as the party got later, and when Ory got ahold of it, he took a picture of Max. She had been standing right at the open French doors that led out into the courtyard, but the light from inside was bright enough that when she turned to look at him as he said, “Excuse me, ma’am,” her face was bathed in a yellow glow that made her eyes shimmer. “Blue,” he said. He snapped it just as the smile had started to spread across her lips.

      One of the other women pulled her away to gossip about something before it was done developing, so Ory stood there in the night air just outside the doors, shaking the film lightly, peeking every few seconds to see if it had finished. By the time he found her again and she pressed another flute of Dom Pérignon into his hands and whispered in his ear, breath hot, her voice light with a hint of buzz, “You are not going to believe what Imanuel just told me about the second groomsman,” she’d forgotten he’d taken a picture of her at all.

      Ory slid the photo back in and put his driver’s license securely on top of it. Even though she was all done up, hair pulled into a messy bun and makeup on, Max still looked almost the same, and it would do for showing people he passed, if he ever passed anyone, to ask if they’d seen a woman who looked like this. Assuming they could remember how to speak, or anything they’d seen at all.

      Back in the main room, the paper that had been taped to the inside of their door since the beginning caught his eye again. There was one rule he and Max had made, long before she’d lost her shadow and they had made the rest of them. Rule Zero, they had started calling it after they’d written the list. He pulled it down and crumpled it into a withered ball. There was no way Max could not have seen it when she left. What did that mean? How much had she forgotten?

      They’d made Rule Zero when they became the only ones left at the hotel. For months there had been no electricity, no running water, then no radio. Then finally there were no other guests. They couldn’t avoid the conversation about it any longer.

      “It’s not fair,” Max had said. “If it was me that went missing, you’d come after me.”

      “No, I wouldn’t,” Ory replied. It didn’t even sound believable to him.

      “Yes, you would,” Max argued. “Besides, it’s different. You go out all day, and I stay here most of the time. If I disappeared, it would be because I lost my shadow and forgot to stay, so of course you shouldn’t follow then!”

      “Don’t—” He grimaced. It felt like tempting fate to ever mention the possibility it could happen to either of them.

      “I only meant, if you were the one who didn’t come home, it would probably be because you were injured somewhere and needed my help.”

      “I’ll make sure to get killed, then, so there’s nothing to come help.”

      “Ory,” Max said, her voice horribly small.

      The silence settled between them, heavy. “Sorry,” he finally murmured.

      They looked down at dinner—one plastic bag of potato chips. What he’d found the last time he’d gone out.

      “I just can’t,” Max said. “It would be one thing if one of us forgot. But if you go missing while you’re out looking for food, I’m going to go to where you said you went and try to find you.”

      “That’s not the deal,” Ory said.

      “That’s as good as you’re going to get,” she shot back. “I’ll give you that if one of us forgets, the other doesn’t go after. I can’t do any more than that. Okay?”

      “Okay,” Ory finally said. He used paper from the abandoned guest book—wrote the rule in silence and hung it up. You never go after the other person if they forget. They didn’t speak for the rest of the evening.

      It was the best they could do, but it wasn’t enough. Over the next few weeks, Ory stopped telling Max where he went to scavenge for scraps each day, or if she refused to let him out the door without an answer, lied so blatantly she knew it was so. Eventually she stopped asking, because she knew what he was doing.

      Later that night, after they’d made Rule Zero, Ory used a tiny bit of the precious soap they had left. The shelter had contained boxes and boxes of surplus inventory, back when it was Elk Cliffs Resort, and in the early days they’d squandered it. Bathing whenever they liked, washing their hair at least once a day. It made things still feel normal. They realized too late that what had looked like an endless supply in the housekeeping closets actually wasn’t. They now had two hundred toothbrushes left, but no more toothpaste. Nine hundred towels, but barely any body wash. Now they were trying to stretch what was left, bathing only every few days, and only washing the essential areas. He dipped his finger into the plastic container and tried to scrape every millimeter of excess back in. Only what was needed. He reached down, away from his face and hair, and worked the slippery cleansing film over his testicles. He pulled back the foreskin, trying to spread the soap upward, working painstakingly to scrub away the vague, inescapable musk.

      Max was already in bed when he toweled off after his bucket bath and slipped into the darkness of the bedroom. He crawled in next to her, naked, self-conscious. Her breathing СКАЧАТЬ