The Book of M. Peng Shepherd

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      Everything looks so different, it’s hard to tell where I am. I thought I was prepared. I mean, I’ve seen the back of the shelter where the trap is, and some of the overgrown hills nearby—but the resort was always sort of foresty anyway, all grass and trees. I haven’t been outside the grounds probably since everyone else from the wedding was still here. So when I got to the bottom of the mountain and looked left and right, trying to figure out where I was, it looked so unlike Elk Cliffs Road that I never would have recognized it in a million years. I had to close my eyes and figure out what it had looked like before, how to get where I wanted to go, from memory. Which is kind of hilarious, considering. It’s fucking hilarious.

      Sorry, bad joke. I guess I’m more nervous than I thought I’d be, out on my own like this.

      It’s been only a few days, but I’m actually not as hungry as I expected. You remember what the scientists said, back when it started—that once a shadowless has forgotten everything, it also forgets it’s hungry or thirsty, or even that it needs to breathe. God, I hope I forget to eat or drink before I forget to breathe. I’d rather starve a hundred times than suffocate to death. Can you imagine? All that pain, the fire in your lungs, the slow, darkening stillness, and all you’d have to do is just take a breath, if only you could remember that your body could do it?

      I’m sorry, Ory. I’m sure you don’t want to hear that. I find myself thinking about stranger and stranger things. Maybe it’s one of the effects.

      Part of me still can’t believe I did it. That I actually left you. It almost seems like someone else’s memory when I think back on it now, for as long as I still can—like I’m watching someone who looks like me, but isn’t.

      The morning of that seventh day, when you finally went to the city to search for food, you gave me one last nervous look before you shut the door behind yourself to head off. The key twisted in the lock. I waited until your footsteps had faded. If there was a window uncovered that faced the direction you were walking, I would’ve watched you hike through the ever-tangling weeds until you disappeared. Instead, I counted to five hundred.

      Then I went into the closet, took down the bag of sweaters from the top shelf, and filled the purse I brought for Paul and Imanuel’s wedding with the essentials: underwear, some of our first-aid kit, one flashlight, our spare hunting knife. My tape recorder.

      I worked quickly on purpose. So fast I couldn’t think about what I was actually doing. If I’d gone any slower, my resolve would have failed. I zipped up the inner pocket of the purse, threw it over my shoulder, marched to the door, turned the lock, stepped out, and then shut it behind me. Click.

      That’s when I paused.

      The finality of it really hit me then. That as soon as I walked away from that door, I’d never be able to find it again. I’d forget it, or the way back to it. This was really, really it.

      The only thing that got my feet to move was the idea that came to me at that very moment. Until that point, I’d planned to go east, to try to make it to our home in D.C. Just to see it one last time before I forgot what it looked like. Before I forgot you. That’s probably where you would guess I tried to make it to as well—tried, but got lost and then … You know.

      But then I thought, Why? Why not do the opposite? Why not see somewhere completely new for my very last days as Max?

      So I went west instead.

       ORLANDO ZHANG

      THAT WAS HIS LAST NIGHT IN THE SHELTER, ALTHOUGH HE didn’t know it at the time. Ory, sitting alone on a thin mattress, gun over his knee, everything he could carry stuffed into his pockets. So very different from the first night he and Max had spent there.

      It was afternoon in the courtyard that day, years ago. Ory was standing on the lawn, holding a champagne flute in one hand. They called that place Elk Cliffs Resort then. The late sun warmed the left side of everything—faces, tables, each blade of grass. Beside him, Paul was practicing his speech, cursing every time he had to look at the thin, sweat-soaked book in his hands.

      “Fuck. Fuck!” he growled.

      “You know, for a poet, that’s kind of an underwhelming opening line,” Ory said.

      Paul glanced at him. His brow shone in the high-altitude light. “I can’t remember the words,” he confessed sheepishly. “You’d think—I mean, I wrote the goddamn thing for him.” He sighed, meaning the book, all the poems in it. It was his second published collection, dedicated to Imanuel. “You’d think I could memorize the one I want to use for my vows.”

      “He’s a doctor. He’ll never notice,” Ory said. Paul laughed. Across the grass, Max winked at him from afar, dress billowing in the breeze. The game trap was now there in the place where she was standing. “You’ll get it,” Ory tried to reassure him. “One more time.”

      Paul put the book back in his jacket pocket and took a long, deep breath. СКАЧАТЬ