Читать книгу The Book of M - Peng Shepherd - Страница 14

IN THE SUMMERS, NAZ’S ARCHERY PRACTICE WAS VERY EARLY, before the humidity became too unbearable. From June to August, Boston was like the inside of a clay baking tagine. It was almost worse than Tehran. She had to get up at four A.M., but would still watch the news for updates on Hemu Joshi’s condition while she dressed in darkness before pulling herself away to go to practice.

It only got worse. By the third week, Hemu had forgotten almost everything about his life. He couldn’t recognize his mother, and when asked if he had any siblings, couldn’t name his brothers. He could recite his phone number but not his address. He knew he was born and raised in Pune, but didn’t seem to know that Pune was in India or that India was a country. Then he forgot what cricket was.

On the archery range, Naz tried to concentrate, but her mind wasn’t there. She wondered if she should go back. India was scarily close to home. Her sister emailed and said to stay, not to give up her training, that there was nothing she could do in Iran to help anyway. Naz hid her phone in her sports bra between shots, then would lean down so her hands were hidden and text someone—her next-door neighbor, her friends back in Tehran—anyone, it didn’t matter. They were all talking about the same thing. Did you see the test where HJ could only remember 4 of the days in a week? Or HJ just tried to list all the streets in his neighborhood, did you watch that one?

Yeah. Did you see the clip where they showed him pics of his classmates from high school and he tried to name them? they’d reply. It was constant. After a few days, Naz started to worry she was going to get kicked off the team, but then she peeked down the line of targets and realized the other archers were all doing the exact same thing. Go to CNN live stream, they have an update.

She kept waiting for good news, but there never was any. Only bad and worse. Then the Angels of Mumbai began to follow Hemu’s path as well, just like the Nashik Cherubs. All suffering various degrees of amnesia, with no discernible pattern across age, sex, education, or geography. There was one woman from Mumbai who seemed to be decaying the slowest, while one of the teenagers from Nashik had completely forgotten all the facts of his childhood and his ability to speak Marathi, the local dialect, within five days of becoming shadowless.

Scientists from every country took over the television channels, armed with hypotheses and ideas for experiments to explain why the shadows never came back, or why without one, a mind starts to flake away like ash on a cindered log. In India, doctors ran test after test on Hemu, trying to prove it was early-onset Alzheimer’s, trauma-induced amnesia from one too many cricket balls to the head, stress from the fame, hippocampal damage due to alcoholism he didn’t have, whatever. They took a brain scan from a patient in the United States—a middle-aged man who had suffered total and permanent retrograde amnesia in a car accident just a few weeks before Hemu Joshi’s own case appeared—to compare to that of Hemu. Patient RA, he was dubbed by the media, to protect his privacy. Oddly, there was nothing abnormal about Hemu’s images. The news reported that the two men even met, the American amnesiac and Hemu Joshi. They flew Patient RA from New Orleans all the way to Pune for a week, to see if talking to another person suffering a similar affliction might knock something loose.

It didn’t. Patient RA flew back home with his entourage of doctors, to return to his assisted-living facility. After that, videos of Hemu never appeared on air again. Naz didn’t know what that meant.

Reports about the other shadowless from Mumbai and Nashik still filled every broadcast, though. The experiments grew wilder as the scientists grew more desperate. They shocked them, hypnotized them, starved them of sleep and then tried to plant memories in their delirious states, cut into their brains. Nothing worked. It sounded silly, but Naz knew there was no other way to say it. The earth’s rotation aside, what happened to them wasn’t science. It was magic.

Even so, she couldn’t stop staring at the scientists poking at them on the news, whenever they gave interviews. The world kept following. Everyone hoped they would all get better. That they’d remember who they were, that they’d recognize their families again. But they never did.

She probably would’ve kept watching forever, rooting for them, but eventually she had to stop. There was just nothing left to watch. Stories about the shadowless disappeared from broadcasts, and even the skeleton crews pulled back, until there was no coverage at all. It seemed to be the end.

Until eight days later, a curly-haired kid in Brazil looked down during lunch recess and realized he didn’t have a shadow anymore. And then two days after that, he couldn’t remember his own name.

THE BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT WAS ON THE AIR ABOUT FIVE hours after the news broke, announcing that he’d closed Brazil’s borders to all international travel, to help contain whatever this was. Brazilians abroad weren’t allowed to return, and noncitizens could go only as far as their embassies. It was an international outrage, but no other country dared to actually retaliate or rescue their citizens by force—they’d have to send soldiers in for that. Into the place where shadows were disappearing.

The kid’s family vanished. There was POLICÍA—NÃO SE CRUZAM tape up around their property on the news, and the Brazilian government released a statement that said they’d been taken into custody in order to provide them “the best treatment possible.” The phrase chilled Naz. Their neighbors put themselves into self-imposed quarantine. None of them lost their shadows. Americans camped angrily out in the consular hall of the U.S. embassy in São Paulo. Australians built a giant barbecue on the front lawn of their own. Naz emailed Rojan about going home again, but tickets had jumped to $15,000. Airports everywhere but Brazil were overrun with desperate travelers trying to run to—or run away from—somewhere. So instead, Naz just held her breath, hoping it was some kind of strange fluke.

But it wasn’t. Another case showed up on the other side of Brazil, completely unconnected, near the border with Peru. Then a week after that, it seemed like all the shadows in Panama disappeared at the same time.