“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. He squinted into the light. “Seven years, and I’m nervous,” he said. “Isn’t that funny?”
“Wouldn’t be worth it if you weren’t.” Ory grinned.
That day was ancient history. Only about four weeks after Hemu Joshi first stepped out to the ravenous flash and whir of news cameras, and a few days after the cases in Brazil and Panama appeared. The U.S. had announced it was considering closing its borders, but aside from the cases that had begun appearing in Latin America, that was as near as the Forgetting seemed. It was still a dim, vague thing, a thing that was happening there, not here. Until suddenly it was.
It was almost funny when he thought back on it now. There they all were, tuxedoes and dresses fluttering in the fresh mountain breeze, tables set, candles lit ahead of the warming dusk, preparing to celebrate exactly the opposite of what was about to happen: the joining of memories, the promise that they would last long after the people were all gone. Instead, they witnessed the Forgetting reach the United States just before midnight.
THE CEREMONY WAS BEAUTIFUL. PAUL AND IMANUEL HAD been together longer than Ory and Max, and their love was old news to him—he hadn’t expected to cry when they read their vows. And then when he did, he couldn’t believe he had ever expected not to.
Ory could see only half of Max’s face from where he was standing at the front next to Paul, but he looked at her anyway as Rabbi Levenson pronounced them married and the room erupted in cheers. She leapt to her feet and stuck her fingers in her mouth in a piercing whistle. Paul and Imanuel were lost in a kiss, but Ory jumped at the sound, and then laughed when he realized it had come from her.
Ory helped herd everyone into the ballroom, where dining tables and a dance floor were set up. Someone had passed streamer poppers around the crowd, and when Paul and Imanuel entered last, Imanuel red-faced with joy, Paul doing a comical prance and singing a theme song he’d made up for them both, they all pulled the strings and rained a kaleidoscope of sequins and twirling crepe paper scraps down on them.
“Official co-choreographer,” Max said afterward as she and Ory savored their champagne, disbelieving his claim that he’d helped Paul invent his entrance dance. They were outside in the sloping courtyard with a handful of other guests, looking at the stars and vast darkness of the forest beneath. “I’ll believe it when I see you perform it.”
“Oh, you’ll see it,” Ory teased. “You’ll see it tonight, in our room.”
“I look forward to it,” she said, clinking the rim of her glass against his.
He could tell that in one more drink or so, she’d be ready to go make a fool of herself on the dance floor with him. She was not a great dancer, all angles and elbows, but he loved the fact that she didn’t care at all. He was ready to be a clumsy, gangly embarrassment too, to hold her hands as they spun and to try to dip her, to feel her hair stick to his sweaty cheek as he pulled her back in close. To feel her fingers clutch his shoulders for safety until it pinched when he tried to pick her up into a twirl. He leaned in to smell her perfume, but it was the back of her head facing him suddenly, not the side of her delicate neck. Someone had just pulled her into a hug.
“Here he is.” Ory grinned and wrapped his arms around both her and Paul, making them into a gigantic, six-legged monster. One of their champagnes went everywhere, disappearing into the grass.
“My best man,” Paul laughed, and mussed Ory’s hair as he put a protective arm around Max’s shoulder. “Now, you’ve only known him for a few years, but let me tell you something about kid-Ory,” he started, but then Imanuel was there also, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and his phone in the other.
“Husband!” Paul interrupted himself, and the stern expression on Imanuel’s face, whatever had been distracting him moments before, melted away for an instant as they kissed again. “Is that a patient? Is someone in labor? During our wedding?” Paul teased as he pulled back.
“No,” Imanuel smiled sheepishly, but then the solemn expression returned to line his features. Ory saw he had an internet browser open on the screen of his phone. “I went to get a drink and I heard the caterers talking. It—it happened to Boston.”
There was a moment when no one knew what he meant. It was probably the last moment that anyone ever didn’t know. Now nothing ever meant anything else.
“The shadows?” Ory finally asked. But it seemed impossible. The rumors had begun that said perhaps it was something contagious, the new century’s black plague, or Ebola, but it seemed like hysteria, still easy to dismiss. There was just no real information—no one was sending any signals out of the afflicted countries, by phone or email or post or television or radio—and besides satellite images and high-altitude military flyovers, which showed nothing but stillness and the occasional flicker of a terrified shape wandering through streets or jungle, there was nothing else to go on.
“It happened in Boston?” Max asked.
“Not in Boston.” Imanuel shook his head. “To Boston. Almost everyone there.”
BY MIDNIGHT, WORD HAD SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE WEDDING party. The courtyard was deserted, champagne glasses abandoned half-full where they were, and everyone was crowded back into the ballroom. Some were on their cell phones, and the caterers had turned on the TV bolted to the wall in the corner of the room.
“Don’t,” Max said. She put her hand over Ory’s to stop him from opening the browser on his own phone, cradled now in his palm. They’d left their apartment in D.C. late that morning, and hadn’t packed a charger in the rush to make it to the wedding on time. “Save the power, just in case.” It wouldn’t matter—cellular signal would go down in another day or two before they’d run out of battery—but they didn’t know that then. Ory nodded gratefully at her good thinking and edged the device back into his pocket.
On television, helicopter footage cut between downtown Boston and one of the larger highways out of the city beneath a reporter’s voice-over. The National Guard had circled the metropolis and blocked all routes in and out, putting the entire population under indefinite quarantine. There was a mini screen in the bottom right corner running at the same time as the live feed; it was a rerun of the president’s speech that had apparently aired half an hour before, when the news about Boston first broke. He was in the middle of assuring the public that the nation’s top scientists were working around the clock to figure out the cause of the epidemic—the world was still calling it “the epidemic” then, as if it was some kind of simple biological quirk, some twisted proteins or mutated virus that could be solved by the right vaccine—and advised everyone not to travel except in emergency circumstances. “Stay safe, stay inside, limit travel, and limit contact with others whenever possible,” his grainy image repeated. “We are doing everything we can to find a way to neutralize the spread. I promise you, as soon as we discover a cure, we’ll be sending FEMA and Red Cross agents door to door through every neighborhood to distribute it.” His voice was calm, but the message was clear. Do not go to the hospital. Do not go to the grocery store. Do not leave your house. Wait.
Now, it was clear the Forgetting was not contagious. At least it didn’t seem like it was. The number of times that Ory had been curiously examined or attacked by a shadowless while out scavenging, the number of random survivors he’d tried to help in the early days who later succumbed, and he was still here, still whole. If it had been contagious, he’d have lost his shadow years ago. He still had no idea what it actually was. And he’d given up trying to figure it out. But back