The Book of M. Peng Shepherd

it was just a few turns from the shore of Old Harbor, where she was sure the boat was hidden. They waited until 1:30 A.M. exactly and then ran down the road as silently as they could in the pitch-blackness. Sure enough, the little metal boat was there, stuffed into the shrubs. As they dragged it the last few yards to the shore, Naz stepped into the icy water by accident with one foot and gasped in agony.

      “Naz!” Rojan whispered, panicked.

      “Fuck, that’s cold!” Naz hissed.

      “Don’t do that! I thought something was wrong!”

      “Something is wrong!” she snapped, but she shut up. Her sister was right, she could be freezing later. Rojan climbed into the boat and set her backpack and the duffel bag down, then put out a hand. Naz slipped the bow over her shoulder and grabbed Rojan’s palm.

      They rolled up their sleeves and paddled with their hands until their fingers were numb, because there were no oars. They drifted south, south, south. At some point in the darkness, they bumped into something floating. Naz’s first thought was that it was a body, but thank God it wasn’t—it was just a piece of wood.

      When they finally found a shore that seemed far enough away, they crawled out of their own dinghy and crept between the carcasses of other half-sunk boats to the asphalt.

      “Heritage Drive.” Rojan read the street sign overhead softly. She looked at Naz expectantly, waiting to hear if they’d gone far enough, if they were clear of Boston proper and the roadblocks.

      “I think we’re okay,” Naz muttered, dumbfounded. Somehow they’d paddled all the way to Quincy. How far was that? She tried to estimate. Five, six miles? “Let’s go slow.” She pulled the bow off her back and kept it ready. The streets were even more unnervingly still than from where they’d come.

      On the back wall of the next building, glowing under the flickering light of a roof security lamp, someone had graffitied a phrase in spray-paint.

      “The One Who Gathers?” Rojan read softly. The name sent a chill through Naz as her sister said it. Rojan reached out and touched the bottom drip of paint—it was long dry. “What on earth do you think it means?”

      Naz shook her head slowly. “I have no idea,” she said.

       THE ONE WHO GATHERS

      LATER, HE CAME TO HAVE MANY NAMES. THE ONE WITH A Middle but No Beginning. The Stillmind. Patient RA. Last, most important of all—The One Who Gathers. But in the beginning, he had no name at all.

      Once he had recovered enough to walk on his own, he was discharged from the hospital and moved to an assisted-living facility, to begin therapy with a specialist named Dr. Zadeh. This was years ago, some three months before that ominous May day when Hemu Joshi became the first man to lose his shadow. It was still early spring where he lived, in New Orleans—the sun rose late and set early in the gently crisp air there. Dr. Zadeh had come to him in the ICU on the first day, once the surgeons told him that his new patient was awake.

      Things were a blur then. Emptiness and fear. He couldn’t lift his head or speak. The nurses were so harried that none of them realized he might want to know what was going on, let alone stopped to tell him. But then Dr. Zadeh strode in with his starched lab coat, pen in hand, clipboard bursting with papers that must contain answers, and looked directly at him. Not at his vitals monitor, or his Frankenstein’s monster scalp incision, but at him. The man felt a chill when he did it. Until that moment, the man hadn’t been entirely sure he was alive at all.

      “I’m Dr. Zadeh,” the doctor said. He spoke slowly and clearly. “You are in Ochsner Baptist Medical Center, in New Orleans. You were involved in a car crash and suffered injuries. Some of them were very serious. You were in a coma for a week, but you’re out of the woods now. Blink once if you understand.”

      Yyyyyh, he tried. His mind could not will his tongue.

      Finally he gave up trying to speak, and blinked once. It felt strange, as if only one eye had done it.

      “Good,” Dr. Zadeh said, so encouragingly that he felt as if he’d accomplished something superhuman. “I’m going to ask you a few questions to better understand where we are with your recovery, and then I’ll be able to give you more information. I want you to blink once to mean yes. Blink twice to mean no. Do you understand?”

      The man blinked once.

      “All right. First, are you in pain?”

      He stared at the ceiling. Slowly things darkened and then brightened again twice in a row, to mean no. Blink, blink. The drugs were good. In fact, they were so good that he almost wanted pain—only so he could know that the rest of him was still there, on the bed.

      “That’s excellent, excellent. If you ever are in pain, I want you to blink very rapidly and continue until I notice. I’ll be able to adjust your dosage immediately through your IV and then find the surgeon on duty.”

      He blinked again once, to indicate he understood. Dr. Zadeh took a slow, thoughtful breath. The man waited, curious. He couldn’t imagine a single thing the doctor might want to know. He couldn’t move or feel, or really even think. He seemed to just exist—nothing more. “Do you know your name?” Dr. Zadeh asked.

      Oh, the man thought. How strange.

      “I need you to blink your answer to me,” Dr. Zadeh reminded him gently. “Do you know your name?”

      Blink, blink.

      “Thank you,” Dr. Zadeh said in a practiced, neutral way. “Next question. Do you know to where you were going in your car when you had the accident?”

      The man looked at the walls, then the ceiling. His eyelids shuttered twice.

      “Thank you. Do you know what city you grew up in?”

      Blink, blink.

      “Thank you. Do you know where you went to school?”

      He hadn’t realized that such things as cities and schools existed. Then as soon as Dr. Zadeh said the words, he could name the names of a hundred of them—but not a single thing about himself. Except that he had eyelids. Blink, blink. He waited for the next question. Blink, blink. Then the next. Blink, blink. Gradually the ceiling grew hot, then wetly blurry.

      AFTER HE’D HEALED ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO SPEAK EASILY again, the man was told more of what had happened. In the rain, the car on the other side of the street had hydroplaned. He’d swerved to avoid a head-on collision and rolled his own vehicle down the side of a hill. It had been pouring so hard that night, the other driver didn’t realize where the man’s car had gone, the police report stated later. That it wasn’t still on the dark road, traveling safely away in the other direction. It was another passing driver who noticed the headlights, like two stars in the black, but floating far too low to be in the sky. The man had been wearing a seat belt, but something went wrong. His head still hit the windshield twice, fracturing his skull and one eye socket. Underneath the gauze patch on the left side of his face, there wouldn’t be an eye, he was warned ahead of the bandage’s removal. There had been nothing left there to save. The man listened to it all, waiting for any fragment of that terrifying crash to hit him again. But there was nothing.

      Dr. Zadeh spent a full week on his assessment. Brain scans, endless questions, more brain scans. He came in one day without his clipboard and sat on the edge of the man’s white hospital bed. Total retrograde amnesia, from the moment of the accident, Dr. Zadeh told him softly. He was born at forty-two years old. A man with a middle, but no beginning.

      THE ASSISTED-LIVING FACILITY WORKED MOSTLY WITH ALZHEIMER’S patients, but Dr. Zadeh managed to secure him a room there. He was one of the foremost neurologists in the country, the man learned from a fellow resident during a game of bingo. The hospital funded the facility for Dr. Zadeh in exchange for his research. The man became his star patient.

      Every