You were on speaking terms again, at least. Beyond that, it wasn’t clear. And I didn’t want to know.
“Are you . . . her?” a man leaning against a ladder, hammer in hand, asked. Are you Max?
“Who are you?” I replied.
He cleared his throat, chastened. “I’m sorry. Always too curious, Malik used to say. I came with them, from the Iowa. My name’s Original Smith,” he said. “Well, that’s less important now—Smith Dos passed away a while ago. But there are still two of us, I guess. The other’s Smith Tres.”
I looked at the ground. His shadow appeared the same as he did, an outline of his form as perfect as your own was to you. I didn’t understand. “There are multiple versions of you, too?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” Original Smith said. “We’re all different people. We just happen to share the same name. That’s all.”
I WENT HOME TO MY ROOM IN HOUSE 55 AND DIDN’T GO BACK to the district near the base of the sanctuary’s hill for a long time. As much as I could, I wanted to avoid seeing you and Ahmadi again. Not so much for your sake, but more for hers and mine. I felt a sort of kinship with her, even though we’d never met. She was just as innocent as I was in all of this. And I was sure she was afraid there would be a terrible, inescapable triangle among us, regardless of who you chose. So I stayed away, even though it didn’t really matter. There still was a triangle—her, you, and Max. Not me, but the other Max. The first one.
During the days I wandered, speaking only to other shadowless, afraid of the looks the shadowed ones gave me. They all knew. Horror, revulsion, pity at what had happened to me shone in their eyes. I wanted to blame the elephant. It was his doing. But the more days I spent outside, watching New Orleans, I realized that although what had happened was his fault, it also wasn’t. It might have crossed Gajarajan’s mind to consider the likelihood that the tapes belonged to me versus the chance that I might have taken or been given them from someone else, but when he ultimately chose to try and save my life, there was no scheming in the decision. It was just a terrible condition of his nature, that Gajarajan doesn’t understand why it would matter to whom the tapes had truly belonged. Elephants don’t see it the same way people do, and especially neither do shadows. He didn’t realize that it makes a difference to humans if the body is the same or not—not just the mind.
What happened was a mistake, but it was also a success. It had worked, despite the unintentional pain. The reason Gajarajan had failed to do it again after me was because he only understood the what—not the why.
Some time later, I heard that you had also realized the same thing.
Gajarajan had discovered that he had to use something that already contained human memories inside of it to create a shadow of sufficient depth and strength that would agree to be attached to a person. That was why everything else he’d ever tried had failed—a sparrow, a car engine, a chandelier, a brick. Only the tape recorder had succeeded. But the reason for its success was also the reason for its failure.
Gajarajan didn’t understand what memories mean to humans—only how to restore them. You understand what they mean, but not how to make them. Together, you both can be wise enough.
You and your army turned out to be the key Gajarajan had been seeking after all. In all of New Orleans, there is only one thing that both contains human memories and also carried no danger of re-creating my accident. Your books.
It’s not as good as bringing back a body’s original memories, but that’s impossible now—Gajarajan has proven that the result could be far worse than simply losing someone forever. The next best thing is to give a shadowless some memories, so they can have some concept of self to start from. But because the shadow will now be made from a past that never existed, because the source of the shadow has never been alive in the real world, there will be no chance of discovering later that the memories are an accidental perversion of nature—a recycling of a person already in existence.
It made me happy to hear that Gajarajan had accepted human help. That no one else would ever have to accidentally suffer. New Orleans would still be New Orleans, a house would still be a house, the sun would still be the sun. No one would ever become someone else by mistake. No one else would ever lose someone twice.