He took it slowly from her. “Okay, they’re a little shaky,” he confessed.
Max laughed as he stuffed it into his pack. Her head was tossed back, lips grinning. For an instant she was frozen in profile, as if painted into the moment. There, standing in front of the table—but nothing draped against the wall, nothing spread across the floor.
He wouldn’t have thought it would make a difference, but to watch a person move around and cast no shadow anywhere became terrifying after a while. There was a strange weightlessness to it. As if they weren’t actually there.
“Blue,” Ory finally said.
“Fifty-two,” Max replied.
He looked back down at his pack before she could see the relief on his face. Did it hurt or warm her that he checked so often? Did she think it was because he loved her or because he didn’t trust her any longer? There was no way to believe either answer. Ory reached into his pack, fingers searching until he felt it. “There’s something I want to talk about, before I go.”
She turned to face him, eyes focusing on what rested in his grip. An old-school tape recorder.
“Ory,” Max started tiredly. “Not again.”
“Please, Max,” he begged. He pushed the recorder into her hands. She held it stiffly in her long, dark fingers, as if it were a dead bird.
“We already talked about this,” she replied at last. “I thought we’d agreed.”
“Let’s just try it. We have to try.” They looked at each other. “The deer,” Ory said. Meaning, it was getting worse. That now they knew she would start to forget bigger things.
The corner of the tape recorder glinted dully in her palm. Ory could just barely see the red REC button on the side. He had thought, before it finally drove them apart, that her forgetting might bring them closer together. But every day was more and more strange. Every argument had become a horrible calculation: Was it worth it? How many hours would they lose to awkward silence in the aftermath?
“Okay,” Max finally said. “Yeah. Who knows. Maybe it’ll work.”
They both looked at the little machine in silence. At last, she awkwardly tried to jam it into the too-small pocket of her coat.
“Oh, one more thing,” Ory added. He dug around in the front zipper of his bag until he found the long, thin coil. It was a loop of stainless steel cable, from god knows what dilapidated graveyard of a hardware store. There was a sturdy notch on one side of the recorder’s plastic body to connect a safety loop—he threaded the cord through there and secured the clip. When he finished, the little machine hung like a necklace just below the swell of her chest, at a perfect length to lift up and record and to be tucked safely away underneath a shirt.
Max wrapped her arms around Ory and buried her forehead in his shoulder. They swayed.
“Wait, let me turn it on . . .” She was smiling. Her thumb pressed the stiff REC button, and she held the machine up to his mouth. “Okay, say it now,” she whispered.
“Blue,” Ory said awkwardly, shy at being recorded, but with feeling.
“Fifty-two,” Max replied when she’d pulled it close to her lips. She clicked it off and let it drop back down on the cord, still holding him. Ory held her back.
He thought at first she was cold and was using his body heat to warm herself up like she always did in the mornings, but that wasn’t what she wanted.
“I won’t be able to explore very far if I don’t—” he started.
“Who cares,” she cut him off as she pried open his belt. There was a new desperation to her movements. Before she’d finished stripping it off him, Ory knew he didn’t care anymore either.
The deer. Would the recorder actually make a difference? The color of the knife handle. Had he given it to Max because he still had hope, or because he had none?
He felt something rip as she pulled: a hem, a belt loop. The sound burned into his brain, and he played it again in his head, to remember the popping tear of the thread, what it sounded like when she knew it was him, and he was the one she wanted. “Blue,” he whispered again.
“Fuck me already,” Max hissed. She pulled the tape recorder over her head and tossed it onto the pile of discarded clothes.
It was all right. They could have secrets from each other, for the short time they had left to have secrets. She had agreed to try the tape recorder. Ory didn’t have to admit to her that his determination to keep her whole was more for himself than for her, that he was afraid she would be no different from the rest of the shadowless—that she would also love the strange magic of her amnesia more than him, and stop fighting to remember. She didn’t have to tell him if she believed it, too.
Orlando Zhang