this is the first half.
The man who lost his shadow.
By the time Edgar realized he had lost his shadow, it was long gone – it might have been missing for days, weeks for all he knew. He remembered sizing himself up against it when he had visited the graveyard with Ava and Miles, who wanted to see the ruins of the Abbey, and they stood in the glaring morning sun, watching their shadows drape over the stones. They talked and laughed, inventing stories for people buried so long ago that the stones were worn beyond their names.
The first thing he did when he realized was check the mirror. His reflection looked back at him, big-eyed and worried. At least he wasn’t some form of dead. Had the ghosts taken his shadow in some kind of revenge, or as a game? But ghosts were not so different from the living. They could never have done it.
It might have been one of the crow-people on the subway a week ago. They stood in a great gaggle, pulling their shawls of molted feathers close up to their faces and over their wings. They talked about dire things in a dire language Edgar couldn’t understand, but they squawked at him in English when he bumped into one on his way off the train.
The thought that it might have been stolen was frightening. Anything that could steal a shadow was dangerous, and probably coming back. Still, he looked for it as though it were simply lost, turning the townhouse inside out. He made such a mess that his shadow could have been buried under any dislocated pile of paper or stack of books.
“Just tell me what you’re looking for!” Ava said in a huff, a wooden spoon sticking out of her back pocket, and brandishing a lamplighter in her right hand. Edgar took a step back, and not just for the sight of the long silver lighter. A man without a shadow was thought a dangerous one and worse things besides. He didn’t feel dangerous, just worried.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s a personal thing, you probably wouldn’t recognize it if you saw it and I can’t describe it to you.” He wasn’t even sure what his shadow would look like, now that it wasn’t attached to his feet, though he had the idea that he’d know it when he saw it.
He hadn’t meant to be insulting, but she didn’t look pleased. “All right then. Just keep your books out of my kitchen. Do you know when Miles is coming home?”
Edgar shrugged. He didn’t.
When it turned out that Miles had been home all along – having come home early by the high way of balconies and rooftops and having sat up there for an hour watching the evening stars come out - Ava was so angry that, (at the first sight of Edgar coming towards the kitchen with a stack of things) she made the room heave him down the hall again when he tried to come near.
He would have otherwise been put out by this, but he had been having trouble caring much. The effect of not having a shadow, he supposed, and shook his head as if to clear water from his ears. Just then Miles came striding down the narrow hall, took one glance at Ava, and said, “Oh, I’m in for it,” as though it would be comforting.
At dinner he tried to sit out of direct light and made extra effort to enjoy Ava’s pheasant and pepper stew. She sat stiff-backed, tired but annoyed at both her housemates. The great antler of candles guttering next to his plate was a good distraction from the way the light fell bright and stark against his face. He shouldn’t have worried so much; Miles and Ava spent most of the time arguing about whether they needed new plates and about Miles’ persistent use of the high way, which Ava disliked and Miles said was safe, though he always kept a knife on him.
Their bickering was familiar and calming. Edgar had lived with them since their second year at the university and in five years they hadn’t changed much. Every year during monsoon season – which was coming, he reminded himself, and all too soon – they repeated the same rituals of boredom and desperation inside the narrow, many-leveled house. The same friends visited them, though they were busier now, and sleeker, suddenly able to afford a kind of polish.
After dinner, Edgar retreated alone to his library to put the books back on the shelves and sigh gratuitously to himself a lot and listen to baseball on the radio. It was hot, even at night; the sun that baked the city in the months before the monsoons drenched the room during the day through big windows in the front wall. And they were thick, to withstand rain and wind and debris, and his elk-hide chairs dark. It was like a greenhouse. The good-cop-bad-cop radio announcers buzzed as cicadas did in the country. It’ll be a scorcher tomorrow, Mad Dog.
Edgar was the only one still at the university. Ava and Miles and even little philosophic Minski had real jobs, though teaching took up more and more of his time. The beginning and end of each year was a shock to him. He had stopped comparing them, the even years and the odds; they all ran together. And if they cancel any more games this season for heat raids they’ll be playing into the rain. Mike, you know how that can be, didn’t that happen when you played?
Time reading in his library moved without him realizing it. They can’t get much farther than the first week before the swamp starts growing in the dugouts. Both laughed. The crack of a bat cut this short – and it looks like a double for Bernie if he hustles - and Edgar shut the radio off.
There wasn’t much out there that could tell him about a lost shadow. In all the stories and accounts he’d read the character began without a shadow, and this made them cold and prone to recklessness; they would lash out, attempting to effect the world around them, and then draw back into the darkness when they did. In the oldest and most famous, a small anecdote from “Dream and the Bard,” the man without a shadow tried to fashion one out of the dark fears of people he had killed, the fears that leaked out of their ears when they died. He was hunted as nothing more than a common werecat, deemed dangerous but not deadly, killed in the snow by a silver stake through his eye.
It was all just fairy tales, though, morality stories for children – that they should always watch after their shadows, the effect they had on the world around them, lest they grow detached and careless.
Miles stomped into the kitchen in a strange elated mood, smacking a long black something against his palm. “Nightstick flashlight. I’ve wanted one of these babies for years, no more messing with security dogs!”
“I hope you didn’t liberate that from someone honest.” If Ava were older she might have clucked, but she was more exasperated than annoyed.
“Don’t worry, I bought it in Yonkers.” Edgar snorted. That probably meant someone else had stolen it and pawned it. “The handle’s titanium, so there’s space enough to set a moonstone and its not going to go reacting with real moonlight, but it will make the beam shine yellow if it falls on anything I’m after.” He flipped the flashlight and shined it at Edgar, who looked up and got an eyeful of bluish light. “Hands up, don’t move.”
“Ow! I need these.” He blinked tears from his eyes and shook his head, freeing the ghost of laugh.
He heard Miles drop the flashlight with a thunk; Ava looked up from paying the bills and yelled, “Watch it; you’ll put holes in the floor.”
“What’s the matter?” But Edgar thought he knew. He’d been standing against the white wall behind the table, sorting through the cookbooks on the shelf. The light should have cast a distended black shadow all along the wall.
Miles picked up the flashlight cautiously. “Close your eyes for a moment.” Edgar did, though he didn’t want to. He knew what was coming. “Ava, come here. Look at this.” He pointed the light at Edgar from different angles and Edgar heard Ava give a little squeak of recognition and fright. She turned off all the lights in the kitchen and tried it again, to the same effects.
He expected a gasp or a shout, but nothing came, and then he didn’t know what to expect. He opened his eyes. Ava’s brows were furrowed in concentration
But Ava just steered him over to the table in response, though he sat at the far end, facing them. “How did this happen?”
“I don’t know.” And he told them his theories, thinking of a few more along the way and hastily patching them in – hadn’t there been legends that witches could steal a person’s will, or their reflection, and so relegate them to the realms of the almost-dead? Why not shadows?
But Miles made a hiss of sharp breath when this was suggested – “I know witches,” he said, “and they’re not responsible, and I can’t think of anything around here that could have done it, though there are in other places.” But he could only say very vaguely what these things were and where they came from – not quite human, the north – and “they can’t come this far south. Their powers are tied to the forest they come from.”
“How could you have lost it?” Ava was worried, admonishing. Edgar shrugged. “Can a shadow just … come loose?”
They spent so much of the evening theorizing that they forgot to be wary of him. But the next morning Ava was stiff at breakfast, though Miles had returned in the dead hours of the morning and was sleeping safely in his spare bed. Edgar felt like he was being watched, and he grabbed a roll, made full-mouthed excuses, and left early for the University.
Whoever coined the idea that living in a fairy tale had glamour had never read the real ones. Edgar didn’t relish it. That others had noticed made the situation real. They would see him as an oddity, rash and detached from the world, even if they could overlook their skittishness for familiarity.
So Edgar took to wandering the parched dusty streets when he had time. He didn’t have much else to do, or much excuse for his wandering; he could have been reading, or grading papers, and ended up putting these pursuits off later and later into the night. He wouldn’t want to admit that he was avoiding his housemates; he preferred to think he was graciously giving them space. He left the house with more and more time before classes, sometimes going out as Miles was coming in. The early mornings he prowled first around the neighborhood and then outside of it, a newspaper rubbing ink on his sweaty skin as he pinned it beneath his arm. These days, he admired shadows more than anything else. He would sit on the corner with old puttery Mr. Brooks, but instead of reading the paper he’d watch the light as it filtered through leaves and awnings and phone lines.
He got the sense that these shadows would disappear, too, forever this time; that the monsoons would wash them away for good and they wouldn’t return the next spring, and that everything would be as stark and static as himself. He felt flatter, more like he blended into the walls. The shadows might go and he might disappear with them. He struggled to be heard in his classes, and he’d started making sly jokes and throwing chalk to direct attention. So far this was met with the amiable complaints students make about tough professors they secretly like, the proud damnations to other students of the crazy Mr. Whitby. But it wouldn’t last.
Ava and Miles were just as restless as he was, and they regularly met in the street or in the park. They were gladder to see him, outside; they didn’t feel as confined with a madman, and he didn’t feel like he was imposing on their sanity.
The whole city was restless, in this dry heat, going outside and back in again when it became too pressing or when the acrid garbage smell of city hung in foul smog around midday. People flocked outside in the evenings and congregated under streetlamps after dark. When the rains began, people wouldn’t see their neighbors for days at a time and shopkeepers would play cards with their assistants in the watery darkness, saving electricity and candles in the lean weeks of rain and wind.
When it got too hot to wander or sit in the shade Edgar retreated to the basement of the University library. He was drawn to tales of northern wastes, accounts of arctic explorations, books from the anthropology school of the customs and beliefs of the tundra and taiga. He read of masked spirits, wearing cloaks of mortal souls; and of the crow-people and their battles for territory in the dense evergreen forests. It was always snowing and the sweat that dripped between his shoulder-blades was cold.
He found himself wandering farther into the northern neighborhoods of the city, seeing if it was any cooler there (he felt foolish afterwards, because of course it wasn’t) and watching the ocean bump up and down along the docks. The spray felt good, but the water was warm and murky. He found a hole-in-the-wall café that served coffee very iced and sat in the cool dark corner every day after class, watching dockworkers and lost tourists come and go, flat silhouettes framed by the painful brightness outside.
Miles banged through the front door and started rifling through the hall closet, throwing out five pairs of rubber and elk-hide and croc-skin boots, tossing coats and hats on top and finally standing up in the rubble of rain things with a roll of black tape, triumphant. Edgar looked up from his sorting of the mail.
“First storm, tonight. Everybody knows about it, you can tell its hanging, but I expect they’ll run the sirens anyway.” He put the thick tape very carefully around the triangular window next to the door as he spoke, pressing it flat and tight with his thumb, and then whirled upstairs to do the rest of the windows. Edgar shrugged, stacked the mail, and followed more slowly. The rain would be a relief, but just that. The bottled excitement that usually came with the first night of monsoon season was absent. He’d still probably go out to wander and get soaked to the bone every day. At least he could be sure that no one would notice that he was missing his shadow. No one had a shadow in the damp and the rain; the flat gray made everyone seem a little less human.
He deposited the others’ mail on the table and retreated to his library. It was stifling, certainly the hottest it had been all summer, though the sun had been hidden behind a haze all day. He wandered through it, feeling sluggish and lost, and gave up so he could grade papers, work on his own, and maybe get a decent nights’ sleep. For all that he was tired during the day, his nerves perched on edge at night, bobbing up and down like strangely weighted, mechanical birds. But schoolwork didn’t go well either. He paced the room, organized the papers two different ways, started on one and moved to the other. He felt the storm coming as acutely as anyone. Maybe more. He gave up and went to help Miles.
Preparing for the rains settled him. It was ritual work, done every year. He made sure the windows of his library were taped but opened all the blinds; the perpetual cascade of rain would prevent him from becoming claustrophobic and disoriented. He sorted out the great pile in the entrance hall, hanging up coats and stacking boots beneath them, then stripped all the beds and brought the linens to the Laundromat down the street. It would be the last time for weeks that the idea of getting anything wetter than it was already would be appealing, and sheets needed to be air dried.
Edgar found that he had a much easier time getting his work done while he watched the laundry spin, out of focus, more perception than sight. It distracted the restless part of him, the flighty part, the part that hurt for grounding. Walking back home with a bundle of wet sheets and a few papers marked in red, he suspected that it was the same thing that drew him to rain, and shifting light, and walking.
“Edgar.” Ava took the laundry from him as he walked in, looking a bit confused but otherwise pleased. “Thank you.” Had she thought that he had become that disconnected, that he’d forget to do the jobs that were his every year? What did she know about how he thought? “Miles and I want to go out to dinner, do you want to come? It’s okay if you don’t, I mean,” she tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, balancing the basket on her knee as they went up the stairs, “it’ll be crowded, no one feels like being in a kitchen tonight, and I could start something for you before we go.”
Edgar realized that he was the child here, that he had always been the child even as he had always been the crusty old man, and that Miles and Ava were like parents taking care of him. “Thanks, but I’d like to come out with you.” The restaurants and bars would be packed, noisy, drowned in clove smoke.
They ran into so many acquaintances – old school friends, coworkers, neighbors – that they dragged over a nearly broken stool from the dark corner near the bar, so they could invite people to sit down with them. Edgar “held down the fort” at their table as Ava and Miles did rounds of the comfy, but labyrinthine, Greek restaurant. He welcomed visitors, had reasonable, adult conversations with them, but he didn’t go seeking anyone out and declined all invitations for drinks or a walk or a journey to another table. He knew it was a bit unreasonable – he could have just left a napkin on the chair – but being posted guard while everything moved around him was pleasant. It was his duty.
The sun had set by the time they reached home, and without talking much they returned to their preparations. They didn’t need to talk, except to ask what closet things were in or tell Miles to turn off the radio when he left the room. Edgar was surprised by Ava as he walked past her, attending to the porthole windows on the stairs.
“Hey, Ed, will you please get the laundry down? It’s hanging on the balcony.” She said this distractedly, not looking up from her taping. It was important that the tape was perfect over all the edges and cracks in the window frame.
He tromped up the narrow stairs and then through Miles’ attic ‘office’ which, considering the nature of his profession, was really a combination between a museum archive and a treasure room. The glass doors to the balcony were open and the sheets hanging over the sides fluttering, threatening to fly out over the street. He was hit square in the face with the first breath of cool air since before he had lost his shadow. That was how he marked time – with before and after.
There were too many sheets to take them down in a bundle in his arms. He knotted a few of the smaller ones over his shoulders, like a many-layered cape. The fragmented horizon where the city crashed against the sky rumbled with the dissipating heat and the wet, acid taste of change. For a moment he thought he heard the ocean, then knew it was the violent sloshing of the trees that lined the streets.
The storm grouched and stomped over the earth, still many miles to the south, announcing its return. Ed reveled in the sound and the wind, fiercer there above the trees and chimneys than it would be on the ground. He had the urge to scramble over the rooftops, shouting to the sky, his sheets-cape flapping behind him.
Then a flash of lightning lit him up to the bones, polarizing everything, and he went inside to fold the sheets and help tape the windows.
