The Man Without a Shadow. Joyce Carol Oates

the National Institutes of Health; and he is often traveling abroad, with a need for someone like Margot in the lab whom he can trust as his protégée, his emissary, his representative. At the present time, Milton Ferris has embarked upon an ambitious lecture tour in China under the auspices of the USIA.

      Alvin Kaplan, Ferris’s male protégé, has recently left the university. He has been promoted to professor of experimental psychology at Rockefeller University—a remarkable position for one so young. Like Margot Sharpe, now assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the university, Kaplan has co-published numerous papers with Milton Ferris.

      Both Alvin Kaplan and Margot Sharpe delivered papers on their groundbreaking research in amnesia at the most recent American Association of Experimental Psychology conference in San Francisco.

      Saw your name in the newspaper!—occasionally someone will call Margot Sharpe. Family member, relative, old friend from the University of Michigan. Sounds just fascinating, the work you are doing.

      Sometimes, Margot will receive a call or a letter—Why don’t we ever hear from you any longer, Margot? Do I have the wrong address?

      Once, Margot couldn’t resist showing E.H. a copy of the prestigious Journal of American Experimental Psychology in which the major article appeared under her name—“Distraction, Working Memory, and Memory Retention in the Amnesiac ‘E.H.’” Her heart beat rapidly as E.H. perused it with a small wondering smile.

      (Was she behaving unprofessionally? She would have been devastated if a colleague found out.)

      Gentlemanly E.H. reacted with bemusement, not resentment—

      “Is ‘E.H.’ meant to be me? Never knew I was so important.” He asked if he might take the journal home with him so that he could read it carefully—to try to “understand what the hell is going on inside my ‘scrambled brains’”—and Margot said of course. And so Margot placed the journal on a table in the testing-room for E.H. to take home with him.

      (Confident that the amnesiac would forget the journal within seventy seconds and she could easily slip it back into her bag without him noticing.)

      Since then Margot has several times showed E.H. journals with articles about “E.H.”—some of them co-authored by Milton Ferris and his team of a half-dozen associates including Margot Sharpe, others by just Milton Ferris and Margot Sharpe.

      By degrees, they have become associated with each other as scientists. Collaborators.

      It has been years. Has it been years?

      In the memory lab, time passes strangely.

      It was only the other day (it seems) when Margot was first introduced to “Elihu Hoopes”—who’d stared at her with a kind of recognition, hungry, yearning, and squeezed her small pliant hand in his.

       I know you. We know each other. Don’t we?

       We were in grade school together …

      E.H. squeezes Margot’s hand in his strong dry fingers. She has been anticipating this—she doesn’t pull her hand away from his grasp so quickly as she does when others are in the room with them.

      “Mr. Hoopes—‘Eli.’ I’m so happy to see you.”

      “I’m so happy to see you.”

      There is something different about this morning, Margot thinks.

      Margot thinks—But I can’t. It would be wrong.

      Still they are clasping hands. With no one else in the testing-room to observe they are free of social restraint. Between them, there is but the residue of instinct.

      “Do you remember me, Eli? ‘Margot.’”

      “Oh yes—‘Margot.’”

      “Your friend.”

      “Yes, my friend—‘Mar-got.’”

      Conscientiously, E.H. pronounces her name Mar-go. So quick at mimicry is E.H., one would think his skill a kind of memory.

      “I think I knew you in—was it school? Grade school?”

      “Yes. Gladwyne.”

       We were close friends through school. Then you went to Amherst, and I went to Ann Arbor.

       We were in love, but—something happened to part us …

      (Wouldn’t Eli realize, Margot Sharpe is much younger than he is? At least seventeen years?)

      (Yet: E.H. is a perpetual thirty-seven and Margot Sharpe is now thirty-four. If E.H. were capable of thinking in such terms he would be thinking that, magically, the young woman psychologist has caught up with him in age.)

      “I’ve been looking forward to today since—last Wednesday. We’re doing such important work, Eli …”

      “Yes. Yes we are, Mar-go.”

      It is very exciting, their proximity. Their privacy. Margot can feel the man’s breath on her face as he leans over her.

      E.H. seems to be inhaling Margot. She wants to think that her scent has become familiar to him. (She has conducted olfactory memory tests with him of her own invention indicating that yes, E.H. is more likely to remember smells than other sensory cues; his memory for smells of decades ago is more or less undiminished.)

      E.H. is taller than Margot by at least five inches, so that she is forced to look up at him and this is pleasurable to her, as to him.

      Is E.H. nearly forty-seven now? How quickly the years have passed! (For E.H. no time at all has passed.)

      His hairline is receding from his high forehead, and his russet-brown hair is fading to a beautiful shade of pewter-gray, yet E.H. remains youthful, straight-backed. His forehead is lightly creased with bewilderment or worry that quickly eases away when he smiles at a visitor.

      “Eli, how have you been?”

      “Very good, thank you. And you?”

      The question is genuine. E.H. is anxious to know.

      All of the world is clues to the amnesiac. Like a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces that has been overturned, scattered. Through some effort—(a superhuman effort beyond the capacity of any normal individual)—these countless pieces might be fitted together again into a coherent and illuminating whole.

      Is E.H. “very good”? Margot knows that the poor man had bronchitis for several weeks that winter. Terrible fits of coughing, that made testing impossible at times. Not only were short-term memories slipping out of the amnesiac’s brain as through a large-holed colander but the severe coughing seemed to exacerbate loss of memory.

      (Margot has been concerned about E.H.’s health in recent years. She is assured that the amnesiac receives physical examinations at the Institute, that his blood, blood pressure, and other vital signs are routinely tested. In her own case, Margot often forgets to schedule dental appointments, gynecological appointments, eye examinations—and how much more likely to neglect himself is a man with memory deficits.)

      E.H. has forgotten the bronchitis and its discomforts. E.H. has forgotten his original, devastating illness. E.H. quickly forgets all physical distress, maladies. He may be susceptible to moods—but E.H. quickly forgets all moods.

      He has lost weight, Margot estimates about five to eight pounds. His face is the face of a handsome ascetic. He retains the alert and agile air of an ex-athlete but he has become an ex-athlete who anticipates pain.

      Today he is wearing neatly pressed khakis, an English-looking striped shirt, and a dark green cashmere sweater. His socks are a very dark purple patterned in small yellow checks. All of his clothing is purchased at expensive men’s stores like J. Press, Ralph Lauren, Armani. Margot has seen these clothes before, she thinks, but not for some time. (Who assists E.H. with his wardrobe? Sees that