The Man Without a Shadow. Joyce Carol Oates

Yes. We’ve been working together for—some time.” E.H. smiles gallantly as if he knows very well how long they’ve been working together, but it is a secret between them.

      Today E.H. has the larger of his sketchbooks with him. He has finished the New York Times crossword puzzle—the newspaper page is discarded as usual, on the floor.

      E.H. has been sketching with a stick of charcoal, seated beside a window in the anterior of the fourth-floor testing-room. He appears to be oblivious of the plate glass window that is dramatically lashed with rain, as he is oblivious of his clinical surroundings; the objects of E.H.’s art, which excite his fierce attention, are almost exclusively interior, and he does not care to share them with others.

      (Except sometimes, Margot Sharpe.)

      (Though Margot knows not to ask E.H. to see his drawings but to wait for E.H. to offer to show her. The offer, if it comes, will come spontaneously.)

      “Do you have any idea how long we’ve been working together, Eli?”—Margot always asks.

      E.H.’s smile wavers. He speaks thoughtfully, gravely.

      “Well—I think—maybe—six weeks.”

      “Six weeks?”

      “Maybe more, or maybe less. You know, I have some problem with what is called ‘memory.’”

      “How long have you had this problem, Eli?”

      “How long have I had this problem? Well—I think—maybe—six weeks.” E.H. smiles at Margot, with a pleading expression. He is still gripping Margot’s hand; gently, she has to detach it.

      “Do you know what has caused this problem, Eli?”

      “Well, it’s ‘neurological.’ I suppose they’ve done X-rays. I think I remember my head shaved. My skull was fractured in Birmingham, Alabama—no one knew at the time. A ‘hairline’ fracture. But then, at the lake back in July, a few months ago, there was a fire. I think that’s what they told me—a fire. Hard to believe that I was careless leaving burning embers in the fireplace but—something happened.” E.H. pauses, frowning like one who is struggling to pull up, from the depths of a well, something unwieldy, very heavy that is straining every muscle in his body. “A fire, that burnt up my damned brain.”

      “A fever, maybe?”

      “A fever is a fire. In the damned brain.”

      It is a wet windy overcast morning in March 1969.

      SHE THINKS, HIS name has been eerily prescient—Hoopes.

      For Elihu Hoopes has lived, for the past four and a half years, in an indefinable present-tense. A kind of time-hoop, a Möbius strip that turns upon itself, to infinity.

      Except “infinity” is less than seventy seconds.

      There is no was in Elihu Hoopes’s life, there is only is.

      Forever he will be thirty-seven years old. Forever, he will be confused about where he is, and what has happened to him.

       A fire? I think it was a fire. Or, Granddaddy’s two-passenger single-prop plane crash-landed on the island, and burst into flames. And later in the hospital, I think there was a fire, too. My clothes and hair were wet, but smoldering. I could smell my hair singed. I may have breathed in some of the fire, and burnt my lungs.

       They said that I had a high fever but—it was a fire, I could see and smell.

       The girl was not found. There were rescue parties searching for her. In the woods around Lake George. On the islands.

       If someone had taken her, it was believed he might’ve taken her to one of the islands. If he had a boat. If no one saw.

       In his little, light Beechcraft aircraft painted bright chrome yellow like a giant bird Granddaddy flew above the lake. Many times Granddaddy flew above the lake, you would hear the prop-plane engine passing low over the roof of the house.

       Granddaddy said, Come with me, Eli! We will search together for your lost cousin.

       Not the first time the little boy had flown in the plane with his grandfather but it would be the last.

      IN HIS BRIGHT affable voice E.H. begins to read from his notebook.

      “‘There is no journey, and there is no path. There is no wisdom, there is emptiness. There is no emptiness.’”

      Pausing to add, “This is the wisdom of the Buddha. But there is no wisdom, and there is no Buddha.”

      He laughs, sadly.

      “There is no test, and there is no ‘testes.’”

      And he laughs again. Sadly.

      SHE HAS BEEN instructed: to discover, you have to destroy.

      To locate the source of behavior in the brain, you have to destroy much of the brain.

      Monkey-, cat-and rat-brains. In search of elusive and mysterious memory. Years, decades, thousands of animal-brains, hundreds of thousands of hours of surgery. Systematically, methodically. Meticulous lab records. Unyielding cruelty of the research scientist to whom no (living) specimen is an end in itself but a (possible) means to a greater end. Hundreds of thousands of animals sacrificed in the pursuit of the “engram”—the brain’s ostensible record of memory.

      A principle of experimental neuroscience.

      No one can surgically explore a (living, normal) human brain, only just animal-brains. And all these decades, results have been inconclusive. Margot Sharpe notes in her amnesia logbook the (famous/infamous) conclusion of the great experimental psychologist Karl Lashley:

       This series of experiments has yielded a good bit of information about what and where the memory trace is not. I sometimes feel … the necessary conclusion is that (memory) is just not possible.

      THE CHASTE DAUGHTER. How lucky Margot Sharpe has been! And she wants to think—My career—my life—lies all before me.

      By 1969 the phenomenon of the amnesiac “E.H.” is beginning to be known in scientific circles.

      An extraordinary case of total anterograde amnesia! And the subject otherwise in good health, intelligent, cooperative, sane—a rarity in brain pathology research where living patients are likely to be psychotic, moribund, or brain-rotted alcoholics.

      Articles by Milton Ferris of the University Neurological Institute at Darven Park on “E.H.” have begun to appear in the most prestigious neuroscience journals; usually these articles list Ferris’s research associates as co-authors, and Margot Sharpe is among them. Seeing her name in print, in such company, has been deeply gratifying to Margot, and it has happened with surprising swiftness.

      Rich with data, graphs, statistics, and citations, the articles bear such titles as “Losses in Recent Memory Following Infectious Encephalitis”—“Retention of ‘Declarative’ and ‘Non-declarative’ Memory in Amnesia: A History of ‘E.H.’”—“Short-Term Retention of Verbal, Visual, Auditory and Olfactory Items in Amnesia”—“Encoding, Storing, and Retrieval of Information in Anterograde Amnesia.” Their preparation is a lengthy, collaborative effort of months, or even years, with Milton Ferris overseeing the process. No paper can be submitted to any journal, of course, without Ferris’s imprimatur, no matter who has actually designed and executed the experiments, and who has done most of the research and writing. Recently, Margot has been given permission by Ferris to design experiments of her own involving sensory modality, and the possibility of “non-declarative” learning and memory. In the prestigious Journal of American Experimental Psychology a paper will soon appear with just the names of Milton Ferris and Margot Sharpe as authors; this is a forty-page extract from Margot’s dissertation titled “Short-Term and Consolidated Memory in Retrograde and Anterograde Amnesia: A Brief History