The Man Without a Shadow. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ his illness, E.H.’s talent for art seems much diminished. The post-amnesiac pencil drawings are fervid but amateurish: the artist compulsively fills in every square inch of the paper, leaving little that is blank or empty, to be filled in by the viewer’s imagination; the effort of studying a typical drawing of E.H.’s is considerable. You can see that the artist has taken time with the pencil drawings—too much time. Where Elihu Hoopes’s drawings were once lightly, deftly and minimally executed, now he meticulously shades in degrees of darkness, as if to suggest shadows within shadows; he is partial to cross-hatching, a visual cliché. Some of the drawings are so detailed and the pencil lines so faint, Margot can scarcely make out what they are supposed to represent. (Margot has given E.H. sets of pencils, and a pencil sharpener, as well as spray to preserve the charcoal, but it isn’t clear if he uses these.) The charcoal sketches are more accomplished, not so labored over and more resembling E.H.’s pre-amnesiac work, but have been carelessly preserved, smeared with fingerprints. As if, Margot thinks, the artist executes his work in a kind of trance and then, upon waking, forgets it.

      Margot’s response is always enthusiastic—“Eli, so much fascinating work! You’ve been busy this week. You’ve been inspired.”

      Inspired is not the right word. Haunted, more likely.

      As Margot shifts the drawings slowly along the table from left to right, E.H. peers at them with a kind of perplexed pride. She understands that he doesn’t remember most of what he has done even as he tries to give no sign of surprise.

      The charcoal drawings depict a marshland beneath a low, ominous sky. There are misshapen trees, fallen limbs, tall grasses and a shallow stream with a rippling surface. In one of the drawings you can see what appears to be a figure in the stream—a pale, naked figure, a child perhaps, with long flowing hair and opened and sightless eyes. (Margot feels her mouth go dry, seeing this.) E.H. makes a sound of impatience or disdain—he fumbles to take hold of the drawing, and jerks it along, replacing it with another. Margot can see that the charcoal is smearing, E.H. hasn’t sprayed fixative on it. As if nothing is wrong Margot continues as she’d been doing, shifting the drawings along the table … (E.H. is breathing quickly and shallowly. Margot is not sure what she has seen. The figure on its back in the stream was very impressionistic.) The last drawings in the group resemble the first drawings almost identically—more marshland scenes, and the stream; insects on the water’s surface casting small soft shadows below. And finally there is a vast lake or inland sea ringed with pine trees. The sky here is massive, like a canyon. The water’s surface here is rippling, tremulous. There is an atmosphere of tranquility that, the more closely you look, becomes an atmosphere of dread.

      “Eli? Is this Lake George?”

      “Maybe.”

      “Such a beautiful lake, I know! I’ve never seen it.”

      Margot always speaks brightly to E.H. It is her professional manner, worn like a shield.

      “I’ve only seen pictures of Lake George—photographs. Some of these, Eli, you’d taken yourself, years ago …” Margot speaks carefully, but Eli does not respond.

      “Eli, what has happened here at the lake? Has something happened here?”

      E.H. stoops over the drawings, to stare at them. As if trying to recall them. He seems to be feeling pain, behind his eyes. Impulsively he says, “It did not happen yet.”

      “What ‘did not happen yet’?”

      E.H. shakes his head. How can he know, he seems to be pleading, when it hasn’t happened yet?

      Margot has come to the end of the drawings. She’d like very much to turn back, to examine the (pale, naked?) figure in the stream. She isn’t even sure that this is what she saw—she is feeling uneasy, for E.H. is standing very close to her, his breath on the side of her face.

      Apart from his firm and caressing handshake each time they meet, E.H. has never touched Margot Sharpe. He does not—(she has noticed)—touch anyone except to shake hands, and he is sensitive to being touched by medical staff. Yet, Margot has imagined that E.H. would often like to touch her.

      She seems to recall that he has. He has touched her.

      In a dream, possibly. One of her many dreams of Darven Park, that grip her intensely by night but fade upon waking, like pale smoke streaming upward.

      It is déjà vu she feels, at such times. The most mysterious of quasi-memories.

      E.H. is saying, “It did not happen—yet. It is the ‘safe time’—before.”

      “Before what, Eli?”

      E.H.’s face is shutting up. Like a grating being pulled down over a store window. Rudely abrupt, and Margot Sharpe is being excluded.

      “Eli? Before—what?”

      E.H. snatches up the drawings and sketches—shuffles them crudely together—returns them to their folder. He is hurried, harried—doesn’t seem to care if some of the pages are torn. Margot cries, “Oh! Eli. Let me help …” She would like to take the folder from him, to reassemble his art more carefully. She will bring waxed paper to insert between the charcoal drawings. But E.H. is finished with his art for the day.

      Crudely he laughs—“Poor bastard whoever did this, his future is all used up.”

      Alone with E.H. in the testing-room. In the corridor outside there are voices, but the door is shut.

      Margot thinks—He could hurt me. Swiftly, his hands. His hands are so strong.

      Margot thinks—What a ridiculous thought! Eli Hoopes is my friend, he would never hurt me.

      She is ashamed of herself, thinking such a thing. She is utterly baffled and dismayed at having thought it.

      “THE ARTIST PRE- and Post-Amnesia: A Study of ‘E.H.’”

      This is the title of a slide presentation—(subject to Milton Ferris’s approval)—Margot Sharpe hopes to give at an upcoming meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco, December 1970. Milton Ferris has read an early draft of the paper and has been guardedly enthusiastic—his concern is that Margot Sharpe, his Ph.D. student, may be “getting ahead of herself.”

      Margot wants to protest, this is ridiculous! She has heard the cautionary expression more than once, applied to other young scientists who assist Ferris—“Getting ahead of himself.”

      Though obviously it is more reprehensible for a woman—“Getting ahead of herself.”

      What a long time it is taking Margot Sharpe, to complete requirements for her Ph.D.! Nearly five years.

      Each time she has thought she might have finished, her advisor has further criticisms and suggestions. He is always (guardedly) enthusiastic about her work, it is clear that he likes and trusts her, appreciating (perhaps) her taciturnity in the lab, her somber and diligent way of implementing experiments, rarely questioning his judgment as others might—(Kaplan, for instance. There is a volatile paternal-filial relationship between Ferris and Kaplan, which Margot Sharpe envies; she knows that Kaplan is devoted to Ferris, with whom he has been working for nearly eight years). As Ferris is the chair of her Ph.D. committee, and has taken an avuncular, if not a paternal, interest in her since her arrival in his lab, Margot knows that she must placate him in every way—more than СКАЧАТЬ