The Man Without a Shadow. Joyce Carol Oates
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Название: The Man Without a Shadow
Автор: Joyce Carol Oates
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780008165406
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“Oh, very happy!”—Margot feels tears flooding her eyes.
“And are we married now? Have you come to take me home?”
“Soon, Eli! When you’re discharged from this—clinic … Of course, I will take you home.”
“Do you love me? Do I love you?”
Margot is trembling with excitement, audacity. She has gone too far. She has no idea why she has said such things.
It is a Skinnerian experiment, Margot thinks: stimulus/response. Behavior/reward/reinforcement.
A Skinnerian experiment in which Margot Sharpe is the subject.
It is clear, and she should prevent it: when E.H. smiles at her in a way that suggests sexual craving, Margot feels a surge of visceral excitement, a thrill of happiness, and can barely restrain herself from smiling at him in turn.
Instinctively—unconsciously—the amnesiac subject is conditioning her, the neuropsychologist, to respond to his feeling for her; and as Margot responds, she is further conditioning him.
She has begun to notice a twinge of excitement, yearning, in the region of her heart when she enters the perimeter of E.H.’s awareness. He does not see Margot Sharpe, whose name he can’t remember, but he sees her: a young woman whose face he finds attractive partly or wholly because it reminds him of a face out of his childhood, a comfort to him in the terrible isolation of amnesia. He is looking at Margot with such yearning you would certainly think that he is, or has once been, her lover.
“Do you love me? Do I love you?”—it is a genuine question.
Margot feels a wave of guilt. And anxiety—for what if Milton Ferris were to know of her unprofessional behavior, her weakness!
She must break the transference—the “spell.” Quickly she calls over a nurse’s aide to watch over E.H. while she goes to use a restroom; and when she returns she sees E.H. in an animated conversation with the young female aide, who laughs at the handsome amnesiac’s witty remarks as if she has never heard anything quite so funny.
He has totally forgotten Margot Sharpe of course.
When Margot approaches he turns to her, with a quick courteous smile, like one who has become accustomed to being the center of attention without questioning why, only perceptibly annoyed at being interrupted—“Hello! Hel-lo!”
“Hel-lo!”
“Eli, hello.”
Does he remember her? It is very tempting for Margot Sharpe to think yes, he remembers her.
Though she knows better of course. As a scientist of the brain she knows that this terribly damaged man cannot truly remember her.
This is a day when Margot Sharpe has come to the Institute alone. She has driven alone in her own vehicle, a Volvo sedan; she has not ridden with the other lab colleagues, as usual; she is feeling somewhat agitated, after a night of disturbing dreams, and is grateful not to have to talk and relate to anyone else.
She is particularly grateful that she has been scheduled to work with the amnesiac subject alone that day. For being with the amnesiac subject as he takes his interminable tests is not like being with another person, even as it is not like being alone with oneself.
(It is not a very happy day in Margot Sharpe’s life. It has not been a very happy week in Margot Sharpe’s life, nor has it been a happy month in Margot Sharpe’s life. But Margot Sharpe is not one to acknowledge personal problems when she is performing professionally.)
More frequently in recent years, Milton Ferris has designated Margot Sharpe his surrogate in Project E.H. Ferris trusts Margot Sharpe “without qualification”—(he has told her, and this is greatly flattering to her)—and behaves as if she were now his favored protégée at the university; he has been responsible for Margot being hired in a tenure-track position in the Psychology Department, and at a good salary. Of his numerous younger colleagues, Margot Sharpe seems to be the one Milton Ferris trusts most in the wake of the departure of Alvin Kaplan.
There has been some good news for the university memory lab—a renewal and an expansion of their federal grant, the elaborate proposal for which Margot did much of the work. And now Milton Ferris has become a consultant for a popular PBS science program and is often in Washington, D.C., at 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 СКАЧАТЬ