The Man Without a Shadow. Joyce Carol Oates

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      The complex neurological skills needed for reading, writing, and mathematical calculation seem not to have been much affected by E.H.’s illness, as they were acquired before the infection. So E.H. reads brightly from the notebook: “‘Elihu Hoopes attended Amherst College and graduated summa cum laude with a double major in economics and mathematics … Elihu Hoopes has attended Union Theological Seminary and has a degree from the Wharton School of Business.’” E.H. reads this statement as if he has been asked to identify himself. Seeing his visitors’ carefully neutral expressions he regards them with a little tic of a smile as if, for just this moment, he understands the folly and pathos of his predicament, and is begging their indulgence. Forgive me! The amnesiac has learned to gauge the mood of his visitors, eager to engage and entertain them: “I know this. I know who I am. But it seems reasonable to check one’s identity frequently, to see if it is still there.” E.H. laughs as he snaps the little notebook shut and slips it back into his pocket, and the others laugh with him.

      Only Margot can barely bring herself to laugh. It seems to her cruel somehow.

      There is laughter, and there is laughter. Not all laughter is equal.

       Laughter too depends upon memory—a memory of previous laughter.

      Dr. Ferris has told his young associates that their subject “E.H.” will possibly be one of the most famous amnesiacs in the history of neuroscience; potentially he is another Phineas Gage, but in an era of advanced neuropsychological experimentation. In fact E.H. is far more interesting neurologically than Gage whose memory had not been severely affected by his famous head injury—the penetration of his left frontal lobe by an iron rod.

      Dr. Ferris has cautioned them against too freely discussing E.H. outside their laboratory, at least initially; they should be aware of their “enormous good fortune” in being part of this research team.

      Though she is only a first-year graduate student Margot Sharpe doesn’t have to be told that she is fortunate. Nor does Margot Sharpe need to be told not to discuss this remarkable amnesiac case with anyone. She does not intend to disappoint Milton Ferris.

      Ferris and his assistants are preparing batteries of tests for E.H., of a kind that have never before been administered. The subject is to remain pseudonymous—“E.H.” will be his identity both inside and outside the Institute; and all who work with him at the Institute and care for him are pledged to confidentiality. The Hoopes family, which has donated millions of dollars to the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine, has given permission exclusively to the University Neurological Institute at Darven Park for such testing so long as E.H. is willing and cooperative—as indeed, he appears to be. Margot doesn’t like to think that a kicked dog, yearning for human approval and love, desperate for a connection with the “normal,” could not be more eagerly cooperative than the dignified Elihu Hoopes, son of a wealthy and socially prominent Philadelphia family.

      Elihu Hoopes is trapped in a perpetual present, Margot thinks. Like a man wandering in circles in a twilit woods—a man without a shadow.

      And so he is thrilled to be saved from such a twilight and made the center of attention even if he doesn’t know quite why. How otherwise does the amnesiac know that he exists? Alone, without the stimulation of attentive strangers asking him questions, even the twilight would fade, and he would be utterly lost.

      “‘MARGO NOT-MADDEN’?—THAT is your name?”

      At first Margot can’t comprehend this. Then, she sees that E.H. is attempting a sort of joke. He has taken out his little notebook again, and has painstakingly inscribed in it what appears to be a diagram in logic. One category, represented by a circle, is M M and a second category, also represented by a circle, is M Not-M. Between the two circles, which might also be balloons, since strings dangle from them, is a broken line.

      “My days of mastering symbolic logic seem to have abandoned me,” E.H. says pleasantly, “but I think the situation is something like this.”

      “Oh—yes …”

      How readily one humors the impaired. Margot will come to see how, within the amnesiac’s orbit, as within the orbit of the blind or the deaf, there is a powerful sort of pull, depending upon the strength of will of the afflicted.

      Still, Margot is uncertain how to respond. It is a feeble and somehow gallant attempt at humor but she doesn’t want to encourage the amnesiac subject in prevarication—she knows, without needing to be told, that her older colleagues, and Milton Ferris, will disapprove.

      Also, an awkward social situation has evolved which involves caste: the (subordinate) Margot Sharpe has supplanted, in E.H.’s limited field of attention, the (predominant) Milton Ferris. It is even possible that the brain-damaged man (deliberately, craftily) has contrived to “neglect” Dr. Ferris who stands just at his elbow waiting to interrupt—(“neglect” is a neurological term referring to a pathological blindness caused by brain damage); and so it is imperative that Margot ease away from E.H. so that Ferris can reassert himself as the (obvious) person in authority. Margot hopes to execute this maneuver as inconspicuously as possible without either the impaired man or the distinguished neuropsychologist seeing what she is doing.

      Margot doesn’t want to hurt E.H.’s feelings, even if his feelings are fleeting, and Margot doesn’t want to offend Milton Ferris, the most distinguished neuroscientist of his generation, for her scientific career depends upon this fiercely white-bearded individual in his late fifties about whom she has heard “conflicting” things. (Milton Ferris is the most brilliant of brilliant scientists at the Institute but Milton Ferris is also an individual whom “you don’t want to cross in any way, even inadvertently. Especially inadvertently.”) As a young woman scientist, one of very few in the Psychology Department at the University, Margot knows instinctively to efface herself in such circumstances; as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan with a particular interest in experimental cognitive psychology, she absorbed such wisdom through her pores.

      Also, it was abundantly clear: there were virtually no women professors in the Psychology Department, and none at all in Neuroscience at U-M.

      Margot is not a beautiful young woman, she is sure. She has a distrust of conventional “beauty”—her more attractive girl-classmates in school were distracted by the attention of boys, in several cases their lives altered (young love, early pregnancies, hasty marriages). But Margot considers herself a canny young woman, and she is determined not to make mistakes out of naïveté. If E.H. is a kind of dog in his eagerness to please, Margot is not unlike a dog rescued from a shelter by a magnanimous master—one who must be assured, at all times, in the most subtle ways possible, that he is indeed master.

      In his steely jovial way Milton Ferris is explaining to E.H. that Margot is “too young” to have been a classmate of his in the late 1930s—“This young woman from Michigan is new to the university and new to our team at the Institute where she will be assisting us in our ‘memory project.’”

      E.H. frowns thoughtfully as if he is absorbing the information packed into this sentence. Affably he concurs: “‘Michigan.’ Yes—that makes it unlikely that we were classmates at Gladwyne.”

      In the same way E.H. is trying to behave as if the term “memory project” is familiar to him. (Margot wonders if this persuasive and congenial persona has been a nonconscious acquisition in the amnesiac. She wonders whether testing has been done in the acquisition of such “memory” by individuals as brain-damaged as E.H.)

      As Milton Ferris speaks expansively of “testing,” E.H. exhibits eagerness and enthusiasm. Over the course of the past eighteen months he СКАЧАТЬ