The Man Without a Shadow. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ might know that his I.Q. was once tested at 153, when he was eighteen years old; but he can’t know that, after his injury, his I.Q. has been tested several times, and has been measured in the range of 149 to 157. Still of superior intelligence, at least theoretically.

      This is fascinating to Margot: E.H.’s pre-injury vocabulary, language skills, and mathematical abilities have survived more or less intact but (it is said) he can’t retain new words, concepts, or facts even if they are embedded in familiar information. He has been observed taking notes on the financial section of his favorite newspapers but when asked about what he has been inscribing a few minutes later he shrugs disdainfully—“Homo sapiens is the species that ‘makes’ and ‘loses’ money. What else is new?” He has forgotten what had so engrossed him but he can readily invent a substitute with which to disguise his memory loss.

      At times E.H. seems to know that John F. Kennedy was assassinated recently—(two years ago)—while at other times E.H. speaks of “President Kennedy” as if the man were still alive—“Kennedy will need to revise his position on Cuba. He will need to lead the country out of the quagmire of Vietnam.”

      And, grandiloquently: “Some of us are hoping to get to Washington, to meet with the president. The situation is getting more and more urgent.”

      It would seem delusional except, as Ferris has noted, the Hoopes family of Philadelphia has long had ties with state and federal politicians.

      Like many brain-afflicted individuals E.H. carries with him dictionaries and other word-books; he keeps long lists of words in his notebooks alphabetically arranged—that is, there are pages of A’s, B’s, C’s, and so forth. (E.H. takes pleasure in consulting these when he does the Times crossword puzzle as, his family has attested, he’d never consulted a dictionary when doing the puzzle before his illness.) His proficiency in math is impressive. His knowledge of world geography is impressive. He can discuss rival economic theories—Keynesian, classical, Marxist; he likes to expound upon von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, key lines of which he has memorized. But if questioned he can only repeat more or less what he has already said; his ideas are fixed, like his vocabulary. No new ideas or revisions of the past can penetrate. And if he is challenged his affable nature vanishes and he becomes irritable, ironic. He is adept at board games and puzzles of a kind he’d mastered when he was a boy but he can’t easily learn new games.

      Margot supposes that if E.H. could reason more clearly he would assume that the repeated tests he undergoes constitute a kind of treatment or therapy that might allay his condition; but he can’t know his “condition” though it has been explained to him repeatedly; and he can’t know that the tests are in fact “repeated” or that they are for the sake of experimental research—that’s to say for the sake of neuroscience and not for the sake of the subject.

      Ferris is speaking carefully to E.H.: “Mr. Hoopes—Eli—let me explain again that I am a neuropsychologist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and these are members of my lab. We’ve been working with you for the past fifteen weeks here at the Institute at Darven Park, each Wednesday, and we have made some exciting preliminary discoveries. You have met me before, and we have gotten along splendidly! I am ‘Milton Ferris’—”

      E.H. nods vehemently, even a little impatiently, as if he knows all this: “‘Mil-ton Fer-ris’—yes. ‘Dr. Ferris.’”

      “I am not a ‘doctor’—I am a professor. I have a Ph.D. of course but that is not essential! Please just call me—”

      “‘Professor Fer-ris.’ Yes.”

      “And I have explained—I am not a clinician.”

      This is a way of telling the subject I am not a medical doctor. You are not my patient.

      But E.H. seems to purposefully misunderstand, awkwardly joking: “Well, Professor—that makes two of us. I am not a clinician, either.”

      E.H. has spoken a little too loudly. Is this a way of signaling irritation with Professor Ferris? Since his attention has been forcibly removed from black-haired Margot Sharpe?

      (Margot wonders too if E.H. is speaking quickly as if to signal, subliminally, that he isn’t much interested in the information that Milton Ferris is providing him; despite his severe amnesia E.H. “remembers” enough from previous exchanges to know that he won’t remember this information, either, thus resents being given it.)

      While his visitors look on E.H. leafs through his little notebook until he comes to a crucial page. He smiles, showing the page to Margot rather than to Ferris—a drawing of two tennis players, one of them wildly flailing with his racket as a ball sails over his head. (Is this player meant to be E.H.? The player’s hair and features suggest that this is so. And the other player, with a blurred face and exaggerated grin, is meant to be—Death?)

      “This—‘tennis’—I used to play. Pretty damned good on the Amherst team. Are we going to play ‘tennis’ now?”

      “Eli, you’re an excellent tennis player. You can play tennis another day. But right now, if you’d like to take a seat, and …”

      “‘Excellent’? Is that so? But I have not played tennis in a long time, I think.”

      “In fact, Eli, you played tennis just last week.”

      Eli stares at Ferris. This is not what Eli has expected to hear and he seems incapable of absorbing it but without missing a beat Ferris says in a warm and uplifting voice, “Now, Eli, you’ve always trounced me. And it has been reported to me not only that you’d played with one of the best players on the staff but you’d won each game.”

      “‘Reported’—really!”

      E.H. laughs, faintly incredulous.

      Margot sees: the poor man is feeling the unease of one being made to understand that the most complete knowledge of himself can come only from the outside—from strangers.

      A melancholy conviction, Margot thinks, to realize that you can’t know yourself as reliably as strangers can know you!

      Patiently Milton Ferris explains to E.H. why he has been brought to the Institute that morning, and why Ferris and his laboratory are going to be “testing” him—as they’d done in the past; E.H. listens politely at first, then becomes bemused and beguiled by Margot whom he has rediscovered: she is wearing a black wraparound skirt with black tights beneath, a black jersey pullover that fits her petite frame tightly, and black ballerina flats—the clothes of a schoolgirl dancer and not the crisp white lab coats of the medical staff or the dull-green uniforms of the nursing staff. There is no laminated ID on her lapel to inform him of her name.

      Annoyed, Ferris says: “Whenever you’d like to begin, Mr. Hoopes—Eli. That’s why we’re here.”

      “Why you are here, Doctor. But why am I here?”

      “You’ve enjoyed our tests in the past, Eli, and I think you will again.”

      “That’s why I am here—to ‘enjoy’ myself?”

      “We are hoping to establish some facts concerning memory. We are hoping to explore the question of whether memory is ‘global’ in the brain—not localized; or whether it is localized. And you have been helping us, Eli.”

      “Have they kicked me out of the office?—has someone taken my place? СКАЧАТЬ