The Man Without a Shadow

CHAPTER THREE

Hel-lo!”

“Eli, hello.”

(Does he remember her? Margot is beginning to believe yes, the amnesiac definitely remembers her.)

“We have some very interesting tests for today, Eli. I think you will like them.”

“‘Tests’—yes. I am good at tests—it seems.”

E.H. rubs his hands together. His smile is both anxious-to-please and hopeful.

It is true, E.H. is very good at tests! And when E.H. fails a test, it is sometimes nearly as significant (in terms of the test) as if he had not failed.

Before they begin, however, E.H. insists that Margot try his favorite “brainteaser” puzzle, which fits in the palm of a hand, and consists of numbered, varicolored squares of plastic which you move around with a thumb until there is an ideal conjunction of numerals and colors. E.H. is something of a marvel at the Institute where no one on the staff, not even the younger, male attendants, can come near his speed in solving the puzzle; others, including most of the women, and certainly Margot Sharpe, are totally confused by the little puzzle, and made to feel like idiots desperately shoving squares about with their thumbs until E.H. takes it from them with a bemused chuckle—“Excuse me! Like this.”

And within seconds, E.H. has lined up the squares, to perfection.

Margot pleads with E.H., please no, she doesn’t want to try the maddening little thing, she knows there is a trick to it—(obviously: but what is the “trick”?)—and she doesn’t have time for such a silly game; but E.H. presses it on her like an eager boy, and so with a sigh Margot takes the palm-sized plastic puzzle from him and moves the little squares about with her thumb—tries, tries and tries—and fails, and fails—until her eyes fill with tears of vexation at the damned thing and E.H. takes it from her with a bemused chuckle—“Excuse me! Like this.”

And within seconds, E.H. has lined up the squares, to perfection.

His smile is that of the triumphant, just slightly mocking pubescent boy.

“HEL-lo!”

“Eli, hello.”

Does he remember her? Margot is certain that he does—in some way.

He doesn’t understand that he is an experimental subject. He is data. He thinks—

(But what does E.H. think? Even to herself Margot is reluctant to concede—The poor man thinks he is one like us.)

E.H. has been told many times that he is an “important” person. He believes that this fact—(if it is a fact)—both predates his illness (when he’d had a position of much responsibility in his family’s investment firm and had been a civil rights activist) and has something to do with his illness (if it is an “illness” and not rather a “condition”)—but he isn’t certain what it entails.

The “old” Elihu Hoopes—a man of considerably higher than average intelligence, achievement, and self-awareness—cohabits uneasily with the “new” Elihu Hoopes who feels keenly his disabilities without being able to comprehend them.

“Good that our hunting rifles and shotguns are kept at the lake,” E.H. has said to Margot Sharpe, with a sly wink. “And good that such weapons are not kept loaded.”

What does this mean? Margot feels a frisson of dread.

More than once the amnesiac subject has made this enigmatic remark to Margot Sharpe but when she asks him to explain it, E.H. simply smiles and shakes his head—“You’re the doctor, Doctor. You tell me.”

MARGOT REPORTS TO Milton Ferris: “I think that—sometimes—unpredictably—E.H. is ‘remembering’ things in little clusters that, so far as we know, he shouldn’t be able to remember. For instance, last week we watched a short film on Spain, and while E.H. has forgotten having seen the film, and has forgotten me, he seems to be remembering some fragments from the film. He’s been ‘thinking of Spain,’ he told me, out of nowhere. And I think he remembers some of the Spanish music from the film, I’ve heard him begin to hum when we’re working together. And he’s been making sketches that are different from his usual sketches—‘They just come to me, Doctor. Do you know what they are?’—and they are scenes that look vaguely Spanish. An exotic building or temple that resembles the Alhambra, for instance …”

It is like a tightrope performance, speaking to Milton Ferris.

There is the content of Margot’s words, and there is the tension of speaking to him.

“Very good, Margot. Good work. Keep records, we’ll see what develops.”

Laying his hand on Margot’s shoulder lightly, to thank her, and also to dismiss her. For Milton Ferris is a busy man, and has many distractions.

Margot pauses feeling a sensation like an electric current coursing through her body. Margot swallows hard, her mouth has gone dry.

Between them, a moment’s rapport—sexual, and covert.

But soon then, disappointingly, E.H. seems to forget Spain. He stops humming Spanish-sounding music when Margot is near, and he returns to his familiar sketch-subjects. When Margot carefully pronounces “Spain”—“Spanish”—“Alhambra”—E.H. regards her with a polite, quizzical smile and no particular recognition; when she shows him photographs of Spanish settings, he says, “Either Spain or a South American country—though I guess that must be the Alhambra.”

“Did you ever visit the Alhambra, Eli, that you can remember?”

“Well! I can hardly say that I’ve visited the Alhambra that I don’t remember.”

Pleasantly E.H. laughs. Margot sees the unease in his eyes.

In fact, Margot knows that E.H. has not visited Spain. Surprisingly for a man of his education, social class, and artistic interests, E.H. has not traveled extensively abroad; the energies of his young manhood were focused upon American settings.

“Were you there, with me? Are these photographs we took together?”—E.H.’s remark is startling, and difficult to interpret: flirtatious, belligerent, ironic, playful.

Margot understands that the amnesiac subject tries to determine the plausible answer to a question by questioning his interrogator. At such times his voice takes on an almost childlike mock-innocence as if (so Margot speculates) he knows that you are onto his ruse but, if you liked him, you might play along with it.

“Yes, Eli. We were there together, you and me. For three weeks in Spain, when …”

It is wrong of Margot Sharpe to speak in such a way, and she knows it. But the words leap from her, and cannot be retrieved.

“Were we! And were other travelers with us, or—”

E.H. gazes at her plaintively, yearningly.

Margot regrets her impulsive remark, and is grateful that no one is close by to overhear.

“—were you my ‘fiancée’—is that why we were together?”

“Yes, Eli. That is why.”

“Or was it our honeymoon? Was that it?”

“Yes. Our honeymoon.”

“Were we happy?”

“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 to “Elihu Hoopes”—who’d stared at her with a kind of recognition, hungry, yearning, and squeezed her small pliant hand in his.

I know you. We know each other. Don’t we?

We were in grade school together …

E.H. squeezes Margot’s hand in his strong dry fingers. She has been anticipating this—she doesn’t pull her hand away from his grasp so quickly as she does when others are in the room with them.

“Mr. Hoopes—‘Eli.’ I’m so happy to see you.”

“I’m so happy to see you.”

There is something different about this morning, Margot thinks.

Margot thinks—But I can’t. It would be wrong.

Still they are clasping hands. With no one else in the testing-room to observe they are free of social restraint. Between them, there is but the residue of instinct.

“Do you remember me, Eli? ‘Margot.’”

“Oh yes—‘Margot.’”

“Your friend.”

“Yes, my friend—‘Mar-got.’”

Conscientiously, E.H. pronounces her name Mar-go. So quick at mimicry is E.H., one would think his skill a kind of memory.

“I think I knew you in—was it school? Grade school?”

“Yes. Gladwyne.”

We were close friends through school. Then you went to Amherst, and I went to Ann Arbor.

We were in love, but—something happened to part us …

(Wouldn’t Eli realize, Margot Sharpe is much younger than he is? At least seventeen years?)

(Yet: E.H. is a perpetual thirty-seven and Margot Sharpe is now thirty-four. If E.H. were capable of thinking in such terms he would be thinking that, magically, the young woman psychologist has caught up with him in age.)

“I’ve been looking forward to today since—last Wednesday. We’re doing such important work, Eli …”

“Yes. Yes we are, Mar-go.”

It is very exciting, their proximity. Their privacy. Margot can feel the man’s breath on her face as he leans over her.

E.H. seems to be inhaling Margot. She wants to think that her scent has become familiar to him. (She has conducted olfactory memory tests with him of her own invention indicating that yes, E.H. is more likely to remember smells than other sensory cues; his memory for smells of decades ago is more or less undiminished.)

E.H. is taller than Margot by at least five inches, so that she is forced to look up at him and this is pleasurable to her, as to him.

Is E.H. nearly forty-seven now? How quickly the years have passed! (For E.H. no time at all has passed.)

His hairline is receding from his high forehead, and his russet-brown hair is fading to a beautiful shade of pewter-gray, yet E.H. remains youthful, straight-backed. His forehead is lightly creased with bewilderment or worry that quickly eases away when he smiles at a visitor.

“Eli, how have you been?”

“Very good, thank you. And you?”

The question is genuine. E.H. is anxious to know.

All of the world is clues to the amnesiac. Like a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces that has been overturned, scattered. Through some effort—(a superhuman effort beyond the capacity of any normal individual)—these countless pieces might be fitted together again into a coherent and illuminating whole.

Is E.H. “very good”? Margot knows that the poor man had bronchitis for several weeks that winter. Terrible fits of coughing, that made testing impossible at times. Not only were short-term memories slipping out of the amnesiac’s brain as through a large-holed colander but the severe coughing seemed to exacerbate loss of memory.

(Margot has been concerned about E.H.’s health in recent years. She is assured that the amnesiac receives physical examinations at the Institute, that his blood, blood pressure, and other vital signs are routinely tested. In her own case, Margot often forgets to schedule dental appointments, gynecological appointments, eye examinations—and how much more likely to neglect himself is a man with memory deficits.)

E.H. has forgotten the bronchitis and its discomforts. E.H. has forgotten his original, devastating illness. E.H. quickly forgets all physical distress, maladies. He may be susceptible to moods—but E.H. quickly forgets all moods.

He has lost weight, Margot estimates about five to eight pounds. His face is the face of a handsome ascetic. He retains the alert and agile air of an ex-athlete but he has become an ex-athlete who anticipates pain.

Today he is wearing neatly pressed khakis, an English-looking striped shirt, and a dark green cashmere sweater. His socks are a very dark purple patterned in small yellow checks. All of his clothing is purchased at expensive men’s stores like J. Press, Ralph Lauren, Armani. Margot has seen these clothes before, she thinks, but not for some time. (Who assists E.H. with his wardrobe? Sees that his things are laundered, dry-cleaned? Margot supposes it must be the watchful and loving guardian-aunt with whom he lives.) Even in the throes of amnesia E.H. exhibits a touching masculine vanity. Margot always compliments him on his clothing, and E.H. always says, “Thank you!”—and pauses as if he has more to say, but can’t remember what it is.

Margot Sharpe has done what few of her science colleagues would do, or would consider it proper for a scientist to be doing: daringly, like an investigative reporter, or indeed a detective, she has looked into the background of the amnesiac subject E.H. In all she has spent several days in Philadelphia meeting with former associates of Elihu Hoopes including black community organizers who knew him in the late 1950s and 1960s as one of a very small number of white citizens who gave money to their causes, as well as to the NAACP and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; she has learned that, in some quarters, Eli Hoopes is considered a “hero”—that is, he’d behaved “heroically” in joining civil rights activists who’d picketed City Hall, protested Philadelphia police brutality and harassment, campaigned for better schools in South Philly, better health-care facilities, an end to discriminatory hiring in municipal government. He’d established a fund for university scholarships at Penn, earmarked for “disadvantaged youths.” He’d given money to Philadelphia Inquiry, a local version of Mother Jones that appeared sporadically during the 1960s. (In one of the issues, which the former editor passed on to Margot Sharpe, there appeared a personal account by Elihu Hoopes titled “Hiding in the Seminary & the Afterlife”—a provocative memoirist piece in which Elihu Hoopes speaks of his experience at Union Theological Seminary and why he’d dropped out after two years: “I felt that I was living in a cocoon of privilege. My eyes were opened by a black Christian who told me of lynchings in the South—following World War II.”)

As a way of being friendly and winning the amnesiac subject’s trust, Margot has several times asked E.H. about his “activist” life and his “seminary” life; E.H. is likely to become overexcited talking of these past lives which he seems to know are “past”—yet has no idea how he knows this, and what has happened in the interim. He has a vague understanding that he has not seen, for instance, the black community organizer with whom Margot had spoken, for some time; yet, since he believes himself to be thirty-seven years old, and living still in Philadelphia, he is confused about why he hasn’t seen the man—and whether the Philadelphia Civil Rights Coalition has disbanded. (Margot is hesitant to tell E.H. that the Coalition has not disbanded; she fears he would not understand why it isn’t possible for him to reconnect with it.) E.H.’s memories of the seminary are both vivid and vague as in a film that goes in and out of focus. And his memory of his recent past is becoming strangely riddled with blank spaces. He is beginning to forget proper names—a symptom, Margot doesn’t like to note, of the more general, inevitable amnesia of an aging brain.

So, Margot has learned that it is wisest to steer the amnesiac subject into activities and routines that don’t arouse his emotions, or provoke his memory. This morning she leads him through the first of a battery of tests designed to measure “working memory.” Initially E.H. performs well, like a bright twelve-year-old; these are complicated tests, tests of some ingenuity—(Margot designed them herself); yet as Margot works with E.H. she is less buoyant than usual.

She forgets to praise the amnesiac, who so yearns to be praised but will not recall what is missing if you don’t praise him; tears gather in her eyes and threaten to spill down her cheeks. She is so unhappy!