The Man Without a Shadow

Rich with data, graphs, statistics, and citations, the articles bear such titles as “Losses in Recent Memory Following Infectious Encephalitis”—“Retention of ‘Declarative’ and ‘Non-declarative’ Memory in Amnesia: A History of ‘E.H.’”—“Short-Term Retention of Verbal, Visual, Auditory and Olfactory Items in Amnesia”—“Encoding, Storing, and Retrieval of Information in Anterograde Amnesia.” Their preparation is a lengthy, collaborative effort of months, or even years, with Milton Ferris overseeing the process. No paper can be submitted to any journal, of course, without Ferris’s imprimatur, no matter who has actually designed and executed the experiments, and who has done most of the research and writing. Recently, Margot has been given permission by Ferris to design experiments of her own involving sensory modality, and the possibility of “non-declarative” learning and memory. In the prestigious Journal of American Experimental Psychology a paper will soon appear with just the names of Milton Ferris and Margot Sharpe as authors; this is a forty-page extract from Margot’s dissertation titled “Short-Term and Consolidated Memory in Retrograde and Anterograde Amnesia: A Brief History of ‘E.H.’” It is, Milton Ferris has told Margot, the most ambitious and thoroughly researched paper of its kind he has ever received from a female graduate student—“Or any female colleague, for that matter.”

(Ferris’s praise is sincere. No irony is intended. It is 1969—it is not an age of gender irony in scientific circles, where few women, and virtually no feminists, have penetrated. To her shame, Margot has been thrilled to hear Milton Ferris spread the word of her to his colleagues, who’ve made a show of being impressed. Margot doesn’t want to think that her mentor’s praise is somewhat mitigated by the fact that there are only two women professors in the Psychology Department at the university, both “social psychologists” whom the experimental psychologists and neuroscientists treat with barely concealed scorn.)

That the lengthy article has been accepted so relatively quickly after Margot submitted it to the Journal of American Experimental Psychology must have something to do with Ferris’s intervention, Margot thinks. It has not escaped her notice that one of the editors of the journal is a protégé of Ferris of the late 1940s; Ferris himself is listed among numerous names on the masthead, as an “advisory editor.”

In any case, she has thanked Ferris.

She has thanked Ferris more than once.

Margot is conscious of her very, very good luck. Margot is anxious to sustain this luck.

It isn’t enough to be brilliant, if you are a woman. You must be demonstrably more brilliant than your male rivals—your “brilliance” is your masculine attribute. And so, to balance this, you must be suitably feminine—which isn’t to say emotionally unstable, volatile, “soft” in any way, only just quiet, watchful, quick to absorb information, nonoppositional, self-effacing.

Margot thinks—It is not difficult to be self-effacing, if you have a face at which no one looks.

“HEL-LO!”

“Hello, Mr. Hoopes—‘Eli.’ How are you?”

“Very good, thanks. How are you?”

In the vicinity of E.H. you feel the gravitational tug of the present tense.

In the vicinity of E.H., you glance about anxiously for your own shadow, as if you might have lost it.

Margot is very lonely except—Margot is not lonely when she is with E.H. Others in Ferris’s lab would be astonished to learn that Margot Sharpe who is so stiffly quiet in their presence speaks impulsively at times to the amnesiac subject E.H.; she has confided in him, as to a close and trusted friend, when they are alone together and no one else can hear.

She has volunteered to take E.H. for walks in the parkland behind the Institute. She has volunteered to take E.H. downstairs to the first-floor cafeteria, for lunch. If E.H. is scheduled for medical tests she volunteers to take him.

She is cheerful in E.H.’s company, as E.H. is cheerful in hers. She has boasted to E.H. of her academic successes, as one might boast to an older relative, a father perhaps. (Though Margot doesn’t think of Elihu Hoopes as fatherly: she is too much attracted to him as a man.) She has admitted to him that she is, at times, very lonely here in eastern Pennsylvania, where she knows no one—“Except you, Eli. You are my only friend.” E.H. smiles at this revelation as if their exchange was a part of a test and he is expected to speak on cue: “Yes—‘my only friend.’ You are, too.”

Margot knows that E.H. lives with an aunt, and assumes that he must see family members from time to time. She knows that his engagement was broken off a few months after E.H.’s recovery from surgery, and that his fiancée never visits him. What of his other friends? Have they all abandoned him? Has E.H. abandoned them? The impaired subject will wish to retreat, to avoid situations that exacerbate stress and anxiety; E.H. is safest and most secure at the Institute perhaps, where he can’t fail to be, almost continuously, the center of attention.

Margot thinks how for the amnesiac subject, are not all exchanges part of a test? Is not life itself a vast, continuous test?

It isn’t clear during their intimate exchanges if E.H. remembers Margot’s name—(frequently, he confuses her with his childhood classmate)—but unmistakably, he remembers her.

He understands that she is a person of some authority: a “doctor” or a “scientist.” He respects her, and relates to her in a way he doesn’t relate to the nursing staff, so far as Margot has observed.

Of course, you can say anything to E.H. He will be certain to forget it within seventy seconds.

And how difficult this is to comprehend, even for the “scientist”: what Margot has confided in E.H. is inextricably part of her memory of him, but it is not part of his memory of her.

Margot confides in E.H.: her imagination is so aflame she has trouble sleeping through the night. She wakes every two or three hours, excited and anxious. New ideas! New ideas for tests! New theories about the human brain!

She tells E.H. how badly she wants to please Milton Ferris; how fearful she is of disappointing the man—(who is frequently disappointed with young colleagues and associates, and has a reputation for running through them, and dismissing them); she wants to think that Ferris’s assessment of her “brain for science” is accurate, and not exaggerated. It’s her fear that Ferris has made her one of his protégées because she is a young woman of extreme docility and subservience to him.

Margot confesses to E.H. how sometimes she falls into bed without removing her clothing—“Without showering. Sleeping in my own smell.”

(So that E.H. is moved to say, “But your smell is very nice, my dear!”)

She confesses how exhausted she makes herself working late at the lab as if in some way unknown to her she disapproves of and dislikes herself—can’t bear herself except as a vessel of work; for she will not be loved if she doesn’t excel, and there is no way for her to excel except by working and pleasing her elders, like Milton Ferris. She recalls from a literature class at the University of Michigan a nightmarish short story in which the body of a condemned man is tattooed with the law he’d broken, which he is supposed to “read”—she doesn’t recall the author’s name but has never forgotten the story.

E.H. says, with an air of affectionate rebuke, “No one forgets Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony.’”

He too had read it as an undergraduate—at Amherst.

Margot is surprised, and touched. “You remember it, Eli? That’s—of course, that’s …” It is utterly normal and natural for E.H. to remember a story he’d read years before his illness. Yet, Margot who’d read the story not nearly so long ago, could not recall the title.

E.H. begins to recite: “‘“It’s a peculiar apparatus,” said the Officer to the Traveler, gazing with a certain admiration at the device … It appeared that the Traveler had responded to the invitation of the Commandant only out of politeness, when he’d been invited to witness the execution of a soldier condemned to death for disobeying and insulting his superior … Guilt is always beyond doubt.’”

E.H. laughs, strangely. Margot has no idea why.

Something about the man without a shadow reciting these lines makes her fearful—I don’t want to know. Oh please!—I don’t want to know.

THEY HAVE NEVER told him—Your cousin is dead. Your cousin was dead as soon as she disappeared.

No one saw. No one knows.

Wake up, Eli! Silly Eli, it’s only a dream.

So much Eli has seen that summer, only a dream.

SHE RENTS A single-bedroom unit in dreary university graduate housing, overlooking a rock-filled ravine at the edge of the sprawling campus. (The University Neurological Institute at Darven Park is several miles away in an upscale Philadelphia suburb.) She avoids her neighbors, who seem so much less serious than she, given to playing music loudly, and talking and laughing loudly; especially, she avoids married couples—the thought of marital intimacy, the pettiness of domestic life and sheer waste of time required for such a life, makes her feel faint. She has no time for friends—she has ceased writing to her friends from college; they seem diminished to her now, like pygmies. One or two of the men in Ferris’s lab have—(she thinks, she isn’t absolutely sure)—have made sexual advances to her, awkwardly and obliquely; with similar awkwardness, and much embarrassment, she has discouraged them—No I don’t think so. I—I don’t think—it’s a good idea to see each other outside the lab … Seeing her fellow researchers in such relentless intimacy, day following day, for hours each day, it is not possible for Margot to harbor romantic feelings toward the men, or feelings of friendship for the other women; like rivalrous siblings they are easily irritated by one another, and easily provoked to jealousy, for each is vying with the others continuously—(how fatiguing this is!)—for admiration, approval, affection from Milton Ferris.

Work has become her addiction, as work has become her salvation. In human relations you never know where you stand; in your work you can mark progress clearly, and your progress will be noted by others—your distinguished elders.

It is slightly shameful to Margot, how she lives for Milton Ferris’s praise—Good work, Margot!—a murmur like a caress along the length of her body.

At times she is sure that there is an (implicit, unstated) promise between her and Ferris, like a match not yet struck.

At other times, seeing how Ferris’s interest waxes, wanes, waxes, she is sure of nothing.

He, Ferris, with his wiry white beard, bristling manner and sharp-glinting eyeglasses, his flashes of wit, sarcasm, insight, and frequent brilliance—(all who work with the man are convinced of his genius)—has become a figure of considerable (if forbidden) romance to Margot Sharpe. He is fifty-seven years old, he has become famous in the field of neuropsychology; he has long been a member of the National Academy of Science. He is (said to be) happily married, or in any case stolidly married. Yet—We are special to each other.

Margot feels a sensation of weakness, faintness—when Ferris singles her out for praise in the lab. Her face flushes with blood, her heart beats with great happiness. It has often been so, for Margot has been, through her life, the exemplary good-girl student: the Daughter.

She is the Chaste Daughter. She is the one who, if you believe in her, will never betray you.

Yet Margot thinks—I am not in love with Milton Ferris.

Then—I must never allow him to know.

In the night in her bed. In this strange darkness, in her bed. Sometimes she slides her arm around her waist, in mimicry of an embrace. Sometimes she caresses her ribs through her skin, taking a kind of mournful pleasure in so intimate (and unthreatening) a touch. Shuts her eyes tight to summon sleep. And there is Elihu Hoopes standing before her with his eager, hopeful smile and stricken eyes—Margot? Hel-lo.

E.H. says—Margot? I am so lonely.

(IN LIFE, MARGOT knows that E.H. will never say these words. For E.H. will never remember Margot from one encounter to another.)