The Man Without a Shadow

by Joyce Carol Oates

Standing on a plank bridge in this place that is new to him and wondrous in beauty. Thinking it must be at Lake George—but he isn’t sure. He has not seen this particular place before—he is sure of this. He seems to know that he must brace himself, he grips the railing with both hands, tight.

  This is a place new to him and wondrous in beauty yet he is fearful of turning to see, in the shallow stream flowing beneath the bridge, behind his back, the drowned girl.

  . . . naked, about eleven years old, a child. Eyes open and sightless, shimmering in water. Rippling-water, that makes it seem that the girl’s face is shuddering. Her slender white body, long white tremulous legs and bare feet. Splotches of sunshine, “water-skaters” magnified in shadow on the girl’s face.

  They would shake him hard, they would say to him Eli you did not see. You did not see your cousin in the woods. You did not see Gretchen at all that day, you are mistaken.

  They would shake him hard, and harder. They would say to him For God’s sake you are having a bad nightmare, Eli. You can’t give in to nightmares, you will drive us all crazy.

  “Mr. Hoopes?”

  He turns. He is startled to see that someone has come up quietly behind him or has been standing behind him for some time, and he’d had no idea.

  “We should go back now, Mr. Hoopes. You have an appointment at one o’clock, remember.”

  “Yes! That is correct.”

  He speaks lightly. He smiles.

  It is perplexing to him, the sudden appearance of the girl. She is not the girl he has been imagining—she is not the girl he has been seeing. She is much older, in her twenties. She is caramel-skinned, with dark tight-braided hair in a complex weave on her head. She wears a pale green cotton smock over dark green cotton slacks. On her feet are crepe-soled white shoes and on her left lapel a laminated white ID badge. Probably a medical worker. Nurse’s aide or an attendant. He squints with his good eye to read her name—YOLANDA.

  Confused. Tries to disguise his alarm. (He knows) there is something behind him at which he is forbidden to look, beyond the railing of the plank bridge, the shallow stream flowing beneath the bridge. Frightened of seeing what this is but Yolanda continues to smile at him in a way to suggest that nothing is wrong in the slightest. She knows him—“Mr. Hoopes.” She is not surprised or dismayed, she is not horrified. She does not know about the child in the stream.

  “You been havin a nice time walkin out here, Mr. Hoopes? Real nice here in’t it? My favorite place, around here.”

  “Yes. Mine also.”

  His voice which is the voice of an adult male. Feels this voice—deep baritone in his throat—and realizes that he is not a child, himself: he is not five years old. Much older, his body hangs on him like an oversized coat.

  And whatever has happened, happened at some other time. And in some other place.

  “Mr. Hoopes? You forgettin your—your drawin book . . .”

  The caramel-skinned girl points to an artist’s sketchbook that has been propped against the bridge railing with a look of having been distractedly put aside. The sketchbook is shut, there is no stick of charcoal or pencil in his hand but he has a pleasurable memory of having grasped something between his fingers—indeed, there is a charcoal stick in a pocket of his jacket. Evidently he has been sketching the rich marshland on the farther side of the bridge where redwing blackbirds and starlings have flocked.

  “Thank you! I wouldn’t want to leave this behind.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Hoopes. Last time you left that book, I had a hard time finding it.”

  “‘Yo-landa’—do you like to walk here, too? Do you live nearby?”

  “No, Mr. Hoopes! Don’t live anywhere near this place.”

  The girl laughs, showing small white teeth. Her accent is soft, pillowy. She is “from the islands”—he guesses, by her accent, Dominican Republic.

  “Am I late, Yolanda? I hope not.”

  “No, Mr. Hoopes! That’s why I’m here—to make sure you are not late.”

  “Am I late sometimes? Is that why you follow me around?”

  The girl laughs, as if Elihu Hoopes has tickled her. “Mr. Hoopes, I don’t ‘follow you around’—I walk with you.”

  “So I don’t get lost.”

  “For sure, you won’t get lost.”

  “I hope they pay you sufficiently, to keep people like me from getting lost.”

  It is a query—People like me. Elihu Hoopes hopes to determine by the young woman’s response whether there are indeed people like me or whether he is one of a kind.

  To be one of a kind is a terrible fate. He is afraid that is what he is.

  But Yolanda is walking ahead, and it isn’t clear if she is really listening to him. Speaking with strangers is like volleying a tennis ball: if you can keep the volley going there is a connection, an urgent and exciting connection, but once the connection is broken—you are flailing, lost.

  He has forgotten the plank bridge, the stream beneath the bridge, the shadowy shimmering rippling water at which he wasn’t supposed to look—he has forgotten the warning against looking. Turning his head.

  But he has turned his head, and there is nothing. What has so frightened him? He feels his heartbeat begin to slow, for the danger is past.

  He rubs his hands together, chill perspiration of palm to palm.

  Now he sees: they are on a wood chip path. He is not in the Adirondacks or any wild place but in what appears to be a parkland of some kind. Ahead, partially visible through a stand of trees, is a building of pale-glimmering glass.

  A place of affluence, his heart sinks. Affluence is artifice, that deflates the soul.

  Behind him is a marshy area fecund with reeds and cattails, glittering with strips of water like the shards of a broken mirror. Monarch butterflies, redwing blackbirds. And on the rippling surface of the water a continual skittish play of water-insects like firing neurons.

  Behind him and passing into forgetfulness, the plank bridge and the shallow stream.

  Trails are marked here but they are all wood chip trails that probably just loop back upon themselves in a quarter mile as in a maze. He is disappointed, he isn’t at Lake George—obviously, he is nowhere near Lake George—but in this place of fastidiously maintained trails, granite benches named for deceased donors, beds of colorful autumn flowers—zinnias, marigolds, asters.

  The marshland is a natural place, he supposes. Someone had the idea of creating parkland to abut it. Affluence flows into nature and alters it, in its image.

  Strange how he seems to know the direction in which they are headed, though he has never been here before. When the wood chip trail branches, both the caramel-skinned girl and Elihu Hoopes take the left branch without thinking.

  The girl whose name he has forgotten—(he knows that it is a beautiful exotic name)—strides ahead on the path. Splotched sunshine falls like coins about their heads. He feels an urge to reach out to her, to touch her—the slender shoulder in the pale green smock, the hair at the back of her head that is so tightly braided. But he knows—You can’t. You must not. Not ever again.

  He is not aroused. Not sexually aroused. But he yearns to touch her, he is so lonely.

  Must not. Not ever again.

  As if she can read his anxious thoughts the girl turns to him, smiling. “Mr. Hoopes, you going to tell me the birds again? Seems like, I get them all mixed-up.”

  They are standing at the edge of a large pond bordered by willow trees. On the pond are waterfowl—mallards, geese, majestic white swans. And at the shore, smaller birds pecking excitedly at grain that someone has scattered for them.

  He points to the ducks—“blue-winged teals”—“mallards”—“American wigeons.” He points to the geese—“Canada geese”—“snow geese.” He points to the swans—“whistling swans.” The smaller birds are “cardinals”—“slate-colored juncos”—“vesper sparrows”—“song sparrows”—“field sparrows.” The names of the birds come to him unbidden, as through a magical action of
his finger’s pointing and the birds themselves, provoking the girl to laugh in delight as if he has performed a remarkable trick.

  “Except,” Elihu Hoopes says, “the birds don’t know their names. Only we know their names, because we have given them their names.”

  The caramel-skinned girl laughs uncertainly. She regards Elihu Hoopes with the wary reverence with which she would regard any middle-aged male patient at the Institute whose malady is hidden inside his head.

  “And what kinda cloud is that, Mr. Hoopes?”

  His gaze swings upward. The sky is somehow surprising, unexpected—steep canyons of cloud that look as if you could fall into them, without end. And beyond, the soft pale blue of rainwashed glass.

  “Mostly cirrocumulus—‘mackerel sky.’ At the horizon, stratocumulus—rain clouds.”

  These names, too, come to Elihu Hoopes unbidden. He can sense that the girl has asked these questions of him before since his answers don’t greatly surprise her; nor will she recall them, for essentially they do not interest her.

  He wants to tell the beautiful caramel-skinned girl I tell you these things because I love you. Whoever you are.

  He smiles, in secret. How surprised the girl would be, if she knew!

  “Mr. Hoopes, you are a—teacher? Professor?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Lawyer?”

  “No. Don’t think so.”

  “Somethin in business, then.”

  “‘Somethin in business, then.’ Yes.”

  Though when he tries to recall the work he’d done, desk-work, office-work, telephone, columns of numerals, calculations—when he tries to recall his father speaking urgently to him on matters of Hoopes, Inc.—something in his brain seizes. Like ice cracking. Can’t bring himself to recall whatever it is, or was. All that is finished.

  “This is a beautiful park the Institute has here, in’t it, Mr. Hoopes?”

  “Is it?”

  “You saying it is not?”

  “Too tame for me, Yolanda.”

  He sees (again) that the girl’s name is Yolanda. Yet he is careful to pronounce the name casually, as if he has known it all along.

  He has come to be hypersensitive to the expectations of others and has come to know by the most subtle, near-invisible alterations of another’s facial muscles if what he says is plausible and reasonable or if it is senseless and irrational and will alert the listener that something is wrong with this person.

  But Yolanda laughs as if Elihu Hoopes has said something scandalous.

  “Too tame? How d’you like a place then, Mr. Hoopes—wild?”

  “Yes, Yolanda. Wild.”

  Elihu speaks wistfully. Yolanda looks pained. He realizes that she has been enunciating Mr. Hoopes carefully: he has to wonder if the name Hoopes has associations for her, if she is from Philadelphia and has encountered the name previously, in quasi-exalted circumstances; or, more likely, if it is just a name to her, a curious name, as Elihu Hoopes seems to be a curious individual, one of those not quite right in the head.

  Glancing down at himself: neatly pressed khakis, linen shirt, oxblood loafers. It seems that Eli is not wearing any sort of hospital attire, and so he is not a “patient.”

  Yet: he might be an “out-patient.”

  (Though he doesn’t feel physically “unwell.” His sense of pain—tactile, internal—seems blunted, numbed. As if parts of his body have gone to sleep.)

  He would like to ask Yolanda where they are, and why—but can’t summon the right, lightly bantering words.

  “We goin up there right now, not a minute late, Mr. Hoopes”—Yolanda assures him, as if she can read his thoughts.

  Leaving the private park now. Following a graveled walk to the rear entrance of the pale-glimmering building that is, he quickly counts, eight storeys high.

  Hospital? Medical center?

  Compulsion for quick counting of things that can be reduced to numerals but a compulsion that has little practical use for any numeral that comes into his head—(he knows, he understands this but not why)—very soon drifts out of his head, and is gone.

  Averting his gaze so he can’t count God-damned cars in the parking lot but the method is: how many cars in each row, how many rows, multiply.

  “H’lo there, Mr. Hoopes! You havin a good walk?”

  “H’lo, Eli. Yolanda takin good care of you, is she?”

  Smiling strangers appear out of nowhere. Two women, a man also in uniform: pale green smocks or jackets, dark green trousers and crepe-soled white shoes. They seem to know him and to like and respect him—this is a positive thing. He makes no effort to read their ID badges for (he senses) he should know their names.

  It is a positive thing to be liked and respected for it is not probable then that you will be hurt.

  He’d been beaten, once. More than once. He can shut his eyes and recall the astonishment of being hit, punched, kicked, screamed at—Nigger lover! Fucking Jew! So quickly you are knocked to the ground and once you are on the ground, you are helpless. Try to protect your head, try to protect your face, stomach. He can recall the terror of believing that he would die, and a curious stillness within the terror, as if a part of him, his soul perhaps, had curled up tight in self-protectiveness, and had passed into oblivion.

  Like islands emerging in a dark marshland, these memories. But he doesn’t clutch at them, he has learned to let such memories rise, and fall back again into oblivion, for he has learned not to exhaust himself in an effort futile beyond all calculation. What drifts into his mind, will drift into his mind without this effort. And no matter the effort, it will disperse again and drift away.

  He isn’t sure if he remembers pain, or if he is remembering someone else’s pain. A body kicked and dragged along the pavement, screams and grunts, the soft-sickening sound of a body being kicked by a booted foot but (possibly) not his body.

  “H’lo, Eli! Great day isn’t it”—another smiling stranger passing by. This one in a white lab coat, has to be a doctor.

  “Great day, yes—if you’re alive.”

  Strange that he seems to know the way to the bank of elevators though he has no idea where he is being taken. Stepping inside, and the caramel-skinned girl presses one of the buttons, and Eli sees, but in the next instant has forgotten. On one of the floors someone steps into the elevator and touches his shoulder, and he turns. Smiling face like a mask that sometimes slips if he turns his head too quickly and whoever this is might see his panicked eyes.

  “Eli? How are you?”

  “Very well, thanks. And you?”

  “Very well.”

  The caramel-skinned girl leads him out of the elevator at the fourth floor. He will remember that: numeral four.

  Four is yellow, usually. Not a bright yellow like his grandfather’s little plane but a more subdued yellow.

  And so: if he can remember yellow, he can remember four.

  “Come with me! You’re just in time.”

  Walking now with an energetic youthful man. Friendly and assured, talking to Elihu Hoopes as if he knows him. Whoever was with him in the elevator is gone now. Would turn his head to look yearningly for her but knows it is futile, she has been swept away.

  Someone he loves. Has loved. Gone.

  Through swinging doors—NEUROPSYCHOLOGY LAB.

  White walls, stone-colored tile floor, fluorescent lighting—he has never been here before but there is something familiar about the place, and in this way comforting.

  Now there are two individuals—two men—both in white lab coats—walking with him. One on his right and one on his left. The panicked thought comes to him—They are neurologist and neurosurgeon. They will drill a hole into my skull, I will smell the dry smoke.

  Here in Neuropsychology he seems to be “Eli” more than he is “Mr. Hoopes.” His senses quicken, he is approaching the heart of the mystery.

  Strange to him that another time he turns into a room, through an opened doorway, as if instinctively, though he has neve
r been in this place before.

  If he shuts his right eye, sometimes half his vision falls away. And when he opens his right eye, everything is restored except—(sometimes)—there is another person with him, whom he has not seen before, who has appeared out of nowhere. And it is imperative, he knows, not to acknowledge any surprise or confusion.

  In a sunlit room several persons are seated. Are they waiting for him? But why, waiting for him?—this makes him anxious. One of them is a woman who stares at him with an expression of commingled anticipation and dread, who rises quickly to greet him, in a bright voice crying, “Eli! Oh, Eli.”

  She seems dazed by the sight of him, anxious. Clumsily she tries to embrace him, or to step into his arms—but he stands very still, stiff and unmoving. “Eli, how are you? It’s Rosalyn . . .”

  Rosalyn is Eli’s younger sister. But this woman is not Rosalyn.

  “You know me, Eli—don’t you? Hello . . .” The woman’s voice trails off plaintively.

  It is discomforting, how close the woman stands to Eli Hoopes. She grips his arms, staring at him pleadingly. Her eyes shimmer with tears of alarm and reproach.

  “Eli, please say something. We’ve been told this would be a good time to see you . . .”

  Detaches himself from the impetuous woman, politely.

  “Hel-lo. So good to see you.”

  Hears his voice flat and mechanical as a programmed voice. He is not very convincing, he is afraid: it is difficult to pretend you are happy to see someone when you have no feeling for the person and have no idea who she is.

  Like playing tennis with a sprained ankle. Barely, it can be done, but only with a herculean effort of will. Sweat oozing onto your forehead, the pain is so extreme.

  “Oh, but it’s good to see you, Eli!—you are looking better-rested than last time . . . Have you been sketching? Will you show us what you’ve done?”

  The woman’s voice is anxious and pressing. The woman is imploring him, with a bold sort of desperation. How can he respond? What is his reply? He has stopped dead in his tracks just inside the room, as if in a trance, arms at his sides. Close by, two men have risen to their feet, smiling at him uncertainly, with that same expression of commingled anticipation and dread.