The Man Without a Shadow

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Tries to recall—he’d left the building through a revolving door that seemed to suck him into it, and flung him outside. He knows that he should look for his vehicle in the parking lot, but—he can’t bear the prospect of searching through the immense parking lot for it, as in one of those protracted and excruciating dreams that exhaust the dreamer even as they come to nothing.

  No car keys in his pocket. And he is missing something else—what?

  Something he is accustomed to carrying with him, that is too large for a pocket.

  His fingers twitch. He is feeling uneasy.

  A sensation as of small ants streaming over his lower body.

  Finds himself on a graveled path leading away from the building and into a landscaped park. Here is a large pond beautifully bordered by weeping willow trees and sycamores; on the rippling surface of the water are swans, mallards, Canada geese and snow geese.

  There is a temptation to think—(but he will not give in to this temptation!)—that he has (somehow) found his way to Lake George, and to another time. Making his way along a trail, beginning to walk at a quickened pace, now there is no one to observe him. And now in a marshy area, following a raised plank trail to a plank bridge where he stands at the railing, staring into the marshland. Is this a wild place, is this offshore at Bolton Landing? There is a shallow stream that passes beneath the bridge. But so slowly, you can’t determine the direction of the current. He is relieved, for perhaps it has not happened yet.

  His cousin Gretchen is still alive. He has not heard the adults whispering, and he has not heard his aunt scream. He has not been sent hurriedly away.

  Water-insects, playing on the surface of the marshy water. He is fascinated by their faint shadows cast upon the creek-bed a few inches below.

  If he could sketch these! He would feel so much better, if he could. But his fingers twitch emptily.

  No charcoal stick or pencil. No sketch pad.

  Everywhere there is life in this fecund place. Monarch butterflies, dragonflies. Redwing blackbirds, starlings, crows. Tall reeds and cattails. Even the lifeless trees exude a strange stark beauty. Yet he is feeling anxious. Something is wrong, or will be wrong. He grips the railing with both hands as if expecting a sudden gust of wind. But there is no wind, it is very still, calm. Is this a sign of something wrong—it is so very calm? A warm day, overcast and gray. Here is the horror: color has been draining slowly out of everything he sees—the monarch butterflies have become ghost-moths.

  A sensation of utter despair overcomes him, rising from his legs like paralysis. As in a biblical curse he has been turned to stone.

  Imagining the Future. He cannot.

  Margot Sharpe asks, why? Why can’t the amnesiac imagine the future? Is it because he has lost the past?

  THE EXAMINATION. “MR. Hoopes, are you comfortable in that seat?”

  He is being tested in a way that makes his heart race. It is not a sensation he likes, and yet he seems to crave it.

  There is a senior examiner, and there are three younger assistants who may be graduate students, as well as another young assistant who is filming the examination. He has been told their names, which he has not remembered.

  The senior examiner, an attractive, fiercely-pale-skinned woman with glossy, graying black hair, is showing him a sequence of photographs which he is to identify. She is, to Eli, a striking presence, of an indeterminate age, though not young; a mature woman, in black, very small-boned, intense. Her voice is softly modulated and yet steely, resolved. She has spread out photographs on a table: very young girls, children younger than ten, and among them a cloudy-haired girl with widened eyes—his younger sister Rosalyn, aged about five. Of course, Eli identifies her at once. “This would be about 1930.”

  Among photographs of girls, most of them strangers, Eli pulls out other photographs of Rosalyn, at older ages: eleven, fifteen, eighteen. He never hesitates, he recognizes Rosalyn at once. His beautiful sister whom he’d loved, and has not seen in a while, he thinks.

  “That’s our summer place at Lake George. Our dock.”

  Oh, God. Eli is feeling stricken to the heart.

  The examiners are taking note. His success is being recorded. He is made to feel triumphant.

  Mr. Hoopes they call him. Except the glossy-black-haired woman who is their coordinator sometimes calls him Eli.

  Out of another folder are photographs of young boys. Again, most of the children are strangers to Eli, but among the photographs are several of Eli’s brother Averill and his brother Harold—Harry.

  Again, he identifies them at once. Approximate ages eight, eleven, thirteen, seventeen. The deep back lawn of their parents’ house in Gladwyne. Graduation at the Academy—a teenaged Averill in cap and gown, grinning at the camera. Christmas at their grandparents’ house on Parkside Avenue, a tall, beautifully trimmed evergreen tree in the background and the brothers—Averill, Harry, and Elihu in the foreground.

  He feels another blow to the heart. His brothers, and him.

  How long ago it seems! He and his brothers have become estranged politically, and in other, more personal ways.

  “And these?”

  The examiner has spread out a dozen miscellaneous photographs on the table. These are family snapshots of adults and children in mostly casual unpremeditated poses. At first, they all appear to be strangers; then, Eli discovers family members—mother, father, grandparents, aunts and uncles. When were these pictures taken? Decades ago? Other photographs are of strangers, Eli is certain—but why is he being shown these? He can’t remember.

  He identifies as many faces as he can. This time he is feeling less triumphant.

  “Is something wrong, Mr. Hoopes? Would you like to rest, before we continue?”

  “Nothing is wrong! I’m feeling just—just . . .”

  Depleted. Emptied out. Eviscerated. Not-here.

  The examination continues. More and more the photographs are of strangers, at first teasingly reminiscent of Hoopes relatives and family friends, then total strangers; Eli frowns at them, trying to see why he is being shown these faces. So many minutes have passed, he has lost all sense of the logic of the procedure; vaguely he seems to recall, though this might have been one of his bad dreams, visual perception tests following brain surgery in those days when he (or someone who resembled Elihu Hoopes) had been unable to speak coherently, walk without staggering, or make the most elementary motions with his hands.

  Please don’t be upset, Eli. Please don’t cry.

  We are here to help you. And we will help you.

  “None of these, Eli? Are you sure?”

  Faces of adult men, strangers. He is sure.

  Some of these men are alone, smiling or staring into the camera. Others are with women, children. Families.

  He feels a tinge of envy indistinguishable from rage.

  “My family is gone.”

  “Eli, what? What did you say?”

  Shakes his head irritably. Had not meant to speak out loud.

  The camera is recording every syllable.

  The white-skinned woman with glossy-black bangs to her forehead and almond-shaped eyes—the woman who is a doctor of some sort, or a psychologist—has spread out a new set of photographs on the table for the amnesiac subject to identify.

  These are photographs of “famous” people, mixed with photographs of seemingly “unknown” people. Eli Hoopes rapidly and bemusedly identifies the “famous”—Dwight Eisenhower, Carmen Miranda, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Nixon, Booker T. Washington, Herman Melville, Abbott and Costello, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Lyndon Johnson, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Jacqueline Kennedy, Edward R. Murrow, Ernest Hemingway, Joe Louis, “Gorgeous” George, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Tom and Jerry, Mickey and Minnie Mouse; others, whose facial features are quirky and distinct enough to belong to individuals with public reputations, he can’t identify. Yet thinking—This is a trick. I know these people, and they know me.

  “No one in this set, Eli? Yo
u’re sure?”

  “Yes! I’m sure.”

  He pushes the photographs away, irritably. He sees how his examiners are regarding him. The female supervisor, the young assistants. It is chilling to think that they are examining his brain; in a way, they are dissecting his brain. No entry into the brain except by such labyrinthine indirections—until Eli Hoopes dies, and his brain can be autopsied.

  A special set of photographs is particularly uncanny, unsettling. Exactly why, Eli can’t say. He stares at strangers’ faces that appear to his eye somehow unnatural.

  “And why is that, Eli? Can you explain?”

  No. Can’t explain.

  “Look closely. Maybe you will see why.”

  He looks closely. Thinks—They are mirror-reversed.

  But—how would Eli Hoopes know this, if the faces are the faces of strangers?

  (He is beginning to perspire. A rivulet of sweat down the side of his face.)

  (Obviously, the examination contains tricks. It is an experiment, and he is the experimental subject, or dupe. He is being shown photographs of relatives again—is that it? Family members and relatives who have grown older, beyond the scope of the amnesiac’s memory.)

  “Him! Looks like my brother Harold.”

  “Your brother Harold? Are you saying that this is your brother, or that he ‘looks like your brother’?”

  “Both.”

  But Eli isn’t so sure. In fact, he isn’t sure at all.

  “No. I think that’s my uncle Nils Mateson. And this woman—my aunt Lucinda.”

  Again, Eli isn’t sure. He pushes the photographs away, feeling sick.

  “Would you like to stop for a while, Eli? We can take a break for ten minutes if you like.”

  So many faces! It is the most profound riddle, why a human being must have a face; and why human identity is so bound up with face. Eli wonders at the injustice of it. Why don’t human beings more uniformly resemble one another, like many animals; what is the evolutionary advantage in such specificity of identity? If human beings more narrowly resembled one another, the distinctions between individual personalities and character would be less. A certain sort of desperate yearning and anguish might fade.

  He has forgotten her name. The glossy-black-haired woman with the kindly eyes.

  Except for her, Eli Hoopes would be lost.

  She is showing him another set of photographs, taken from another folder. The subjects appear to be adult men, strangers. All are middle-aged Caucasians. They strike the eye as well-educated, well-dressed, attractive men; most are smiling toward the camera, not aggressively but in a friendly way, causing the corners of their eyes to crease. It is curious that their dark russet-brown hair is sharply receding from their foreheads and that their ears are rather long, and similarly shaped. Eli studies these photographs as if they were a particular riddle. He says, with a shrug, “They graduated from the same university. They belonged to the same fraternity.”

  “Anything more?”

  “They’re—related. Maybe they don’t know it.”

  “Look closely, Eli.”

  Of course it’s a trick. But what is the trick?

  Then he sees: the subject in each of the photographs is the same individual, pictured in differing settings, and in differing degrees of darkness. He is a stranger to Eli Hoopes yet Eli wonders uneasily if this is someone in the Philadelphia area perhaps who knows him.

  Seeing that Eli is staring at the photographs with a look of irritation, the glossy-black-haired woman says, “That’s you, Eli. These photographs were taken within the past two years.”

  Eli laughs, stunned. Then, Eli is very quiet.

  Eli stares at the photographs for a long moment, looking from one to another. Himself?—him? He feels a sensation of sick, physical loss.

  “‘Elihu Hoopes’—this person?”

  “Yes, Eli. You.”

  THE LOST ONE. She sees him, on the plank bridge.

  He has fled into the marshy area behind the Institute, along a plank walk. He is standing on a plank bridge staring into the marsh as if transfixed.

  She doesn’t want to frighten him. Softly she calls, “Mr. Hoopes?”

  He turns. He appears distraught, and yet relieved.

  He knows me. He is not frightened of me.

  “Eli! I was wondering where you’d gone to.”

  He is frightened. But he knows to disguise fear, by instinct.

  A slender, black-haired woman whom he has never seen before is smiling at him. Lightly she touches his wrist, as if she knows him.

  She is someone with authority, he can see. A beautiful woman with white skin, warm kindly eyes.

  “Hel-lo!”

  NURSING. “MR. HOOPES?—Eli? Have you hurt yourself?”

  “Hurt—who? Where?”

  “This looks like a bruise . . .”

  “Looks like a baby bat.”

  He is in a jovial mood. Not Margot’s favorite mood.

  Laughs, and pulls down his shirtsleeve. (His shirt is a beautiful shirt, fine pale-lavender Egyptian cotton with a monogram EMH. Elihu Michael Hoopes.) Margot has noticed odd-shaped dark-wine-colored bruises on the amnesiac’s arms. When he wears shorts, on the tennis court, she has noticed that his muscled legs are often bruised as well.

  The medical staff at the Institute has assured her that Eli Hoopes is examined at regular intervals. Because Hoopes suffers from a severe memory deficit, his health must be monitored by others. And he is in good health, they tell her—at least, “reasonably” good health. Margot has demanded to see his medical chart, though she is not a blood relative and she is not his legal guardian; this required some arguing on her part, and a confrontation with the Institute staff. But in the end Margot has persevered, for, as she repeatedly informs the medical staff, she is the principal investigator of Project E.H.—“The person who needs to be kept informed at all times of this man’s medical condition.”

  The fact is, Elihu Hoopes is fifty-six years old and beginning to suffer from hypertension and arthritic pains in both legs. Since a bad case of bronchitis several years before, he has become susceptible to respiratory infections.

  Most frequently he cuts himself shaving, and he shaves each morning without fail.

  The thin cuts bleed. E.H.’s blood coagulates slowly. Then, he cuts himself again. His arms, shins, thighs are bruised, mysteriously—he can’t remember why. Seeing Margot’s look of distress he laughs—“Looks like somebody is ‘accident-prone,’ eh Doctor? Maybe if the poor bastard fell on his head, he’d get right there.”

  He boasts of not feeling much pain. An abscessed tooth, he’d scarcely noticed until at a routine dental examination the abscess was discovered, and emergency root canal work prescribed. Bruises on arms, legs, thighs—E.H. laughs, it means so little to him. When Dr. Flint, E.H.’s neurologist, checks with E.H.’s legal guardian Mrs. Lucinda Mateson, Mrs. Mateson tells him curtly that her nephew Elihu has “no medical problems” and is in “very good health.”

  At the Institute, Elihu Hoopes is scheduled for regular, routine physical examinations. At least, this is what Margot has been told.

  Margot insists upon rolling up E.H.’s shirtsleeve, to examine the baby-bat-shaped bruise more carefully.

  And there are other bruises. Dark-wine-colored, in the man’s fairly pale flesh. “Does this hurt? This?” She strokes the bruised areas, that remind her of her grandfather’s arms, when she was a little girl. A similar pattern of bruises in the flesh, that seemed to come out of nowhere and faded within a few days.

  How tenderly she’d felt for her grandfather, and how frightened for him! Even as her grandfather seemed scarcely to feel the pain of his bruises, and laughed at his “little nurse” . . . But Margot cuts off this memory, it is not helpful at the present time.

  Margot brings a tube of Arnica montana to apply to E.H.’s bruises, massaging the oily liquid into his skin. E.H. is both touched and embarrassed by Margot’s attention. He grasps her hand with his. Twines his fing
ers through hers. Tight.

  “Doctor! I love you.”

  HE IS LEARNING to trace a geometrical figure by way of a mirror.

  She has devised an ingenious experiment in which the amnesiac subject “learns” a skill through repetition: watching his hand in a mirror as it grips a pen; learning to direct the pen into the shape of an octagon, by way of the mirror.

  At first, E.H. is frustrated and exasperated—“God damn! I just can’t do this.”

  “Please take your time, Eli. We have all the time in the world.”

  “Do we!”

  Margot takes note: the stricken man doesn’t ask why.

  Why am I doing this. Why do you torment me.

  Is this my life, my only life? Is this how I know that I exist—in my effort to please you whom I don’t know and from whom I can expect nothing?

  But E.H. is a “good sport.” You can see that E.H. has been an athlete at one time in his life: an athlete does not give up.

  And so, gamely, E.H. tries, tries and fails; tries again, and partly succeeds; tries, tries and tries until at last he has managed to outline an octagon flawlessly, in one single, fluid motion, by watching his hand in a mirror. He does this again, and again; takes a break of twenty minutes, during which time he forgets what he has been doing, but, under Margot’s supervision, when he outlines the octagon another time, he does surprisingly well; and after a few attempts, his performance improves quickly.

  E.H. laughs, perplexed. “This is strange, Doctor. I seem to know how to draw this damned thing in the mirror. Is there some trick here?”

  Margot tells him there is no trick. Margot tells him that she is not a “doctor”—she is a neuropsychologist.

  Margot is very pleased with the results. Margot will retest E.H. the following week, and the week following that. Margot will discover that the amnesiac subject can “remember” a complex skill though he has consciously “forgotten” it.

  E.H. is made to feel proud of himself, though he isn’t sure why. Outlining an octagon by watching his hand in a mirror? Is his examiner serious?