The Man Without a Shadow

by Joyce Carol Oates

“CAN THERE BE a person without a shadow? Without a memory is like being without a shadow.

  “I am that person. I think.”

  Cautiously he speaks aloud. His own voice has become strange to him, in his own ears.

  So trusting! Like any husband long habituated to a wifely presence.

  As in a dream there is presence but often not a person.

  (Margot has wanted to explore that curious mental phenomenon in dreams—why, when we dream of someone or something familiar, the visual image frequently isn’t accurate; though encoded in our brain cells, these memories aren’t precisely transmitted. Where “is” the dream, in relation to such memories? “Where Do Dreams Reside?”—is her projected title.)

  And so, when Margot drives E.H. home from the Institute, at the end of a day of testing, the amnesiac subject takes for granted that she is his “driver”—also, in some way, his “wife.”

  Though he can’t remember “Margot Sharpe” yet by degrees over the years E.H. has become habituated to her aura, or her fragrance, which is always the same lilac-cologne. He will say “Are you my dear wife?” in a tender though uncertain voice, and Margot will reassure him, “Yes, Eli. Of course.”

  So long as Margot remains within E.H.’s field of consciousness, he will not forget her. Her name, perhaps—but not her.

  Based upon tests with E.H., Margot Sharpe has written on the distinction between “(anterograde) recollection” and “familiarity”—a crucial distinction, though for the average observer it is a very subtle one. For the amnesiac to survive with his sanity intact, he must create a web of associations that, lacking specificity, are at least familiar, therefore comforting.

  And so when they are driving together if Margot feels the need to exit the interstate, to leave E.H.’s presence for a few minutes (to use a restroom for instance) when she returns she will stroke E.H.’s arm in a way to suggest familiarity. Through his pre-amnesiac life, and particularly in his childhood, such touching would likely have been common, thus familiar. And quickly she will say to him, as a way of identifying herself, “Eli, dear! Darling! How is my sweet husband?”

  Scarcely missing a beat E.H. will say, “Very good! And how is my sweet wife?”

  It is touching. You could say, it is tragic.

  How the amnesiac will learn to disguise amnesia so that (Margot thinks shrewdly) it isn’t always evident that the amnesiac understands what he is doing by instinct.

  E.H.’s happiness is Margot’s (secret) happiness. Margot has no happiness that is not bound up (secretly) with his.

  By having studied E.H.’s yearbooks of decades ago—Gladwyne Day School, Gladwyne Prep, Amherst College—shrewd Margot Sharpe is able to construct conversations with E.H. about “mutual” classmates at these schools. She will say, “Do you ever hear from—?” giving the name of a classmate or teammate of Eli Hoopes, of long ago.

  And E.H. will speak with much pleasure about this person, vividly recalling him or her. So convincing is Margot in these exchanges in which E.H. does most of the talking it is easy for her to forget that her recollection is totally invented. That’s to say, a lie.

  Yet it’s easy for Margot, a day or two later, a month later, to pick up the conversation with E.H. who is likely to say the same things again, with the same feeling, which Margot can now anticipate. (“Remember how surprised we all were, when Claude Gervais never came back from Christmas break?”—“Scottie was such a good friend of all of us, it’s so strange that we never heard from her after graduation”—“Professor Edwards was so brilliant—but so sarcastic . . .”) In these faux-recollections, Margot Sharpe presents herself as a friendly acquaintance of Eli Hoopes, not a close friend, or a girlfriend; a friend of Eli’s friends, whom she names with unfailing accuracy.

  In Gladwyne yearbooks, available in the school library, Margot has sought out Eli Hoopes’s earliest classmates. She has contemplated photographs of Eli as a boy—surprisingly, not a very handsome boy, but recognizably Eli Hoopes. Until the age of ten or eleven Eli was a “small” boy; soon after he grew to become one of the taller boys in his class. Even when his skin was blemished, young Eli exuded a brash sort of confidence. He was a very good student, clearly—always on the honor roll; and he was an athlete—lacrosse, swim, tennis, track teams. Class vice president, class president.

  English Club, Latin Club, Math Club, History Club, Drama Club, Choristers, “Hi-Lo.” Margot is surprised and impressed by the block of small print listing Eli Hoopes’s activities beneath his yearbook photos, so much larger than those of most of his classmates.

  Also in the yearbooks she has located “Margaret Madden”—“Margie Madden”—who was in Eli Hoopes’s class. A slight girl, not pretty, with dark, slanted eyes and hair severely parted on the left side of her head, and a small wistful mouth—Yes I know that I am plain but I am very special so love me please! Love me.

  It is so, Margot discovers: this girl does resemble her, if one looks closely. The slanted eyes, and also faint shadows beneath the eyes; the set of the mouth; small nose, narrow chin. The smart girl, the watchful girl. However different the adult Margot Sharpe and the child Margaret Madden might appear to the ordinary gaze, to a sharp eye like Eli Hoopes’s there is something essential about their faces that links them like sisters.

  Face recognition is a marvel of the human brain, only partly understood. There is a region in the brain that “remembers” faces instantaneously; there are said to be “face cells” specialized for each face known to an individual, a concept Margot finds difficult to comprehend though neuroscience colleagues in her department have tried to explain the phenomenon to her.

  Obviously, “face cells” in the amnesiac’s brain are no longer forming. Memories are no longer consolidating. But “face cells” pertaining to faces seen long ago are still active.

  Margot is pleased to see that, shy-seeming and diminutive as she was, Margaret Madden was nearly as active as Eli Hoopes: English Club, Latin Club, History Club, Girls’ Choir, “Hi-Lo.” Yet more surprising, little Margaret Madden was on the girls’ volleyball team.

  Margot smiles. She is proud of her lookalike sister of the late 1930s.

  “Eli, do you ever hear about ‘Margie Madden’? You remember—we went to school with her at Gladwyne.”

  Eli laughs as if Margot has said something very witty. Then, a cloud comes into his face. Warily he asks,

  “You are Margie Madden—is that it?”

  Margot shakes her head no, certainly she is not Margie Madden.

  She laughs, protesting. Eli regards her doubtfully.

  “Yes, I think that I resemble her—I mean, we used to resemble each other. We were often mistaken at school, especially by some of our teachers. But my name is ‘Margot Sharpe.’”

  “‘Mar-got Sharpe.’ Yes.”

  But Eli continues to look doubtfully at Margot, as if undecided whether he should speak further. It is unusual for Eli to be so silent, when the subject is his school past.

  “Eli, is something wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Margot speaks gaily, for her heart is beating rapidly. He knows—this is all a masquerade. He knows everything.

  But Eli only strokes Margot’s arm, and squeezes her fingers. She clasps his hand in response, tightly.

  No. He is my dear husband, he doubts nothing. He loves me.

  “Well, ‘Mar-go’—I’m trying to calculate how Margie Madden, who would be approximately thirty-seven years old, could be a classmate of yours at Gladwyne Day. You’re a beautiful woman, my dear wife, but you are not—obviously—thirty-seven years old any longer.” Seeing the look of hurt in Margot’s face, Eli lifts her hand to kiss it playfully, yet urgently.

  “Don’t worry, dear wife—I love you just the same. Even if you are not her.”

  THERE IS A carpet, or a strip of something, that I am walking on . . . and it is being rolled up behind me. So that there is only the strip I am walking on, and nothing in front of me or behind me. Sometimes, I am so very
tired—but there is no place to rest.

  LIKE A MARRIED couple, they lapse into bickering.

  Almost, there is pleasure in such bickering. There is familiarity.

  Securing an uncooperative husband into the passenger seat of her car. Always it is a challenge for Margot, for it is always new to her husband.

  Laughing she pleads, “Eli, please! Don’t be ridiculous, we do this every time we drive,” and Eli says, “God damn, nobody needs a ‘seat belt’ for a car. In an airplane, yes. Not a car,” and Margot says, “Well, there are new laws in Pennsylvania now. There are state laws all citizens have to obey.”

  Eli says, snorting in derision, “If you want to ‘belt’ yourself in, go ahead. But not me.”

  “Eli, please! Will you let me buckle this, as a favor to me?”

  “No.”

  “You’re smart enough, Eli, to figure this out: if the car is equipped with seat belts, they are meant to be used. And if they are meant to be used, it’s a good idea to use them.”

  “Really! What sort of illogic is that?”

  “But a seat belt is a safety feature, Eli. You must know that.”

  “Why must I ‘know’ that? If we have an accident, how will I escape? I’ll be trapped in a flaming car.”

  “Well, the idea is—you are prevented from being thrown through the windshield.”

  “The idea is, I will be immolated in my ‘seat belt.’ In a flaming holocaust.”

  Eventually, Eli relents. It is a husbandly gesture, gallant and exasperated, to humor a foolishly worried wife.

  AND THEN, SOMETIMES he is furious with her. Out of nowhere like a match recklessly struck, his anger flares.

  This evening at dusk on the interstate headed for the Gladwyne exit and Eli has been telling Margot about how his camera was taken from him and smashed by a “rabid” sheriff’s deputy in Birmingham, Alabama—a story Margot has heard many times before, and is fascinated to hear again, noting not so much similarities in the recollections but small, subtle divergences which only Margot Sharpe could detect—when abruptly Eli wonders where his camera is; and Margot assures him, his camera is “back home”—“Eli, all your things are back home where you left them. Safe ‘back home.’”

  Margot has found that the words back home are a comfort to the amnesiac. Though the amnesiac’s conception of back home may be insubstantial as a dream.

  And stroking the amnesiac’s arm, and hand—that often helps.

  Margot has become E.H.’s nurse. Badly wanting to be for him what Yolanda and Eva had been—a source of female solace, with all the sexual accommodation that it implies.

  But Eli is impatient tonight, and throws off the nurse’s hand. Eli is in a sudden fury demanding to know where his sketchbook is—his camera is gone, and now his sketchbook—where is it?

  He tries to twist around in his seat, but the seat belt secures him. He is fussing, cursing, panting—Margot, at the wheel, tries to calm him—she will stop the car, she says, and find the sketchbook which (she is sure) is in the backseat as it usually is, with other items; but Eli continues to be excited and upset and she sees in his gaunt face, in the fleeting light of oncoming headlights, a look of such loathing for her, she almost loses control of the car. “Eli, please! I’m sure that your sketchbook is just behind you . . .”

  Margot brakes the car to a stop on the shoulder of the interstate as traffic rushes by. Still cursing, Eli manages to unbuckle his seat belt and turn around furiously in his seat, groping for the sketchbook—which is propped up against the back of his seat as usual on such drives to Gladwyne.

  But Eli isn’t mollified by finding the sketchbook which he leafs through suspiciously, concerned that some of the pages have been torn out. Margot assures him that no one has interfered with his sketchbook—she allows no one at the Institute to touch it—but Eli is sure that drawings are missing, his work has been “sabotaged.”

  Margot offers to look through the sketchbook with Eli, to see that nothing has been touched, but Eli shoves her away in a fury. And then, before she can protect herself, in a paroxysm of rage he strikes her with his fists and closes his fingers around her throat as he berates her—“You! God damn you! I don’t know you! I don’t trust you! Who the hell are you—‘Doctor’!”

  Margot claws at Eli’s fingers, but his fingers are too strong for her, and too frenzied. Fortunately the attack is over within seconds.

  So swiftly over, Margot can tell herself, dazed—This is not happening. This did not happen.

  It was fleeting, and not deliberate—a kind of accident, not to be recorded in Margot Sharpe’s Notes on Amnesia: Project E.H.

  Not a personal attack, in any case. A flailing-out, as a drowning man may flail out against his very rescuer. And Margot did not lose consciousness, not even for an instant. She is sure.

  When Margot recovers, she is alone in the car. She is gasping for breath, wincing with pain. Her vision is blotched—(is there blood in her eyes?). A man’s strong, phantom fingers are still closed on her throat, pitiless.

  For some minutes Margot is too dazed to comprehend what has happened, and where she is.

  On a shoulder of the interstate? Alone in her car? Traffic rushing by, as in a nightmare avalanche?

  In the twilit sky at the horizon, the sun resembles a great broken yolk bleeding into a bank of clouds massed and gnarled as brains.

  She is on the interstate south, to Gladwyne. She remembers.

  “Eli? Oh God, Eli—where are you?”

  She finds him fifty feet away, staggering at the edge of the highway like a drunken man, as if hoping to flee the car. Margot dares to touch his arm and he turns to her in a panicked crouch, eyes affrighted and glaring in oncoming headlights like the eyes of a wild beast.

  He is panting, he is whimpering. Rude gusts of wind from passing vehicles fling dust and bits of dried leaves into his face.

  He has no idea where he is. He is utterly, utterly lost.

  He is mine.

  Though Margot is badly shaken herself she knows that she must exert control. She must prevent the amnesiac from running from her—throwing himself into traffic, for instance. She soothes him with her voice, stroking and calming his agitated hands. Gently she calls him “Eli”—“My dear husband, Eli”—until at last the amnesiac is calmed, or in any case subdued, fatigued suddenly, but managing a faint, hopeful smile—“Hel-lo, my dear wife.”

  So long they have floated in the present tense. So long each has floated without a shadow.

  Yet now one evening in October 1994 Margot is listening in astonishment as, seemingly for no reason, in the drawing room at 466 Parkside, Gladwyne, elderly Mrs. Lucinda Mateson begins to speak in a halting voice of the drowned girl in the Adirondack stream.

  “. . . a terrible thing. Just—terrible . . . She was my niece—my brother Edgar’s daughter Gretchen—eleven years old that summer . . . She’d been watching some of the younger children including Eli and his brothers and evidently ‘someone came by’—and next thing anyone knew, Gretchen was gone. And none of the children ever saw her again.”

  Margot sits very still, not sure what she is hearing. She and Mrs. Mateson are seated together in the drawing room smelling of lilies while upstairs, in another part of the stately old house Margot has never seen, Eli Hoopes has hidden away and has forgotten them.

  Margot has brought lilies, an armful of lilies, for Mrs. Mateson who is her friend. And Mrs. Mateson has served Margot Earl Grey tea as she always does on these occasions, and a scattering of cookies on a silver platter.

  How sweetly overpowering, the scent of lilies! It is almost too much, Margot thinks. She feels drunk—drunken.

  And Mrs. Mateson’s eyes blur with tears as she confides in Margot, in a husky, lowered voice, of a family tragedy that happened more than six decades before.

  “Our lives were darkened by it—‘enshadowed.’ It would turn out that my beautiful little niece had been talked into going into the woods with an older boy—also from Philadelp
hia, whose family had a place at Lake George, and who were friends of the Hoopeses. This boy—‘Axel’—‘Axel McElroy’—was seventeen, tall and very thin, stoop-shouldered, troubled, difficult—he liked to play with much younger children and he had a history of harassing them, especially girls. It was said in the papers that Axel was the grandson of Bishop McElroy—(you wouldn’t know that name, probably, but the McElroys were prominent Philadelphians at the time)—but in fact he was the adopted son of a niece of the bishop’s—there was no close connection at all. You know what the newspapers are like, and today TV is worse—making scandal out of what they can, if prominent families are involved. The bishop—an Anglican bishop—was just devastated by this tragedy, and retired soon afterward . . .

  “Most of our family was at Lake George at the time, just after Fourth of July of 1929. Eli was five years old. It was believed that he was the last person to see Gretchen, before she went away with Axel. He insisted he hadn’t seen Gretchen all day though she’d been watching over him and his brothers—Gretchen and another older girl. Eli was very upset saying he hadn’t seen her but later he said he saw her in a canoe ‘going across the lake.’ But Axel didn’t take Gretchen across the lake . . . There was a search for Gretchen immediately. Everyone was mobilized except the youngest children. My father—Eli’s grandfather—insisted upon flying his little prop plane over the lake, and over the islands in the lake, looking for Gretchen. He was a very strong-willed man. He took Eli with him in the plane at least once. My brother and his wife—Eli’s parents—didn’t want him to go with my father, but somehow—my father took him . . . Something went wrong and he had to crash-land on one of the islands. I think my grandfather and Eli were out all night. Along with the anxiety about Gretchen, and the search for her, this was too much! It was a nightmare time and how many hours it lasted, I don’t know.

  “Gretchen’s body was found in the woods, in a stream, about two miles from the lake. She had been strangled and her head struck against rocks and then she’d been dragged to the shallow stream. There was blood on some rocks, which was where she’d died. He’d done things to her—to her body—that terrible boy, Axel. He’d done cruel things, we were never exactly told. At least, I was never told. Maybe some in the family knew. Men might’ve known. But women and girls weren’t told, and we did not want to know.