The Man Without a Shadow

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“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!