The Man Without a Shadow. Joyce Carol Oates
keep a notebook, for instance, as he’d begun to do after his illness.
Already Margot Sharpe has begun to keep a notebook herself. This will be a quasi-private document, primarily scientific, but partially a diary and journal, stimulated by her participation in Milton Ferris’s memory lab; through her career she will draw upon the material of the notebook, or rather notebooks, for her scientific papers and publications. “Notes on Amnesia: Project E.H.” will run into many notebooks to be eventually transcribed into a computer file to be continued to the very day of E.H.’s death (November 26, 1996) and beyond charting the fate of the amnesiac’s posthumous brain after it has been removed—very carefully!—from its skull.
But on this morning in October 1965 in the University Neurological Institute at Darven Park, Pennsylvania, all of Margot Sharpe’s life as a scientist lies before her. Introduced to “E.H.” she is dry-mouthed and tremulous as one who has been brought to the edge of a precipice to see a sight that dazzles her eyes.
Will my life begin, at last? My true life.
IN SCIENCE IT is understood that there are significant matters, and there are trivial matters.
So too in the matter of lives.
For it is a fact not generally, not publicly acknowledged: we have lives that are true lives, and we have lives that are accidental lives.
Perhaps it is rare that an individual discovers his true life at any age. Perhaps it is usually the case that an individual lives accidentally through an entire life. In terms of its consequence to what is called society or posterity, the accidental life is scarcely more than an addition of zeroes.
This is not to suggest that an accidental life is equivalent to a trivial life. Such lives may be enjoyable, and fulfilling: we all want to love and to be loved and within our families, and within a small circle of friends, we may feel ourselves cherished, thus exalted. But such lives pass away leaving the larger world untouched. There is scarcely a ripple, there is no shadow. There will be no memory of the merely accidental.
Margot Sharpe has come from a family of accidental lives. This family, in semi-rural north-central Ojibway County, Michigan, in a region of accidental lives. Yet already as a child of twelve she’d determined that she would not live so uncalculated a life as the lives of those who surrounded her and her way of discovering her true life would be through leaving her hometown Orion Falls, and her family, as soon as that was possible.
In Orion Falls young people may go away—to enlist in the armed forces, to branches of the state university, to nursing school, and so forth; but they all return. Margot Sharpe knows that she will not return.
Margot has always been curious, highly inquisitive. Her first, favorite book was the illustrated Darwin for Beginners which she’d discovered on a library shelf, aged eleven. Here was a book with a magical story—“evolution.” Another favorite book of her childhood was Marie Curie: A Woman in Physics. In high school she’d happened to read an article on B. F. Skinner and “behaviorism” that had intrigued and excited her. She has always asked questions for which there are not ready answers. To be a scientist, Margot thinks, is to know which questions to ask.
From the great Darwin she learned that the visible world is an accumulation of facts, conditions: results. To understand the world you must reverse course, to discover the processes by which these results come into being.
By reversing the course of time (so to speak) you acquire mastery over time (so to speak). You learn that “laws” of nature are not mysteries but knowable as the exits on Interstate 75 traversing the State of Michigan north and south.
Is it unjust, ironic?—that catastrophe in one life (the ruin of E.H.) precipitates hope and anticipation in others (Milton Ferris’s “memory” lab)? The possibility of career advancement, success?
It is the way of science, Margot thinks. A scientist searches for her subject as a predator searches for her prey.
At least, no one had introduced the encephalitis virus into Elihu Hoopes’s brain with the intention of studying its terrible consequences, as Nazi doctors might have done; or performed radical psychosurgery on him for some presumably beneficial purpose. Chimps and dogs, cats and rats have been so experimented upon, in great numbers, and for a while in the 1940s and 1950s there’d been a vogue of prefrontal lobotomies on hapless human beings, with frequently catastrophic (if not very accurately recorded) results.
Sometimes the radical changes caused by lobotomies were perceived, by the families of the patients at least, to be “beneficial.” A rebellious adolescent becomes abruptly tractable. A sexually adventurous adolescent (usually female) becomes passive, pliant, asexual. An individual prone to outbursts of temper and obstinacy becomes childlike, docile. “Beneficial” for family and for society is not always so for the individual.
In the case of Elihu Hoopes it seems likely that a personality change of a radical sort had been precipitated by his illness, for no adult male of E.H.’s achievement and stature would be so trusting and childlike, so touchingly and naively hopeful. You have the uneasy feeling, in E.H.’s presence, that here is a man desperate to sell himself—to be liked. The change in E.H. is allegedly so extreme that his fiancée broke off their engagement within a few months of his illness, and E.H.’s family, relatives, friends visit him ever less frequently. He lives in the affluent Philadelphia suburb Gladwyne with an aunt, the younger sister of his (deceased) father, herself a “rich” widow.
From personal experience Margot knows that it is far easier to accept a person ravaged by physical illness than one ravaged by memory loss. Far easier to continue to love the one than the other.
Even Margot who’d loved her “great-grannie” so much as a little girl had balked at being taken to visit the elderly woman in a nursing home. This is not something of which Margot is particularly proud, and so she has begun a process of forgetting.
But E.H. is very different from her elderly relative suffering from (it would be diagnosed after her death) Alzheimer’s. If you didn’t know the condition of E.H. you would not immediately guess the severity of his neural deficit.
Margot wonders: Was E.H.’s encephalitis caused by a mosquito bite? Was it a particular species of mosquito? Or—is it a common mosquito, itself infected? In what other ways is herpes simplex encephalitis transmitted? Have there been other instances of such infections in the Lake George, New York, region? In the Adirondacks? She supposes that research scientists in the Albany area are investigating the case.
“How horrible! The poor man …”
It is the first thing you say, regarding E.H. When you are safely out of his earshot.
Or rather, it is the first thing Margot Sharpe says. Her lab colleagues are more adjusted to E.H. for they have been working with him for some time.
Nervously Margot smiles at the stricken man, who does not behave as if he understands that he is stricken. She smiles at him, which inspires him to smile at her, with a flash of something like familiarity. (She thinks: He isn’t sure if he should know me. He is looking for cues from me. I must not send him misleading cues.)
Margot is new to such a situation. She has never been in the presence of a living “subject.” She can’t help but feel pity for E.H., and horror at his predicament: how abruptly Elihu Hoopes was transformed from being an attractive, vigorous, healthy man in the prime of life to a man near death, losing more than twenty pounds, white blood count plummeting, extreme anemia, delirium. A herpes simplex infection resulting in encephalitis is so rare, E.H. might more readily have been struck by lightning.
Yet E.H.’s manner isn’t at all guarded, wary, or stiff; he might be a host welcoming guests to his home, whose names he doesn’t quite recall. Indeed he seems at home in the Institute setting—at least, he doesn’t seem disoriented. For these sessions at the Institute E.H. is brought from his aunt’s suburban home near Philadelphia by an attendant, in a private car; originally E.H. was a patient at the Institute, and then an outpatient;