The Man Without a Shadow (29 page)

It is like taking Eli Hoopes into her body, as in lovemaking. Her alert, hungry brain takes in the man's ghostly brain, his very soul.

Eli, I love you more than ever. I will never abandon you.

SOON TO BECOME
classics of neuropsychology are Margot Sharpe's papers of the 1990s: “Familiarity and Recollection in a Case of Severe Hippocampal Damage”—“Toward a Theory of Déjà Vu and Jamais Vu: Sensory Stimuli and Recollection in the Amnesiac ‘E.H.'”—“Toward a Theory of the Function of the Amygdala”—“Toward a Theory of Cryptomnesia”—“Maze-Learning and Somatic Recognition in a Case of Severe Amnesia”—“Spatial Memory, Visual Perception, and the Hippocampus.” For the first time in her career Margot Sharpe has agreed to work in collaboration with a colleague from outside her lab, a university neuroscientist who performs surgery on the brains of capuchin monkeys to replicate, in a series of experiments, the precise neurological injuries of E.H. based upon the fMRI scans—“Pattern Recognition, Maze Performance, and Somatic Memory in the Human and Primate Brain” (1994) is the first of their celebrated papers.

Particularly, Margot is fascinated by the phenomena of déjà vu/cryptomnesia and its reverse, jamais vu (the conviction that one has never seen something which in fact one has seen, perhaps often). She has researched the subject thoroughly and has written on it a number of times, in regard to E.H. who so often feels as if he has seen something before, which he can't remember; even as, more or less constantly, he is certain that he has never seen something before, when he has seen it.

Margot wonders: Are these curious mental phenomena associated with (buried) memories? Are the neurons which react to them closely adjacent in the brain to neurons that store such memories? Or, as some researchers have argued, are they merely the result of a random firing of neurons, a nervous excitability of the brain as without meaning or significance as heat lightning flashing in the sky?

Yet, Margot can't concede that there is no meaning in any of these phenomena. There is only the possibility of not knowing what the meaning is just yet.

That uncanny sensation of believing that we have experienced something before, yet are unable to remember when, or where.

That uncanny sensation of believing that we have not experienced something before, though knowing that we have.

“MR. HOOPES? WILL
you describe what you see here?”

In a dim-lit testing-room E.H. is seated in his favored comfortable chair being shown images on a screen which Margot Sharpe and her associates have prepared. Partly, this is a test E.H. has had before, a sequence of “familiar”—“famous”—individuals whom he recognizes readily (if the images predate 1964). Thus, he can identify Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
and Dwight D. Eisenhower, but is nonplussed by Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Sr., Bill Clinton; he has no difficulty identifying Judy Garland as Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
but has not the slightest idea who the principals of
Stars Wars
are. Joe Louis he recognizes immediately but not Muhammad Ali.

Jonas Salk but not Richard Brauer, the neurologist whose patient he has been for many years at the Institute.

Amid strangers whom E.H. could not be expected to know Margot has mixed in Hoopes family members, relatives, and acquaintances whom E.H. might be expected to know; if these pre-date 1964 he can identify them, if not, he's uncertain—“I'd say this is my uncle Emmet in some surreal decayed state. That's an elderly man.”

And, “This one looks like my cousin Jonathan Mateson except something alarming has happened to him. I never saw Jonathan looking like
that
.”

And, impulsively: “Is that—
me
? The way I'm going to look in twenty years?”

E.H. laughs, and Margot tries to laugh with him. In fact the image on the screen is Elihu Hoopes at the age of fifty, somewhat gaunt-cheeked, with a faint, familiar smile. This is a photograph taken of him at the Institute sixteen years earlier.

Then, E.H. sits very still, staring. On the screen is an unexpected and startling image. Amid the succession of black-and-white photographs is an impressionistic work of art: a charcoal sketch of a young girl of about eleven, naked, very pale, seemingly lifeless, lying beneath the surface of a shallow stream. The girl's heavy-lidded eyes are shut, her lips are slightly parted, and her dark hair is spread out around her head. The surface of the water is lightly rippling so that the girl's naked body is not clearly seen.
The drawing's tone is shadowy, indistinct. The point of view is overhead, as if one were somehow above the stream, at a height of about ten feet, looking down.

E.H. has ceased breathing. Margot does not dare look at him, just yet.

“Mr. Hoopes? Eli? Do you recognize this drawing?”

“N-No.”

During a previous testing session Margot managed to appropriate the amnesiac's sketchbook without his noticing so that representative drawings could be photographed and reproduced as slides. In this case Margot had the idea of reversing the image, and it is this mirror-image of the original at which E.H. stares.

In this variant, the drowned girl lies with her head at the upper-right corner of the page, and her slender pale feet in the lower-left corner, instead of the reverse.

“Eli, you've never seen this drawing before?”

“No.”

E.H.'s mood has changed. He was feeling ebullient, correctly identifying many of the preceding faces, but now he's restless, and has begun to breathe audibly.

“Could you describe the drawing, Eli?”

“Describe it? Why'd I want to do that?”

“Can you see it clearly?”

“I'm not blind in both eyes, Doctor.”

“Where do you think the scene is set?”

“Where's it
set
? It's a charcoal drawing—it's set on a sheet of parchment paper.”

“A charcoal drawing? How do you know?”

“Well, isn't it? I
know
.”

As a slide, the photograph of the drawing isn't so clearly a charcoal drawing. Its smudged surface reproduces as merely shadowy.

“Could you describe the drawing, Eli? Just use the first words that come to mind.”

E.H. shakes his head
no
. In the faint reflection from the screen his face looks stricken, creased.

“If you were telling a story about this drawing, Eli, what would you say? Just—improvise.”

But E.H. shakes his head again, emphatically. When Margot lightly touches his wrist he shakes off her hand.

“Do you think that the drawing is skillfully executed, Eli? Could you identify the artist?”

“Artist? A poor man's Edvard Munch.”

“Excuse me—?”

But E.H. refuses to repeat his remark. He has been sitting with his arms tightly folded across his chest, eyes narrowed and mouth twitching. Margot feels a thrill of unease, as one might feel in close proximity to a wild creature that might suddenly lash out in fear and rage.

“Well—we'll continue.”

Margot has followed the drowned girl with less disturbing images which E.H. can identify without difficulty, though he is still agitated—familiar portrait of Albert Einstein, familiar silhouette of the Empire State Building. When the amnesiac is feeling less threatened Margot reverts to reproductions of E.H.'s drawings of neutral settings—woodland lake, mountains and marshlands, birch trees on a hillside. These scenes, which seem to Margot exquisitely drawn, have been reproduced as E.H. drew them, and not in reverse; these E.H. contemplates for some time, as if entranced.

“Do you recognize these, Eli?”

“Y-Yes. But I don't know why.”

“Do you know where they're set?”

“Lake George.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I—I know. Just know.”

“And are these charcoal sketches?”

“Could be.”

The next image is a large, sprawling log house overlooking a lake densely bordered by evergreens. The house has first- and second-floor decks, immense fieldstone chimneys, and a steep roof with a heraldic cock lightning-rod at one of the peaks. In the background is a dock that juts out into the lake, with boats tied to its posts; one of these is a sailboat. It is sunset, or sunrise?—the sun's rays seem to skid, like knife-blades, along the pocked surface of the dark water.

“Hey! That's our place on Lake George. That's our dock. And our boathouse.” E.H. speaks with boyish excitement, and some apprehension. “That boy out in the canoe, could be me.”

“And who is with you in the canoe, Eli?”

“I didn't say that that was me in the canoe, Doctor. I said it could be me.”

“Did you go canoeing often at Lake George, when you were a boy?”

“Yes of course. My father taught me—assiduously.”

Adding, vehemently: “I canoe at Lake George now, Doctor! I was just there last month, and I'll be going back in a few weeks. Soon as I get—whatever it is that's wrong with me—get well again . . .” E.H.'s voice trails off uncertainly.

“Do you still stay in your family house when you visit Lake George?”

“I told you, I was just there. I'll be going back in a few weeks, assuming there hasn't been a blizzard. The Hoopes family has owned that property since 1926. I've been going every year since
I was a baby—that's to say, thirty-seven years. Not much changes in Bolton Landing—that's the name of the town. We have a very loyal, reliable local man there—Alistair Laird. In fact, I should call Al—he needs to know when I'm coming up for the weekend, to get the place ready . . .”

Following this, E.H. is very still. A thought has come to him—Margot doesn't interrupt.

“I guess—people have died. People have gone away. The last time I was there—I was alone.”

“You went hiking in the woods, then? Did you camp in the woods, the last time?”

E.H. shrugs, as if he can't remember, or, to deflect his examiner's question, as if it is too melancholy a memory to exhume.

The next drawing Margot shows is of a small single-prop airplane on a dirt airstrip. Unlike the other drawings which are dark, this drawing is bright with color—yellow. The airplane is bright-colored and slightly abstract as in a Chagall painting in which whimsy and foreboding are conjoined. For this drawing, as for only a few drawings, E.H. used pastel chalks with charcoal.

“Looks like my grandfather's Beechcraft. Before it crashed.”

“Is anybody inside? Can you see?”

“My grandfather is the pilot. There's a little boy in the front seat—could be me.”

“The little boy in the front seat is you, Eli?”

“Well, it could be. I can't see his face clearly.”

“And was your grandfather's airplane such a bright yellow, Eli?”

“Until the crash, yes.”

“And after the crash?”

“Well—there wasn't any plane, then. My grandfather never climbed into a plane again.”

“Was he injured?”

“No. Or maybe, yes. His ‘motor reflexes'—‘hand-eye coordination' . . . He didn't trust himself to fly a plane again, and so the plane was never repaired.”

E.H. is silent for a while. E.H. is brooding. In his eyes, a glimmer of tears.

“After the time of the crash—people died. After that summer, people went away. I don't know where.”

Other slides intervene, of an impersonal nature. E.H. has no difficulty identifying Bugs Bunny, Louis Armstrong, Robert Frost; then the charcoal drawing of the girl in the shallow stream returns. Margot notes that E.H. draws in his breath sharply, and sits very still.

“Do you recognize this drawing, Eli?”

“N-No.”

“Have you ever seen it before?”

“No.” But E.H. speaks uncertainly.

“You're sure—you have never seen it before?”

“Not this ‘picture'—no. Is it a charcoal drawing?”

“It is. Yes—a ‘charcoal drawing.'”

E.H. laughs, harshly. “Not a very good drawing, I think.”

“You don't think it is? Why not?”

“‘Why
not
?'—it just isn't. The artist, whoever he is, is—fearful of something.”

“Fearful of—what?”

“Fearful of seeing what a drowned girl in a creek in the summer in the Adirondacks would actually look like. This is—let's say—romantic bullshit.”

“But maybe the artist is trying to create an impression? A mood? An emotion?”

“That's what we mean by ‘romantic bullshit.' An artist should be pitiless, and
see
.”

Gently Margot lays her hand on Eli Hoopes's arm, which is trembling. “Please try to describe it, Eli. We are trying to test your visual and linguistic abilities—to see how you have progressed.”

“‘Progressed'—that sounds optimistic! If you are an American, as we are, it is imperative to be optimistic.” E.H. laughs, harshly. He is willing himself to forget, Margot thinks. It is not just the amnesia, the failure of information to find its way into the injured hippocampus; there is a willfulness too, which no test could measure but which the practiced neuropsychologist can determine.

But Margot is not going to let E.H. forget so quickly.

“Could you improvise a story about the figure in the drawing?”

“I'm a stockbroker, not a storyteller, Doctor. Why'd I improvise anything?”

“Because I am asking you to, Eli.”

Margot sees that E.H. is not looking at the screen. His eyes are shut, he is refusing to see. She feels him trembling like one on the cusp of convulsing with cold.

“If—if there were a story to the drawing, Eli—only just
if
—what would the story be?”

Margot is familiar with the literature of hypnosis. The extreme impressionability of the human mind where suggestion is concerned. Eli Hoopes isn't a “hypnotizable” subject, she has thought. He is strong-willed, even obstinate. Only if he wishes of his own volition to tell a story, will he speak.