The Man Without a Shadow by Joyce Carol Oates

Alvin Kaplan.
    There has been some good news for the university memory lab—a renewal and an expansion of their federal grant, the elaborate proposal for which Margot did much of the work. And nowMilton Ferris has become a consultant for a popular PBS science program and is often in Washington, D.C., at the National Institutes of Health; and he is often traveling abroad, with a need for someone like Margot in the lab whom he can trust as his protégée, his emissary, his representative. At the present time, Milton Ferris has embarked upon an ambitious lecture tour in China under the auspices of the USIA.
    Alvin Kaplan, Ferris’s male protégé, has recently left the university. He has been promoted to professor of experimental psychology at Rockefeller University—a remarkable position for one so young. Like Margot Sharpe, now assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the university, Kaplan has co-published numerous papers with Milton Ferris.
    Both Alvin Kaplan and Margot Sharpe delivered papers on their groundbreaking research in amnesia at the most recent American Association of Experimental Psychology conference in San Francisco.
    Saw your name in the newspaper!— occasionally someone will call Margot Sharpe. Family member, relative, old friend from the University of Michigan. Sounds just fascinating, the work you are doing.
    Sometimes, Margot will receive a call or a letter— Why don’t we ever hear from you any longer, Margot? Do I have the wrong address?
    Once, Margot couldn’t resist showing E.H. a copy of the prestigious Journal of American Experimental Psychology in which the major article appeared under her name—“Distraction, Working Memory, and Memory Retention in the Amnesiac ‘E.H.’” Her heart beat rapidly as E.H. perused it with a small wondering smile.
    (Was she behaving unprofessionally? She would have been devastated if a colleague found out.)
    Gentlemanly E.H. reacted with bemusement, not resentment—
    â€œIs ‘E.H.’ meant to be me? Never knew I was so important.” He asked if he might take the journal home with him so that he could read it carefully—to try to “understand what the hell is going on inside my ‘scrambled brains’”—and Margot said of course. And so Margot placed the journal on a table in the testing-room for E.H. to take home with him.
    (Confident that the amnesiac would forget the journal within seventy seconds and she could easily slip it back into her bag without him noticing.)
    Since then Margot has several times showed E.H. journals with articles about “E.H.”—some of them co-authored by Milton Ferris and his team of a half-dozen associates including Margot Sharpe, others by just Milton Ferris and Margot Sharpe.
    By degrees, they have become associated with each other as scientists. Collaborators.
    It has been years. Has it been years?
    In the memory lab, time passes strangely.
    It was only the other day (it seems) when Margot was first introduced to “Elihu Hoopes”—who’d stared at her with a kind of recognition, hungry, yearning, and squeezed her small pliant hand in his.
    I know you. We know each other. Don’t we?
    We were in grade school together . . .
    E.H. squeezes Margot’s hand in his strong dry fingers. She has been anticipating this—she doesn’t pull her hand away from his grasp so quickly as she does when others are in the room with them.
    â€œMr. Hoopes—‘Eli.’ I’m so happy to see you.”
    â€œI’m so happy to see you .”
    There is something different about this morning, Margot thinks.
    Margot thinks— But I can’t. It would be wrong.
    Still they are clasping hands. With no one else in the testing-room to observe they are free of social restraint. Between them, there is but the residue of instinct.
    â€œDo you remember me, Eli? ‘Margot.’”
    â€œOh