The Man Without a Shadow by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

remember my head shaved. My skull was fractured in Birmingham, Alabama—no one knew at the time. A ‘hairline’ fracture. But then, at the lake back in July, a few months ago, there was a fire. I think that’s what they told me—a fire. Hard to believe that I was careless leaving burning embers in the fireplace but—something happened.” E.H. pauses, frowning like one who is struggling to pull up, from the depths of a well, something unwieldy, very heavy that is straining every muscle in his body. “A fire, that burnt up my damned brain.”
    â€œA fever, maybe?”
    â€œA fever is a fire. In the damned brain.”
    It is a wet windy overcast morning in March 1969.
    SHE THINKS, HIS name has been eerily prescient— Hoopes .
    For Elihu Hoopes has lived, for the past four and a half years, in an indefinable present-tense. A kind of time-hoop, a Möbius strip that turns upon itself, to infinity.
    Except “infinity” is less than seventy seconds.
    There is no was in Elihu Hoopes’s life, there is only is .
    Forever he will be thirty-seven years old. Forever, he will be confused about where he is, and what has happened to him.
    A fire? I think it was a fire. Or, Granddaddy’s two-passenger single-prop plane crash-landed on the island, and burst into flames. And later in the hospital, I think there was a fire, too. My clothes and hair were wet, but smoldering. I could smell my hair singed. I may have breathed in some of the fire, and burnt my lungs.
    They said that I had a high fever but—it was a fire, I could see and smell.
    The girl was not found. There were rescue parties searching for her. In the woods around Lake George. On the islands.
    If someone had taken her, it was believed he might’ve taken her to one of the islands. If he had a boat. If no one saw.
    In his little, light Beechcraft aircraft painted bright chrome yellow like a giant bird Granddaddy flew above the lake. Many times Granddaddy flew above the lake, you would hear the prop-plane engine passing low over the roof of the house.
    Granddaddy said, Come with me, Eli! We will search together for your lost cousin.
    Not the first time the little boy had flown in the plane with his grandfather but it would be the last.
    IN HIS BRIGHT affable voice E.H. begins to read from his notebook.
    â€œâ€˜There is no journey, and there is no path. There is no wisdom, there is emptiness. There is no emptiness.’”
    Pausing to add, “This is the wisdom of the Buddha. But there is no wisdom, and there is no Buddha.”
    He laughs, sadly.
    â€œThere is no test, and there is no ‘testes.’”
    And he laughs again. Sadly.
    SHE HAS BEEN instructed: to discover, you have to destroy.
    To locate the source of behavior in the brain, you have to destroy much of the brain.
    Monkey-, cat- and rat-brains. In search of elusive and mysterious memory. Years, decades, thousands of animal-brains, hundreds of thousands of hours of surgery. Systematically, methodically. Meticulous lab records. Unyielding cruelty of the research scientist to whom no (living) specimen is an end in itself but a (possible) means to a greater end. Hundreds of thousands of animals sacrificed in the pursuit of the “engram”—the brain’s ostensible record of memory.
    A principle of experimental neuroscience.
    No one can surgically explore a (living, normal) human brain, only just animal-brains. And all these decades, results have been inconclusive. Margot Sharpe notes in her amnesia logbook the (famous/infamous) conclusion of the great experimental psychologist Karl Lashley:
    This series of experiments has yielded a good bit of information about what and where the memory trace is not. I sometimes feel . . . the necessary conclusion is that (memory) is just not possible.
    THE CHASTE DAUGHTER. How lucky Margot Sharpe has been! And she wants to think— My career—my life—lies all before me.
    By 1969