The Man Without a Shadow by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Imagining the Future. He cannot.

Margot Sharpe asks, why? Why can’t the amnesiac imagine the future? Is it because he has lost the past?

THE EXAMINATION. “MR. Hoopes, are you comfortable in that seat?”

He is being tested in a way that makes his heart race. It is not a sensation he likes, and yet he seems to crave it.

There is a senior examiner, and there are three younger assistants who may be graduate students, as well as another young assistant who is filming the examination. He has been told their names, which he has not remembered.

The senior examiner, an attractive, fiercely-pale-skinned woman with glossy, graying black hair, is showing him a sequence of photographs which he is to identify. She is, to Eli, a striking presence, of an indeterminate age, though not young; a mature woman, in black, very small-boned, intense. Her voice is softly modulated and yet steely, resolved. She has spread out photographs on a table: very young girls, children younger than ten, and among them a cloudy-haired girl with widened eyes—his younger sister Rosalyn, aged about five. Of course, Eli identifies her at once. “This would be about 1930.”

Among photographs of girls, most of them strangers, Eli pulls out other photographs of Rosalyn, at older ages: eleven, fifteen, eighteen. He never hesitates, he recognizes Rosalyn at once. His beautiful sister whom he’d loved, and has not seen in a while, he thinks.

“That’s our summer place at Lake George. Our dock.”

Oh, God. Eli is feeling stricken to the heart.

The examiners are taking note. His success is being recorded. He is made to feel triumphant.

Mr. Hoopes they call him. Except the glossy-black-haired woman who is their coordinator sometimes calls him Eli.

Out of another folder are photographs of young boys. Again, most of the children are strangers to Eli, but among the photographs are several of Eli’s brother Averill and his brother Harold—Harry.

Again, he identifies them at once. Approximate ages eight, eleven, thirteen, seventeen. The deep back lawn of their parents’ house in Gladwyne. Graduation at the Academy—a teenaged Averill in cap and gown, grinning at the camera. Christmas at their grandparents’ house on Parkside Avenue, a tall, beautifully trimmed evergreen tree in the background and the brothers—Averill, Harry, and Elihu in the foreground.

He feels another blow to the heart. His brothers, and him.

How long ago it seems! He and his brothers have become estranged politically, and in other, more personal ways.

“And these?”

The examiner has spread out a dozen miscellaneous photographs on the table. These are family snapshots of adults and children in mostly casual unpremeditated poses. At first, they all appear to be strangers; then, Eli discovers family members—mother, father, grandparents, aunts and uncles. When were these pictures taken? Decades ago? Other photographs are of strangers, Eli is certain—but why is he being shown these? He can’t remember.

He identifies as many faces as he can. This time he is feeling less triumphant.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Hoopes? Would you like to rest, before we continue?”

“Nothing is wrong! I’m feeling just—just . . .

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