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friend, not just the amnesiac’s researcher. She wants to think that there is a special rapport between them—from their very first meeting, this has been evident. If others humor him, or scarcely listen to his meandering remarks, Margot makes a point of listening, and replying; often, she lingers to talk with E.H. after the testing session is over for the day, and her lab partners have left. She never becomes impatient with the amnesiac subject, and she never becomes bored with administering tests though some of the tests are needlessly repetitive.
    Experimental psychology is in itself repetitive, and overall not so very inspired as Margot had thought at the outset of graduate school. Scientific “truth” is more likely to be discovered by slow increments than by sudden lightning-flashes. Experimenting—assembling data—“evidence.” This is the collaborative effort of the lab assistants who prepare reports for the principal investigator Milton Ferris to analyze, assess, and consolidate.
    Margot has discovered that E.H.’s art before his amnesia had been executed with a degree of skill and assurance that he seems to have lost, as he has certainly lost a wide range of subjects. Before the encephalitis, Elihu Hoopes had been a good enough amateur photographer to have exhibited his work in Philadelphia, including once in a group show titled “Young Philadelphia Photographers 1954” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His subjects were various—portraits and close-ups, street scenes, river scenes, civil rights marches and demonstrations, uniformed policemen in riot gear. He’d never been a full-time artist but had developeda distinctive style of drawing, sketching, painting. Post-amnesia, E.H. was said to have lost interest in photography, as if he has forgotten entirely that he’d ever been a photographer or (Margot thinks) has repudiated an art that demands technical precision, and an ongoing interest in the outside world. (In an experiment of her own devising about which she hasn’t told Milton Ferris, Margot has shown E.H. reproductions of his photographs from the 1950s and early 1960s, and E.H. replied flippantly—“What’s this? Not bad.” He’d seemed to think that the portraits might be a trick—“Nobody I know, anymore.” He’d shown more interest in photography books Margot brought for him—black-and-white plates by Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Imogen Cunningham—though even this interest was fleeting: Margot was likely to discover the expensive books left behind in the testing-room.)
    Since his illness, E.H.’s talent for art seems much diminished. The post-amnesiac pencil drawings are fervid but amateurish: the artist compulsively fills in every square inch of the paper, leaving little that is blank or empty, to be filled in by the viewer’s imagination; the effort of studying a typical drawing of E.H.’s is considerable. You can see that the artist has taken time with the pencil drawings—too much time. Where Elihu Hoopes’s drawings were once lightly, deftly and minimally executed, now he meticulously shades in degrees of darkness, as if to suggest shadows within shadows; he is partial to cross-hatching, a visual cliché. Some of the drawings are so detailed and the pencil lines so faint, Margot can scarcely make out what they are supposed to represent. (Margot has given E.H. sets of pencils, and a pencil sharpener, as well as spray to preserve the charcoal, but it isn’t clear if he uses these.) The charcoal sketches are more accomplished, not so labored over and more resembling E.H.’s pre-amnesiac work, but have been carelessly preserved, smeared with fingerprints. Asif, Margot thinks, the artist executes his work in a kind of trance and then, upon waking, forgets it.
    Margot’s response is always enthusiastic—“Eli, so much fascinating work! You’ve been busy this