Margot Sharpe is a graduate student of the great psychologist Milton Ferris when she meets amnesiac Elihu Hoopes. Eli has suffered brain damage from an illness and has no short term memory. Everything from before his illness he remembers clearly, but his real time memory lasts no more than seventy seconds. Margot can work with him on various tests for most of the day. If she leaves to go to the restroom, when she returns he has forgotten who she is, what they were doing, even that they’ve met before. Hel-lo, he will say. Eli often tries to place people he meets today as grown-up versions of those he went to school with. I can’t even imagine the frustration a patient with this illness must feel, but Eli is usually genial and upbeat. Eli comes from a wealthy family, was well educated, athletic and worked for his family’s financial firm. After his illness and the onset of memory loss, he lives with his aunt and is taken to the clinic each week. However, certain events in his otherwise idyllic childhood keep resurfacing. He keeps a sketchbook and repeatedly draws a scene of a young girl who has drowned. This was his cousin Gretchen, who was killed at Lake George, the family’s summer retreat.
Margot becomes, to say the least, obsessed with Eli Hoopes. She works with him for decades, long after Milton Ferris has moved on to bigger and better things. She publishes widely on her subject, known to the academic world as E.H. His identity is kept secret, partially to protect him from the press, but also to protect the researchers’ claim to this most unusual subject. All sorts of tests are devised to benefit the scientific community studying memory, or the loss of it.
So many interesting things arise regarding the subject E.H. Even without short term memory he seems to remember someone who is unkind to him, and though he certainly could not say why, changes his behavior from cheerful and congenial to standoffish and reserved when encountering that person again, even though to him, it’s always for the first time.