1957. You are ten years old, no longer a small boy, but not yet a big boy, a person best described as a medium boy, a boy at the summit of his late-middle childhood, still walled off from the world in the year of Sputnik 1 and 2, but less so than you were the year before, with some vague understanding that the Suez Crisis has ended, that Eisenhower has sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, in order to stop the riots and help desegregate the schools, that Hurricane Audrey has killed more than five hundred people in Texas and Louisiana, that a book about the end of the world called On the Beach has been published, but you know nothing about the publication of Samuel Beckett's Endgame or Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and even less than nothing about the death of Joseph McCarthy or the expulsion of Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters union from the AFL-CIO. It is a Saturday afternoon in May, and you and a friend of yours from school, Mark F., a new comrade who is also your Little League teammate, are driven to the movies by one of your parents and dropped off to watch the feature by yourselves. The title of the film you see that afternoon is The Incredible Shrinking Man, and in much the same way that The War of the Worlds affected you four years earlier, this film turns you inside out and drastically alters the way you think about the universe. The shock when you were six can best be called a theological shock-a sudden realization of the limits of God's power, and the daunting conundrum that entailed, for how could the power of the all-powerful one in any way be limited?-but the shock of Shrinking Man is a philosophical shock, a metaphysical shock, and such is the power of that somber little black-and-white film that it leaves you in a state of gasping exaltation, feeling as if you have been given a new brain.1
*
From the ominous music that plays during the opening credits, you understand that you are about to be taken on a dark and menacing ride, but once the action begins, your fears are assuaged somewhat by the presence of a voice-over narrator, the shrinking man himself, who addresses the audience in the first person, which means that no matter what terrible adventures might be in store for him, he will manage to come through them alive, for how could a man tell his own story if he were dead? The strange, almost unbelievable story of Robert Scott Carey began on an ordinary summer day. I know that story better than anyone else-because I am Robert Scott Carey.
*
Lying side by side in their bathing suits, Carey and his wife, Louise, are sunning themselves on the deck of a cabin cruiser. The boat drifts languidly over the waters of the Pacific, the sky is clear, and all is well. They are both young and attractive, they are in love, and when they aren't kissing, they talk to each other with the playful, teasing banter of lifelong soul mates. Louise goes below deck to fetch some beer for them, and that is when it happens, when a dense cloud or mist suddenly appears on the horizon and begins rushing toward the boat, a large, all-enveloping mist that scuds along the surface of the ocean with a strange, clamoring sibilance, so loud that Carey, who is drowsing on the deck with his eyes closed, sits up, then stands up to watch the cloud speed forward and engulf the boat. He raises his arms in an instinctive gesture of defense, doing what he can to protect himself from the vaporous assault, which is nothing, but then the fast-moving cloud is already past him, and within seconds the sky is clear again. As Louise emerges from the cabin, she sees the cloud floating off into the distance. What was that? she asks. I don't know, he replies, some kind of . mist. Louise turns to him and notices that his torso is covered with flecks of phosphorescent dust, quasi-metallic particles glinting in the light, unnatural, disturbing, inexplicable, but the glow begins to fade, and the scene ends with the two of them rubbing off the flecks with towels.
*
Six months go by. One morning, as Louise is setting the table for breakfast, Carey calls down to her from their upstairs bedroom, asking if the right pants have been sent back from the cleaners. Cut to the bedroom: Carey is standing in front of a full-length mirror, pulling the waist of his pants out from his body. There are two or three inches of slack, meaning that the pants are too large for him, and a bit later, when he puts on his shirt, his monogrammed white business shirt, that proves to be too large for him as well. The metamorphosis has begun, but it is still early days at this point, and neither Carey nor Louise has the smallest notion of what lies ahead. That morning, in fact, the ever-cheerful, wisecracking Louise suggests that Carey is simply losing weight and that she finds it very becoming.
*
But Carey is alarmed. Without telling his wife, he goes to a doctor for a checkup, and it is in Dr. Bramson's office that he learns he is now five feet, eleven inches tall and weighs one hundred seventy-four pounds. Above average on both counts, but as Carey explains to Bramson he has always been six-one and has mysteriously dropped almost ten pounds. The doctor calmly brushes aside these numbers, telling Carey that he has probably lost the weight because of stress and overwork, and as for the missing two inches, he doubts they are really missing. He asks Carey how many times he has been measured. Only three, it turns out, once for the draft board, once in the navy, and once for a life insurance physical. Errors could have been made during all three of them, Bramson says, errors often happen, and results can vary depending on when the exam is held (people are tallest in the morning, he remarks, then they shrink a little over the course of the day as gravity compresses the spinal disks, the bone joints, and so forth), and on top of that one must not overlook the problem of standing too erectly, which can make a person seem taller than he actually is, and so, when all is said and done, a difference of two inches is nothing to worry about. You've likely lost some weight due to insufficient diet, Bramson says, but (with a dismissive laugh) people don't get shorter, Mr. Carey. They just don't get shorter.
*
Another week goes by. Standing on the bathroom scale one evening, Carey discovers that he has lost four more pounds. Even more unsettling, when he and Louise embrace a few moments later, she is standing eye to eye with him, an irrefutable sign of his slow diminishment, since in the past she had always stood on her toes when they kissed, stretching up in order to bring her lips against his. I'm getting smaller, Lou, he says-every day. She knows that now, accepts that now, but at the same time she is incredulous-as anyone would be, as you yourself are, sitting in the darkened theater watching the film, for the thing that is happening to Scott Carey cannot possibly happen. A knot of dread begins to form in your stomach. You can already sense where the story is going, and it is almost too much for you to bear. You pray for a miracle and hope you are wrong, hope that some scientific mastermind will step in and figure out a way to arrest the shrinking of the shrinking man, for by now Scott Carey is no longer just a character in a film, Scott Carey is you.
*
He returns to Dr. Bramson's office, goes back several times over the next week, and Bramson, who is no longer smiling and confident, no longer the reassuring skeptic who scoffed at Carey after the first exam, is now studying two sets of X-rays, one taken at the beginning of the week and the other at the end, identical shots of Carey's thoracic region that detail his spinal and rib structure, and as Bramson puts the first plate on top of the second, it is apparent that although the pictures are essentially the same, one skeletal system is smaller than the other. This is the medical proof, the final test that abolishes all doubt about the nature of Carey's condition, and Bramson is both shaken and bewildered, suddenly in over his head, and therefore grim, almost angry, as he walks over to Carey and Louise and tells them what he has found. It is wholly unprecedented, he says, there is no way to account for it, but Carey is indeed getting smaller.
*
On Bramson's advice, Carey goes to the California Medical Research Institute, a West Coast stand-in for a place like the Mayo Clinic, where he spends the next three weeks in the hands of various specialists, undergoing an intensive battery of tests. These probings and inspections are presented in a brief montage, and as one image quickly gives way to another, Carey's voice returns to explain what is happening: I drank a barium solution and stood behind a fluoroscope screen. They gave me radioactive iodine . and an examination with a Geiger counter. I had electrodes fastened to my head. Water-restriction tests. Protein-bond tests. Eye tests. Blood cultures. X-rays and more X-rays. Tests. Endless tests. And then the final examination, a paper chromatography test .
*
Dr. Silver, the man in charge of the case, tells Carey and Louise that in addition to a gradual loss of nitrogen, calcium, and...
