Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And the crucial matter was: “Mary Ellen Enright” was evidently a healthy specimen. She had not died in teletransportation. If her brain had been injured, it was not a major injury.

  If it was a minor injury, maybe it would heal.

  When I tried to rise from the cot, however, I felt faint, and would have lost my balance—but the strong-muscled young woman in the white nurse’s uniform reached out to catch me.

  “There you go, ‘Mary Ellen’! On your way.”

  She laughed. Our eyes locked, for a fleeting second.

  She had pinned-back blond hair, so pale it was almost white. Above her left breast, a little plastic name tag—IRMA KRAZINSKI.

  She knows who I am. Yet, she is not an Enemy.

  Later I would think—Maybe she is one like me and will pity me.

  AT THE RESIDENCE a large cardboard box awaited M. E. ENRIGHT in the front foyer.

  “You are—‘Mary Ellen’? This just arrived.”

  The box measured approximately three by four feet. It was so crammed, one of its sides was nearly bursting.

  And the box was badly battered, as if it had come a long distance, in rainy weather. Transparent tape covered it in intricate layers crisscrossing like a deranged cobweb. Even with a pair of shears provided by the resident adviser of Acrady Cottage it was very difficult to open.

  “My! Someone took care that this box would not rip open in delivery!”

  Inside were clothes: several skirts, blouses, sweaters, a pair of slacks, a navy-blue wool jumper, a fleece-lined jacket, flannel pajamas, white cotton underwear, white cotton socks, a pair of sneakers, and a pair of brown shoes identified by the resident adviser as “penny loafers.” There were also “Bermuda shorts” and a “blazer”—clothes of a kind I had never seen before. And sheer, long “stockings”—I’d never seen before. All these items were secondhand, rumpled, and smelled musty.

  I was staring inside the box. I felt dazed, dizzy. I thought—These are castoff clothes of the dead.

  “Shall I help you carry these upstairs? It might be more practical just to leave the box here and take your things up in our arms . . .”

  “No. I can take them by myself. Thank you.”

  The resident adviser, Miss Steadman, was being very kind. But I did not want even to look at her. I did not want to speak with the woman more than necessary and I did not want to be alone with her in the room to which I was assigned for even a few minutes.

  I did not want her to see these clothes close up. I did not feel comfortable with her registering that, to me, some of these things were unfamiliar. Nor did I want her to smell the sour, stale odor that lifted from them, any more than she already had.

  I did not want her to feel sorry for me. That poor girl!—indeed, she is poor.

  Also, Miss Steadman’s words, her manner of speech, were strange to me. It was clear that she was speaking English yet so slowly, with such odd nasal vowels, it made me anxious to listen to her.

  At the bottom of the box was an envelope with M. E. ENRIGHT stamped on it. I would not open this envelope until I was alone in room 3C when I would discover that it contained five twenty-dollar bills that were crisp as if freshly printed, and a stiff sheet of paper headed THE INSTRUCTIONS.

  There was no personal note. I felt a small stab of disappointment for I had thought—I mean, I’d wanted to think—that S. Platz had taken a personal liking to me.

  In my arms I carried my new belongings upstairs to room 3C. I grew short of breath quickly for I had not recovered from my long journey. Miss Steadman watched me with concerned eyes but did not attempt to help me another time.

  Freshmen would be arriving on the Wainscotia campus the next day. I’d been sent into Exile at the perfect time and I did think that S. Platz must have had something to do with this timing.

  Room 3C was at the rear of the cottage. A large room with two dormer windows and a slanted ceiling. Bare floorboards, bare walls with scattered holes for picture hanging and small nails.

  Four beds, four desks: four roommates!

  It was surprising to me, I would be rooming with three other girls and not alone.

  But a relief, the room was ordinary. Except for the slanting ceiling that, if I wasn’t alert, would bump against my head.

  Quickly my eyes glanced about. It would be an involuntary reaction in Zone 9: establishing that a new space held no (evident) danger. Nothing in it (that I could see) to frighten, threaten, or disorient.

  Nothing unique to Zone 9. Rather, a room that could be anywhere.

  I took the bed in the farthest corner, beneath the slanted ceiling. I would leave the windows, the better-positioned beds, and the largest closets for my roommates for I did not want them to dislike me.

  “‘Mary Ellen’! Are you sure, you want that bed way off in a corner?”—so my roommates asked when they arrived, with evident sincerity.

  These were nice girls. (Were they?) Staring at me with curious eyes but they were not rude, or did not mean to be rude.

  Though they were enough alike to be three sisters they were strangers to one another. “White” girls—ST1. All were from rural Wisconsin and had gone to Wisconsin high schools. Their broad flat northern-midwestern accents were identical. Their names were immediately confused in my head like a buzzing of insects.

  I thought—One of them may be my executioner.

  “When did you arrive, Mary Ellen? Last night?”

  “Where’re you from, Mary Ellen?”

  “Did your parents bring you? Are they still here?”

  “Sorry, Mary Ellen! We’re taking up a lot of room, I guess . . .”

  Much of the day the room was crowded with parents, relatives, young children, helping my roommates move in.

  I went away to hide. The sounds of strangers’ voices, loud, assured, happy-seeming, those broad flat vowels, were oppressive to me. But I did not cry.

  At evening I returned to the room at the top of the stairs for I had nowhere else to go. Acrady Cottage was my home now.

  EVENTUALLY, WHEN I BEGAN to wear the clothes that had come in the box, I would discover that only a few items fitted me.

  Some things were too small, too short, too tight—most were too large.

  Faint half-moons of stains beneath the armpits of sweaters. Loose buttons, missing buttons. Broken zippers. Dark-smeared something, possibly food, I hoped not blood, on a skirt.

  The girls of Acrady Cottage would whisper among themselves, to see me so badly dressed—like a pauper, with clothes from Goodwill—but I never minded for I was grateful for what had been given to me.

  My favorites were a pleated Black Watch plaid skirt (as it was identified for me by a roommate) with an oversized ornamental brass safety pin holding the skirt together—ingeniously; a dark-rose turtleneck sweater that reminded me of a sweater back home, though this sweater was much larger; a long-sleeved white blouse with a “lace” collar that fitted me, and gave me a serious, somber look, that I particularly liked because it seemed to suggest This is a good girl, a nice girl, a shy girl, a girl who would never, ever be subversive or raise her voice. Please be kind to this girl thank you!

  In my old, lost life I had never worn blouses. I had never worn “lace”—or known anyone who had.

  I had never worn skirts, dresses. I had worn only jeans. In fact, just two or three pairs of jeans, that had not cost much and that I wore all the time without needing to think.

  In Zone 9 girls wore skirts to classes, sometimes dresses. They wore “sweater sets”—cardigans over matching short-sleeved sweaters. Sometimes they encased their legs in nylon stockings which I did not think I could manage without tearing, though I would try.

  How my friends would laugh, to see me in a lacy blouse. In nylon stockings. In the Black Watch plaid skirt with the big brass safety pin holding the pleated material together—Oh God what has happened to Addie. Is that even her?

  NOT A PLEASANT SIGHT. Electrodes in my roommates’ heads.

  Well, not electrode
s. I knew better.

  “Like this, Mary Ellen. I can’t believe you’ve never ‘set’ your hair!”

  Laughing at me. Not unkindly. (I wanted to think.)

  But I could not manage it: putting my hair in plastic “rollers” before going to bed.

  First, you wetted your hair with some special smelly setting-solution. Brushed and combed your hair. Separated your hair into numerous strands, and rolled these strands onto “rollers” (three sizes: largest pink, medium blue, smallest mint green) which were secured to the scalp as tightly as possible with bobby pins.

  Yes, your scalp might hurt from the pins and from having to lie with your head on a pillow, on rollers.

  You might even get a little headache! But it was worth it, for the effect of the smooth glossy pageboy the next day.

  Tried just once. Awake half the night. Drifting off to sleep and waking in a nightmare sweat of electrodes in my brain. And in the morning most of the rollers had come out, and when I brushed out my hair it was as limp and straggling as ever, or almost.

  Hilda said, “Next time, Mary Ellen, I’ll set your hair in rollers. Don’t you dare say no.”

  Coed

  So lonely! It was as if my body had been gutted from within.

  As if, in the place where my heart had been, there was an emptiness that nothing could fill.

  Other freshmen were homesick, and other girls in my residence cried from time to time in this new place. But their homesickness was a kind of exquisite torture, a way of measuring their love for their families. They called home, often on Sunday evenings (when the rates were lower) and received calls from home. They wrote home, and received letters from home. Their mothers sent them baked goods to share with their roommates and friends. And their homes were accessible to them—just a few hours away by car.

  I began to be ashamed, as well as despondent, that I received no mail from home—no calls, no packages. I could not bear it, the girls of Acrady Cottage pitied me and spoke of me wonderingly behind my back.

  Yet, there must be genuine orphans in the world, with no families and no relatives. The category into which Enright, Mary Ellen had been placed could not have been so empty of inhabitants.

  I wondered if I would discover someone like myself? Or—someone like myself would discover me?

  A “coed” at the State University at Wainscotia, Wisconsin, enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts with the likelihood of an education major, Class of 1963.

  If this was Exile, it was not the cruelest Exile.

  I knew this: the cruelest Exile would be death.

  Badly wishing I could let my parents know that I was (still) alive. (But was I alive? Often I wasn’t sure.)

  Wishing that I could know that my parents were (still) alive in NAS-23 and that we would be together again, in four years.

  WAINSCOTIA STATE UNIVERSITY covered many acres of land in semi-rural Wainscotia Falls in northeastern Wisconsin, a day’s drive from the city of Milwaukee in the south. Most of its nine thousand students were from small Wisconsin towns or farms. One of the largest colleges was Agriculture and Animal Husbandry.

  Other prominent colleges were the School of Education, the School of Business, the School of Nursing, and the School of Engineering.

  So many thousands of people linked by a single sprawling campus! Though much of the time the campus looked calm—in the morning, on the hilly paths, students hurrying to classes, in small groups, in pairs, alone—as the chapel bell sounded sonorously. You must move along. You must take your place. You have your name, your identity. You have no choice.

  There was a thrill in this! There was the solace of the impersonal.

  I was enrolled in five courses, three of them “introductions”—to English literature, to psychology, and to philosophy. These were large lecture courses with quiz sections that met once weekly. It was possible to be invisible in large lecture halls and to imagine that no one was observing me.

  If I saw, on campus, or in one of my classes, a girl from Acrady Cottage, my vision blurred and didn’t register what I saw. If a girl waved to me, or smiled at me—I did not seem to see. Wherever it was possible, I was invisible.

  Eventually, they would leave me alone, I believed. I would learn in Intro to Psychology the phenomenon of operant extinction: when reinforcement is no longer forthcoming, a response becomes less and less frequent.

  All my determination was to survive. To get through the challenge of the first weeks, the first semester, and the first year; to get through four years; to complete my Exile, and be teletransported back home.

  I did not want to think that absolute obedience to The Instructions might not save me. I did not want to think about the future except in the most elemental terms: behavior, reward.

  Almost it seemed to me, S. Platz had personally promised me—my Exile would end, one day.

  In the meantime I was obliged to obey The Instructions. I had immediately memorized them though I did not quite understand what was meant by the admonition against providing “future knowledge” in the Restricted Zone.

  So far as I had been informed the microchip in my brain blocked many memories of my past (that were, of course, in 1959, anticipations of the “future”). I could not confidently “foresee,” still less predict. When I tried to recall classic discoveries of the intervening decades—the discovery of DNA, for instance—the development of molecular genetics—brain “imaging”—any modern history apart from Patriot History—it was like trying to peer through a frosted glass window.

  You can see shadowy shapes beyond, maybe. But you cannot see.

  How ironic it was, I’d been, for those few cruel days, valedictorian of my high school class!

  AS FOR THE ADMONITION against seeking out “relatives”—I would not have known how to begin.

  In the Cultural Relocation Campaign that swept the country when I was in middle school, hundreds of thousands—millions?—of individuals were evicted from their homes, to be settled in relatively depopulated areas which the Government wanted to “reconstitute”; among these were Mom’s and Dad’s parents—Roddy’s and my grandparents—who were evacuated to western Nebraska and northern Maine, respectively; but I had no idea where they’d lived previously, still less where they might have been living in 1959.

  And I would not have dared leave the ten-mile radius of the “epicenter.”

  I would be the ideal student—the ideal “coed.” I would attract no unwanted attention. I would never betray or even feel the mildest curiosity. I would never enter into any “intimate” relationship with anyone—hardly! This was my resolve.

  During the first week of classes instructors took attendance by reading off names. It was exciting to hear a cascade of strangers’ names in which there was secreted, like a cuckoo egg in a nest of unsuspecting birds, the name to which I’d been assigned: Enright, Mary Ellen. This seemed to me so wholly a fictitious name, so totally unconvincing a name, I steeled myself as shyly I raised my hand and murmured “Here.” But no one took any notice. Most of the names were, like “Enright,” immediately forgettable. Though scattered amid these were odd nasal-sounding names that turned out to be, as I would later discover, Swedish, Norwegian, Germanic.

  Instructors were not likely to linger over Enright, Mary Ellen.

  Virtually all of my fellow students, indeed all of my professors, were ST1: “Caucasian.” Exceptions were staff workers (cafeteria, janitorial, grounds) who were likely to be ST5 or darker.

  I wondered if in any of my classes there were other Exiled Individuals. Could we recognize one another? Did we dare recognize one another? But how? At what risk?

  We would all be in disguise. In secondhand clothes, with secondhand names, determined to survive.

  I took a kind of grim pride in my own disguise: sweaters and skirts from out of the battered cardboard box, fleece-lined jacket in cold weather, sneakers, even “penny loafers” with white cotton socks darned at the toes, but not darned very substantially. My textbooks and
anthologies were all secondhand, their spines stamped USED. In the campus bookstore I’d bought a spiral notebook whose cover was speckled black and white, and on the pristine lined pages of this notebook I took fanatic notes in a kind of miniature handwriting, to save on space. In lecture halls I was the faceless girl in the first row hunched over her notebook, rapidly writing as the professor spoke, scarcely daring to look up.

  How strange to be writing. This was a so-called hand-eye coordination skill that had nearly vanished by the time I was born—though Mom and Dad had insisted upon teaching Roddy and me how to write. And strange to be reading in a book, on paper “pages” which you had to turn with your fingers, and which, if you wanted, you could tear out; but you needed no “power” to maintain the book, and no electronic medium.

  Strangest of all, the university library—a vast brownstone building of numerous floors descending even into the earth, filled with row upon row of “stacks” containing “books” to be touched, and opened, by hand. And in reading rooms, high ceilings, myriad lights, and polished floors—and students!

  Just to climb the stone steps to this building, like some ancient temple, left me dazed, and apprehensive.

  Often in Zone 9 I found myself out of breath. My heart beat erratically as it had beat—(I remembered this amid so much that had been wiped from my memory)—when I’d witnessed the Domestic Drone execution of—(but what was the boy’s name? Zoll- was the first syllable)—in a time that seemed to me now long ago, and fading. My head ached somewhere behind my eyes, where the microchip had been inserted. If I tried to think of—(was the word home? parents?)—there emerged a barrier like Plexiglas. Against this barrier I would strain and strain—like a trapped creature trying to press through a wall.

  Yet, if I gave up this effort, and turned my concentration upon my work, reading passages of print in textbooks and anthologies, underlining, taking notes, making outlines, writing first drafts of papers—in the way of a “normal” undergraduate in Zone 9—the pressure in my brain relaxed, and my breathing grew calmer.