Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Wolfman asked me who was president of NAS-23 but when I pronounced the name, Wolfman didn’t recognize it.

  Presidents of the Reconstituted North American States were heads of the Patriot Party. The general population knew little about them though they were believed to be multi-billionaires, or the associates of multi-billionaires. Their names were often invented names, fictitious names, attached to individuals or animated human figures replicated endlessly online and on TV; you were conditioned to “like” them by their friendly, smiling facial expressions and by ingeniously addictive musical jingles that accompanied them, as you were urged to “dislike” other figures. To attempt to learn facts about them was in violation of Homeland Security Information and could be considered treasonous.

  Wolfman was saying that, for a long time after World War II, Americans had lived in terror of a nuclear holocaust. Schoolchildren as young as five or six were drilled in what to do if there was a sudden “nuclear flash”—they were to scramble beneath their desks, bow their heads and cover the backs of their necks with their clasped hands.

  “For those fortunate enough there were shelters, stocked with provisions like this one. ‘Shelter’ was a booming business, for a while.”

  “But there was never any ‘nuclear holocaust’?”

  “As it turned out, no.”

  “But now—here in Zone Nine—they still believe it might happen? Russia might drop a nuclear bomb on the United States?”

  “No, Mary Ellen. You don’t say ‘they still believe’—it’s 1959, and it’s natural for the citizens of the United States, in 1959, to believe in the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, not an aberration.”

  I felt a twinge of pain behind my eyes. I’d learned to deal with the perplexity of living in this bygone era as if it were the present-tense and not past; but I had not articulated the logic of such a life, and of course I’d never spoken to anyone about it.

  Amused by my naïveté, or slightly exasperated by it, Wolfman said: “Yes, the citizens of the U.S., at this time, have a prevailing expectation of nuclear war. They can’t comprehend it, really—any more than we can comprehend our own deaths, and the extinction of our identity. We are not capable of imagining ourselves, or our loved ones, non-existing. We are not capable of imagining tens of millions of human beings murdered in the twentieth century, in the great ‘world wars,’ in Soviet Russia and in Communist China. But the populace has been brainwashed to believe in the Communist threat, and to buy into bomb shelters and enormous stockpiles of weapons. Though you haven’t had much history education in NAS since the Cultural Revolution of the Public Schools you must know about the Russian satellites of the 1950s—the two ‘Sputniks’—and nuclear testing in Russia as in our American Southwest. It’s a time of nuclear fetishizing. The Americans of 1959 don’t have access to the ‘future’—as we do—to know that there never was a nuclear holocaust and no bomb shelters were ever used by anyone. Nor was there a ‘Communist takeover’ of the U.S. government—or anything remotely approaching it.”

  “But—that’s good news, isn’t it? I think it must be.”

  Wolfman laughed. “You’re a sensible girl, ‘Mary Ellen.’ Of course, you’re right. Our parents would not have been born, consequently we wouldn’t have been born, in the ‘future,’ if there’d been a ‘holocaust’ in this past. So yes, you are absolutely correct.”

  Strange that what Wolfman meant as “future” was in fact “past” to me—the past from which I’d been expelled. And for Wolfman, who’d been Exiled much longer than I had, this “future” was yet more past.

  Seeing my look of confusion Wolfman spoke of post-war American politics: the so-called Cold War, the sinister power of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the army-navy congressional hearings, the “witch-hunting” of Communists by such “patriotic” federal justices as Harold Medina in the late 1940s and the defeat of the intellectual Adlai Stevenson by the popular ex-general Dwight D. Eisenhower. “The history of the United States was always a struggle between ‘them’ and ‘us’—capitalists, and their wealth—and the rest of us. Not surprising, ‘us’ never had a chance.”

  Wolfman laughed, and shrugged. In this melancholy underground place, what did anything so abstract as history matter? You were aware of breathing, and of the need for oxygen; if something went wrong with the ventilators, you would soon cease to exist.

  In such a situation, it was natural for me (I see that now) to gaze upon Wolfman with eyes that welled with both tears and adoration.

  Here is my friend! My only friend.

  This, like any responsible adult man confronted with the infatuation of a seventeen-year-old, Wolfman hoped to ignore.

  “Just be calm, ‘Mary Ellen.’ This is ordinary life now. Don’t become emotional—there is too much for us to lose.”

  With the air of an earnest TV advertiser Wolfman took me on a brief tour of the bomb shelter. He opened storage closet doors to show me the goods inside: floor-to-ceiling shelves with cans of tuna fish and salmon, peas, corn, spaghetti, and “fruit cocktail”; Campbell’s soup—tomato, chicken noodle, cream of mushroom; boxes of Cheerios, Wheaties, and Rice Krispies; powdered eggs, powdered milk, boxes of sugar, and salt. A gigantic refrigerator (not turned on, and lacking a light) stocked with Pepsi and mineral water. In another storage room, more gallons of mineral water, gallon-sized containers of liquid soap, bleach. In another storage room oxygen tanks, bandages, stretchers, bedpans, canes, crutches, walkers, several collapsible wheelchairs. Rows of lockers. Lavatories, bathrooms. An unnerving sight of dozens of gray uniforms hanging together on a heavy bar like the husks of great insects. In the event of the nuclear holocaust, survivors were obliged to wear this gear? Including the thick-goggled masks? The prospect was so depressing, I could not bear to think of it.

  Wolfman said, “They are like our ancestors, aren’t they? They seem so innocent. But fortunately, nothing turned out as they’d feared.”

  The bomb shelter did not seem to be dust-free. You had to wonder what sort of long-dormant germs, bacteria, dwelt here biding their time. I had an impulse to glance behind me, to see if I’d left footprints on the floor. The air was barely circulating through vents and smelled stale, like soiled clothing.

  In an assembly room a single console-model dwarf TV sat against a wall, gray-blank-screened, facing rows of seats. I counted the rows: fifteen. Seats in each row: twelve. More signs on the walls, with numbered instructions and cartoon figures. Here was an air of suspended drama as if a vital scene had been interrupted. On the metallic-gray carpeted floor, as if it had just recently been tossed down, was the crumpled cellophane wrapper of a Milky Way candy bar. Adjoining were two dormitory rooms containing as many as fifty beds each—“One dorm for each sex,” Wolfman said. A grim sort of merriment shone in his eyes.

  I asked if he had a place in the shelter, in case of an emergency.

  “Of course not. I’m an assistant professor, I’m of no consequence at Wainscotia. I just happen to know about the ‘nuclear bomb shelter,’ as I make it my business to know about many things, and so I tracked it down, and learned the combination. In my former, ‘subversive’ life in NAS”—Wolfman lowered his voice, with a tilt of his head—“I was an ‘outlaw-hacker.’ I was pretty damned brilliant for my age if I say so myself—I’d hacked the computers at Homeland Security, Youth Disciplinary, Media Dissemination, Patriot Insurers, my own high school in Manhattan, and a few others. When they finally caught up with me I was twenty years old—but I’d been a star hacker for six years, and would’ve never gotten caught except a ‘friend’ informed on me.”

  Wolfman spoke so openly about his case! After his initial stiffness with me, it seemed scarcely believable.

  Wolfman asked what I’d done to become Exiled—“It must be a paranoid time in NAS for them to Exile someone as young as you. Usually it’s just incarceration at a youth facility and ‘rehab’—‘co-opting.’”

  Apologetically I told Wolfman that I hadn’t done anything nearly so
“subversive” as he’d done—“At least not intentionally. I was valedictorian of my high school class and I’d written a speech—a series of questions—that our principal was afraid would get him into trouble with Homeland Security, I guess. No one gave me any warning or asked me to modify the speech—they just arrested me at commencement rehearsal, and took me away.” My voice quavered. “I never saw my parents again.”

  Wolfman regarded me with concerned eyes. Though he meant to keep the mood between us light, matter-of-fact.

  “What’s your sentence?”

  “Four years.”

  “Four years! That’s nothing. Just enough to get a useless college education, and be teletransported back.”

  I didn’t want to register useless college degree.

  “How long is your sentence, Dr. Wolfman?”

  “Call me ‘Ira,’ please. As we’re kindred in Exile, so we’re on a first-name basis. My sentence is eleven years of which I have just two to go before my case can be adjudicated—God knows what will come of that. I’ve heard of adjudicators who double the sentence, or worse. It’s totally up to a five-man panel, you know.”

  “It is? I didn’t know . . .”

  I was feeling sick to hear this. But Wolfman tried to soften the blow by smiling at me.

  “All decrees of Homeland Security are provisional. But they can be vacated, too—if your people can pay the requisite ‘fine.’ Didn’t you know that?”

  “N-No . . .”

  I wondered: Did my parents know? Did my father know, that his MI status might have been revoked?

  “But you’ll do well, ‘Mary Ellen’—you have plenty of time to prepare your case. As for me, I’m not eager to return home. I had enemies there. I was betrayed by people I’d thought were my colleagues. I’ve tried to make my peace with Zone Nine.”

  “Don’t you miss your family? Your friends?”

  “Of course, I did. For a long time I did. Most EIs suffer from severe depression for the first year of Exile, and are at risk for suicide. But I’ve been an ‘orphan’ so long, and my parents ‘deceased,’ I’ve come to believe my Exile-identity, almost. It’s hard for me to think seriously of being ‘reconstituted’—I’d be at risk of falling into my previous pattern—‘L and S’—(“Liberalism and Subversion”)—and getting arrested again, and ‘vaporized.’ No one goes into Exile twice.”

  Rapidly I’d calculated: if Wolfman had just two more years to his sentence, I would be left behind by him. Already I was feeling a mild panic at this loss.

  “I know that you’ve been taking your transition hard, ‘Mary Ellen’—I’ve felt sorry for you but there wasn’t much that I could do. Encouraging you to meet with me in my office, and to cry over your fate, would not be helpful. I’ve tried to keep our relations professional, and I will continue to do so. Tell yourself: Zone Nine isn’t so terrible a place, set beside NAS. It may take you about eighteen months to become adjusted, as it did me. During that time I felt so totally estranged from everyone, it was like they were dead, and didn’t realize it; or I was dead, and didn’t realize it. I can’t shake a feeling of pity for them—though I’ve come to like some of them. I even admire Axel—the die-hard behaviorist. I earned my B.A. from Wainscotia, for whatever that’s worth, and my Ph.D. in experimental psychology; the department was so impressed with me that they hired me immediately as an assistant professor, due to the influence of A. J. Axel. In Zone Nine I have a kind of career I couldn’t have in NAS since my personality is naturally ‘subversive’—that’s to say, skeptical—and ‘questioning of authority.’ It was astonishing to me that I hadn’t been Deleted instead of just Exiled—I think they must have felt that my hacker skills were too valuable to destroy.”

  “Are there others like us here?”

  “Scattered through Zone Nine, yes. Since I’ve come here I’ve encountered individuals, mostly male, who’d seemed to me fellow EIs—obviously. My first year, I looked for them everywhere. But I was wary of approaching anyone, or identifying myself. And the others were terrified, and avoided me. You’re different of course—distinctive! You have the courage of youth, as few of us do.”

  Courage of youth. That did not seem flattering.

  “Is there anyone you know like us—Exiles?”

  “Well, possibly. I have suspicions. But I’ve kept my distance, as I’ve said. For of course you can’t tell if someone is a spy, even in Zone Nine. I assume there are spies here, as well as agents of our Government. How they communicate with one another, how they travel from one zone to another—if they do—I don’t know. Recall, cyberspace is ‘eternal’—‘timeless’—if you know how you can traverse it in any direction. My parents were scientists who’d been drafted to work for the Government—so I know some things about NAS cybertechnology—though my information has got to be dated. I do know that Wainscotia State University is the default university for people like me, and you, who have intellectual pretensions and have been ‘subversive.’ Wainscotia is the teeming petri dish of mediocrity.”

  Wolfman went on to speak with contempt of Wainscotia’s “preeminent” men: Amos Stein and his team of physicists and mathematicians who were working on a “proof” of the steady-state universe, in order to rebuff those astrophysicists who believed that the universe was infinite, and infinitely expanding; Myron Coughland, an intellectual chauvinist who argued that the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the present day culminated in the trivial babblings of American “positive-thinkers”; Morris Harrick, with his comically chauvinistic history of the “progress” of science, culminating in the present “Christian, Caucasian” era; another historian, C. G. Emmet, who believed also in the “progress” of humankind, culminating in twentieth-century northern European and American civilization, without any acknowledgment—at all—of the Holocaust—“As if it had never been.” Wolfman spoke disgustedly.

  And A. J. Axel himself, Wolfman’s mentor, so steeped in Skinnerian behaviorism he’d stopped thinking as an experimental scientist a decade ago, and had no clue that a “cognitive psychology” revolution was close at hand—“Within a few years, B. F. Skinner will be finished. His ‘great achievement’ will be history, a fossil. I hope to leap clear of the wreckage if I can.”

  Wolfman spoke recklessly, defiantly. I was astounded by his words. For months I’d believed all that Miss Steadman, Miss Hurly, and others in the University community reiterated with such enthusiasm, that Wainscotia was a center of excellence—that we were all so very fortunate to be here. Now Wolfman was laughing.

  “Why are you looking so surprised? Did you think that Professor Axel was a genius? Every place and every time has its resident ‘geniuses.’ A naïve fool who’d fallen for Walter Freeman’s gospel of the lobotomy—at least Axel is extricating himself from that debacle after he’d witnessed a few deaths. His zeal now is ‘social engineering’—shocking men and boys who are attracted to other men and boys until they’re reduced to quivering masses of nerves, unable to be attracted to anyone, or anything, and likely to commit suicide. Which Axel won’t include in his data since it falls outside the perimeter of his experimentation.”

  Wolfman laughed, seeing the expression on my face.

  “But—but isn’t Wainscotia—”

  “No. Wainscotia is not. To punish ‘free thinkers’ for subversion they sentence us to ‘the Good Place’—Wainscotia. One of those idyllic American campuses in the Heartland where no research or creative work comes to anything. No matter how much effort is poured into it, how much ‘talent’ and ‘perseverance.’ Perfectly intelligent scientists originally from decent East Coast universities here take disastrous turns, wind up in dead-ends—and won’t realize it until they’re embalmed and can’t leave. No one is ‘original’ here—no one is ‘significant.’ A promising young astrophysicist from Cal Tech gave up his Ph.D. project in ‘string theory’ to pursue ‘extra-terrestrial life’—that’s it for him, until he retires. Scientists, mathematicians, scholars, artists, writers and poets—even ch
emists—nothing they discover in Wainscotia will outlive them. Nothing they accomplish will have the slightest value to anyone. Their heirs will hide away their self-published autobiographies and melt down their gilt ‘lifetime achievement awards.’ Their ideas are derivative, or redundant, or just plain mistaken, silly. In the meantime they live exalted lives at Wainscotia, as inside a bell jar, like pampered bacteria. They win awards and government grants administered by their friends. They’re featured on the front page of the student newspaper and the local newspaper. They may even make it into Time, once. They’re invited to give Sunday sermons. Some are worshipped by their post-docs, as by the local ladies.”

  This was stunning. Shocking. I listened in silence to Wolfman’s words like buoyant flames. It was clear that Wolfman meant to be funny, and yet—Wolfman was angry too, and sad.

  It was true, I’d thought that Professor Axel’s behaviorist psychology was limited in its scope and technique, but I’d supposed that this was a limitation of my own; what I’d learned of Freudian psychology hadn’t seemed more convincing, and had the added disadvantage of being undemonstrable in a laboratory.

  But—poor Morris Harrick of the Museum! I felt particularly sorry for this elderly gentleman who seemed, like a species of underground mole, to have spent his entire professional life in a burrow, to no purpose.

  Zone 9 would be my world for the next three and a half years. Its air of collective mediocrity would be the air I had to breathe, to survive.

  I felt as if the ground were tilting beneath my feet.

  Wolfman’s cruel laughter turned into a fit of coughing. His skin looked clammy. I wondered if he was well.

  He sat heavily in one of the chairs facing the blank-screened TV. The merriment had faded from his eyes. He regarded me as one might regard a child bright for her age yet handicapped in some way.

  I would wonder why Wolfman had come to me at this time. Near the end of the first semester—when soon, within weeks, I would no longer be his student.