Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Still I waited unobtrusively, I thought, near the back of the hall, studying posters advertising upcoming Film Society movies including several “classics of the silent era.”

  Nothing is so depressing as films-to-come that, if you see them, you are destined to see alone.

  Seeing me alone, a lone undergraduate at the Film Society, several people spoke to me. Except that I was very quiet, and avoided looking any stranger in the eye, for fear of seeing a glitter of recognition, I might have been “befriended” at the Film Society—this would have attracted Wolfman’s attention!

  Trying to overhear what Wolfman was saying. I did not like the high-pitched laughter of the woman with the center-parted hair. (I’d seen her glance in my direction. But I had not glanced at her.) At last, the little group broke up. The woman had no choice but to depart with her friends.

  It would have seemed to the casual eye that Wolfman had been ignoring me until now, not rudely, but incidentally, as if it had to be chance merely that a faculty member and one of his undergraduate students were in the same room together; now, he acknowledged me with a frowning sort of smile.

  “Hello, Miss Enright!”

  My eyes were heavy-lidded, as if I’d been crying. But I had not been crying. Until seeing Wolfman with these strangers, I’d been feeling alert, excited, hopeful.

  Wolfman understood, seeing my stricken expression. But Wolfman would not indulge me in any public place.

  He meant to be nice. He meant to be kind. His questions to me were the questions a university instructor might make to one of his students, whose name he probably didn’t recall. Politely he asked me how I’d liked the movie?—and was surprised when I told him what I thought, for I hadn’t spoken at all sharply in the shelter, beneath the museum. I’d been meek and melting then but now there was a sort of adolescent vehemence in my critique of the film, and an impatience that others should pretend to admire the ridiculous “western.”

  Wolfman laughed—“Whoa! I guess you aren’t a fan of John Wayne.”

  His manner, both startled and amused, reminded me of my father.

  I said, I thought the movie was insulting. It was so simple, and so crude. If I’d been a Native American, I would be furious. If I’d been a woman—

  But of course, I was a woman.

  Wolfman regarded me with a quizzical sort of admiration. You could see he was a man who liked being surprised. In a lowered voice, though no one was likely to overhear us, he said, “You’ll get used to intellectual ‘insult,’ my dear. If you see enough TV and movies in the Happy Place.”

  Not wanting to leave my ranting subject I was saying how the women’s faces were so artificial. And the way the Indians were shot off their horses, screaming as they fell. And the awful “musical score” that ruined every scene . . .

  “No one behaved in the slightest way convincing. No one even looked convincing.”

  Wolfman said, “Movies aren’t about the way people look, ‘Mary Ellen.’ Movies are about our perceptions of them.”

  What this meant, I didn’t understand. But I thought that I would ponder it, instead of asking Wolfman to explain.

  “You could do one of your behavioral experiments, following a western. Ask people questions with multiple answers, and you’d see that their bias against Indians has increased, and their general antagonism. Seeing so many people shot off horses, the viewers would want to shoot, too.”

  Like Wolfman’s brightest student I spoke.

  Wolfman laughed as if my idea was too fanciful: How could you establish that “bias” had increased? For all you knew, bias might have decreased. And how could you establish what had caused an effect, the movie alone, or other factors? Yet, Wolfman conceded that such an experiment could be revealing—except attitudes are not “behavior” and can’t be measured.

  Excitedly I said, “You could administer two experiments, one a few weeks before the movie, and one immediately after the movie. And why isn’t a thought ‘behavior’? It takes place in the brain—you could probably see it. Some sort of X-ray.”

  My head was feeling blurry. I was blundering into the “censored” area, I think—remembering something that, in January 1960, did not yet exist in experimental psychological research, and could not be articulated.

  “Thoughts can’t be X-rayed, Mary Ellen. Not yet.”

  “Well—not yet.”

  We were speaking quickly, quietly. I would almost have thought that I’d clutched at Wolfman’s hand, to keep him from running after his friends, and away from me.

  For I was remembering—my brain had been scanned. A sequence of images had been made of my brain, to determine if I was lying or not.

  (Hadn’t this happened? In the Youth Disciplinary Division, Homeland Security?)

  Wolfman was frowning, working his mouth in a way to signal me—No more! Stop.

  An alarmed look had come into his face. Wolfman’s brashness was calculated, and mine was—only just brash.

  Quickly Wolfman walked away, without waiting for me to come with him.

  I was left alone in the little movie theater, deserted except for the Film Society officers who were shutting things down. It seemed to me that quizzically—pointedly—they were observing me, but I did not meet their gaze, and quickly left.

  A few minutes later I saw, outside, on the snowy walk in front of the building, the woman with the stark staring eyes, still with her friends, and now Ira Wolfman had caught up with them. In a loose group they walked off toward Moore Street for a drink in one of the pubs.

  I did not follow. I wouldn’t have given Wolfman the satisfaction.

  The Test

  Hurriedly dressing in the dark. I did not want to disturb my roommates. My thoughts were preoccupied with Wolfman, which was not a good thing—my thoughts should have been preoccupied with the upcoming psychology exam.

  It was difficult to eat, so early. It was difficult to force down food. But if I did not eat breakfast, by 9:30 A.M. I would be famished. My eyesight would grow blurred. My mental capacity would be affected.

  I brought my notebook with me. I would study in the dining hall, as I ate breakfast.

  In the brightly lit dining hall there were very few students at 7:05 A.M. These were dark-skinned “foreign” students who sat together at a table near one of the windows, usually amid a sea of Caucasians except, at this early hour, the dining hall was near-deserted.

  ST5 or ST6. A rare sight at Wainscotia.

  The foreign students were not undergraduates but graduate students in such subjects as physics, chemistry, engineering. They were exclusively male. Their eyes, lighting onto me, registered something tentative and marginal in me, that was akin to their own sense of estrangement. Once or twice, the young men had beckoned to me to come sit with them; but I’d pretended not to have seen.

  In their own countries, it was said, male and female did not so easily intermingle. Not before marriage. In beckoning to me the young “foreign” men excited themselves, testing the limits of their taboo. I felt dismay and dread, to be so considered, in their eyes, as an object of their (male) perception.

  Especially this morning as I passed along the cafeteria line, I felt their eyes upon me. They did not seem so friendly. I fumbled placing on my tray a small glass of orange juice, a ten-cent waxed container of milk, a five-ounce box of cereal, two pieces of white-bread toast . . .

  The smell of breakfast-food made my mouth water. I never realized how hungry I was until I smelled food.

  Adriane! Is it—Adriane!

  Adriane come sit with us.

  (I didn’t hear this.)

  (Did I hear this?)

  (No. I did not hear this.)

  Pushing the tray along, and a roaring in my ears. The cafeteria worker who punched my meal ticket, a heavyset black woman with kindly creases in her face, asked if I was all right?—or maybe did I want to sit down, for a minute?

  I must have seemed confused. I didn’t seem to know how to answer her.

  T
he woman took the tray from me, so that I wouldn’t drop it. She set it on the nearest table, which was empty.

  This all right, honey? You be fine here.

  The roaring in my ears was near-deafening. I could not bear to look at the table of “foreign” students who were looking at me, and who seemed to recognize me.

  They, too, were Exiles in Wainscotia. That had to be the explanation.

  I drank a small mouthful of the orange juice, which tasted as if laced with turpentine. I could not manage to open the waxed milk-container. I ate some of the cereal, dry out of the box. The pieces of toast I cleverly wrapped in paper napkins to take with me, for the morning’s ordeal.

  I’d been in the dining hall less than ten minutes. When I left a half-dozen students were entering, stamping snow off their boots. These, too, were dark-skinned—“foreign.” They were exclusively male. I saw their malicious eyes, savage-eyes, like the eyes of the doomed Indians in the western, whose fate it was to be shot off their horses. They smiled at me, and said something to me, words I couldn’t quite hear, which I chose to believe were friendly.

  In their wake I heard Adriane? Adriane?

  Slightly mocking, ululating—Ad-riane?

  So desperately I fled, I slipped on the icy pavement, and fell hard, the breath knocked out of me; but in the same instant I managed to scramble to my feet, and ran back to Acrady Cottage.

  IF I’D HAD A TELEPHONE NUMBER for Ira Wolfman I would have called him. I’d have cried into the receiver There are other Exiles here! They know me.

  But then, a few minutes later, in a less hysterical state I thought that perhaps this wasn’t the case: the dark-skinned young men were not actual students but virtual images, operated by an agent in NAS-23 as military and domestic drones were operated, at great distance, to confuse and terrify me; but primarily to tempt me into acknowledging them, and identifying myself to them, in violation of The Instructions.

  That is, it had been a test. The first such test (so far as I knew) since I’d arrived in Zone 9.

  If I’d spoken with them, if I’d acknowledged myself as Adriane Strohl, this would have constituted grounds for “vaporization”—on the spot.

  The Exam

  Discuss, in 750–1,000 words, the principles, techniques, and significance of Behaviorism in 20th-century psychology, and its possible and probable social applications.

  The exam was several pages long, stapled together.

  More than two hundred somber-faced Psych 101 students, in rows of desks in the university gym.

  Proctors prowled the large echoing space, to discourage cheating.

  (Yet, cheating in such large lecture courses was known to be “rampant” at Wainscotia. Almost, there was a tradition of such cheating at Wainscotia, the more brazen the more celebrated, especially by fraternity men, alongside a tradition of good citizenship, honor, integrity, and school pride.)

  (At Pennsboro High no one cheated. Surveillance cameras and monitors were everywhere. And no one wanted to get a really high grade, in any case.)

  Quickly I skimmed the exam. My heartbeat was pleasantly quickened.

  I thought—Around me, the Skinner box materializes.

  My initial impression of the exam was that there was nothing here that I didn’t know intimately. For I had studied, studied, and studied like a rat in a maze who keeps running in hope of a reward even after the reward has been removed from the maze.

  I considered the essay question which was both disappointing and provocative. I thought—I can write something original, and “analytical.” Wolfman would wish this.

  If I answered the questions with the obvious answers, like a creature in a Skinnerian experiment, I would receive a grade of perhaps 100 percent—no one taking the exam on this day was likely to receive a higher grade. But if I experimented with the essay question, for instance, a tracing of Darwinian evolutionary thought with regard to B. F. Skinner, and something of the historical background of behaviorism, before Skinner, I could say something unexpected, and interesting.

  Wolfman will recognize my writing. Wolfman will be impressed.

  He’d cautioned me not to write more than I needed to write. Not to range beyond the narrow scope of the course. But I was sure he’d only meant to protect me.

  I took approximately twenty minutes to answer the fifty multiple-choice questions. Following A. J. Axel’s eccentric manner of testing, the multiple-choice questions were not conventional. In each, you were asked to choose the single “correct” statement—or the single “incorrect” statement—of four statements. In this way, the tester was testing not only the student’s knowledge of the subject but also the student’s mental agility. You could know the “correct” answer but not feel confident about choosing it because of the other, competing statements. Perhaps this was unfair?—it was distinctly Skinnerian.

  Around me, my classmates were shifting in their desks, sighing, running their fingers through their hair. These were laboratory rats being run through a maze!

  Yet, there was nothing in the exam that had not been set forth clearly, and repeatedly, in Professor Axel’s lectures. If the students had been receptive, passive vessels for information, they’d been programmed to give the correct answers now. We were the pigeons and rats of Skinner’s experiments, behaving in ways to assure rewards and not punishments.

  Something in me rebelled against this limitation—the tyranny of merely correct answers!

  In my logic course I had wanted to ask our professor if it was possible that x could be both x and non-x simultaneously—but I’d known that my question would have been greeted with a look of startled concern, as one might greet the ravings of a lunatic.

  In life, it is (invariably) the case that x is both x and non-x simultaneously. But in formal logic, no.

  Your sentence is to surrender to Zone 9. You must not resist.

  It was Wolfman’s voice, in warning.

  There was Wolfman in another part of the gym. Restless on his feet. Fortunately he wasn’t assigned to my quadrant of the gym.

  Wolfman knew, I could write a perfect essay. But Wolfman deserved better, if he was going to read/grade my exam. He would want to think highly of me. If only in secret, he would want to feel pride.

  Since the incident in the dining hall I’d been feeling excitement, apprehension. Like one who has narrowly escaped with her life, I felt both relief and restlessness.

  I would write an “original” essay of 1,001 words! I smiled to think this.

  I would write an essay that would begin with several questions: What is “free will”? What is “The Law of Effect”? What is entelechy? What is “mind”? What is “the problem of imitation”?—Is there a “natural selection” of thought? and then I would answer the questions, or rather, I would weave together provisional answers in a complex statement. I would refer to the history of behaviorism only in passing. I would not waste time stating obvious facts. I would be ambiguous, purposefully unclear. I would be highly critical of B. F. Skinner whom I would compare with the German researcher Driesch whose concept of animal vitalism allowed for something like a “soul” in both animals and human beings. I would write also of John Watson, Skinner’s precursor, who’d made important discoveries in childhood conditioning, and whose boast of having the power to “create” any sort of human being out of rough, raw materials was thrilling, as Watson’s behaviorism seemed to repudiate any sort of fatalistic/genetic determinism. And I would write about Darwin—of course. Charles Darwin was one of Wolfman’s scientist-heroes.

  Then—midway in the essay—a brilliant idea came to me: I would write in the voice of a maze-rat!

  I would deal with the riddle of subjectivity from the point of view of the (hapless, powerless) subject. Whether “interior” states are in fact measurable as exterior states. How to measure the seemingly immeasurable. Can a shadow be dismissed as non-existent, because it has no weight? Yet, a shadow has visual properties. A shadow can be perceived. Is there something inside the b
rain that receives, organizes, and interprets sensory perceptions? Is this something the “self”—is this “self” the “soul”?

  I hadn’t time to return to the beginning of my essay, to make the rat-voice consistent. I would hope that Wolfman would smile, and be impressed.

  So deeply immersed in my maze-rat essay, like a rat in the innermost depths of a maze, I was shocked when proctors announced that there were just five minutes remaining before blue books had to be turned in—already, it was 10:25 A.M. But I wasn’t finished!

  Heedlessly, thrillingly, like one plunging down a steep hill, and not yet at the foot of the hill, I’d covered a dozen pages in the blue book, I’d written more than 1,001 words, I was sure; I’d intended to go back and edit what I’d written, and I’d meant to insert several important footnotes . . . Though the gym was not overheated, I’d begun sweating inside my clothes. I glanced around for Wolfman but didn’t see him—he must have been at the rear of the gym, behind me and out of sight.

  Three more minutes!

  To my dismay I saw that my “original”—“brilliant”—essay hadn’t turned out as I’d hoped. It was too ambitious—too diffuse. It was rather a précis for a fifty-page paper—a critique of behaviorism. In the rat-voice I’d digressed onto a secondary issue, the “social consequences” of behaviorism, and realized too late that I had lost precious time. I had neglected to set down the principles of behaviorism—these were so elementary, and so often repeated! I could not see the point of setting down what was obvious. My head was aching from tension, and from a lack of sleep. My thoughts were becoming jumbled like laundry in a dryer. I could not escape the accusing eyes of the “foreign” students who knew me as one of them, unless the “foreign” students were agents of the State. (Or were they but “virtual” images? I had not approached them to see if, horribly, I might have been able to pass my hand through one of them as the others looked on, snickering.) One lengthy paragraph, on page six of the blue book, a paraphrase of several passages from Skinner, had been x’d out by error, in my hasty editing; I saw now that the paragraph was required for my argument, and could not think how to eradicate the effect of the X. I’d memorized the passage from Skinner, or anyway most of the passage, which I’d read independently of our textbook, in a primary work, Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior (1953):