Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  When he was alone Wolfman hiked for miles. His legs were ropey with muscle. When we were together usually we hiked for no more than two miles, along a looping trail through snowy hills. Many of the trees in the arboretum were identified with little plaques so a hike in the arboretum was educational, like prowling through the Museum of Natural History; though after a snowfall the plaques identifying the trees were likely to be obscured. Often after a snowfall the arboretum wasn’t immediately plowed and so, hiking there, as Wolfman insisted, we had to make our way in knee-high boots along the trails that were difficult even to discern when covered with snow. It was my fear—(Wolfman laughed at this fear)—that we might go off-course, and unintentionally violate The Instructions, that forbade EIs to go more than ten miles from their epicenters; Wolfman thought it was ridiculous to imagine we could hike so far unintentionally, and even so, if we did, Wolfman doubted that there would be consequences.

  It was Wolfman’s belief that outdoor settings were “safer” than indoors, generally; the vast reaches of the arboretum were safer than the university campus; though no place was as safe from surveillance as the nuclear bomb shelter beneath Van Buren Museum, where it was certain NAS surveillance couldn’t reach.

  Initially I’d had no reason to doubt Wolfman. When he’d led me down into the bomb shelter I’d been so astonished, so intimidated, I had not been capable of thinking clearly. But in subsequent weeks I’d come to wonder how Wolfman knew what he claimed to know about surveillance systems in faraway NAS-23, beamed at Wainscotia, Wisconsin.

  In a bemused undertone Wolfman told me: “Their security isn’t perfect—NAS. We’re not continuously on their radar. They want EIs to think that they know everything about us, but they can’t possibly. For one thing, and this is basic, Wainscotia isn’t wired. There’s no cyberspace here. There’s no grid. It’s like ‘atoms and the void’—preceding creation. They may have agents here, but they can’t have many. Back home, in our time, it’s taken for granted that everything is ‘monitored’—every cell phone or computer transaction, anything electronic. We take for granted that we’re being recorded—like lab animals in cages, who’ve been born into captivity. But Zone Nine is very different. That’s why they call it the ‘Happy Place.’”

  But—who called Zone 9 the Happy Place? I didn’t understand.

  “And the connection between ‘future’ and ‘past’ is tenuous. It isn’t ‘Big Brother is watching you’—not at all. It’s my theory that the aperture could shut down—the connection could snap like a rubber band—they could lose us, and never see us again.”

  This was not altogether comforting to me. If I understood Wolfman correctly.

  “You mean—we would never return home? We would be permanently exiled here?”

  Wolfman laughed. “Yes, it’s pretty suffocating here—our ‘hotbed of mediocrity.’ But the alternative is not so obviously superior, is it?”

  I wanted to protest—I missed my parents. I loved my parents and wanted desperately to see them again—I hadn’t been allowed even to say good-bye . . .

  Wolfman hadn’t left behind anyone he’d loved much, evidently. Or, if he had, his Exile had been so long, his feelings had atrophied.

  “Something could very easily happen in NAS, to render the Government powerless. Ordinary citizens are unaware that there are contentions within NAS—the president has his faction within the Patriot Party but there are other factions, too. There are secret dissenters, rivals. There are military uprisings that are quelled—or maybe not. In this case, it would be a ‘cyberspace’ uprising—whoever has control of the computers has control of NAS. The so-called leaders of NAS are invisible to us but hardly to one another. Their ‘power’ depends upon electric power. It’s the most elemental source of power, generating a vast computer-system. It’s all generated by wind now but it isn’t foolproof and one day, the entire structure could just go down.”

  Such rapture in Wolfman’s voice, I knew that he had fantasies of returning to NAS in triumph. The bright brash rebel-Exile who returns, overcomes his enemies, takes away their power and takes their place.

  I wondered what Wolfman’s role had been in NAS-23. Had he been more involved in the Government than he’d told me? Clearly he was of a caste higher than my parents’—my father was an intelligent man but lacked the confidence of Ira Wolfman, even in Exile.

  Half-pleading I said, “I wish you wouldn’t say those things, Ira. I—I want to go back . . .”

  “Yes, they control you in exactly that way, Adriane. All ‘Exiles’ think they yearn for home—until they return to it.”

  “That’s a—a terrible thing to say, Ira . . .”

  “Why? Isn’t it true?”

  “I love my parents, I m-miss them . . .”

  On the verge of tears. Throat shut up tight.

  Didn’t want to think that this might be true, to a degree. Painful, how much of what Wolfman said was true. To a degree.

  OFTEN AS A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT I’d been moody, sad, angry, even despondent—so trapped by the perimeters of my life, and my parents’ lives. I’d felt sorry for my parents and (maybe) impatient with them, as a child might be impatient with her parents, unable to comprehend the complexities of their lives.

  To return to a variant of that life, knowing what I knew now of the power of the State, would be difficult.

  Yet, I was feeling elated suddenly. Wolfman had called me “Adriane.”

  I heard love in his voice, when he called me this forbidden name. I heard tenderness, respect, regard, concern—friendship and protectiveness. Of course I also heard amusement, condescension.

  I heard intimacy. This was the most precious gift to one in Exile.

  Now that I was no longer his undergraduate student Wolfman did treat me slightly differently, as if I were more adult. In the spring of 1960 I was enrolled in five new courses but I was not continuing with Psychology 102, not just yet.

  Wolfman, too, thought it was a good idea that I wasn’t continuing the course this semester. If I’d had a different quiz instructor Wolfman would have been overly curious about my work for this person, and how he was grading me; and if I’d been assigned to Wolfman a second time, our relationship would have been a strain to both of us.

  (I did admire Wolfman for having read my final exam “blindly” and for having graded me as honestly as he had. I’d been hurt—of course—for we always want to be assured that we are special; but Wolfman had certainly done the right thing. He had not compromised his academic standards for even a fellow EI. He had not made me feel beholden to him.)

  I said: “You call me ‘Adriane’—you know my true name. But you have never told me your true name.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But—why not?”

  “My name is what you call me, Adriane. Anything you call me—that’s my name. My birth name is of no significance.”

  “But—why can’t I know it? You know mine.”

  “I’ve grown to fit ‘Ira Wolfman.’ I think I might prefer it, as a name to attach to my publications. And in any case it’s close enough to my original name.”

  “Which is closer—‘Ira’? Or ‘Wolfman’?”

  “Both.”

  “Is ‘Wolfman’ a—Jewish name?”

  Wolfman laughed at this. Telling me that yes it was, but no, not, rather an “Anglo approximation” of a Russian-Jewish name back in the early twentieth century.

  Despite the deep snow (which no other hikers had yet penetrated) Wolfman had been increasing his pace by degrees. It was a habit of his—I didn’t want to think that it was a stratagem—walking in front of me on a trail so that my breath was taken up with the effort of following him and not with the effort of speaking with him.

  Several times I staggered in the snow. My heartbeat began to hurt. I was beginning to be overwarm inside the shabby fleece-lined jacket.

  Wolfman don’t leave me! Wolfman please protect me.

  High overhead the sky was a bright blue like china
and when we passed beneath trees, dark-winged birds fluttered in the highest branches, calling to us in hoarse cries, like crows, or starlings, with indignant yellow eyes.

  AND SOMETIMES, we met at the Rampike Street Laundromat.

  Warm-yeasty smells of the Laundromat. Soft collapsing sounds of laundry tossing in the dryers. In this era before cell phones the place was often quiet even when relatively crowded for the clientele was mainly graduate students, who brought their work with them. (Most undergraduates had access to washers and dryers in their residences. Acrady Cottage had these, in the dank basement, but I preferred the more impersonal Laundromat where I might meet Ira Wolfman.)

  This was a place of refuge, it seemed. There was a soothing and dreamlike air here. You would not ever be “vaporized” in the Rampike Street Laundromat, such a thought was preposterous.

  Initially we’d met by accident at the Laundromat. But ever after that I’d contrived for us to meet.

  I’d offered to iron Wolfman’s cotton shirts damp from the Laundromat. This was not an era before wash-and-wear fabrics but such fabrics were considered cheap, and were in fact cheap. Cotton and linen were more formal, and more desirable. Wolfman had a half-dozen long-sleeved cotton dress shirts which he wore when he lectured. When he wore a tie he loosened it soon after lecturing and, as soon as he was off campus, pulled it off saying he felt choked—“Literally.”

  It was a novelty—ironing! I’d seen advertisements on the Acrady TV. “Housewives” happily ironing their husbands’ shirts.

  In Wolfman’s sparely furnished three-room apartment on Myrtle Street there was, kept folded upright in a closet, an ironing board with a badly scorched covering, and a shiny iron so heavy it nearly fell from my hand the first time I lifted it. (The ironing board came with the furnished apartment.) These were artifacts of an old, vanished America of which I’d had but a glimmering awareness for I’d never seen my mother “ironing”—we’d lived in a post-cotton era, of quick-drying and wrinkle-less fabrics.

  I wondered what my mother would have thought of her daughter wielding a heavy iron like a pioneer woman! Yet—I would have liked to assure her—there was some small comfort in the task.

  If you love the task. If the shirts belong to someone you love. If you are not forced to “iron,” but have chosen to “iron.”

  In NAS-23 there were households in higher-caste neighborhoods in which servants were employed. In some households, a team of servants. These were usually of the IS (Indentured Servants) caste which meant desperate individuals who, having no money, and being very likely in debt, entered into contractual relationships with employers for a prescribed number of years; many, indeed most, but not all of the IS were ST5 or lower: dark-skinned. You would not call these slaves, which was an offensive term, not even indentured servants, but simply “servants.”

  To this Wolfman observed Hey! I didn’t make you my friend to make you my servant. I’m not colonizing you, Adriane.

  Still Wolfman appreciated the ironed shirts. Otherwise he’d have had to take his shirts to a laundry, which was expensive and a nuisance. (It seemed that Wolfman, for all his skill as an experimental psychologist, wasn’t capable of ironing his own shirts. Why was this? A masculine deficit?) And yes, Wolfman appreciated my cleaning dishes he’d left to soak for days in the sink of his “kitchenette.” And to scour the sink itself, and put away things in cupboards and drawers.

  Colonize. This was an ambiguous term.

  For the colonized might be complicit in such an arrangement. In Skinner’s rat mazes the rats soon learned that treats awaited them when they ran the gauntlet correctly. And so, why not run? Why prefer being locked in a cage?

  And we prepared meals together, Wolfman and me. And ate meals together.

  I waited for Wolfman to kiss me more forcibly, to suck at my lips so that my breath was drawn from me. I waited for him to run his hands over my body which was eel-like and yearning, that would have wrapped itself around him if he had. I waited.

  Yet we lay on Wolfman’s bed, in the semi-dark. Quietly talking, or not talking.

  So that I thought—This is the happiest I can be. I want this never to end.

  Listening to Wolfman’s favored music, on what he called long-playing records: symphonies of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler. In his own time, growing up in New York City of the Reconstituted North American States, he’d had virtually no contact with classical music but only the electronically driven post-rap “heavy metal” music of his generation which was generic and anonymous.

  It was a surprise to him, Wolfman said, to discover music that was labyrinthine like thinking and feeling commingled. Music that didn’t need to be deafening to penetrate the soul.

  (Did Wolfman, a scientist, really use the term “soul”? I think he did—unconsciously. For often Wolfman spoke in extravagant ways when feeling, and not just thinking, was involved.)

  Wolfman had been kindly, asking me to speak about my life. Less easily, he spoke of his own.

  There were secrets in Wolfman’s life, I had to suppose. He was older than I was by a decade, at least—of course, more secrets would have accrued.

  One evening he told me about his parents. His voice trembled with childlike wonder and another, less definable emotion—a kind of elation verging upon terror.

  He had not seen much of his “famous” parents while growing up, he said. But he’d admired them—very much—for they’d been distinguished research scientists at the (former) Columbia University Medical Institute, epidemiologists whose specialties were bacterial diseases of the tropics. Unfortunately, at about the time Wolfman had begun middle school, his parents’ highly publicized findings brought them to the attention of the Defense Strategies Department; soon then they were drafted into the MRP (Military Research Program) where their (secret, classified) assignment was the cultivating of strands of virulent bacteria to be “weaponized.” Their work of several years was with a particular species of bacteria that could exist only within a narrow environment, to be targeted by the military in case of a declaration of war with one of NAS’s many enemies. (“As you know, ‘Declaration of War’ is ex post facto since the War in the Middle East,” Wolfman said dryly. “It’s so much wiser to declare the war after it has begun, not before.”)

  At first Wolfman’s parents, particularly his mother, had been upset by the nature of their new research; then by degrees they were drawn into the competition and excitement of the work-team at MRP, which employed the most prestigious research scientists in the country. “My parents received all sorts of special perks including a rent-free condominium overlooking the Hudson River, a car and a driver, joint election to the National Academy of Sciences, and virtually unlimited funding for their research; also, for me, their only child, admission to the most elite prep schools though I’d never been a ‘good citizen’ as a student, and had actual demerit marks on my record. As it was, I went to three private schools before I finally managed to graduate. I’d told you, Adriane, that I’d been a computer hacker in middle school. I also created video games, several of which were bought by Nightmare Works, Inc., when I was twelve, and became modest best sellers, and several of which were considered so politically dangerous, and so obscene, they were banned. I was the Mystery Teen who’d penetrated security at Congress in December, NAS-11, and sent a flotilla of toy ‘drones’ into the legislators’ midst as they were debating one or another lobbyists’ bill—you probably wouldn’t remember, you were too young at the time. But it was everywhere in the media. It was a real scandal—if a teenaged kid could breach congressional security with toy domestic drones what about our enemies with their ‘sophisticated weaponry’?—everywhere online and on TV.”

  Wolfman laughed. He was drinking beer from a can, set atop a copy of a journal called Brain on his bedside table. I was feeling dismay at what he’d told me about his parents but said nothing to Wolfman.

  “The legislators panicked of course—stampeded and trampled one another in their desperation
to get out. The few females in the room, legislators and aides, were stomped and injured. Fortunately, no one was killed. I’d planned to perfection the onslaught of the toy drones—but hadn’t given much thought to what would follow. That’s a kid’s brain, typically—no matter how bright, the kid is immature. Immediately, I stopped hacking for months, not wanting to get caught. My parents knew nothing about my ‘experiments’—they were wholly innocent. I wouldn’t have been tracked by FCS—Forensic Cyberspace Security—except a ‘friend’ informed on me. By this time I was a freshman at NAS-Cambridge—formerly Harvard. My parents tried to intervene for me but failed. Unlike you, I was incarcerated in a Youth Facility for a while—the Government was hoping to co-opt me in one of their ‘defense security’ programs but I refused.” Wolfman swallowed hard, and fell silent.

  Lying beside Wolfman, just lightly touching him, the side of my upper body, the side of my legs, I held my breath wondering what he was not saying.

  I asked Wolfman about his parents: Had he been close to them? Had they confided in him? What had he said to them, the last time he’d seen them? (For in my case the last time I’d seen my parents I had had no idea that it would be the last time. I was sick with regret that I’d probably been my usual moody self-absorbed self, and could not even clearly remember what we’d said to each other. Oh, terrible!) Did he know if they’d been arrested too, in connection with his arrest? Did he know what—if anything—had happened to them after he’d been arrested?

  Wolfman didn’t answer immediately. Wolfman gave the impression of one who is searching his mind, trying to recall, like a man with a wide rake dragging the rake along the ground.

  “I—I think—they are all right. I think so.”

  Then, “Well—my mother suffered some sort of breakdown, and had to be hospitalized in a NAS facility in Bethesda, Maryland. This was after my arrest. While I was incarcerated.”

  I asked Wolfman if he’d seen his mother, since his arrest? If she was still hospitalized?

  “I—I’m sure my mother isn’t hospitalized after so long. I’ve never heard—never been informed—exactly what happened to her, or even if—if she’s still alive.”