Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I asked Wolfman if the interrogators had tried to make him confess to having been “influenced” by his parents?—“That’s what they tried with me.”

  “No.”

  Wolfman’s answer came too quickly. I could feel heat lifting from his skin as he lay beside me, only part-consciously aware of me, staring at the ceiling.

  “I—I do miss my parents. I guess. Just now, I could ‘see’ them—almost—as I hadn’t seen them in years.” Wolfman began trembling. I was shocked, but I held him tightly. It had not been the case in my life, that I’d had the opportunity to comfort others.

  I thought—I can love him more than he knows. I am strong enough to love for him, too.

  Wolfman said, “I was ‘drafted’ too—but managed to be phased out. Not at DSD but CSD—Computational Strategies Division—a younger generation, with some extreme personalities. Of course, they’d all been co-opted. No one so vindictive as those who’ve been co-opted by the enemy. For much of their energy is fueled by shame.”

  I wondered what Wolfman meant by this? But I didn’t feel comfortable about asking him.

  “What happened was—it was a stupid mistake on my part. Inadvertently I’d texted a friend, using a code we’d devised, which aroused suspicion . . .”

  Wolfman was saddened. Wolfman couldn’t continue.

  Wolfman pressed his face against my neck and we lay together in silence comforting each other in our separateness, our ignorance.

  “I love you.”

  I spoke softly, tentatively. So quietly, Wolfman could pretend not to hear.

  Sane

  The voices were pleading yet bold: “Come join us! March with us.”

  And: “Save your life! The lives of your loved ones! Save the life of the Earth! March with us.”

  A chorus: “Come join us! March with us. Come join us! March with us. S-A-N-E—now!”

  But I held back. I was very frightened.

  I remembered—my father had been arrested at a public demonstration when he’d been in his mid-twenties. He’d paid for the remainder of his life for that single impulsive act of curiosity and sympathy.

  And my uncle Toby—he’d paid with his life.

  A large rowdy crowd had gathered in front of the university chapel, spilling onto the snowy campus green. Was this a spontaneous sports rally? A parade? The mood of the crowd didn’t appear to be cheerful or festive but rather angry, jeering. Were they heckling marchers? But why were they heckling marchers? In Wainscotia everyone was so friendly.

  Dirt-tinged snow lay in heaps beside the walks and drives. It was an overcast afternoon in March 1960. On my way to class I’d been hearing voices—shouts—a sound of agitation and derision that was upsetting in this place, for it was unusual. Only on Saturday afternoons in the football stadium, in football season, did such excited calls and cries waft across the campus, or on weekend nights on the Hill, where fraternity and sorority houses glared with festive lights.

  My instinct was to turn the other way. I could take a back-way to Masson Hall, to my literature class, and avoid the commotion.

  Yet somehow I found myself pressing forward. Curiosity drew me, and a sense that, if something was happening on campus, I would want to know what it was, to discuss it with Wolfman. Through each day I accumulated incidents, episodes, paradoxes and riddles to present to Wolfman for his reaction. For I wanted to entertain and intrigue Wolfman, badly I wanted to be essential to the man’s life.

  Go home! God-damn Commies go back home to Russia!

  I saw that the loose, rowdy crowd had surrounded a small group of marchers who’d been making their way from the chapel to the administration building across the quad. Just as I’d arrived the marchers had had to halt midway. There were about thirty of them, ringed in by as many as two hundred individuals of whom most appeared to be vociferous male undergraduates. The marchers were carrying picket signs, swords in vivid red letters—

  SANE

  NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR A

  SANE NUCLEAR POLICY

  SANE

  NUCLEAR TESTING—

  STOP STOCKPILING WAR

  Demonstrators for peace! They were protesting U.S. nuclear experimentation in Nevada and in the South Pacific—protesting war. I had heard of this newly formed national organization, in fact Wolfman had spoken of it with reserved admiration, but I’d never met anyone who belonged to it. I had never seen a “peace march” before.

  The hostile jeers of the crowd, raised fists and angry faces—these were shocking to me. Commies! Traitors! Go back to Russia, you don’t like it here.

  How contorted with hatred, the usual bland-white midwestern faces, and how shiny their eyes with rage!—you could not comprehend the power of so small a gathering of protesters, the effect of their handmade picket signs, to rouse such emotion.

  Campus security guards were holding back the hecklers and simultaneously urging the SANE marchers to leave the area. Security vans had arrived to carry the marchers away in safety. Yet, the SANE protesters resisted. Bravely and stubbornly, they resisted. They were strangers to me though it would be revealed, in the student newspaper, that several protesters were on the Wainscotia faculty, and several were graduate students; most of the protesters were from Milwaukee and Chicago. They ranged in age from mid-twenties to mid-sixties or older. Many white-haired, and a scattering of bearded men. The elders appeared to be the leaders. A revelation to me—at least one-third of the protesters were female.

  Eagerly I looked but saw no one I knew—at first, I’d thought that Ira Wolfman might be among them. (He wasn’t. I felt relief yet also disappointment.)

  The crowd wasn’t dispersing, and the marchers remained where they were, prevented from marching across the quad but brandishing their handmade signs aloft. Their chanting was drowned out by the shouts of the crowd. When they passed out pamphlets most of the pamphlets were taken rudely from them, torn and tossed down.

  I thought—How can they take such risks? How are they so brave?

  No one would be shot down or “vaporized” in Zone 9. Yet surely there were federal agents, F.B.I. informers, in Wainscotia. I’d learned from Wolfman of the Cold War, the anti-Communist hysteria, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign of slander, innuendo, and persecution. To be anti-war, anti-weapons, anti-nuclear was to risk being persecuted as a Communist in 1960 though there was, legally, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in the United States at this time.

  Subsequently, sometime in the troubled years post-9/11, these freedoms were curtailed, or banished outright. It had happened easily, Dad had said—at the time, few had seemed to notice.

  Many of the hecklers were fraternity boys. A scattering of agitated girls. To my dismay I saw my roommate Hilda among them. And others from Acrady Cottage. Their faces were baffled, stern, indignant. They were “scholarship girls”—how did they perceive the SANE marchers as threats? Several young men in ROTC uniforms were shouting at the marchers, approaching them in a threatening manner.

  Badly I wanted to support the SANE marchers. I felt sympathy for them, and shame that the Wainscotia students were so hostile, and so ignorant. I thought that the marchers must be nervous or anxious, in this chaotic place, yet they appeared calm, and they were certainly courageous.

  A voice bellowed through a bullhorn—This is University Security! We are asking you to evacuate the quadrangle! Evacuate the quadrangle immediately! Everybody—no exceptions!

  The noisy crowd was beginning to back away if not disperse. The marchers were smiling in relief. Some, in giddy relief. Several young women sighted me, and must have seen the sympathy in my face for they began chanting, “Come join us! March with us! Save your life! March with us!”—appealing to those of us who hadn’t shaken fists at them or turned away in disgust.

  Yet I held back. I had not the courage, or the recklessness . . .

  “March with us! Save your life!”

  As the marchers began moving away, tramping through the dirtied snow, I followed after the
m. No one could hear me, I think, but I was calling to them, trying to tell them that I was sympathetic with their ideas for war was “evil”; I told them that they were very brave and that I respected them—“Where I come from, people can’t protest the way you are doing.”

  (Oh, what was I saying? Fortunately in the din and confusion no one heard me.)

  One of the male marchers approached me. Was this someone I was supposed to know, from one of my classes? A burly youngish man built like a wrestler with coarse flyaway hair, a scruffy beard, urgent eyes. Evidently he was one of the SANE leaders—I’d seen him being confronted by the head of the campus security police. Unexpectedly he smiled at me—“Hey! Hello! You and I know each other—yes?”

  “We do?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name is”—I faltered, for the name seemed so obviously fraudulent—“‘Mary Ellen Enright.’”

  “‘Mary Ellen’—whatever. Come with us! Here’s a sign.”

  “But I can’t. I have a class . . .”

  “Hell with your class, ‘Mary Ellen’! Come with us! Save the Earth.”

  “I—I don’t think there will be a nuclear war . . .”

  Weakly I stammered this. What was I thinking of!

  The burly young man stared at me bemused.

  “‘Don’t think there will be a nuclear war’—what the hell, you don’t think there will be a nuclear war? How in hell can you say such a thing? You’re a prophet? You can see into the future? Nuclear weapons have already been used—atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and for no God-damned reason anyone can explain, Nagasaki. Why not again? Why not many times? The president is a U.S. war general, the U.S. Congress are rabid anti-Communists, there is plenty of profit to be made from the Cold War, so why not a nuclear war? How can you make such an irresponsible remark, ‘Mary Ellen’?”

  I was mortified, the burly young man stared at me with such disdain.

  I stammered an apology. I said that, even if there wasn’t a war, it was important to educate people against nuclear war. It was important to support SANE.

  “Yes! Right! Come with us! March with us!”—the young man grabbed my hand and pulled me after him; I was too surprised to resist, and he was too strong in any case. He gave me a picket sign which I brandished as the others did. I was very excited by this time, suffused with emotion. These are my friends. My family.

  I asked the young man what his name was and he said what sounded like James, Jamie.

  Now came a resurging of hostility. A swarm of yelling frat boys storming the quad from a new direction. Commie traitors! Bastards! Get the hell out of Wainscotia! The picket sign was wrenched from my fingers. Someone collided with me, hard. I found myself on the ground, in the snow. I saw only legs and feet—I heard only shouts and screams. Then, I saw the SANE regrouped marchers being escorted off the quad by security police. One of the white-haired leaders was bleeding from a cut in his forehead. The burly young man who’d given me the picket sign was running as a football player might run, aiming his right shoulder at—whoever it was, I couldn’t see.

  The crowd was breaking up another time. Sirens were deafening. Emergency vehicles were driven onto the quad. Hecklers were being pushed back. Marchers were being escorted into vans, unresisting now. Picket signs lay strewn in the snow, many of them broken. Pamphlets lay scattered and torn. The SANE demonstration of March 11, 1960, at Wainscotia State University, Wisconsin, the first such demonstration at the university in its history, had ended in a sort of stalemate after a tumultuous forty minutes.

  Back at Acrady Cottage girls looked at me in surprise as I limped inside.

  “Mary Ellen!—what on earth happened to you? Did those awful ‘SANE’ people knock you down?”

  WISHING I COULD tell my parents about the demonstration—the “march for peace.”

  No one was arrested.

  No one was beaten or (badly) bloodied.

  Had the march been a failure, or a (qualified) success?

  That there’d been a demonstration for peace at all seemed to me a wonderful thing.

  My shoulder ached where someone must have run against me to knock me down, the way guys knock one another down in football. My right knee ached from the fall. And there were scratches on both my hands. But I was elated, and anxious—as if a border had been crossed, that could not be recrossed.

  I’d limped away from the scene. I was thirty minutes late for my class. Yet I would go to class, I would not miss a single class for I was determined to be an A student here in the Happy Place, Zone 9.

  The rest of that day my eyes repeatedly glanced up, narrowed. Steeling myself for the quick-darting appearance of domestic drones en route to vaporize us all—though the year was 1960, and the setting was idyllic Wainscotia, Wisconsin.

  NUCLEAR PROTESTERS ROUTED FROM CAMPUS—next day’s banner headline in the student newspaper. Photographs of outraged Wainscotia frat boys shoving back protesters. (The burly young man built like a wrestler might have appeared in one of the photographs, seen from behind: I looked.)

  In the local newspaper, the Wainscotia Falls Journal-American, the banner headline was less friendly:

  COMMIE PICKETERS ROUTED

  FROM WSU CAMPUS

  “Outside Agitators” Blamed

  THAT EVENING, Wolfman telephoned me.

  For the first time, Wolfman telephoned me at Acrady Cottage.

  Did the girl who picked up the phone in the parlor understand what an extraordinary event this was, that Mary Ellen Enright had received a telephone call?

  Any telephone call. From anyone.

  Most remarkably, from her psychology instructor.

  Benumbed I came to the phone. I had no idea who would call me and could only think that I was being informed of something unhappy.

  I had long given up the foolish fantasy of my parents calling me.

  Dad’s voice—Hiya, kid. How’re you?

  Mom saying—Oh, Adriane. Oh . . . Bursting into tears.

  “‘Mary Ellen’? Hello.”

  No need for Ira Wolfman to introduce himself. Of course.

  “Ira . . .”

  “What did you do, this afternoon? What the hell did you do?”

  “You mean?—the SANE protest . . .”

  “How could you do such a reckless thing? Participate in a mob scene? Call attention to yourself in an act of ‘civil disobedience’? The SANE people didn’t have permission to march on campus—they were defying orders. Their request had been turned down. They’re very lucky they weren’t all arrested, taken away in vans. Their heads broken.” Wolfman paused, breathing audibly. I knew better than to try to interrupt. Relenting he said, “It’s good of them to come here. It’s foolhardy but—noble. I admire them but—look, you can’t possibly get involved. I can’t possibly get involved. There will be no nuclear holocaust—not as they are imagining it. No Russian-provoked conflagration. So, that’s that. They don’t need us.” Again Wolfman paused.

  Then: “You know there are spies here. You know that ‘Mary Ellen Enright’ is under surveillance. Everyone who participated in that demonstration will be noted in FBI files. And probably in university files.”

  “But, Ira—it isn’t against the l-law here . . .”

  “It isn’t against the law—legally. But since when does the FBI or the federal government give a damn about ‘legally’? Seeming to side with communism is perceived as treasonous.”

  “These people aren’t ‘Communists’—they are protesting nuclear weapons . . .”

  “I know what they’re ‘protesting’—for Christ’s sake. And I know that you are not Adriane Strohl here, if you want to survive.”

  Wolfman sounded disgusted with me. I could not believe how harsh his voice was.

  Stammering I told Wolfman that I hadn’t thought of all those things—I hadn’t had time. One of the protesters had handed me a sign. In fact I’d expected to see him among the SANE protesters . . .

  Now Wolfman became vehement.


  “Are you crazy? Join the marchers? Of course not! I’m up for adjudication in two years, I’d never risk resentencing.”

  “But it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”

  “The ‘right thing to do’ is to survive, Mary Ellen. You know that.”

  “I—I’m not sorry, Ira. The SANE people are very nice. I really liked them. They were courageous, and everything they said made sense about nuclear ‘stockpiling’—the ‘Cold War’—the ‘tragic lesson of Hiroshima’ . . .”

  “I told you: the nuclear holocaust never happened. You know that, so fuck this crap. Just—fuck this.”

  Now Wolfman had truly shocked me. And hung up.

  The Lonely Girl I

  Ira, forgive me! Please don’t cut yourself off from me.

  You know, I love you so much. I can’t bear to live in this place without you . . .

  These words I wrote in blue ballpoint pen on a sheet of notebook paper.

  Pleading and without dignity. Words spilling like blood from a slashed wrist.

  Dear Ira, I am sorry for having behaved “recklessly”—as you’d charged.

  Please forgive me for behaving foolishly. You are right, I should have thought more carefully of the consequences . . . that is, the consequences that might have been.

  (I’d begun to worry: What might the consequences be? Would there be consequences for “Mary Ellen Enright”—sometime in the future?)

  I don’t think it is fair to break off our friendship over this matter—I will never behave so foolishly again.

  Please don’t punish me! I think that I am “punished” enough . . .

  Though I don’t really think that I did anything other than what was the right thing to do, by showing my sympathy with the marchers—I hope you will forgive me.

  These words I wrote in days subsequent to the SANE march. Trying to compose a letter for Wolfman—an actual letter to be addressed to I. Wolfman, 433 Myrtle Street, Wainscotia Falls, Wainscotia.