Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  There. I had said it. The obvious: Wolfman’s mentor would not approve.

  “But I will be measuring behavior, Adriane,” Wolfman said irritably. “That is—exactly—precisely—what I will be doing. Do you not comprehend?”

  “But—”

  “Do you not comprehend? How important this work will be? In the history of psychology? ‘Obedience to authority’—a uniformed patriarch. Please help me, Adriane. Don’t discourage me. You could be my lab assistant, as well as my friend and companion. My kinsman. I could teach you all that I know, we could work together, a series of brilliant psychological experiments . . . Like John Watson and his graduate student, whom he eventually married.”

  For a moment I could not speak. The heat of elation lifted from Wolfman’s skin. His face was slick with perspiration. I could hear only the words—eventually married.

  “But, Ira—is this experimental work that has already been done, that you are remembering? The Instructions forbid us to—”

  “No. It is not work that has ‘already been done.’ It is, it will be, original work.”

  Wolfman was vehement. I could not challenge him.

  “Where would we do this work? Here at Wainscotia?”

  “No. Not here. Don’t be obtuse. We would need to be independent researchers. We can make our way to California, or Oregon. I have contacts there. I mean, as ‘Ira Wolfman.’ Of that other, no one but you knows. We would have to leave here. My time here is finished, in any case. In the department.”

  “But we can’t leave. We’re Exiles. We each have sentences, we can’t travel more than ten miles from . . .”

  Wolfman shrugged impatiently. Wolfman threw off my hand, where I’d been stroking his twitchy arm.

  “Fuck ‘Exile’! Fuck ‘NAS’! It’s here and now I’m concerned with. All that—phantasmagoria”—Wolfman waved his arm dismissively—“the hell with it. I think it has all evaporated—it’s gone down. The fact is, Axel isn’t happy with me any longer. He knows beforehand that I’m the son who will betray him. He’s shrewd—you can’t run rats through mazes for most of your life and not know how they will run in the future. And pigeons, exactly how they will peck. Accordingly, Axel has ‘axed’ me—as he has axed other protégés—I’ve been denied tenure. The departmental meeting was last week. They won’t even be sending my name to the president’s committee. Axel invited me to dinner at his home, to inform me. And for the last time to dinner, I’m sure—‘It was a tragic mistake on their part, Ira. I tried to intervene on your behalf, but I was outnumbered.’”

  I tried to comprehend this. Wolfman, the most promising of assistant professors in the department, the young man who’d been selected by A. J. Axel to substitute for him in his lecture course, and to work closely with him in his laboratory, had been fired from the Wainscotia psychology department?

  “Not fired, terminated. Supposedly there’s a distinction. I’m not being promoted, and I’m not getting tenure, because they perceive me as rebellious, which happens to be true. Axel has arranged for me to have two more years, however. (Just coincidentally, the terms of my so-called sentence.) But we can leave earlier, Adriane. At the end of this term.”

  All this was stunning news to me. Though I could understand Wolfman’s harsh-bitten words, I could not comprehend their meaning.

  Tried to explain to Wolfman, I didn’t think it was possible for us to leave Wainscotia. He had to know that it was forbidden to leave the “epicenter”—“It must be the same sentence, for you as for me.”

  Wolfman flung off my arm, and sat up. He didn’t want to be held now. He didn’t want female comfort, or solicitude.

  He swung his legs off the bed. We had not—yet—become lovers, and now I understood that we never would be. At least, not in this place. Not in Wolfman’s apartment on Myrtle Street.

  “If we violate The Instructions . . .”

  Wolfman laughed harshly. He was lighting another cigarette, his fourth or fifth of the evening. He flung the wooden match in the direction of an ashtray, and it fell to the floor.

  “You believed that crap? ‘Exile’? ‘Teletransportation’? ‘Zone Nine’? None of this is real, Adriane. It’s a construct.”

  “A ‘construct’? What do you mean?”

  Weakly I sat on the edge of Wolfman’s bed as Wolfman paced about the room, sucking in smoke, coughing. Rain continued to lash at the windows of the room, so thickly that a streetlight just across the street was virtually invisible except for a nova-like halo of light at its top.

  “As I’ve told you, I don’t think that NAS is monitoring EIs as they’d once done. It might be that the Government is under attack—there could be a new president, in fact—a new administration. Or a new war. You’ve been out of contact for at least eight months.” Wolfman laughed. “Maybe NAS has lost a war? Maybe one of the ‘terrorist’ enemies has conquered North America? Maybe there has been a ‘reform’ overthrow, and the old regime is gone. We wouldn’t know—maybe, we will never know. And what has it to do with us?”

  Seeing the look of confusion in my face Wolfman said, extravagantly, “Look: it’s possible to see that this is all ‘virtual’—Zone Nine. The ‘Happy Place.’ I’m your friend Ira but I’m also a researcher at CSD—Computational Strategies.”

  Now Wolfman spoke more calmly, matter-of-factly.

  He might have been explaining something to his students that was both an astonishing revelation (to the naïve) and the most obvious common sense (to one like himself).

  “You believed it! All Exiles do! Such credulity is based upon your—our—sense of guilt and inadequacy. Zone Nine is ‘virtual’—it isn’t real. As a CSD researcher I did VVS work—‘Visceral Virtual Settings’—my most ingenious project has been a replica of a state university in a small town in Wisconsin, 1959 to 1960—Wainscotia U. It doesn’t exist on any map, except the CSD map. I think it’s pretty damned impressive—built absolutely to scale, in space and in time. Did you discover any glitch? Any anachronisms? You did not—because the person who created Zone Nine is a genius in his highly competitive field—(you should see the skills of the kids coming up, as young as thirteen—killer sharks!)—and because you didn’t expect to see them. In fact, Adriane, you’re still in custody in Youth Disciplinary. You’ve never left the state of New Jersey. You’ve been there—I mean, here—for approximately eight months, in a comatose/hypnotized state. They’re feeding you through a tube, and emptying you out through a catheter and no, your parents never did get notified. They feel guilty, thinking it’s something they did to have a child taken from them.”

  I was staring at Wolfman. Speechless.

  Not just struck dumb but struck blank. Brain-blank.

  Wolfman, smiling at me slyly. Defiantly. Thinking maybe he’d gone too far?—but no, Wolfman never went too far.

  “Hey. Listen. I’m a staffer at YD, part-time. They lend me out from CSD. The challenge was to create a virtual reality appropriate for EIs in which to incarcerate you, via the microchip. The microchip is real. But nothing else is. You’ve been dreaming that you were ‘teletransported’ to a past time, absurdly—how could a past time exist? Time travel is a preposterous notion, my dear girl. How could you, so skeptical about B. F. Skinner, fail to understand that simple concept? There is no past. There is no there. For instance—if we were to ‘travel back’ in time thirty seconds, how could this be? Would we ‘travel back through’ our own bodies? And what would we encounter? Our own bodies, at an earlier age? If we traveled back an hour, eleven hours, a month, a year—our own bodies? Would we see these bodies, or would we inhabit them? Which would be ‘us’? You’ve fallen for all of this phantasmagoria, because our virtual creations are so exquisite. I’ve been particularly praised—my code name is ‘the Wolf.’ I’m especially pleased with the Van Buren Museum of Natural History and the ‘nuclear bomb shelter’ below it. Quite a joint achievement! And the pompous professors of Wainscotia—Axel, Morris, Coughland, Harrick, Stein. I know them intimately, since they are
my creations. You didn’t get to meet them all yet. It did take me a while to create Zone Nine. But I’m patient, as I am skilled at my craft. That was why I was drafted into ‘special forces’ within CSD.” Wolfman smiled at me, much pleased with himself. “And, absurd as it sounds, I truly feel protective of you, ‘Mary Ellen’—almost, at times, I’ve come to feel that I’ve created you.”

  I was stunned by Wolfman’s remarks. I could not think how to respond.

  I felt like a soft, winged thing, a moth that has been batted out of the air. Not hard enough to break its wings, but hard enough to knock it stunned to earth, and the wings slow-moving, wounded and mute in wonderment.

  In a teasing voice Wolfman said “You will never know, ‘Mary Ellen,’ will you?”

  “I—I don’t understand . . .”

  “But I’ve told you: Zone Nine is a virtual construct. Not one thing here except you, and me, is real.”

  “Ira, are you serious?”

  Wolfman spread his fingers like a magician intent upon showing that he has no hidden tricks.

  “Do you think that I’m ‘serious’? Or—what is the opposite of ‘serious’?”

  I stared at Wolfman who smiled at me with maddening insouciance. As if to prompt me, he said: “As a dreamer doesn’t know she is dreaming, so you can’t know your circumstances.”

  “But—you know, don’t you? Please . . .”

  Wolfman lay his hand on my shoulder to comfort me. In his face was an expression of both kindliness and exasperation.

  “Yes, I’m joking, Adriane. Of course. I was just running a maze—that is, exploring a possibility. If I were a cybertech staffer at CSD, instead of a teletransported EI, what I’ve told you might be plausible. Or plausible in some way. But the painful fact is, I’m at a loss to control my life in Zone Nine, just like you.” Wolfman laughed, baring his teeth in a grimace. “Maybe I did create Zone Nine but my supervisor appropriated the program and trapped me inside it! Like my parents who’d invented a biological weapon who might then have been infected by it as a part of the research . . . possibly by their own supervisor, to get rid of them once they were no longer useful. We’re trapped in our own experiments. Please don’t look so dismayed, Adriane—I’m telling the truth now. The bare, plain, irremediable truth. If Zone Nine were my invention I’d have arranged for my own freedom—and now, for yours. But I’m trapped here, in the epicenter—just like you.”

  Wolfman held out his arms, to comfort me. Sobbing I pressed myself against him.

  I could not trust him. His words had been devastating to me, even those I could not truly comprehend.

  Yet, I had no one else.

  Elopement

  Wolfman insisted that we leave Wainscotia at the end of the term.

  “No one can stop us. No one will even notice. We’ll ‘elope’—and begin a new life.”

  Elope. So long I’d waited for Wolfman to seriously love me. Or, at least to say that he loved me.

  He had not uttered the word, yet. But if he wanted me to leave Wainscotia with him, and to begin a “new life” with him, it must be understood between us that he did love me, so far as Wolfman could love another person.

  Wolfman’s plans were vague but thrilling. We would live together under assumed names, somewhere in the West. In April 1960 the United States was not yet the (Reconstituted) North American States in which all citizens were under continuous surveillance. Much of it, in the western states, was unpopulated, virtually uncharted. It had not yet been wired. There was no grid.

  “Our enemies thought to exile us in this ‘prehistoric’ place,” Wolfman said, “but in fact, the absence of technology will be our salvation. There are vast empty zones where human consciousness doesn’t intrude. We can get work of some kind when we need money. I can use my hands as well as my wits. I have friends in Berkeley who will take us in. We can prepare new documents—birth certificates, ID’s. No one will know who we are, or once were.”

  Wolfman spoke with such conviction, I could not doubt him.

  It was the end of the spring term. “Mary Ellen Enright” had completed her first year at Wainscotia, with a near-perfect grade-point average.

  Impulsively Miss Steadman hugged me when she’d received the news from the dean’s office. “All of us in Acrady Cottage are so proud of you, Mary Ellen!”

  I was embarrassed by Miss Steadman’s words. And I felt a vague shame, for my high grades had been a consequence of desperation and loneliness, and few other students could have been so motivated. My very misery had given me an unfair advantage.

  Overnight, Acrady Cottage had emptied. My roommates had departed with hugs, kisses, promises to see me in the fall—though there were no plans for us to room together again.

  In the summer term I would continue to live on campus, but in another residence. I would work at the university library five days a week. During the university’s summer session, which was an accelerated six-week period that began in late June, I would take a course in mathematics, which was a weak subject for me. (So Wolfman had advised me, months ago.) A life of routine lay before me like an unmarked calendar. I felt the comfort of such emptiness—no emotion, no anxiety. If Wolfman departed Wainscotia as he’d been threatening to do.

  Without Wolfman, I would live my life from day to day, until my sentence was completed. Could I endure this life?

  In despair I said to Wolfman, “How can I come with you, when it’s forbidden?”

  And when you’ve never said you love me.

  “I’ve told you, Adriane. No one is watching us.”

  “But—how can you be sure?”

  “Trust me.”

  Badly I wanted to trust Wolfman. His teasing words about Zone 9 as a virtual construct in which I’d been placed unknowingly had had a profound effect upon me—I woke in the night, frightened that Wolfman had been telling the truth, and that he was an agent of NAS; at other times, I was certain that he’d been joking.

  I said to Wolfman, “What is the meaning of our lives? Does psychology tell us?” and Wolfman said, “Psychology is a mirror into which we look, and see our own faces. No science can tell us why.”

  Though Wolfman had spoken disparagingly of the psychology department at Wainscotia, I understood that he’d been deeply wounded by his failure to be granted tenure, and promoted. And I understood that the reason was probably the reason he’d told me—his ideas were unacceptable to the older faculty members, particularly A. J. Axel.

  Wolfman had the idea of packing a selection of our belongings and mailing them c/o General Delivery, Berkeley, California. A half-dozen cardboard boxes filled with clothes, books, personal items, neatly taped and stamped for third-class mail.

  “But—how will we leave?”

  “We’ll leave unobtrusively. We’ll hike in the arboretum—and we’ll never return.”

  So Wolfman convinced me. Ever more, Wolfman was affectionate with me, and appealing to me as he’d rarely been in the past. His disgust with me over the matter of SANE seemed to have been totally forgotten.

  So it happened, I brought my things—a small selection of my mostly unwanted things—to Wolfman’s apartment, where we packed them into boxes as he’d planned. Wolfman was a perfectionist in taping boxes shut, making sure they were secure and snug. Then, we took them to the post office to mail to Berkeley, California.

  Did I ever think, as we hauled the boxes to the post office, that I would open them? Remove my folded clothes, my books?

  Did I ever think that Ira Wolfman and I would journey to California together, to begin a new life?

  In the days before our planned departure, I was very excited—frightened, elated. I felt both reckless and resigned.

  And Wolfman, too, seemed both reckless and resigned.

  For every time I expressed doubt of what we planned to do, Wolfman cut me off: “Adriane! Have faith in me.”

  I was very frightened at the prospect of violating The Instructions. But I was more frightened of losing Wolfman and findi
ng myself again alone in Exile.

  I thought—I have lost my parents, but I have Wolfman.

  Wolfman’s plans were becoming more specific. The latest news was that we would definitely have jobs in a research institute at UC Berkeley, where Wolfman had friends. These friends would provide legal documents for us, as well.

  “They think it’s romantic, that we’re ‘eloping,’” Wolfman said happily. “And they have no idea who we are—of course.”

  On May 19, at 8:00 A.M., Wolfman waited for me just inside the arboretum. We wore hiking clothes and boots. On Wolfman’s head, a baseball cap. “It’s important that we look like anyone else,” Wolfman said. “The more ordinary, the better.”

  We were both wearing backpacks. Wolfman stipulated that we were to carry several bottles of water apiece as well as food for several meals, a change of clothing, warm socks. Wolfman would supply a Swiss army knife.

  Wolfman had charted our route. We started out on our usual trail but, instead of taking a loop that would return us to campus after two miles, we took another fork, that led us farther from campus, in a region of pinewoods that stretched for miles to its northern boundary at a state highway in the adjacent township of St. Cloud.

  Wolfman had calculated: we would take a Greyhound bus from St. Cloud to Minneapolis; from Minneapolis, we would take another Greyhound bus to Denver, Colorado; and so to San Francisco, California, and Berkeley. Wolfman knew the departure times of these buses, and Wolfman had money for our tickets.

  Briskly Wolfman was hiking into the arboretum. I had to half-run to keep pace with him.

  It was early enough in the morning that no one else was around.

  It was a partially cloudy day in spring, not warm, but clear, still. My heart was beating in that quick erratic way it had learned to beat, when the arresting officers had come for Strohl, Adriane and Mr. Mackay had so eagerly handed me over to them.

  This was not a good memory. Blindly I clutched at Wolfman’s sleeve. “Will I ever see my parents again, Ira? How will I return to see my parents?”