Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Nurse Irma was furious now.

  “I said, miss—Do you understand?”

  I did not understand but yes, I retreated. I obeyed and left the infirmary. I shut the door firmly behind me. And I thought despite my disappointment, and my hurt, that another time, the nurse named Irma with the dark blond hair, the nurse who’d tended to me in my first hour in Zone 9, had been kind to me: she had not reported me to the authorities in lethal violation of The Instructions.

  The proof was, I was still alive.

  Possibly

  Possibly, in my terrible loneliness I had loved Ira Wolfman for weeks. Before our exchange at midterm.

  Possibly, forever.

  It was a feeling much more powerful than anything I could feel for Nurse Irma Krazinski.

  From the first time I’d seen him in our classroom in Greene Hall. Entering the room briskly, dropping his briefcase on the table at the front of the room, casting his eyes like a fine-meshed net out over the rows of desks, our attentive faces . . . Hello! My name is Ira Wolfman, I am your section instructor for Psychology 101.

  And there was the man striding to the podium in the lecture hall when he substituted for Professor Axel. For a young professor taking the place of a much-esteemed elder, Wolfman had not seemed hesitant, or lacking in confidence. Happily he’d smiled out at his audience like a diver on a high board before he executes a perfect dive. This acknowledging of an audience as if we were companions together, embarking upon an exciting journey, was not the custom of white-haired Professor Axel who more or less read his lecture notes without troubling to glance out at us, to establish that we were there.

  Before it was revealed to me that Wolfman was an Exile like myself, I’d seemed to have known—something.

  He is the one. He will save me from Zone 9.

  As I did not appear to be susceptible to the flu sweeping the campus, so I was not so susceptible to falling in love like girls my age. I could take pride in this.

  My roommates at Acrady Cottage talked excitedly, tirelessly of boys they were dating, or hoped to date; fraternity men with whom they were already in love, or were desperate to hear from, their happiness depending upon the next telephone call . . . But I was not one of these, for I was not that young any longer.

  My feeling for Wolfman was different. Mine was the desperation of the drowning who will clutch at one who comes near, who has the power to save her from a terrible death.

  Dean’s List

  “Mary Ellen?”—the voice was startlingly near. Miss Steadman.

  It was the seventh week of classes, just after midterm. Early November. A late, dark, sleet-lashed afternoon. The resident adviser appeared to be waiting for me as I hurried into the residence in my hooded fleece-lined jacket, bound for the stairs, past the wall of mailboxes at which I rarely glanced.

  No mail ever came for Mary Ellen Enright of course. But often there were flyers and announcements in my mailbox which cruelly resembled mail.

  I wasn’t envious of the other girls’ letters. I never thought of it, any longer.

  My daytime anxiety was concentrated on my course work. There were five courses: five instructors. That one of them was Ira Wolfman was a coincidence.

  I tried not to think of anything else. I shrank from the attention of others. Except, I could not be rude to any adult. I could not rush past Miss Steadman in her doorway, smiling at me.

  Silently begging the woman—Leave me alone, will you! All of you! Please.

  Such fierce thoughts raced through my head. It seemed amazing to me, that others could not hear them and recoil from me.

  “Mary Ellen? May I speak with you—briefly?”

  I could not turn from Miss Steadman with a muttered No. Meekly I followed her into her apartment: into her sitting room which opened out onto the smaller of two lounges in Acrady Cottage, where there was a console-model television, a “Philco”—the smallest television I had ever seen, with a miniature screen, a picture in tremulous shades of gray, broadcast over just three channels.

  In the evenings, some of the girls of Acrady Cottage watched this ridiculous little television set! And Miss Steadman who seemed to crave company sometimes watched, too.

  Ardis Steadman was a tall rangy woman with sand-colored hair, eyebrows, skin. She was plain-faced, earnest. Her eager smile revealed pale-pink gums. Her eyes were large, brown, brimming with sincerity. She’d introduced herself to us at the first meeting of Acrady Cottage as an assistant in the office of the dean of women. She was a Ph.D. candidate in Public School Administration, in her mid-thirties perhaps, or perhaps younger, for Miss Steadman was one of those women who, as a young girl, is already praised as “mature”—“responsible”—“a leader.” My roommates spoke of trying to avoid Miss Steadman who was really nice, but bor-ing.

  Especially, they pitied her as unmarried: spinster.

  (Such words as spinster, old maid were new to me, for in NAS-23 marriage was hardly more common than divorce. But I understood the meanings of these words, and something of the panic that underlay them in Zone 9.)

  Miss Steadman smiled happily at me. In her warm eager voice she asked how I was?—how my classes were going?—and I murmured polite replies. I tried to sound cheerful, upbeat: it was a phenomenon of Wainscotia—“upbeat.” But I was not very skilled at “upbeat” and I could see that Miss Steadman was not deceived.

  She asked me in some detail about my courses. For I was a “scholarship girl”—and so of particular interest to her. (I’d learned that, at Wainscotia, I was a University Scholar—and not a Patriot Scholar. Evidently, in 1959, “Patriot Scholar” did not yet exist.) Miss Steadman had heard of most of my instructors, and was enthusiastic about them; particularly, she was enthusiastic about Professor A. J. Axel who’d collaborated with the great B. F. Skinner at Harvard—“Professor Axel has developed his own experimental project, with the aim of curing antisocial behavior—the ‘aberrant,’ the ‘perverse,’ and the ‘subversive.’ Wainscotia is to establish a center for this new field—‘The Wainscotia Center for Social Engineering.’ Each October, we expect Professor Axel to receive a Nobel Prize. This will happen soon, I predict!”

  I asked Miss Steadman what sort of “aberrant,” “perverse,” and “subversive” behavior did she mean?

  Miss Steadman paused. A faint blush rose into her face. With a frown she said, “Oh—the kind of shameful behavior you can imagine, Mary Ellen. Or, rather—you can’t imagine. And I can’t, either.” She shook her head vigorously. “It’s mostly among men, I think. Between men. But Professor Axel will change all that.”

  How would Professor Axel change such behavior? I asked.

  “Oh, I think—electric shock treatment.” Miss Steadman spoke vaguely.

  I wondered if Wolfman was involved in this Center? I had to suppose he was, as an assistant to A. J. Axel.

  But how ironic, an Exiled Individual enlisted to cure antisocial behavior!

  Miss Steadman had much praise for the chairman of the philosophy department, Professor Myron Coughland, whose theory it was that the history of philosophy and linguistics from the Greeks onward had been a steady progression to present time, mid-twentieth-century Christian United States—“It has something to do with ‘practical’—‘pragmatic’—ethics, and with ‘democracy’—‘the greatest good for the greatest number’—plus Christianity of course. Our American beliefs in the age of Sputnik, which are very different from the beliefs of Soviet Russia! Professor Coughland has a hundred-thousand-dollar grant from the National Science Institute to pursue his research. He’s been on the front page of the student newspaper, I’m sure you must have seen the articles.”

  Vaguely I murmured yes. Maybe I’d seen the articles. Since my exile in Zone 9 I had tried to fill in the considerable gaps in my knowledge of history—there’d been very little in our Patriot Democracy History courses about the Soviets’ early success in sending a small, unmanned satellite (“Sputnik”) into space, and their development of nuclear weapons, for mos
t of high school Patriot Democracy History focused upon continual threats to American democracy, and the triumphs of American democracy over its countless “terrorist” enemies around the world.

  “It is obviously true that our American philosophy is the culmination of thousands of years, and that human beings are ‘more civilized’ than ever before—don’t you think? Who could possibly disagree, who has listened to Professor Coughland? He argues that our American presidency is the ‘high point’ of political history, and that Dwight Eisenhower is the greatest world leader so far.”

  I knew little of the presidency of 1959, except that the blandly smiling, golf-playing president had been a general in World War II, and was a popular favorite with the American people, like our president of NAS-23, whose approval ratings in the polls, posted every morning on the Internet, was in the range of 95 to 99 percent.

  In 1959, there appeared to be two major political parties, Democrats and Republicans, that struggled with each other for dominance; by NAS-23 there was just the Patriot Party, funded by NAS’s wealthiest individuals, which appointed all political leaders as well as the judiciary. CVs—“Citizen Voters,” a rank determined by income—could cast ballots for the Patriot Party candidate, represented by a smiling emoji, to which a name was affixed, in an election that was both preliminary and final, for the Patriot Party candidate, with no opposition, was inevitably the president. (Dad had said that within his memory there’d been elections with not just one emoji but two emojis on the ballot. The voter, in the privacy of the voting booth, was “free” to vote his choice.)

  (It had been explained to us in Patriot Democracy History that, in past decades, hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent on “campaigning”—a largely useless gesture since the presidency invariably went to the candidate with the largest campaign fund; so election procedure was modified to determine which Patriot Party member could amass the most money, and this individual was presented on the ballot as the party candidate, with no need to actually spend the money.)

  BADLY I WISHED that I could trust Miss Steadman, to confide in her something of my lost life in what was, to her, the “future”; but even if I’d dared to violate The Instructions, Miss Steadman would not have believed me, and would have thought that I was mentally ill.

  Already in 1959, as I’d learned in my psychology lecture class, it had become a technique to discredit “rebellious” individuals by suggesting that they were mentally ill—emotionally unstable.

  “Borderline personality”—which made me wonder who controlled and defined the border.

  In her pleasant but dogged manner Miss Steadman was asking if I found logic “difficult—a brainteaser,” as she had as an undergraduate, and I said yes, very difficult. Miss Steadman said: “Logic isn’t a course of study for women. Like math, physics, engineering—our brains are not suited for such calculations.”

  Did I believe this? Such thinking was self-destructive, as it was mistaken. In NAS-23 it was axiomatic that “all sexes are equal”—which is to say, no sex is allowed to be “handicapped”—no individual of any sex merited special consideration. But my objection wasn’t very convincing, and Miss Steadman ignored my remarks.

  In fact since coming to Zone 9 I’d often felt that something was wrong with my brain. The microchip and the teletransportation had injured my ability to think. Laboring on the problems in my logic textbook I felt a visceral misery, as if “logic” were a kind of virus that had infected me, from which I couldn’t be purged; after a few hours I was left fatigued, despondent. I had noted that not one professor in the philosophy department was a woman, and that not one philosopher in the Intro to Philosophy anthology was a woman. It was as if the female did not exist. I wondered if an immersion in logic might result in a strong wish to commit suicide.

  I could not tell Miss Steadman this but I did tell her that, of the several courses I was taking, it was logic I was most worried about failing.

  “Oh, Mary Ellen—you won’t fail! I’m sure.”

  (It was probably so, I wasn’t likely to fail the course. My lowest grade in our several quizzes had been A−. Yet still, I anguished over the possibility of failing, for, in logic, there is much unhappiness that is possible, beyond the range of the merely probable.)

  Miss Steadman went on to speak, with the breathy enthusiasm of an administrator, of Wainscotia in the “forefront” of academic research. Philology, mathematics, sociology, physics—“You’ve heard of Amos Stein? Originally of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton? No?” Miss Steadman seemed disappointed in me. “Professor Stein was also featured in the student newspaper recently. He’s the director of the ‘Hoyle project’—a team of first-rate physicists and mathematicians working on a rebuttal of Einstein’s theory of relativity. And there is something called the ‘Big Bang’ theory—the universe began with an explosion, and is ‘rapidly expanding.’ But our Wainscotia team believes that the universe is infinite and unchanging—a ‘steady state.’ No beginning and no end. If you believe in God, only the ‘steady state’ is sensible. For after all—what could precede God? All the professors need is mathematical proof. It’s said that they’re working on the problem virtually day and night—and that they have enlisted a computer in the project, in Greene Hall. The computer is so large, it takes up half the ground floor of Greene Hall! Everyone in the intellectual world is eagerly awaiting their findings—we’re hoping that Wainscotia will be a site for world-renowned physicists and mathematicians to work together in the future. Einstein also argued that ‘all things are relative’—that ‘time can bend’—obviously impossible. As if God could ‘bend’! Professor Stein says such reasoning is ‘Jewish logic’—to confound, and not to illuminate.” Miss Steadman spoke so vehemently, her lips were damp with spittle.

  Yet, her remarks were exciting to me. I did not understand anything of Einstein’s theories—though I had heard of the “steady-state universe”—(I wondered if it had originated in the Midwest?)—I didn’t understand it either. But I felt Miss Steadman’s hope, that Wainscotia State would be so rewarded.

  I recalled S. Platz describing the university to which I would be sent as “excellent”—she had sounded so positive, and hopeful for me! When I returned from Exile, I would be well trained; if I received high grades I might qualify for a good job, and could help out my parents financially.

  My life-after-Exile loomed before me like a mirage at the horizon. If my present life was difficult, and lonely, I had only to think of this life—this mirage—to feel more hopeful.

  Miss Steadman was speaking of Wainscotia’s “preeminent” biologist Carson Lockett II, who’d been trained at Oxford in “life sciences”—a world expert in the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, the Victorian scientist who had anticipated Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory; but had gone beyond Darwin in hypothesizing a “special creation” for the human brain which, Wallace argued, could not have possibly emerged from “natural selection” over millions of years—“Dr. Lockett and his colleagues are engaged in a refutation of Darwinian atheism in the most objective, scientific, ‘evolutionary’ terms.” And Miss Steadman was speaking of Wainscotia’s resident poet H. R. Brody—did I know his work? Had I seen his photograph?—“H. R. Brody has white hair like Robert Frost. His poems are rhyming poems, about nature—like Frost’s. They are not those strange little lower-case-letter poems by the man ‘cummings’—‘c. c. cummings’—or is it ‘e. c.’?—who doesn’t even try to rhyme. I don’t understand much of contemporary poetry but H. R. Brody’s poetry is beautiful, and wise.”

  I tried to remember if I had ever heard of H. R. Brody as a poet, in our English classes in NAS-23. I didn’t think that I had. Eighty years later, H. R. Brody had been totally forgotten.

  “Are you interested in poetry, Mary Ellen? I think you must be.”

  Why would Miss Steadman say this? All I could stammer was no.

  In fact I’d tried to write poetry in high school. In our English class we were given poetry-f
ormulas, with rhymes to fill in—

  I’m Nobody! Who are ____?

  Are you—Nobody—___?

  And

  I think that I shall never see

  A poem as lovely as a ___.

  Poems are made by fools like ___,

  But only God can make a ___.

  My own poems were not so smoothly composed. A twenty-line formula-poem, for me, might spill over into thirty lines, or end prematurely at eighteen.

  I’d also tried to write what were called “stories”—following the pattern of the Nine Basic Plots we were provided, along with vocabulary lists and recommended titles.

  We were not allowed to take books out of the public library marked A—for Adult; we were restricted to YA, Young Adult, which had to be approved by the Youth Entertainment Board, and were really suitable for grade school. My parents had had Adult Books at one time, but I had never seen them.

  I did try to compose a graphic novel with animals, not people. My illustrations were clumsy and childish and the project, that had begun with much enthusiasm, gradually dwindled away like ice melting.

  I remembered that my brother Roddy had gone through a phase in middle school when he’d built kites out of papier-mâché. These were sort of amazing kites, dragons, eagles, giant butterflies, you’d never expect from Roddy.

  For a while I’d helped him make the kites. It had been exciting to do something with Roddy instead of mostly trying to avoid him. Our parents were impressed, too. But eventually he lost interest, or became discouraged for some reason saying with a shrug Who cares? Making stuff is a waste of time.

  Miss Steadman was smiling at me as if in the expectation that I might share with her something of my “poetic” nature but I knew better than to reply. She then asked how I was getting along with my roommates?—and I told her that they were very nice, and I liked them very much.