Hazards of Time Travel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Well, good! They are very different from you, Mary Ellen, I think.”

  I should hope so! My roommates are zombies.

  To hide my surprise I smiled. (In the Happy Place, I was smiling nonstop!) For this had been an unexpected remark of Miss Steadman.

  “Your roommates are religious girls,” Miss Steadman said, “like most of the girls in Acrady, I believe. But you—some of us have wondered—what is the church of your choice?”

  Church of your choice. A strange and coercive phrase.

  “I—I don’t go to ‘church’—actually. But I am a—a—what you’d call a—‘religious believer.’”

  “Well, I thought so, Mary Ellen.” Miss Steadman frowned thoughtfully as if the issue (was Mary Ellen Enright “religious”) had been gravely pondered. “And you are—a Christian?”

  This was blunt! No one had ever asked me such a question before. In NAS-23 it was assumed that all citizens were “Christian” but that “Christian” did not mean much more than “NAS-citizen.” Certainly, no one ever spoke of “Christian values”—doing good, helping the less fortunate, being “selfless.”

  “Sometimes, Mary Ellen, you seem just slightly”—Miss Steadman searched for the appropriate word—“sad. Your roommates have said that you’ve been homesick.”

  “No.”

  “Well—good! That’s good to know.”

  It was disconcerting that my roommates would speak about me to the resident adviser behind my back, but equally disconcerting that the resident adviser would allow me to know that they had.

  “You’ve come a distance to Wainscotia, I think?”

  What did Miss Steadman mean by this? I was becoming very uneasy.

  (How much information had Miss Steadman been given about me?)

  “We’re all homesick in new places. Even those of us who’ve lived away from home for years.”

  Miss Steadman spoke gently, warmly. Encouraging me to share my feelings with her. Of course, I would not!

  At the front of the residence there were voices, laughter. It was mysterious to me what my roommates and the other girls found so hilarious, so often.

  Gathering by the mailboxes, loitering in the foyer. Drifting upstairs to their rooms. Such hilarity! From a little distance I could not decipher a word they said. Some of them brayed loudly, some were convulsed with giggles. It was nearing 6:00 P.M.: soon they would troop off to the dining hall for the evening meal. (Acrady Cottage was too small to provide meals for residents. The deafening-loud dining hall to which we were assigned was two blocks away, and served both male and female students.) Usually I sat alone in the dining hall at a table with solitary individuals like myself, engrossed in a textbook and pretending not to notice girls from Acrady who might have invited me to join them. My invisibility was like a magic coat that kept me warm but also compounded my loneliness.

  I was wearing the navy-blue jumper that was too large for me, over a gray turtleneck sweater with a stretched neck; the rubber boots, which were scruffy and stained. I wondered if Miss Steadman could see that the clothes in the box had been secondhand? Not mine, only just addressed to me? And did she know about me? Nurse Irma had known about “Mary Ellen Enright”—to a degree. Certain key administrators at Wainscotia had to know.

  But possibly not. Possibly inhabitants of Zone 9 knew nothing about NAS-23 and its procedures. It was likely that they were given minimal information: an Exiled Individual, an individual with no past, no background, no family, no history, appearing among them by government decree.

  For all they knew, “Mary Ellen Enright” was an orphan whose parents had died in a natural disaster, or in some act of war. Why would they have questioned this?

  As Miss Steadman spoke of homesickness I began to think— She wants me to confess to her, and then she will report me.

  Or, maybe—She wants me to confide in her, and then she will comfort me.

  Or—Miss Steadman is in Exile herself!

  Except I did not believe this. Miss Steadman was hardly the Treason-type.

  Oh, I hated this! Trapped in my thoughts.

  Exile means you can’t free your mind to think of anything except Exile. While others never question the terms of their existence you question the terms of your existence constantly. Why am I here, when will I be taken from here, who is watching me, who is monitoring me, is it this person who invites me to trust her? What will she report of me? What will be the summary and the judgment?

  Miss Steadman was asking where I was from. A quite natural/friendly question yet I stammered trying to give a plausible reply. Trying to recall The Instructions—what was not forbidden, and was therefore allowed.

  “I—I’d rather not say, Miss Steadman.”

  Miss Steadman stared at me, surprised. “But—why not?” Her manner was guileless, innocent. I had truly surprised her.

  “It makes me sad to think about it. I’m sorry.”

  “Well! I’m sorry that this is upsetting to you. I’d been told that you have a scholarship from out of state, I’d had the idea it was one of the eastern Atlantic states like New York, New Jersey . . .”

  “I’m an ‘orphan,’ Miss Steadman. I’m not from anyplace really. And my parents—my parents who adopted me—are both dead.”

  These words were shocking to me. I had never spoken them aloud before. Yet, I’d rehearsed them. I thought—If this is being recorded, I have not said anything wrong.

  Miss Steadman’s manner seemed to suggest that my remarks were utterly unexpected. If she had a file on me, it was incomplete. Or, she wanted me to think so.

  (I wondered, too: were tape recorders available for ordinary individuals, in 1959? Was it likely that Miss Steadman could be recording this conversation? There were few electronic devices in this primitive culture but agents of the State might be equipped for surveillance.)

  More girls had entered the residence and were congregating around the mailboxes like a flurry of squirrels. Ordinarily Miss Steadman would appear at the front of the house around this time in the hope of waylaying a few girls to chat with her, but not this evening.

  “Did you say that you have no family, Mary Ellen? Is that what I understood you to have said?”

  “Yes. I mean no—I have no family. I was adopted and—my ‘adoptive parents’ died.”

  These words came glibly. Almost, I wanted to laugh at the solemn expression on Miss Steadman’s face.

  “That’s so very sad, Mary Ellen! When did this happen?—I mean, when did your parents die?”

  When? I had no idea. The Instructions had not prepared me for such an interrogation. Like an actor who has been handed only a skeletal script I would have to improvise.

  “A long time ago—I think. I don’t really remember.”

  “Well—that’s very sad . . . And very unusual.”

  Unusual that an orphan’s parents have died, or unusual that the orphan seems not to remember when they died?

  “So, did no one bring you here to Wainscotia? Did you come alone?” Miss Steadman seemed embarrassed by my faltering words yet persevered in her questioning. In her plain earnest face was a look almost of hunger.

  “Yes. Alone.”

  “So young, to be traveling alone! I didn’t think I’d seen anyone with you, that first night. You seemed very—independent.”

  Independent! I smiled inanely.

  “I wanted to help you with your steamer trunk, but you told me you didn’t want help. Yes, you were very—precociously, I’d thought—independent.”

  Steamer trunk? What was this woman remembering?

  Somehow confusing a badly wrapped cardboard box with something called a steamer trunk. Had there been, over the years at Acrady Cottage, more than one “Mary Ellen Enright”?

  Miss Steadman was assuring me that she, too, had been homesick when she first went to college—not at Wainscotia but a smaller college, in northern Wisconsin. But she found her friends, eventually—“As you will also, Mary Ellen.”

  To this cheerfu
l remark I had no reply. Trying to envision “friends” hiding on the Wainscotia campus whom it would be my task to discover and if I did not, it would be a failing of mine.

  Somehow, I’d missed the transition, Miss Steadman was speaking of food. Dining hall? Home-cooked?

  Often, I forgot to eat. Or, I had no appetite for the food in the dining hall. (Much fried food, greasy fatty meat, vats of lumpy mashed potatoes, “fruit cup” and Jell-O desserts.) My roommates had noticed—at first—and offered to bring back food for me from the dining hall, but I hadn’t encouraged them.

  “Would you like to have dinner with me, Mary Ellen? I mean—tonight?”

  Stammering thanks, but—“I don’t think so, I have so much homework . . .”

  “I mean in my apartment here. I like to cook. I specialize in simple meals.” Miss Steadman smiled shyly. “You’re welcome to join me, Mary Ellen, if you wish.”

  “Thanks, but—I guess I can’t.”

  “Well. Another time perhaps.”

  With an air of disclosure Miss Steadman went on to say that she’d had an “advance report” from the dean’s office regarding my midterm grades.

  Grades? Now I was concerned.

  In my stressed state the very mention of grades made my heart trip.

  “Oh dear, don’t look alarmed, Mary Ellen! You’ve done very well. The dean makes it a point to go over reports from the faculty at midterm to see if anyone is having problems, and to offer help with these problems before it’s too late. And I hope you will keep the news to yourself, as it is confidential.”

  Trying now to feel relief instead of acute anxiety.

  “Your instructors have reported that you’ve earned straight A’s, it seems. Well—one A minus, in logic. Wonderful work, Mary Ellen! Congratulations.” Miss Steadman smiled at me. If I had not drawn away she would have seized my hands and squeezed them in an outburst of girlish enthusiasm. “You are currently at the very top of Acrady Cottage, and Acrady is usually at the top of the freshman women’s residences.”

  At the top. What did this mean? I was beginning to perspire, for it seemed that once again without thinking I had insufficiently held myself back.

  But the situation was different. Now it was good to be praised, not a warning. If but by this friendly stranger who had no idea who I was.

  I thought My parents would be proud of me.

  “Oh, Mary Ellen! You aren’t crying—are you?”

  “N-No.”

  My face was very warm. By now I was desperate to escape.

  At the doorway of her sitting room Miss Steadman asked if I liked chamber music and I said yes, yes I did like chamber music, for it seemed a reasonable reply; though really I knew little about chamber music, and might have thought that this was music played on instruments like organs, pianos, and harpsichords, in special music-chambers. If I was interested, Miss Steadman said, there was a chamber music quartet recital at the music school on Friday evening, playing compositions by Bach, Brahms, and Ravel; she was going, and had an extra ticket if I would like to join her.

  “We could have dinner before at a restaurant on Moore Street.”

  Seeing how alarmed I looked at the prospect of a restaurant dinner, Miss Steadman said quickly that she would pay for both our meals—“If you’re interested, Mary Ellen. But I know you spend most of your time on your courses.”

  I told her yes, I would be interested. For I wanted to learn all that I could, and “chamber music” was new to me.

  At the same time I did not want to spend time with Miss Steadman. I did not want to risk intimacy with another person. And I did not trust Miss Steadman, finally.

  “Good night, Mary Ellen! It was good to talk to you, at last.”

  At last. What did that mean?

  I ran away upstairs. So grateful to have escaped without saying a wrong thing that might be used against me.

  Fell onto my bed, exhausted. Thank God my roommates were at the dining hall.

  Thinking—She wants to be my friend. Why can’t I trust her!

  The Spell

  Truth was: I had no time in my emotional life for anyone except Ira Wolfman. I had not time to fantasize about anyone but Ira Wolfman.

  Like a small comet in the wake of a larger comet, helpless to resist its gravitational field, I fell under Wolfman’s spell.

  The microchip in my brain blocked me from summoning my parents. I could not summon my closest, lost friends. And during my sleepless nights I began to think of Wolfman compulsively.

  He knows me. He will acknowledge me, soon.

  But when? A week passed after midterm. And another week.

  In Professor Axel’s lecture Wolfman sat in the front row, to the far left as you entered the hall from the rear. I did not want to distract Wolfman by sitting near him, or in his line of vision if he turned his head, so I sat several rows behind him, with a clear view of his profile. In fact I stared mesmerized at Wolfman’s profile, as A. J. Axel lectured of the distinction between Pavlovian and Skinnerian “conditioning,” and the significance of “operant reinforcement” in terms of a “social utopia.” I saw that Wolfman was glancing around, into the audience of mostly undergraduates—as he hadn’t done previously, that I could recall.

  Was Wolfman looking for me? In my naïveté I wanted to think so.

  Here was a purely classical, Pavlovian response: when Wolfman turned to glance back into the audience, my heart gave a painful leap, and a sense of alarm tinged with acute pleasure, or acute pleasure tinged with alarm, ran through my body like an electric current. At once I felt faint, and very happy.

  Yet, if Wolfman’s eyes moved over me—quickly, with a pained expression—he did not seem to wish to see me. This was a clear rebuff. My physiological symptoms abated at once, like air escaping a balloon.

  A Pavlovian response, involuntary.

  Also, I noted that while Wolfman was courteously friendly to other students in our quiz section, whose names he certainly didn’t know, he seemed never to notice me if we happened to encounter in the lecture hall, or in the corridor outside. He seemed stubbornly blind to the physical fact of Enright, Mary Ellen.

  This had to be voluntary. Deliberate.

  In our class Wolfman was not so composed as he’d appeared at the start of the term. Though always prepared for the class, with notes, much-annotated texts, and a seemingly endless supply of anecdotal experimental-psychology material, he often appeared distracted, like one in the presence of—who? What? An enemy? A spy? He was edgy, uneasy. He lit cigarettes and smoked hurriedly. (In Zone 9 it was common for professors to smoke in classrooms; students smoked everywhere, as if by natural right. A dull-blue haze drifted freely. Did no one know of the hazards of smoking? Secondary smoke? Did no one associate lung cancer with all this smoke? After a few days in these barbaric circumstances I’d learned to arrive early in my classrooms to take a seat near a window if possible, or near a door that might be opened a crack. I would never learn to stifle my coughing as clouds of toxic smoke drifted languidly in the air in which for fifty minutes nonsmokers were trapped. It was a symptom of Zone 9 that nonsmokers never dared complain of smoke. If we waved smoke from our faces it had to be with an air of apology, for our silent protests antagonized smokers and smokers were the great majority.)

  Wolfman was an energetic instructor, always on his feet. As he lectured he wrote decisively and dramatically on a “blackboard.” He paced about the room which was wider than it was deep, with long rows of seats stretching the width of the space; as Wolfman faced the class he had no need to see me for my seat was far to the left, in what would be the periphery of his vision.

  Virtually everything Wolfman said was fascinating to me. Yes including the words the, and, a. It’s as if he were lifting a flap of human skull and peering into the workings of the brain coiled inside. He spoke of animal and plant characteristics that had “several times evolved” through the millennia—“bioluminescence,” for instance. (“Obviously, ‘bioluminescence’ is important
,” Wolfman said. “Without it, fireflies would have to mate in less exciting ways.”) Wolfman spoke of Darwin’s initial bewilderment at the extravagant display of the male peacock’s tail before Darwin had “got it” that such showy behavior had to be linked to natural selection—“Smart as Darwin was, he hadn’t taken a clue from eighteenth-century male attire in England and Europe—wigs, lace, satins and silks, even makeup. He was too Victorian to make the identification.” Enchanting to me, who’d had dull, careful, cautious, not-very-intelligent or well-educated teachers in high school, to hear a man of Wolfman’s intelligence speak—about anything.

  “It’s a phenomenon of mental life,” Wolfman said, one memorable hour, “that the dreamer is always convinced that he is awake, no matter how surreal a dream may become. There’s one test, though. See if you can remember it when you’re dreaming, when you believe you’re wide awake. Look into the distance, if you can. Out a window, if there’s a window. In a dream you won’t see the detail you see right now, looking out this window—the foliage, for instance; the intricate network of leaves. I’m sure there are no ‘cloud formations’ in dreams. And if you’re trying to read something in your dream, you will discover that you can’t—instead of print there’s just a jumble of hieroglyphics, or nothing at all. Go to a mirror, if you can—you’ll see, there is no reflection in it. There is no you in a dream, just firing neurons. These are ways you can be absolutely certain if you’re asleep, or if you’re awake—which is the state you are in now: awake.” Wolfman snapped his fingers, loudly.

  In the lecture hall students laughed uneasily. Was Dr. Wolfman serious, or joking? Somehow, Wolfman’s jokes were only funny if you didn’t think about them too carefully.

  Another time Wolfman told us: “There are no jokes, students. When you laugh, ask what are you laughing at?”

  From time to time I began to raise my hand, to volunteer answers to Wolfman’s questions. Sometimes Wolfman called upon me—“Yes, Miss Enright?”—and sometimes Wolfman ignored me. Each time I raised my hand, each time I spoke, was terribly exciting to me. Each time, my voice faltered. Sometimes, I choked and could scarcely speak. Yet, I persevered, I plunged forward. I felt like the valedictorian of my class—I would not be discouraged.