Joyce Oates - Hazards of Time Travel

Hilda sat at her desk with an exaggerated sort of perfect posture like a young woman in an advertisement and typed, rapidly and flawlessly, to demonstrate to me how easy “typing” was:

SEPTEMBER 23, 1959

ACRADY COTTAGE

WAINSCOTIA STATE UNIVERSITY

WAINSCOTIA FALLS, WISCONSIN

USA

UNIVERSE

“See? Now you try it, Mary Ellen.”

September 23, 1959! It could not be true—could it?

This was Zone 9—of course. This was my Exile. I must accept my Exile, and I must adjust. Yet—

The horror swept over me: this was eighty years into the past, and more. I had not yet been born. My parents had not yet been born. There was no one in this world who loved me, no one who even knew me. No one who would claim me. I was utterly alone.

“Mary Ellen? What’s wrong?”

With a look of genuine—sisterly—concern, Hilda reached out for me, even as I shrank away.

“Don’t t-touch me! No …”

I was terrified, nauseated. Yet too weak to escape—a black pit opened at my feet, and sucked me down.

Help me! Help me—Mom, Daddy …

I miss you so much …

It was a ravenous hunger in me, to return home. A yearning so strong, it seemed almost that a hand gripped the nape of my neck, urging me forward as in a desperate swooning plunge.

I am all alone here. I will die here.

THEY’D STRAPPED ME DOWN.Wrists, ankles, head—to prevent “self-injury.”

A painful shunt in the soft flesh at the inside of my elbow, through which a chill liquid coursed into my vein. It was a mechanical procedure they’d done many times before.

In a flat voice the pronouncement: subject going down .

I saw myself as a diminishing light. A swirl of light, turning in upon itself and becoming ever smaller, more transparent.

Abruptly then—I was gone.

Dematerialization of the subject. Teletransportation of the subject’s molecular components. Reconstitution in Zone 9.

“‘MARY ELLEN ENRIGHT.’This is she?”

The question was put to someone not-me. Yet I could observe the lifeless body from a slightly elevated position and felt pity for it.

Like a zombie. Exiled.

I would wonder— Does a zombie know that it is a zombie? How would a zombie comprehend.

This was funny! But laughter caught in my throat like a clot of phlegm.

In this very cold place. Where blood coursed slow as liquid mercury.

I was very confused. I could not clear my head. My brain had been injured. I had heard them joking.

NSS it was called— Neurosurgical Security Services. Rumors had circulated in high school. The subject was taboo.

Before teletransportation they’d inserted a microchip into a particular part of my brain called the hippocampus, where memory is processed before being stored elsewhere in the brain. At least, I thought this must have happened. I did not think it had been a dream.

Part of my scalp had been shaved, a pie-shaped wedge of skull removed, the microchip installed. (Evidently) I felt no pain. A zombie does not feel pain. Even the sawed-out portion of the skull and the lacerated scalp were cold-numb and remote to me. And yet I felt such a powerful wave of gratitude, I could have wept— They did not remove my parents from me. They left me my parents at least.

For that part of my brain might have been removed, which contained all memory of my parents.

In Exile you cling to what you have, that has not (yet) been taken from you.

From this cold place I was carried, with others who’d been teletransported, in a vehicle resembling an emergency medical van.

The vehicle did not move rapidly. There was no siren.

This was not an emergency but routine.

The vehicle made stops at several destinations, before mine. In my semiconscious state I had little awareness of what was happening. I was trying to speak to my parents whose faces were vivid to me in their concern for me. I was trying to say In four years I will see you again. Don’t forget me!

I could not have said if I was seventeen years old, or seven years old.

I could not have said which year this was. I had no idea where I was.

We had left the lights of a city and were traveling now in a vast rural night. It was astonishing to me, stars in the night sky overhead were large and luminous as I had never seen stars before in my old, lost life.

The air was purer here, in Zone 9. So sharp to inhale! The night sky was not obscured by the scrim of pollution to which we were all accustomed in the old, lost life.

We who were being carried in the van in the night were strapped to stretchers and could not turn our heads to regard one another. We were very tired, for we’d come a long distance.

It might have been the case, not all of the teletransported had made the journey fully alive. It was not clear to me initially whether I was fully alive.

One of the other teletransported was hyperventilating in panic. Something must have gone wrong with his medication. I could not turn my head to see. Or, my head was strapped in place. I held myself very still and breathed calmly as Dad would instruct me in the presence of the Enemy. I thought— They will vaporize him. It was a desperate thought— They will vaporize him, and not me .

At the next stop, I was taken from the van.

Unstrapped from the stretcher, and made to stand.

“Use your legs, miss. There is nothing wrong with your legs. Your brain sends the signal—left leg, right leg. And your head—lift your head.”

I was able to walk a few yards, before I collapsed.

In the morning I woke beneath a thin blanket, on a lumpy cot. The bandages were gone from my head. The straps were gone from my wrists and ankles. Most of the grogginess had faded.

It would be explained to me: I was a freshman student at Wainscotia State University in Wainscotia Falls, Wisconsin. I had arrived late the previous night, feverish. I had been brought to the university infirmary and not to my residence. And now, in the morning, since my fever had disappeared, I was to be discharged.

“Your things have been delivered to your residence, Miss Enright.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Your residence is Acrady Cottage, on South University Avenue.”

“Thank you.”

Acrady Cottage. South University Avenue. It was up to me to find this place, and I would do so.

I was feeling hopeful! Small gulping waves of wonder would rush over me from time to time, amid even the paralysis of fear.

For the crucial matter was: my parents were living, and I would return to them, in four years. My parents had not been “vaporized” even in my memory.

And the crucial matter was: “Mary Ellen Enright” was evidently a healthy specimen. She had not died in teletransportation . If her brain had been injured, it was not a major injury.

If it was a minor injury, maybe it would heal.

When I tried to rise from the cot, however, I felt faint, and would have lost my balance—but the strong-muscled young woman in the white nurse’s uniform reached out to catch me.

“There you go, ‘Mary Ellen’! On your way.”

She laughed. Our eyes locked, for a fleeting second.

She had pinned-back blond hair, so pale it was almost white. Above her left breast, a little plastic name tag—IRMA KRAZINSKI.

She knows who I am. Yet, she is not an Enemy.

Later I would think— Maybe she is one like me and will pity me.

AT THE RESIDENCEa large cardboard box awaited M. E. ENRIGHT in the front foyer.

“You are—‘Mary Ellen’? This just arrived.”