Joyce Oates - Hazards of Time Travel

No! My own questions.

“Did either of your parents help you write your speech? Influence you? Are these questions their questions?”

No, no, no .

“Are these treasonous thoughts their thoughts?”

I was terrified that my father, or both my parents, had been arrested, and were being interrogated too, somewhere else in this awful place. I was terrified that my father would be reclassified no longer MI but SI (Subversive Individual) or AT (Active Traitor)—that he might meet the same fate as Uncle Tobias.

My valedictorian speech was examined line by line, word by word, by the interrogators—though it was just two printed double-spaced sheets of paper with a few scrawled annotations. My computer had been seized from my locker and was being examined as well.

And all my belongings from my locker—laptop, sketchbook, backpack, cell phone, granola bars, a soiled school sweatshirt, wadded tissues—were confiscated.

The interrogators were brisk and impersonal as machines. Almost, you’d have thought they might be robot-interrogators—until you saw one of them blink, or swallow, or glare at me in pity or disgust, or scratch at his nose.

(Even then, as Dad might have said, these figures could have been robots; for the most recent AI devices were being programmed to emulate idiosyncratic, “spontaneous” human mannerisms.)

Sometimes an interrogator would shift in his seat, away from the blinding light, and I would have a fleeting but clear view of a face—what was shocking was, the face appeared to be so ordinary, the face of someone you’d see on a bus, or a neighbor of ours.

My valedictorian address had been timed to be no more than eight minutes long. That was the tradition at our school—a short valedictorian address, and an even shorter salutatorian address. My English teacher Mrs. Dewson had been assigned to “advise” me—but I hadn’t shown her what I’d been writing. (I hadn’t shown Dad, or Mom, or any of my friends—I’d wanted to surprise them at graduation.) After a half-dozen failed starts I’d gotten desperate and had the bright idea of asking numbered questions—twelve, in all—of the kind my classmates might have asked if they’d had the nerve—(some of these the very questions I’d asked my teachers, who had never given satisfactory answers)—like What came before the beginning of Time?

And What came before the Great Terrorist Attacks of 9/11?

Our RNAS calendar dates from the time of that attack, which was before my birth, but not my parents’ births, and so my parents could remember a pre-NAS time when the calendar was different—time wasn’t measured in just a two-digit figure but a four-digit figure ! (Under the old, now-outlawed calendar, my mother and father had been born in what had been called the twentieth century. It was against the law to compute birth dates under the old calendar, but Daddy had told me—I’d been born in what would have been called the twenty-first century if the calendar had not been reformed.)

NAS means North American States—more formally known as RNAS—Reconstituted North American States, which came into being some years after the Great Terrorist Attacks, as a direct consequence of the Attacks, as we were taught.

Following the Attacks there was an Interlude of Indecisiveness during which time issues of “rights”—(the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Civil Rights law, etc.)—vs. the need for Patriot Vigilance in the War Against Terror were contested, with a victory, after the suspension of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by executive order, for PVIWAT, or Patriot Vigilance. (Yes, it is hard to comprehend. As soon as you come to the end of such a sentence, you have forgotten the beginning!)

How strange it was to think there’d been a time when the regions known as (Reconstituted) Mexico and (Reconstituted) Canada had been separate political entities—separate from the States! On a map it seems clear, for instance, that the large state of Alaska should be connected with the mainland United States, and not separated by what was formerly “Canada.” This too was hard to grasp and had never been clearly explained in any of our Patriot Democracy History classes, perhaps because our teachers were not certain of the facts.

The old, “outdated” (that is, “unpatriotic”) history books had all been destroyed, my father said. Hunted down in the most remote outposts—obscure rural libraries in the Dakotas, below-ground stacks in great university libraries, microfilm in what had been the Library of Congress. “Outdated”/“unpatriotic” information was deleted from all computers and from all accessible memory—only reconstituted history and information were allowed, just as only the reconstituted calendar was allowed.

This was only logical, we were taught. There was no purpose to learning useless things, that would only clutter our brains like debris stuffed to overflowing in a trash bin.

But there must have been a time before that time —before the Reconstitution, and before the Attacks. That was what I was asking. Patriot Democracy History—which we’d had every year since fifth grade, an unchanging core of First Principles with ever-more detailed information—was only concerned with post-Terrorist events, mostly the relations of the NAS with its numerous Terrorist Enemies in other parts of the world, and an account of the “triumphs” of the NAS in numerous wars. So many wars! They were fought now at long-distance, and did not involve living soldiers, for the most part; robot-missiles were employed, and powerful bombs said to be nuclear, chemical, and biological. In our senior year of high school we were required to take a course titled “Wars of Freedom”—these included long-ago wars like the Revolutionary War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the more recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars—all of which our country had won—“decisively.” We were not required to learn the dates or causes of these wars, if there were actual causes, but battle-places and names of high-ranking generals, political leaders, and presidents; these were provided in columns to be memorized for exams. The question of Why? was never asked—and so I’d asked it in class, and in my valedictory address. It had not occurred to me that this was Treason-Speech , or that I was Questioning Authority .

The harsh voices were taking a new approach: Was it one of my teachers who’d written the speech for me? One of my teachers who’d “influenced” me?

The thought came to me— Mr. Mackay! I could blame him, he would be arrested …

But I would never do such a thing, I thought. Even if the man hated me, and had me arrested for treason, I could not lie about him.

AFTER TWO HOURSof interrogation it was decided that I was an “uncooperative subject.” In handcuffs I was taken by YD officers to another floor of Home Security which exuded the distressing air of a medical unit; there I was strapped down onto a movable platform and slid inside a cylindrical machine that made clanging and whirring noises close against my head; the cylinder was so small, the surface only an inch or so from my face, I had to shut my eyes tight to keep from panicking. The interrogators’ voices, sounding distorted and inhuman, were channeled into the machine. This was a BIM (Brain-Image Maker)—I’d only heard of these—that would determine if I was telling the truth, or lying.

Did your father—or any adult—write your speech for you?

Did your father—or any adult—influence your speech for you?

Did your father—or any adult—infiltrate your mind with treasonous thoughts?