Hazards of Time Travel Read online

  Congratulations, Addie!

  A smirk of a smile.

  Badly I wished that just Mom and Dad were there, in this memory that was so precious to me.

  But I could not dictate the memory—could I? If I tried, I was in danger of losing the memory altogether.

  Softly I said Hello! It’s me—Adriane . . .

  Daddy didn’t hear me. Mom didn’t hear me. If Roddy heard me, he gave no sign.

  They were talking about—I couldn’t hear what they were talking about. It was a familiar problem—it was not-new—boring, humiliating. Probably, it was a financial problem. Or some problem of Roddy’s? Some complaint of Roddy’s? Or—Mom was having difficulty with her supervisor at work. Or—(maybe this was more likely)—Dad was having difficulty with his supervisor at the medical center. (It was an old humiliation of Eric Strohl’s, that since he’d been demoted from staff resident M.D. to hospital attendant, his income had been decimated; yet, to keep this miserable job, he had to advise ever-younger and more career-minded physicians, and often he had to do minor surgical procedures for them, like the installing or removing of “ports” [portable, catheter-like artificial veins] in chemotherapy patients. He was also on hand to draw blood and assist in radiology. Yet, it wasn’t like Dad to complain even jokingly—so this was strange.)

  (And strange too: where was I, in this memory? Why wasn’t I sitting at the kitchen table with my family? Judging by Roddy’s age, I must have been about sixteen at this time. But where was I?)

  Pressing my forehead against the wall of the third-floor room of Acrady Cottage, Wainscotia, Wisconsin—Zone 9.

  Saying, begging—Mom? Dad? Can’t you see me? It’s—Adriane. Please—look at me.

  But they weren’t looking at me. They were oblivious of me.

  Then I saw something that chilled me: my father’s face was coarser than I’d ever seen it. Not just that Daddy hadn’t shaved, but Daddy was looking disheveled like a man you’d see on the street, homeless, feral: his gray thinning hair uncombed, furrows in his cheeks, a self-pitying downturn to his mouth. And small, bloodshot eyes . . .

  And my mother: What had happened to her?

  Mom who’d always been so slender had definitely gained weight. Her face was fleshy, peevish. A sardonic smile on her lips. And her face heavily made-up, with exaggerated arched eyebrows.

  Mom’s gaze was sulky, dissatisfied. An expression of barely suppressed rage in Mom’s face I had never seen before.

  Mom, Dad—don’t you love me? Don’t you miss me?

  It’s your daughter Adriane—don’t you remember me?

  Carelessly, as if she resented waiting on my father and brother, Mom brought the pan from the stove, to spoon out oatmeal into bowls. And now I saw that there were only three bowls on the table. And I saw that their breakfast wasn’t oatmeal after all—greedily they were eating some sort of gelatinous substance that was sticky, quasi-transparent, of a sickening fleshy-pink color, quivering in their bowls. This was no breakfast food that I could identify—horribly, it seemed alive.

  Roddy glanced in my direction, as if he could see me!

  Roddy said with a mean little smirk Where she’s gone to now, it serves her right.

  And Mom said She thought she was too good for us.

  And Dad said Good riddance!

  They laughed. It was a crude, hellish laughter. There was a swirl of light in the kitchen, as if the Plexiglas barrier were reflecting something shiny, interrupting the scene. I saw with horror that something was very wrong—these people were strangers to me.

  The crudely imagined figure meant to be my father was not my father. The crudely imagined figure meant to be my mother was not my mother. And my brother Roddy . . .

  It isn’t Roddy, either. They have taken away Roddy, and substituted this person for him.

  I wondered if this was so: if it hadn’t been my brother who’d informed upon me but the other in his place, who’d sent me into Exile.

  Suddenly the smell of the quivering jelly-like “oatmeal” was nauseating. Suddenly, I was gagging. The Plexiglas went opaque. The memory was shuttered, gone. I was left alone in a corner of the room, on my knees, pressing my forehead so hard against the wall that the impress of the wood would leave welts in my skin.

  “MARY ELLEN!”—someone was calling me.

  That ridiculous name, that name I hated—someone was calling it, and pulling at my shoulder.

  I woke, astonished and frightened. Where was this? What time was this? I must have fallen asleep, or lost consciousness, on the floor beside my bed, on my knees, and one of my roommates had found me slumped against the wall.

  “Mary Ellen, what’s wrong? You’ve been crying—you’re upset. It must be the flu. Let me help you up.”

  My roommate whose name was—(Betsy?)—helped me up, onto my bed. She sat beside me, holding my hands that were like ice. She spoke comfortingly to me, soothingly. I was confused but knew not to say anything incriminating about where I had been. Where my remembering had taken me.

  Another roommate came into the room, and joined her. What was wrong with Mary Ellen? What had so upset Mary Ellen? A nightmare? A bad memory?

  The second girl was—Hilda? I remembered her last name, which was a charming name: McIntosh.

  Betsy and Hilda conferred about “Mary Ellen”—what was wrong with “Mary Ellen,” and what might be done with “Mary Ellen.”

  I was thinking: the ugly memory had been a false memory. The microchip was programmed to interfere with my memory. To provide me with a cruel, false, ugly memory. To punish.

  Yet, it was hard not to think that the father in my memory, the mother in my memory, and the brother in my memory were “real.”

  It is terrifying, to lose memory. To lose trust in memory.

  What is a human being except the sum of her memories? Look inward, not outward. The soul is inward.

  I believed this. And yet, if my memories were taken from me, what would happen to me? What would happen to my soul?

  My roommates argued with one another: Should I be put to bed, or should I be taken to the dining hall, to eat a proper dinner with them? Betsy and Hilda believed that I was seriously undernourished, and didn’t sleep enough; Carly thought that I had “some kind of flu-virus.” My skin was clammy, not feverish. But my face was oddly flushed, and my eyes were bloodshot.

  My third roommate had come into the room, and joined us.

  I told them that I wasn’t sick—I didn’t want to be put to bed. I had homework to do that evening, I was behind in my work. So Betsy, Hilda, and Carly walked me into the bathroom, ran cold water and washed my face that was streaked with tears. They brushed my hair—(“Oh gosh, look—it’s coming out in the brush. She needs to drink more milk!”). They insisted that I apply makeup: foundation, powder. And lipstick, which Carly lent me. They were enthusiastic about my looks—“If you’d just smile more, Mary Ellen. If you weren’t so tired, and sad-looking.”

  “We’re homesick, too—or anyway we were. But Wainscotia is so wonderful, it’s time you were over missing home.”

  Carly lent me a sweater to wear to the dining hall: a soft-woolen heather-colored cardigan, far more beautiful than any of my secondhand clothes. Hilda lent me an actual coat—not a jacket—to wear to the dining hall. And leather boots, instead of my ugly rubber boots.

  They sat with me, and watched me eat. They took my plate back for seconds. We talked together, and laughed. Other girls from Acrady Cottage joined us. After a while I was feeling better. That is, Mary Ellen was feeling better.

  We returned to Acrady Cottage. There was a light snowfall, an icy crust of snow crackled underfoot. In the near distance, the rotunda of the library glowed with a bluish interior light. I thought—I have no one now. But I will survive. And I will return home, one day.

  I gave back the leather boots, and the deep-forest-green wool coat, but when I tried to give back the heather cardigan Carly said, with a sweet, pained smile, “Oh no, Mary Ellen! It looks nicer o
n you than it does on me. It’s yours.”

  (BUT I COULD NOT be their friend. Because I was not “Mary Ellen”—I was someone else whom they had never met.)

  GO AWAY PLEASE

  I had only to close my eyes and the red-inked words hovered before me.

  In melancholy moods, I didn’t have to close my eyes. In the very air before me I seemed to see Wolfman’s uplifted hand, the palm of his hand, the admonition that had sent me from him—

  GO AWAY PLEASE

  The gesture was playful—but desperate-playful. Wolfman had been sincere in wanting me gone.

  He’d acknowledged me as one like himself, in Exile. And in the same gesture Wolfman had repudiated me.

  Of course I understood: he was under a sentence of potential Deletion, like me. He had to follow the Instructions, as I did. He could not be reckless as I was.

  Ira Wolfman had adjusted to his Exile-life, evidently. Or he’d learned to give that impression. He was older than I was, much more intelligent, and wiser as well—he knew that there was no way back home for us.

  We could be brought back home. But we could not make our way home.

  This was the curse of Exile: you are powerless to change your life, except for the worst. Others can change your life for you, unpredictably.

  When I’d been sick, I’d missed some classes. But just one of Wolfman’s classes, which met on Friday morning. Since the flu was said to have affected so many students at Wainscotia, instructors were understanding, and hadn’t penalized us for absences or late papers. I was determined to make up for my lost classes for I was determined to be an excellent student at Wainscotia State University.

  In all my courses but particularly in Psychology 101.

  I WENT TO MEALS with my roommates more frequently. I was friendly with other residents of Acrady Cottage. I did not avoid Miss Steadman. (Though I’d disappointed our resident adviser at Thanksgiving by hiding away in the university library, and then upstairs in my room in the near-empty residence, with the excuse that I had too much work to do and couldn’t come to dinner with her and other lonely left-behind Wainscotia girls.) I wore the heather-colored cardigan sweater. I wore the Black Watch plaid pleated skirt. I even wore a strand of pale pink “pearls”—a dime-store necklace I’d found on a sidewalk on campus. In Wolfman’s quiz section I was an attentive student but I did not raise my hand for Wolfman to call upon nor did Wolfman, in his coolly courteous way, call upon “Miss Enright.” In a lapse of good judgment I even agreed to “double-date” (a term new to me) with Betsy and her Sigma Nu boyfriend; my date was a fraternity brother of his whose friends called him “Hedge,” from a small town in northern Wisconsin. Hedge was taciturn and blushed easily. It was difficult to know if Hedge was chronically embarrassed or chronically irritated. He seemed not to know how to talk to me, and I certainly didn’t know how to talk to him. He was a mechanical engineering major whose grades were mostly C’s. He’d been drinking beer before he’d come to Acrady Cottage to pick me up, and, at the Sigma Nu “keg party,” in the basement of the sprawling red-brick fraternity house with its carpet stained from years of rough usage, he continued to drink with his friends, like one determined to get drunk as quickly as possible. The evening passed in a blur amid deafening music, voices and laughter, a smell of pizza and spilled beer. It wasn’t surprising but it was dismaying to see Betsy drinking so much, “necking” with her date, and dancing drunkenly with him; after an hour or so, Betsy disappeared into the crowd, and I never saw her again that night. Hedge, flush-faced, seemed to want me to dance with him, too—or at least, he wanted to show his frat brothers that he was dancing with me, or clumsily pressing himself against me. He was very drunk: his belches stank of beer like popped balloons. At one point I hid away in a lavatory marked GIRLS ONLIE. I comforted freshman girls who were very drunk, and vomiting. I thought—If Wolfman would love me. If Wolfman would just acknowledge me. I wondered if, if I behaved recklessly, in violation of The Instructions, I would be “vaporized” by a Domestic Drone Strike here in Zone 9, and disappear before I felt pain or even fear. When I had the opportunity, and Hedge was nowhere in sight, I slipped away from the fraternity house through the wide-opened front door, and ran stumbling back to Acrady Cottage.

  How wonderful it was, to have escaped my first—(and last)—fraternity keg party! How wonderful to be alone, but not now lonely, running through a lightly falling snow back to my residence, my breath steaming! My roommates were all out on “dates”—I could have wept with relief in the room.

  Relief is happiness for those who, otherwise, would have no happiness. But relief can be an exquisite happiness, even in Exile.

  BETSY NEVER SPOKE to me about the keg party at Sigma Nu.

  Betsy did not speak to me very frequently, or very warmly, about anything at all, for the remainder of the time we roomed together.

  (Though I’d overheard Betsy complaining bitterly about me, for I’d embarrassed her with my “selfish” behavior, in front of her Sigma Nu friends; and I would learn sometime later that the night of the keg party had not been a lucky night for Betsy, who would withdraw from Wainscotia during winter break, and would not return.)

  When, all too often, I saw Hedge on campus, and Hedge saw me, we quickly looked away from each other.

  The sudden, cruel thought came to me—What does it matter if they hate me? They are both in their seventies by now, if they are still alive.

  THIS WAS THE TERRIFYING SECRET of Zone 9, of which its inhabitants were blissfully unaware: in the time that, to me, was present-tense, in the twenty-third year of the Reconstituted North American States, their lives were nearly over. If they were alive at all.

  The Museum of Natural History

  In December, I began part-time work at the Van Buren Museum of Natural History which was a sepulchral stone building adjacent to the Greene science building.

  The Museum of Natural History was a shadowy hushed place which few people visited. In its dark interior, Time seemed to have stopped decades ago; in the rooms where fossils and ancient bones were displayed, thousands of years ago.

  My work was carding and shelving books, for the museum included a special collection of rare natural-history books. My work was typing letters, documents, labels identifying items in glass display cases.

  In Zone 9, much of work-life was reiteration. Office work was mechanical, robot-like. A typist was a kind of robot. You typed words directly onto a sheet of paper—the words were formed by (black) ink on a “ribbon” that wound through the typewriter on twin spools. Often you used a “carbon copy” to make a second copy, for there were no photocopying machines—there were no personal computers and printers. Everything was done by hand.

  Everything was one-time-only, and yet would have to be repeated, usually. It was a kind of madness that could not have been explained in NAS-23. Office work inched slowly along deep-rutted grooves. It was commonplace to be required to type a second “ribbon” copy. There was terror in such repetition to no purpose save a replication of the original which might have been achieved by merely mechanical means—except, in 1959, these means did not yet exist.

  Much of my part-time work involved (re)typing labels for exhibits. In NAS-23, such labels would be printed out within minutes, or seconds. Yet the task occupied hours of my time. My salary was one dollar an hour—before taxes.

  In NAS-23, currency had been “reconstituted” in order to combat inflation. Still, everything was much more expensive than it had been in my parents’ memory, they’d said—while their salaries, which were modest salaries, had been frozen for years. It was a profound surprise to me to receive so small a salary from the university—(equivalent to approximately one-half of a cent in NAS-23 terms)—and yet more of a surprise when I discovered that, after taxes, I was earning less than sixty cents an hour!

  When I realized this, I burst into tears. My supervisor Miss Hurly said curtly, “Every one of us is taxed, Mary Ellen.” She meant to encourage me by saying that if I cont
inued to work well I might receive a raise of as much as twenty cents in the next semester.

  Twenty cents! I laughed.

  This was training, however. This was “experience.”

  Though the term did not exist in Zone 9 as it existed in the twenty-first century I was an “intern”—of sorts—I was accumulating skills, and a résumé, and, if I needed them, references for future employment. On Hilda’s borrowed typewriter I had learned to type competently; in fact, it was not a very different sort of typing from what I’d been doing since the age of two at a computer. And then, I’d learned to operate the somewhat fantastical “office-model” Remington in the museum, which must have weighed twenty-five pounds. This was an enormous black machine with steel keys that could be made to fly through the air in arcs of about three inches, striking white paper and “printing” black-ink letters. Miss Hurly had taught me to remove old, used-up ribbons and replace them with new ribbons; these ribbons, amazingly, came equipped with both black ink (top) and red ink (bottom); it was not possible to remove a typewriter ribbon without getting my fingers smudged with ink, but I was proud of myself for having learned at all. Miss Hurly taught me also to clean the keys of gummed-up ink until they shone as if new.

  Of my lost world of computers, cell phones, electronic pads and “readers”—I could have explained very little to any inhabitant of Zone 9. Even my memory of what these had meant to me, how I’d been habituated and addicted to them, seemed to be fading, like memories of my family and friends.

  (And I wondered: Can you still love someone whose face you are forgetting? Whose voice you can no longer hear?)

  (And I had to concede: If I had my cell phone here in Wainscotia, whom would I text or call? There was no one.)

  Unexpectedly, I was beginning—almost—to like the typewriter. I could see why Hilda was so proud of her portable model, set beside which the massive office-Remington at the museum was high-tech. The most extraordinary fact regarding both was that they did not have to be plugged in—here were machines so primitive they didn’t require power. I had learned to “set margins”—to “backspace”—to anticipate, like a subject in a behavioral psychology experiment, a tiny bell ringing near the end of a line. Most importantly, my fingers that had been accustomed to the light touch of a computer had learned with surprising alacrity to strike the keys down, hard. In the more popular keys, a, o, s, t, you could see the faint indentations of typists’ nails.