Hazards of Time Travel Read online

  Ghost-typists had preceded me in the shadowy interior of the Museum of Natural History.

  My supervisor was a white-haired woman in her mid-fifties named Ethel Hurly who spoke in a hushed but stern voice as one might speak in a mausoleum. She had a large soft descending bosom and wore polka-dot blouses with bows at the throat. Her superior was the museum director, Professor Morris Harrick, whose Ph.D. was from Princeton in the field of “classical science” and whom I rarely saw. (Like so many of the higher-regarded Wainscotia faculty, Professor Harrick was from what had used to be, until the controversial Reconstitution of Higher Education in NAS-20, an Ivy League university.) I perceived that Miss Hurly was in love with Professor Harrick, who was himself white-haired, and in his fifties; with polished glasses, a distracted look, and a habit of blowing his nose loudly into white cotton “handkerchiefs.” (These were actual clothes, small squares of cloth, invariably white, which men of a certain caliber or class used conspicuously, to signal, it seemed to me, that they had in their power or in their hire, in private, a female so trained that she would not bridle at laundering and “ironing” them, for his one-time use. Fortunately, for the rest of us, paper tissues had been invented by 1959.) Professor Harrick seemed to be married, for he wore a wedding band on the third finger of his left hand, and on the desk in his office there were small framed photographs of family members including young children. So Professor Harrick was a father, too! And very likely a grandfather.

  It was touching to me that Miss Hurly adored Professor Harrick with no hope of his returning her feeling, or even becoming aware of it. I felt sorry for her even when she was impatient with me, surprised at my lack of skills and my general naïveté. (Once she’d said to me, “Mary Ellen, were you born in the United States? Sometimes you don’t seem like an American.”)

  Morris Harrick was a dignified gentleman who not only carried a freshly ironed white cotton handkerchief in his vest pocket, but also wore a vest, a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a white cotton shirt and proper necktie, each day he appeared in the museum, or taught A History of Western Science in Greene Hall, immediately following Professor A. J. Axel’s psychology lecture. Professor Harrick rarely spoke to me directly and scarcely “saw” me at all—he’d several times called me “Dolores,” which was the name of another undergraduate girl–employee in the museum, whose work-hours didn’t overlap with mine.

  As I loved Wolfman at a distance, or consoled myself in my loneliness with the possibility of loving Wolfman, so Miss Hurly loved distracted Professor Harrick, for whom she was always typing letters, documents, and manuscripts to be sent to learned journals in the professor’s field. Miss Hurly showed me Professor Harrick’s publications in these journals, which were impressive, and all but unreadable, as well as the professor’s several books with such titles as A History of Natural Philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the Enlightenment, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Miss Hurly echoed Miss Steadman in her enthusiasm for the male academic intellect: “Professor Harrick has devoted his career to examining how ‘false’ theories of science have been replaced by ‘true’ theories through the centuries, to our present-time, mid-twentieth-century America. I don’t know the details of course—but Professor Harrick’s argument is very persuasive. He is another candidate from Wainscotia for the Nobel Prize.”

  I asked Miss Hurly if she’d heard of A. J. Axel and she said yes, of course—“One of Wainscotia’s great minds!” I dared not ask her if she’d heard of Ira Wolfman, for a quaver in my voice might have given me away.

  It made me swallow hard, struck with sadness to think of Miss Hurly and Morris Harrick and to realize that, in NAS-23, each had been long dead; and whether Professor Harrick had won a Nobel Prize, I did not know.

  IN THE MUSEUM, often I worked late. I did not like to return to Acrady Cottage where I was obliged to impersonate “Mary Ellen” to my roommates and sister-residents.

  Work was a narcotic! Work was my way of sanity, that prevented me from brooding upon my parents, my lost friends, Ira Wolfman—the colorful, tattered kites that Roddy and I had once made together, that were now long destroyed.

  Daddy had once advised One day, one hour at a time, honey. One breath. We can do it.

  (Not to me, Daddy had said these gently urgent words, but to my mother, I think. She’d been crying at the time, in their bedroom with the door shut.)

  Resolutely I typed—retyped—labels for the display cases: the Latin names of flowers, fungi, birds and mammals; beautiful names, they seemed to me, because exotic, in a long-dead language. (In NAS-23, Latin was not taught in even the most esteemed schools.) And when I’d had enough of typing on the massive Remington machine, when my fingernails ached with the pressure of striking the keys, I turned to my textbooks, and my notebook, and worked on my assignments. It had not been difficult for me, despite my anxieties, to receive uniformly high grades in all my subjects, including now Intro to Logic; in the narrowness of my Exile-life, which yielded a private, secret depth like that of a chasm in the earth whose depth is not visible from the surface, it was not difficult for me to excel—most of my classmates seemed only moderately engaged with their course work, even scholarship girls at Acrady Cottage. The great, public life of the university was of the surface: football and other sports, “Greek life” (fraternities, sororities whose mansion-sized houses were predominantly ranged along the hilly end of University Avenue), “pledging,” “dating.” If I worked in the museum on Saturday afternoon I could sometimes hear, in the distance, a roaring of cheers like a frenzied and frothing waterfall from the football stadium at the far side of the campus, which was said to contain more than twenty thousand spectators! In the museum, empty except for me, it was scarcely possible to imagine twenty people, let alone twenty thousand.

  Among Wainscotia undergraduates it was considered “square” to study hard, and to seem “serious”; to spend much time on studies was considered a kind of treason, if you were a “Greek.” My grades of A and A+ were best kept secret as they were disfiguring to me as acne—(I knew: my roommates had frankly told me). Since the Sigma Nu beer party which I’d fled, and since Hedge, and my roommate Betsy’s disappointment in me, I had had no “social life” at all—to my relief. For nowhere are you so lonely as in the midst of a party.

  And nowhere do you feel so unloved as when couples are drunkenly pawing at each other, in a crude parody of love.

  And when I’d had enough of my schoolwork, and my head and eyes had begun to ache with the effort, and something of the futility of this effort, I prowled the museum, switching on lights in the shadowy recesses—room after room, exhibits on platforms and on the walls, in display cases, what seemed like acres of fluorescent-lit gloom. In winter, when the sun disappeared in a bank of discolored clouds at about 5:00 P.M., it was pitch-dark by 6:00 P.M. as if it were midnight.

  Even during the day there were few visitors to the Museum of Natural History. Some of these were professional guests whom Professor Harrick and a colleague or two might be showing through the museum, concentrating upon special exhibits. Some might be alumni, or the parents of students. These visitors rarely stayed long. Their voices too were hushed in the sepulchral regions of the museum. Between rows of display cases they moved like wraiths, staring briefly, then moving on. If they glanced in my direction—shelving books, or perched behind the giant Remington at a desk adjacent to Miss Hurly’s desk—they appeared startled, as if one of the stuffed-creature exhibits had stirred to life.

  Wandering the museum after hours! At times I felt an unexpected sort of happiness, at other times a more profound sense of futility.

  No matter how much you learn—how high your “grade-point average”—you are alone here. And no one cares whether Adriane Strohl lives or dies.

  One of the famed exhibits in the museum was the Van Buren Glass Flowers, which exerted a kind of spell upon me. I thought of my mother—I tried to think of my mother, Madeleine—(yet how strange this name sounded t
o me now: “Madeleine”)—who would have admired the extraordinary flowers, ingeniously wrought in glass of the most subtle hues: the most beautiful were orchids, lilies, exotic tropical blooms of the size of a human head. Yet the flowers were curiously scentless of course. A faint patina of grime lay upon even the most polished specimens, if you looked closely.

  The most intriguing of the exotic glass flowers was a “carnivorous” plant from the Amazon rain forest—its elongated flesh-colored petals resembled a crocodile’s (opened) jaws, and, in life, were said to be sticky-sweet to attract insects and small mammals. Out of childlike curiosity I lay my fingers on the (opened) petal, to see if the carnivore-plant would shut its jaws on me; but it did not, for it was made of glass, and never moved.

  I tried to remember my mother’s indoor plants: stunted specimens, which failed to thrive in weak winter sunshine, but which flourished, to a degree, in warm weather, when we set them onto our back steps. But what was their name? A very common name . . . And the blossoms were small, and bright-red. And had no scent.

  I missed Mom so much! And Daddy.

  And Paige, and Melanie, and . . . what was her name, whose father had been arrested?—Carla . . . ?

  The punishment of Exile is loneliness. There is no state more terrifying than loneliness though you would not think so, when you are not lonely; when you are secure in “your” life.

  In these after-hours in the Museum of Natural History it seemed to me that there might be someone who’d stayed behind, until the museum had officially closed; or, more unnerving, a being in the museum whose presence predated my own. My heart began to beat quickly as I moved from room to room—switching on overhead lights, seeing shadows leap in the corner of my eyes. On the high-ceilinged walls were skulls, bones, near-complete skeletons of ancient birds and beasts; in display cases, rocks containing fossils, and more skulls, bones, and small skeletons. And there were stuffed and mounted creatures—such birds as hawks, owls, falcons, shorebirds and songbirds, a glassy-eyed bald eagle; such small mammals as red foxes, raccoons, squirrels, lynxes and bobcats, and on a wall an enormous elk’s head with twelve-point antlers and shining glass eyes.

  And a beautiful wolf with silver-tipped fur, a wise sharp dog-face, intelligent-seeming glassy eyes. Canine x, indigenous to Wisconsin.

  Intensely the (dead) creatures seemed to be observing me. Theirs was a profound sorrow, all the more piteous for being mute. I saw that the labels attached to many of the displays were yellowing and supposed that, soon, I would be asked by Miss Hurly to retype them. I smiled at the futility of the museum—this place that felt underground, though it was on the first floor of the building; this place that Time had forgotten. For in the Museum of Natural History it was not even 1959.

  A soft film of dust lay over all things. I expected to see, when I walked along the aisles, my footprints on the floor behind me.

  I was smiling, in order not to cry. In one of the glass display cases I saw my own wan reflection floating, superimposed upon an exhibit of aged turtle shells, from which the living turtle-bodies had departed. Yet, I thought I saw one of the turtle shells quiver. Something was moving, reflected in the glass . . .

  To my shock I saw then that a man was approaching me in the shadowy light, his hand extended. Wolfman! Smiling at me, a forefinger to his lips and the palm of his hand held out to me, upon which he’d written in bright red ink:

  FOLLOW ME PLEASE

  Shelter

  In silence Wolfman led me deeper into the interior of the museum.

  Quickly I followed. I would have followed Ira Wolfman anywhere.

  Like a sleepwalker who is but dimly aware of her surroundings but determined to behave as if she were in control of her movements, I followed.

  Wolfman had come to me! I’d seen in his face a frowning smile, or half-smile—a pained sort of tenderness. He is risking his life for me, I thought.

  I vowed then, I would love Wolfman with all my strength. I would die for Wolfman.

  He knew the Van Buren Museum of Natural History, it seemed. He was not a stranger to its vast subterranean-seeming reaches. And he knew that I worked here—he must have made inquiries about me, to have such specific knowledge of my work hours.

  Shyly I smiled at Wolfman. My heart was beating rapidly in my chest like a trapped bird!

  Still without a word Wolfman took my hand, and pulled me gently—firmly—forward. His fingers clasped mine with startling familiarity. As in a dream of surpassing wonder and beauty we passed through rooms I had never seen before: entire walls festooned with songbirds perched on replicas of tree limbs, and a great flock of brightly colored warblers; a hall of “wetlands” creatures—rubbery stuffed frogs and toads, turtles of all sizes, snowy egrets perched on a single leg, mute swans, Canada geese, mallard ducks frozen in dark gelid ponds. Clinging to the underside of a tree trunk, a weak-eyed opossum. All these creatures seemed to be watching us, alerted by the life in our bodies.

  Wolfman mouthed the words—Don’t speak! Not yet.

  We passed through a display of large mammals of the American West—antelope, deer, buffalo, bison, mountain lions, bears (black, brown); a display that was an enormous whale skeleton, through which we walked furtively, eagerly. And there was an enlarged photograph of the gigantic creature, on a wall facing us. Where was Wolfman leading me? I felt dazed with happiness, or with dread. In my fantasies of Ira Wolfman I had not made out what we would say to each other, if we were truly alone together. How we would declare ourselves to each other, if we dared. I had not allowed myself to imagine Wolfman actually taking my hand.

  I had not allowed myself to imagine Wolfman holding me, kissing me. My dreams of Wolfman had always faded at that point.

  As if to obscure our trail Wolfman switched on and off lights as he led me through the museum.

  At last we were in a remote corner of the museum, far from the entrance. Here was a dimly lighted room crowded with a miscellany of exhibits as if the museum curator had run out of space and despaired of his mission, like a distracted Creator, and had stored here crudely stuffed animals (small deer, lynx and bobcat, rodents) whose fur was matted and whose glass eyes were sunken in their sockets; trays of fossil rocks whose labels had peeled away; unidentified skulls and bones; and rattlesnakes coiled together on sheets of shale, looking so uncannily alive with their small beady glass eyes that I shuddered at the sight of them, and tried to pull my hand from Wolfman’s as he laughed at me—“They can’t hurt you, ‘Mary Ellen.’ They’re under a spell, too.”

  At the rear of the room, partly hidden behind a large display case, was a stairway, leading down; at the foot of the stairway was a squat-looking door cut into the wall. Set into the door was a combination of the kind affixed to safes and lockers and this combination Wolfman turned, and turned back, and again turned, with careful fingers, until the lock sprang open, and the door swung just slightly inward. And Wolfman took my hand more firmly now, and pulled me inside.

  Wolfman shut the door. “Now, we’re safe! No surveillance.”

  He’d switched on a light. Fluttering fluorescent lights, overhead. There was a smell here of the earth—damp, rich, rotted. We were on a cement landing. More steps led down, to a darkened lower level.

  Wolfman tugged at my arm. I felt a moment’s panic, that I must follow him—where?

  Wolfman preceded me, down the steep cement steps. So that, presumably, if I grew faint, or lost my balance, he could turn and steady me.

  We came to another, much lower level. The air here smelled ranker and was fiercely cold.

  I rubbed at my eyes. My vision seemed blurred. I saw that we were in the outer room of a basement of some sort, with cement walls, cement floor and (cement?) ceiling; on the floor was a metallic-gray carpet, and on the walls signs containing elaborate instructions NUCLEAR ATTACK EMERGENCY PRECAUTIONS. Close by the entrance was a life-sized dummy equipped with gas mask, thick gray clothing and gloves and heavy boots.

  It was impossible not to think
that the uniformed dummy was somehow observing us, through his goggle-glasses.

  “This is a nuclear bomb shelter, ‘Mary Ellen.’ You’ve probably never seen one before. There’s another, larger shelter, better-equipped, for more elite members of the university community, in the basement of the administration building, which I know about but have never seen.”

  In wonderment and in dread I looked around. I could not help but think that, despite our distance from the surface of the earth, Homeland Security was recording us, and that we would be terribly punished.

  Wolfman said that there were still bomb shelters in our time—in NAS—but only for Government officials. The average citizen knew nothing about them. But in the 1950s bomb shelters were much more common, featured in mass-market magazines like Life and Time, and on television; many private citizens built their own shelters in their basements—“Like an extension of the ‘family room.’ A place in which to be cozy though you would want also to be armed, to keep out neighbors.”

  Wolfman remarked that the nuclear bombs and missiles had been expected to come from the USSR—Soviet Russia, a “political behemoth” that no longer exists in NAS-23. He asked me whether in present-day NAS Russia was still one of the “terrorist enemies of democracy” and I told him that I thought so, yes, for there were a number of “terrorist enemies”; but Russia was an enemy with whom the North American States made treaties, in opposition to China which was NAS’s great and abiding enemy.