Hazards of Time Travel Page 7

  This is your life now. What you must be, now.

  Lost Friends

  Sometimes I woke with a sob, and it wasn’t my parents I was missing but my friends.

  And it came to me in a rush of emotion—I loved my friends! I’d taken them for granted sometimes, for which I was sorry now.

  Trying to recall their names: Carla, and Melanie, and Deborah, and . . . was it Paige?

  Like trying to peer through something clotted. A thick gauze. Strength was required to remember. My eyes ached in their sockets with the effort of trying to see my friends’ faces that were beginning to fade.

  We’d been together since middle school. We’d become closer in high school under certain stresses and pressures. To be like everyone else. But—how is that possible? No one is like anyone else.

  At Pennsboro High there’d been a vicious social hierarchy about which no one was supposed to speak: the sons and daughters of Government officials at the top, and the rest of us spread out beneath. With my father an MI, my social caste had been determined from the first day my mother had brought me to preschool.

  There’d been a time in tenth grade when Carla had been deeply sad and anorexic, and her friends had helped her through the crisis; there’d been a time in our junior year when Glenna had been in a perpetual state of anxiety, when her research-scientist father had been removed from his laboratory on a charge of Science-Treason. And there was the terrible ten-month period when Deborah’s father was in custody at Homeland Security Interrogation, and no one knew if he’d ever be released. (Eventually Mr. Albright was released, but in a perpetual benign zombie-state, so it was as if Deborah had lost her father after all.) Using a text-code we’d invented for ourselves, which we were shrewd enough to change every few weeks, we’d texted one another continuously, day after day, for years. We were closer in some essential ways than we were with our parents who did not speak openly to us, and certainly we were closer with each other than with any of our male classmates. (“Female” and “male” were expected to distrust each other. It was not considered good behavior to have close friends of the opposite sex before high school graduation.)

  Somewhere in my damaged memory was the vague knowledge that my friends had tried to warn me about the valedictorian address—Paige had advised me to work with our English teacher on the speech, which, she thought, should have been modeled after previous valedictorian addresses, that had not antagonized the Youth Disciplinary censor, but I’d ignored her suggestion totally—in fact, I’d been insulted and hurt by it.

  How stupid I’d been! Paige had wanted to protect me, and I’d been heedless.

  I wondered what graduation at my high school had been like. The boy-athlete whom Mr. Mackay had wanted to give the valedictory address would have given it, in my place. Someone else would have been named salutatorian. No one except my friends would miss me.

  Wasn’t someone else supposed to be valedictorian?

  Someone else? Who?

  That girl . . . What was her name . . .

  What girl? I don’t remember any girl.

  You know, the one with—I guess brown hair . . .

  Oh gosh! I remember her—sort of . . .

  She was arrested for Treason. She’s gone now.

  Gone—where?

  Gone.

  He, Him

  And then, in this place of utter loneliness, I fell in love.

  He was not the first person who looked kindly upon me in Zone 9. Or protectively. Or even curiously.

  He was the first person who knew. Staring at me, in an instant he knew who I was. What I was.

  And I thought—There are two of us now. Him, and—Mary Ellen.

  Wolfman

  “‘Enright, Mary Ellen’”—the eyes moved onto me curiously, coolly.

  I could scarcely breathe. Digging my nails into the palms of my hands.

  Our instructor was returning midterm exams. He was smiling, though not with his eyes. His eyes moved restlessly over us, impersonal and detached, calculating.

  I wondered: were we “subjects” to him? Wolfman was a research psychologist, an assistant professor in psychology.

  After several weeks of class he knew the names of certain individuals in our class but not, until now, mine.

  Hesitantly I’d risen from my seat to take the little blue booklet from Wolfman. He had not known me before. I had not distinguished myself in the quiz section by raising my hand, answering his questions or asking questions of my own, as a scattering of other students had, more aggressive than Mary Ellen Enright. But now, Wolfman was looking at Mary Ellen Enright.

  “Good work, Miss Enright. You’ve been reading Skinner outside the textbook?”

  “Y-Yes.”

  Continuing to stare at me, just a moment too long.

  In class Wolfman was brusque and sunny and sharp-witted—a knife-blade that has been honed razor-sharp, you would not carelessly reach out to touch. Now his ironic smile faded. His expression seemed one of surprise—genuine surprise. As if about to ask me something further but changed his mind, quickly looking away and calling the next name.

  A sensation of faintness enveloped me. But I managed to return to my desk, clutching the blue book without daring to open it.

  Does he know?

  Does he—somehow—recognize me?

  Is he in Exile too—like me?

  For the remainder of the hour I remained in a state of something like suspended animation. I could not bring myself to look at the quiz section instructor at the front of the room, casually sitting at the edge of a table; meekly I leaned over my notebook, to take notes. Nor did Wolfman glance at me. Through a roaring in my ears I could barely hear his voice expounding upon some principle of psychology and by the end of the period, when the bell sounded, I remained benumbed in my desk as others trooped out of the room. When at last I dared to raise my eyes Ira Wolfman had departed.

  Only when I was safely alone did I open the blue book. Extravagant, exclamatory, the grade was in red ink—99%.

  And in red ink the witty scrawl below—No one is perfect.

  The EI is forbidden to identify himself/herself except as established by HSEDB.

  The EI is monitored at all times.

  A soul in Exile. I was convinced, I’d come into contact with a kindred soul.

  Those of us who’d been assigned to Wolfman’s quiz section were considered both lucky (Wolfman was fun) and not-so-lucky (Wolfman was tough). He could be intimidating as well as entertaining. He was, to midwestern eyes and ears, “different”—even “foreign.”

  Wolfman spoke more fluently, more rapidly and on the whole less patiently than most other adults in Zone 9 whom I’d encountered. His hair was thick and dark and lifted from his forehead in wayward curves that reminded me of the thick swirly feathers of an owl. (Thinking of the handsome great horned owl specimen in the Natural History collection.) Though Wolfman was clean-shaven you could see the shadow of a beard darkening his jaws and beneath his jaws, on his throat. Most days for our class he wore a sport coat, dark trousers and a white or pale blue shirt. Often, not always, a necktie. His eyes were dark, of the hue of wet slate, quizzical and restless. You did think that, at times, Wolfman’s attention—his deepest and most profound attention—was elsewhere.

  I am here but not truly here. You have no idea who I am.

  It was Wolfman’s custom to fling out questions as one might fling out a handful of coins to underlings—some students responded alertly, others held back suspecting a trick. Others were confused, disoriented. We were likely to be cautious of Ira Wolfman despite his genial and inviting smile.

  There were twenty-five students in the quiz section of whom three were female. Rarely had I tried to answer the instructor’s questions for I feared his possible sarcasm, the stroke of a razor-sharp blade across the knuckle of an unsuspecting undergraduate.

  The week’s subject was “neurobehavioral analysis”—a Skinnerian postulate that the nervous system is inactive most of the ti
me and roused only by stimuli from the environment, that result in “reflexes.” It was a behavioral premise that an animal is, essentially, a machine. A human being is an animal and is therefore, essentially, a machine. Individual, group, and mass behavior can be programmed, conditioned, predicted and controlled. Radical behaviorism is a science: you can graph the consequences of experiments. A human being is not inward but outward—the sum of (measurable) behavior. A human being is behavior, to be observed and charted by others. What the environment can’t control is the genetic self. But this too is determined. Zombies come in all shapes, sizes, and types.

  I did not want to think that this was true. But in Zone 9, in the psychology department of Wainscotia State University, such “truths” prevailed.

  The lecture course taught by Professor A. J. Axel—Introduction to Twentieth-Century Psychology—was one of the most popular and revered in the College of Liberal Arts, with an enrollment of more than two hundred students. Many were pre-med, for this was a requirement. Wolfman’s quiz section met on Friday mornings when it was his task to explicate Professor Axel’s often abstruse lecture for us, to shine a beacon of clarity into the dark patches of our ignorance. You could see that the youthful Wolfman took pleasure in befuddling us further, before enlightening us. He took pleasure in scribbling graphs—“learning curves”—on the blackboard, to illustrate the professor’s argument. It was a pleasurable task to explain experiments in detail to which Professor Axel only alluded.

  Occasionally, always very subtly, Wolfman corrected Professor Axel. As Professor Axel meant to say . . .

  A. J. Axel was claimed to be one of the most distinguished academic psychologists in the United States, a former Harvard collaborator with the greatest experimental psychologist of the twentieth century, B. F. Skinner. He had been a protégé of the famed Dr. Walter Freeman as well, assisting Freeman in performing a number of lobotomies in the Midwest, in the early 1950s. He was the director of the Wainscotia Center for Social Engineering. Tall, white-haired, gentlemanly, invariably dressed in a tweed coat, white shirt and tie, Axel was a figure of dignity and erudition. Yet, Axel was not always comprehensible to his audiences for his vocabulary was highly specialized, as in a secret code. Such mysterious terms as operant conditioning, schedules of reinforcement, law of effect, reinforcers, punishers, escape learning, avoidance learning were predominant.

  To undergraduates Wolfman was “Dr. Wolfman,” for he had a Ph.D. To Wolfman, we were “Miss”—“Mister.”

  He was unfailingly courteous with us, if often slightly ironic; he seemed not to trust us to quite understand his jokes. And he seemed to have many jokes. He was quick-witted, funny. With the acuity of one swatting a fly while his attention seemed to be elsewhere, he could rebuke a skeptical student.

  Wolfman attended Professor Axel’s lectures on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 10:00 A.M., seated in the front row of the lecture hall with several other assistant professors and departmental graduate students. With few exceptions among the graduate students, they were all male: there were virtually no female faculty members at Wainscotia.

  Of Professor Axel’s young assistants Ira Wolfman must have been the most trusted, for when the professor was forced to miss a lecture Wolfman took his place. On those mornings there was a quickened sense of anticipation in the lecture hall, for most of the students preferred dashing young Ira Wolfman to the renowned A. J. Axel.

  Sometimes following Wolfman’s lectures there was a scattering of applause in the lecture hall. Unobtrusively in my seat I clapped with the others, thrilled and breathless.

  In our class Wolfman described psychology experiments in which he’d participated: the systematic precipitation of “learned helplessness”—a term for “breakdown”—in pigeons, rats, and small primates (monkeys) after a volley of stimuli followed by random and unpredictable consequences. Initially, the subject tries to make sense of the stimuli, to perceive a pattern amid randomness; the subject tries to “control” the situation, but of course fails, and eventually suffers a breakdown.

  After the “learned helplessness,” the subject can be reconstituted through a volley of new stimuli, with predictable consequences.

  Like animals, human beings require order, coherence, predictable consequences. If they fail to experience these, they suffer breakdown.

  It was a fact of behavioral psychology. No one could contest this (cruel) fact.

  I thought—That is our condition. If we are lucky.

  Lonely

  Before Wolfman I’d been so lonely: I had done something reckless.

  It was foolish, futile—I’d known this beforehand. And it was reckless.

  Kneeling in the shadowy corner of my room, beside my bed, and pressing my forehead against the wall, in an effort to summon back memory—memories—of my old, lost life—biting my lower lip to keep from crying—and I could not, could not remember—my mother’s face, or voice; my father’s face, or voice; my own face, in the bureau mirror in my room that I’d had since I had been a little girl, when Daddy had painted my room a pale rose color, and Mommy had painted the frame around my mirror a color she called creamy-white . . . And I felt that my head might explode with the effort; for the microchip in my brain was blocking the very memories that would nurture me, like a kind of mental asthma, suffocating . . .

  You can’t. You are forbidden. You are in Exile. This is your punishment.

  And so I gave up. Several times in succession, I gave up.

  And one day when I’d given up trying to remember, when loneliness was choking me, I threw on my fleece-lined jacket and went out again in the late afternoon, at a time when other students were leaving campus, returning to their residences for dinner; and hiked over to the university infirmary on the far, eastern edge of the campus; and there, I searched for the nurse whom I’d seen in my first hour at Wainscotia, in the immediate aftermath of the teletransportation—I didn’t remember the woman’s name but I remembered her face, her darkish blond hair brushed back behind her ears, her eyes that were kindly but wary—Don’t ask me any questions, Mary Ellen Enright. Just go away.

  I asked the receptionist if there was a nurse who fitted that description, in her early thirties maybe; and the receptionist shook her head no; she had no idea whom I meant. And I said, “But could I look around for the nurse—there’s really something I need to ask her.”

  The receptionist told me that at the present time no one else was on duty in the infirmary except her. The resident doctor was “on call”—but not on the premises.

  I glanced about the waiting room, which was empty. It was a small, cramped space with just three chairs. (Curious to see ashtrays in the infirmary waiting room!) There was a close, stale, congested smell of something medicinal and sickly, as well as cigarette smoke, and in the near distance, in the adjoining ward, a sound of despondent coughing. I remembered now—some sort of sickness was sweeping the campus, “Asian flu”—several girls in Acrady Cottage were stricken.

  Since I seemed so indecisive the receptionist said again that she didn’t know whom I meant, and she knew all of the nurses in the infirmary.

  Hearing this, I simply chose not to absorb it. No.

  “Are you sure? Could I—look around? Is there a nurses’ station?”

  The nurse-receptionist looked at me as if I had to be joking.

  “Nurses’ station? Here?”

  “Her name might have been”—I was straining to remember, despite something knotty in my brain that blocked my thoughts—“something like Imogene?—Irma?”

  “‘Imogene’—‘Irma.’ No.”

  Quickly the nurse-receptionist spoke. Too quickly, I thought.

  And I thought—Is this the nurse? This woman, who is speaking to me?

  I saw, now. She was older than I’d remembered—about my mother’s age. Her (dark blond) hair was all but hidden behind a nurse’s starched white cap. She was wearing a bulky cardigan over her white nylon nurse’s uniform for it was cold in the infirmary, and
her plastic name tag was hidden beneath the sweater. I saw that she was the woman—the nurse—who’d helped me wake up, in my first, terrified hour in Zone 9.

  “I think you know me? ‘Mary Ellen Enright’? You were kind to me, when I was brought here . . .”

  Now the receptionist spoke sharply, with a mirthless laugh. “Miss, I said no. I’ve never seen you before, and you’ve never seen me. And now it’s time for you to leave.”

  “But—aren’t you ‘Imogene’—or—‘Irma’? Please—”

  “Now.”

  “—‘Irma Kazinski’—‘Krazinski’—”

  “If you don’t leave, miss, I’m going to call—security. You’ve been warned.”

  Her eyes on my face, and not friendly. The way in which she enunciated the word security allowed me to know that it wasn’t security she meant but something far more devastating—Deletion, DDS, vaporization.

  For a moment I stood paralyzed, unmoving. I could not contemplate leaving the infirmary and returning to Acrady Cottage, alone.

  “There is no one here who—knows me. I was—I am—Adriane Strohl—I am not ‘Mary Ellen Enright’—I was sent here—brought here—from NAS-23—do you know anything about me? Anything at all—you could tell me?”

  Nurse Irma’s face was shut tight. The irises of her eyes were tiny as peppercorns, as if sightless. Her mouth was an angry scrawl.

  “You’re raving. You must be feverish. But we can’t take you here—we’re filled up with flu patients. Don’t you know there’s flu sweeping the campus? Better for you to get out of here while you can. While you can walk. Before you get sick. Before you get very sick. Miss Enright—is that your name?—be sure to shut the door firmly when you leave. Do you understand?”

  “Please—anything you could tell me, just—anything . . . About what is happening there—in NAS-23? Has anything changed? Is there still Homeland Security, and the president? And the Army, and the Wars for Freedom? Do you know anything about my parents—Madeleine and Eric Strohl? We live—lived—in Pennsboro, New Jersey. Don’t send me away, I’m so lonely . . .”