Читать книгу Hazards of Time Travel - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 19

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 RESIDENCE a large cardboard box awaited M. E. ENRIGHT in the front foyer.

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

The box measured approximately three by four feet. It was so crammed, one of its sides was nearly bursting.

And the box was badly battered, as if it had come a long distance, in rainy weather. Transparent tape covered it in intricate layers crisscrossing like a deranged cobweb. Even with a pair of shears provided by the resident adviser of Acrady Cottage it was very difficult to open.

“My! Someone took care that this box would not rip open in delivery!”

Inside were clothes: several skirts, blouses, sweaters, a pair of slacks, a navy-blue wool jumper, a fleece-lined jacket, flannel pajamas, white cotton underwear, white cotton socks, a pair of sneakers, and a pair of brown shoes identified by the resident adviser as “penny loafers.” There were also “Bermuda shorts” and a “blazer”—clothes of a kind I had never seen before. And sheer, long “stockings”—I’d never seen before. All these items were secondhand, rumpled, and smelled musty.

I was staring inside the box. I felt dazed, dizzy. I thought—These are castoff clothes of the dead.

“Shall I help you carry these upstairs? It might be more practical just to leave the box here and take your things up in our arms …”

“No. I can take them by myself. Thank you.”

The resident adviser, Miss Steadman, was being very kind. But I did not want even to look at her. I did not want to speak with the woman more than necessary and I did not want to be alone with her in the room to which I was assigned for even a few minutes.

I did not want her to see these clothes close up. I did not feel comfortable with her registering that, to me, some of these things were unfamiliar. Nor did I want her to smell the sour, stale odor that lifted from them, any more than she already had.

I did not want her to feel sorry for me. That poor girl!—indeed, she is poor.

Also, Miss Steadman’s words, her manner of speech, were strange to me. It was clear that she was speaking English yet so slowly, with such odd nasal vowels, it made me anxious to listen to her.

At the bottom of the box was an envelope with M. E. ENRIGHT stamped on it. I would not open this envelope until I was alone in room 3C when I would discover that it contained five twenty-dollar bills that were crisp as if freshly printed, and a stiff sheet of paper headed THE INSTRUCTIONS.

There was no personal note. I felt a small stab of disappointment for I had thought—I mean, I’d wanted to think—that S. Platz had taken a personal liking to me.

In my arms I carried my new belongings upstairs to room 3C. I grew short of breath quickly for I had not recovered from my long journey. Miss Steadman watched me with concerned eyes but did not attempt to help me another time.

Freshmen would be arriving on the Wainscotia campus the next day. I’d been sent into Exile at the perfect time and I did think that S. Platz must have had something to do with this timing.

Room 3C was at the rear of the cottage. A large room with two dormer windows and a slanted ceiling. Bare floorboards, bare walls with scattered holes for picture hanging and small nails.

Four beds, four desks: four roommates!

It was surprising to me, I would be rooming with three other girls and not alone.

But a relief, the room was ordinary. Except for the slanting ceiling that, if I wasn’t alert, would bump against my head.

Quickly my eyes glanced about. It would be an involuntary reaction in Zone 9: establishing that a new space held no (evident) danger. Nothing in it (that I could see) to frighten, threaten, or disorient.

Nothing unique to Zone 9. Rather, a room that could be anywhere.

I took the bed in the farthest corner, beneath the slanted ceiling. I would leave the windows, the better-positioned beds, and the largest closets for my roommates for I did not want them to dislike me.

“‘Mary Ellen’! Are you sure, you want that bed way off in a corner?”—so my roommates asked when they arrived, with evident sincerity.

These were nice girls. (Were they?) Staring at me with curious eyes but they were not rude, or did not mean to be rude.

Though they were enough alike to be three sisters they were strangers to one another. “White” girls—ST1. All were from rural Wisconsin and had gone to Wisconsin high schools. Their broad flat northern-midwestern accents were identical. Their names were immediately confused in my head like a buzzing of insects.

I thought—One of them may be my executioner.

“When did you arrive, Mary Ellen? Last night?”

“Where’re you from, Mary Ellen?”

“Did your parents bring you? Are they still here?”

“Sorry, Mary Ellen! We’re taking up a lot of room, I guess …”

Much of the day the room was crowded with parents, relatives, young children, helping my roommates move in.

I went away to hide. The sounds of strangers’ voices, loud, assured, happy-seeming, those broad flat vowels, were oppressive to me. But I did not cry.

At evening I returned to the room at the top of the stairs for I had nowhere else to go. Acrady Cottage was my home now.

EVENTUALLY, WHEN I BEGAN to wear the clothes that had come in the box, I would discover that only a few items fitted me.

Some things were too small, too short, too tight—most were too large.

Faint half-moons of stains beneath the armpits of sweaters. Loose buttons, missing buttons. Broken zippers. Dark-smeared something, possibly food, I hoped not blood, on a skirt.

The girls of Acrady Cottage would whisper among themselves, to see me so badly dressed—like a pauper, with clothes from Goodwill—but I never minded for I was grateful for what had been given to me.

My favorites were a pleated Black Watch plaid skirt (as it was identified for me by a roommate) with an oversized ornamental brass safety pin holding the skirt together—ingeniously; a dark-rose turtleneck sweater that reminded me of a sweater back home, though this sweater was much larger; a long-sleeved white blouse with a “lace” collar that fitted me, and gave me a serious, somber look, that I particularly liked because it seemed to suggest This is a good girl, a nice girl, a shy girl, a girl who would never, ever be subversive or raise her voice. Please be kind to this girl thank you!

In my old, lost life I had never worn blouses. I had never worn “lace”—or known anyone who had.

I had never worn skirts, dresses. I had worn only jeans. In fact, just two or three pairs of jeans, that had not cost much and that I wore all the time without needing to think.

In Zone 9 girls wore skirts to classes, sometimes dresses. They wore “sweater sets”—cardigans over matching short-sleeved sweaters. Sometimes they encased their legs in nylon stockings which I did not think I could manage without tearing, though I would try.

How my friends would laugh, to see me in a lacy blouse. In nylon stockings. In the Black Watch plaid skirt with the big brass safety pin holding the pleated material together—Oh God what has happened to Addie. Is that even her?

NOT A PLEASANT SIGHT. Electrodes in my roommates’ heads.

Well, not electrodes. I knew better.

“Like this, Mary Ellen. I can’t believe you’ve never ‘set’ your hair!”

Laughing at me. Not unkindly. (I wanted to think.)

But I could not manage it: putting my hair in plastic “rollers” before going to bed.

First, you wetted your hair with some special smelly setting-solution. Brushed and combed your hair. Separated your hair into numerous strands, and rolled these strands onto “rollers” (three sizes: largest pink, medium blue, smallest mint green) which were secured to the scalp as tightly as possible with bobby pins.

Yes, your scalp might hurt from the pins and from having to lie with your head on a pillow, on rollers.

You might even get a little headache! But it was worth it, for the effect of the smooth glossy pageboy the next day.

Tried just once. Awake half the night. Drifting off to sleep and waking in a nightmare sweat of electrodes in my brain. And in the morning most of the rollers had come out, and when I brushed out my hair it was as limp and straggling as ever, or almost.

Hilda said, “Next time, Mary Ellen, I’ll set your hair in rollers. Don’t you dare say no.”