Hazards of Time Travel. Joyce Carol Oates

normally, if I knew myself visible.

      In these early days in Zone 9 I did not think of those others who might be in Exile here—for surely there were others like myself. Like one trapped in a small cage who has no awareness of others similarly trapped, and in her desperation no sympathy to spare, I could only think of my own situation.

      Hurrying up the stairs. Panting, and sweating. For it was a hot dry September in this place, and Acrady Cottage was not air-conditioned.

      In Zone 9 very few buildings were air-conditioned. Evidently in this era air-conditioning was rare. And what air there was, to my dismay and disgust, was often polluted by cigarette smoke.

      Astonishing to me, my roommates smoked! Each one of them. As if they knew nothing about cigarettes causing cancer, or did not care. Worse, I saw their annoyed expressions when I coughed and choked and yet—how could I help myself? Smoking had been banished in NAS-23 for as long as I’d been alive. (Intravenous nicotine was promoted in its place.)

      Thinking Is this my punishment? Secondary smoke inhalation.

      Had to wonder who my roommates really were. Why I’d been assigned to room 3C of Acrady Cottage, with these individuals. In NAS-23 it was said—“No accidents, only algorithms.” I could not think that there were coincidences in the stratagems of Homeland Security. I could not think that at least one and perhaps all of my roommates were informants assigned to Enright, Mary Ellen.

      Possibly, one of them was a robot. But which one?

      SUCH RELIEF, when I was alone in our room.

      (But was I ever “alone” in our room?)

      That prevailing odor of cigarette smoke like body odor made my nostrils pinch.

      Here was my opportunity to examine a clumsy black machine with a keyboard on the desk of one of my roommates—a “typewriter.”

      I’d heard of typewriters of course. I’d seen photographs of typewriters and my parents had spoken of owning a typewriter, I think. (Or had it been my grandparents?) But I had never seen an actual typewriter, from an era before computers.

      In a kind of trance I stared at the strange machine. Something about it that made me uneasy.

      So badly I missed my laptop computer, I felt almost faint. I missed my cell phone, that fitted so comfortably in the palm of my hand it was like a growth there, a rectangular luminous eye.

      Could not comprehend the logic of this machine. Could it be so crude, only just—typing?

      No Internet? No e-mail? No texting? Only just—typing?

      There was nowhere to look in or about the typewriter! There was no screen.

      Profound to think that this clumsy machine connected with no reality beyond itself. Just—a machine.

      You were trapped in yourself, at a typewriter. You could not escape into cyberspace. In Zone 9, you could not access cyberspace.

      Hard to comprehend: in 1959 cyberspace did not exist.

      And yet, that was not possible—was it? For one of the great accomplishments of the twenty-first century—we’d been told and retold—was the establishment of cyberspace as an entity separate and distinct and (presumably) independent of human beings, thus independent of constraints of time and space.

      Not that I’d ever understood this. To truly understand you’d have to know math, physics, astrophysics, the most advanced computer science that was in fact, in NAS-23, classified information …

      “Mary Ellen?”—the voice was close behind me.

      The smiling girl had crept up silently behind me—“Hilda” was her name. She’d scared me so, my heart leapt in my chest like a shot bird.

      Hilda was very friendly of course. They were all very friendly.

      Their eyes eating at me, like hungry ants. Memorizing, assessing. Planning the words they would use in their reports to Homeland Security.

      In her flat midwestern voice that seemed mocking to my ears Hilda was saying that the machine was her “almost-new Remington,” of which she seemed to be proud.

      “You can try it, if you want to. Here’s a piece of paper!”

      Hilda inserted a sheet of paper and rolled it into position. She indicated to me how I should type, striking several keys in succession—random keys, with her deft fingers.

      But I just stared. I was feeling light-headed.

      I would have tried to speak but my tongue felt like cotton batting too big for my mouth.

      Hilda said, “Like this, see? Of course, you have to memorize the keyboard. So that your fingers type without you having to think. That comes with practice. I learned in high school—it isn’t hard.”

      I touched one of the keys. Nothing happened.

      “It doesn’t w-work …”

      Hilda laughed at me. Not maliciously but as an older sister might laugh at a naïve younger sister.

      “Of course it works, Mary Ellen! Like this.”

      Mary Ellen. Was this name uttered in a friendly way, or in a mocking way?

      I wanted to think that the girl-figure “Hilda” was actually a girl like myself, who was being sincerely friendly. I did not want to think that the girl-figure was a registered agent of Homeland Security or (possibly) a virtual representation of an undergraduate girl manipulated on a screen by a (distant) Homeland Security agent teasing me in my Exile in Zone 9.

      It was distracting to me, that Hilda stood so close. Many of the girls of Acrady Cottage stood close to me, and caused me to back away. Our way of behaving with one another in NAS-23 was noticeably different: the unspoken rule was do not come close. Since the arrest, and the terrible sight on the TV monitor of the boy executed, I was in dread of strangers coming too close. My skin prickled with the danger.

      Hilda was so very friendly, so nice, she seemed entirely oblivious of my wariness. It would be said of Hilda that she was a “pretty” girl—(as it would be said of me, I was sure, that I was a “plain” girl). Shorter than I was by at least two inches, and plumper. Where my body was lean almost like a boy’s her body was shapely as a mature woman’s. Like the other girls Hilda wore a sturdy brassiere—a “bra”—that might have stood by itself, made of firm, metallic-threaded fabric; beneath her clothes, this “bra” asserted itself like an extra appendage. Half-consciously I shrank away hoping that Hilda would not, seemingly unconsciously, brush against me with her sharp-pointed breasts.

      Hilda sat at her desk with an exaggerated sort of perfect posture like a young woman in an advertisement and typed, rapidly and flawlessly, to demonstrate to me how easy “typing” was:

      SEPTEMBER 23, 1959

      ACRADY COTTAGE

      WAINSCOTIA STATE UNIVERSITY

      WAINSCOTIA FALLS, WISCONSIN

      USA

      UNIVERSE

      “See? Now you try it, Mary Ellen.”

      September 23, 1959! It could not be true—could it?

      This was Zone 9—of course. This was my Exile. I must accept my Exile, and I must adjust. Yet—

      The horror swept over me: this was eighty years into the past, and more. I had not yet been born. My parents had not yet been born. There was no one in this world who loved me, no one who even knew me. No one who would claim me. I was utterly alone.

      “Mary Ellen? What’s wrong?”

      With a look of genuine—sisterly—concern, Hilda reached out for me, even as I shrank away.

      “Don’t t-touch me! No …”

      I