Hazards of Time Travel. Joyce Carol Oates

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       The Miracle

       Grief

       Visitors

       “Uncle”

       Heron Creek Farm

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Novels by Joyce Carol Oates

       About the Publisher

      They would not have come for me, naïvely I drew their attention to me. Willingly I dared what I should not have dared.

      Of my own free will misjudging. Or rather, not judging—not thinking. In vanity and stupidity and now I am lost.

      Sometimes on my knees in a posture of prayer I am able to break through the “censor barrier”—to remember …

      But my brain hurts so! It is a terrible effort like struggling against the gravity of Jupiter.

      My Exile-status forbids me to speak to anyone here of my sentence or of my life before Exile and so I am doubly lonely.

      Though rarely alone in this strange place I am very lonely and am not sure that I can persevere.

      My sentence is “only” four years. It might have been “life.”

      Or, it might have been Deletion.

      On my knees each night straining to remember, to recall my old, lost self, I try to be grateful, my sentence was not Deletion.

      And I try to be grateful, no one in my family was arrested as a collaborator/facilitator of Treason, with me.

I

       DELETION

      DI—“Deleted Individual.”

      If you are Deleted, you cease to exist. You are “vaporized.”

      And if you are Deleted, all memories of you are Deleted also.

      Your personal property/estate becomes the possession of the NAS (North American States).

      Your family, even your children, if you have children, will be forbidden to speak of you or in any way remember you, once you cease to exist.

      Because it is taboo, Deletion is not spoken of. Yet, it is understood that Deletion, the cruelest of punishments, is always imminent.

      To be Deleted is not equivalent to being Executed.

      Execution is a public-lesson matter: Execution is not a state secret.

      A certain percentage of executions under the auspices of the Federal Execution Education Program (FEEP) are broadcast via TV to the populace, for purposes of moral education.

      (In a prison execution chamber made to resemble a hospital surgery, the CI [Condemned Individual] is strapped to a gurney by prison guards; then, in the clinical-white uniforms of “medics,” prison staffers administer the lethal dose of poison into the CI’s veins as tens of millions of home TV viewers watch.)

      (Except us. Though Dad was already of MI [Marked Individual] status, and his Caste Rank [CR] vulnerable, neither Dad nor Mom allowed our TV to be turned on at Execution Hours which were often several times a week. My older brother Roderick objected to this “censorship” when he was still in school on the grounds that, if his teachers discussed the educational aspect of an execution in class, he would not be able to participate and would stand out as “suspicious”—but this plea did not persuade our parents to turn on the TV at these times.)

      Deletion is a different status altogether, for while Execution is intended to be openly discussed, even to allude to Deletion is a federal offense punishable as Treason-Speech.

      My father Eric Strohl had been MI since a time before I was born. As a young resident M.D. in the Pennsboro Medical Center he’d been under observation as a scientifically-minded individual, for such individuals were assumed to be “thinking for themselves”—not a reputation anyone would have wished to have. In addition, Dad was charged with associating with a targeted SI—(Subversive Individual)—who was later arrested and tried for Treason; Dad hadn’t done more than sympathetically listen to this man address a small gathering in a public park when he and the others were caught in a Homeland Security “sweep”—and Dad’s life was changed forever.

      He was demoted from his residency in the medical center. Though he had an M.D., with special training in pediatric oncology, he could find work only as a lowly-paid medical attendant in the center, where there had to be maintained a bias against him, that he might never be allowed to “practice” medicine again. Yet, Dad never (publicly) complained—he was lucky, he often (publicly) said, not to be imprisoned, and to be alive.

      From time to time MIs were obliged to restate the terms of their crimes and punishments, and to (publicly) express gratitude for their exoneration and current employment. On such occasions Dad took a deep breath and, as he said, bartered his soul another time.

      Poor Dad! He was so good-natured in our household, I don’t think I realized how terrible he must have felt. How broken.

      Within the family it was understood that we didn’t discuss Dad’s status per se, but we seemed to be allowed—that is, we were not expressly forbidden—to allude to his MI status in the way you might allude to a chronic condition in a family member like multiple sclerosis, or Tourette’s, or a predilection for freak accidents. Being MI was something shameful, embarrassing, potentially dangerous—but since MI was a (relatively) minor criminal category compared with more serious criminal categories, it wasn’t a treasonable offense to acknowledge it. But Dad took risks, even so.

      For one of the memories that comes to me, strangely clear and self-contained, like a disturbing dream suddenly recalled in daylight, was how one day when no one was home except us Dad took me upstairs to an attic room that had been shut up for as long as I could remember, with a padlock; and in that room Dad retrieved from beneath a loose floorboard, beneath a worn carpet, a packet of photographs of a man who looked teasingly familiar to me, but whom I could not recall—“This is your uncle Tobias, who was Deleted when you were two years old.”

      At this time I was ten years old. My two-year-old self was lost and irretrievable. In a quavering voice Dad explained that his “beloved, reckless” younger brother Tobias had lived with us while going to medical school and that he’d drawn the attention of the F.B.E./F.B.I. (Federal Bureau of Examiners, Federal Bureau of Inquisitors) after helping organize a May Day free-speech demonstration. At the age of twenty-three “your uncle Toby” had been arrested in this very house, taken away, allegedly tried—and Deleted.

      That is, “vaporized.”

      What is that, Daddy?—“vaporized.” Though I knew the answer would be sad I had to ask.

      “Just—gone, sweetie. Like a flame when it’s been blown out.”

      I was too young to register the depth of loss in my father’s eyes.

      For Dad had often that look of loss