Hazards of Time Travel. Joyce Carol Oates

stood staring at the front of the brightly lighted auditorium the Arrest Warrant was read to me by the female Arresting Officer. I was too stunned to hear most of it—only the accusing words arrest, detention, reassignment, sentencing—Treason-Speech and Questioning of Authority.

      QUICKLY THEN, Mr. Mackay called for an “emergency assembly” of the senior class.

      Murmuring and excited my classmates settled into the auditorium. There were 322 students in the class, and like wildfire news of my arrest had spread among them within minutes.

      Gravely Mr. Mackay announced from a podium that Adriane Strohl, “formerly” valedictorian of the class, had been arrested by the State on charges of Treason and Questioning of Authority; and what was required now was a “vote of confidence” from her peers regarding this action.

      That is, all members of the senior class (excepting Adriane Strohl) were to vote on whether to confirm the arrest, or to challenge it. “We will ask for a show of hands,” Mr. Mackay said, voice quavering with the solemnity of the occasion, “in a full, fair, and unbiased demonstration of democracy.”

      At this time I was positioned, handcuffed, with a wet, streaked/guilty face, at the very edge of the stage. As if my classmates needed to be reminded who the arrestee Adriane Strohl was.

      Gripping my upper arms were two husky Youth Disciplinary Officers from the Youth Disciplinary Division of Homeland Security. They were one man and one woman and they wore dark blue uniforms and were equipped with billy clubs, Tasers, Mace, and revolvers in heavy holsters around their waists. My classmates stared wide-eyed, both intimidated and thrilled. An arrest! At school! And a show-of-hands vote which was not a novelty in itself except on this exciting occasion.

      “Boys and girls! Attention! All those in favor of Adriane Strohl being stripped of the honor of class valedictorian as a consequence of having committed treason and questioned authority, raise your hands—yes?” There was a brief stunned pause. Brief.

      Hesitantly, a few hands were lifted. Then, a few more.

      No doubt the presence of the uniformed Youth Disciplinary Officers glaring at them roused my classmates to action. Entire rows lifted their hands—Yes!

      Here and there were individuals who shifted uneasily in their seats. They were not voting, yet. I caught the eye of my friend Carla whose face too appeared to be wet with tears. And there was Paige all but signaling to me—I’m sorry, Adriane. I have no choice.

      As in a nightmare, at last a sea of hands were raised against me. If there were some not voting, clasping their hands in their laps, I could not see them.

      “And all opposed—no?” Mr. Mackay’s voice hovered dramatically as if he were counting raised hands; in fact, there was not a single hand, of all the rows of seniors, to be seen.

      “I think, then, we have a stunning example of democracy in action, boys and girls. ‘Majority rule—the truth is in the numbers.’”

      The second vote was hardly more than a repeat of the first: “We, the Senior Class of Pennsboro High, confirm and support the arrest of the former valedictorian, Adriane Strohl, on charges of Treason and Questioning of Authority. All those in favor …”

      By this time the arrestee had shut her teary eyes in shame, revulsion, dread. No need to see the show of hands another time.

      The officers hauled me out of the school by a rear exit, paying absolutely no heed to my protests of being in pain from the tight handcuffs and their grip on my upper arms. Immediately I was forced into an unmarked police vehicle resembling a small tank with plow-like gratings that might be used to ram against and to flatten protesters.

      Roughly I was thrown into the rear of the van. The door was shut and locked. Though I pleaded with the officers, who were seated in the front of the vehicle, on the other side of a barred, Plexiglas barrier, no one paid the slightest attention to me, as if I did not exist.

      The officers appeared to be ST4 and ST5. It was possible that they were “foreign”-born/ indoctrinated NAS citizens who had not been allowed to learn English.

      I thought—Will anyone tell my parents where I am? Will they let me go home?

      Panicked I thought—Will they “vaporize” me?

      Heralded by a blaring siren I was taken to a fortresslike building in the city center of Pennsboro, the local headquarters of Homeland Security Interrogation. This was a building with blank bricked-up windows that was said to have once been a post office, before the Reconstitution of the United States into the North American States and the privatizing and gradual extinction of the postal service. (Many buildings from the old States remained, now utilized for very different purposes. The building to which my mother had gone for grade school had been converted to a Children’s Diagnostic and Surgical Repair Facility, for instance; the residence hall in which my father had lived, as a young medical student, in the years before he’d been reclassified as MI, was now a Youth Detention and Re-education Facility. The Media Dissemination Bureau, where my brother Roddy worked, was in an old brownstone building formerly the Pennsboro Public Library, in the days when “books” existed to be held in the hand—and read!) In this drafty place I was brought to an interrogation room in the Youth Disciplinary Division, forcibly seated in an uncomfortable chair with a blinding light shining in my face, and a camera aimed at me, and interrogated by strangers whom I could barely see.

      Repeatedly I was asked—“Who wrote that speech for you?”

      No one, I said. No one wrote my speech, or helped me write it—I’d written it myself.

      “Did your father Eric Strohl write that speech for you?”

      No! My father did not.

      “Did your father tell you what to write? Influence you? Are these questions your father’s questions?”

      No! My own questions.

      “Did either of your parents help you write your speech? Influence you? Are these questions their questions?”

      No, no, no.

      “Are these treasonous thoughts their thoughts?”

      I was terrified that my father, or both my parents, had been arrested, and were being interrogated too, somewhere else in this awful place. I was terrified that my father would be reclassified no longer MI but SI (Subversive Individual) or AT (Active Traitor)—that he might meet the same fate as Uncle Tobias.

      My valedictorian speech was examined line by line, word by word, by the interrogators—though it was just two printed double-spaced sheets of paper with a few scrawled annotations. My computer had been seized from my locker and was being examined as well.

      And all my belongings from my locker—laptop, sketchbook, backpack, cell phone, granola bars, a soiled school sweatshirt, wadded tissues—were confiscated.

      The interrogators were brisk and impersonal as machines. Almost, you’d have thought they might be robot-interrogators—until you saw one of them blink, or swallow, or glare at me in pity or disgust, or scratch at his nose.

      (Even then, as Dad might have said, these figures could have been robots; for the most recent AI devices were being programmed to emulate idiosyncratic, “spontaneous” human mannerisms.)

      Sometimes an interrogator would shift in his seat, away from the blinding light, and I would have a fleeting but clear view of a face—what was shocking was, the face appeared to be so ordinary, the face of someone you’d see on a bus, or a neighbor of ours.

      My valedictorian address had been timed to be no more than eight minutes long. That was the tradition at our school—a short valedictorian address, and an even shorter salutatorian address. My English teacher Mrs. Dewson had been assigned to “advise” me—but I hadn’t shown her what I’d been writing. (I hadn’t shown Dad, or Mom, or any of my friends—I’d wanted to surprise them at graduation.) After a half-dozen failed starts I’d gotten desperate and had the bright idea of asking numbered