Hazards of Time Travel. Joyce Carol Oates

       COED

      So lonely! It was as if my body had been gutted from within.

      As if, in the place where my heart had been, there was an emptiness that nothing could fill.

      Other freshmen were homesick, and other girls in my residence cried from time to time in this new place. But their homesickness was a kind of exquisite torture, a way of measuring their love for their families. They called home, often on Sunday evenings (when the rates were lower) and received calls from home. They wrote home, and received letters from home. Their mothers sent them baked goods to share with their roommates and friends. And their homes were accessible to them—just a few hours away by car.

      I began to be ashamed, as well as despondent, that I received no mail from home—no calls, no packages. I could not bear it, the girls of Acrady Cottage pitied me and spoke of me wonderingly behind my back.

      Yet, there must be genuine orphans in the world, with no families and no relatives. The category into which Enright, Mary Ellen had been placed could not have been so empty of inhabitants.

      I wondered if I would discover someone like myself? Or—someone like myself would discover me?

      A “coed” at the State University at Wainscotia, Wisconsin, enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts with the likelihood of an education major, Class of 1963.

      If this was Exile, it was not the cruelest Exile.

      I knew this: the cruelest Exile would be death.

      Badly wishing I could let my parents know that I was (still) alive. (But was I alive? Often I wasn’t sure.)

      Wishing that I could know that my parents were (still) alive in NAS-23 and that we would be together again, in four years.

      WAINSCOTIA STATE UNIVERSITY covered many acres of land in semi-rural Wainscotia Falls in northeastern Wisconsin, a day’s drive from the city of Milwaukee in the south. Most of its nine thousand students were from small Wisconsin towns or farms. One of the largest colleges was Agriculture and Animal Husbandry.

      Other prominent colleges were the School of Education, the School of Business, the School of Nursing, and the School of Engineering.

      So many thousands of people linked by a single sprawling campus! Though much of the time the campus looked calm—in the morning, on the hilly paths, students hurrying to classes, in small groups, in pairs, alone—as the chapel bell sounded sonorously. You must move along. You must take your place. You have your name, your identity. You have no choice.

      There was a thrill in this! There was the solace of the impersonal.

      I was enrolled in five courses, three of them “introductions”—to English literature, to psychology, and to philosophy. These were large lecture courses with quiz sections that met once weekly. It was possible to be invisible in large lecture halls and to imagine that no one was observing me.

      If I saw, on campus, or in one of my classes, a girl from Acrady Cottage, my vision blurred and didn’t register what I saw. If a girl waved to me, or smiled at me—I did not seem to see. Wherever it was possible, I was invisible.

      Eventually, they would leave me alone, I believed. I would learn in Intro to Psychology the phenomenon of operant extinction: when reinforcement is no longer forthcoming, a response becomes less and less frequent.

      All my determination was to survive. To get through the challenge of the first weeks, the first semester, and the first year; to get through four years; to complete my Exile, and be teletransported back home.

      I did not want to think that absolute obedience to The Instructions might not save me. I did not want to think about the future except in the most elemental terms: behavior, reward.

      Almost it seemed to me, S. Platz had personally promised me—my Exile would end, one day.

      In the meantime I was obliged to obey The Instructions. I had immediately memorized them though I did not quite understand what was meant by the admonition against providing “future knowledge” in the Restricted Zone.

      So far as I had been informed the microchip in my brain blocked many memories of my past (that were, of course, in 1959, anticipations of the “future”). I could not confidently “foresee,” still less predict. When I tried to recall classic discoveries of the intervening decades—the discovery of DNA, for instance—the development of molecular genetics—brain “imaging”—any modern history apart from Patriot History—it was like trying to peer through a frosted glass window.

      You can see shadowy shapes beyond, maybe. But you cannot see.

      How ironic it was, I’d been, for those few cruel days, valedictorian of my high school class!

      AS FOR THE ADMONITION against seeking out “relatives”—I would not have known how to begin.

      In the Cultural Relocation Campaign that swept the country when I was in middle school, hundreds of thousands—millions?—of individuals were evicted from their homes, to be settled in relatively depopulated areas which the Government wanted to “reconstitute”; among these were Mom’s and Dad’s parents—Roddy’s and my grandparents—who were evacuated to western Nebraska and northern Maine, respectively; but I had no idea where they’d lived previously, still less where they might have been living in 1959.