Hazards of Time Travel

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 was terrified, nauseated. Yet too weak to escape—a black pit opened at my feet, and sucked me down.

THE LOST ONE (#ulink_a2cecd4b-79e7-562c-b185-736f34bf757d)

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.