Hazards of Time Travel. Joyce Carol Oates

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       THE LOST ONE

       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.

      Before teletransportation they’d inserted a microchip into a particular part of my brain called the hippocampus, where memory is processed before being stored elsewhere in the brain. At least, I thought this must have happened. I did not think it had been a dream.

      Part of my scalp had been shaved, a pie-shaped wedge of skull removed, the microchip installed. (Evidently) I felt no pain. A zombie does not feel pain. Even the sawed-out portion of the skull and the lacerated scalp were cold-numb and remote to me. And yet I felt such a powerful wave of gratitude, I could have wept—They did not remove my parents from me. They left me my parents at least.

      For that part of my brain might have been removed, which contained all memory of my parents.

      In Exile you cling to what you have, that has not (yet) been taken from you.

      From this cold place I was carried, with others who’d been teletransported, in a vehicle resembling an emergency medical van.

      The vehicle did not move rapidly. There was no siren.

      This was not an emergency but routine.

      The vehicle made stops at several destinations, before mine. In my semiconscious state I had little awareness of what was happening. I was trying to speak to my parents whose faces were vivid to me in their concern for me. I was trying to say In four years I will see you again. Don’t forget me!

      I could not have said if I was seventeen years old, or seven years old.

      I could not have said which year this was. I had no idea where I was.

      We had left the lights of a city and were traveling now in a vast rural night. It was astonishing to me, stars in the night sky overhead were large and luminous as I had never seen stars before in my old, lost life.

      The air was purer here, in Zone 9. So sharp to inhale! The night sky was not obscured by the scrim of pollution to which we were all accustomed in the old, lost life.

      We who were being carried in the van in the night were strapped to stretchers and could not turn our heads to regard one another. We were very tired, for we’d come a long distance.

      It might have been the case, not all of the teletransported СКАЧАТЬ