Hazards of Time Travel. Joyce Carol Oates

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 questions—twelve, in all—of the kind my classmates might have asked if they’d had the nerve—(some of these the very questions I’d asked my teachers, who had never given satisfactory answers)—like What came before the beginning of Time?

      And What came before the Great Terrorist Attacks of 9/11?

      Our RNAS calendar dates from the time of that attack, which was before my birth, but not my parents’ births, and so my parents could remember a pre-NAS time when the calendar was different—time wasn’t measured in just a two-digit figure but a four-digit figure! (Under the old, now-outlawed calendar, my mother and father had been born in what had been called the twentieth century. It was against the law to compute birth dates under the old calendar, but Daddy had told me—I’d been born in what would have been called the twenty-first century if the calendar had not been reformed.)

      NAS means North American States—more formally known as RNAS—Reconstituted North American States, which came into being some years after the Great Terrorist Attacks, as a direct consequence of the Attacks, as we were taught.

      Following the Attacks there was an Interlude of Indecisiveness during which time issues of “rights”—(the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Civil Rights law, etc.)—vs. the need for Patriot Vigilance in the War Against Terror were contested, with a victory, after the suspension of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by executive order, for PVIWAT, or Patriot Vigilance. (Yes, it is hard to comprehend. As soon as you come to the end of such a sentence, you have forgotten the beginning!)

      How strange it was to think there’d been a time when the regions known as (Reconstituted) Mexico and (Reconstituted) Canada had been separate political entities—separate from the States! On a map it seems clear, for instance, that the large state of Alaska should be connected with the mainland United States, and not separated by what was formerly “Canada.” This too was hard to grasp and had never been clearly explained in any of our Patriot Democracy History classes, perhaps because our teachers were not certain of the facts.

      The old, “outdated” (that is, “unpatriotic”) history books had all been СКАЧАТЬ