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Copyright
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © 2018 by The Ontario Review, Inc.
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Cover illustration inspired by Getty Images / Klaus Vedfelt
Joyce Carol Oates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008295448
Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008295462
Version: 2019-10-04
Dedication
For Stig Björkman,
and for
Charlie Gross
Epigraph
A self is simply a device for representing a functionally unified system of responses.
B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I: Valedictorian
The Instructions
Deletion
The Warrant
“Good News!”
The Arrest
“Disciplinary Measure”
Exile: Zone 9
II: Zone 9 – The Happy Place
Typewriter
The Lost One
Coed
Lost Friends
He, Him
Wolfman
Lonely
Possibly
Dean’s List
The Spell
Orphan
Suddenly
The Denial
The Wall
The Museum of Natural History
Shelter
The Sacrifice
Adoration
The Searchers
The Test
The Exam
The Failing Grade
Wolfman My Love: Selected Memories
Sane
The Lonely Girl I
The Lonely Girl II
April
“Terminated”
Elopement
The Bat
III: Wainscotia Falls
Saved
The Miracle
Grief
Visitors
“Uncle”
Heron Creek Farm
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Novels by Joyce Carol Oates
About the Publisher
They would not have come for me, naïvely I drew their attention to me. Willingly I dared what I should not have dared.
Of my own free will misjudging. Or rather, not judging—not thinking. In vanity and stupidity and now I am lost.
Sometimes on my knees in a posture of prayer I am able to break through the “censor barrier”—to remember …
But my brain hurts so! It is a terrible effort like struggling against the gravity of Jupiter.
My Exile-status forbids me to speak to anyone here of my sentence or of my life before Exile and so I am doubly lonely.
Though rarely alone in this strange place I am very lonely and am not sure that I can persevere.
My sentence is “only” four years. It might have been “life.”
Or, it might have been Deletion.
On my knees each night straining to remember, to recall my old, lost self, I try to be grateful, my sentence was not Deletion.
And I try to be grateful, no one in my family was arrested as a collaborator/facilitator of Treason, with me.
DELETION
DI—“Deleted Individual.”
If you are Deleted, you cease to exist. You are “vaporized.”
And if you are Deleted, all memories of you are Deleted also.
Your personal property/estate becomes the possession of the NAS (North American States).
Your family, even your children, if you have children, will be forbidden to speak of you or in any way remember you, once you cease to exist.
Because it is taboo, Deletion is not spoken of. Yet, it is understood that Deletion, the cruelest of punishments, is always imminent.
To be Deleted is not equivalent to being Executed.
Execution is a public-lesson matter: Execution is not a state secret.
A certain percentage of executions under the auspices of the Federal Execution Education Program (FEEP) are broadcast via TV to the populace, for purposes of moral education.
(In a prison execution chamber made to resemble a hospital surgery, the CI [Condemned Individual] is strapped to a gurney by prison guards; then, in the clinical-white uniforms of “medics,” prison staffers administer the lethal dose of poison into the CI’s veins as tens of millions of home TV viewers watch.)
(Except us. Though Dad was already of MI [Marked Individual] status, and his Caste Rank [CR] vulnerable, neither Dad nor Mom allowed our TV to be turned on at Execution Hours which were often several times a week. My older brother Roderick objected to this “censorship” when he was still in school on the grounds that, if his teachers discussed the educational aspect of an execution in class, he would not be able to participate and would stand out as “suspicious”—but this plea did not persuade our parents to turn on the TV at these times.)
Deletion is a different status altogether, for while Execution is intended to be openly discussed, even to allude to Deletion is a federal offense punishable as Treason-Speech.
My father Eric Strohl had been MI since a time before I was born. As a young resident M.D. in the Pennsboro Medical Center he’d been under observation as a scientifically-minded individual, for such individuals were assumed to be “thinking for themselves”—not a reputation anyone would have wished to have. In addition, Dad was charged with associating with a targeted SI—(Subversive Individual)—who was later arrested and tried for Treason; Dad hadn’t done more than sympathetically listen to this man address a small gathering in a public park when he and the others were caught in a Homeland Security “sweep”—and Dad’s life was changed forever.
He was demoted from his residency in the medical center. Though he had an M.D., with special training in pediatric oncology, he could find work only as a lowly-paid medical attendant in the center, where there had to be maintained a bias against him, that he might never be allowed to “practice” medicine again. Yet, Dad never (publicly) complained—he was lucky, he often (publicly) said, not to be imprisoned, and to be alive.
From time to time MIs were obliged to restate the terms of their crimes and punishments, and to (publicly) express gratitude for their exoneration and current employment. On such occasions Dad took a deep breath and, as he said, bartered his soul another time.
Poor Dad! He was so good-natured in our household, I don’t think I realized how terrible he must have felt. How broken.
Within the family it was understood that we didn’t discuss Dad’s status per se, but we seemed to be allowed—that is, we were not expressly forbidden—to allude to his MI status in the way you might allude to a chronic condition in a family member like multiple sclerosis, or Tourette’s, or a predilection for freak accidents. Being MI was something shameful, embarrassing, potentially dangerous—but since MI was a (relatively) minor criminal category compared with more serious criminal categories, it wasn’t a treasonable offense to acknowledge it. But Dad took risks, even so.
For one of the memories that comes to me, strangely clear and self-contained, like a disturbing dream suddenly recalled in daylight, was how one day when no one was home except us Dad took me upstairs to an attic room that had been shut up for as long as I could remember, with a padlock; and in that room Dad retrieved from beneath a loose floorboard, beneath a worn carpet, a packet of photographs of a man who looked teasingly familiar to me, but whom I could not recall—“This is your uncle Tobias, who was Deleted when you were two years old.”
At this time I was ten years old. My two-year-old self was lost and irretrievable. In a quavering voice Dad explained that his “beloved, reckless” younger brother Tobias had lived with us while going to medical school and that he’d drawn the attention of the F.B.E./F.B.I. (Federal Bureau of Examiners, Federal Bureau of Inquisitors) after helping organize a May Day free-speech demonstration. At the age of twenty-three “your uncle Toby” had been arrested in this very house, taken away, allegedly tried—and Deleted.
That is, “vaporized.”
What is that, Daddy?—“vaporized.” Though I knew the answer would be sad I had to ask.
“Just—gone, sweetie. Like a flame when it’s been blown out.”
I was too young to register the depth of loss in my father’s eyes.
For Dad had often that look of loss in his face. Exhausted from his hospital job, and his skin ashy, and a limp in his right leg from some accident after which a bone had not mended correctly. Yet, Dad had a way of smiling that made everything seem all right.
Just us, kids! We’re hanging in here.
Except right now Dad wasn’t smiling. Turned a little from me so (maybe) I wouldn’t notice him wiping tears from his eyes.
“We aren’t supposed to ‘recall’ Tobias. Certainly not provide information to a child. Or look at pictures! I could be arrested if—anyone heard.”
By anyone Dad meant the Government. Though you would not say that word—“Government.” You would not say the words “State”—“Federal Leaders.” It was forbidden to say such words and so, as Dad did, you spoke in a vague way, with a furtive look—if anyone heard.
Or, you might say They.
You could think of anyone, or they, as a glowering sky. A low-ceiling sky of those large dirigible clouds rumored to be surveillance devices, sculpted shapes like great ships, often bruised colored and iridescent from pollution, moving unpredictably but always there.
Downstairs, in the vicinity of our electronic devices, Dad would never speak so openly. Of course you would never trust your computer no matter how friendly and throaty-seductive its voice, or your cell phone or dicta-stylus, but also thermostats, dishwashers, microwaves, car keys and (self-driving) cars.
“But I miss Toby. All the time. Seeing medical students his age … I miss how he’d be a wonderful uncle to you, and to Rod.”
It was confusing to me. I’d forgotten what Dad had said—Vaporized? Deleted?
But I knew not to ask Dad more questions right now, and make him sadder.
Exciting to see photographs of my lost “Uncle Toby” who looked like a younger version of my father. Uncle Toby had had a frowning-squinting kind of smile, like Dad. And his nose was long and thin like Dad’s with a tiny bump in the bone. And his eyes!—dark brown with a glisten, like my own.
“Uncle Toby looks like he’d be fun.”
Was this a stupid thing to say? Right away I regretted it but Dad only just smiled sadly.
“Yes. Toby was fun.”
He’d tried to warn his brother about being involved in any sort of free speech or May Day demonstrations, Dad said. Even during what had appeared to be a season of (relative) relaxation on the part of the Homeland Security Public Dissemination Bureau; during such seasons, the Government eased up on public-security enforcement, yet, as Dad believed, continued to monitor and file away information about dissenters and potential SIs (Subversive Individuals), for future use. Nothing is ever forgotten—Dad warned.
At such times rumors would be circulated of a “thaw”—a “new era”—for always, as Dad said, people are eager to believe good news, and to forget bad news; people wish to be “optimists” and not “pessimists”; but “thaws” are factored into cycles and soon come to an end leaving incautious persons, especially the young and naïve, vulnerable to exposure and arrest and—what comes after arrest.
After Uncle Toby’s disappearance (as it was called) law enforcement officers had raided the house and appropriated his medical textbooks, lab notebooks, personal computer and electronic devices, etc., and all pictures of him either digital or hard copy that they could find; but Dad had managed to hide away a few items, at great risk to his own safety.
Saying, “I’m not proud of myself, honey. But I knew it would be wisest to ‘repudiate’ my brother—formally. By that time he’d been Deleted, so there was no point in defending him, or protecting him. I guess I was pretty convincing—and your mother, too—swearing how we didn’t realize we were harboring an SI—a ‘traitor’—so they let us off with just a fine.”
Dad drew his sleeve across his face. Wiping his face.
“A devastating fine, actually. But we had to be grateful the house wasn’t razed, which sometimes happens when there’s treason involved.”
“Does Mom know?”
“‘Know’—what?”
“About Uncle Toby’s things here.”
“No.”
Dad explained: “Mom ‘knows’ that my brother was Deleted. She never speaks of him of course. She might have ‘known’ that I’d kept back a few personal items of Toby’s at the time but she’s certainly forgotten by now, as she has probably forgotten what Toby looked like. If you work hard enough to not think of something, and wall off your mind against it, and others around you are doing the same, you can ‘forget’—to a degree.”
Brashly I was thinking Not me! I will not forget.
Touching one of my lost uncle’s sweaters, soft dark-wool riddled with moth holes. And there was a yellowed-white T-shirt with a stretched neck. And a biology lab notebook with half the pages empty. And a wristwatch with a stretch band and a blank dead face forever halted at 2:20 P.M. that Daddy tried to revive without success.
“Now you must promise, Adriane, never to speak of your lost uncle to anyone.”
I nodded yes, Daddy.
“Not to Mommy, and not to Roddy. You must not speak of ‘Uncle Toby.’ You must not—even to me.”
Seeing the perplexed look in my face Dad kissed me wetly on the nose.
Gathering up the outlawed things and returning them beneath the floorboards and the worn carpet.
“Our secret, Adriane. Promise?”
“Yes, Daddy. Promise!”
SO YES, I knew what Deletion was. I know what Deletion is.
I am not likely to emulate my uncle Toby. I am no longer interested in being “different”—in drawing attention to myself.
As I have sworn numerous times I determined to serve out my Exile without violating the Instructions. I am determined to be returned to my family one day.
I am determined not to be “vaporized”—and forgotten.
Wondering if beneath the floorboards in the attic there’s a pathetic little cache of things of mine, gnarled toothbrush, kitten socks, math homework with red grade 91, my parents hastily managed to hide away.
THE WARRANT
Hereby, entered on this 19th day June NAS-23 in the 16th Federal District, Eastern-Atlantic States, a warrant for the arrest, detention, reassignment and sentencing of STROHL, ADRIANE S., 17, daughter of ERIC and MADELEINE STROHL, 3911 N. 17th St., Pennsboro, N.J., on seven counts of Treason-Speech and Questioning of Authority in violation of Federal Statutes 2 and 7. Signed by order of Chief Justice H. R. Sedgwick, 16th Federal District.
“GOOD NEWS!”
Or so at first it seemed.
I’d been named valedictorian of my class at Pennsboro High School. And I’d been the only one at our school, of five students nominated, to be awarded a federally funded Patriot Democracy Scholarship.
My mother came running to hug me, and congratulate me. And my father, though more warily.
“That’s our girl! We are so proud of you.”
The principal of our high school had telephoned my parents with the good news. It was rare for a phone to ring in our house, for most messages came electronically and there was no choice about receiving them.
And my brother, Roderick, came to greet me with a strange expression on his face. He’d heard of Patriot Democracy Scholarships, Roddy said, but had never known anyone who’d gotten one. While he’d been at Pennsboro High he was sure that no one had ever been named a Patriot Scholar.
“Well. Congratulations, Addie.”
“Thanks! I guess.”
Roddy, who’d graduated from Pennsboro High three years before, and was now working as a barely paid intern in the Pennsboro branch of the NAS Media Dissemination Bureau (MDB), was grudgingly admiring. I thought—He’s jealous. He can’t go to a real university.
I never knew if I felt sorry for my hulking-tall brother who’d cultivated a wispy little sand-colored beard and mustache, and always wore the same dull-brown clothes, that were a sort of uniform for lower-division workers at MDB, or if—actually—I was afraid of him. Inside Roddy’s smile there was a secret little smirk just for me.
When we were younger Roddy had often tormented me—“teasing” it was called (by Roddy). Both our parents worked ten-hour shifts and Roddy and I were home alone together much of the time. As Roddy was the older, it had been Roddy’s task to take care of your little sister. What a joke! But a cruel joke, that doesn’t make me smile.
Now we were older, and I was tall myself (for a girl of my age: five feet eight), Roddy didn’t torment me quite as much. Mostly it was his expression—a sort of shifting, frowning, smirk-smiling, meant to convey that Roddy was thinking certain thoughts best kept secret.
That smirking little smile just for me—like an ice-sliver in the heart.
My parents had explained: it was difficult for Roddy, who hadn’t done well enough in high school to merit a scholarship even to the local NAS state college, to see that I was doing much better than he’d done in the same school. Embarrassing to him to know that his younger sister earned higher grades than he had, from the very teachers he’d had at Pennsboro High. And Roddy had little chance of ever being admitted to a federally mandated four-year university, even if he took community college courses, and our parents could afford to send him.
Something had gone wrong during Roddy’s last two years of high school. He’d become scared about things—maybe with reason. He’d never confided in me.
At Pennsboro High—as everywhere in our nation, I suppose—there was a fear of seeming “smart”—(which might be interpreted as “too smart”)—which would result in calling unwanted attention to you. In a True Democracy all individuals are equal—no one is better than anyone else. It was OK to get B’s, and an occasional A−; but A’s were risky, and A+ was very risky. In his effort not to get A’s on exams, though he was intelligent enough, and had done well in middle school, Roddy seriously missed, and wound up with D’s.
Dad had explained: it’s like you’re a champion archer. And you have to shoot to miss the bull’s-eye. And something willful in you assures that you don’t just miss the bull’s-eye but the entire damned target.
Dad had laughed, shaking his head. Something like this had happened to my brother.
Poor Roddy. And poor Adriane, since Roddy took out his disappointment on me.
It wasn’t talked about openly at school. But we all knew. Many of the smartest kids held back in order not to call attention to themselves. HSPSO (Home Security Public Safety Oversight) was reputed to keep lists of potential dissenters/ MIs/ SIs, and these were said to contain the names of students with high grades and high I.Q. scores. Especially suspicious were students who were good at science—these were believed to be too “questioning” and “skeptic” about the guidelines for curriculum at the school, so experiments were no longer part of our science courses, only just “science facts” to be memorized (“gravity causes objects to fall,” “water boils at 212 degrees F.,” “cancer is caused by negative thoughts,” “the average female I.Q. is 7.55 points lower than the average male I.Q., adjusting for ST status”).
Of course it was just as much of a mistake to wind up with C’s and D’s—that meant that you were dull-normal, or it might mean that you’d deliberately sabotaged your high school career. Too obviously “holding back” was sometimes dangerous. After graduation you might wind up at a community college hoping to better yourself by taking courses and trying to transfer to a state school, but the fact was, once you entered the workforce in a low-level category, like Roddy at MDB, you were there forever.
Nothing is ever forgotten, no one is going anywhere they aren’t already at. This was a saying no one was supposed to say aloud.
So, Dad was stuck forever as an ME2—medical technician, second rank—at the district medical clinic where staff physicians routinely consulted him on medical matters, especially pediatric oncology—physicians whose salaries were five times Dad’s salary.
Dad’s health benefits, like Mom’s, were so poor Dad couldn’t even get treatment at the clinic he worked in. We didn’t want to think what it would mean if and when they needed serious medical treatment.
I hadn’t been nearly as cautious in school as Roddy. I enjoyed school where I had (girl) friends close as sisters. I liked quizzes and tests—they were like games which, if you studied hard, and memorized what your teachers told you, you could do well.
But then, sometimes I tried harder than I needed to try.
Maybe it was risky. Some little spark of defiance provoked me.
But maybe also (some of us thought) school wasn’t so risky for girls. There had been only a few DASTADs—Disciplinary Actions Securing Threats Against Democracy—taken against Pennsboro students in recent years, and these students had all been boys in category ST3 or below.
(The highest ST—SkinTone—category was 1: “Caucasian.” Most residents of Pennsboro were ST1 or ST2 with a scattering of ST3’s. There were ST4’s in a neighboring district and of course dark-complected ST workers in all the districts. We knew they existed but most of us had never seen an actual ST10.)
It seems like the most pathetic vanity now, and foolishly naïve, but at our school I was one of those students who’d displayed some talent for writing, and for art; I was a “fast study” (my teachers said, not entirely approvingly), and could memorize passages of prose easily. I did not believe that I was the “outstanding” student in my class. That could not be possible! I had to work hard to understand math and science, I had to read and reread my homework assignments, and to rehearse quizzes and tests, while to certain of my classmates these subjects came naturally. (ST2’s and 3’s were likely to be Asians, a minority in our district, and these girls and boys were very smart, yet not aggressive in putting themselves forward, that’s to say at risk.) Yet somehow it happened that Adriane Strohl wound up with the highest grade-point average in the Class of ’23—4.3 out of 5.