The Time Traveler's Guide to Grammar

Wednesday, Oct.1, 2361

  “Today,” Professor Walters announced. “You guys are going to have three goals in time and space. Professor Lynch, Orders, and I will be standing at each point holding a flag. See how many flags you can get by the end of the day today. Now I’m forcing all of you guys to stay at 1sec IT/1 sec RT so that you do not literally take forever doing this assignment. I expect all of you to get to the first place, and most of you will get to the second. This year I decided to add a third problem because I got an anonymous letter from the future saying one group of you wanted a more challenging curriculum.”

  Professor Walter shot Caden and Quinn a sharp look. Over the past week the two of them had not completed their homework and had done miserably on their quizzes. Yet in practice they had out-performed juniors and seniors. No one had a clue how they were doing it, and everyone was dying to find out.

  Caden and Quinn exchanged knowing glances, trying not to giggle. The funniest part about Professor Walter’s comment was that they had just placed the note on his desk this morning. It was Professor Walter who assumed that anyone asking for more work had to ask from the future where he or she realized the benefit of practice. No professor would imagine that homework, at least to these two, was better than watching a movie or going to the beach.

  The class shuffled into line, and as each pair entered the time machine, Professor Walter gave them the paper with the destinations on it.

  Once Caden had moved their time machine to the beach, they sat out in the sun and looked at their paper. The record for completing two questions was two hours and twenty minutes. Caden planned on beating that record by thirty minutes while completing all three questions. He also planned that within that hour and a half time period they would also be through with their victory brunch.

  “First destination: Professor Orders is standing at coordinates 58’’ 42’’on the moon. His time is Thursday of next week at 8am Eastern Standard Time. Obtain a blue flag from him.”

  “We can just use a simple declarative sentence.”

  “Yeah, we can pretty much just input this sentence into the computer. The only question is, how should we best mess with this?” Caden’s eyes danced with mischief.

  Quinn grinned “Why don’t we input the sentence using a periphrastic possessive?”

  Caden raised an eyebrow. “What is that?”

  “It means to attribute possessiveness to an inanimate object, usually with a preposition then a noun. Like the word ‘sick leave.’ What if we looked for the same coordinates, but for flags that were ‘dancing in the wind’?”

  “You’ve been studying.”

  “I think scheming would be the better word.”

  Caden chuckled.

  “So it would be ‘we will go where Mr. Orders is chasing the flags that are dancing in the wind’?”

  “Close. ‘Shall’ is used for I or we when speaking about the future, and ‘will’ is used for you, he, she, and they. You reverse the rule when you want to express determination or intention.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “Want an example before we’re off?”

  “Oh, it’s alright, I got it down.” Quinn smiled her assurance, confident that she could remember the rule.

  “Then let’s get this show on the road!” Caden changed the word “will” to “shall” then inserted the sentence into the scanner.

  A moment later they found themselves on the moon, a few feet from where Professor Orders stood. By this time the government had created an artificial atmosphere over the first five hundred feet of the moon so it was possible to breathe. They almost skipped out of the time machine in their excitement. The scene that lay before them exceeded their expectations. They doubled over in laughter at seeing Mr. Orders. He was running around a leather couch, trying to collect ten fabric blue flags that were dancing around his feet.

  Mr. Orders scowled when he saw them. “Damn kids, I was planning on reading the paper for a good long time until the first group got here. How the hell are you getting these things to do this?”

  Caden and Quinn both shrugged. “We don’t know,” but they were smiling the entire time.

  Mr. Orders sighed. “Just help me catch the suckers. Do you know anything that can keep these things down?”

  Caden and Quinn looked at each other.

  “Changing the aspect?” Quinn asked.

  Caden nodded, and they made their way back to the time machine to change the sentence. From “go to the place and time on the moon where Mr. Orders is holding the blue flags that are dancing in the wind” they changed the tense of the verb to signify a change in temporal flow. They both laughed as they scanned in: “go to the place and time on the moon where the flags danced in the wind.”

  “Think the computer will now know that ‘the’ flags refer to the ones Mr. Orders was holding, or do you think that we should specify which ones again?” Quinn asked.

  “I think the computer should be able to. It is able to recognize that a pronoun like ‘he’ or ‘she’ can stand for specified persons that have already been mentioned earlier in the sentence. I see no reason why it would not be able to do the same thing on a broader scale. Why don’t we see?”

  Caden scanned in the paper. Sure enough, they landed back a second later in the same place. When they opened the door, they saw Mr. Orders grumbling as he picked up the flags.

  “I wonder,” Caden said quietly, “If it can recognize what ‘the’ flags we wanted were, if it can also remember what places it has been, or what has been scanned in before. Then maybe we can teach it more descriptive grammar. You never know, maybe we could have some inside jokes with the time machine.”

  Quinn did not think this was possible. In only her few weeks of using the time machine though, she had learned that what was ‘possible’ was only a matter of what was conceivable at that point in time.

  “First, let’s do the second question. You told me earlier about the passive voice. I want to use it now.”

  Caden stood up straight, and pretended to stroke his mustache. His gruff voice imitated Mr. Orders’ voice perfectly. “The passive voice is frowned upon by a great number of English teachers. The passive voice has many pitfalls; unwary sojourners can fall into the abyss of confusion and boredom when using a grammatical construction in which the subject of the sentence or clause denotes the recipient of the action rather than the performer.” Caden straightened up and lost the accent. “This means that we will have to have an auxiliary verb plus a participle of a transitive verb.”

  Quinn looked at the second question. “So instead of saying that ‘we will go in the time machine to 2785’ we would say ‘the time machine brought us to 2785.’”

  “Then?”

  “Then we are supposed to obtain a red flag from Mr. Lynch. We can rework that to say that ‘the yellow flag was obtained by Caden and Quinn.’”

  Quinn scribbled down the sentence and sent it into the scanner.

  Before they opened the time machine, Caden said, “Brace yourself. The passive voice will make everything seem slower, and there will be an odd change in your depth perception and feeling of movement.”

  Then the door was opened by Caden.

  Stepping into the light, Caden walked over to where Mr. Lynch stood, swaying oddly. The footsteps of Caden seemed to be doing the walking for him. The light refracted oddly off of all of the objects. The objects wavered, while the two people seemed to be standing still. The thought came into Quinn’s mind that it was the objects that were doing the acting, and that the people were being acted upon.

  The door was grasped by Quinn’s shaking fingers. As the role of subject and object had switched the grammatical orientation, so too had the entire orientation of the world changed. The world swam in front of her eyes, the ground shimmying and tilting in her vision even as her feet felt as if it stood still.

  The yellow flag was given to Caden. Then the long return of a dozen feet was begun. Stumbling and weaving as if drunk, the legs
of Caden brought him ever closer to the time machine’s door.

  Finally inside Caden came, breathing and heaving. The paper was hurriedly brought out, Quinn’s fingers dancing of their own accord the words Quinn’s mind wanted to bring into existence. A new set of instructions was placed on the scanner to fix Mr. Lynch’s situation.

  Only as the time machine settled them back down did the nausea give way to weak laughter.

  “I don’t think we’ll be using the passive voice much.” Quinn said.

  “Yeah, worse than a hit from a twenty-second century bong. It is an experience I think everyone should have though. It teaches you a quick lesson about how clarity in your writing is important. The times I’ve used passive voice in time travelling I only had one sentence in passive voice and I did not feel half as disoriented.”

  “So sometimes you can use small doses of the passive voice?”

  Caden nodded, “sometimes I think it’s necessary when you want to stress that it is important that the red flag was given to someone rather than that someone specific took the yellow flag.”

  “Well,” Quinn looked at the sheet again. “How about we skip using the passive voice for our last question?”

  Caden chuckled weakly, “I think we can definitely do that. How do you feel about using a conditional clause?”

  Quinn shrugged. “Sure. So we have to begin the sentence with ‘if’ or ‘as though’ or some other expression of supposition. I know the verb will take on a different mood depending on the speaker’s attitude or intention towards what’s being said. I haven’t really studied the intricacies of it though…”

  “When the clause states a condition that’s contrary to fact, the verb is in the subjunctive mood, ‘if I were to do something.’ This changes if the clause states a condition that may be true, the verb is in the indicative mood. So the sentence would be ‘if I was to do something.’”

  Quinn frowned, thinking. “How were you planning on applying this?”

  Caden was writing something down, but he did not let her see what it was before he placed it on the scanner. “Sit back and see,” he said.

  Quinn sat on the red barstool that was placed in this time machine and waited. There was the customary swaying of the time machine. Then the time machine dropped into place and the door opened onto a city street. Mr. Walters was right in front of them, lounging at a café. A cup of coffee steamed beside him. The red flags were nowhere to be seen.

  “I can go out and get the flag this time” Quinn offered. Caden still did not look steady on his feet after his experience with the passive voice.

  Caden nodded, and she rose from the stool and stepped outside. She was right in front of Mr. Walters before he saw her. When he did, he jumped half out of his seat. The coffee on the table jumped out of its cup and onto the front of his shirt. He picked up a dark red fabric napkin and wiped his shirt front.

  “I knew something was up when the two of you began showing such a large disparity between your written scores and your practice scores. Everyone else thought that you were just lazy, but I kept thinking to myself, ‘They finally did it! They found another way to travel through time!’”

  Quinn stared at his napkin. There never was any red flag. Only a red napkin and a trick question.

  “So you gave the rest of the class incorrect coordinates, but you knew that we were no longer travelling in time using math.”

  “Precisely. Not that anyone gets to the third question, but if they did, they would have found it impossible to solve. The coordinates simply do not exist. The professor, and what may serve as a red flag,” he waved the red napkin, “does exist. I knew that I could have gone into any history textbook and see how the two of you were working the machine, but I wanted to see if I could get the answer on my own.”

  “And you did?”

  “Yes. Now I know that you are going to ask me whether you are going to fail out because you cheated, or because you are travelling incorrectly,” Mr. Walters beckoned her closer, his eyes twinkling under his bushy brows. “Alright, so I may have gone a few minutes into the future already to check if I was right.”

  The both of them were silent as a waiter came over with a new cup of coffee. The waiter, a skinny young boy, looked horribly confused. “I know you said that you were clumsy and would need a second cup of coffee shortly, but, well…I had not actually believed you.”

  Mr. Walters cackled. “You begin to know your flaws after living with them for sixty years.”

  The boy nodded and left the two of them alone once more.

  “So you’re a lot older here?”

  Mr. Walters nodded, “it took me a long time to figure out what you kids were up to. But what I wanted to say was that you are definitely not going to fail. I would like you, however, to start writing down how you are travelling in time.” Mr. Walters brought out a beat up novel from his briefcase. The pages were ripped, and the entire book looked as if it had gone through a fire.

  Mr. Walters blushed, “I’m sorry, I was doing some archaeological work back in the twenty-first century. It seems as if being able to travel through space and time does not make you qualified to make popcorn in a microwave. Anyway, you said in your note to your reader that you began writing this book around nineteen. I figure now isn’t too bad of a time to tell you about it. It will give you something to focus your head on instead of slacking off in class.”

  Mr. Walters began mixing sugar into his coffee. Quinn just stood there. Mr. Walters looked up again, surprised that she was still there.

  “Shoo! Shoo! Get on with the two of you!”

  Quinn stepped back towards the time machine. Turning around, she was almost to the door when Mr. Walters called out, “and tell Caroline that I know very well that she is not sick, and that I am expecting her essay on my desk by Monday!”

  Quinn passed through the door. Caden looked up from a magazine that he was reading. “You took forever.”

  Quinn rolled her eyes. “Do you have any clue who Caroline is?”

  Caden shrugged, “Beats me.”

  “And what in the world did you put into the scanner? You definitely could not have put in the coordinates, because Mr. Walters said that the coordinates could not bring you anywhere.”

  “ ‘If it was meant for Mr. Walters to discover how we traveled through time, bring us to him at the right time and place.’ Simple as that.”

  “So you knew that it was a trick question?”

  “Yeah, of course. Didn’t you?”

  Quinn was silent. She hadn’t had a clue that their teacher never meant for the question to be answered.

  “Now,” Caden looked down his watch. “We have completed all three questions in an hour and forty seven minutes. We’ve beaten everyone’s record, and by a smashing three minutes more than my expectations.”

  “Liar. You know you told me a goal that we would surpass.”

  “I know,” Caden grinned. “It’s still a success in my book though, and since I have already made reservations…”

  “I’m obligated to join you for a celebration brunch?”

  “Exactly.” Caden beamed.

  “I’m feeling Mexican food. Do you have reservations at a Mexican restaurant?”

  Caden winced. “I actually hadn’t checked to see what food you would like. I hope you don’t mind a picnic?”

  She wasn’t sure how to respond to Caden’s picnic offer. She knew he was the type to spend hundreds of dollars on dinner, not to spend the time making sandwiches and place them in a cute wicker basket.

  “Um…yeah. Yeah, that would be all right with me.”

  Caden began scribbling on a sheet of paper.

  “Where is the picnic basket?” she inquired.

  “Already there.”

  Caden scanned in the paper.

  “Of course.” When had Caden not arranged every detail?

  The time machine picked up momentum only for a second, then plopped back down quickly. The door opened onto a
grassy meadow in late summer. The time machine had situated itself by a lone tree overlooking the hillside. Little pink flowers bobbed on their golden stalks, poked gently by the wind.

  They both stepped out of the time machine. Quinn breathed deeply, savoring the sensation of the sweet air filling her lungs.

  Sure enough, there was not only a picnic basket, but also a table dressed with a checkered tablecloth. Two chairs sat beside it, and on top of the table something was steaming.

  Approaching the table, she saw that, sure enough, there was a basket of tortillas. Opening up the other containers, she discovered that there were fried plantains, rice, beans, and some chicken dish that she did not know the name of. Once more, Caden had managed to do everything perfectly. She wanted to say that it was because of his pigheaded need for everything in his life to be flawless. Then she could believe that eating with Caden was in no way cheating on Greg. Then maybe she could also stop entertaining wildly romantic fantasies of the mysterious, time-traveling Caden. She was going to Midgar because she wanted to be a certified time traveler, but only so that she could get into any Ivy League that she desired. The state had an agreement with the Time Traveling Authority that any child who was selected to become a time traveler had to go through the certification process. Afterwards, the person got to decide whether they wanted to stay in one time. The students were bribed by the state with safe jobs with excellent salaries, health benefits, and prestige in elite social circles. Or, the students could become citizens of Time and surreptitiously aid in making the world, past and future, a better place.

  Her parents both worked for the state. They were overjoyed for her to be selected, but it never crossed their minds that she would love time traveling more than she loved the notoriety that came with it. Before learning how to travel with language, and yes, before Caden, she had not seriously considered staying as a time traveler.

  “You thought I had finally messed up on something.” Caden’s words broke through her musings.

  Quinn rolled her eyes, “I did not even dare to hope that I had knocked Your Royal Highness from his lofty throne.”

  They sat down to eat. They spoke of meaningless things. She discovered that Caden was left-handed. She admitted that she could write with her toes. Caden told her of his aspirations to own the first time-traveling dog, for he had never had a pet growing up. She spoke about how she was now expected to begin writing a book. They both wondered how hard it was to make popcorn in the twenty-first century. They knew that the twenty-first century had microwaves, so it was not as if the people lived in the Dark Ages of the first two milleniums. But it seemed that without robots doing the cooking, making popcorn on one’s own was a daunting undertaking.

  She uncovered that Caden avoided speaking seriously about the future. He spoke of how he felt as if he was losing his grip on the world. Both of his parents had died, and so he had no one to hold him in this society. He made no mention of any close friends that he might have. He spoke to her of how he no longer felt as if he fit into any time. He told her of how he had tried to help the future by speaking to them of how their wars and class divisions would not aid them any more than they had aided their ancestors. He had seen the cycles of hatred breaking into bloodshed and falling into regret happen again and again.

  Quinn felt cold, and miserable for thinking that Caden was standoffish. Suddenly his need to be perfect took on a whole new light. Caden had spent three years travelling in the future, which he could have conceivably stretched out to an entire lifetime. Quinn looked again at the lavish meal spread out before them. This was the result of someone who had far too much free time on his hands.

  She felt a greater chill as she realized that this was the life that she too could sign up for. That decision was only a few years ahead in her future. What if after that time she realized that she had made the wrong decision? Yet, she could not imagine living her life without time travelling. She had not really reflected upon how, in a few short weeks, time travelling had become a part of her. She could hardly understand how her parents were content to shop at the local grocery store when they could taste dishes from cultures that had yet to be born. She could not fathom how she had been so caught up in studying from a textbook for her next exam when there were whole civilizations from which to learn.

  “Ready to go?” Caden looked at his watch. “If we leave now we will be getting back at exactly the right time.”

  Quinn snapped out of her reflections. “Sure, yeah, that sounds fine. Should we clean up?”

  Caden shook his head. “Nope, but you might want to stand up now.”

  Quinn hesitantly stood up. Caden followed suit. Then the table, along with everything on it, disappeared. The chairs followed a second later.

  “How…?” Quinn stared.

  “I believe it was an adjunct, which is a disposable part of a sentence. If the command to move the table had not been there the rest of the sentence would still work. The specific sentence that I used was ‘Caden and Quinn had a picnic, the table disappeared back to its former location, and then the two of them went back to Midgar.’”

  “So the sentence could have been ‘Caden and Quinn had a picnic, and then the two of them went back to Midgar’?”

  “Yes. Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it?”

  Quinn nodded.

  They reached the time machine, and she stepped up to the door. It did not open to her presence. Sometimes the sensors malfunctioned, so they had been given a code that they could punch in.

  “Hmmm…” she put her hands on her hips. “I know the code, but I completely forgot where the box is to punch it in….”

  Caden stepped towards the door. It opened immediately.

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem like there is anything wrong with the door.” He passed into the time machine.

  She frowned, and walked towards the door. Her foot crossed the threshold and immediately rebounded back out. She tried her foot again and then her hand. Each time her limbs would cross into the time machine and then back out, as if they had struck a trampoline.

  Then Caden began chuckling.

  She scowled. “What did you do?”

  Caden leaned against the door, looking quite pleased as he surveyed her discomfort. “You really didn’t think that I would just let you throw me into a snow bank without trying to get back at you?”

  “Uggh,” she crossed her arms. “So that’s what this is about? You really should have gotten over that by now.”

  “Well, I have not. What I do have set up is a condition clause that states ‘after the picnic, if Quinn wants to enter the time machine again, she must….’ You fill in the blank.”

  “Say a heartfelt apology to you?”

  “As you have already tested, the computer cannot determine whether or not an apology is heartfelt. Somehow, I believe your apology would fall into the ‘not’ category. Nice try though.”

  “Punch Caden?”

  Caden winced. “Getting colder. Try again.”

  She rolled her eyes again. “Give me a hint.”

  Caden stuck his head out of the time machine. She had the perfect opportunity to punch him if she really wanted to. Instead she was caught staring at how the sunlight turned his eyelashes a golden color. She was still staring at his eyelashes when Caden cupped his hand around the back of her neck and brought her lips the rest of the way to his mouth. His mouth felt shockingly warm, and surprisingly gentle.

  He moved his hand from the back of her neck to her hair, then to a place right behind her ear that made her shiver in response. There was no way that he could have discovered that spot simply by luck. Quinn felt frozen as she realized that this meant there was supposed to be many other moments where Caden kissed her. This could never happen if she decided to stay in this time. Caden would never be content with the life Quinn wanted.

  Still she ached to twine her fingers in his hair with every fiber of her being.

  The wall that had been k
eeping her from entering the time machine dissolved. Now there was no space dividing their two bodies. Caden pulled back slightly, allowing his lips to barely graze against her own, silently questioning whether she wanted him to go on.

  “I believe ‘kiss Caden’ would have been the correct response.” His words landed, warm and lightly teasing, on her cheek.

  She pulled back completely. She could not meet his glance as she whispered, “I’m sorry if my actions have led you on, but I have a boyfriend that I do in fact care about greatly.”

  Quinn then stepped past him and into the time machine. She knew that she had done the right thing. She had a boyfriend. She had never mentioned Greg in front of Caden, but he knew what she wanted every day for lunch! Caden had to know her relationship status.

  She also had a family, and she knew that the more she grew to like Caden, the more she would dislike living in one time, the more she would visit the future, and the more secrets she would have to hide from her family. She would travel into the future and see the deaths of everyone she loved. She would be bound not to save them.

  Caden brought them back to Midgar. Neither spoke as Mr. Walters congratulated them on their excellent timing. After the school day was over, Quinn slid past Caden and out of the door. He followed her, tried speaking with her twice before he gave up. It seemed as if he had finally gotten something wrong.

  That night she hung out with Greg and spent time with both her mother and father. She felt horribly disconnected from all of them and tried her best to be engaging. She could not quite convince herself as well as she could convince them that she hated school and still planned on spending the rest of her life solely in their time.