Ball Strohman, teacher of various grades at Time Academy, and one time wife of Dr. Jerry Strohman, worked hard to focus her energy. She was behind the desk at the front of a fourth grade classroom, and as usual her students were acting up. The classroom was typical for the Academy. The children sat at individual desks, facing front, and there were windows on the outside wall letting the bright New Zealand sunlight fill the room. The other walls were covered with educational posters, extolling the power of positive thought and hard work, as well as a variety of summarized basic lessons in time theory.
Ball hated teaching. She had been doing so full-time at the Academy for over nine years, and in all that time, her work had never blossomed into anything more than a job, and a frustrating one at that. Students interrupted constantly, played pranks, hurt each other, and were, to put it mildly, generally disrespectful, all of which would have been ok, had they only bothered to absorb some small portion of her lessons. As it was, however, she was swimming upstream in a futile attempt to keep them from drowning in their own ignorance, something which she had no hope of achieving.
The funny thing was, she had loved the Academy so much as a child. She remembered working hard, late night study sessions, thoughtful conversations with her teachers. Sure, she had snuck out her dorm a few times to watch the sunrise, or smoked he odd cigarette when no one was looking. But that was the point, she sneaked. She couldn’t imagine herself showing the outright disrespect to teachers the way these kids did. When things had fallen apart with Jerry, this was the first place she thought of. The one place she remembered being truly happy. But you can’t go home again, and she wasn’t sure if she could ever really be happy again here in this place that had changed so much.
Maybe she had been more unruly than she thought back then, and she was just getting back a little of her own. Still, she couldn’t possibly have deserved this much. Anyway, it didn’t matter, because those days were gone, and no matter how much she idealized that time with nostalgia, she was stuck with students who could never live up to her ideal of who she thought she used to be.
And it wasn’t just the fourth graders. They were all like that. Arrogant little snot nosed kids who couldn’t pay attention to save their lives, and dismissed any instruction as pointless. Born know-it-alls who couldn’t be bothered with formal teaching. No. She wasn’t like this as a student. It was the world that had changed.
“Kids. Kids! Settle down! Don’t touch that! Jimmy, sit down this instant!. Lisa, please. Ok. Quiet down everyone. Ok, thank you.” Ball took a deep breath and put her hands on the desk. Today’s lesson was traditionally the toughest one of the year, certainly for fourth grade, and she wasn’t quite up to it today. She hadn’t slept well and was still plagued by the vague memory of a disturbing dream involving her father. He was overbearing enough in person, but this barely memorable hallucinatory phantom was worse for it's larger than life dominance, and she still felt that he was watching her in judgement long after she had woken up. She tried to shake the feeling, and bulldoze herself into the lesson plan, but instinctively knew it would end in chaos.
“Now this is the first real day of time travel and we have the potential for huge amounts of confusion and miscommunication. So I am begging you. Seriously begging you to please focus, and don’t play with your remotes.” A hand went up, and Ball knew she had already lost the room. “Yes, Jennifer.”
“Mrs. Strohman? Will we finally get to move through time today?”
“Yes, Jennifer. At long last, the day you have been waiting for has arrived.” She was about to dive into her lesson plan when yet another hand went up. “Well,” she thought, “at least they’re raising their hands.”
“Yes, Colby?”
“Which button do we press?”
“Don’t push ANYTHING!” Ball Strohman took a deep breath, stood up and put her hands on her desk. “Ok. Hands in your laps.” She paused to make sure the room of 10 year olds complied, which took longer than she would have liked, but was ultimately successful. “Now we’ve been talking about the elements of time travel for the last month and I know you are all anxious to try a little for yourselves. As long as you behave, you will all have an opportunity to at long last dip your toes into the river of time.” Ball heard tittering in the back, but decided to ignore it for the time being.
“We’re just going to travel back and forth within our class period today, but to start, we'll need a buffer of about 10 minutes. At the end of that time, we’ll enter two codes,” she continued to say as she wrote the code on the blackboard, “that will move us forward and backward within that 10 minute period,.” Another hand. “Yes, Cornish.”
“We already did that.”
“Cornish, didn’t I ask you not to touch anything?”
“I didn’t” Cornish looked away from his teacher, and down at his desk, the guilt written clearly on his face.
“Of course you did. While the rest of us have been sitting here, patiently awaiting our turns to at long last experience the wonders of time travel, you dove in, punched the code I gave you into your remote, and traveled 10 minutes into the future.”
“No, I didn’t, Mrs. Strohman. I swear,” Cornish protested, his guilt more obvious by the minute.
“Yes, Cornish, you did. And when you did so, the Cornish of 10 minutes into the future, the Cornish presently sitting in front of me, traveled back 10 minutes to take your place. So although you remember only innocently sitting through the 10 minute waiting period, your naughtier self did not, and dragged you back here to sit with us. Undoubtedly, you will not be able to bear sitting through this again and will travel back to the end of the wait period, dragging naughty Mr. Cornish back here to wait his turn. Yes?”
Cornish, caught and called out, broke. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Strohman.”
“And he’s back. Now nobody touch ANYTHING!” She took another deep breath. Nothing had visibly happened during the Cornish incident, so the students didn’t really know that he had moved forward and back in time, except for what they heard from her. In fact, even Cornish didn’t really know he had moved in time. All he really knew was that he had intended to. Ball, however, her senses honed after years of training, knew immediately. She felt the world change when Cornish moved, and studied the rest of the students to see if any of them had felt it as well. She was disappointed.
And before she could move on, she felt it again, just before the kid everyone called Slappy raised his hand.
“Yes, Slappy.”
“Ok, this is bizarre. Nobody has called me Slappy since…whoa... Am I dreaming this? Or was prison the dream… Jeez, is this 4th grade? This must be the...” Slappy looked around the room and took it all in. Then he looked back at Ball. “I used to have a huge crush on you, Mrs. Strohman.”
Ball, her frustration rising, focused her energy. She looked at Slappy, this little kid that had so much potential, and thought, he doesn’t know. Unexpectedly, she couldn’t stop herself from feeling the sadness of how he might end up. Whether he really was in prison or not didn’t much bother her, but the thought that this kid, this kid with so much potential would lose any instincts he had developed for time was devastating. She usually told herself that all the trouble of teaching, all the disrespect she felt from her students, was worth enduring to train the next generation of Time People. That the world, and in particular, her people, would be a better place for her suffering. The thought that she might be going through all of this for nothing, or worse, that she herself might be ruining these kids’ chances of living up to their natural potentials began tearing her apart. The students all looked at her in rare silence, waiting for her to speak. She reminded herself of her mantra: “Only the Present. Only the Present”, and marshaled her strength as she waited for Slappy to leave his future behind forever.
“Ok, Slappy. It sounds like things may not be working out so well for you, but I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about that. I need to send you back or we might lose little Slappy forever. Do you understand?”
Slappy just looked confused, like he had just awoken from a very real dream, but couldn’t remember the details.
Ball walked over to Slappy’s desk, and punched some numbers into his remote. “You know, I had high hopes for you. I’m sorry about the way things turn out.”
“What was the question again?” Slappy asked, hopefully.
Ball knew he was now in the present, and had lost all memory of his future. The poor little Slappy was at this moment coming to in the future, probably in a prison cell, with no memories from before he was 10, and only vague ones at that. She was running out of time.
“Goodbye, Slappy,” she said, and pushed one more button on Slappy’s remote. “Remember, the future can be yours.”
Suddenly the expression on Slappy’s face transformed. Ball felt the change in the time flow, a sort of indescribable sensation that flowed through her inside and out, and looked around the room again. Still no sign that anyone else felt it. Well, they were young. It would come in time. “Well, Slappy? Are you proud of yourself?”
“Whoa. Where am I? What just happened?”
Ball let her anger start to rise up again. “What just happened was you violated my only rule, and instead of paying attention you nearly destroyed any chance you had at a decent life. You had no idea what you were doing, and you are very, very lucky we were able to get you back.”
Slappy stared and Ball glared. She would have to redouble her efforts with this one. Just the thought was exhausting. Worn out, Ball relented.
“Don’t give up, Slappy. The future can be yours.” She walked back to her desk. “And I have a message for you from the future,” she said with no little condescension. “You are here because you have a gift. Don’t be afraid to use it.”
She was proud of that thought and reveled in it for a moment. Then, struck by sudden panic she added, “BUT ONLY WHEN I SAY SO!”
Ball used the next 10 minutes to go over the lesson plan, and against her better judgment, took her students on their first time ride. With few exceptions, the day, like most, continued to get worse until she left for the day, tired, embittered, and worn out, her better self buried in job she just wasn’t built for, in a place she no longer recognized.
And so it went for Ball, who gave up science for teaching, but soon will give it up again, only to be caught back up in the whirlwind of time.
•
And so it goes for our three main characters. Jerry is frustrated with his life on the as yet unnamed planet, a life full of regret. Ball is frustrated with her life back on Earth, similarly living a life of regret. And the Old Man, well, let’s just say that soon enough we will discover that he too is living a frustrated existence, full of regret. It would appear we are stumbling upon our first major theme.
We can, of course, be comforted by the fact that cathartic change is, in most stories, predictably inevitable, and before we are through with our heroes, they will no doubt shed their frustrations and regrets, and ultimately find happiness. Who knows, perhaps our villain will as well. With or without our villain, however, the cathartic change for our heroes is utterly predictable, as is the route for that catharsis, which we are to set up for in the following scene.
No comments:
Post a Comment