Day 1
Eve sat quietly reading. She would pause occasionally to check the institutional dial clock over her desk. She strongly felt the best office hours were the ones where no one showed up. And this was shaping up to be a good one. It was too early in the semester for grade grubbing undergrads and too late for the now overburdened doctoral students. Fifteen minutes to go.
She flipped another page. She'd read Gawain a couple dozen times before, but this time she was looking for homoerotic undertones between Gawain and the Green Knight. She felt a little guilty as she did so. She did not actually think they were gay, but the homoerotic papers were getting published like crazy right now. And publishing was the only way to tenure. Ten minutes to go.
The ax could be a phallic symbol, she thought. The beheading could be a rape. She rolled her eyes. Putting together this bullshit came much too easy. But she dutifully scribbled her thoughts into the margins, then checked the clock again. Five minutes.
There was a knock on her door. She bit back the instinctive frown and changed it to a welcoming smile. "Hello?"
"Hey. It's me, Lee." He opened the door too quickly, and the knob slammed against the wall. The gangly doctoral student did not notice the thud, or the way Eve squinted her blue eyes at the sound. He was far too engrossed in the papers in his hands.
"I am going to blow your mind." Lee said, his smile lifting his glasses.
"My mind is ready to be blown." Eve said. She could have corrected him, but she knew the type. Intelligent, inspired, no interpersonal skills.
"I was working on my translations, right? Old English to Old German to German to English. And as I'm doing it things don't add up."
"There is a lot easier way of doing the translation." Eve said.
Lee shrugged. "If I do it the old way I have no thesis."
"So what did you find?" Eve asked.
"A new verb tense." Lee said.
Eve sat back in her chair. The smile remained, but it was forced. Lee was cracking up. Losing his marbles. In danger of extending office hours.
"A new verb tense?" She said.
"It has to be. The texts tell people where to go, what to do, and a few times the people do it. Even when it makes no sense to do so. And these times correspond to a different verb tense, the command tense."
"There already is a command sense. It's called the imperative. You're a doctoral student. You know this."
"Of course, but this is different. The spelling is off." Lee said.
"Spelling was not standardized for hundreds of years after the works you study. Most of them never even had a dictionary" Eve said.
"The people do out of character things in the tales though." Lee said.
"It is primitive fiction." Eve said. "Most of our notions of characterization came about in the last three hundred years."
Lee stood, papers in hand. The excitement that had propelled him into the room was gone.
Eve stood up and put her hand on his shoulder.
"Listen, what you are going through is normal. You want to make the breakthrough. You want the thesis that sails right through the advisory committee and into some Ivy's tenure track. The same thing happened to me. I thought I had found a lost poem of Shakespeare's on a men's room wall in Surrey. I was wrong. People still make jokes about the 'Shitty Surrey Shakespeare Sonnet'".
"So what did you do?" Lee asked.
"I cranked out a thesis about gynophobia in the original criticisms of the Canterbury Tales. I didn't love it, but I had a job to do. And you do too."
Lee drew a deep breath, then blew the hair out of his eyes.
"Give me one more week. If I can get something more concrete I'll bring it. If I can't, I'll get started on prostitution as an act of liberation in Henry the Fifth."
Eve squeezed his shoulder, then patted him on the back. "That is how you get tenure. Goodbye Lee."
She looked up at the clock as he walked out. Only three minutes over. She could still catch her bus. Poor Lee, she thought. Some people aren't cut out for the academic life.
Day 7
The dial clock promised an end to Eve's office hours. The second hand was tickling the twelve when a knock came at her door.
"Dammit," She whispered.
"Pardon?" Lee's voice came through the door.
"Come on in." Eve said.
Lee walked in, papers clutched in his hands. His smile was feverish.
"I figured it out." He said.
"Did you now?" Eve asked.
"It's the inflection. We lost it, maybe a thousand years ago." Lee said. "I can't imagine why. But it works." Lee said.
"How do you know?"
"Look at this."
Lee held up a coffee cup. And waited.
"Coffee?" Eve asked.
"It was free." Lee said.
"With your reward card?" Eve asked.
"No, with the command."
He put the coffee on the table between them.
"Watch," he said. "
Give
me the coffee."
Eve reached out and handed him the coffee.
"I'm not sure what the magic is. It's your coffee." Eve said.
"Well, give is the only word I figured out." Lee said. "It shows up quite a bit in the texts. But still, you gave me the coffee."
"What was I going to do with cold coffee?" Eve pushed back her glasses and stood up. "Listen, just shake some dirt on Shakespeare. It always works." She walked over to her Elizabethan shelf. "I think I have an annotated copy of Henry the Fifth. I'll need it back, but it should be a good start."