wildcat

I've been keeping up a conversation with a friend of mine while she's been travelling. She got a great gig teaching Conversational English to people in the future, where it's a mostly dead language and attempts have been made to preserve it by recruiting people from the past. I come home after a day of carting books, magazines, and newspapers around, handing them to people over a counter, taking them back, arguing over late fines for DVDs -- and there'll be a message from her on my TimeBook account. We tried to play Cross-Time Scrabulous for a while but she kept making words up and claiming they haven't been invented yet.

She asks about pretty basic things, like the current cost of fossil fuels, how much sushi I've had in the last week -- she won't explain why she asks about the sushi. At first I thought it was because she just couldn't get it in the future, but then she said something about unagi the other week...

She doesn't visit that often. Maybe because of family stuff, but she seems to like the future a lot, and she always seem perplexed by finances whenever she's in the Now, carrying around all this cash like it's going out of style and looking bemused at me when I pay for a bottle of Bombay Sapphire with my debit card. She says she doesn't really understand the economy of the future, but it doesn't work the same way it does now.

Occasionally, she asks about Poland.

She's very careful to avoid mentioning how far into the future she is, but I sometimes think she's just being coy. "Oh, they had an alien invasion on Monday," she said the other day. I think it was a Sunday. Just like that. They had an alien invasion. She still feels very much like an outsider. Apparently they're weird about time-travellers, even ones that teach English. Possibly because she owns natural fibres that haven't been genetically modified. Possibly because she actually remembers -- knows -- what Britney Spears's voice sounds like, rather than just singing along with text and a beat in a karaoke booth. "No, but seriously, they've never heard the original version of Oops I Did It Again?"

"Dude, they only really know Marilyn Manson as a talk show host. Off MeTube."

"YouTube."

"No, MeTube. Knock-off from after Google buys YouTube."

"Google already owns YouTube."

"No, no. The second time, after they have to buy it back from the Mormons to save mankind."

"You're making this shit up."

She sends me stuff in the mail, which can be a bit of a hassle, but people are doing it more and more, trading stuff back and forth between now and then, so the post office is a lot better about it. The packages are usually grey and sort of cardboard-like, plastic trying to look like cardboard. She sends me books that I can't read because the pictures jump around, there's not a lot of text, and she wants me to send her copies of People Magazine in return. All anybody in the future reads is Elpoep. Something about "ghost particles." She occasionally uploads photos backwards into time. People blog backwards now, little travel diaries detailing their attempts to woo people from the future -- she's had a few of those herself -- and a lot of my friends have started to decorate their apartments in Nouveau Futur style, purchasing bargain basement reproductions in silver and black from catalogues. I hear a couple of actual businesses from the future are taking orders from now.

I see field trips -- kids from tomorrow shoveling weird snacks into their mouths while gawking in the streets. "Oh, they're obsessed with the past," my friend says in her messages. "They ask me a lot of questions. I taught this whole class on the Tarot, actually. I had to explain that my mother thinks it's a sin, but they don't get what Sin is. They also think the cards are pretty silly, they thinks it must be really weird for us to not know what's going to happen before it does. They don't get trying to predict something."

She still asks about how things are here, but I mean. They're just not as big as the future is, right? The cars have wheels, sure, but everybody's trying to be like future people and that's all they want to talk about at dinner parties. She asked me the other day what Starbucks smelled like, like she couldn't remember. Like they don't have them in the future. I got a little excited about that, almost thought about trying to get a job teaching English. Imagine! A world where I don't have to suppress the gag reflex when I smell that burnt coffee bean haze. Only, what comes after Starbucks? What's going to eat Starbucks?

Someone at work asked me yesterday why Britney Spears was on the cover of People Magazine all the time, what she did before she was "professionally crazy."