Dr. Fenton is paralyzed, his sleep vision betrayed by rapid movement behind his closed eyelids, by his sweat-beaded brow and thrumming heart. In his twilit subconscious, he looks now from the pretty freckled face of a girl to the shoreline of a lake where they walk together in the August sun. In the dark light of dreams, he knows the name of the lake is Tekakwitha, but only recognizes the girl's face as he might any face, in a passing moment of déjà vu. A braying firehouse blast erupts across the water; it beats a claxon BAMP, BAMP, BAMP!
Nick awakes breathing hard, trembling, blind. Then, slowly realizing he heard his alarm clock, reaching for it on the night stand in his Boston home; he now sees its blurred red digits. His wife is softly snoring next to him, his daughter Alex is bundled under her Elmo sheets and blankets in her bedroom down the hall. He is not walking with the vaguely familiar girl along the shoreline of a lake.
As his ringing cell phone also whirrs and slowly turns, buzzing a little twirly jig next to the blaring clock, Nick understands he is once again Dr. Nicholas Fenton, a tenured Western philosophy and literature professor at Emerson College.
While wondering who the hell would be calling him at six in the morning, Dr. Fenton blindly slaps the phone and sends it tumbling to the Berber carpet with a dull thump, then smacks the snooze on his alarm.
He specializes in the evolution of how human beings interpret the natural and spiritual world, or more succinctly, how humans understand their own consciousness. From Plato, Aquinas and Descartes to Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Einstein, Heisenberg and Feynman, he lectures on the essence of human consciousness to a small-but-devoted populace of smart, passionate twenty-year-olds.
His classes are full every semester—"sold out"—as he likes to joke; new juniors signing up as his best students move on to more specialized work, most looking ahead to graduate school. He also teaches a seminar on the American short story and two sessions of freshman composition, just to keep it real, as he also likes to joke—albeit with a wince.
At least in professional circles, Nick mostly goes by Nicholas or Dr. Fenton since finishing his doctoral dissertation and accepting the Boston job. Those closest to him still call him Nick. He climbs out of bed early every day, to review papers, prepare lectures and then continue his additional research on how the destabilizing Western family directly parallels the intensifying sophistication of technology, particularly in the cyber technology arena.
He is impassioned with his ideas about the Western family, and holds them as the basis of his personal outlook, not just as a potential book concept. Nick believes the obsession in modern life with the effectively anonymous communication of Facebook to be symptomatic. And for him, society's illness is its greater and greater inability to deal with the challenges of real human communication, and relationships.
Why deal with each other, "warts and all," when we can communicate as false and / or exaggerated versions of ourselves—avatars in cyberspace. Why our obsession with emailing, chatting, texting and posting, but not touching, not basing our primary familiarity on instinctual, basic human impulses? Nick's book concept will rely on an analysis of how—because society prefers the manifest nihilism of virtual relationship to real—we have become more unable than ever before to maintain and grow our most important, most real relationships.
If Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Sartre—and in more focused way, Nietzsche and the other nihilists of his undergrad studies were right, he wonders—if everything really does amount to nothing after all, then, why do we lust after the nothingness of virtual relationship in the context of our own consciousness? Why do we not instead make the most of our sentience and sensuality, in what is for all we know the only short, temporary, "real" world we'll ever know?
It troubles Nick how he sees in Emerson freshmen the dumbest, most emotionally-unstable and pharmaceutically-dependent young people in the history of the species. Despite being the most "advanced," healthiest, wealthiest society the world has ever known, Nick believes now as never before, Western society's decline has its roots in the failure of marriage and parenting.
Nick wants to explore in his book how we're too caught up in our own virtual business and secret virtual personal worlds to dig deeper into our kids' increasingly unreal lives, to if necessary use emotional force to keep from losing them; to love and raise them despite their jaded resistance of our effort to simply be their parents. Nick wants his book to present and substantiate his theory that the net result of technology-compromised marriages and parent-child relationships will eventually be the dissolution of the family, with nothing short of the breakdown of society to follow.
He plans to substantiate his theory with data showing correlative relationships between and among the rise of technology, the increase in divorce rate, juvenile delinquency and diagnosis of depression and anxiety, in both young people and adults.
Nick will couch the depression / anxiety aspect of his book in an explication of modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry, from which we mutely accept the necessity of keeping our acid reflux under control, even if it means we have greasy, black diarrhea. Even if "being happy" means we supplement our antidepressant with another drug that makes us think we should shoot ourselves in the eye, anyway.
Jim Gilmore, his best friend, bike riding buddy and a physics professor at Emerson, introduced him last year to an agent in Manhattan, who has in turn expressed interest in the first draft of Nick's book. The potential book deal is exciting for Nick, but the ideas he wants to write about are far more important to him. He wants to fully explicate his belief that society's survival depends on the survival of family, its re-emergence as a vital institution.
As Nick climbs into the shower after turning off his alarm and powering down his phone, so neither will wake his still-snoozing wife, he is mulling over his book thesis. He thinks fleetingly, too, of the potential book deal through Gilmore's agent friend, but dismisses it in the immediate, so he can plot out his day.
With the shower off and water running down his chest, dollop after dollop softly hitting the tub as he towels himself, Nick revisits his dream of walking with the familiar girl along the lakeshore. He has never loved someone so much as his wife Emily; she is stirring now in the kitchen downstairs, making coffee. In ten years together, just shy of seven with their only daughter Alexandra, Nick tells everyone who happens to ask about Emily and him—things are just okay and that's okay with us.
But last night, and with greater and greater frequency over the last year, vivid and intense dreams of the girl have begun stealing first most, then nearly all the quality of his sleep. It is not that he does not sleep, but that he awakes as if he had actually been swimming and canoeing in the sun, at a camp where he at least half-remembers spending summer days in the late-1980s. Did he ever spend those days? He attributes to a sleepy mind his inability to place these memories as wholly his own, confused as to how they are the apparent source of his dreams.
He thinks maybe it is the scent of these past few Indian summer mornings that has brought his time as a young man so much to mind lately; summer memories and memories from all his past seasons. Perhaps, too, these magical October days, warm, dry and sunny in daylight and deliciously cool at night, have become a breeze in his spirit. And maybe the spirit-breeze is lifting hidden memories from his subconscious—memories of a mountain lake and the face of a girl he cannot quite place—shaping the memories into dreams stealing his sleep.
But as he clips on his watch and hears the coffee pot gurgling to a full stop in the kitchen, Nick knows he doesn't have time to plumb the depths of his psyche. He brushes his wiry black locks, happy to be feeling well despite seeing so much silver peppered in his hair and beard.
Quickly tying a loose knot in the funky paisley he wears with a white, cotton button-down and brown chino slacks, Nick throws on an olive blazer and heads downstairs. Emily leans against the counter by the sink, sipping black coffee from a classic diner mug, staring at nothing. Without looking up, at least directly, under her breath she says, "Wow."
"What?" he says. Despite being a little late and badly wanting coffee himself, he senses Emily's tired but playful edge. He gives her the full show, looking to his left and right, then craning his neck behind him in his best impression of Wile E. Coyote.
"You were just kidding when you picked out that blazer, right; I hope?" asks Emily. Now she is smiling full-on, sarcastically, her soft blue eyes complementing her wry mouth.
"Tie's all wrong with it, right?" says Nick. "The solid brown blazer with the elbow patches, right? I got it, Em. I need to get in the car; would you pleeease pour some coffee in my travel mug and throw a scone in a napkin for me; please?"
Nick is back downstairs in a minute, now in a blazer to which Emily half-nods her approval. He picks up the coffee and scone she's fixed for him and kisses her on the mouth. Out the door and in his Saab, throwing his work satchel on the passenger seat, he looks up and to his left as he barely hears a light tapping sound.
At the second-floor window, peeking through Irish lace curtains and sleepy eyes, Alexandra Fenton waves see-you-later, have a nice day with her left hand as she fumbles her curly, pure-blond locks with her right. Nick waves and smiles up at her, never so much in love.
Traffic flows easily on his ride into Emerson. Nick is in his office before eight, reviewing the first of a stack of papers submitted yesterday by students in his 'Great Western Minds' seminar. Lecturing and assigning short explication essays based on their reading of Plato and Descartes, Nick has led this year's sophomores at a brisk pace through the seminar's first six weeks.
The papers he is reviewing now are the result of the first "intellectual curveball" Nick has thrown at his students. He has asked them to read Camus' The Stranger, and then write about how the hero of this classic existentialist piece represents humanity questioning its essential place in reality. Nick hopes his students will expand on how "The Stranger" / Mersault, through everyday life experience, keynotes the speculations of Jean-Paul Sartre and others in the 20th Century existentialist movement.
He further hopes to explore with his students his own ideas about cyber-identity, depersonalization and the failure of basic human relationship in modern society. As a challenge to his students and to bolster his own research, Nick wants to dig into how the estrangement of modern humans from each other, despite the ultra-connectedness of modern life, has led to what he sees as an epidemic of loneliness, depression-anxiety diagnosis and a dependency on pharmaceuticals. Further, he intends to explore with his students why and how the depression-anxiety epidemic ironically rages in a pharmaceutical-obsessed culture, still unable to address the challenges of cancer, HIV and other, real infectious diseases.
Nick's reverie is half-broken, as he is positive he hears Gilmore now, thoroughly practical Land's End lace-ups padding quickly down the hall toward his office. Then, in his half-reverie, he hears Gilmore's knock. It is a lovely Indian summer afternoon; "Lord Jim," as Nick calls him, will of course want to go for a Cannondale ride after they leave the office. He grips the sturdy arms of his old cherry desk chair and gets up to greet his friend.
Only when Nick opens his office door, he sees deep-blue-black sky, a shimmering three-quarter moon and a riot of stars, careening over the twisted, wiry black trees of a forest and swamp in the near distance. Leading up to the edge of the woods, a stark meadow of dry grass and fallen leaves whispers with the caress of a night breeze.
There. As Nick scans the meadow bordering the woods' blue-dark edge, he suddenly sees himself, watching another figure. Yes. A female figure. Dancing. She is dancing with the night breeze as her eyes find his shadow twin.
Her eyes close; she smiles. Reeling in a perception vortex, Nick now dizzyingly sees from the perspective of "the other Nick," watching as the girl's eyes snap open; bright, feral and utterly empty.
In the abrupt open area bathed in a finger of moonlight where she dances, Nick recognizes the figure as the girl from his dreams. Now, levitating and impossibly lifted on the breeze and the blue-dark, she slithers across the air toward the other Nick. No; toward him. As reality and perspective collapse, Nick can no longer distinguish. He braces himself in the doorframe of his office, appearing catatonic to Dr. Clifton James across the hall.
At first he whimpers, and then hears himself scream long and loud, watching in his mind's eye as the girl rushes toward him across the nightscape. James picks up his desk phone and dials 811 for the campus paramedics, afraid to leave his own chair as he watches Fenton, staring at nothing and shaking, but not screaming.
"Nick, man; are you all right?" He hears James' voice, gravelly and a touch stodgy. Nick has always thought of him as just typically professorial enough to be a pain in the ass. He has also known him for five years as a warm, funny man who likes good single malt. Now, he focuses on his colleague's slightly flushed and frightened face, feeling only grateful for James being there with him. He closes his eyes tightly and opens them, turning his head to look at the old prof's face, now just inches from his own.
"Hello, Cliff. Ah, I need to sit down. And I think I need to go see the doctor about my not sleeping, lately. Starting to see things," says Nick.
"Nick," I called the campus medics; they should be here any second, OK?" James hands him a bottle of water from the mini-fridge next to his desk.
"OK. But I feel fine, now, really."
"Still," says James, "I thought you were having a stroke as I was watching you across the hall. Just let the campus EMTs check you out, OK?"
Nick relents. The EMTs arrive. They find his heart rate and blood pressure through the roof, but tell him his heart rhythm is normal, that he's having a common panic / anxiety attack, that "if he wants, since they're already here," they will give him a ride to the local hospital's emergency room, so he can, "get some Ativan."
He doesn't know what Ativan is, but he knows the EMTs are affiliated with the local hospital and ambulance service, and his Emerson health insurance will be billed for having them come to campus, whether he goes to the emergency room or not. So in a kind of depersonalized state, freaked out by his trippy-dark hallucination, but also feeling more than a little stupid, now, he almost laughs out loud as he methodically packs his work satchel.
Nick decides he will go home after visiting the emergency room, whenever that might be; satchel in-hand, he walks with the EMTs to the ambulance. On the bumpy, chilly ride to the hospital a mile and a half from Emerson, Nick tells jokes to a sweet, chatty onboard EMT, who he can see is doing her best not to look at him as if he's loony.
At the emergency room, panic grips him, but nothing like what he felt an hour ago, when he stood almost apoplectic in his own office doorway, gazing on the otherworldly nightscape. As a nurse with vacant eyes asks him to hop up on a gurney, the discomfort Nick feels is as garden-variety as his apparent panic attack.
The sights, sounds and smells of urban emergency medicine in full swing wash over him. Ashen faces, bloodshot eyes with dilated pupils, ragged, petulant demands for "...motherfucking help over here!" vomit, blood, disinfectant. He feels his heart race as a freakishly ugly orderly checks his pulse and blood pressure, then barks out, "...why your vitals so high, man? You need to calm down!" As the orderly jabs a needle into the top of Nick's left hand to draw blood, his mostly-toothless mouth twisted into a kind of smirk, he says, "We'll get you some Ativan in a minute, OK?"
A kind, boyish doctor comes and listens to Nick's chest, tells him he's "racing," but sounds, "Good." A second orderly comes and sits next to his gurney. Now they have the nut watch on him for real. The first orderly comes back with a small glass of water and two liquid gel caps: "point-seven-five milligrams Ativan each, buddy, here you go." He takes the gel caps from the orderly's thick, red hand and swallows them with the water.
As he watches the flaccid face of the second orderly feign a smile, now, half-listening to the family stories he is telling her, Nick suddenly cannot stop his hands from moving to run through his hair with a sleepy self-caress. A smile literally pulls the corners of his mouth wide apart; he feels like he should get up and dance a teddy bear boogie.
Warm, unafraid, willing, he hangs carelessly on to what he thinks, anyway, is his self-perception, and now understands. Oh, of course you wonderful, handsome sonofabitch, he says silently to himself, it's the sweet-freakin-Jesus Ativan. The first orderly called it by its pharmaceutical name: lovey, luscious lorazepam and Nick don't give two shits because he's high as a fucking kite.
He's mildly stressed in a disassociated way as the boyish doctor comes back to check his vitals and a physician's assistant runs an EKG. Riding even higher now on the magic carpet of Ativan, fine, fine, fine and hypnotized, he cannot find it in himself to care.
Another older doctor comes and sits next to him. Warm and easy, he starts casually asking Nick a series of questions. Oh, cool, a psych evaluation, Nick says under his breath and chuckles. The younger doctor comes back with an EKG printout in his hand; he glances at the curled paper for half a second and throws it in the waste basket under Nick's gurney.
"You're a healthy young man," says the boyish doctor. "See your doctor in the next couple days; talk with him about a prescription for Ativan and maybe Prozac along with it. He'll probably talk with you about a therapist, too. Take care."
The young doctor claps him on the shoulder, hands him some discharge paperwork and a bottle with ten Ativan, then turns to go. Nick shakes his hand and thanks him. The older doctor, apparently satisfied with Nick's answers to the psych evaluation questionnaire, gives him a quick nod and a smile.
"Have your regular doctor get you in touch with a cognitive therapist. Together with the meds you're starting, a good cognitive will help you get to the bottom of what's going on," he says.
Nick does not tell the older doctor he started seeing a therapist shortly after the dreams started. He checks himself out at the front desk and takes his cell phone out of his work satchel; he calls his wife at Favorite Things, the craft and gift shop they own.
Emily answers on the first ring. "So, when were you going to tell me you had a panic attack at work today, Nick?" says Emily. I saw Cliff's wife at Kinko's in town about an hour ago. She says Cliff told her the campus medics came to your office today to check you out, and they took you to the emergency room?"
"They did, Em. And I'm fine, physically. You know I've been having some weird dreams lately. And you know I've started seeing Marsden. I'm think I'm going to talk with him at my session tomorrow about a little medication. Promise."
"As long as you feel you're not going to freak out at the office, again. You know how everyone in the department's watching your every move since you made tenure. I'm just saying don't give them any reason to question you."
"And I think you're right, Mrs. Fenton," says Nick. "Trust me. I'll handle this, even if it means a little short-term course of happy pills. I'm not going to put us in jeopardy, OK?"
Emily doesn't actually say she agrees with him and that she's OK with everything he's said but Nick can hear the assent in her voice. He can feel her love too, without her verbalizing it. That's enough.
"One more thing, hon'," says Nick, "they gave me Ativan here at the emergency room, and even if I hadn't left my car on campus and hitched a ride over here in an ambulance, 'no lie, I'm feelin' pretty damn high; no way I should be driving." Suddenly he bursts out with a loony cackle. "Shit," he almost says aloud, "this stuff's comparable, but way better than what I remember of the pot back at Northeastern."
After they hang up, Emily ends up asking his mother to close the shop. At first, after she picks him up at the emergency room and they get a little lost finding their way home in an unfamiliar neighborhood, the ride is tense—even with the yummy Ativan caressing Nick's sparking neurons.
He looks over at Emily and sees her smirking at his stoned face. They laugh out loud together. When they get in their house, he can hear his mother with Alex down the hall in her bedroom, reading a book. He changes quickly into pajamas and tells his daughter he had a late meeting and his car would not start after, so Mommy picked him up. He kisses both his daughter and Mom. She follows him out into the hallway from Alex's bedroom, where in a low voice he quickly explains to her what's going on.
Suddenly even more tired, and still on a gentle but anti-socializing lorazepam high, he heads for bed, doesn't remember getting under the covers, awakes to his alarm happy to see the morning, and cruises through his morning routine with another Ativan to dull the willies he knows he will feel when he first gets to his office.
Everyone he works with voices concern for him, but not to the point of being intrusive. Nick knows they're faking it, that there's a good chance they've always thought him a little nuts and that they're probably not shocked he finally lost it yesterday. At the same time, he half-realizes his harsh perspective on his colleagues' empathy probably has more than a little to do with the clarifying, yet somewhat sociopathic bent the lorazepam is giving him. He's happy his co-workers have done him the favor of maintaining professional demeanor, so for the moment he just doesn't have to deal with them.
