It is 10:45 a.m. Nick has an appointment in fifteen minutes with Jonna Kenall, who calls herself J and positively emanates hot-smart-co-ed charm. He takes two deep breaths and pulls Jonna's paper from the stack he was reviewing before being overtaken yesterday by "whatever that was," he says aloud.
Nick realizes only now that he did not scream aloud when the vision of the girl overtook him. He also understands how Gilmore was neither walking down the hall toward his office, nor knocking on his door before his "episode." Finally, he knows he will definitely have to wing it with young Ms. Kenall.
He calls his family doctor and manages to get a late afternoon appointment, explaining to a nurse how the emergency room doctors last night recommended additional anxiety medication, to be taken together with Ativan. In a vague, disconnected way, he feels grateful that a prescription might help him catch up on sleep, of the dreamless kind he does not remember from the night before. He is even happier to have to prepare for the appointment with Jonna. Wherever his mind went yesterday, wherever it has been since the dreams of the girl started a few weeks earlier, Nick wants to stay the hell away from there.
He realizes too how more than ever before he is looking forward to a bike ride after work today; he hopes Gilmore will still want to go, since he surely knows what happened yesterday. Together they sometimes feel like old coots compared to some of the guys they see on the bike path along the river bordering the Emerson campus' south edge, but Nick knows they will warm up quickly in their saddles on this fine October day.
They will roll for a while, side-by-side, shooting the shit, before they sprint and send a welcome rush tumbling through their respective forty-something systems. Nick relishes even the thought of the endorphin lift he knows will go a long way toward clearing his dark visions of late. He remembers, too, how irrationally overjoyed he was to hear the emergency room doctors recommend vigorous exercise last night, along with medication, to help with his anxiety. He had been positive the doctors would hospitalize him to monitor his racing heart, that like in some old movie they would recommend bed rest. Now, remembering how nuts he had acted, just like yesterday he sort of thinks he feels stupid—but the Ativan won't let him register any self-criticism.
A delicate tapping startles him. He turns his head to stare for moment at the poster of Einstein in black and white beneath the class schedule on this side of his door, and debates for a few seconds even getting out of his chair. Albert's wagging tongue in the famous old snapshot suddenly makes him laugh. He gets up to open the door for the girl who was solely responsible for seven frat boys taking his Whitman-Twain class last year.
Gliding in through his office door on a palpable cloud of fresh-tropic body spray, 20-year-old Jonna "J" Kenall wears a loose, cable-knit, cinnamon-colored sweater draped over snug-but-not-tight blue jeans.
An oversized, black, studded belt encircles her slender midriff and hips, complementing the low-heeled charcoal boots she wears; pewter caps on their pointed toes. Jonna's naturally-curly black hair is pulled back in a simple, dull-gold silk ribbon. She either wears no makeup, or just knows how to apply it tastefully.
Jonna sits in the "inquisition chair," as he calls it, alongside and to the left of where he sits at his desk. Nick looks into Jonna's eyes and smiles, suppressing a laugh when he is reminded how this young beauty, pursued by every jock and pre-law hotshot on campus, flirts with him constantly. And for Nick, being a knockout is the least interesting thing about Jonna.
She is consistently articulate, funny and on-point in both of the classes she takes with him, careful not to dominate every discussion, but clearly recognized by her classmates as a star. What makes her find him attractive is a total mystery.
In fact, part of the reason he enjoys having Jonna in class is that her charming-if-mysterious crush on him reminds Nick how much he loves Emily and Alex. He thinks he must be middle-aged when a hot twenty-year-old makes him imagine having sex with his wife, or in an entirely different vein, playing tag with his daughter.
"So Doc, what's shakin'?" says Jonna. She favors him with a crooked smile and a snicker. My God, he thinks, this girl must have them lined up at her dorm room door.
"Jonna, we need to talk about the tack you're taking in the latest draft of your second essay on The Stranger, and how you're using the ideas of Sartre to define Mersault as an archetype of existentialism."
"So you don't think I'm on the right track?" asks Jonna, leaning forward now, cocking her head to her left and averting her eyes slightly.
"I do think you're on the right track; I just want you to use more of your own thoughts to develop your thesis. Everyone knows Sartre and Camus were literally fellow travelers. I want to know what you think."
Jonna shoots her gaze back to him, opening her eyes wide. "I think Camus and Sartre were both wrong; I think existence is neither absurd nor based on nothing. In fact I think time doesn't exist because it can't possibly have a beginning or an end. I think we're only energy; living and dying only mean changes in our form, not our essential consciousness, which is timeless. And if time doesn't exist, then our consciousness, like time itself has no beginning or end. We just continue to change form endlessly, 'imagining' every state in which we persist within the endless flow of time, both for ourselves and everything else making up our 'reality.' Everyone and everything else does the same thing we do. Trees, goldfish, clouds; we're all imagining each other, though I'm not quite sure how goldfish or clouds imagine."
Jonna laughs out loud.
At first Nick is so absorbed in Jonna's trippy-but-smart little rant he does not respond. Then he challenges her argument.
"Have you been surfing YouTube? Did you pick up that whole 'imagining ourselves' thing from the Bill Hicks clip?"
"Yeah, I've seen the Bill Hicks clip, but I've been thinking about this stuff since I was little; these ideas freak me out, really. I've never had the chance until your class to start working out the stuff in my head, ya know?"
"I think I do know, Jonna," says Nick. "And if you can present your argument clearly, referencing Camus, Sartre, and maybe Aristotle, not reiterating and comparing their ideas as a means of expressing your own, I think you may be pleased with your grade for the second essay."
"I get you, Doc," says Jonna.
"Remember that above all, we're reading what we're reading and writing about it to sharpen our understanding of what it means to be alive, to purely think and deduce. Kind of like what Socrates and Aristotle started, and what Camus, Sartre and so many others refined. I think the prospect may bore you but, if you leave my class a better thinker, I know you'll do better in law school in a couple years, Jonna."
She suddenly colors, the rose rising in her cheeks making her lovelier, yet somehow completely girlish. Again, Nick thinks of Emily and Alex. "Don't take this the wrong way, doc, but, your wife is lucky."
"I'm luckier, Jonna," says Nick. "Thank you. Now, do you see what I'm suggesting as far direction for your current essay, based on what I've seen in your first draft?"
"I do, Doc. Papers' due in class next Tuesday, right?"
"Next Tuesday, right," says Nick.
"Great. I think you'll like what you see when I submit my final draft. Right now, though, I gotta jet, OK?"
Nick thanks Jonna for stopping by and waves a little 'so long' as she closes his office door behind her.
