By Tuesday all the hours were beginning to blur together. Heather was trying to revise her second chapter and type the third into the computer at the same time, but she seemed to be running on a treadmill. Her thesis adviser stopped by several times to wish her luck and check her final versions, and the look on his face appeared more and more dubious. After dinner that night, she wandered into UHS on impulse and had her blood pressure taken. It was up 20 points. A nurse told her to go to bed. She didn't. It was the fifth all-nighter.
After breakfast Wednesday Heather took a nap and set her alarm for two hours of rest. At 8:30 a jackhammer started up outside her window. Heather slept through it. At 9:15 her alarm went off, but she didn't hear it. At 11 the jackhammer started up again, and she jumped out of bed. She never throught she'd be grateful to have a jackhammer wake her. She typed all day, except for the hour she couldn't get on the computer because her sophomore-year roommate had accidently incapacitated two of the machines and was nowhere to be found. Vaguely she remembered having an hourly that day, but it didn't matter anymore. She still had to type in her conclusion.
At midnight her roommate Lisa showed up and offered to work the printer. Heather offered her her first-born. At 2 a.m. Stuart dropped in a offered to type her last chapter into the computer, and Lisa went home. Heather started to revise her third chapter.
"Heath Bar," Stuart said, and Heather looked up. "This sentence makes absolutely no sense." Heather rewrote it. Five minutes went by.
"Heath, do you really want to say this? It's a sweeping generalization."
"Yes." Heather snapped. Two minutes passed.
Stuart groaned, "you don't really want to call this guy a 'dastard,' do you?"
"What's the matter with it?"
"Nothing. Only you would use that word."
Stuart went out for coffee at 6 a.m. By the time he returned. Lisa had come back and was printing out chapter three. Stuart watched her for a few minutes and slumped over a chair. It was 8:30. Heather rubbed his hand and told him to get some sleep. It was the evening and the morning of the sixth all-nightes.
Heather started revising the conclusion and smiled at Stuart's editing. He had qualified a few generalizations, broken up long sentences, deleted the over-written phrases like "dastard." Lisa sat down to watch Heather go over the conclusion for the last time. By 11 she was on the last page, and Heather realized it was useless to try to revise anymore. Her synapses were misfiring. Her hands were shaking. The thesis was due in six hours, and the conclusion still had to be printed out, the bibliography written, and the whole thing copied and put in binders. She panicked.
While Lisa stayed to print out the conclusion. Heather returned to the suite to write the bibliography. She passed Elaine, who was en route to Gnomon Copy. For a moment Heather thought about wolfing down lunch, but she was too nervous to eat. By the time she'd written down her primary sources. Lisa had finished printing the conclusion. Lisa called her. There were four types on the last page, and she asked how to change Heather's file. It was 1 p.m.
Heather was halfway through the secondary sources when she got sick of typing and pruned her bibliography. Lisa had returned with the thesis and an armful of apples and was finishing the proofreading. Heather thumbed through the pages. They were beautiful, but she felt an overwhelming sense of in-completion, as if she were handing in a good first draft, as if there were still sources to be read, analysis to be added, ideas to polish. She couldn't quite believe it was finished. It was 3:30.
She and Lisa sneaked into the House office with the thesis and replaced the paper in the House copying machine with thesis bond. Lisa started copying, while Heather collated The senior tutor walked in, open-mouthed. "We're just copying a paper." Lisa said. "A long one." Heather and Lisa attracted an audience of House officials. Apparently no one had ever tried copying a thesis in the House office before.
At 4:15 they tried to figure out how to open the spring binders. It took them five minutes, and another five minutes to figure out how to fit copies in the binder neatly, 4:25--it was finished.
Heather had a particularly silly grin on her face as she trudged to Littauer, but she didn't care. Thesis writers were lounging around, munching on cookies and Swedish meatballs. Heather set down her two copies. A tutor asked her if she wanted beer, wine, or some of Kentucky's finest.
"You've got to be kidding." Heather said. "I haven't slept in two days, and I haven't eaten all day. Give me the whiskey."
On the seventh night. Heather slept.
A senior who recently handed in a thesis--on time