THE CREATION OF A THESIS

In the beginning, nobody took the suicide pact seriously. Why should Steve and Angela and Frank and Elaine and Heather--all rational seniors--want to die? But there they were, lined up side by side on the Weeks Bridge in the March pre-dawn, staring into the Charles like derelicts trying to drown the pain of too many lonely nights. Elaine decided to jump first. She dived into the current, came bobbing up out of instinct, and waved to the four on the bridge. Her hair swirled around the Ophelia in denim as the eddies carried her out of sight.

Heather was next. She bit her nails and peeled the skin from her lips as she listened to the river beckoning her. She didn't want to jump, she had to jump, she shouldn't jump, she ought to jump: she couldn't make up her mind. Steve. Angela and Frank were all encouraging her, first with words, then with hands on her shoulder, finally with shoves. She started to kick and scream anything to avoid being thrown into the abyss.

Then Heather woke up, angry with herself for having such a trite dream. She knew what it meant thought and why it bothered her. Steve, Angela, Frank Elaine and she were all writing theses.

Heather started at the typewriter, her thoughts now idling, now racing, now shifting into neutral. She had long ago learned that she couldn't write a word in the afternoon, that her thoughts ran smoothly only after 9 p.m., but her thesis was due in 148 hours, and she resolved to try to write at least her conclusion. She glanced at the placard on the wall above her that had "TYPE" in block letters, but its hypnotic effect had long worn off. She adjusted the pillow she was sitting on, thumbed through her notecards, and decided to put some Tchaikovsky on the stereo.

The final countdown had begun the previous afternoon--Thursday--at the stroke of 5 p.m., when she realized her thesis was due in exactly one week. Staying on schedule was hopeless; she still had a 25-page conclusion to write, and everything else to revise. Depression set in. She wished she were in History and Lit, which meant her thesis would not only be in, it would be at least 60 pages shorter. She wished she'd picked a useful topic instead of the epitome of esoterica: The effect of Cheddi Jagan's economic policies on bauxite production in Guyana in the early '60s. Guyana--it wasn't that she was bored with the topic so much as she was simply sick of hearing Jim Jones jokes from people who had asked about her thesis and then felt awkward because they had nothing to say. Heather decided she wanted to go home.

Time had finally become a tangible dimension for her. Before the last week, it was merely an abstract dimension measured by movements in space. But now, she could feel a grip that was dry and hard and held her fast. Afternoons were like that--minutes seemed like hours, while she waited for a flash of inspiration that never came to rescue her. At night, time was slippery, and she could move and think freely. By 7 a.m. she had written half the 25-page conclusion. It was the evening and the morning of the first all-nighter.

Saturday Heather bought thesis binders. Half a dozen people had told her this purchase would be the climax of the thesis rush, the point of no return, the sunlight at the end of the tunnel. It wasn't. The Coop had run out of binders. She found them eventually, but they were outrageously expensive. Later she learned the department gave out old ones gratis.

She ran into Elaine wandering glassy-eyed behind Lowell House. Elaine had, two days before, decided to rewrite 60 pages of her thesis. She was trying to write a government thesis for the History Department, and her adviser knew nothing about her topic, Elaine told Heather that she had frantically begged Stuart, a junior and a born editor, to look over her thesis, and that, of course. Stuart had eaten up the attention. That night, in fact, he pored over Elaine's first draft for hours. When he took a break, it was to visit Heather and ask how her conclusion was coming.

"Lousy," she answered, and he read the page she was typing.

"You're in a lot better shape right now than Flaine. Why, you ought to get at least a magna." Heather snorted. The compliment was too obvious.

She changed the subject by asking him to accompany her to Littauer to turn in the last chapter. It was 1 a.m., and she wanted to hand it in to her adviser by early morning. Stuart agreed, but when he returned two hours later, the chapter was still in the typewriter. Dawn was breaking by the time she finished writing and revising, and Stuart was curled up on her couch. Heather nudged him, but he was in a deep sleep and only groaned and turned his head. She covered him with a quilt and walked to Littauer by herself. In the Yard an old woman was feeding bread crusts to the pigeons and a long jogger was blowing steam into the air. Heather picked up the Sunday Times on the way back but never found time to read it. It was the evening and the morning of the second all-nighter.

Heather felt the minutes slip past her too fast to be exhilarated about finishing her rough draft. She was typing her own thesis onto the computer in Littauer's basement--doing that, she supposed, would allow her to type what would become a final draft and yet make revisions. The computer, moreover, automatically numbered footnotes and put them at the bottom of pages. Heather figured that since she had taken Nat Sci 110 as a freshman, she could breeze through the preliminaries of learning how to operate the text-editing language. And at five pages an hour, she figured she could finish typing in 20 to 25 hours.

She did not count on the Science Center printer breaking down. Nor did she realize how long it would take her to get used to typing on a computer. It took her all afternoon and most of the night Sunday just to get the first ten pages into the terminal. It was the evening and morning of the third all-nighter. On Monday it became obvious that the printer in the Science Center was not going to be fixed soon, and seniors in the Ec Department began trickling into Littauer, chirruping that they had to transfer their files, cawing when they saw the line for the printer, screeching when they discovered that the printer in Littauer stuck on every other page. The room containing the printer was an antiseptic prison vibrating with the sounds of the air conditioner and the computer. Periodically the curses of a frustrated zombie rose above the hum because the printer's fragile filament got tangled or the computer swallowed a line or paragraph. The pica mechanism finally refused to work at all, and every page had to be written in tiny elite type. It was a thesis-padder's nightmare. In the terminal room, grad students, government and economics concentrators hunched over the displays, ever-conscious of the vultures peering over their shoulders and none-too-subtly checking their wristwatches.

Heather had grabbed a terminal that morning and refused to relinquish it. She had 40 pages to type into her files that day, pages she wanted to cut and edit and perfect, but she was running out of time. The chances of being able to print anything out that day dimmed, and Heather had a vision that she would have to enlist every friend she had on Wednesday night to type the entire thesis because the printer was exhausted. She swore she'd tell every junior she knew never, never to try to type a thesis onto the computer; it was worth it to pay a typist $200.

At 3 a.m. she met Stuart and Elaine at Brigham's. Flaine had just sent her conclusion to a typist. She was talking in monosyllables, her eves bloodshot and dazed, since the effects of the coffee and speed she'd been downing all weekend were just beginning to wear off. Heather envied her: She had to trudge back to Littauer, and Flaine could go to sleep. Heather would have givern her first-born for six hours of sleep. It was the evening and the morning of the fourth all-nighter.

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