The Procrastinator's Paradox

Jonah stared at the open textbook on his desk, the words blurring together into an incomprehensible jumble. He blinked hard, trying to force his exhausted brain to focus. 2:37 AM. He had been at this for hours, desperately reviewing material for his Practical Interpretation final exam tomorrow morning.

With a heavy sigh, Jonah leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He should've started studying days ago, but he had put it off again and again, convinced he could cram it all in at the last minute. Now the moment of truth was fast approaching, and Jonah was utterly unprepared.

He glanced resentfully out the window at the darkened quad below his dorm room. Other students were likely sleeping peacefully, finished with their own exam prep. Meanwhile, Jonah was stuck here, anxiety churning in his gut as the weight of his procrastination fully sank in.

He couldn't fail this test. As a scholarship student from a poor family, Jonah desperately needed to keep his grades up. One mark could jeopardise everything he had worked for just to get here.

With a shake of his head, Jonah tried to clear his spiralling thoughts. He just needed to focus. One chapter at a time. He could do this.

Taking a deep breath, Jonah began reading aloud from the dense textbook chapter on "Reality Confluence: Navigating Perceptual Frontiers of the Modern Age." He sounded out the complicated words slowly, hoping the act of speaking would help cement the concepts in his mind.

"In the ontological fabric of the multiverse, emergent phenomena..."

A sudden scraping sound from the hallway made Jonah jump. He paused, listening closely. It sounded like something heavy being dragged across the floor. He calmed himself, took a deep breath, and pushed the bowl of chocolates away. Chocolates made him jumpy in excess. Jonah hit excess before midnight.

Curious, Jonah cracked open his door and peered out. At the far end of the hallway, he could see the old janitor, Thaddeus, struggle to lift a floor waxing machine in the communal lounge. Jonah watched as Thaddeus shoved the electric behemoth onto the ping-pong table. Like a gunslinger, he flourished his spray bottle and liberally spritzed the ping-pong table.

Jonah wrinkled his nose at the pungent odour of solvent wafting down the hallway. Why was Thaddeus waxing the table at 3 AM? It solved a mystery of why the ping-pong tables had turned yellow and the bottom edge of the nets was always missing. Shaking his head, Jonah retreated to his room. Hendrix College could be an odd place sometimes.

Glancing back at his desk, Jonah felt his motivation drain away. He was so tired. His eyes could barely focus on the tiny text swimming across the pages. Maybe he should try again after a quick nap...

No! Jonah sat up sharply. He couldn't give in to exhaustion now. He had to keep reviewing if there was any hope of passing this test. With new determination, Jonah turned back to the open textbook.

"The paradoxical landscapes of simultaneous existence and non-existence..."

Jonah's eyes fatigued quickly. His gaze drifted to the window. Sometimes focusing on something distant helped. The quad below was bathed in silvery moonlight. It looked so peaceful out there. Jonah imagined himself lying on the grass, staring up at the night sky and listening to the gentle breeze.

A lump formed in his throat. He never should have put off studying for so long. Now here he sat, trapped and frantic, while the rest of the world slept on in blissful ignorance. Sometimes Jonah wondered if he had made a mistake coming to Hendrix at all. He wasn't like most of the other students - born into money with bright futures assured. He was here on scholarship, barely scraping by while trying to navigate classes far beyond his small-town high school education.

The whirring of the waxing machine stopped, but only for a moment.

Maybe it was foolish to think he could handle this intense academic pressure. As freshman year dragged on, Jonah kept putting off declaring a major. He was terrified of committing himself to a field of study only to fail spectacularly. The weight of that decision paralysed him.

A sudden tapping jerked Jonah from his spiralling reverie. He looked over to see a fat squirrel perched on the outside windowsill, peering in curiously. As Jonah watched in surprise, the squirrel tapped its little paws against the glass again. It looked frantic. It mimed for Jonah to open the window.

"Shoo, get out of here!" Jonah waved his arms, but the squirrel didn't move.

The squirrel turned its head and regarded Jonah with one eye, then the next. Its tiny fingers straining against the window. Its muscles twitched as it tried to force it open.

With a sigh, Jonah relented. To his astonishment, with only an inch gap, the squirrel immediately twisted inside, scurried across his desk, and snatched one of his mother's chocolate chip cookies before leaping down and scurrying to the door. Clutching the cookie in its greedy paws, the squirrel looked expectantly at Jonah as if waiting to be let out.

"Unbelievable. I was saving those." Jonah muttered. He cautiously opened the door, keeping his legs as far from the squirrel as possible. What could it harm? Maybe it would interrupt Thaddeus' work and give Jonah some much needed piece.

Tonight kept getting weirder and weirder.

Jonah shook his head to clear it. He couldn't let himself get derailed. His exam was in less than eight hours now. He had to keep studying.

Squaring his shoulders, Jonah sat down and resumed reading from the textbook. He made it a full paragraph further before a faint, but distinct smell made him wrinkle his nose. Was that... cigar smoke? Jonah glanced around in confusion. His dorm was non-smoking, and he knew the fire alarm had a hair-trigger. The last thing Jonah wanted was to lose an hour of study time while the fire department searched through the dorm. Where was that smell coming from?

Sniffing the air, Jonah traced the odour outside his room to the janitor's closet. That was impossible. There was no way someone was smoking cigars in the tiny space. Right...? Tentatively, Jonah eased open the closet door.

A dozen beady eyes stared back at him. Jonah blinked in disbelief. In the dark closet, a circle of squirrels stood around an old, ragged-edged shoe box. They quickly hid their tiny cigars behind their backs.

Jonah stood frozen, unable to process the bizarre scene before him. The squirrels stared at the one with the cookie. One of the squirrels finished its cigar in a few quick puffs before tossing the butt aside, snatched the cookie, and scampering toward the closet door on its little legs.

Heart pounding, Jonah looked around wildly for something, anything, to defend himself from the tiny cigar-smoking mammal. But the squirrel merely tilted its head, studying Jonah curiously with its shining black eyes. Jonah scrabbled backward in alarm as the squirrel tossed the nibbled cookie at Jonah's feet, then pushed the door closed, sealing the other squirrels back inside.

Jonah held perfectly still, barely daring to breathe. His mind reeled.

There were a couple of nattering noises, then the sound of a match being struck. Jonah jerked back in horror. This had to be a hallucination brought on by stress and lack of sleep. Squirrels didn't do—well—whatever that was!

A cold sweat broke out across Jonah's skin as the implications sank in. The chocolate coins - had they been laced with some kind of drug? Is that why he was now hallucinating wildly?

Jonah raced to his room, and frantically threw out the remaining cookies, along with the chocolate coins and M&M's he'd been snacking on earlier. His heart pounded as he stared at the innocuous baked goods in the bin. What had he unknowingly ingested? What had his mom cooked?

Terrified and paranoid, Jonah began ransacking his room, looking for clues about who could have done this to him. Finding nothing, he rushed to the bathroom and vigorously scrubbed his hands and face. The drug could have been transmitted through touch. He had to remove any lingering residue.

Jonah stared at his wild-eyed reflection in the mirror. They were bloodshot, almost jaundiced yellow.

He needed gloves immediately. Anything his bare hands touched could be contaminated, even his textbook. He raced back to his room and tore through his dresser, finally unearthing a pair of old winter gloves. He tugged them on, his breath coming in panicked gasps. But he couldn't take any chances.

Safely gloved, Jonah hurried back to his desk. He glanced around warily before sinking down and pulling the textbook toward him. The chapter title seemed to waver mockingly before his eyes: "Reality Confluence: Navigating Perceptual Frontiers of the Modern Age."

Jonah swallowed hard. He had to pull it together and keep studying through whatever nightmare drug trip was happening to him. The exam was still coming, hallucinations or not. He just had to make it through the next few hours.

Blinking slowly against the headache pounding behind his eyes, Jonah focused on the open textbook. "Temporal variances become non-linear differentials..." he read aloud, the technical words jumbling together meaninglessly. His eyelids grew heavier, the text blurring before him. Jonah's head sank down onto the open book as exhaustion finally overwhelmed his adrenaline-fuelled panic. "Just need to rest my eyes for a minute," he mumbled. "Then I'll keep studying..."

***

Jonah blinked groggily as sunlight streamed through his window directly on his face. He sat up slowly, grimacing as the textbook pages stuck to his cheek peeled off in a crinkly mess. Disoriented, he glanced at his clock before panic jolted through his body.

11:31 AM. The exam had started an hour ago!

Jonah leapt to his feet, sending his chair crashing backward. He was still wearing the gloves; he realised numbly. Frantically shaking off the lingering sleep, he ripped the gloves off. The clothes he had been wearing were quickly stripped off, and he threw on the first items he could grab out of his dresser. He glanced desperately around the room but saw no lingering evidence of the bizarre hallucinatory night. Out the window, students milled around the sunny quad as if nothing was amiss.

Thoughts racing, Jonah sprinted across campus to the exam building. He got turned around and had to double back before finally arriving, panting and sweaty, outside the right classroom. After bracing himself for a long moment, Jonah creaked open the door.

Rows of students sat hunched over their tests, the only sound the scratching of pencils on paper. Miraculously, the professor still sat nonchalantly at his desk.

Jonah cleared his throat awkwardly. "Sorry I'm late," he croaked out. "I, uh, overslept."

A few students looked up. Some shook their heads.

The professor raised an eyebrow before beckoning Jonah forward. The professor picked up a chair from the side of the room, set it next to his chair, and motioned for Jonah to sit.

There were a few snickers.

Face burning, Jonah slid into the chair and took the test packet from the professor with trembling fingers. He stared at the questions before him in dismay.

The professor set the exam timer in front of Jonah. Thirteen minutes left on the ninety-minute timer.

Despite all his frantic studying, Jonah retained nothing. The technical jargon from last night's textbook may as well have been in another language. Jonah could barely comprehend the exam prompts, much less form coherent answers.

As the last minute ticked down, Jonah scrawled the only words that came to mind in the empty essay boxes:

"Sometimes reality is beyond understanding."