The alarm clock on his bedside table synced to the atomic clock in Switzerland, which was comforting to him. Jimmy liked absolutes—things that could be proved, that could not be denied on the basis of emotion or intuition. The master clock keeping time in Switzerland was accurate to within one second per thirty million—that was an incontrovertible truth. Unlike, say—Jimmy thought as he knocked gently on the bathroom door, as he had promised to do—his feelings about the current guest of the ranch. Last night his dreams had featured Deneen Burgess doing any number of illogical and confounding things. Oh, he understood the erotic dreams; these were a natural consequence of a healthy sex drive and visual and olfactory stimuli (because Deneen smelled quite pleasant, like a blend of flowers and spices and lemons). But there had a been a dream in which she had been sitting primly on the tailgate of his truck, wearing a sparkling evening gown and reading aloud from his Advanced Physics textbook, a tome he’d carried around all senior year until he’d memorized every formula and corollary.
