Quantum Night (14 page)

I
was still in a daze from Menno’s revelations when the taxi dropped me at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The design was supposed to suggest dove’s wings surrounding a glass spire that rose a hundred meters into the sky, but to me it looked like God had crammed a Bundt cake down around a traffic cone.

I was running late, and Kayla had already checked out of her room at the nearby Inn at The Forks; she’d texted me to say she’d headed on in to the reception. I hustled over to the entrance, giving my ritual nod to the statue of Mahatma Gandhi on the way.

The reception was being held in the Garden of Contemplation, which was in the vast lobby adjacent to the reflecting pool. It was bordered by re-creations of the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway, commemorating the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Most of the men were in suits and ties, but I was dressed more casually; Kayla and I planned to make it all the way to Saskatoon tonight, and I wanted to be comfortable for the drive.

I looked around but didn’t see any sign of Kayla. But I did see Nick Smith, a partner in an accounting firm that was helping to sponsor the lecture series. He had a golfer’s tan that was close to a sunburn and
was chatting with someone I didn’t know: a handsome black man of about thirty-five. As I drifted by, the man was saying, “I don’t even know how to put this, but—”

Nick caught sight of me, and he leaned out of the conversation long enough to pull me in. “Oh, Jim, let me introduce you to someone. Jim Marchuk, this is Darius Clark. Jim’s on the board here.” Darius was standing in a military at-ease posture, with hands clasped behind his back. As Nick turned back to face him, he adopted the same pose.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Darius is giving a lecture here tomorrow,” Nick said.

“Well, not exactly,” Darius said. He had a bit of a Southern drawl. “I’m accompanying my partner. She’s the one giving the talk.”

“Ah,” I said.

“But I was just saying to Mr. Smith here—”

“Please, call me Nick.”

Darius smiled at that. “I was just saying to Nick, I’m visiting from Washington—DC, that is. Latisha and I live there.”

“I love that city,” I said.

“No,” said Darius affably, “you love the Mall and maybe a few streets on either side. The city itself is pretty crappy.”

“Oh.”

“I only moved there to be with Latisha. She works for the DoJ, the Department of Justice. Anyway, my point is this. Y’all are having this wonderful reception for us here, and earlier today, we went to lunch at the offices of Nick’s firm.”

“Nice,” I said.

“It was. And I don’t just mean the food. I never had bison before, but . . .”

Darius trailed off, and I smiled encouragingly. “Yes?”

He lifted his shoulders. “Now I know what it feels like to be white.”

“Pardon?” I said. And, to my surprise, Nick chimed in with, “Say what?”

“If you’re black, you can’t walk into a law office, or a government office, or anything like that in DC without people looking at you like you’re there to rob the place. You have no idea what it’s like with people
always expecting the worst from you.” He spread his arms. “But here I was welcomed, made to feel right at home. Nobody looked alarmed or scared when I came in. Everybody was like, ‘Good afternoon, sir. May I take your coat?’”

“Welcome to friendly Manitoba,” Nick said.

It was an empty response; “Friendly Manitoba” was the slogan on our license plates. Most Indigenous Canadians would tell a very different story about visiting highfalutin places here.

“I guess,” said Darius.

Nick was protracting his vowels now. “Really,” he said. “It’s totally normal here.”

Darius narrowed his eyes. “Are you making fun of me?”

Just then, a woman who must have been Latisha joined us; she slipped an arm around Darius’s waist, and I took the opportunity to maneuver Nick toward the bar.

“What’s wrong with him?” Nick asked, glancing back at Darius.

“You were imitating him,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“You’re saying ‘pardon’ now, but you said ‘say what’ back there.”

“Did I?”

“And you were totally copying his posture and accent.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Why would I—”

“Everybody does it to one degree or another. ‘Unconscious mimicry,’ it’s called.

“Oh,” Nick said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

I looked at him, my heart pounding, as I wondered if that were literally true.

Across the lobby, I spotted Kayla emerging from the ladies’ room. I told Nick I’d catch him later and hurried over to her, feeling apprehensive as I maneuvered around people. Normally I was fine in crowds, but
I found myself wondering how many Nicks—how many p-zeds—were flocking about me.

—

The route we’d planned from Winnipeg to Saskatoon was pig-simple: a straight line 570 kilometers due west on the Trans-Canada to Regina, then north for 260 kilometers on Saskatchewan Highway 11 up to Saskatoon—the perfect sort of trip to be executed without much conscious thought. Despite our late start, we were determined to make the first, longer leg without a stop, then, after a quick bite, pressing on the rest of the way.

We put the radio on briefly to get a traffic report, but first caught the tail end of a newscast:
“The bodies of six more dead migrant workers have been found today in Texas. State governor Dylan McCharles denies any correlation between this and the passing of the McCharles Act . . .”

Later, after we’d gotten the word to avoid Confusion Corner—which pretty much went without saying here in The Peg—Kayla turned off the radio, and I said, “I went to see Menno Warkentin this afternoon.”

“Oh, wow!” she replied. “How’s he doing?”

“Fine, I guess. But he knew all about my lost time, and—”

And I faltered. I’d intended to immediately tell Kayla about the big psychological discovery, about how the whole world was filled with p-zeds, but looking at her profile, outlined by the light of the setting sun, that didn’t seem the most important thing. No, what I wanted—what I needed—was for this brilliant, beautiful woman to understand what had happened all those years ago; her wariness at lunch made perfect sense in retrospect, but I couldn’t stand having her continuing to be worried. “He explained it all to me,” I said. “About those horrible things I did. He’d tried something back in June 2001, an experimental technique, and it damaged my limbic system.”

She briefly faced me. “My God, really?”

“Yes. Fortunately, the damage was along two very narrow paths. You know Phineas Gage?”

“The guy who got a metal rod blown through his head?”

“Exactly. Left a nine-centimeter-diameter hole, but he survived for twelve years. It changed him, though—permanently in his case; made him pretty much psychopathic. Well, what Menno did to me was similar to what happened to Phineas Gage—um, but at a narrower gauge, so to speak; the damage was microns wide instead of centimeters. My brain rerouted around it.”

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I wasn’t sure at first, but it’s been obvious over these last couple of days that you’re back to your old self,” she said. “Hell, I wouldn’t be alone with you here in the middle of nowhere if I didn’t think you were.”

“Thanks.”

“And, y’know, I’ve read your blog; I’ve read your books. There’s no way a psychopath could have written them.”

“Hitler was fond of animals and children.”

“You’re not helping your case,” she said, but I could hear the mirth in her voice.

“Sorry.”

“But I don’t understand. Why was Menno experimenting on you like that?”

“Well, see, a couple of months before you’d met me, he’d done something that caused me to lose my inner voice . . .”

—

One hundred kilometers . . .

—

“And Menno believes
most
of the human race has no inner monologue?” asked Kayla.

“That’s right. Something like sixty percent, he thinks.”

“Hmmm. That’s roughly the same percentage Victoria and I found are in the Q1 state.”

“I wonder if it’s the
same
sixty percent,” I said. “If those in the Q1 state, with one electron in superposition, all have just the minimum level of mental functioning, well, their lights could indeed be on with nobody being home.”

“Philosopher’s zombies,” said Kayla, still getting used to the notion.

“Right. Who the hell knows what IQ tests really measure, but a Q1 might do just fine on them; pattern recognition and spatial translations could be entirely autonomic, after all.”

“True.”

“And you’ve already shown that Q2s are psychopaths—who surely have an inner voice, an inner life, but literally think only about themselves; they have no empathy.”

“So you were a Q2 when you . . . when you did those things?”

“I—no, no, I couldn’t be. As I said, psychopaths clearly
do
have inner voices; they’re plotting and scheming all the time. But I’ve been consulting with a memory expert at UW. He thinks the reason I can’t remember that entire period—not just the part where I was behaving normally but also the part where I was behaving badly—was because I was a p-zed throughout; no inner voice, so no verbal indexing of the memories.”

“So there are two kinds of psychopaths?”

“Maybe,” I said. “One group would be quantum psychopaths—Q2s—with two of the three microtubular electrons in superposition. The other group would be those with paralimbic damage. Oh, sure, there could be some overlap: some Q2s might happen to have paralimbic damage, but so might some Q1s and Q3s. Perhaps the psychological community has been conflating two separate things: Q2s, who are psychopathic at the quantum level, and hapless SOBs who have brain damage that leads them to doing terrible things.”

“I bet that’s true,” said Kayla. “You know, you, me, Bob Hare, we’ve all run into that problem. Remember Hare’s
Snakes in Suits,
about psychopaths in the workplace? Try to tell the average Joe that psychopaths are everywhere and he balks, because to him the term exclusively means crazed killers like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The average guy sees a difference not just in degree but in kind between Paul Bernardo and a surgeon who can dispassionately open up somebody’s chest. And he doesn’t see the connection between Jeffrey Dahmer and an avaricious bank president. And yet we keep telling him that they’re the same thing. Well, maybe in this
instance, the laypeople are right. Maybe we actually
are
talking about two distinct phenomena.” I shrugged a little. “It doesn’t help that psychopathy—of either kind, I suppose—can manifest itself in so many different ways, thanks to differing genetics, upbringings, socioeconomic conditions, childhood abuse or lack thereof, and so on. There are twenty traits on the Hare Checklist, right? Each of which can be absent, weakly present, or strongly present, and you need a score of thirty or above to be diagnosed a psychopath. That means there must be thousands of different flavors of psychopathy.”

“Fourteen million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and fifteen.”

I looked at her.

“Math’s my thing,” she said, flashing a radiant smile.

—

Two hundred kilometers . . .

—

“Okay, but if Q1s are p-zeds, and Q2s are psychopaths,” I said, “what does quantum-superposition state three correspond to?”

“Us?” said Kayla, throwing out an idea.

“What do you mean by ‘us’?”

“A person firing on all cylinders: a normal, fully conscious human being with the ability to reflect upon yourself, to think about whether what you’re doing is right or not. In other words a person with—”

“A conscience,” I said.

“Precisely. A conscience.”

Could it be that simple, I wondered? An additive effect? Stage one, with one of three electrons in superposition: basic functioning, but no awareness.

Stage two, with two of three electrons in superposition: the same basic functioning as before, but with self-awareness added on.

And stage three, with all three electrons in superposition: everything from stage one and everything from stage two, plus an extra layer—a degree of thoughtful introspection, a conscience—added on top.

“Consciousness with conscience . . .” I said.

I saw Kayla’s profile, illuminated now only by the dashboard lights, nod. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Oh! And it could be abbreviated C-W-C, right?”

In the dim light, I pantomimed writing the three letters in the air. “Conscious with conscience. I like that there’s a W in the middle, because there literally
is
a double you: two yous, the basic consciousness, and then a looking back on that consciousness, a self-reflection.”

“C-W-C,” she said. “Bit of a mouthful.”

I was reminded of Douglas Adams’s quip about WWW being the only abbreviation that had three times as many syllables as the thing it stood for. Still: “Only if you spell it out. If you say the initials as a word, C-W-C spells ‘quick.’ You know, like in bright or mentally agile: a quick mind, a quick wit . . .”