Quantum Night (6 page)

“Well, there were more than a few assigned books I never got around to reading during my undergraduate days.”

“Yeah, but I did an essay on this book. I found the WordPerfect file for it still on my hard drive.”

“Could you, y’know, have bought the essay? From one of those services?”

I raised my hand palm out to forestall any more of this. “Sure, sure, you can explain away any one of these examples. But
all
of them? Six
months with no new memories laid down and yet me apparently functioning normally? There’s no way to explain that.”

“All right,” said Menno. “But, you know, Jim, if the barrier to your remembering that period is psychological rather than physical—well . . .”

“What?”

“If your subconscious is repressing something, maybe you’ll want to just accept that. You’re fine now, after all, aren’t you?”

“I think so.”

“The missing memories aren’t affecting your work or your personal life?”

“Not until that D.A. tore me to shreds.”

“So, just keep in mind that the cure might be worse than the disease.” Pax was still at Menno’s feet, but her eyes were now closed. “Sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.”

Pax did look at peace. But I shook my head as I rose. “No,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

A
S
I looked out my living-room window at the Red River, I thought perhaps I’d been unfair back at the Atlanta airport. If Fox News was a thorn in the side of every Democrat unlucky enough to hold public office in the United States, it was perhaps fair to say that the CBC was equally vexatious to any hapless Conservative trying to do his or her job in this country. The irony was that the CBC was a public broadcaster owned and operated, albeit at arm’s length, by the federal government. There is little if anything Barack Obama could have done to deflect attacks from Fox News, but year after year of Conservative government in Ottawa had whittled the CBC down to a fraction of what it had once been, and even after Harper was finally given the heave-ho, tough economic times kept the CBC’s funding from getting fully reinstated.

I had CBC Radio One on. The female announcer intoned:
“Although their attempt to blow up the Statue of Liberty was thwarted over the weekend, it’s been revealed that the two would-be bombers, both Libyan nationals, entered the United States from Canada, crossing over from Ontario into Minnesota near Lake of the Woods eleven days ago. This is the second time this year that terrorists from Libya have entered
the US via Canada. President Carroway was clearly frustrated at his press briefing this morning.”

The announcer’s voice was replaced by a clip of the president:
“I’ve expressed my deep concern over this issue to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Perhaps if the killers were flowing in the other direction, he’d take it more seriously.”

As the newsreader was moving on to the next story, my iPhone played the
Jeopardy!
theme music, meaning a call was being forwarded from my office line, the one published on the university’s website. The screen showed “KD Huron” and a number with a 639 area code, one I didn’t recognize. I turned off the radio and swiped the answer bar. “Hello?”

An odd silence for a moment, then a hesitant female voice: “Hi, Jim. I was in town, so I thought I’d look you up.”

“Who is this?”

“Kayla.” A beat. “Kayla Huron.”

The name didn’t mean anything. “Yes?”

Her tone was suddenly frosty. “Sorry. I thought you might be happy to hear from me.”

It’s hard to talk and google on your phone at the same time, but fortunately my laptop was up and running on my living-room desk. I cradled the phone between my cheek and shoulder and typed her name into the computer. “Yes,” I said, “of course I’m glad to hear from you . . . Kayla. How have you been?”

The first link was to her Wikipedia entry. I clicked it, and the article came up with a photo that was surprisingly good by Wikipedia standards, showing a pretty white woman in her mid thirties.

“Well,” said Kayla, “it’s been a lot of years, Jim. Where to start? I mean, I’m fine, but . . .”

“Yeah,” I said, still stalling. “A lot of years.” The first line of the entry said she “explores consciousness at the Canadian Light Source”—which sounded like some flaky new-age institution.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’m here for a symposium at UW.” The University of Winnipeg was the other university in town. “And, well, I saw your name in the paper today, and figured, what the heck, I’d see if you might like to have coffee, you know, to catch up . . .”

I scrolled down the Wikipedia entry: “. . . earned her MS (2005) and PhD (2010) from the University of Arizona following undergraduate work at the University of Manitoba (1999–2003) . . .”

“Yes!” I said, much too loudly. We’d been contemporaries here at U of M—including during my lost six months. “Absolutely!”

“Okay. When would be good for you?”

I wanted to say, “Right now!” But instead I simply offered, “My afternoon is open.”

“About one? Suggest a place; I’ve got a rental car.”

I did, we said goodbye, and I put the phone down on my wooden desk, my hand shaking.

I took a deep breath. I had several hours to kill before I needed to head out to meet Kayla, and, well, if my memory loss was indeed associated with the stabbing, then starting by researching that event seemed the logical first step.

There were normally numerous hoops to jump through to access patient medical records—even your own—but fortunately I knew one of the staff psychologists at the hospital I’d been treated at in Calgary; she and I had served together on the board of the Canadian Psychological Association. It was noon in Winnipeg, but that was only 11:00
A.M.
in Calgary, so it seemed like a good time to try my call. I tapped my way through the menu tree to get the person I wanted. “Cassandra Cheung,” said the lush voice in my ear.

“Sandy, it’s Jim Marchuk.”

Genuine warmth: “Jim! What can I do for you?”

“I’m hoping you can cut through some red tape. I need a copy of my own medical records.”

“Your own? Yeah, sure, I guess that’s no problem. You were treated here?”

“Yeah. I came in on New Year’s Eve 2000—well, after midnight, so it was actually January first, 2001.”

“That’s a long time ago,” she said, and I could hear her typing away.

“Nineteen years.”

“Hmmm. You sure about that date?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Were you maybe an outpatient? Not all records from that far back are in our central system.”

“No, no. It was emergency surgery.”

“My God, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you brought in via ambulance?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not finding anything. Do you remember the name of the surgeon?”

“Butcher,” I said.

“Ha,” replied Sandy. “That’s funny.”

“That’s what I thought!”

“But there’s no Dr. Butcher in the system. Are you sure it was this hospital? Could it have been Foothills instead?”

I wasn’t sure of much at this point. “I . . . I guess. Um, can you try my last name with a typo? People sometimes put a
C
in before the
K:
M-A-R-C-H-U-C-K.”

“Ah! Okay—yup, here it is, but . . .
huh.”

“What?”

“Well, the date wasn’t January first—no one gets to have elective surgery on New Year’s Day: there’s too much likelihood that the operating rooms will be needed for emergencies, and all the surgeons who can be are off skiing.”

“Elective surgery?”

“That’s right. On Monday, February nineteenth, 2001, you had an infiltrating ductal carcinoma removed.”

“A what?”

“It’s a breast cancer.”

“I’m a man.”

“Men can get breast cancer, too. It’s not that common, because you guys have so little breast tissue, but it happens. Says here they cut it out under a local anesthetic.”

“No, no; that’s got to be somebody else—somebody with a similar
name. Besides, I was a student at the University of Manitoba then; I wouldn’t have been in Calgary.”

“Well, what
do
you think you were here for in January?”

“I was attacked with a knife.”

“Jesus, really? What’d you do back then? Tell someone you’d voted Liberal?”

“Something like that.”

“There’s no record of your being treated here for anything of that nature.”

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Um, okay. Thanks, Sandy.”

“Jim, what’s this—”

“I gotta go. Talk to you later.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.”

I sagged back into my chair, my breath coming in short, rapid gasps.

“All right,” I said, looking out at the sea of faces. “Is morality subjective or objective? Anyone?”

“Subjective,” called out Boris, without bothering to raise his hand first.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it varies from person to person.”

“And,” called out Nina, “from culture to culture.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Some people are pro-choice; others are pro-life. Some believe you should always lend a helping hand; others think you make people weak by keeping them from having to struggle for themselves. Right?”

Nods.

“But Sam Harris—who knows who he is?”

“A famous atheist,” said Kyle.

“Yes, true; his best-known book is
The End of Faith.
But he also wrote one called
The Moral Landscape,
in which he argues that if you define moral acts as those that promote the flourishing of conscious beings, then there
is
such a thing as objective morality. Consider this: imagine a world in which every single person
is suffering as much as possible; everyone is in as much physical and emotional pain as the human body and mind are capable of experiencing—something like being in hell or, I dunno, Pittsburgh.”

Laughter.

“Now, says Harris, what if we could dial it down a notch? What if we could take the physical pain from a ten out of ten to a nine out of ten, even for one individual? Wouldn’t that be objectively the right thing to do? Is there any conceivable counterargument, any possible moral view, in which
not
decreasing the pain would be the right thing to do? Yes, yes, we can contrive scenarios in which it’s a zero-sum game—I turn down your pain, but somebody else’s pain therefore has to go up. But that’s not the situation Harris proposed. He said every person is suffering the maximum amount possible; there’s no way lessening one person’s pain could increase somebody else’s. So, given those circumstances, isn’t turning down even one person’s pain clearly
objectively
the moral thing to do? And turning down two people’s pain would be even better, right? And if you could turn down everyone’s pain, even a little bit, that would be a moral imperative, no?”

Boris was unconvinced. “Yeah, but who’s to say what the maximum suffering a human can endure is?”

“Have you seen
The Phantom Menace?
”

Some of the students laughed again, but Boris just frowned. “If it can be a little less, it can be a little more.”

“Not if experiencing pain involves neurons,” I replied. “If every pain-registering neuron is firing simultaneously, you’re maxed out. A human brain
is
a finite object.”

“Some more finite than others,” said Nina, looking pointedly at Boris.

“Anyway,” I said, “we’ll talk more about moral relativism later. What I really want to get at today is utilitarianism—and utilitarianism is striving for the exact opposite of Sam Harris’s thought-experiment hell. Utilitarianism is a terrible name. It sounds so cold and calculating. But really, it’s a warm, even
loving, philosophy. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were its first major proponents, and they said, simply, that all action should be geared toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. The happier people are, the better. The more people who are happy, the better.”

I looked at Boris, who was frowning again. “Comrade,” I said, “you look unhappy.”

Nina and a few others laughed.

“It just all seems so self-serving,” Boris said.

“Ah, but it
isn’t,
”
I replied. “Bentham and Mill are both clear on that point. Under utilitarianism, you are to be neutral when weighing your own happiness against somebody else’s. True, it’s not a self-sacrificing philosophy—you don’t have to give up your own happiness for the sake of another person’s. But if doing something will cause your happiness to be diminished a little and someone else’s happiness to be increased a lot, there’s no question: you
have
to do it. You can’t put your needs in front of those of other people.”

“Let me know how that works out for you,” Boris said.

W
HEN
I’d first gone away to university, I’d left lots of stuff at my parents’ house in Calgary; Heather had done the same. But when our dad died, Calgary housing prices had been going through the roof, and Mom wished to downsize. I’d gone back and disposed of things I didn’t want and moved the things I did to Winnipeg in a U-Haul. And, as with most people’s collections of junk they thought was worth saving, I hadn’t looked at it since although I periodically added more boxes to the midden—doing my part to give future archeology grad students something to work on.

I drove to the storage unit I rented and began to rummage around. Most of my crap was in identical corrugated-cardboard boxes I’d bought from a moving-supply company, but some of it was in bankers’ boxes, and some old clothing—doubtless out of style although I’d be the last person to be able to actually confirm that—was in bright-orange garbage bags. I’d lived in Winnipeg during my dark time, but I figured that there
should have been get-well cards from when I’d been in hospital in Calgary, and copies of police reports related to the stabbing. But I couldn’t find anything like that.

The two heaviest known substances are neutronium and cartons of books. I shifted several boxes around, getting more of an upper-body workout than I was used to. Eventually, I came across one labeled “Textbks 2000-01” in black Magic Marker. I placed it on the storage unit’s floor and used a box cutter to slit open the strapping tape.

Inside were the usual you-could-kill-a-man-with-them texts with titles such as
Social Psychology, Statistics for the Humanities,
and
Freud and Jung in Perspective,
but there were also a few science-fiction paperbacks. Ah, that half-year English elective I’d taken. There were copies of
Frankenstein
and
The War of the Worlds
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
which were titles I recognized, at least, although didn’t recall having read, and others I didn’t know at all. I picked up one with a beautiful cover painting of a steamboat in a green lagoon:
Darwinia
by Robert Charles Wilson. As had been my habit in those pre-ebook days, I’d used the sales receipt as a bookmark. I opened the novel to the indicated page, to see if the prose sparked any memories, but—

The receipt was from the McNally Robinson at Polo Park. That branch didn’t exist anymore, but the date—

The date was 31-12-00, one of the few in that format that could be unambiguously parsed: thirty-one had to be a day, and double-zero could only be a year, which meant this book had been purchased New Year’s Eve 2000.

Here. In Winnipeg.

And the time stamp was 17:43, which must have been just before closing on a holiday evening; even the nerdiest of nerds didn’t ring in the new year in a bookstore.

Of course, someone else might have picked up the novel for me, but—

But, no, the credit-card number was printed on the bottom of the receipt, with Xs substituting for all but the final four digits, and those I recognized; I’d had that number for many years. I must have gone in to purchase the book, planning to get a jump on my class reading over the remaining week of the Christmas break.

Yes, technically, one could be in Winnipeg at 5:43
P.M.
and still fly to Calgary in time to shout “Happy New Year!” six hours later—or, actually, seven, if you take into account the time-zone change. But there’s no way I would have gone home for New Year’s Eve but not Christmas, even if my parents and sister were away. What the hell was going on?

I continued to rummage around and found a Dilbert wall calendar from 2000. I’d hoped there’d be one for 2001, as well, but there wasn’t. I flipped to the last page, the pointy-haired boss staring out at me, and looked at the days between Christmas—which had been on a Monday that year—and New Year’s Eve. There were four appointments in my handwriting spread across those six days. On Boxing Day, I’d noted “Miles 6ish.” I hadn’t thought about Miles Olsen for years; he’d been in one of my classes, and we used to get together occasionally for a beer. On the thirtieth I’d written, “Pay dorm fees.” And on the twenty-ninth and thirty-first, I’d written simply “Warkentin.” There were no classes then, so these must have been related to that research project I’d volunteered for.

I scanned further up the calendar; Warkentin’s name was written in three more times in the week before Christmas. The ink was black for the earlier appointments, blue for the later ones. I hadn’t added them all at the same time, which meant the later appointments had been made after the earlier ones; he’d asked me back for some reason—and on New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake . . .

I’d told Menno yesterday that I’d been in Calgary on New Year’s Eve 2000. Sure, it’s possible he’d forgotten that I was with him on that long-ago date, but he hadn’t mentioned a thing.

No, no, that’s not quite right. He’d faced me, his blind eyes behind dark lenses, and he’d said, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” I’d thought that was odd; he was a psychologist, after all—he should have been fascinated by the challenge of recovering my missing memories.

I’d used Gmail since the days when you needed an invitation to get an account, but those archives only went back to 2004. I’d had a student address here at U of M in 2001, and so I’d called up the IT department on the off chance that they kept email archives going back that far; they didn’t. But I used to have a habit of printing out emails I wanted to
keep—and, to my delight, I found a file folder containing a bunch of them in the same box that had yielded the calendar: a sheaf about half an inch thick of dot-matrix printouts, one email per sheet, conveniently stacked in send-date order. I worked my way through them: class assignments, a few from my sister, but nothing that stirred any memories.

I reached the end of February and flipped the page; the next email was from March second, and—my goodness!—it was from Kayla Huron to me. The subject line was “Re: Friday,” but whatever my original message had been was lost to history; there were no quoted lines at the bottom of what she had written, which was, “Yeah, me, too. And I’d love to! You like Crash Test Dummies? They’re playing over at UW next week. Can you pick up tickets?” That was all the email said, except for the number 2.9 at the bottom.

I kept reading messages; there were twenty or so from Kayla mixed in with other things. The other things were all prosaic—I’d clearly only printed out emails that had to-do items for me mentioned in them—and, indeed, the Kayla ones all had action items, too, but they also had something else: flirtation, giving way after a couple of weeks to actual smut. Apparently, we’d been
way
more than just classmates.

And all her messages to me ended with the same number: 2.9. Except the last one, that is—and the action item was clear: “Pick up your stuff, asshole.”

Near as I could figure, Kayla and I had been hot-and-heavy for three-and-a-half months, until, apparently, it had all blown up. And, in about half an hour, I’d see her for the first time in nineteen years.