Quantum Night (28 page)

W
HEN
Kayla joined us, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, and with a towel wrapped around her head, I filled her in on what was happening, starting with the call between the president and the prime minister.

“Carroway,” she said, as if naming a bacillus. “The guy’s got to be a psychopath.”

“I imagine so,” I agreed.

“And, for that matter,” said Kayla, “Governor McCharles, too. I’d love to get those guys down on the beamline, prove the truth about them to the world.” An idea blossomed on her face. “Say, what about your microsaccades technique? Can’t you do it on them?”

“I doubt they’re going to volunteer to put on my goggles.”

“No, no, but you said you could do it with film, right?”

At some point, I’d told Kayla the same story I’d told my sister Heather about analyzing Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter. “Yeah,” I said, “but
The Silence of the Lambs
was a special case—a sustained close-up shot of the character staring directly into the camera, and I could get it at 4K resolution.” I shook my head. “It’s the same problem with the videos Menno made of me in 2001. I’d love to try my
test on that VHS tape, confirm that I was a Q1 even during the final interview—prove it was paralimbic damage not quantum psychopathy—but the footage isn’t nearly high-enough resolution, and, besides, they’re kind of side views; no way to visually check for microsaccades.”

“Hell,” said Kayla, “the president of the United States has to be one of the most-photographed people in the world. There must be existing footage of him that’s sufficiently high-resolution.”

“Sure. The Sunday-morning political shows—Stephanopoulos,
Meet the Press
—are all done in 4K now, but they keep cutting away. One, two, three, cut; one, two, three, cut. Even when he’s talking, they keep going to a reaction shot.”

“Don’t those programs have the footage they didn’t broadcast?”

I’d made a few dozen TV appearances over the years. “Not normally; those sorts of interviews are done live-to-air or live-to-tape: the director switches between cameras as the interview is being conducted, and only the image from the selected camera is actually broadcast or recorded.”

“What about press conferences, like that one you just saw?”

“They’d be good, but, again, he has to keep looking at the same thing, and I doubt he does.”

“How much footage do you need?”

“Well, if he’s not a psychopath, it should be obvious after three or four seconds—but to prove that he is? I’d really like ten uninterrupted seconds.”

“Ten seconds with no blinking?”

“Blinks are fine, but he needs to be looking at the same thing for all ten seconds, and without his cooperation, that’s going to be hard to get.”

“Maybe,” said Kayla. “Maybe not. He makes tons of public appearances. And lots of people have great cameras these days. Find the next rally he’s at and ask online for someone to get high-res video, focusing on his eyes.”

“Who would do that?”

“Tons of people. Your technique is public knowledge now—”

“No, it isn’t. I mean, the
goggles
are public knowledge, after the Becker trial, but the fact that you can also do the test with high-resolution footage? I’ve kept that under wraps.”

“Why?” asked Kayla.

Why, indeed? Besides just a concern for people’s privacy, there were two main answers. First, just as Menno had felt it better to hide that most of humanity lacked inner lives, I’d worried that if untrained individuals started trying to apply my test, the inevitable incorrect diagnoses from those who simply failed to detect microsaccades that were actually there would ruin relationships and careers, and maybe even lead to vigilante justice. As I’d told Heather, Bob Hare had voiced similar concerns in 2011 when Jon Ronson had published his pop-sci book
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry,
which described the PCL-R and suggested laypeople could make correct assessments.

And the other reason? Economics. Hare made royalties off the PCL-R, the complete kit for which sold for $439; I—and, just as importantly, my university, which held the patents—stood to make a lot more money licensing Marchuk Goggles than we did from a technique anyone could apply.

I explained this in a few words; Kayla got it instantly. “Still,” she said, “there have to be people out there who either have, or can get, the footage you need.”

The doorbell rang; Victoria had arrived. Ryan announced that today was a perfect day to watch
Minions III
for, by my guess, the thousandth time—that would keep her occupied, and a Google scavenger hunt would keep me busy while the physicists worked.

—

And, at last, I found what I wanted. I’d had no idea there were websites devoted to whether famous people had had plastic surgery, but in fact there are lots of them. Few performers publicly admitted to a facelift or boob job, and that had given rise to an online industry of minutely analyzing supposedly before-and-after photos and having commentators of varying degrees of expertise hazard opinions about what work might have been done. On a site arguing that Quinton Carroway had had an eyelift—I didn’t even know that was a thing—there was a very-high-resolution still frame of his face with a caption saying it was taken from some pirated footage checking the president’s makeup before a recent
speech. I dropped a note to the site’s proprietor, asking if the actual video was online somewhere, and, to my surprise, ten minutes later he’d replied with a BitTorrent link to a solid minute of 4K video of an extreme close-up of the president. I checked on Ryan while it downloaded to my laptop, then stuck my head into Kayla’s office.

“No, no, no,” Kayla was saying, “surely the Hamiltonian at
t-prime
is going to be at least as big as it was at
t.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but I’ve got some good footage of Carroway, and I’m about to run my analysis. Want to see?”

They rose, and we headed back to the dining-room table upon which my laptop was resting. The footage was still loading frame by frame into the software.

I’d become quite attuned to eye color while doing my research on microsaccades. Anthony Hopkins has pale blue-gray eyes; Jodie Foster’s are a more gunmetal blue—although, for some reason, they’re shown as brown on the poster for
The Silence of the Lambs,
which depicts her with a death’s-head hawkmoth covering her mouth. It’s easy to pick out the pupil against blue or green eyes; it’s a lot harder to track it against brown ones—which is what President Carroway had—and I preferred to track the actual pupil than the iris. But fiddling with the brightness and contrast settings let me get a good-enough lock, and I hit the play button. “Okay, here we go.”

One second. Two. Three. Four. “Damn.” His gaze darted to the left.

One. Two. “Shit.” He tipped his whole head down.

One. Two. Three. His hand came up to rub his left eye.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Sev—nope, turning, as someone called to him.

One. Two. “Crap.” He looked off to the right.

One. Two. Three. Four. “Oh, for the love of Pete!” Some clown had walked in front of the camera.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. “Yes!” Seven.
Eight!
“Yes!”
Nine!
“Yes, yes!”
Ten!

“So?” said Victoria anxiously. “Is he or isn’t he?”

“Just a sec,” I said, switching over to the pupillary-deviation graph. Nothing greater than one minute of arc—the kind of jiggle caused by
the body’s own pulsing blood; microsaccades were at least two arc minutes and could range up to a hundred and twenty.

“Bingo,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “There’s no doubt about it: the president of the United States is a psychopath.”

—

Starting late in our afternoon, there were reports of riots in Cologne, Rome, and Budapest, and that night, there was more rioting all across Canada, but, thankfully, no more along Kayla’s tree-lined street—although border cities such as Seattle, Detroit, and Buffalo were showing signs of similar lawlessness.

“I don’t get it,” Kayla said, sitting next to me on her living-room couch after we turned off the news. “What’s the trigger?”

I shook my head. “There isn’t one.”

“But the rioting is spreading.”

“And so are fashion styles, and Internet memes, and conspiracy theories, as always. And Boko Haram is conducting raids, like every day, and antisemitism is expanding like a poison puddle across Europe again. And idealistic kids are being radicalized, like every other day. And people are joining cults and reading their horoscopes, like every other damn day. Wars are raging in the Middle East and Africa, as usual; climate change is being ignored, evolution denied, sexism and racism perpetuated, all as per usual. Sure, most memes that take hold are reasonably benign, but malignant ones can spread just as easily, whether you call them the KKK or National Socialism or the Troubles in Northern Ireland or a decade or more of missing and murdered Native women in Canada.”

“But something must have caused them to spread.”

“Sure, but it was doubtless something small. Losing a hockey game in Winnipeg; other picayune catalysts elsewhere. You don’t need a complex explanation—some particle-physics or neuroscience mumbo jumbo—for something that’s happened over and over and over again throughout history.” I glanced down at the spot where her blouse was concealing her tattoo. “Butterflies don’t just symbolize metamorphosis; they symbolize small changes having big effects.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

She leaned in and kissed me, then went off to put Ryan to bed. When we retired for the evening, Kayla fell asleep before I did, and I lay in the dark, listening to the susurration of her breath, waves lapping a beach.

It should have come as no particular surprise, I supposed, that President Carroway was a psychopath. Such people were ideally suited to politics, each one a heaping plateful of traits selected from a smorgasbord that included pathological lying, charisma, glibness, skillful manipulation, and promiscuity—literally and figuratively getting into bed with whoever served the needs of the moment. Working my way through the presidents I knew anything about, I suspected several others had also been psychopaths, including some Democrats (surely Lyndon Johnson and almost as certainly Bill Clinton) and some Republicans (doubtless Richard Nixon and maybe George W. Bush, although I’d go even money that Dubya was a p-zed in the thrall of Dick Cheney).

But holding suspicions and actually knowing were two different things. And as I lay there, a sickle moon hanging low out the window, I wondered what the Leader of the Free World was going to do next.

I
did not have to wait long to find out. The next morning, President Carroway’s latest speech was all over the media. Kayla and I, and Ryan, sensing the solemnity of what was going on even if she didn’t understand it, watched it, the three of us sitting slack-jawed in front of the living-room TV. Carroway began by striding to the podium and uttering four words that would doubtless become a meme in their own right:
“My fellow North Americans . . .”

My heart thundered. The president went on in the adamantine baritone I’d previously heard admonishing those passing through airports:
“On my order, beginning at 9:00
A.M.
Eastern time, US Customs and Border Protection agents closed the border between the United States and Canada, locking down all vehicular crossings and all US Customs stations at Canadian airports. At the same time, United States Air Force jets scrambled from McChord Air Force Base in Washington State, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland; these jets have now secured Canadian airspace.”

“My God . . .” Kayla said softly.

Carroway’s dark eyes narrowed slightly.
“At 9:17
A.M.
, our
ambassador to Canada, Schuyler Grayson, accompanied by a United States Marine Corps honor guard, presented himself at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, the home of the Canadian prime minister, to urge Prime Minister Naheed Nenshi to finally accept our aid in quelling the ongoing rioting that has begun to spill over the border into this country.”

I wasn’t sure which of us initiated it, but Kayla’s left hand and my right found each other.

“Prime Minister Nenshi once again refused our assistance in containing the situation. This has left us with no choice; America’s interests must be protected throughout the world. And so, on my orders, US troops are now moving into Ottawa, into all provincial capitals, and into other Canadian cities with populations in excess of one million; government buildings and essential infrastructure in each will be secured by nightfall. The Governor General of Canada, who serves as Commander in Chief of the Canadian Forces, has seen the wisdom of asking her troops to stand down, and we expect a smooth transition.”

Gimlet eyes bored into the camera, a cold, reptilian glare:
“God bless the United States—including our northern provinces and territories, now fully under American protection.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said softly. “We’ve been annexed.”

—

And then things got worse.

In a brave attempt at thinking life would go on pretty much as normal, Ryan had relented and gone back to day camp, and Kayla had returned to the Light Source. I’d intended to work on the third edition of
Utilitarian Ethics of Everyday Life,
which I’d been putting off far too long, but I found myself transfixed by what was happening. Rarely, if ever, was Canada the lead “International News” story on any site, and I hadn’t realized until just now how comforting that actually was. But suddenly everyone—the BBC, NHK, Al-Jazeera, both the American and Australian ABC, and more—was talking about the True North, not so strong and something less than free.

Actually, as the day wore on, the coverage shifted from what was happening
in
Canada to how
others
were reacting to it: outrage from
London, which still took a paternal interest in its erstwhile colony; Pope Francis decrying this return to imperialism; a gathering of Iraqi imams denouncing what they called the transparent Islamophobia behind this flagrant violation of international norms; some Americans claiming Carroway had manufactured “the Canadian crisis” to distract from the culling of illegals within the United States; a government official in Mexico fretting that his country was bound to be taken next.

By three in the afternoon—which, CTV Saskatoon informed me, was 6:00
A.M.
in Moscow—it had become clear that the Russians, who’d as yet made no public announcement, were reacting very negatively. Three
Akula
-class nuclear submarines had been tracked moving boldly into Canadian Arctic waters. According to the pundits, the Kremlin was viewing Carroway’s incursion as if it were the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse: with Canada suddenly a
de facto
part of the United States, America was now head-butting the Siberian frontier. As a woman from Harvard observed, except for Alaska and the Chukotka Peninsula, which had been locked in a staring contest across the Bering Strait since the end of the last ice age, the two superpowers had been kept safely apart by the vast granite hulk of Canada—until now.

Kayla got home from work at 7:10
P.M.
; she’d picked up Ryan on the way here. “Have you been following the news?” I asked, gathering them in a hug.

“Oh, yes,” Kayla said.

I’d muted the sound on the living-room monitor when I’d heard the front door opening, but Vladimir Putin was on the screen. At the best of times, he had a dour countenance. Today he looked positively livid although, given that his government had annexed Crimea—home to many a Marchuk—back in 2014, he apparently only waxed apoplectic when someone else mounted an invasion.

“He’s got to be a psychopath, too, you know,” said Kayla, tilting her head at the screen.

It seemed almost superfluous to check, but as Kayla took Ryan upstairs to get cleaned up, I dropped a note to my online benefactor from yesterday, who was as accommodating and expeditious as before. He said there was no doubt among those who tracked such things that
the Russian president had had a raft of cosmetic operations, including a nose job, cheek fillers, and at least one facelift, not to mention an ongoing regimen of Botox injections; I was soon downloading high-resolution footage to my laptop that purported to show telltale signs of these procedures.

The video, which seemed to be of Putin enduring a long question from some journalist who doubtless shortly thereafter had received a one-way ticket to the Gulag, contained a solid twelve seconds of the president’s full-on disdainful stare. Just as Kayla had opined, my software confirmed that Vladimir Putin was indeed a psychopath. I shared this news as she came back downstairs; Ryan had stayed up in her room.

Kayla nodded. “Which means,” she said, a quaver in her voice, “he’s not likely to back down.”

“Neither is Carroway,” I said. “It’s like how it was with your brother Travis—extreme sports, right? The rush of adrenaline? You think
snowboarding
is a kick, imagine nuclear brinksmanship with trillions of dollars’ worth of weapons at your command.” I shook my head. “Those two pricks are
loving
this.”

We watched the muted images for a time—intercuts between Carroway and Putin, back and forth, thrust and parry. “Somebody has to stop them,” Kayla said at last.

“Yes,” I replied softly—so softly that she asked me to repeat myself. “Yes,” I said again, boosting my outer voice to match my inner one, “somebody does.”