Quantum Night (5 page)

I couldn’t answer the first question in a reassuring way, so I skipped to the second. “Atlanta.”

Heather knew me too well. “Something
is
wrong. What?”

“Do you know what Grandpa Kulyk did in World War II?”

Silence for a moment. Off in the distance—here or there, I wasn’t sure which—a siren was wailing. “What the hell, Jim.”

“Sorry?” A question, not an apology.

“What the hell,” she said again.

“Excuse me?”

“Jim, if this is some kind of joke . . .”

“I’m not joking.”

“You know full well what he did in the war, at that camp.”

“Well, I know
now,”
I said. “I found out today. I’m here giving expert testimony in that trial I told you about. The D.A. blindsided me with the news.”

“It’s not
news,
for Christ’s sake,” said Heather. “It came out ages ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Are you nuts? We all knew about it.”

My head was swimming. “I don’t remember that.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Jim, look, I’ve got a client meeting in—well, damn, I should be doing it now. I don’t know what to say, but get some help, okay?”

I
’D
have been happy to go home after the morning’s evisceration, but when the judge had called the recess, Miss Dickerson indicated she wasn’t through with me. After failing to find a vegan entrée in the courthouse cafeteria, I’d settled for a packaged salad and a cup of black coffee.

The fireworks began again as soon as court resumed. “Objection!” said Juan, rising in response to Dickerson asking me once more about my personal history. “This fishing expedition has no bearing on the sentencing of Devin Becker.”

Dickerson spread her arms as she turned toward the brooding judge. “Your Honor, this is the first time Mr. Marchuk’s technique has been introduced in a court of law. With the court’s permission, it seems only appropriate to delve into any biases or prejudices—even ones that he himself might not be aware of—that might have tainted his results.”

“Very well; objection overruled—but don’t wander too far afield.”

“Of course not, Your Honor.” She turned back to me. “Mr. Marchuk, sir, what’s your stance on capital punishment?” I saw Juan clenching his wide jaw.

“I’m against it.”

Dickerson nodded, as if this was only to be expected. “Earlier you
told us you were Canadian, and our friends to the north don’t have capital punishment. Is your objection simply something that goes with your citizenship, like a fondness for hockey and maple syrup?”

“I object to capital punishment on a philosophical basis.”

“Ah, yes. When Mr. Sanchez was introducing you, he made mention of the fact that in addition to your three degrees in psychology you also have a master’s degree in philosophy, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, given this sentencing trial is precisely about whether Mr. Becker will receive the death penalty, perhaps you could briefly enlighten us as to your philosophical objections to it?”

I took a deep breath. I’d often debated the issue in classrooms, but the palpable disapproval of the jurors was throwing me off my game; the D.A. hadn’t allowed anyone who was morally opposed to capital punishment to be impanelled for this case. “They aren’t just my objections,” I said. “I’m a utilitarian philosopher. Utilitarians believe the greatest good is maximizing happiness for the greatest number. And one of utilitarianism’s founders, Jeremy Bentham, back in 1775, articulated several compelling arguments against the death penalty, arguments that still make sense.”

I let my butterflies settle for a moment, then: “First, he said—and I agree—that it’s unprofitable. That is, it costs more to society to execute people than it does to keep them alive. That was true in Bentham’s day, and is even more true today: the extended legal proceedings, including this very one that we’re all part of right now, plus the inevitable appeals, make it far more expensive to execute a criminal than it is to imprison him or her for life.

“And, just as important, Bentham said—and, again, I agree—the death penalty is irremissible. That is, there’s no way to undo an error. Of course, the unhappiness that results from a wrongful execution is huge for the death-row inmate. More than that, though, if a society executes an innocent man, and that fact is subsequently revealed when, for instance, the real killer is caught, then everyone in that society feels—or, at least,
should
feel—great remorse at the horrible thing done in the name of all of us. And then—”

“Thank you, sir. We get the idea. Now, then, what about abortion? If your argument is that punishing the innocent with the ultimate sanction is debilitating for society, then I’m sure the men and women seated here, in the wake of our Supreme Court having recently overturned
Roe v. Wade,
will be gratified to hear that you’re pro-life.”

“I’m not. I’m pro-choice.” I heard a hiss-like intake of breath from one of the jurors, and saw another one, the bearded white man, shake his head slowly back and forth.

Belinda Dickerson returned to her desk, and her assistant took a book out of a briefcase and handed it to her—and, like every author, I have the ability to recognize one of my own books at just about any distance, even when it’s partially obscured. “Your Honor, I’d like to introduce this copy of
Utilitarian Ethics of Everyday Life,
by our current witness, James K. Marchuk.”

Judge Kawasaki nodded. “Mark as People’s one-four-seven.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Just to confirm, sir, you
are
the author of this book, correct?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“As you can see, I’ve marked two pages with Post-it flags. Would you be so kind as to turn to the first one and read the highlighted passage?”

Post-it flags come in many colors; I use them all the time myself. She’d no doubt deliberately chosen red ones; she wanted the jury to be thinking about blood.

I flipped to the first indicated page, carefully took out my reading glasses, and said: “‘As in all utilitarian thinking, one cannot put one’s own desires or happiness ahead of another’s simply because they
are
one’s own, but in the case of a genetically defective fetus which, if brought to term, will live an unhappy, pain-filled life, terminating the fetus is clearly the path that will most increase the world’s net happiness, for, as we have observed, there are only two ways to add to the world’s total joy. The first, obviously, is to make the people who already exist happier. The second is to actually increase the number of people in the world through childbirth,
provided they will likely live happy lives.’”
Italics, as the saying goes, in the original.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat then went on. “‘The corollary to this is that the world’s total happiness is decreased by either making existing people less happy—as raising a disabled child with its attendant emotional and financial costs would doubtless do for the parents—or by allowing more people to come into existence who will be unhappy, as a child born to a life of pain and suffering will be. In such a case, therefore, abortion is perhaps morally obligatory.’”

The argument was more complex than that, and I dealt with all the objections one might raise in the subsequent paragraphs, but I stopped when the blue highlighting came to an end, closed the book, and looked up.

You could hear a safety pin drop in that courtroom. The jurors were all staring at me, some with mouths agape, and the color had gone out of Juan’s face. Only Devin Becker looked unperturbed.

Dickerson let the silence grow for as long as she felt she could get away with, then: “Thank you. Now, the next passage, please.”

I nervously opened the book again and flipped to the second marked page. At the top of it was a double-indented quotation from utilitarianism’s other founder, John Stuart Mill; I knew it by heart:

Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

But Dickerson hadn’t highlighted that. Instead, the blue marking began immediately afterward; I swallowed, then started reading aloud:

“‘Mill’s key point is that we reasonably and correctly value the lives
of a human more greatly than we do that of a chimpanzee, for the chimp, while perhaps enjoying the moment, cannot anticipate future happiness as well as we can—and that act of anticipation is in itself a pleasure.’

“‘Likewise, we value a chimp—to the extent in many jurisdictions of outlawing their use in laboratory experiments—more than we value a mouse, a being of demonstrably lesser intellectual capacity. But to be fair, and to avoid a charge of speciesism, we must apply the same standards to our own kind.’

“‘Yes, an embryo, from the moment of conception, is genetically fully
Homo sapiens,
but it has no complex cognition, no ability to plan or anticipate, and little if any joy. As it develops, these faculties will accrue gradually, but they clearly do not exist in anything approaching their full form until several
years
after birth. On the bases previously discussed, a utilitarian should support abortion when a prenatal diagnosis has been made that is strongly indicative of an unhappy, painful life; it is on this current basis—the lack of a fully developed mind for years to come—that a utilitarian can additionally embrace not just abortion but also a merciful release when a severe defect is not apparent until after parturition.’”

“‘Parturition,’” said Dickerson. “A right fancy word, that.” She glanced at the jury. “For those of us more accustomed to plainer speaking, what is ‘parturition’?”

“Childbirth.”

“In other words, Mr. Marchuk, sir, you believe abortion is okay. You believe—and I find this almost impossible to say aloud, but it is what the indicated passage said, isn’t it? You even believe
infanticide
can be okay. But you
don’t
believe in capital punishment.”

“Well, as Peter Singer would argue . . .”

“Please, sir, it’s a yes-or-no question. Are you against capital punishment in all circumstances?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in favor of abortion?”

“I’m in favor of increasing utility, in maximizing happiness, so—”

“Please, sir, again: yes or no? In the vast majority of circumstances
in which a woman might desire an abortion, are you in favor of letting her have it?”

“Yes.”

“And are there even times when infanticide, when killing an already-born child, is, in your view, the right thing to do?”

“On the basis that—”

“Yes or no?”

“Well, yes.”

“And your goal here is to convince the good men and women of this jury that it would be morally wrong to execute the defendant?”

I spread my arms. “I have no goal other than to explain the screening technique I developed, but—”

“No, buts, sir. And no more questions. Your Honor, I’m very grateful to be through with this witness.”

I
said it didn’t bother me if people examined my résumé, and that’s true—with one exception. When other academics look at it, they shake their heads when they see I did my undergrad at the same institution I teach at now; that’s always considered fishy. Although I love the University of Toronto’s “Prof or Hobo?” web quiz, which asks you to identify by their photos whether a person is a vagrant or a faculty member, we tenure-track types are supposed to be more like male chimpanzees: once we reach maturity, and have proven ourselves intractably irascible, we’re expected to leave our native community, never to return.
Welcome Back, Kotter
was a bad-enough scenario for a high-school teacher; it was anathema to those of us in academe.

But my own career had brought me from doing my bachelor’s degree here at the University of Manitoba—my flight had gotten in last night—back to being a tenured professor at the same institution. When asked why, I cite several reasons. “A fondness for bitter cold,” I’d quip, or “An abiding love of mosquitoes.” But the real reason was Menno Warkentin.

When I started at U of M, in 1999, Menno was teaching the same first-year introductory-psych course that I myself taught now. Back then, I was eighteen, and Menno was fifty-five. He was now seventy-four and
had emeritus status, which meant he was retired but, unlike some of the figurative if not literal bums who were eventually shown the door, was always welcome in his department, and, although drawing only a pension and not a salary, could still do research, supervise grad students, and so on. And, for all those years, he’d been my friend and mentor—I’d lost track of the hours we’d spent in his office or mine, shooting the breeze, talking about our work and our lives.

More than just his age and professorial status had changed since I’d started being his student; he’d also lost his sight. Although he happened to be diabetic, and blindness was a common side effect of that condition, that wasn’t the reason. Rather, he’d been in a car accident in 2001, and while the airbag had kept him from being killed, its impact had shattered his beloved antique glasses, and shards had been thrust into his eyeballs. I’d once or twice seen him without the dark glasses he now wore. His artificial blue eyes were lifelike but didn’t track. They just stared blankly forward from beneath silver eyebrows.

I found Menno sitting in his office with his headset on, listening to his screen reader. His guide dog, a German shepherd named Pax, was curled contentedly at his feet. Menno’s office had an L-shaped dark-brown shelving-and-counter unit against the back and side walls, but he had everything out of the way, up high or pushed to the back, so he couldn’t accidentally knock things over. And whereas I always had stacks of printouts and file folders on my own office floor, he had nothing that he might trip on. His office had a large window that looked not outside but into the corridor, and the white vertical blinds were closed, I guess on the principle that if he couldn’t see out, no one should be able to see in.

Today, though, in the summer heat, his door was open, and as I entered, Pax stood and poked her muzzle into Menno’s thigh to alert him that someone had arrived. He took off the headset and swung around, my face reflecting back at me from his obsidian-dark lenses. “Hello?”

“Menno, it’s Jim.”

“Padawan!”—his nickname for me since my student days. “How was your trip?”

I took a chair, and Pax settled in again at Menno’s feet. “The D.A. really worked at discrediting me.”

“Well, that’s his job,” Menno said.

“Her job. But yeah.”

“Ah.”

“And she brought up some stuff about my past.”

Menno was sitting on a reddish-brown executive-style chair. He leaned back, his belly like a beach ball. “Oh?”

“Stuff that I myself didn’t recall.”

“Like what?”

“Do you remember 2001?”

“Sure. Saw it in a theater when it first came out.”

“Not the movie,” I said. “The year.”

“Oh.” He made a how-could-I-forget-it gesture at his face. “Yes.”

“Jean Chrétien was prime minister then, right? And George W. Bush was sworn in as president.”

“Umm, yeah. That’s right.”

“And what were the biggest news stories of 2001?”

“Well, 9/11, obviously. Beyond that, off the top of my head, I don’t remember.”

“But you
would,”
I said.

“What?”

“You would remember others if you gave it some thought, right?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“The D.A. surprised me with an article about my grandfather from the
Winnipeg Free Press.
I went to the DaFoe Library this morning, and they pulled the microfilm of that edition. I started looking at other headlines from that day, but none of them stirred any memories, and neither did the front pages of the
Free Press
from other days around then. So I went online and looked at the covers of
Time
and
Maclean’s
from 2001. I didn’t recognize any of the stories until the summer. Two thousand, no problem. The second half of 2001, yeah, it all came back to me. But the initial six months of 2001 are a blank. The first thing I can pin down from that year is the day after Canada Day. July first fell on a Sunday that year, so people got July second off work. I remembered being pissed that I’d tried to go to
the post office on that Monday to pick up a parcel, only to find it closed for the holiday.” I spread my arms. “I’ve lost half a year of my life.”

“You’re sure?”

“As far as I can tell, yes. I mean, I remember being disgusted when the US Supreme Court handed down the decision in
Bush v. Gore
—but that was in December of 2000. I don’t remember Bush’s actual inauguration although there
had
to have been protests, right?”

“I imagine so.”

“And in June of that year, Carroll O’Connor passed away—Archie Bunker himself! You know how much I love
All in the Family.
I simply
couldn’t
have missed that bit of news, but somehow I did. Until today, I’d always assumed he was still alive in retirement somewhere.”

“And you just realized you had this gap?”

“Well, it was nineteen years ago, right? How often do we think about stuff from that far back? I do remember 9/11. I remember being right here, on campus, when I heard about the planes hitting the World Trade Center; I’d just started my third year. But other things from that long ago? How often would they come up?”

Menno shifted his bulky form in his chair. “Any idea why you can’t remember those six months?”

“Yes,” I said, but then fell silent. Menno had known me back then, but I’d never told him about this.

“And?” he prompted, reaching down to stroke Pax’s head.

I took a deep breath, then: “I died when I was nineteen. Legally dead. Heart stopped, breathing stopped. The whole nine yards.”

Menno halted in mid-stroke. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?” he asked, leaning back again.

I pulled my chair closer to his desk. “I’d gone back home to Calgary for the Christmas break. My sister was off in Europe, and my parents were on a cruise—but I wanted to see my friends. I remember New Year’s Eve, of course. Yes, the whole world had celebrated big-time a year before, on December thirty-first, 1999, but you know me: I held out for the
real
beginning of the twenty-first century, which was January first, 2001, right? Not 2000.”

“Because there was no year zero,” supplied Menno.

“Exactly! Anyway, I’d attended a party at the house of one of my high-school friends, and that night—that is, like 2:00
A.M.
on the morning of January first, 2001—when I was heading home, I was attacked by a guy with a knife. It was a cold, clear night. I remember the stars: Orion standing tall, Betelgeuse like a drop of blood, Jupiter and Saturn near the Pleiades.”

“You and the stars,” he said, smiling; I’m secretary of the Winnipeg Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

“Exactly, but it’s relevant, see? I was doing what I always do. Cold night, I’ve forgotten my mitts so my hands are shoved into my jacket pockets, toque pulled down over my ears, and I’m walking along looking up—not ahead of me, but up, finding the ecliptic, looking for planets, hoping to maybe see a meteor streak across the sky. Sure, I’d checked for traffic before crossing the street, but that’s all I did. I wasn’t looking to see what was happening on the other side. Oh, I probably registered that there were a couple of people there, but I wasn’t paying any damn attention to them. And so I crossed diagonally because I was heading in that direction, right? And when I got to the other side, suddenly this guy wheels around, and he’s got this pinched, narrow face and teeth that are sharp and pointy and all askew, and his eyes, man, his eyes are
wild.
Wide open, whites all around. And he shoves me with one hand, palm against my chest, and he snarls—really, it was a total snarl, his breath coming out in clouds—and says ‘What the fuck do you want?’

“I look over at the other guy, and, Christ, he’s covered in blood. It seems black in the yellow light from the streetlamp, but that’s what it’s got to be, blood all over his nylon jacket. That guy’s been stabbed; I’ve walked into a drug deal gone bad. I stammer, ‘I’m just heading to the C-Train.’

“But it’s no good. The guy is crazy or high or both, and he’s got a knife. The other guy takes the opportunity to try to get away: he starts running—staggering, really—onto the street. But he’s badly hurt, and I see now that he’d been standing in a puddle of his own blood, a puddle that’s freezing over.

“But the guy with the knife is looking at me, not him, and he lunges
at me. And I’m
me,
right? I don’t know jack about street fighting. I don’t know how to deflect a blow or anything like that. I feel the knife going in sideways, and I know, I just know, it’s going in between my ribs, just off the centerline of my chest. It doesn’t hurt—not yet—but it’s going deep.

“And then it pierces my heart; I know that’s what’s happening. And he pulls the knife out and I stagger a half-pace backward, away from the road, clutching my chest, feeling the blood pouring out, and it’s hot, it’s like scalding hot compared to the chilled air, but it’s not ebbing and flowing, it’s not pumping. It’s just
draining
out onto the sidewalk. I fall backward, and I’m looking up at the sky, but it’s too bright here, the streetlamp is washing everything out, and I’m thinking,
God damn it, I wanted to see the stars.

“And then—nothing. None of that tunnel bullshit, no bright light except the sodium one from the lamp; none of it. I’m just
gone.”

Menno had switched to leaning forward, and about halfway through, he’d steepled his fingers in front of his wide face. They were still there. “And then what?” he said.

“And then I was dead.”

“For how long?”

I shrugged. “No one knows. It can’t have been
too
long. Man, if the word ‘lucky’ can be applied to that sort of situation, I was lucky. I’d fallen right by that streetlamp, so I was in plain view, and it was bitterly cold. A medical student coming home from a different party stumbled upon me, called 911, plugged the hole in my torso, and did chest compressions until the ambulance got there.”

“My God,” said Menno.

“Yeah. But, given the timing, it has to be what’s affecting my memory.”

Silence again, then, at last: “There was doubtless oxygen deprivation. You likely did suffer some brain damage, preventing the formation of long-term memories for a time.”

“You’d think—but there should be more evidence of it. During my missing six months, if I wasn’t laying down new memories, I’d have had enormous difficulty functioning. I was in your class then. Do you remember me behaving strangely?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Sure, but I also was one of your test subjects in that research project, right?”

He frowned. “Which one?”

“Something about . . . microphones?”

“Oh, that one. Yeah, I guess you were.”

“You had a cool name for it, um . . .”

“Project Lucidity.”

“Right! Anyway, I was helping you with that before the knifing, and—well, I don’t know: that’s the whole point. Maybe I was part of your study afterwards, too?”

“I honestly don’t remember,” said Menno.

“Of course. But could you check your files, see if you have stuff about me going that far back? I’m looking for anything that might jog my memory.”

“Sure, I’ll have a look.”

“I
must
have been laying down long-term memories during my . . . my ‘dark period.’ I mean, how else could I have functioned?”

“I suppose, yeah.”

“And I did a half-year course in science fiction then, one semester, January to April. It was required that I take an English course, and that seemed less painful than CanLit.”

“Ha.”

“Anyway, I found the reading list from it still online. Apparently, we all read this novel about a biomedical engineer who discovers scientific proof for the existence of the human soul—but I don’t remember ever reading it; I only know that’s what it’s about because I looked up the title on Amazon today.”