Quantum Night

8

I drove along Pembina Highway, heading for my rendezvous with Kayla Huron, once again listening to the CBC. As I pulled into Grant Park mall, the 1:00 P.M. newscast began:

“Big news from Parliament Hill: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has just fallen as his controversial carbon-tax budget narrowly failed to pass a parliamentary vote. It’s a situation not unlike the one that briefly ousted his father, Pierre Trudeau, as prime minister in 1974. Canadians will go to the polls next month to choose our next national leader…”

I walked across the asphalt, entered Pony Corral, and presented myself to the pretty young woman standing at the lectern. I don’t know why restaurants have lecterns; they made me want to teach.

“Just one today?” she said.

I hated it when they said, “Just one?” in that sympathetic tone. Sorry you’re a loser, sir. But I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Actually, I’m meeting someone. Do you mind if I have a look?”

She gestured at the dining room, and I went in, looking around—but Kayla spotted me first. “Jim!”

I saw an attractive redhead in a booth. She’d been a brunette in the Wikipedia photo, but the ginger color suited her. As I approached, she rose. Normally, if I’d been greeting an old friend from that long ago, I’d have gone in for a hug or a peck on the cheek, but Kayla appeared… leery, perhaps, and so I simply sat down opposite her.

Her expression changed—via a conscious effort, it seemed—and I realized she was evaluating me in that way you do when you run into someone you haven’t seen for a long time: looking for gray hairs, receding hairlines, paunches, wrinkles. On the hair checklist, both boxes were empty for me, and being vegan kept me trim, but, damn it, I preferred to call them “laugh lines.” At least I wasn’t doing the same thing; I had no old memories to compare the present her to—and I liked what I saw just fine.

Still, because it seemed the appropriate thing, I said, “You haven’t changed a bit.”

She smiled, but, again, it was a little wan, a tad reserved. “Nor have you.” She already had a glass of white wine. “So,” she added, “what’s new?”

I liked to respond to that question with, “New York, New Jersey, New Delhi,” but I didn’t know this woman, damn it, I didn’t know her at all; I couldn’t be sure it would get a laugh. And yet at one time she had liked me, and so just being myself seemed the way to go. I trotted out the “New” list, and it did earn me a smile—and, at least for a second, the hesitancy was gone.

“Same sense of humor,” she said. “You remember Professor Jenkins? What was that joke you told that got you kicked out of class?”

I was rescued by a waitress in a tight black top, cleavage showing. “Something to drink, sir?”

“What have you got on tap?”

She rattled off a list. I chose a dark craft beer, then turned back to Kayla. Unfortunately, though, she asked her question again. “Do you remember? That joke? Something about an orangutan?”

Christ, I don’t think I’ve ever heard an orangutan joke in my entire life—well, except for The Simpsons singing “Help Me, Dr. Zaius” to the tune of “Rock Me Amadeus.”

“I don’t recall,” I said.

She shrugged a little. “Well, it was a long time ago. So, what’s up with you? Are you married?”

“I was, briefly. We divorced a couple of years ago. You?”

“Also divorced. I live with my daughter. She’s six.”

“What’s her name?”

“Ryan.”

I nodded. One of the many boy’s names that had become girl’s names in my lifetime. I’m waiting for one of my friends to name their daughter Buster or Dirk.

The waitress returned with my beer. I thanked her and took a sip. Kayla and I had had a fight—a big one that caused her to walk out of my life for two decades—but one that I didn’t remember at all. Maybe she’d been justifiably angry with me, or maybe she had wronged me horribly, but in a way that had never quite been so true before, it really was no skin off my nose. “Kayla,” I said, “about what happened, you know, all those years ago. I just want to say I’m sorry.”

She looked at me for a few moments, as if seeking something in my expression. Then she tilted her head slightly. “Thanks, Jim.”

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Kayla, I need your help.”

“With what?”

“I, ah, I had an accident many years ago, about two months before we started dating. I don’t know if I ever told you…?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Well, I almost died. And apparently that did something to my memory. I—I’m sorry, I truly am, but until today, until you called, I had no memory of you.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Then why’d you want to see me again? You sounded so eager on the phone.”

“I am. I lost memories of six months—January to June 2001—and I want to get them back. I’m hoping you can fill in some of the gaps. Earlier today, I read some of our old emails, and—”

She looked aghast. “You kept those?”

“Printouts of a few, yeah.”

She took a sip of wine, then set the glass down carefully, as if afraid she might knock it over. “That explains why I haven’t heard from you in all the years since.”

“I’m sorry.”

A waitress glided by. Kayla tracked her movement, perhaps so she wouldn’t have to look at me. When the waitress had disappeared from view, Kayla dropped her gaze to the tablecloth. “I’ve googled you from time to time,” she said “You’ve done well.”

“Thanks.” Silence for a moment. “Okay,” I said, “one thing’s been bugging me. A lot of those emails ended with the number two-point-nine. What the heck does that mean?”

A spontaneous little smile—fond remembrance, perhaps? “You really have lost your memory, haven’t you?” She reached into her purse and took out a retractable ballpoint pen. She then pulled a paper napkin toward her. “You know how you make a love heart online? The emoticon?” She drew it: <3

“Yes?”

“It’s the less-than sign followed by the number three, see? And what’s less than three? Two-point-nine. So it’s a cute way of saying the same thing.”

“Ha! That’s really clever.”

She smiled again, and this time the warmth was unmistakable. “That’s exactly what you said all those years ago when I first used it.”

“So, forgive me, but… we were… we were in love?”

Her eyes tracked across the room again even though there wasn’t anyone to follow. “Oh, who knows? I thought we were, back then, but, well, we were just kids.”

I took another sip of my beer. “Yeah.”

The server came to take our orders—which was a case of opportune knockers, as it helped break the awkward moment. “What’ll it be?” she asked.

“Steak sandwich,” said Kayla. “Rare. With the Caesar, please.”

“And for you?”

“The vegan wrap,” I said.

“Very good,” she said, and sashayed away.

Kayla’s eyebrows arched up. “The vegan wrap? You used to love a good steak.”

She was right, but that had been before I’d read Peter Singer. The best-known modern utilitarian, Singer was the author of, among others, Animal Liberation, which had kick-started the whole animal-rights movement. Given humans can be perfectly healthy eating only plants, the minor increase in our happiness that we might get from the taste of chicken or beef in no way offsets the pain and suffering of animals raised or slaughtered in cruel conditions. “I’ve changed,” I said affably.

She narrowed her eyes, as if that were still somehow an open question. “You don’t mind that I’m having steak?”

“I’m from Calgary. If I couldn’t stand being around people eating beef, I’d never be able to go home again.”

“Ha.” She took another sip of her wine.

We chatted for the next half hour, during which our meals came, and, slowly but surely, she seemed to get comfortable with me, in part due, I liked to think, to my charm, and in part perhaps to a second glass of wine. She mentioned our dates from all those years ago that stood out in her mind, including a road trip one weekend down to Fargo; attending Keycon, Winnipeg’s annual science-fiction convention; seeing the Blue Bombers play; hanging out at Aqua Books and Pop Soda’s—both sadly now defunct—and going to a traditional Cree sweat-lodge ceremony. I’d hoped something would ring a bell, but I couldn’t remember any of them.

Kayla finally fell silent; it’s doubtless no fun reminiscing with someone whose only responses are, “Really?” and “We did?” and “Wow, that sounds like it must have been fun.” To fill the void, I delicately broached another topic. “So, um, you’re a New Ager?”

She practically did a spit-take with her wine. “What?”

“Well, I only glanced at your Wikipedia entry, but it said you were with something called the Canadian Enlightenment Centre.”

She had a wonderfully warm laugh. “You mean the Canadian Light Source. It’s a synchrotron, Canada’s largest particle accelerator; just under three gigaelectronvolts. It’s on the grounds of the University of Saskatchewan.”

“Oh! But it said you ‘explore consciousness.’”

“I do. Psych was your major, but just an elective for me; I was doing physics. But Warkentin’s course really got me interested in the mind, which is how I ended up working on the quantum mechanics of consciousness. After graduating from U of M, I headed off to the University of Arizona to study under Stuart Hameroff.”

“Who is?”

“An anesthesiologist. He was fascinated by exactly what he was doing when he deprived people of consciousness. Roger Penrose, a physicist who sometimes collaborates with Stephen Hawking, wrote a book that said consciousness had to be quantum mechanical; it couldn’t be just classical physics because of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Stuart read it and got in touch with him, oh, almost twenty-five years ago now. That’s why I’m at the Light Source; there’s a synchrotron specialist I’m working with there who’s got a technique for detecting superposition without promoting decoherence.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, one must.”

She smiled warmly. “‘Superposition’ is that uniquely quantum condition in which something is in two states at once: for instance, not either here or there, but simultaneously both here and there. We call it ‘decoherence’ when superposition collapses. Anyway, my work builds on what Stuart brought to Penrose. Stuart said, look, an inhaled anesthetic, like halothane, affects the microtubules—the cellular scaffolding—in neurons. There are two-lobed pockets in the microtubules, and each pocket houses a free electron. When you’re awake, those electrons are in superposition, simultaneously existing in both the top and the bottom lobe. When the anesthetic is introduced, the electrons lose coherence, collapsing into being in just one or the other lobe—and when that happens, the patient ceases to be conscious.”

I frowned, trying to sort this out. “So halothane is used as an inhalant to induce anesthesia?”

Kayla nodded. “Right.”

“And anesthesia is a state in which only classical physics occurs in the brain?”

“When it puts you out cold, yes.”

“So, halothane is a classical gas.”

“Yes?”

“It has its own theme song.”

“What are you talking about?”

“‘Classical Gas.’ It’s that famous instrumental by Mason Williams.” I made ba-ba-ba-bump-ba-ba trombone sounds.

“You are a very strange man,” Kayla said.

She was not the first to have observed that; still, I guess I looked crestfallen because she reached over and patted the back of my hand. “Which is precisely why I fell for you all those years ago.”

I smiled, and she went on: “Anyway, my work is on consciousness as a product of quantum superposition of electrons in neuronal microtubules. And, well… that’s kind of why I looked you up.”

“I, um, don’t quite see the connection.”

“I saw the news coverage about your being an expert witness.”

I looked away. “Oh.”

“You know, you did know about your grandfather. I remember when the news broke. You were mortified.”

“Yeah, so my sister said. But I honestly don’t recall it. I—it’s so strange, not remembering that period.”

“I’m sure.”

“And that’s why you wanted to see me? Because of my grandfather?”

“No, no, no. I mean, yeah, that’s fascinating, but it was your technique that caught my eye—the microsaccades thing.”

“Caught your eye. Microsaccades.”

“What? Oh.”

“I’m here all week.”

She shook her head in what I took to be fond exasperation, then said, “No, it was the correlation with the Hare Checklist that interested me. I’ve been following your work in that area.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Because, just like your microsaccades test, I’ve found a quantum-superposition state that also precisely corresponds to psychopathy. If you’re a high scorer on the Hare Checklist, you’ll have this correlation, too.”

“Seriously?”

“Yup.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, cripes, the time! I gotta go. They’re expecting me back at three.”

And that should have been that, but the words just popped out of my mouth. “Well, what about dinner?”

Her eyebrows ascended, but then, after considering it for a long moment, she said, “Sure. Sure, why not?”

Kayla and I agreed to meet for dinner at 8:00 P.M., which gave me almost five hours to kill—and time to do some more reality-checking. She and I hadn’t started dating until March of 2001, so she couldn’t help me with what had gone down the preceding New Year’s Eve, but perhaps someone else could.

I suppose the information I wanted was also online, but nothing beat the human touch. And so after returning to my office in the Duff Roblin Building and making a phone call to be sure she’d be in, I wandered along Dysart Road to the office of Sally Mahaffey, who taught meteorology in the awkwardly named Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources. That could be a miserable hike in winter, but now, in May, it was pleasant as long as you avoided all the droppings from the Canada geese wandering about.

The interior of the Wallace Building was done in Early Modern Tinkertoy, with red, green, and yellow tubes and pipes everywhere, and its washrooms were bizarre standalone modules like indoor outhouses. Sally’s office was off a corridor painted floor to ceiling, doors included, in bright yellow; going down it, I felt like I was inside a French’s mustard squeeze bottle.

Although there were lots of faculty members I’d never met, I’d run into Sally a few times in her role as treasurer of the Faculty Association. She was sixty-something, with hair I thought of as appropriately thundercloud gray.

“Hey,” I said, entering. “Thanks for making time for me.”

Her office had wall-mounted metal shelving she used for a display of vintage weather-forecasting equipment; I was pleased with myself for knowing that the propeller with cups was an anemometer. “My pleasure,” Sally said as she got up from her chair—which didn’t do much to increase her height. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for some old weather data.”

“How old?”

“Two thousand and one.”

She sounded relieved. “I had a history student come here last week, wanting to see the weather report for a key battle in the War of 1812. I had to explain to the poor thing that Environment Canada’s records don’t go back quite that far.” She sat down in front of her computer and proceeded to type rapidly, using two knobby fingers. “Location?”

“Calgary.”

“Airport or downtown?”

“Downtown, I suppose.”

“What date?”

“January first, early in the morning. Like, 2:00 A.M.”

She worked away for a minute. Above her desk was a political cartoon showing a trio of baffled old men in baggy golf shorts on an island only a few feet across surrounded by nothing but water. The caption: “Climate-change deniers retire to Florida.”

“Got it,” she said, rolling her chair aside to let me have a look.

There was so much data on the screen—meteorologists apparently care about all sorts of measurements regular folk don’t—that it took me a moment to find my way around. But at last I spotted it: Falling snow. “That can’t be right,” I said, pointing. “Are you sure you’ve got the correct date?”

She indicated where it was listed; the time was correct, too. “Can you show me the hour before, and the hour after, please?”

She nodded and did so. For 1:00 A.M., the readout was also “Falling snow.” For 3:00 A.M., it had changed to “Heavy snowfall.”

“But the sky was crystal clear,” I said. “I remember that.”

“I’ve seen a lot of wondrous weather in my day,” Sally said gently. “Tornadoes, sun dogs, hail the size of grapefruit. But I’ve never seen snow come down from a cloudless sky. Are you sure you’ve got the right day?”

“Yes.”

“And the right year? It took me to February to stop writing 2019 on things.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure about the date.” I recalled the stars so vividly that night, Orion low in the southwest. I knew my way around the night sky like the proverbial back of my hand; Orion is absolutely visible in Calgary at that time of night in the winter months. Or, at least he is when the sky is clear. I took hold of the edge of Sally’s desk for support.