“I never wanted any harm to come to you, ever.”
“—then you wrecked my paralimbic system. Actual fucking brain damage!”
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you! I was trying to cure you.”
Boisterous students were moving down the corridor. While waiting for them to pass, I digested this. “Cure . . . ?”
“Yes,” said Menno emphatically. “We kept testing you with the Lucidity equipment, hoping to find that your inner voice had come back. A month, two months, three months—it was killing me, what we’d done to you. Of course, there’s more to consciousness than just an inner voice—it’s a whole suite of things—but that was the only aspect we could directly check for. When it’s present, it surely correlates with it being like something to be you, to having first-person, subjective experience. But we’d somehow taken all that away—and I had to try to bring it back.”
“So you carved into my skull?”
“Nothing as dangerous as that. And we succeeded, you know. Your inner voice did come back.”
“The MRI I saw was dated June fifteenth. But I have no recollection of anything until the beginning of July.”
Menno tilted his head, as if thinking. “It was so long ago. I don’t remember. But . . . but, yeah, now that I think about it, your inner voice didn’t come back right away. It was—God, well, I guess it could have been a couple of weeks later.”
“Damn it, Menno, you want me to go to the dean or to the press first? Or maybe the cops? What the hell did you do to me?”
He was quiet for a long moment, then spread his arms. “Lucidity was a military project, did you know that? We were working on a battlefield microphone. Anyway, that meant we had access to some other classified techniques. The Pentagon was testing a system—they’ve since abandoned it, thank God—using two intersecting laser beams to trigger action potentials. The beams supposedly passed harmlessly through living tissue, and, well, there was a paper out of Russia that suggested an approach related to stimulating the amygdala that I thought just might bring you back, so—”
“Jesus!”
“I was trying to fix things—”
“And instead fucked me up even worse!”
Pax was staring at me, still startled by my anger, but Menno’s voice was calm. “As I said, the laser system didn’t work as advertised. Turned out the damn thing destroyed tissue along the lines of both beams—although fortunately the beams were extremely narrow, and they cauterized the blood vessels. Thank the Lord for neuroplasticity, though; you bounced back from the damage, but . . .”
“But it was like Phineas Gage,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” said Menno. “I was trying to help. And, look, Kiehl didn’t publish until five years later; I had no way of knowing.”
I thought about that. Kent Kiehl’s seminal paper “A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective on Psychopathy: Evidence for Paralimbic System Dysfunction,” had come out in 2006. He demonstrated that damage to what he dubbed the paralimbic portions of the brain—including the amygdala—could cause people to exhibit psychopathic symptoms. Phineas Gage, the Vermont railway worker who, in 1848, had a tamping iron blown straight up through his skull, probably suffered from that sort of damage, turning him from an affable fellow into a manipulative, reckless, irresponsible, promiscuous monster—in other words, a psychopath.
“I’m truly sorry, Jim,” Menno said again.
“Paralimbic damage,” I said, thinking aloud. “But . . .” I put a hand on my chest, fingers splayed. “My heart . . .”
“Yes?” said Menno.
My head was swimming. The knifing, the guy with the splayed teeth, the blood freezing on the sidewalk. I remembered it all so clearly. And—
No. Damn it. No. Another old paper came to mind—I’d cited it myself in some of my own publications: Armin Schnider on “Spontaneous Confabulation, Reality Monitoring, and the Limbic System.” Schnider contended that those with anterior limbic damage became absolutely convinced of narratives they’d created to explain events even though they were just making things up.
I looked at Menno, a little reflection of me staring back from his opaque glasses. I didn’t think of myself as a particularly macho guy, and, of course, there was nothing funny about breast cancer, but, still, men were strange when it came to that part of their anatomy, and a stabbing is a way more interesting story to tell, but—
No, no, I would have been here in Winnipeg on—what date had Sandy Cheung said? February something . . .
February nineteenth. Monday, February nineteenth. First business day during Reading Week—or, as some of my less-academically-minded friends called it, Ski Week, the time each year during which Canadian universities had no classes so students could catch up on their work. Yes, if I’d needed a tumor removed, I might well have arranged to have had it done when I could be back in Calgary with my family. Jesus.
I looked again at Menno. “You fucked me up.”
“I’m so, so sorry. I really was trying to help.”
I leaned against the office door, thinking. “The inner-voice stuff—or, more to the point, the lack of inner-voice stuff: did you publish about that?”
Menno shook his head. “Like I said, all our research was classified. And when Dom moved to the States, well, it was his project, really.”
“You’d made a major breakthrough—philosopher’s zombies exist!—and you kept quiet about it all these years?”
“I had to,” Menno replied. “I’m a Mennonite.”
“Yes?” I said. “So the idea of people without inner lives contradicted your religious beliefs?”
“What? No, no. I mean, yes, I suppose so—where’s the soul, and all that? But that’s not what I’m talking about. Mennonites are pacifists. I couldn’t tell the DoD what we’d found. God, can you imagine what they’d have done if they knew? Talk about cannon fodder! They could use our technique to identify which soldiers would make the best mindless little drones. I had to bury the research as much as I could.”
That took me aback. “You think p-zeds are blindly obedient?”
“I know so—because until I messed up your amygdala, you yourself were. I was stunned when Dom managed to talk you into continuing with our experiments; I’d figured you’d never want to see us again. But a guy in a lab coat asks you to do something, and, boom!, yes, sir; as you wish, sir; no problem, sir. Philosopher’s zombies aren’t leaders; they’re followers. They don’t want anything themselves. Bob Altemeyer was probably identifying p-zeds, as you call them, with his research here on authoritarian followers, and Stanley Milgram almost certainly was identifying them back in 1961 with his obedience-to-authority experiments. Of course a p-zed will shock someone just because they’re told to do so; they have no inner voice arguing against it. Thank God, eventually yours came back.”
“So no harm, no foul, right? It all worked out in the end? You robbed me of half a year of my life!”
I expected some sort of protest; no matter how accurate the charge, most people reflexively defend themselves. But Menno just sat there quietly for a long moment, and then, slowly, deliberately, he removed his glasses, set them on his desk, and he looked at me.
With his dead glass eyes.
“I felt terrible about what happened to you, Jim. You have no idea how much it tore me up. And, as a psychologist, I know all about the indicators, the signs—the preternatural calmness that comes over a person when the decision has been made. And when I made my decision, I recognized it for precisely what it was, but nonetheless, it seemed the thing to do.”
His eyes always faced straight forward; he was incapable of a sidelong glance. And he was looking at me, or at least facing me, and although he blinked at the normal rate, his aim never wavered. Even though I knew he couldn’t see a thing through those glass spheres, it was more unnerving than even the psychopathic stare.
“You think
it was easy, living with what we’d done? What I’d done?” He shook his head, blind gaze swinging like twin searchlights. “It tortured me. I couldn’t sleep; couldn’t—you know.” He paused. “I drove out to Dauphin one night—a long drive, a mostly empty highway. There were trees at the side of the road, which is what I’d expected, but it was frustrating as hell—just saplings, young elms. I wanted something massive, something I was sure wouldn’t snap in two. And then, there it was—a whole stand of them. I took aim at one in the middle, and I floored it. And, well . . .” He waved a hand in a circular motion in front of his face. “This.” He shrugged a little. “It wasn’t the outcome I was looking for, and it’s been a bitch, let me tell you, all these years, being blind.” The glassy spheres faced me once more, and I looked at them for as long as I could. “I can’t make up for what I did, Jim, but recognize that, in some measure at least, I’ve paid for it.”
17
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 th
rough 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.”