Quantum Night

  “God,” said Heather, shaking.

  “Let me take you guys upstairs,” Abdul said. “At least there are couches you can sleep on.” We nodded, and he led us down the stone corridor and past the giant wall panels proclaiming in English and French, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” But the interior lighting was off, and I could only make the words out because I already knew what they said.

  —

  Much of the museum’s shell was made of glass, so when the sun came up the next morning, the building was filled with light. I hadn’t been aware of actually falling asleep, but I must have at some point because it was the brightness that woke me. I staggered out of the curator’s office I’d been sleeping in and went to find Heather.

  She was standing at a railing, looking down at the alabaster-clad bridges crisscrossing the museum’s cavernous interior. I’d stood here before, also looking down, and the spectacle always reminded me of the scene in Forbidden Planet in which Dr. Morbius shows his visitors the twenty-mile-deep cubic interior of the dead-and-buried Krell city on Altair IV. Morbius’s words from that classic film popped into my head. The heights they had reached! But then, seemingly on the threshold of some supreme accomplishment which was to have crowned their entire history this all-but-divine race perished in a single night . . .

  “Hey,” I said, joining my sister staring into the abyss. “You all right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Let’s see if we can get back to my place, okay?” I tried to make a joke of it. “It was bad enough being out there last night; wait till the school buses full of kids on field trips arrive here.”

  “School’s out for the summer,” she said, her tone flat.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I guess it is.” And that’s when I turned around, looked out through the great curving glass, and saw the plumes of black smoke against the blood-red dawn.

  —

  It was a shocking bus trip back to my home. I was used to other passengers chatting with friends or having their heads bent down, thumb-typing on their phones, but everyone was looking out the streaked, dusty windows. Many people, including Heather, had mouths agape; the pedestrians I saw were likewise looking shell-shocked.

  Of course, most of the damage was superficial: smashed windows, torn-down fences, obscene graffiti; there was only so much mayhem people who’d arrived unprepared could cause. Still, it was distressing to see, and the CJOB app said there had been eleven fatalities—one of which was almost certainly from the knife fight Heather and I had passed—and thirty more people were in hospital.

  I’d called Kayla from the museum to let her know I was all right, but we only spoke briefly. She hadn’t been aware of the riots here; we arranged to Skype this evening.

  The bus let us off at the far side of the strip mall from my condo building. We walked through its parking lot, past my building’s outdoor pool, into my lobby, and headed up. My unit had two washrooms but only one shower; we both desperately needed to clean up, but I let Heather go first. While she showered, I went out on the balcony and looked out at the river implacably rolling along. About fifty meters upriver from me, near one of the picnic tables, a couple of guys were fishing.

  My thoughts turned to Saskatoon, but only partially to Kayla; yes, I missed her enormously and certainly could use her hugs after last night. But I was also thinking about CLS, and wondering if there was any possible way to get my sister down on Victoria’s beamline so I could know for sure whether Heather really was a Q1.

  I ran through memories of our childhood together: times she’d made me laugh, times she’d made me cry, times when I’d been worried about her—and times when it seemed she’d genuinely been worried about me. Could she have just been going through the motions? Granted, I’d had no particular psychological acumen as a child or teenager, but surely now, in retrospect, it should be obvious one way or the other.

  We had been very different in high school. She’d hung around with the popular crowd, doing all the things popular kids did, drinking and smoking and cutting classes. And she certainly followed fashion trends, and to this day I can recite the lyrics of every Spice Girls song, having heard her play their damn albums over and over again. Me, I’d refused to wear blue jeans—I didn’t own a pair until I was thirty—or T-shirts with any kind of advertising on them, and I’d listened mostly to the great sci-fi movie soundtracks of John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. Granted, she had gotten good marks in school—sometimes better than my own—but, then again, taking in input and mindlessly spitting out output was precisely what p-zeds were presumably adept at.

  I was startled by the sound of the screen door behind me sliding open. Heather had changed into clean clothes. “Your turn,” she said.

  I nodded and headed inside. It felt good to get all that grime and sweat off me, and, afterward, I grabbed a quick shave, then headed into my bedroom, which was just past the little guest room Heather was using, and put on fresh clothing. My one pair of blue jeans was hanging in my closet. I did wear them sometimes when I taught in the summer, but I stopped myself as I reached for them and instead took down a pair of beige slacks.

  When I was finished, I returned to the living room. Heather was still on the balcony, looking at the river. I did that often myself, but I was always woolgathering as I did so—which was physically indistinguishable from just idly standing there, in neutral, waiting for something to prod activity.

  I stepped out onto the balcony. “What’re you doing?”

  “Nothing,” she said. And then, as if that required a justification, “Enjoying the view.”

  I looked at her, wondering. I know, I know—I’d wondered about Kayla, too, but Kayla had been scanned on Victoria’s beamline, and, besides, she continued to endlessly surprise me. But my sister? Oh, I’d surprised her, apparently, when I hadn’t known about what had happened to our grandfather, but when was the last time she had surprised me—prior to last night, that is?

  I turned and looked out at the river, too, and—

  —and something was going on. The two fishermen were still there, all right, but so were a couple of uniformed cops, and two more men were crab-walking down the grassy embankment.

  “Come on!” I said, moving back inside. Heather followed, and, as we headed down the stairs, I thought about whether this was any different from what had happened last night. As we exited out into the late-morning sunshine, I decided it was: last night, she’d fallen in with the mob; today, I was simply curious.

  Fortunately, Heather was back to wearing flat shoes, and it took us less than a minute to trot over to where all the excitement was going on. We weren’t the first rubberneckers to show up; a pair of female joggers in sweatpants had stopped to gawk.

  Something large had been hauled up onto the riverbank: a bundle more than a meter long swaddled in green garbage bags tied around with duct tape.

  A cop was keeping us at bay, but we jockeyed for a better view—and got it. The bags had ripped open on one side and a lower leg and foot were protruding.

  “Oh, God,” said Heather softly.

  We stood there transfixed; the guys in plain clothes were clearly crime-scene investigators. One of them snapped pictures of everything, while the other took samples of the skin, which was smooth and the color of coffee with cream. The uniformed cops, meanwhile, were getting statements from the fishermen; I strained to listen. From what I could make out, when they first saw the bundle, they’d assumed some jerk had dumped his garbage in the river, but, as it drifted by, one of them saw the exposed skin. They were both wearing hip waders, and had managed to snare the package before the current took it away; they’d hauled it ashore and called 911.

  The crime-scene guys eventually went to take the body away, picking up the bundle—only to have the garbage bags split completely open and the corpse drop out and roll a bit down the embankment. And there she was: a
n Indigenous woman, with long black hair, and the side of her head caved in from a heavy blow; she looked to be no more than twenty.

  I fought to keep what little there was in my stomach down, and thought briefly of that story I sometimes told my students when introducing utilitarianism about the girl drowning in this very river. The bridge I spoke about in that scenario was just south of here; I looked over at it for a moment.

  But there were two salient differences. First, my little hypothetical was just that, a made-up example; this was all too real. And, second, that hapless child had simply slipped and fallen in. But this young woman—somebody’s daughter, possibly somebody’s sister, perhaps even somebody’s mother—had been brutally murdered, and although it would doubtless be some time before a report would be made public, if she was like the legions of others who’d gone before her, she’d probably been sexually assaulted.

  Yes, the carnage in Texas was getting media attention, but that was only because it was new. The endless stream of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls here in Manitoba should have been a national disgrace. Back in 2014 and 2015, when the tally had been just twelve hundred natives unaccounted for, then–Prime Minister Stephen Harper, when demands went up for a federal inquiry, had said that the issue “isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest.”

  Last night’s stay at the Human Rights Museum had been physically uncomfortable, but my mind went back further to when I’d visited it with Kayla, attending that reception in the Garden of Contemplation, and how socially uncomfortable that had been. But prior to Nick Smith’s unconscious mimicry of him, that African-American fellow—Darius something—had said he’d been so pleased by the way he was treated here in Winnipeg: “Now I know what it feels like to be white.”

  But that was only because the choice of out-group was arbitrary: in one place, it might be Jews; in another, those of African ancestry; in Texas now, Latinos. And here, in Winnipeg, the geographic center of the North American continent, it was Native Canadians who were routinely discarded—a fact that had led Maclean’s to call Winnipeg “Canada’s most-racist city” in 2015. Usually one to pop up with a factoid for every occasion, I’d kept my mouth shut when Darius had made his comment, just as so many of us had for so long.

  Heather had been right this morning: school’s out for the summer. Everywhere I looked, all over the planet, shit was getting real.

  32

  HEATHER had an afternoon of business meetings—the reason Gustav had allowed her trip out here—and when they were done, I met her for a final cup of coffee, then drove her out to the airport. I could have just dropped her at the curb, but instead I parked and helped her in with her luggage. My sister had always been one to overpack. I used to think that was because she was contemplating myriad possible scenarios at her destination; now I wondered if it was simply that she quite literally couldn’t make up her mind about what to bring and what to leave behind.

  Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport has an awful lot of syllables in its name for what is in fact a fairly small facility. After I’d hugged my sister goodbye and she’d headed through security, I found myself looking wistfully at the departure board, listing both a WestJet and an Air Canada flight to Saskatoon this evening. But I’d have to content myself with Skype.

  We ivory-tower types usually get to avoid rush-hour traffic, but tonight I had to endure it: the hundreds of thousands of cars that moved about each day ebbing and flowing like tides. Some of the drivers were on autopilot only for this boring routine, but for most, this part of the day was no different than any other—just moving with the flock, following the programming, doing what everybody else was doing.

  I’d missed both breakfast and lunch, so I went through the drive-through at McDonald’s—billions and billions served—and got fries and a salad, then continued the slow slog back to my home, only occasionally glancing out my side window at the mess still being cleaned up from last night.

  When I at last pulled into my parking lot, I walked up the grassy hillock to see where all the action had taken place this afternoon, but everyone was gone without a trace, and the whole awful thing would soon be forgotten, just another statistic.

  Once I got back into my apartment, I checked my email. There was one from Bhavesh Namboothiri:

  Sorry, Jim! I know we have an appointment tomorrow, but my home was vandalized pretty badly last night—some of the rioters don’t just hate the Devils, I guess. I’ll be in touch when I’m able to resume our sessions.

  I went and lay down on my bed. I felt sorry for poor Namboothiri, but I wasn’t too upset that we had to postpone. I was having a hard-enough time facing the present just now; I wasn’t sure I was up for horrors from my past.

  —

  A little after 5:00 P.M., Kayla Huron removed her dosimeter and put it on the rack by CLS’s glass-fronted entrance. Victoria Chen was heading out at the same time, and she unclipped her dosimeter, too, letting her long black hair fall around her shoulders. They walked toward their cars together, the sun still high in the western sky. Saskatoon was known as the sunshine capital of Canada—a city of light; just one of the reasons that it had beaten out London, Ontario, to be the home of the nation’s synchrotron-research facility.

  “Any plans for this evening?” Kayla asked Vic as they made their way across the asphalt.

  “Just a quiet night at home reading. You?”

  “After I pick up Ryan from my mom’s, just dinner and TV. Oh, and Skyping with Jim.”

  Vic looked at her. “How’s that going?”

  “Honestly? The whole greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number thing begins to irritate after a while. I mean, yeah, I get it, but . . .”

  “Yeah. But, you know, at least he walks the walk.”

  “Oh, yeah. He’s totally serious about it.”

  “For sure,” said Vic. “And the world would be a better place if everyone thought like him.”

  “True.”

  “But really,” Vic said, “the world would be a better place if everyone thought, period.”

  —

  Ever since my divorce—ever since I’d gone back to living alone—I had reverted a bit to my student ways. Not completely, of course: I liked craft beers; Kraft Dinner, not so much. But I did have a fondness for the convenience of microwave popcorn, and I heated up a bag. I took it over to the couch, positioned my laptop on top of the footstool to properly face me, and opened Skype. It was still two minutes until 8:00 P.M., our agreed-upon time to chat this particular night. Kayla was showing as offline. I idly looked at my other contacts: lawyer Juan Garcia was online, presumably in California; my ex Anna-Lee was online, too—and I wistfully imagined Virgil was playing somewhere near her. My little boy. I took a deep breath and let it out, a slow, sad exhalation.

  The clock in my taskbar changed to 8:00, with still no sign of Kayla; she normally had the scientist’s obsession with punctuality. I nibbled some popcorn, and checked Facebook and Twitter while I waited for her, but, when 8:10 rolled around, I was reaching to shut my laptop’s lid when I noticed her status change from offline to online. I selected “Video Call,” straightened up, listened to Skype’s jaunty ringing for a few seconds, and then, as often happened, I heard Kayla before I saw her.

  “Jim?” she said, sounding anxious. “Thank God you’re still online.”

  I began to say, “Are you—” when the picture finally popped in. At first it was dark—the background brighter than her—but then her webcam adjusted itself, and there she was, the left half of her face bloodied, red hair askew.

  “God!” I said, my heart suddenly thundering. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll be all right. Just scared to death.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “It’s crazy out there. I stopped at a traffic light, and punks swarmed in and started rocking my c
ar back and forth.”

  “Christ. Why?”

  “I don’t know. But they’re rioting here, too, just like Winnipeg last night.”

  “Over a hockey game?”

  “God knows,” she said. “I got away from them, but my car slammed into another vehicle. Somebody cut in front of me, trying to get away from some other assholes.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Look, I gotta get this cleaned up.” I thought she was going to terminate the call, but instead she said, “Here . . .” and the image went wild as she picked up her MacBook. I saw flashes of her walls and ceiling, and then, after a moment, she’d clearly perched the machine on her bathroom counter. I watched from the side and looking up as she leaned into the mirror and used a tan washcloth to daub a cut on her forehead; the cloth came away crimson.

  “Should you see a doctor?”

  “The tow-truck guy said if you’re ambulatory, they’re saying don’t come in tonight; they’re full in the emergency rooms right across the city.” She ran some water—sounding quite loud to me—then washed her face. “There,” she said. “Not too bad. No need for stitches.”

  “Let me see.”

  She moved closer to the camera and I had a look at the cut; she was right that it would probably heal on its own although the area around it had turned visibly more purple since she’d first logged on. “God,” I said. “I wish I was there.”

  She moved back. “So do I, baby.” She looked off camera, in the direction, I knew, of her bathroom’s little frosted window. “The night’s just begun, and I suspect we haven’t seen the worst of it yet.”

  —

  Kayla and I talked for a while longer, then she had to go comfort Ryan, who was distressed by what had become a constant background wailing of sirens and alarms punctuated by the sound of gunshots.