Quantum Night

20

“Anna-Lee, Jim, thanks so much for coming in,” Dr. Villager had said—three years ago now, I guess it was.

“Sure,” I replied, taking the left-hand seat facing her desk, and, “Of course,” said Anna-Lee, settling into the right-hand one.

“I have some news,” Villager said. Anna-Lee must have heard something in the doctor’s voice; she reached over and took my hand, squeezing it. “As you know, I always recommend amniocentesis for women over thirty-five, purely as a precaution. And, well, there’s good reason for that. The risk of certain anomalies goes up dramatically after that point.”

“My God…” Anna-Lee’s voice was almost inaudible.

Dr. Villager nodded. “The fetus has Down syndrome.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, knowing, of course, that she must be.

“Yes, absolutely. He—it’s a boy—has three chromosome twenty-ones. The provincial health plan will pay for an abortion if you wish.”

“My God,” said Anna-Lee, again. “My God.”

“You don’t have to decide today,” Dr. Villager said. “But you should decide soon.”

Anna-Lee and I were lying in bed, side by side, each of us on our backs, each staring up in the dark at the featureless ceiling. “Sweetheart,” I said, “we talked about all this before you took the test.”

I was hoping for a verbal acknowledgment, or, at least, the rustling of the pillow to indicate that she was nodding in agreement. But there was nothing.

“I mean,” I continued, “since we’re only planning on having one child, we need to consider whether this child is the best use of our resources, right? There’ll be enormous extra expenses, and, no matter what we do, the child will almost certainly have a life not only of lesser quality but also lesser quantity; people with Down rarely live past their twenties.”

She was immobile, a toppled statue.

“And, well, you know the utilitarian position: one can’t give special consideration to one’s own needs; you can’t put them above those of others. But you can factor them in as you would anyone else’s. This isn’t the life we wanted. Yes, sure, parenting is always a full-time job, anyway, but this will leave no room for anything else. And the economic impact…”

I trailed off, wishing she’d give some sign—any sign—that I was getting through to her.

“That’s our son you’re talking about,” she said at last.

I blew out air. “An embryo has no—”

“Please,” said Anna-Lee firmly.

But I pressed on. “An embryo has no more moral standing than what we’d give to an animal with a similar level of self-consciousness, rationality, ability to feel, and so on. The utilitarian position—”

“Fuck utilitarianism,” she said, and rolled onto her side facing away from me.

I rolled onto my side, too, wanting to spoon her, but I knew enough not to reach out and touch her just then. With my ear pressed against the pillow, I could faintly hear my heartbeat.

Or—

No, no. Of course it was my own heartbeat. Who else’s could it have been?

I was there in the delivery room when Virgil came out into the world. He was quiet; even after Dr. Villager slapped him gently on the bottom, he made no sound. I’d hoped, against all logic, to see a normal child, but even with his features squished and wet, it was obvious the prenatal diagnosis had been correct. Virgil’s face was flat, and his tongue protruded slightly. Dr. Villager handed him to Anna-Lee, who still had tears on her face from the pain of delivery, but her expression was joyous as she held the boy—until she looked up at me. Although I was doing my level best, her gaze went cold.

They kept Virgil and Anna-Lee at the hospital for four days after his birth; apparently there was a whole suite of things that could go wrong early on for a Down child—respiratory problems, difficulties suckling, and more. I spent as much time as I could at the hospital; Anna-Lee’s mother was there during those visiting hours when I couldn’t be.

When they were finally ready to discharge Virgil, I came to take him and Anna-Lee home. I went into the familiar hospital room, with its pale-yellow walls; my faculty health plan covered the extra cost of the private room. I was surprised to find my mother-in-law there, too, standing silently next to the bed.

“I’m not coming home,” Anna-Lee said the moment I entered. Virgil was sleeping on her chest.

“But Dr. Villager said—”

“I’m leaving here,” Anna-Lee said, “but Virgil and I are going to stay with my parents.”

I was silent for a time, digesting this. “May I ask why?”

“I never want Virgil to see that look in your eyes.”

“What look?”

“The look that says you wish he’d never been born.”

“Anna-Lee, please…”

“It’s true, isn’t it? That’s how you feel.”

I opened my mouth but couldn’t find any words.

Anna-Lee held our baby tightly and shook her head. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jim.”

I shook my head, dispelling the memories, and turned back to face Kayla, in her living room, in the here and now—and I quickly sought to move the conversation on from the topic of children. “Are these of Travis?” I said, getting up to look at a cluster of photos in little frames on one of her bookshelves. I could see the family resemblance to Kayla: they both had high cheekbones, generous noses, and perfectly vertical foreheads.

She moved in to stand next to me. “Yup.”

He was wearing a brown-and-yellow University of Manitoba T-shirt in one of the shots. “He went to U of M, too?”

“Yeah. Business school. He was quite an athlete—great runner, but also did snowboarding, motocross, and more.” She pointed at another picture. “That’s him finishing the Boston Marathon.”

“What year was that?”

She picked up the frame, flipped it over, and looked at what had been written on the backside. “Two thousand,” she said. “‘The Millennial Marathon.’” I was about to say, “Actually…” but she beat me to it: “Of course, not really—but that’s what they called it.” But then her voice grew wistful. “Last time he ever got to run it.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He’s been in his coma since 2001.”

My heart skipped a beat. “What date?”

“I don’t remember. Sometime before you and I started dating, though.”

“Which was the beginning of March, so, if you’re sure it was 2001, then that means January or February.”

“I guess.”

“You’d said they found him passed out. Where?”

“In a classroom.”

“On the U of M campus?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you know which building?”

“No. Why?”

“Was he by any chance a subject in Professor Warkentin’s experiments?”

“I have no idea.”

“Jesus.” I moved back to the couch and collapsed onto it.

“Jim? What’s wrong?”

“Menno Warkentin told me something a little while ago. He said he felt so guilty about what happened to me, he… well, he tried to kill himself, he said. It didn’t work out; he crashed his car, and ended up blind—”

“My God! Really?”

“That’s what he said. But, when you think about it, what had happened to me? According to a reading he saw on his oscilloscope, I’d lost my inner voice. But, externally, my behavior was pretty much the same as before—so that’s an awfully abstract thing to feel suicidally despondent over, even for a psychologist. And, yeah, he’d tried to fix what had gone wrong, using lasers, but that only made it worse, causing my time of… of bad behavior. But what if I wasn’t the only one who’d fainted because of Menno’s equipment? What if an athletic business student had passed out, too, and he had never recovered? That would weigh on you, month after month, if the guy never woke up, if his life had been totally ruined because of you.”

“Holy shit,” said Kayla.

“Exactly,” I said. “Holy shit.”

“What do we do now?”

“I took photographs of his paper files about his project. Let’s look through those and see if any of them mention your brother.”

We transferred the photos from my iPhone to her MacBook so that we could study them on a bigger screen, but there was no mention of Travis—or a subject TH.

“Do we confront Warkentin?” asked Kayla.

“Well, we could—but if he denies having anything to do with Travis, we’ll have tipped him off, and he could dispose of any other records that might prove it. Perhaps we should bide our time.”

Kayla thought about this, then nodded. “I’m good at that.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. A skill I learned from my brother.”

We stayed up awhile longer, but although I’d napped in the afternoon, Kayla was tired. Trying not to be presumptuous, I asked if she perhaps had a blanket for the couch; it had gotten chilly last night. She stood up, turned, faced me, held out her hand, and said, “Don’t be silly.”

We headed upstairs, got naked, and cuddled pleasantly for a while, and then separated slightly; she fell asleep before me, I think, but it wasn’t long until I nodded off, too, until—

Until I suddenly sat straight up in bed, gasping for breath.

“Jim?” I was disoriented, and the woman’s voice startled me; it took me a moment to realize who it was. She shifted in the bed, and I felt her hand on my back. “My God,” she said. “You’re shaking like a leaf.”

I was also sweating, the sheets damp beneath my thighs. In the darkness I couldn’t see anything except two red LEDs, glowing like a demon’s eyes.

I hadn’t had this nightmare for weeks, but it had been the same as it always was. Me in a rage, lashing out, holding a wooden torch—but, bizarrely, the flames were dark and frozen—while in front of me stood a demon, a monster, a thing that had to be stopped, that had to be punished…

I brought one of my hands to the center of my chest, feeling the pounding of my heart.

“Sorry,” I said. “Bad dream.”

“It’s okay,” Kayla replied softly as she lay back and gently pulled me down toward her, holding me. From this angle, I could no longer see the LED eyes; there was nothing but blackness.