Quantum Night

30

In high-school physics—my last exposure to that discipline prior to reconnecting with Kayla—everyone gets to see the famous 1940 film of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a suspension bridge more than a mile long over Puget Sound. In the film, the bridge starts swaying left and right in the wind, and the pavement undulates from side to side, rising and falling to breathtaking degrees, before the bridge finally breaks apart, its midsection crashing into the water far below. Every student watching that film is stunned—it looks so unreal, so impossible, you think it can’t possibly be true, that nothing like that could ever happen in real life.

There’s a similarly shocking film I sometimes show my students. Like the one of Galloping Gertie—the nickname given to that bridge—this one is old. It shows a man—a business executive, as the news stories later revealed, standing on a ledge high up the side of an office building. He’s clearly despondent, clearly distressed, but someone—a tourist with a movie camera below—has caught sight of him. Soon, others note the man as well, and, as we can see when the tourist briefly tilts his lens down, quite a sizable crowd develops, all gawking up at the man.

And then a male voice rings out—the camera, aimed back up at the poor soul high above, doesn’t show whose—cutting loose a single affricative syllable: “Jump!”

The man on the ledge is startled, and, briefly, there’s a ripple of disapproving tut-tuts on the soundtrack, but then another male voice is heard: “Jump!” And a woman joins the chorus: “Jump!” And soon, the cry is going up throughout the crowd. “Jump!” “Jump!” “Jump!”

At last the poor fellow does indeed do what the crowd is bidding, more or less. He doesn’t jump, but he does use the flats of his hands to push himself against the window behind him, and falls in a manner so similar to Don Draper’s plunge on the opening credits of Mad Men that I’ve often wondered if the animators used this film as a source. The tourist dutifully records its all, including the impact on the pavement far below, the man hitting so hard that he actually bounces back up and then crashes down again, dead.

When I run the film in class, I usually stop with the man pushing off—no need to show the horror of a person actually dying, and, besides, I want the students to concentrate on the other horror: the reality that a group of strangers, come together purely by the happenstance of their individual wanderings, can suddenly exhibit conscienceless behavior that few if any of its members would display in isolation.

These days, office windows don’t open, there are no ledges to step out on, and even the replacement Tacoma Narrows Bridge has suicide netting, and so there aren’t as many smartphone videos of crowds urging someone to leap to their death as you might image. But similar things—one asshole starting something and it propagating like a contagion through a population—still happen. They happen all the time.

When I’d been in high school, they’d taught us that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had collapsed due to resonance between high winds that matched the bridge’s natural structural frequency. But that was wrong—a dated interpretation, even then. It turns out, as I learned years later, that the real cause was a completely different phenomenon, something called aeroelastic flutter. The old explanation, which seemed to make a kind of sense, was factually inaccurate.

And when I’d first seen that film of the suicidal jumper, all those years ago, my prof had said it was an example of deindividuation, the loss of self into a crowd.

But that, too, was wrong; that, too, was a dated interpretation, proceeding from the false assumption that there was a self to lose.

I’d known for months that Heather would be in town tonight. Gustav would never let her take a pleasure trip on her own, but even he understood that her business—the business that kept him in sports cars and fine liqueurs—required her to travel now and then; she was staying at my place.

There was a play I’d been dying to see at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre called Shocking, a fictionalized account of the life of Stanley Milgram; it was having a trial run here before moving to Broadway next year for the sixtieth anniversary of Milgram’s infamous obedience-to-authority experiments.

I’d bought the tickets long before any Winnipeggers seriously thought the Jets might make it to the Stanley Cup—but, astonishingly, they had, and, as luck would have it, the night Heather and I were going to the play was also the night of the final game between them and the New Jersey Devils at the MTS Centre, just a kilometer west of the John Hirsch Mainstage. Parking downtown was out of the question: thousands who weren’t inside the arena had come out to watch the game in bars and restaurants nearby; we took a bus to the Exchange District and walked through the warm June evening to the theater. Out front were bronze statues of the theater’s founders—made, I suppose, in a founder foundry. The one of Hirsch was wearing glasses; I always thought that looked odd on a statue.

The program booklet had a reproduction of the “Public Announcement” Milgram had used to recruit test subjects from the New Haven community, offering “$4.00 for one hour of your time” for what he’d presented as a “study of memory.” Milgram had been just twenty-seven when he’d started his experiments; the dapper fellow with the salt-and-pepper hair and full beard shown in psychology textbooks was Milgram-as-elder-statesman, not the haunted young man trying to make sense of the Eichmann trial and what Hannah Arendt would soon dub “the banality of evil”—the seeming ease with which average people could be made to slide into doing cruel things.

The actor who portrayed Milgram was a little old for the portions of the story set in 1961 but was quite compelling, and the reconstructions of Milgram’s shock machine and lab were spot-on. The psychologist in me wanted to quibble with a couple of things—the playwright had relied too heavily on Gina Perry’s 2013 book about Milgram’s work, which I’d found unconvincing—but the theatergoer was thoroughly entertained, and Heather had sat rapt, absolutely motionless, throughout the entire performance.

As my sister and I headed out of the theater, I would have loved to have been able to tell her about the reality of p-zeds. The ability of Milgram and his assistants, as authority figures, to get subjects to administer what they thought were increasingly severe—and even life-threatening—electric shocks despite the protests and eventual screams of the recipients had confounded social-science researchers for six decades. Most of Milgram’s subjects, although paying lip service to having qualms, kept ramping up the voltage again and again; his success rate was exactly what you’d expect if sixty percent of the human race were mindless zombies with a large dose of heartless psychopaths on top.

I didn’t say any of that to Heather, though. Still, as we passed the statues again, I asked, “What did you think of the play?” It was getting on to 11:00 P.M., and the air had grown chilly.

“It was good,” Heather replied.

“That all? Just good?”

She paused as if thinking, then: “Yeah.”

We headed south, the Red River a long block to our left. Rounding a corner, I heard a great commotion up ahead: people shouting and yelling, and, within seconds, multiple car alarms, and the jangle of shattering glass.

“What the hell?” said Heather.

I pulled out my phone, clicked on the CBC app. The first headline said it all: “Jets Crash 5 to 4 in Sudden-Death Overtime.”

“Christ,” I said as what I assumed were store alarms started wailing—followed shortly thereafter by two white police cars barreling past us from behind, their roof lights on.

“We better turn back,” I said, but within seconds, I could hear rioters behind us, as well. “Come on!” I shouted, pointing down a side street that looked empty. We started to run, but Heather, now in stocking feet after removing her high heels, couldn’t keep up with me. I slowed down but quickly realized the mistake I’d made. The buildings on either side of us were mostly dark, but up ahead, where this street crossed another, I could see a mob running east, and, in rapid succession, I heard three more windows shatter and a trio of new alarms joining the cacophony.

To our left, smoke was billowing up above the dark silhouette of a four-story office building. There was a narrow, litter-strewn alleyway between two of the buildings here, and we headed down it. We’d probably be safe simply hiding, and I was all for that, but, incredibly, Heather urged me to keep going. “Come on!” she said. “Let’s see!”

The whoomp-whoomp-whoomp of a helicopter caused me to look briefly up—and in that moment, Heather took off down the alley, heading toward the roaring crowd.

I followed, soon catching up with her. We emerged from the alleyway less than twenty meters from five muscular guys, all in Winnipeg Jets hoodies, flipping a red Hyundai Elantra onto its roof; its alarm was wailing. Heather stopped dead, and I have to confess I did, too; you hear about things like that on TV, but to actually see it was something else. The windshield shattered as the car’s canopy collapsed under the vehicle’s weight. The guys looked at their handiwork, and one of them shouted, “Fuck the Devils!” The others soon took up the cry, raising clenched fists to the black sky, and, to my astonishment, my own sister followed suit, hollering, “Fuck the Devils!”

It wasn’t “Jump! Jump! Jump!”—but it was spreading.

“Heather!” I shouted. “For God’s sake!”

The band moved on, and instead of going in the opposite direction, Heather started following them.

The alignment rule: pick a heading for yourself that’s an average of everyone else’s trajectories.

“Heather! Are you nuts?” I set off after her. The five hoods came to a halt, and so did my sister, giving them space.

The separation rule: avoid crowding your neighbors.

She turned and faced me. “Come on, Jim. You only live once.”

The punks were trying to roll another car, but either they were running out of alcohol-fueled steam, or it was heavier than a Hyundai, because they weren’t managing to get it elevated past the tipping point.

Beyond them, a fire was burning brightly: another person’s car had been set ablaze. And someone else was throwing things at a storefront, trying to get the glass to shatter—

—which, at last, it did, the sound a sharp counterpoint to all the other noises rising up about us.

Heather tipped her head down, and I thought she was averting her gaze from the carnage, but then I realized she was looking around for something she herself could hurl through a window.

I surged in, took her by the elbow, swung her around, and pulled her along with me back into the relative safety of the alleyway.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “there are security cameras everywhere, and you’re a fucking officer of the court.”

She looked pissed for a moment, then nodded and lifted her shoulders. “Yeah, I guess.”

The rioting was likely to last all night. Winnipeg had never had something like this before, but Vancouver had—twice—and other cities all over the globe had seen this sort of hooliganism in the past, although more often, in fact, in the winning team’s hometown than in the loser’s.

I could smell smoke now, and the background of shouts and sirens, of alarms and things shattering, continued.

I stared at my sister. Christ, could it be? The whole point of philosopher’s zombies is that, at least most of the time, there’s no way to tell one from someone who is thinking on a conscious level. And, damn it all, the revelation of their existence had been so easy to accept in the abstract—six out of every ten humans lacking an inner life. But my own sister?

I continued to look at her, and she looked back at me, and I tried to fathom what, if anything, was going on behind those brown eyes of hers, as the mob surged and roared through the city I called home. I pulled Heather close, hugging her in a way I hadn’t for decades, keeping her warm and safe against the flickering flames. My eyes stung—but surely it was from the smoke. Sirens blared from all directions, and we waited, my sister and I, together and yet oh-so-apart.