Quantum Night

31

The rioting continued for hours. Fire trucks and ambulances were stymied by overturned cars and barricades made of whatever torn-down fences, garbage cans, recycling bins, loose lumber, and other junk people had pushed into the middle of the roads.

I had a plan that I hoped would get us to a safe haven, which started with having us backtrack along Main Street to Lombard Avenue. On the way, we saw another car being flipped, and three more that already had been. A pair of red Canada Post mailboxes had been knocked over, and one of them had spilled its contents onto the sidewalk. The building on our left had five large square ground-floor windows in a row, and Heather and I watched as a guy used a crowbar to smash each of them in turn, a perfect bingo of destruction.

We exited Lombard at Waterfront Drive by a railway bridge that crossed the hundred-meter width of the Red River. I’d hoped we could clamber up and get over to the residential neighborhood on the east side, but there were already a bunch of people on the tracks, the safety fencing having been torn down. And so, instead, Heather and I headed south along Waterfront Drive, the trees of Stephen Juba Park between us and the river on our left and the deserted Shaw Park baseball stadium on our right. The air was thick with smoke—some of it burning wood, some of it marijuana. We continued cautiously forward. Several of the streetlights high atop their standards looked like they’d been shot out with rifles.

Two young punks came at us from out of the row of trees, each brandishing a two-by-four. I couldn’t make out their faces in the darkness, but it was clear we were going to be attacked when one of them said, “Holy shit! It’s Professor Marchuk!” They turned and hightailed it into the night.

My heart was pounding, and Heather looked scared to death as we continued cautiously along. One drunken guy lying in the grass waved a knife at us and called out in slurred voice, “Come here, asshole! I’ll cut your balls off!”

There was no way to make it the ten kilometers to my home on foot with Heather in high heels, and there was too much broken glass now for her to continue to go shoeless. But looming ahead to the south was the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, now just a few hundred meters away.

We pushed forward, but if there was rioting in the Exchange District, there was rioting in The Forks, as well; I could hear a roar coming from that direction, and flames were licking up from just about exactly where I’d taken Kayla to dinner not that long ago.

Heather and I hurried along. We passed close to two guys involved in a knife fight—reminding me of that night all those years ago, except—

Except that night was just my imagination; this one was real—and so much worse. There was a scream from behind us as we pushed ahead, followed by someone growling, “That’ll teach you!”

Finally, we made it to the long, roofless, stone tunnel leading to the museum’s entrance. I pulled out my phone and scrolled until I found the number for the security desk, which I’d called occasionally in the past for after-hours access.

“CMHR Security,” said a man’s voice.

“Hello. This is James Marchuk. I’m on the Board of—”

“Oh, hi, Dr. Marchuk. This is Abdul.”

“Abdul, thank God! I’m just outside the main entrance to the museum; it’s crazy out here. Can you let me and my sister in?”

“Oh, my, yes—two secs,” he said, clicking off. We waited anxiously; it was more like two minutes than two seconds, and felt like two hours. At last, Abdul opened the farthest left of the four glass doors, and Heather and I scurried inside; the guard locked the door immediately behind us. “We’ve got three calls in to WPS for support,” Abdul said. “They’re trashing the grounds on the south side. The Gandhi statue has been toppled. It won’t be safe to leave again tonight.”

“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: an 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.