Quantum Night

41

When Kayla joined us, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, and with a towel wrapped around her head, I filled her in on what was happening, starting with the call between the president and the prime minister.

“Carroway,” she said, as if naming a bacillus. “The guy’s got to be a psychopath.”

“I imagine so,” I agreed.

“And, for that matter,” said Kayla, “Governor McCharles, too. I’d love to get those guys down on the beamline, prove the truth about them to the world.” An idea blossomed on her face. “Say, what about your microsaccades technique? Can’t you do it on them?”

“I doubt they’re going to volunteer to put on my goggles.”

“No, no, but you said you could do it with film, right?”

At some point, I’d told Kayla the same story I’d told my sister Heather about analyzing Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter. “Yeah,” I said, “but The Silence of the Lambs was a special case—a sustained close-up shot of the character staring directly into the camera, and I could get it at 4K resolution.” I shook my head. “It’s the same problem with the videos Menno made of me in 2001. I’d love to try my test on that VHS tape, confirm that I was a Q1 even during the final interview—prove it was paralimbic damage not quantum psychopathy—but the footage isn’t nearly high-enough resolution, and, besides, they’re kind of side views; no way to visually check for microsaccades.”

“Hell,” said Kayla, “the president of the United States has to be one of the most-photographed people in the world. There must be existing footage of him that’s sufficiently high-resolution.”

“Sure. The Sunday-morning political shows—Stephanopoulos, Meet the Press—are all done in 4K now, but they keep cutting away. One, two, three, cut; one, two, three, cut. Even when he’s talking, they keep going to a reaction shot.”

“Don’t those programs have the footage they didn’t broadcast?”

I’d made a few dozen TV appearances over the years. “Not normally; those sorts of interviews are done live-to-air or live-to-tape: the director switches between cameras as the interview is being conducted, and only the image from the selected camera is actually broadcast or recorded.”

“What about press conferences, like that one you just saw?”

“They’d be good, but, again, he has to keep looking at the same thing, and I doubt he does.”

“How much footage do you need?”

“Well, if he’s not a psychopath, it should be obvious after three or four seconds—but to prove that he is? I’d really like ten uninterrupted seconds.”

“Ten seconds with no blinking?”

“Blinks are fine, but he needs to be looking at the same thing for all ten seconds, and without his cooperation, that’s going to be hard to get.”

“Maybe,” said Kayla. “Maybe not. He makes tons of public appearances. And lots of people have great cameras these days. Find the next rally he’s at and ask online for someone to get high-res video, focusing on his eyes.”

“Who would do that?”

“Tons of people. Your technique is public knowledge now—”

“No, it isn’t. I mean, the goggles are public knowledge, after the Becker trial, but the fact that you can also do the test with high-resolution footage? I’ve kept that under wraps.”

“Why?” asked Kayla.

Why, indeed? Besides just a concern for people’s privacy, there were two main answers. First, just as Menno had felt it better to hide that most of humanity lacked inner lives, I’d worried that if untrained individuals started trying to apply my test, the inevitable incorrect diagnoses from those who simply failed to detect microsaccades that were actually there would ruin relationships and careers, and maybe even lead to vigilante justice. As I’d told Heather, Bob Hare had voiced similar concerns in 2011 when Jon Ronson had published his pop-sci book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, which described the PCL-R and suggested laypeople could make correct assessments.

And the other reason? Economics. Hare made royalties off the PCL-R, the complete kit for which sold for $439; I—and, just as importantly, my university, which held the patents—stood to make a lot more money licensing Marchuk Goggles than we did from a technique anyone could apply.

I explained this in a few words; Kayla got it instantly. “Still,” she said, “there have to be people out there who either have, or can get, the footage you need.”

The doorbell rang; Victoria had arrived. Ryan announced that today was a perfect day to watch Minions III for, by my guess, the thousandth time—that would keep her occupied, and a Google scavenger hunt would keep me busy while the physicists worked.

And, at last, I found what I wanted. I’d had no idea there were websites devoted to whether famous people had had plastic surgery, but in fact there are lots of them. Few performers publicly admitted to a facelift or boob job, and that had given rise to an online industry of minutely analyzing supposedly before-and-after photos and having commentators of varying degrees of expertise hazard opinions about what work might have been done. On a site arguing that Quinton Carroway had had an eyelift—I didn’t even know that was a thing—there was a very-high-resolution still frame of his face with a caption saying it was taken from some pirated footage checking the president’s makeup before a recent speech. I dropped a note to the site’s proprietor, asking if the actual video was online somewhere, and, to my surprise, ten minutes later he’d replied with a BitTorrent link to a solid minute of 4K video of an extreme close-up of the president. I checked on Ryan while it downloaded to my laptop, then stuck my head into Kayla’s office.

“No, no, no,” Kayla was saying, “surely the Hamiltonian at t-prime is going to be at least as big as it was at t.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but I’ve got some good footage of Carroway, and I’m about to run my analysis. Want to see?”

They rose, and we headed back to the dining-room table upon which my laptop was resting. The footage was still loading frame by frame into the software.

I’d become quite attuned to eye color while doing my research on microsaccades. Anthony Hopkins has pale blue-gray eyes; Jodie Foster’s are a more gunmetal blue—although, for some reason, they’re shown as brown on the poster for The Silence of the Lambs, which depicts her with a death’s-head hawkmoth covering her mouth. It’s easy to pick out the pupil against blue or green eyes; it’s a lot harder to track it against brown ones—which is what President Carroway had—and I preferred to track the actual pupil than the iris. But fiddling with the brightness and contrast settings let me get a good-enough lock, and I hit the play button. “Okay, here we go.”

One second. Two. Three. Four. “Damn.” His gaze darted to the left.

One. Two. “Shit.” He tipped his whole head down.

One. Two. Three. His hand came up to rub his left eye.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Sev—nope, turning, as someone called to him.

One. Two. “Crap.” He looked off to the right.

One. Two. Three. Four. “Oh, for the love of Pete!” Some clown had walked in front of the camera.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. “Yes!” Seven. Eight! “Yes!” Nine! “Yes, yes!” Ten!

“So?” said Victoria anxiously. “Is he or isn’t he?”

“Just a sec,” I said, switching over to the pupillary-deviation graph. Nothing greater than one minute of arc—the kind of jiggle caused by the body’s own pulsing blood; microsaccades were at least two arc minutes and could range up to a hundred and twenty.

“Bingo,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “There’s no doubt about it: the president of the United States is a psychopath.”

Starting late in our afternoon, there were reports of riots in Cologne, Rome, and Budapest, and that night, there was more rioting all across Canada, but, thankfully, no more along Kayla’s tree-lined street—although border cities such as Seattle, Detroit, and Buffalo were showing signs of similar lawlessness.

“I don’t get it,” Kayla said, sitting next to me on her living-room couch after we turned off the news. “What’s the trigger?”

I shook my head. “There isn’t one.”

“But the rioting is spreading.”

“And so are fashion styles, and Internet memes, and conspiracy theories, as always. And Boko Haram is conducting raids, like every day, and antisemitism is expanding like a poison puddle across Europe again. And idealistic kids are being radicalized, like every other day. And people are joining cults and reading their horoscopes, like every other damn day. Wars are raging in the Middle East and Africa, as usual; climate change is being ignored, evolution denied, sexism and racism perpetuated, all as per usual. Sure, most memes that take hold are reasonably benign, but malignant ones can spread just as easily, whether you call them the KKK or National Socialism or the Troubles in Northern Ireland or a decade or more of missing and murdered Native women in Canada.”

“But something must have caused them to spread.”

“Sure, but it was doubtless something small. Losing a hockey game in Winnipeg; other picayune catalysts elsewhere. You don’t need a complex explanation—some particle-physics or neuroscience mumbo jumbo—for something that’s happened over and over and over again throughout history.” I glanced down at the spot where her blouse was concealing her tattoo. “Butterflies don’t just symbolize metamorphosis; they symbolize small changes having big effects.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

She leaned in and kissed me, then went off to put Ryan to bed. When we retired for the evening, Kayla fell asleep before I did, and I lay in the dark, listening to the susurration of her breath, waves lapping a beach.

It should have come as no particular surprise, I supposed, that President Carroway was a psychopath. Such people were ideally suited to politics, each one a heaping plateful of traits selected from a smorgasbord that included pathological lying, charisma, glibness, skillful manipulation, and promiscuity—literally and figuratively getting into bed with whoever served the needs of the moment. Working my way through the presidents I knew anything about, I suspected several others had also been psychopaths, including some Democrats (surely Lyndon Johnson and almost as certainly Bill Clinton) and some Republicans (doubtless Richard Nixon and maybe George W. Bush, although I’d go even money that Dubya was a p-zed in the thrall of Dick Cheney).

But holding suspicions and actually knowing were two different things. And as I lay there, a sickle moon hanging low out the window, I wondered what the Leader of the Free World was going to do next.