Quantum Night

46

Menno and I had briefly considered flying to Saskatoon, but trying to figure out how to get Pax there—finding a doggy crate, and so on—would have taken as much time as flying would have saved, and so all three of us clambered into my Mazda. After we’d been on the highway for a couple of hours, Menno surprised me by saying, “It really is a boring landscape, isn’t it?”

So much had been turned upside down in my world of late, I don’t think I’d have been surprised if he’d pulled off his dark glasses to reveal a perfectly normal pair of functioning baby blues.

“It is,” I said, “but, um, how can you tell?”

“The road. It’s perfectly flat. We haven’t gone up or down a hill for ages.”

Pax was in the back seat. I’d let her ride with her head sticking out the rear window, a common pleasure for dogs whose owners could drive but a rare treat, apparently, for her. After a while, though, she’d stretched out, her head on my side of the car, which was where the sun was pouring in.

Since we were planning to do it all without stopping for a meal, and so I could avoid the stretch of highway on which I’d previously been attacked, we were taking the Yellowhead Highway, bypassing Regina. As we came to the sign marking the provincial border, I announced, “We’re leaving Manitoba.”

Menno nodded. “Did you hear about that American couple? They got hopelessly lost, see? So they pull into a gas station, and the husband goes inside. ‘Where are we?’ he asks the man behind the cash desk. ‘Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,’ the man replies. The husband leaves, and, as he re-enters the car, his wife says, ‘So? What did he say?’ ‘I don’t know,’ the husband replies. ‘He didn’t speak English.’”

It was worth a smile at best, but I figured the polite thing to do was to make an audible laugh, and I did so. Satisfied, Menno turned in his seat as much as his bulk would allow, and he leaned his head against a scrunched-up sweater he’d placed against the side window. Soon enough I heard the guttural wheeze of his snoring. As we sped along, I wondered if he closed his eyes when he slept or if they just stared out, unmoving.

One disadvantage of the Yellowhead was that amenities were few and far between. But, just when my bladder was about to go supernova, a rest stop presented itself. Menno and I took turns in the outhouse, and Pax relieved herself on the grass. When we were back on the road again, I broached a difficult subject. “You know who lives in Saskatoon now?”

“Kayla Huron,” Menno replied. “You told me.”

“Not just Kayla,” I said. “Her brother, too. Travis.”

Very softly: “Oh.”

“Kayla finally told him the truth: that he’d been a Q2, and that he’d been knocked down into a coma by an external force, and then she’d managed to bring him out of it as a Q3.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, and—oh, you’ll like this—when Kayla said he’d been a quantum psychopath, Travis replied, ‘Well, I always knew I was a little bit crazy.’”

“What?” said Menno. Then, getting it: “Oh! Clever lad.”

“He is—although not so much a lad anymore. But she didn’t tell him what had caused him to lose consciousness, not specifically.”

“Good, good.” A pause. “How is he doing?”

“Better every day. Still mostly uses a motorized wheelchair, but the physio is going well. He’s back on normal food, and his jaw muscles are getting stronger. Got to eat a steak for the first time last week. Even I was cheering.”

“Ah, well, I’m… I’m glad he’s making progress.”

“Yeah.” I let another kilometer roll by, then: “Look, I know what you said about the prisoner’s dilemma, but…”

“But there’s a good chance I’m going to meet my maker soon, isn’t there?”

“Well… yeah. And so, you know, I was wondering, would you like to see Travis?” And, as soon as that awkward sentence was out, I began to kick myself for saying “see” to the man I’d blinded.

But Menno nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, if he’s willing. The Christian thing to do is ask forgiveness, and this is my last chance for that, isn’t it?”

And so we pulled over again, and I called Rebekkah’s house. She answered, and greeted me warmly; there was nothing to indicate that her daughter had yet told her that she’d broken up with me. I explained to Rebekkah that I was on my way to Saskatoon, accompanied by someone who had known Travis back in 2000 and early 2001, and asked if it would be all right if we stopped in to say hello? She took the cordless handset to Travis, I explained what was happening to him, and his exact words were, “No shit? Warkentin? Yeah, sure. Bring him by.”

We still had a long drive ahead of us—and the time had come, the Warkentin said, to talk of many things. He filled me in on the details of the Lucidity experiments, and I told him even more about what Kayla and Victoria had discovered about the quantum states of consciousness. But every hour, at the top of the clock, I put on the CBC for five minutes. As we were entering Saskatoon, the female newsreader grimly shared this: “Open hostilities now exist between Russia and the United States. The Russian submarine Petrozavodsk, in Canadian waters in the Beaufort Sea north of Tuktoyaktuk, this afternoon reportedly torpedoed and sank a US Navy destroyer, the USS Paul Hamilton, which had a crew complement of two hundred and eighty…”

After that, Menno and I drove the rest of the way in silence; I took him directly to Rebekkah’s house. It hadn’t dawned on me that Ryan might be there, too—but she was; Kayla had been stuck in traffic for hours, thanks to gridlock caused by yet more rioting. As we entered, Ryan squealed in delight at the sight of the German shepherd. “Oooh! What’s his name?”

“Her name,” said Menno. “Pax.”

Rebekkah, who was meticulous about her housekeeping, was scowling, and I realized I should have told her in advance that Menno would be accompanied by a dog.

“Can I pet her?” asked Ryan.

“She’s a very special dog,” Menno said. “She won’t be happy until she gets me to where I’m going. But when I’m settled in, I’ll take off her harness. That tells her she’s off-duty, and then, yes, she’d enjoy being petted.”

Ryan seemed fascinated by these revelations, but Rebekkah said, “It is getting on, and Travis still tires easily.”

There were three steps up to the main floor of Rebekkah’s house—the reason Travis hadn’t yet joined us. We climbed them, Ryan bounding ahead. A short corridor came off the living room, with a washroom on one side, and, on the other, what had once been Rebekkah’s graphics studio but had become Travis’s room.

“Give me a second with him,” I said. I went in on my own, closing the white-painted door behind me. “Travis,” I said, “Professor Warkentin is here. I just wanted to prepare you. He’s blind.”

He looked up at me. Solid food was doing wonders; his face had filled out since I’d last seen him.

“Oh,” he replied, his tone flat. But then he nodded. “Okay, send him in. There’s something I have to tell him.” He rolled his motorized chair half a meter forward and added, “Alone.”

The drama Travis had been hoping for wasn’t going to occur. He’d wanted a “Look at me!” moment; he’d wanted Menno’s jaw to drop in shock at what he’d reduced a once-great athlete to. But Menno just stood there, the mountain come to Mohammed.

“Hello, Professor,” Travis said.

“Please, call me Menno.”

Travis had his own agenda, but one thing he remembered from his Q2 days was to always let the other guy show his hand first. “Jim said you had something you wanted to say.”

“Yes.” Menno’s features worked, as if he were trying to come up with the right words, then, with a little shrug, he said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Well, see, you were knocked into a coma by an experiment that Dominic Adler and I were doing, and you—”

“I remember,” said Travis.

Menno tilted his head. “But Jim said you couldn’t recall the day we knocked you out.”

“I lied,” said Travis, and he gave a little shrug of his own, then operated the control to roll the wheelchair back a little. “Old habits die hard.”

“But—”

“It was kind of my first impulse for so long, you know? Are you up to speed on all this Q1-Q2-Q3 shit?”

“Yes.”

“And what did Jim tell you about me?”

“You started as a Q2, then rebooted as a Q3.”

“Yeah, exactly. And about himself?”

“He started as a Q3, and then rebooted the first time as a Q1.”

“Right, right. And has he told you about memories and stuff? The indexing schemes?”

Menno nodded.

“So, my sister explained it all to me. When Jim changed quantum states, he also changed indexing schemes: he went from verbal to visual. But I didn’t; adult Q2s and Q3s index memories verbally, unless they have a certain kind of autism, right? So, no change for me. I didn’t have any trouble remembering coming to your lab, putting on that damn helmet. I knew you were responsible.”

Astonishment was plain on Menno’s face. “Then why didn’t you tell Jim?”

“I’d just woken up. Playing things close to the vest had always served me well before; never let your opponent—and, man, I’d thought everyone was my opponent—know what you know.”

“Ah,” said Menno. He spread his arms. “Anyway, look, I’m old, I’m diabetic, I’m blind, and they’ve more or less put me out to pasture at the university. And, well, before I go, I just wanted to say I’m sorry—so, so sorry—for what I did to you. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. You have no idea how it’s eaten at me all these years. Not a day has gone by when it hasn’t haunted me; not an hour.”

Travis rotated his chair around so he could look out his window. He’d seen technological miracles aplenty since his revival, but from here, the view of the backyard—grass that needed mowing, powder-blue sky, petunias and portulacas, a weather-beaten picnic table—could have still been 2000, or 1950 for that matter. “I hate that,” he said softly.

Menno was standing just inside the doorway. “Hate that I’ve felt guilty?”

“No, no,” said Travis. “Not you. I hate having that feeling myself. Guilt. Remorse. Regrets. Second thoughts. Reliving things over and over again. Agonizing over the past. I hate it.” He looked at Menno. “You want absolution? Fine, sure, what the hell; you’ve got it. Fucking world looks like it’s about to come to an end anyway, right, so why the hell not?”