Quantum Night (23 page)

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.

H
EATHER
had an afternoon of business meetings—the reason Gustav had allowed her trip out here—and when they were done, I met her for a final cup of coffee, then drove her out to the airport. I could have just dropped her at the curb, but instead I parked and helped her in with her luggage. My sister had always been one to overpack. I used to think that was because she was contemplating myriad possible scenarios at her destination; now I wondered if it was simply that she quite literally couldn’t make up her mind about what to bring and what to leave behind.

Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport has an awful lot of syllables in its name for what is in fact a fairly small facility. After I’d hugged my sister goodbye and she’d headed through security, I found myself looking wistfully at the departure board, listing both a WestJet and an Air Canada flight to Saskatoon this evening. But I’d have to content myself with Skype.

We ivory-tower types usually get to avoid rush-hour traffic, but tonight I had to endure it: the hundreds of thousands of cars that moved about each day ebbing and flowing like tides. Some of the drivers were on autopilot only for this boring routine, but for most, this part of the
day was no different than any other—just moving with the flock, following the programming, doing what everybody else was doing.

I’d missed both breakfast and lunch, so I went through the drive-through at McDonald’s—billions and billions served—and got fries and a salad, then continued the slow slog back to my home, only occasionally glancing out my side window at the mess still being cleaned up from last night.

When I at last pulled into my parking lot, I walked up the grassy hillock to see where all the action had taken place this afternoon, but everyone was gone without a trace, and the whole awful thing would soon be forgotten, just another statistic.

Once I got back into my apartment, I checked my email. There was one from Bhavesh Namboothiri:

Sorry, Jim! I know we have an appointment tomorrow, but my home was vandalized pretty badly last night—some of the rioters don’t just hate the Devils, I guess. I’ll be in touch when I’m able to resume our sessions.

I went and lay down on my bed. I felt sorry for poor Namboothiri, but I wasn’t too upset that we had to postpone. I was having a hard-enough time facing the present just now; I wasn’t sure I was up for horrors from my past.

—

A little after 5:00
P.M.
, Kayla Huron removed her dosimeter and put it on the rack by CLS’s glass-fronted entrance. Victoria Chen was heading out at the same time, and she unclipped her dosimeter, too, letting her long black hair fall around her shoulders. They walked toward their cars together, the sun still high in the western sky. Saskatoon was known as the sunshine capital of Canada—a city of light; just one of the reasons that it had beaten out London, Ontario, to be the home of the nation’s synchrotron-research facility.

“Any plans for this evening?” Kayla asked Vic as they made their way across the asphalt.

“Just a quiet night at home reading. You?”

“After I pick up Ryan from my mom’s, just dinner and TV. Oh, and Skyping with Jim.”

Vic looked at her. “How’s that going?”

“Honestly? The whole greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number thing begins to irritate after a while. I mean, yeah, I
get
it, but . . .”

“Yeah. But, you know, at least he walks the walk.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s totally serious about it.”

“For sure,” said Vic. “And the world
would
be a better place if everyone thought like him.”

“True.”

“But really,” Vic said, “the world would be a better place if everyone thought,
period.”

—

Ever since my divorce—ever since I’d gone back to living alone—I had reverted a bit to my student ways. Not completely, of course: I liked craft beers; Kraft Dinner, not so much. But I did have a fondness for the convenience of microwave popcorn, and I heated up a bag. I took it over to the couch, positioned my laptop on top of the footstool to properly face me, and opened Skype. It was still two minutes until 8:00
P.M.
, our agreed-upon time to chat this particular night. Kayla was showing as offline. I idly looked at my other contacts: lawyer Juan Garcia was online, presumably in California; my ex Anna-Lee was online, too—and I wistfully imagined Virgil was playing somewhere near her. My little boy. I took a deep breath and let it out, a slow, sad exhalation.

The clock in my taskbar changed to 8:00, with still no sign of Kayla; she normally had the scientist’s obsession with punctuality. I nibbled some popcorn, and checked Facebook and Twitter while I waited for her, but, when 8:10 rolled around, I was reaching to shut my laptop’s lid when I noticed her status change from offline to online. I selected “Video Call,” straightened up, listened to Skype’s jaunty ringing for a few seconds, and then, as often happened, I heard Kayla before I saw her.

“Jim?” she said, sounding anxious. “Thank God you’re still online.”

I began to say, “Are you—” when the picture finally popped in. At
first it was dark—the background brighter than her—but then her webcam adjusted itself, and there she was, the left half of her face bloodied, red hair askew.

“God!” I said, my heart suddenly thundering. “What happened? Are you okay?”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll be all right. Just scared to death.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“It’s crazy out there. I stopped at a traffic light, and punks swarmed in and started rocking my car back and forth.”

“Christ. Why?”

“I don’t know. But they’re rioting here, too, just like Winnipeg last night.”

“Over a hockey game?”

“God knows,” she said. “I got away from them, but my car slammed into another vehicle. Somebody cut in front of me, trying to get away from some other assholes.”

“Holy shit.”

“Look, I gotta get this cleaned up.” I thought she was going to terminate the call, but instead she said, “Here . . .” and the image went wild as she picked up her MacBook. I saw flashes of her walls and ceiling, and then, after a moment, she’d clearly perched the machine on her bathroom counter. I watched from the side and looking up as she leaned into the mirror and used a tan washcloth to daub a cut on her forehead; the cloth came away crimson.

“Should you see a doctor?”

“The tow-truck guy said if you’re ambulatory, they’re saying don’t come in tonight; they’re full in the emergency rooms right across the city.” She ran some water—sounding quite loud to me—then washed her face. “There,” she said. “Not too bad. No need for stitches.”

“Let me see.”

She moved closer to the camera and I had a look at the cut; she was right that it would probably heal on its own although the area around it had turned visibly more purple since she’d first logged on. “God,” I said. “I wish I was there.”

She moved back. “So do I, baby.” She looked off camera, in the direction, I knew, of her bathroom’s little frosted window. “The night’s just begun, and I suspect we haven’t seen the worst of it yet.”

—

Kayla and I talked for a while longer, then she had to go comfort Ryan, who was distressed by what had become a constant background wailing of sirens and alarms punctuated by the sound of gunshots.

I didn’t hear anything untoward in my own neighborhood that night, and so I wasn’t aware until I turned on the TV that rioting was going on again in downtown Winnipeg as well as in Saskatoon, and, as I saw unfolding on the screen, in Vancouver and Edmonton and Toronto and Montreal, too. Although in some of the footage you could see people making halfhearted attempts to pretend this was still about hockey—wearing jerseys, brandishing sticks like clubs—it was clear, to me at least, that for the most part it was just looting coupled with mayhem for the sake of mayhem. The current catalyst happened to have been a hockey game; in San Francisco in 2019, new traffic ordinances; in Ferguson in 2015, the anniversary of an unconscionable jury verdict; in Knoxville in 2010, college football coach Lane Kiffin defecting to a rival team. The spark didn’t matter; a similar conflagration could ignite anytime anywhere.

Of course, there were times when it had gone the other way. In a single week in 2015—the first week of summer, as it happened—the US Supreme Court upheld Obamacare and ruled that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right, and the Confederate flag started coming down across the South as Amazon, eBay, Sears, and Walmart all stopped selling merchandise depicting it. Facebook was a sea of rainbows and high-fives. People who’d been hoping and praying for those very things said they couldn’t believe how quickly the tide had turned. That time, the light side of the Force had caught the wave; tonight, sadly, it was the dark side.

I saw Prime Minister Nenshi urging calm, and interviews with various mayors and chiefs of police exhorting people to stay indoors. Even the US channels were covering the Toronto riots, which looked
to be running all along Yonge Street from Harbourfront to Bloor; it was an hour later there, meaning it had ticked past midnight, so that, as a commentator observed, this was technically the third day of rioting in Canada.

Eventually, I got up off the couch, taking my popcorn bag, a few unpopped kernels still rattling around in it, to the kitchen, and tossing it in the trash. And then slowly, sadly, I headed off to bed, hoping against hope that at some point soon reason would prevail.

T
HE
mayor of Winnipeg urged people to remain indoors the next night. No official curfew had been imposed, but I did stay in, watching TV news and surfing on my tablet.

By now, the violence was overwhelming local police everywhere. Canadian Forces personnel had been deployed to aid with riot control and to protect provincial legislatures as well as Parliament Hill in Ottawa; that city, as well as Calgary, had erupted in violence on this third night. The only thing that seemed to be keeping it from being a total coast-to-coast bloodbath was that so few Canadians owned handguns or automatic weapons. Still, the death count was into three figures here in Winnipeg, where it had all begun, and it was at least a dozen in every other city that had rioting.

Fox News was gleeful in its reporting: “All eyes are on Socialist Canada and its Muslim prime minister,” said Sean Hannity, “wondering what he will do to quell the unrest up there.”

Coverage of the continuing attacks on undocumented immigrants in Texas was all but absent on Fox, although MSNBC reported that the vigilantism was spreading, with three people turning up dead near
Las Cruces, New Mexico, and two south of Phoenix, Arizona, states that had nothing like the McCharles Act in place.

Meanwhile, the body of another dead Indigenous woman had been found here in Winnipeg, and two more in northern Manitoba; also, two Cree men near Thompson had been killed by white teenagers in a drive-by shooting as they walked along the side of a road.

Boko Haram was still running amuck in Nigeria, and statistics released today showed that over 8,000 Jews left France for Israel in 2019. “You can smell it in the air,” said a Parisian rabbi. “A pogrom is coming here, mark my words.”

—

Thursday, I had a departmental meeting after my classes ended, but that was done by three. I got in my white Mazda and began the long drive to Saskatoon, a large coffee in my cupholder and a twenty-pack of Timbits on the passenger seat. Once out of the city, I didn’t turn on the radio; I didn’t put on an audiobook; I just drove in silence, particularly enjoying the times when the highway was empty and I could fool myself that I was all alone in the universe and nothing bad was happening anywhere.

But, once again, the illusion was shattered as a pair of high beams lanced through the darkness at me from behind.

I was doing a hundred klicks, but the guy behind me was closing. There was no one coming this way, though, so he had plenty of room to pass if he wanted to on the left, and I moved toward the shoulder to give him even more space.

The gap between us was narrowing. I hated assholes who didn’t dim their lights in circumstances like this, but his were like a pair of supernovae. He was maybe fifty meters behind me.

Twenty.

Ten.

And then, suddenly, he was right beside me, but—

—but he wasn’t passing me. He was
pacing
me, staying next to my car. I looked out, but my own night vision had been shot by his headlamps, and in the dim interior of his car, all I could make out were two
silhouetted figures. I decided to ease up on the accelerator so my car would fall back, but when I did that, he copied me, and—

Fuck!

His passenger-side door scraped against my driver-side one. I tried to give him more room, moving fully onto the shoulder, but he kept slamming into my side, pushing me farther and farther to the right.

I hit the brakes, meaning his next attempt to push me off the road caused him to cut in front of me instead. He spun sideways, I skidded forward, and we collided, both of us pinwheeling into the adjacent field.

My airbag deployed, trapping me long enough that by the time it deflated one of the guys was out and had smashed my driver’s side window and opened the door. I felt myself being hauled out, the dome light in my car letting me at last see their faces—two kids, maybe eighteen or twenty, one in a jean jacket, the other in a leather one.

The man in leather was off to the side; I think he’d been the driver. He pointed at me, and said, “Finish him.”

And that’s when I realized the guy in denim was brandishing a length of metal pipe about as long as his forearm. I was in the gap between the two cars but jumped on the hood, pivoted on my ass, and took off into the field adjacent to the road, a flat expanse that went on to the dark horizon; I’d be more than content if they watched me run away for three days.

“Get him!” shouted the driver—the guy, quite literally, in the driver’s seat; probably a psychopath, with a p-zed stooge who would follow his every command.

I ran as fast as I could, which, with epinephrine coursing through me, was pretty damn fast—not that there was anywhere to go, but I hoped the guy would give up after a bit, and—

Jesus Fucking Christ!

My left foot went into a prairie dog’s burrow, and I pitched forward, smashing my face into hard, dry earth. Jean-jacket quickly caught up and loomed over me, the metal pipe raised high above his head.

I rolled on my back and lashed out with my legs, ensnaring my attacker’s right ankle, and even though the terrain was flat, I succeeded in pulling him off balance and he fell. I scrambled to my feet and,
smashing one shoe down on his wrist, managed to wrestle the pipe from him, and—

And there was no one around, no one to help, no farmhouse, no anything. I thought the guy, seeing I had his weapon, would scurry away and leave me to catch my breath, but he didn’t. Leather-jacket had more—
some!
—sense, and had gotten back into their car and was now speeding off, but this guy was implacable; he had his orders, and he was going to carry them out. I was holding the pipe in both hands, the way a slugger would grip a baseball bat, but the guy pulled out a switchblade and continued to come at me, so I took off again across the field—but it was inevitable that he’d catch up; he was younger and had longer legs.

My heart was pounding, my lungs aching. Like Menno, I thought of myself as a pacifist—but a pacifist need not be a passivist.

And so I stopped running.

Turned.

Planted my feet firmly on the ground.

Raised the lead pipe—like Moonwatcher raising the thigh bone—and brought it down, down, down onto Jean-jacket’s head.

The sound I’d avoided all those decades ago when I’d spared Ronny Handler—the sound I’d always assumed would be a loud cracking, like the one my mother’s porcelain vase had made when I’d accidentally knocked it to the floor—turned out to actually be a dull thud, as if I’d hit a tree stump with an ax handle.

But regardless of the acoustics, the visual effect was . . .

Yes.

The visual, in the moonlight, was
satisfying.

The skull
denting,
the scalp
splitting,
and blood
pouring out . . .

I staggered for a moment—but not as much as the guy in front of me did. He swayed back and forth, and then, like the Twin Towers coming down, collapsed vertically into a heap. I spun on my heel and ran toward my car.

—

Of course, I called it in. The RCMP arrived first, and then the EMTs, who pronounced the guy dead at the scene. The officers were sympathetic,
but they had me follow them in my car into Regina. I wasn’t charged with anything, and so they let me go to a hotel instead of staying in a holding cell, and by the time all the paperwork was done the next morning, it was close to ten. I continued on the last couple of hours to Saskatoon—but, it became apparent that the damage to my car was worse than I’d thought; I barely made it there, and, after calling my insurance company, I took the car to a body shop for repairs.

I wanted to go straight to the Canadian Light Source, but as much as I couldn’t wait to see Kayla, she had to make a living. Instead, I took a cab to her place, and, using the spare key I still had, let myself in, took a quick shower, went to her bedroom, and collapsed.

I was awoken by the sound of the front door opening, and, looking at Kayla’s nightstand clock, I saw I’d slept for almost three hours.

“Sweetheart?” I called out.

“Yes, honey?” And then a giggle. It was Ryan, not her mom.

“Ryan?” I said.

“And Rebekkah,” came her grandmother’s voice.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” I called back.

I quickly dressed and headed downstairs. Ryan rushed over and gave me a hug, which I sorely needed. But when we disengaged, she looked at me with horror. “What happened to you?”

My hand went to my bruised cheek. I’m all in favor of telling kids the truth—there’s no Santa Claus; your parents leave the money under the pillow when you lose a tooth; babies come from sex; when you die, that’s it, there’s nothing more—but deciding whether to say “Mommy’s boyfriend just killed a man” was above my pay grade; I’d let Kayla make the call on what her daughter should know. “I was in a car accident,” I said, which at least wasn’t wholly untrue.

“Wow,” Ryan said. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes,” I said, and that was certainly the truth.

“I gotta go pee,” Ryan announced, which was just as well; I needed a minute—or a lifetime—to pull myself together. I exchanged a few remarks with Rebekkah, then she left, and I went to the kitchen. There was a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge; I poured two glasses and took
them over to the dining room with its bookcases. Ryan joined me when she was done in the washroom. “How was day camp?” I asked.

“Good.” She looked at me and scrunched up her mouth, thinking.

“What?” I said.

“Can I ask you a question, Jiminy?”

“Of course.”

“Are you going to marry Mommy?”

“We haven’t talked about it.”

“But are you?”

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

She looked down at the floor. “Oh.”

“We’ll just have to see how things go, okay?”

She nodded, then, looking up at me again: “Have you been married before?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

I lifted my hands slightly. “She left me.”

“Why?”

“We disagreed about what we wanted.”

“Oh. What did you want?”

“The greatest good for the greatest number.”

“And what’s the greatest number?”

I thought about that, long and hard, thought about this wonderful young lady, thought about my boy Virgil, thought about everything, and, at last I drew Ryan into another warm hug. “Two-point-nine.”