Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

The date was 31-12-00, one of the few in that format that could be unambiguously parsed: thirty-one had to be a day, and double-zero could only be a year, which meant this book had been purchased New Year’s Eve 2000.

Here. In Winnipeg.

And the time stamp was 17:43, which must have been just before closing on a holiday evening; even the nerdiest of nerds didn’t ring in the new year in a bookstore.

Of course, someone else might have picked up the novel for me, but—

But, no, the credit-card number was printed on the bottom of the receipt, with Xs substituting for all but the final four digits, and those I recognized; I’d had that number for many years. I must have gone in to purchase the book, planning to get a jump on my class reading over the remaining week of the Christmas break.

Yes, technically, one could be in Winnipeg at 5:43 P.M. and still fly to Calgary in time to shout “Happy New Year!” six hours later—or, actually, seven, if you take into account the time-zone change. But there’s no way I would have gone home for New Year’s Eve but not Christmas, even if my parents and sister were away. What the hell was going on?

I continued to rummage around and found a Dilbert wall calendar from 2000. I’d hoped there’d be one for 2001, as well, but there wasn’t. I flipped to the last page, the pointy-haired boss staring out at me, and looked at the days between Christmas—which had been on a Monday that year—and New Year’s Eve. There were four appointments in my handwriting spread across those six days. On Boxing Day, I’d noted “Miles 6ish.” I hadn’t thought about Miles Olsen for years; he’d been in one of my classes, and we used to get together occasionally for a beer. On the thirtieth I’d written, “Pay dorm fees.” And on the twenty-ninth and thirty-first, I’d written simply “Warkentin.” There were no classes then, so these must have been related to that research project I’d volunteered for.

I scanned further up the calendar; Warkentin’s name was written in three more times in the week before Christmas. The ink was black for the earlier appointments, blue for the later ones. I hadn’t added them all at the same time, which meant the later appointments had been made after the earlier ones; he’d asked me back for some reason—and on New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake…

I’d told Menno yesterday that I’d been in Calgary on New Year’s Eve 2000. Sure, it’s possible he’d forgotten that I was with him on that long-ago date, but he hadn’t mentioned a thing.

No, no, that’s not quite right. He’d faced me, his blind eyes behind dark lenses, and he’d said, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” I’d thought that was odd; he was a psychologist, after all—he should have been fascinated by the challenge of recovering my missing memories.

I’d used Gmail since the days when you needed an invitation to get an account, but those archives only went back to 2004. I’d had a student address here at U of M in 2001, and so I’d called up the IT department on the off chance that they kept email archives going back that far; they didn’t. But I used to have a habit of printing out emails I wanted to keep—and, to my delight, I found a file folder containing a bunch of them in the same box that had yielded the calendar: a sheaf about half an inch thick of dot-matrix printouts, one email per sheet, conveniently stacked in send-date order. I worked my way through them: class assignments, a few from my sister, but nothing that stirred any memories.

I reached the end of February and flipped the page; the next email was from March second, and—my goodness!—it was from Kayla Huron to me. The subject line was “Re: Friday,” but whatever my original message had been was lost to history; there were no quoted lines at the bottom of what she had written, which was, “Yeah, me, too. And I’d love to! You like Crash Test Dummies? They’re playing over at UW next week. Can you pick up tickets?” That was all the email said, except for the number 2.9 at the bottom.

I kept reading messages; there were twenty or so from Kayla mixed in with other things. The other things were all prosaic—I’d clearly only printed out emails that had to-do items for me mentioned in them—and, indeed, the Kayla ones all had action items, too, but they also had something else: flirtation, giving way after a couple of weeks to actual smut. Apparently, we’d been way more than just classmates.

And all her messages to me ended with the same number: 2.9. Except the last one, that is—and the action item was clear: “Pick up your stuff, asshole.”

Near as I could figure, Kayla and I had been hot-and-heavy for three-and-a-half months, until, apparently, it had all blown up. And, in about half an hour, I’d see her for the first time in nineteen years.

I drove along Pembina Highway, heading for my rendezvous with Kayla Huron, once again listening to the CBC. As I pulled into Grant Park mall, the 1:00 P.M. newscast began:

“Big news from Parliament Hill: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has just fallen as his controversial carbon-tax budget narrowly failed to pass a parliamentary vote. It’s a situation not unlike the one that briefly ousted his father, Pierre Trudeau, as prime minister in 1974. Canadians will go to the polls next month to choose our next national leader…”

I walked across the asphalt, entered Pony Corral, and presented myself to the pretty young woman standing at the lectern. I don’t know why restaurants have lecterns; they made me want to teach.

“Just one today?” she said.

I hated it when they said, “Just one?” in that sympathetic tone. Sorry you’re a loser, sir. But I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Actually, I’m meeting someone. Do you mind if I have a look?”

She gestured at the dining room, and I went in, looking around—but Kayla spotted me first. “Jim!”

I saw an attractive redhead in a booth. She’d been a brunette in the Wikipedia photo, but the ginger color suited her. As I approached, she rose. Normally, if I’d been greeting an old friend from that long ago, I’d have gone in for a hug or a peck on the cheek, but Kayla appeared… leery, perhaps, and so I simply sat down opposite her.

Her expression changed—via a conscious effort, it seemed—and I realized she was evaluating me in that way you do when you run into someone you haven’t seen for a long time: looking for gray hairs, receding hairlines, paunches, wrinkles. On the hair checklist, both boxes were empty for me, and being vegan kept me trim, but, damn it, I preferred to call them “laugh lines.” At least I wasn’t doing the same thing; I had no old memories to compare the present her to—and I liked what I saw just fine.

Still, because it seemed the appropriate thing, I said, “You haven’t changed a bit.”

She smiled, but, again, it was a little wan, a tad reserved. “Nor have you.” She already had a glass of white wine. “So,” she added, “what’s new?”

I liked to respond to that question with, “New York, New Jersey, New Delhi,” but I didn’t know this woman, damn it, I didn’t know her at all; I couldn’t be sure it would get a laugh. And yet at one time she had liked me, and so just being myself seemed the way to go. I trotted out the “New” list, and it did earn me a smile—and, at least for a second, the hesitancy was gone.

“Same sense of humor,” she said. “You remember Professor Jenkins? What was that joke you told that got you kicked out of class?”

I was rescued by a waitress in a tight black top, cleavage showing. “Something to drink, sir?”

“What have you got on tap?”

She rattled off a list. I chose a dark craft beer, then turned back to Kayla. Unfortunately, though, she asked her question again. “Do you remember? That joke? Something about an orangutan?”