Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“And this?”

At first I thought I wasn’t recalling anything. Then I became conscious of a sense of pressure all over my body. It was what I imagined being bound in a straitjacket felt like. Except I wasn’t immobilized; I was moving headfirst, like I was being pulled up an incredibly narrow elevator shaft. No, not up—not a vertical movement. Horizontal. And I wasn’t being pulled. I was being pushed. The pressure on me kept increasing, so much so that—

God.

—my head!

I could feel my head being crushed.

Another memory, from another time, another part of my brain, another indexing system, briefly came to me: my fear on that day I’d jumped up and almost smashed in Ronny Handler’s head.

But my skull wasn’t being crushed from one side; it was being compressed from all sides, and I felt the bones—

I felt the bones sliding, like tectonic plates, some of them even subducting…

And then, cold on the crown of my head; the pressure releasing on the top, then farther down, then—

Eyes stinging, because of…

Because of light.

“My God… My God…”

“What?”

“It’s my birth!”

Namboothiri didn’t sound surprised. “Yeah, there have been numerous reports of autistics remembering their births—because they continue to access the visual-indexing system their whole lives.”

“It’s—wow. Incredible.”

“It’s proof of concept, is what it is. Everything’s stored in there, all right, right back to the beginning. Don’t worry; my equipment records the coordinates of each contact. We should be able to elicit any of these memories again at will now. So, we’re all set to find out exactly what went down all those years ago—call it ‘2001: A Memory Odyssey.’ We’ll pick up again in our next session.”

“But—my God, please. Can’t we continue?”

“I’m sorry, Jim. I really am. But you’re not the only one with summer classes to teach.”

I nodded, grateful for these few glimpses—but desperate for more.

In high-school physics—my last exposure to that discipline prior to reconnecting with Kayla—everyone gets to see the famous 1940 film of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a suspension bridge more than a mile long over Puget Sound. In the film, the bridge starts swaying left and right in the wind, and the pavement undulates from side to side, rising and falling to breathtaking degrees, before the bridge finally breaks apart, its midsection crashing into the water far below. Every student watching that film is stunned—it looks so unreal, so impossible, you think it can’t possibly be true, that nothing like that could ever happen in real life.

There’s a similarly shocking film I sometimes show my students. Like the one of Galloping Gertie—the nickname given to that bridge—this one is old. It shows a man—a business executive, as the news stories later revealed, standing on a ledge high up the side of an office building. He’s clearly despondent, clearly distressed, but someone—a tourist with a movie camera below—has caught sight of him. Soon, others note the man as well, and, as we can see when the tourist briefly tilts his lens down, quite a sizable crowd develops, all gawking up at the man.

And then a male voice rings out—the camera, aimed back up at the poor soul high above, doesn’t show whose—cutting loose a single affricative syllable: “Jump!”

The man on the ledge is startled, and, briefly, there’s a ripple of disapproving tut-tuts on the soundtrack, but then another male voice is heard: “Jump!” And a woman joins the chorus: “Jump!” And soon, the cry is going up throughout the crowd. “Jump!” “Jump!” “Jump!”

At last the poor fellow does indeed do what the crowd is bidding, more or less. He doesn’t jump, but he does use the flats of his hands to push himself against the window behind him, and falls in a manner so similar to Don Draper’s plunge on the opening credits of Mad Men that I’ve often wondered if the animators used this film as a source. The tourist dutifully records its all, including the impact on the pavement far below, the man hitting so hard that he actually bounces back up and then crashes down again, dead.

When I run the film in class, I usually stop with the man pushing off—no need to show the horror of a person actually dying, and, besides, I want the students to concentrate on the other horror: the reality that a group of strangers, come together purely by the happenstance of their individual wanderings, can suddenly exhibit conscienceless behavior that few if any of its members would display in isolation.

These days, office windows don’t open, there are no ledges to step out on, and even the replacement Tacoma Narrows Bridge has suicide netting, and so there aren’t as many smartphone videos of crowds urging someone to leap to their death as you might image. But similar things—one asshole starting something and it propagating like a contagion through a population—still happen. They happen all the time.

When I’d been in high school, they’d taught us that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had collapsed due to resonance between high winds that matched the bridge’s natural structural frequency. But that was wrong—a dated interpretation, even then. It turns out, as I learned years later, that the real cause was a completely different phenomenon, something called aeroelastic flutter. The old explanation, which seemed to make a kind of sense, was factually inaccurate.

And when I’d first seen that film of the suicidal jumper, all those years ago, my prof had said it was an example of deindividuation, the loss of self into a crowd.

But that, too, was wrong; that, too, was a dated interpretation, proceeding from the false assumption that there was a self to lose.

I’d known for months that Heather would be in town tonight. Gustav would never let her take a pleasure trip on her own, but even he understood that her business—the business that kept him in sports cars and fine liqueurs—required her to travel now and then; she was staying at my place.

There was a play I’d been dying to see at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre called Shocking, a fictionalized account of the life of Stanley Milgram; it was having a trial run here before moving to Broadway next year for the sixtieth anniversary of Milgram’s infamous obedience-to-authority experiments.

I’d bought the tickets long before any Winnipeggers seriously thought the Jets might make it to the Stanley Cup—but, astonishingly, they had, and, as luck would have it, the night Heather and I were going to the play was also the night of the final game between them and the New Jersey Devils at the MTS Centre, just a kilometer west of the John Hirsch Mainstage. Parking downtown was out of the question: thousands who weren’t inside the arena had come out to watch the game in bars and restaurants nearby; we took a bus to the Exchange District and walked through the warm June evening to the theater. Out front were bronze statues of the theater’s founders—made, I suppose, in a founder foundry. The one of Hirsch was wearing glasses; I always thought that looked odd on a statue.

The program booklet had a reproduction of the “Public Announcement” Milgram had used to recruit test subjects from the New Haven community, offering “$4.00 for one hour of your time” for what he’d presented as a “study of memory.” Milgram had been just twenty-seven when he’d started his experiments; the dapper fellow with the salt-and-pepper hair and full beard shown in psychology textbooks was Milgram-as-elder-statesman, not the haunted young man trying to make sense of the Eichmann trial and what Hannah Arendt would soon dub “the banality of evil”—the seeming ease with which average people could be made to slide into doing cruel things.