Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

When I was finished, I returned to the living room. Heather was still on the balcony, looking at the river. I did that often myself, but I was always woolgathering as I did so—which was physically indistinguishable from just idly standing there, in neutral, waiting for something to prod activity.

I stepped out onto the balcony. “What’re you doing?”

“Nothing,” she said. And then, as if that required a justification, “Enjoying the view.”

I looked at her, wondering. I know, I know—I’d wondered about Kayla, too, but Kayla had been scanned on Victoria’s beamline, and, besides, she continued to endlessly surprise me. But my sister? Oh, I’d surprised her, apparently, when I hadn’t known about what had happened to our grandfather, but when was the last time she had surprised me—prior to last night, that is?

I turned and looked out at the river, too, and—

—and something was going on. The two fishermen were still there, all right, but so were a couple of uniformed cops, and two more men were crab-walking down the grassy embankment.

“Come on!” I said, moving back inside. Heather followed, and, as we headed down the stairs, I thought about whether this was any different from what had happened last night. As we exited out into the late-morning sunshine, I decided it was: last night, she’d fallen in with the mob; today, I was simply curious.

Fortunately, Heather was back to wearing flat shoes, and it took us less than a minute to trot over to where all the excitement was going on. We weren’t the first rubberneckers to show up; a pair of female joggers in sweatpants had stopped to gawk.

Something large had been hauled up onto the riverbank: a bundle more than a meter long swaddled in green garbage bags tied around with duct tape.

A cop was keeping us at bay, but we jockeyed for a better view—and got it. The bags had ripped open on one side and a lower leg and foot were protruding.

“Oh, God,” said Heather softly.

We stood there transfixed; the guys in plain clothes were clearly crime-scene investigators. One of them snapped pictures of everything, while the other took samples of the skin, which was smooth and the color of coffee with cream. The uniformed cops, meanwhile, were getting statements from the fishermen; I strained to listen. From what I could make out, when they first saw the bundle, they’d assumed some jerk had dumped his garbage in the river, but, as it drifted by, one of them saw the exposed skin. They were both wearing hip waders, and had managed to snare the package before the current took it away; they’d hauled it ashore and called 911.

The crime-scene guys eventually went to take the body away, picking up the bundle—only to have the garbage bags split completely open and the corpse drop out and roll a bit down the embankment. And there she was: an Indigenous woman, with long black hair, and the side of her head caved in from a heavy blow; she looked to be no more than twenty.

I fought to keep what little there was in my stomach down, and thought briefly of that story I sometimes told my students when introducing utilitarianism about the girl drowning in this very river. The bridge I spoke about in that scenario was just south of here; I looked over at it for a moment.

But there were two salient differences. First, my little hypothetical was just that, a made-up example; this was all too real. And, second, that hapless child had simply slipped and fallen in. But this young woman—somebody’s daughter, possibly somebody’s sister, perhaps even somebody’s mother—had been brutally murdered, and although it would doubtless be some time before a report would be made public, if she was like the legions of others who’d gone before her, she’d probably been sexually assaulted.

Yes, the carnage in Texas was getting media attention, but that was only because it was new. The endless stream of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls here in Manitoba should have been a national disgrace. Back in 2014 and 2015, when the tally had been just twelve hundred natives unaccounted for, then–Prime Minister Stephen Harper, when demands went up for a federal inquiry, had said that the issue “isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest.”

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.

Heather 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.