Kayla finally fell silent; it’s doubtless no fun reminiscing with someone whose only responses are, “Really?” and “We did?” and “Wow, that sounds like it must have been fun.” To fill the void, I delicately broached another topic. “So, um, you’re a New Ager?”
She practically did a spit-take with her wine. “What?”
“Well, I only glanced at your Wikipedia entry, but it said you were with something called the Canadian Enlightenment Centre.”
She had a wonderfully warm laugh. “You mean the Canadian Light Source. It’s a synchrotron, Canada’s largest particle accelerator; just under three gigaelectronvolts. It’s on the grounds of the University of Saskatchewan.”
“Oh! But it said you ‘explore consciousness.’”
“I do. Psych was your major, but just an elective for me; I was doing physics. But Warkentin’s course really got me interested in the mind, which is how I ended up working on the quantum mechanics of consciousness. After graduating from U of M, I headed off to the University of Arizona to study under Stuart Hameroff.”
“Who is?”
“An anesthesiologist. He was fascinated by exactly what he was doing when he deprived people of consciousness. Roger Penrose, a physicist who sometimes collaborates with Stephen Hawking, wrote a book that said consciousness had to be quantum mechanical; it couldn’t be just classical physics because of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Stuart read it and got in touch with him, oh, almost twenty-five years ago now. That’s why I’m at the Light Source; there’s a synchrotron specialist I’m working with there who’s got a technique for detecting superposition without promoting decoherence.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well, one must.”
She smiled warmly. “‘Superposition’ is that uniquely quantum condition in which something is in two states at once: for instance, not either here or there, but simultaneously both here and there. We call it ‘decoherence’ when superposition collapses. Anyway, my work builds on what Stuart brought to Penrose. Stuart said, look, an inhaled anesthetic, like halothane, affects the microtubules—the cellular scaffolding—in neurons. There are two-lobed pockets in the microtubules, and each pocket houses a free electron. When you’re awake, those electrons are in superposition, simultaneously existing in both the top and the bottom lobe. When the anesthetic is introduced, the electrons lose coherence, collapsing into being in just one or the other lobe—and when that happens, the patient ceases to be conscious.”
I frowned, trying to sort this out. “So halothane is used as an inhalant to induce anesthesia?”
Kayla nodded. “Right.”
“And anesthesia is a state in which only classical physics occurs in the brain?”
“When it puts you out cold, yes.”
“So, halothane is a classical gas.”
“Yes?”
“It has its own theme song.”
“What are you talking about?”
“‘Classical Gas.’ It’s that famous instrumental by Mason Williams.” I made ba-ba-ba-bump-ba-ba trombone sounds.
“You are a very strange man,” Kayla said.
She was not the first to have observed that; still, I guess I looked crestfallen because she reached over and patted the back of my hand. “Which is precisely why I fell for you all those years ago.”
I smiled, and she went on: “Anyway, my work is on consciousness as a product of quantum superposition of electrons in neuronal microtubules. And, well… that’s kind of why I looked you up.”
“I, um, don’t quite see the connection.”
“I saw the news coverage about your being an expert witness.”
I looked away. “Oh.”
“You know, you did know about your grandfather. I remember when the news broke. You were mortified.”
“Yeah, so my sister said. But I honestly don’t recall it. I—it’s so strange, not remembering that period.”
“I’m sure.”
“And that’s why you wanted to see me? Because of my grandfather?”
“No, no, no. I mean, yeah, that’s fascinating, but it was your technique that caught my eye—the microsaccades thing.”
“Caught your eye. Microsaccades.”
“What? Oh.”
“I’m here all week.”
She shook her head in what I took to be fond exasperation, then said, “No, it was the correlation with the Hare Checklist that interested me. I’ve been following your work in that area.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Because, just like your microsaccades test, I’ve found a quantum-superposition state that also precisely corresponds to psychopathy. If you’re a high scorer on the Hare Checklist, you’ll have this correlation, too.”
“Seriously?”
“Yup.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, cripes, the time! I gotta go. They’re expecting me back at three.”
And that should have been that, but the words just popped out of my mouth. “Well, what about dinner?”
Her eyebrows ascended, but then, after considering it for a long moment, she said, “Sure. Sure, why not?”
Kayla and I agreed to meet for dinner at 8:00 P.M., which gave me almost five hours to kill—and time to do some more reality-checking. She and I hadn’t started dating until March of 2001, so she couldn’t help me with what had gone down the preceding New Year’s Eve, but perhaps someone else could.
I suppose the information I wanted was also online, but nothing beat the human touch. And so after returning to my office in the Duff Roblin Building and making a phone call to be sure she’d be in, I wandered along Dysart Road to the office of Sally Mahaffey, who taught meteorology in the awkwardly named Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources. That could be a miserable hike in winter, but now, in May, it was pleasant as long as you avoided all the droppings from the Canada geese wandering about.
The interior of the Wallace Building was done in Early Modern Tinkertoy, with red, green, and yellow tubes and pipes everywhere, and its washrooms were bizarre standalone modules like indoor outhouses. Sally’s office was off a corridor painted floor to ceiling, doors included, in bright yellow; going down it, I felt like I was inside a French’s mustard squeeze bottle.
Although there were lots of faculty members I’d never met, I’d run into Sally a few times in her role as treasurer of the Faculty Association. She was sixty-something, with hair I thought of as appropriately thundercloud gray.
“Hey,” I said, entering. “Thanks for making time for me.”
Her office had wall-mounted metal shelving she used for a display of vintage weather-forecasting equipment; I was pleased with myself for knowing that the propeller with cups was an anemometer. “My pleasure,” Sally said as she got up from her chair—which didn’t do much to increase her height. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for some old weather data.”
“How old?”
“Two thousand and one.”
She sounded relieved. “I had a history student come here last week, wanting to see the weather report for a key battle in the War of 1812. I had to explain to the poor thing that Environment Canada’s records don’t go back quite that far.” She sat down in front of her computer and proceeded to type rapidly, using two knobby fingers. “Location?”
“Calgary.”
“Airport or downtown?”
“Downtown, I suppose.”
“What date?”
“January first, early in the morning. Like, 2:00 A.M.”
She worked away for a minute. Above her desk was a political cartoon showing a trio of baffled old men in baggy golf shorts on an island only a few feet across surrounded by nothing but water. The caption: “Climate-change deniers retire to Florida.”