“Can you bring a date?”
My heart skipped a beat. “Um, sure. Sure, yeah.”
She pushed the up button. “I was hoping to get to visit that museum on this trip, but haven’t had a chance. Okay; let’s do it. We’ll hit the road right after the reception.”
“Wonderful! Thank you.”
The elevator arrived. She hesitated for a moment, leaned in and gave me a quick hug, then entered the car.
I headed out the sliding glass doors into the summer evening. I didn’t often get down here to The Forks, but whenever I did, I made a point of walking around the Oodena Celebration Circle, an amphitheater sixty meters across and 2.5 meters deep. Equidistant around its perimeter are eight steel armatures that look like cyborg lizards with long tails curving up toward the sky. Each tail has several sighting rings mounted on it, which encircle specific stars at dates and times specified on accompanying plaques. The west armature, for instance, can be used to find Altair, Betelgeuse, Regulus, and Procyon. Meanwhile, gaps between red stone monoliths frame the rising sun on the solstices and equinoxes; I’ve sometimes been on hand with members of the RASC to explain things to tourists. Here, in the dark, the place had a wonderfully spooky quality; it had often been the meeting-up point for Winnipeg’s annual Zombie Walk.
I strolled around the grassy circumference, hands shoved in my pockets, thinking.
Kayla had said I’d hit her. Me. I’d never hit anyone, not as an adult. Even as a kid, it wasn’t in my nature, not since—
Yeah.
When I was eight or nine, I’d been in a fight in the parking lot of my school, with Ronny Handler, a kid my age who’d attacked me for no good reason—really, what utter bullshit it was for the teacher to say it takes two to start a fight—and, to my surprise, in an adrenaline-fueled rage, I’d been able to knock Ronny down, and I was so furious, so incensed, so livid at the unfairness of not being able to walk to school without being picked on because of—what? My shorts? My buzz cut? My ears? Who the hell knew?
When Handler was down, I leapt up and assumed a crouching posture in mid-air, my knees together but bent, and I was ready to come down hard on his head, which was sideways on the pavement, and I knew—eight years old, and I knew—that if I continued what I’d started, if I let the trajectory run its course, my knees would smash into him, and I might well fracture his skull, and maybe even kill him.
And, in that split second, still in the air, I changed my posture, altering my course. My bare knees crashed into the asphalt right beside Ronny’s head, the impact excruciating, my skin being brutally scraped—but Handler survived. I hadn’t been worried so much about him as about the consequences for me if I’d followed through on what I’d begun, and I’d known that shouting “He started it!” would do no good at all if he were lying there bleeding. I remembered thinking this was a moment that could have changed my life, and I’d done the right thing, just in the nick of time.
That was, I supposed, one of the first times that my reason had overcome any baser instincts I might have had. And it—my reason—had held sway ever since.
Except for near the end of my dark period, apparently.
I was passing the northeast armature, a great beast hovering above me, the long tail fading up into the night. I pulled out my phone, looked at the glowing digits. It was after 10:00 P.M., which meant that the psychology department would be deserted, and so I could—
But no. No, that would be crazy.
And yet—
And yet, apparently, it wouldn’t be the worst thing I’d ever done.
I passed a couple of grad students and a janitor as I made my way down the corridor. Being assistant department head was mostly an administrative pain in the butt, but the job did come with a master set of keys. When the coast was clear, I let myself into Menno’s office.
Four avocado-green filing cabinets lined one wall. I was afraid they might be locked, but they weren’t. Menno himself probably hadn’t been in them for years; paper files were of little use to a blind man, I supposed, but perhaps teaching assistants or grad students maintained them for him. I quickly found the “L” files, but there were none about Lucidity, and so I started at the top drawer of the first cabinet, and looked at every file in turn.
I almost skipped by one labeled “DoD,” but was intrigued. Was it really the American military? And indeed it was—and related to Project Lucidity, to boot. I laid out each page on the floor and snapped photos of them with my iPhone. I thought about leaving, but there was a touch of Pavlov’s dogs in me, I guess; I’d been rewarded once, and I wanted to see if I’d be rewarded again. I continued on past D, through E, F, G, and so on, betting against myself that there’d be no X or Z files… and there weren’t; the last paper file was labeled “Yerkes-Dodson handout.”
But there was one drawer left, and so I opened it—and found it crammed with old VHS videocassettes. Seven were labeled “Altruistic Behaviour Study 1988,” one was labeled “Teaching Company Audition,” and five were labeled “APA AGM 1994.” But there was one that had me salivating: the sticker on its spine said, “Lucidity Subject JM,” who doubtless was me—the time-honored custom of referring to patients and experimental subjects by their initials, as if that afforded real anonymity. I took that cassette, headed out of Menno’s office, being careful to turn the lights back off—not that Menno would notice—and drove to my condo, five minutes away.
I hadn’t used my VHS player in years, and was relieved to find it still worked. I looked so young! And so did Menno—and it was startling to see him back before he’d lost his sight; I’d forgotten how expressive his eyes had been. “Let me just identify this recording,” he said in a sibilant voice that was a tad more energetic than it was today. He cleared his throat. “January sixteenth, 2001. Subject JM.”
My heart skipped a beat: footage of me from the beginning of my dark time! Still, that made sense: yes, I’d been involved with Lucidity in 2000, but I couldn’t recall doing any interviews, or, for that matter, why one would bother to interview people about fairly boring hearing tests, or whatever the heck it had been? I wondered what had moved Menno to start doing them at this point.
He leaned back in his chair. “Thanks for coming in, Jim.”
“My pleasure.”
“So, I’m just going to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
“Be my guest.”
“How have you been? How do you feel?”
“Fit as a fiddle,” I said. “Right as rain.”
“Good, good. Your classes are going okay?”
“Yes. I’m enjoying them all.”
“And what about participating in this study? Have you been enjoying that?”
“Sure. And, you know, as a student, I can always use the extra cash.”
“I’m sure,” said Menno. He moved his chair closer to mine. “And how do you feel compared to before you became one of our experimental subjects?”
I saw myself blink three times rapidly. “The same,” I said. “Why? Shouldn’t I?”
There was something flat in Menno’s tone. “Yes, of course.”
The interview lasted seven minutes, according to the timecode running along the bottom of the screen. It was followed by the next one, exactly one month later, on February 16, 2001, which was pretty much the same, although my birthday had passed two days before, meaning I was now twenty.
The one for March 16, 2001, was similar, too. Kayla and I had recently started dating. I talked about how we’d gone to Pop Soda’s the night before and listened to some live jazz; not fancy, but within our student budgets. Other than that, my response to all the questions he asked was the same mixture of clichés, platitudes, and banalities that had filled the previous interviews, and, as I soon discovered, filled the next two, as well. I was fine, chugging along, keeping my head above water, hanging in there.