But the final monthly interview, conducted on Monday, June eighteenth—the sixteenth having fallen on Saturday, it seems—was radically different in tone.
“This is just like the other times, okay?” said Menno. “A routine evaluation; same questions as always.”
I had arms crossed in front of my chest. “Yeah, okay. Let’s get it over with.”
“Tell me how you feel today, Jim.”
“Fine.”
“You’re happy?”
“I’m okay, yeah.”
“Healthy?”
“Sure. Yeah.”
“How are things with Kayla?”
I—the one here in 2020—shifted on my living-room couch; the other me, back in 2001, sat motionless. “They’re fine.”
“You’ve been going out for over three months now.”
“Yeah.”
“And how do you feel about her?”
“She’s okay.”
“Just okay? Do you love her?”
“Sure. She’s great in bed.”
“I mean, do you have feelings for her? Romantic feelings?”
“She’s a good lay. And she looks good, y’know? Impresses the other guys, me being with her.”
“And that’s important?”
“Course. Gotta be seen to be on top, man. The king. Gotta be in control.”
I paused the playback and looked at the image of myself frozen on the screen. I would have sworn up and down that I’d never talked about a woman that way before in my entire life; I wouldn’t have believed it if—well, if it wasn’t right here, on video, in front of me. My stomach was knotting, and I tasted acid at the back of my throat.
I let the playback resume. There was silence for a long moment—I thought I must have accidentally muted the sound—but it was just Menno digesting what I’d said, apparently, because at last he spoke again. “What about your sister? Heather, is it? How do you feel about her?”
“She’s all right.”
“Anything else you want to say about her?”
“I keep in touch. Make her think she’s important, y’know?”
“Why?”
“She’s a soft touch.”
“For money, you mean?”
“Yeah, for money. She’s a lawyer now. Deep pockets.”
I sagged back into my couch, numb. What the hell had happened to me back then?
14
YouTube has countless films of psychological experiments, and I often used the ceiling-mounted projector to show them to my students. One of my favorites is the Heider and Simmel animation from 1944, which starts by showing a large hollow square with a black triangle inside it. Soon one side of the square hinges open, and the triangle moves out. A smaller black triangle and a small circle move in from the right side of the frame. The three solid shapes slide around the screen, sometimes touching, while the hinged square periodically flaps open and closed.
I remember when I first saw that cartoon myself as an undergraduate in Menno Warkentin’s class. He asked us to write down what had happened in the film. I’d said the large triangle was a monster unleashed from a cage to chase off a boy and a girl who were out exploring; the boy—yeah, back then, my consciousness about gender-role stereotypes hadn’t yet been raised—bravely fought off the monster, while the girl snuck into the big square to steal treasure; eventually, the boy and girl escaped, and, in a fit of anger at having been bested, the monster destroyed its cage.
My response was typical if idiosyncratic. Others had seen mating rituals, battlefield maneuvers, or slapstick comedies—but we’d all experienced some sort of story. When Heider and Simmel first did this test, only three of their hundred and fourteen subjects dispassionately described what the film actually depicted: two squares and two triangles moving about an empty space. Everyone else constructed a narrative, pretty much out of whole cloth.
As always, my own students did not disappoint. Boris, in the front row, said, “It’s a political allegory, right? The big triangle, that’s the United States. And Mexico, that’s the little triangle. The flapping box represents the border, sometimes open and sometimes closed, and in the end, by trying to keep everyone out, the US ends up destroying itself.”
You could hear the crickets in the room; nobody else had seen anything quite like that, I guess.
I let a few more people share their interpretations—which ranged from bawdy to rom-com treacly to shoot-’em-up mayhem worthy of Liam Neeson—and then I got down to the point.
“There’s a word for what all of you have just done. It’s confabulation. We tell ourselves stories, building them out of almost nothing, then convince ourselves they’re true…”
Menno Warkentin didn’t come in to the university on Thursdays, so after my morning class, I headed over to his apartment in the heart of downtown. As always, the CBC was on in my car, this time with news that did surprise me.
Hayden Trenholm, the same pundit I’d heard interviewed yesterday, was speaking with Piya Chattopadhyay.
“So,” Piya said, in her bubbly voice, “former Calgary city mayor Naheed Nenshi has just thrown his hat into the ring, running as the federal NDP candidate in the riding of Calgary Southwest. Hayden, what do you make of that?”
“It’s a coup for the NDP,” said Trenholm, “since there has long been speculation that Nenshi was being wooed by the Trudeau Liberals. The fact he went to the NDP might be seen as an indication he has bigger ambitions than Cabinet. I wouldn’t be surprised if the caucus declares him the acting leader in the next few days.”
“And what about the riding he’s running in?”
“It’s the perfect choice if Nenshi is being positioned to lead the New Democrats. Calgary Southwest is Stephen Harper’s old riding; the folks in it know well the perks that go with being the home base of a prime minister. But people all across Calgary love Nenshi, and they enjoy that he’s become an international star. Back in 2013, when Rob Ford was the butt of jokes in Toronto, Nenshi was doing a conspicuously spectacular job in Calgary—so much so, as you’ll recall, Piya, that Maclean’s named him the second-most-important person in Canada, right after the prime minister.”
“True.”
“And in 2015, the City Mayors Foundation awarded Nenshi the World Mayor Prize, naming him the top mayor on the planet. The only other North American contender, Houston’s Annise Parker, came in seventh.”
I made a right turn onto Portage and started looking for a place to park.
Piya said, “When he was first elected in Calgary in 2010, Nenshi became the first Muslim mayor in North America.”
“Yes, that’s right,” replied Trenholm. “He practices Nizari Ismaili, a branch of Shia Islam.”
“But mayor is one thing,” said Piya. “Prime minister is something else. Is Canada ready for a Muslim at 24 Sussex Drive?”
“Well,” replied the pundit, “that’s for the people to decide—four weeks from today.”
As they moved on to the next story, I found a spot on the street—a rare find this time of day—and even though it was three blocks from Menno’s apartment, I took it.