I’d dropped him off a few times before but had never been up to his second-floor suite (no point paying extra for a view, he’d quipped). I was somewhat curious about how—or if—he’d decorated the place.
In fact, it turned out to be nicer than my condo; the living-room furniture, in silver and cyan, was clearly a matching set, and each wall had a lovely framed Emily Carr print showing the British Columbia coast. Replica Haida totem poles—dark, unpainted wood—flanked the door to the kitchen.
Menno was dressed as old professors usually were, in slightly baggy beige slacks and a brown cardigan. He had his dark glasses on; I wondered if he normally wore them when alone or had put them on when I’d buzzed from the lobby.
“Jim!” he said when I’d arrived at his unit’s door “Welcome! What brings you here?” He motioned for me to come in. Pax was eyeing me from across the room. “Have a seat.”
I did so, settling onto the couch. Menno sat in the easy chair that faced it at an oblique angle. There was a little table next to it on the left; Pax sat down beside him on the right.
“I’ve seen the video interviews with me,” I said.
“About the Devin Becker trial?”
“What? No, no. The ones you did. In 2001. With me. In the old physiology building at Fort Garry.”
Protracted silence, then: “How did you find those?”
“The truth? I had a look around your office.”
Menno was quiet again. “Oh,” he said at last.
“I’d asked you what had happened during that period. Why didn’t you show me the tapes?”
“I know it was news to you that you’d lost your memory, Jim. But it wasn’t news to me.”
“Jesus, Menno. How long have you known?”
“Since 2001. Since you lost it. I’m sorry, but, well, it was obvious back then. I didn’t realize you’d lost six whole months, but it was clear you’d lost some amount of time.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
He lifted his shoulders. “Because you were on the mend.”
“The mend? From what?”
“I don’t know,” Menno said. He couldn’t see my expression, but must have sensed I was going to object because he held up a hand. “Honestly, I’ve tried for twenty years to figure it out.” He exhaled loudly. “You know what? It’s a relief to get to talk about it. Since Dominic moved away, I’ve had no one to discuss this with.”
“What the hell happened?”
“Dominic Adler and I were working on developing a device to detect phonemes that hadn’t been spoken aloud—that is, for detecting articulated thoughts in the brain. You’d responded to our notice in The Manitoban, looking for experimental subjects.”
I did a lot of those sorts of things back then; anything to bring in a few extra bucks. “I remember. Some sort of helmet contraption…?”
Menno nodded. “We had two of them, actually. We started out with the first one, and we could indeed pick up the activity in your brain, but it was very faint, and it was being drowned out by what we thought was noise. So we developed a second helmet that added transcranial ultrasound. The idea was to see if we could boost the signal we wanted in your primary auditory cortex, make it more of an internal shout rather than a whisper, so we could pick it up better with our scanner. But instead you and—you lost consciousness.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, you did. TUS stimulation was completely new back then; we didn’t expect it.”
I put a hand on my chest. “What I do remember from that period is the knifing, but…”
“Yes?”
“Well, from what I can tell, I was here in Winnipeg on New Year’s Eve 2000, not in Calgary.”
Menno lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know where you got the idea of the knifing from, but it didn’t happen, at least not then. But… yeah. You were here that night—and got knocked out by our helmet, and when you came back, well, you didn’t come all the way back.”
I looked at him quizzically, but he couldn’t see that. “What?”
“You’d had an inner voice beforehand—I’d seen it on the oscilloscope—but, as we soon discovered, it was gone afterward.”
“What do you mean, ‘an inner voice’?”
“Just that: an internal monologue; articulated phonemes in the brain even when you weren’t speaking. But after you blacked out, it was gone. The lights were on—”
“—but nobody was home?” I said. “Seriously? Really?”
“Yes.”
“A fucking p-zed? A philosopher’s zombie? Jesus. Not just amnesia, but…” I shook my head. “No. No, that’s just a thought experiment. A philosopher’s zombie can’t really exist.”
Menno was quiet for perhaps thirty seconds. Then, in a soft voice, he said, “They do. They’re everywhere.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Most of the people we tested didn’t have inner voices.”
“Then your equipment must—”
“Stop! You think we didn’t triple check? What I’m telling you is true.” He waved generally in my direction. “The only thing remarkable about you was that you had started out with an inner voice, then lost it for a time after you blacked out.”
“How long was I out?”
“Maybe five minutes. And a few days later, we tested you again—without the TUS, of course—and, well, your inner voice was gone.”
“And so you decided to interview me on a regular basis to see—”
“To see if there was any difference. I wish we’d done some interviews with you beforehand, but we had no way to know what was going to happen.”
“I didn’t watch the interviews all the way through, but I didn’t notice anything different—”
“There wasn’t anything major,” confirmed Menno. “Your external behavior was much the same as before.”
“Until the final tape,” I said.
“Oh,” Menno said, very softly. “Right.”
“It wasn’t just on that tape. People could tell; Kayla could. I’d changed.”
“Kayla?”
“My girlfriend—at the time, I mean. Kayla Huron, and—”
Menno looked startled. “Huron?”
“She was one of your students. I saw her yesterday, for the first time in almost twenty years. She told me I—I hit her back then. Me!” I shook my head, still struggling with that reality. “And then, my God, the horrible things I said in that last interview. Un-fucking-believable.”
He nodded slowly. “You did change near the end. I don’t know why.”
“You must have some idea! And, for Pete’s sake—why’d I change back to normal?”
“Jim, honestly, I don’t know. But…”
“Yes?”
“Well, for almost six months before that change, you were indeed a philosopher’s zombie.” He moved his head left and right—perhaps in negation, perhaps visualizing the hordes that had haunted him for decades. “And you were just as vacant, just as empty, just as dead inside as the countless millions of others surrounding us all the time.”
I walked—or staggered—out of the lobby of Menno’s condo onto Portage Avenue. Here, at lunch-time, there were thousands of people going east, and thousands more going west, and I just stood still, an island in the stream, fighting to keep my balance.
Coming toward me was a man with his head bent and his thumbs typing away on his phone. Behind him were two men wearing earbuds—both, as it happened, with the distinctive white Apple cables. They flowed past, not even glancing at me, just mindlessly navigating around an obstacle.