Raised the lead pipe—like Moonwatcher raising the thigh bone—and brought it down, down, down onto Jean-jacket’s head.
The sound I’d avoided all those decades ago when I’d spared Ronny Handler—the sound I’d always assumed would be a loud cracking, like the one my mother’s porcelain vase had made when I’d accidentally knocked it to the floor—turned out to actually be a dull thud, as if I’d hit a tree stump with an ax handle.
But regardless of the acoustics, the visual effect was…
Yes.
The visual, in the moonlight, was satisfying.
The skull denting, the scalp splitting, and blood pouring out…
I staggered for a moment—but not as much as the guy in front of me did. He swayed back and forth, and then, like the Twin Towers coming down, collapsed vertically into a heap. I spun on my heel and ran toward my car.
Of course, I called it in. The RCMP arrived first, and then the EMTs, who pronounced the guy dead at the scene. The officers were sympathetic, but they had me follow them in my car into Regina. I wasn’t charged with anything, and so they let me go to a hotel instead of staying in a holding cell, and by the time all the paperwork was done the next morning, it was close to ten. I continued on the last couple of hours to Saskatoon—but, it became apparent that the damage to my car was worse than I’d thought; I barely made it there, and, after calling my insurance company, I took the car to a body shop for repairs.
I wanted to go straight to the Canadian Light Source, but as much as I couldn’t wait to see Kayla, she had to make a living. Instead, I took a cab to her place, and, using the spare key I still had, let myself in, took a quick shower, went to her bedroom, and collapsed.
I was awoken by the sound of the front door opening, and, looking at Kayla’s nightstand clock, I saw I’d slept for almost three hours.
“Sweetheart?” I called out.
“Yes, honey?” And then a giggle. It was Ryan, not her mom.
“Ryan?” I said.
“And Rebekkah,” came her grandmother’s voice.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” I called back.
I quickly dressed and headed downstairs. Ryan rushed over and gave me a hug, which I sorely needed. But when we disengaged, she looked at me with horror. “What happened to you?”
My hand went to my bruised cheek. I’m all in favor of telling kids the truth—there’s no Santa Claus; your parents leave the money under the pillow when you lose a tooth; babies come from sex; when you die, that’s it, there’s nothing more—but deciding whether to say “Mommy’s boyfriend just killed a man” was above my pay grade; I’d let Kayla make the call on what her daughter should know. “I was in a car accident,” I said, which at least wasn’t wholly untrue.
“Wow,” Ryan said. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes,” I said, and that was certainly the truth.
“I gotta go pee,” Ryan announced, which was just as well; I needed a minute—or a lifetime—to pull myself together. I exchanged a few remarks with Rebekkah, then she left, and I went to the kitchen. There was a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge; I poured two glasses and took them over to the dining room with its bookcases. Ryan joined me when she was done in the washroom. “How was day camp?” I asked.
“Good.” She looked at me and scrunched up her mouth, thinking.
“What?” I said.
“Can I ask you a question, Jiminy?”
“Of course.”
“Are you going to marry Mommy?”
“We haven’t talked about it.”
“But are you?”
“Honestly, I don’t know.”
She looked down at the floor. “Oh.”
“We’ll just have to see how things go, okay?”
She nodded, then, looking up at me again: “Have you been married before?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
I lifted my hands slightly. “She left me.”
“Why?”
“We disagreed about what we wanted.”
“Oh. What did you want?”
“The greatest good for the greatest number.”
“And what’s the greatest number?”
I thought about that, long and hard, thought about this wonderful young lady, thought about my boy Virgil, thought about everything, and, at last I drew Ryan into another warm hug. “Two-point-nine.”
34
The next morning, Kayla entered the office she shared with Victoria, who today was wearing a black turtleneck and black leather pants; the combo probably wouldn’t work on anyone else, but she rocked it. Vic was staring intently at an image on a forty-inch monitor.
“What’s that?” asked Kayla, standing behind her and bending over to have a look.
“The scan I made of Ross on the beamline,” replied Victoria.
Kayla put a hand on Vic’s shoulder. “When I want to creep on an ex, I look at their Facebook wall or OKCupid profile.”
“It’s not that,” said Vic. She pointed at one part of the display. “See here? That’s the spike showing he’s got one electron in superposition—making him a Q1, a p-zed.”
“Yes.”
“But look here,” said Vic. She pointed at a serpentine line high up on the Y-axis, which was marked with a logarithmic scale.
Kayla nodded. “The background stuff.”
“Exactly. The entanglement we’ve observed before.”
“Right.”
“And, so far, it’s never changed, right?”
“Right,” said Kayla. “If it would do something, maybe we could figure out what it represented.”
“Exactly—but look! It has changed, see? Right here.” Vic pointed at where the whole line jumped a small amount.
“It increased,” said Kayla, surprised.
“Exactly. It suddenly went up, and it stayed up.”
“Huh.”
“I ran a test on myself yesterday.” Vic did something with her mouse, and a split-screen display came up showing two graphs that looked almost identical. “Both of these are me.” Her triple-superposition Q3 status showed as three distinct spikes on each of the graphs. “But see?” She pointed first to the left-hand display, then the right. “The entanglement level at the top is up from my previous reading, too; that’s never happened before.”
Kayla frowned. “Go back to Ross’s display.”
More mouse movements, and the screen changed again.
“You had Ross in here on Sunday the ninth?”
“Yep. Jeff okayed it.”
“Sure, no problem.” Kayla leaned in, looking at the times marked on the bottom of the graph. “And the entanglement level on his chart went up at 11:19 A.M.?”
“And twenty-two seconds,” said Vic, pointing at the figure. “And it stayed up, right through to the end of the run I did with him.”
“Wow,” said Kayla softly.
“What?”
“Do you know where I was then?”
“A Sunday morning? Well, we can rule out High Mass.”
“I was at Tommy Douglas Long-Term Care.”
“Oh, my God! Right! That’s the day you revived your brother!”
“Jim recorded it on video. It’s in our Dropbox.” Kayla gestured for Vic to get up, and she took her place at the keyboard. Kayla opened a browser and banged away for a few moments until she had the shared folder on-screen—and discovered that Vic had her computer set to show large thumbnails; playing-card-sized images of Kayla and Jim making love popped up on the monitor.
“Umm,” said Kayla.
“NSFW,” said Vic, grinning from ear to ear. She reached over and took the mouse, using it to change the view to a plain directory listing, and then she stepped back and let Kayla find the file she was looking for. A couple of clicks later, and the video Jim had shot started playing.