“Cool,” I said. “But, so are you saying this happens to anyone who completely loses consciousness? If they revive, they come up at one level higher than they were at before—or, if a Q3, wrap around to being a Q1, as I did?”
“Yes, I think so. But they have to actually have their brain drop into the classical-physics state. That doesn’t happen during sleep; sleeping is a conscious condition, which is why you dream and why external stimuli can wake you up.”
“True,” I said. “And, I’ve heard tons of stories about people who have temporarily lost consciousness through a coma, general anesthesia, or a near-death experience. Those who know them best often say they were changed by the experience. Family and friends say some people who have had NDEs are more mellow afterward—and, in many cases, they would be. If you were a psychopathic Q2 beforehand, you’d come back as a thoughtful, reflective Q3. And if you were a Q3 beforehand, you’d wrap around to being a Q1 p-zed, literally without a care in the world. Of course, that doesn’t happen with every case of general anesthesia, but—”
“Welllll,” said Kayla, “not to freak you out or anything, but a lot of the drugs we use in operations aren’t really anesthetics; that is, they don’t actually put you out cold. Rather, they’re paralytics that also inhibit memory formation. They keep you from moving during surgery, and they keep you from remembering all the pain, but they don’t actually put you out in the quantum-mechanical sense.”
“Holy shit. Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow. Well, thanks heaps. Something new to have nightmares about.”
She smiled contritely. “But there are groups that do suffer total knockouts disproportionately: boxers, football players, and so on. Most of the time it’s just—just!—a concussion. But every once in a while, one of them really is knocked out cold. And, you know, most of them probably started out as nice-enough guys. But everyone’s read those stories about some of them eventually turning into psychopaths, beating their spouses and so on.”
I nodded. One of the Green Bay Packers was in court just last week over having assaulted his wife.
“Anyway, that’s it!” said Kayla triumphantly. “That’s the pattern! Once you realize that the states wrap around, it’s simple. It’s elegant.”
I was asleep next to Kayla, but even when exhausted, I always dozed lightly, and a small change in the illumination filtering through my eyelids woke me up. Next to me, Kayla, naked, was thumb-typing on her phone.
“Texting your other lover?” I said; I was naked, too.
“No, no.” She continued typing furiously. “I’m sending myself a note. I thought of another mathematical proof that the states do in fact wrap around; I don’t want to forget it.” She tapped a little longer, then decisively banged the screen with her index finger and turned to me, illuminated by the phone, a satisfied smirk on her beautiful face.
I gently pulled her back down, so that she was facing me. I stroked her hair, its copper color undetectable in the darkness; stroked her shoulder, the skin smooth; worked my way toward her breast, perfect, round, soft, my palm moving in light circles over her nipple, which hardened; and then, sliding lower down her torso, touching the ridge that marked the leading edge of one of the wings on her blue butterfly tattoo.
The ridge; her scar.
I had one of my own, of course, on the left side of my chest, where that crazed addict’s knife—
No, no. It hadn’t been heart surgery; it had been the removal of a tumor in my breast. Above my sternum. No need to saw through bone.
And so no need—yes, yes: that was what Cassandra Cheung had told me over the phone from Calgary: “Says here they cut it out under a local anesthetic.”
Meaning I hadn’t had my consciousness shut off. I wasn’t knocked down to the classical-physics state then, back in February 2001—and so nothing had changed: I was a p-zed before the surgery and a p-zed afterward.
But Kayla—
“Wow, indeed,” she’d said earlier tonight. “But it’s exactly what the math predicts, and it’s exactly what happened to you and to my brother and to…”
And to whom?
But no… that was crazy.
And, yet, when I’d started to tell her what I’d done to Menno, she deflected it, saying, “It doesn’t matter who we once were; all that matters is who we are now.”
Once were. Are now.
Jesus.
Could it be? Could she—
Kayla must have felt my spine stiffen because she said, softly, “What?”
My heart beat a few times, then. “Your tattoo…”
“I thought you liked it?”
“You had an appendectomy.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Abdominal surgery.”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“When I was twenty-two.”
“So, 2003?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“And they put you under, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
I found myself pulling slightly away from her. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?” But it was obvious from her tone that she knew what I meant.
“Tell me that you’d been a psychopath when we were dating. If you’re a Q3 now, you were a Q2 before the operation.”
“If,” Kayla said firmly, “the anesthetic had actually caused decoherence, had actually put me out cold, hadn’t just been an amnesia-inducing paralytic, hadn’t—”
My voice was a mere whisper. “Oh, Kayla…”
She was quiet for a time, then, at last: “You’re right. I should have told you.” She exhaled noisily. “But, yeah, I am another data point: you, me, and Travis, we all changed states, shifting up or down exactly as the model predicts.”
“Why not tell me? If anyone could have understood, I—”
“It wasn’t the same thing. You have no idea what it’s been like all these years. You, at least, don’t remember the bad things you did in the past—or you didn’t until just now, thanks to the spelunking you did with that memory expert, what’s-his-name…”
“Namboothiri.”
“But me? I remembered it all. Torturing animals as a kid. Being so cruel to a girl in junior high that she tried to kill herself. I couldn’t tell you about all that; you’d never look at me the same way again.”
“That’s not so.”
“But then I woke up in a hospital bed one day and realized that I’d changed. I told you that it had been Menno’s class that got me interested in consciousness, but that’s not true, and—I’m so sorry—I said it was what you had done all those years ago that got me interested in psychopathy. But that’s not true, either. It was the advent of my own conscience the summer after I finished my bachelor’s degree that did it. That’s why I’ve devoted my career to this. I’ve been trying to figure out how I could have done the things I did, and why I no longer had uncontrollable urges to do similar things.”
She reached over, took the hand I’d withdrawn, and placed it over her tattoo again. “A butterfly, see? In honor of my metamorphosis.”
40
It would have been nice if, after Kayla had shared the truth of her transformation with me, we had been able to fall asleep holding each other, accepting that who we are now mattered more than who we’d been then. But a peaceful sleep was not to be: we were immediately interrupted by a tentative knocking on the bedroom door, followed by a plaintive voice calling, “Mommy?”