Other Copenhagens

by Edmund Jorgensen

  “Mmmm,” she said. “You’re so warm.”

  She must have felt his arm stiffen under his jacket, because she let go right away.

  “You know, if you’d rather just call it a night, that’s fine,” she said. “We can pick this up another time, or whatever.”

  As she spoke a cab passed by, and the two frat boys in the back rolled down the window and hooted at them. Shannon gave them the finger.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” said Maxwell. “I really wouldn’t. I’m sorry if I’m acting a little strange, but–look, I don’t even usually bring this up until date three, but you seem really cool, and I’m just wondering if I really want to get my hopes up when you’re just going to freak out when you find out anyway.”

  “You’re kind of in danger of freaking me out right now, Maxwell,” said Shannon.

  “I know, I’m sorry. The worst part is, it’s not really that big a deal. But I have this condition–it’s actually really dumb. It’s nothing dangerous or catching, but it’s just this thing that …”

  At the word “condition,” something seemed to click inside Shannon. She put a finger up to his lips, and Maxwell trailed off in confusion.

  “Tell you what: let’s take the pressure off, shall we? We don’t even have to call this a date. We’re just two people eating pancakes. We’ll go Dutch as a Rembrandt. But we’re already here. I can smell the pancakes–they smell pretty damn good, and I’m starving. And furthermore, I’m freezing my ass off. So why don’t we sit down where it’s warm, fortify ourselves with some coffee and a couple full stacks with butter and maple syrup, and then, if you still want to, you can tell me all about it?”

  With her finger still on his lips Maxwell didn’t speak, but he nodded once. When they resumed walking, Shannon did not, as he had hoped she would, take his arm again.

  * * *

  Dr. Gibbs woke up slowly at first, realizing in stages that, just as in his dream, he was pouring from a bottle of scotch, but that–unlike in his dream–he was pouring it not into a cut-glass tumbler but onto the keyboard of his laptop. The fatigue and lingering effects of the scotch sent him into a spasm of response, and he started twice from his chair to fetch a towel before he even thought to stop pouring. As quickly as he could he put the bottle down on the desk and unplugged the A/C power from the the back of the laptop, but he still lacked the presence of mind to remember the battery, or to understand for a few seconds why the laptop refused to shut off. Somewhere behind the keyboard something popped and fizzled, and the screen went blank.

  Dr. Gibbs leaned back in his chair, defeated. The bottle was almost empty. Scotch had pooled beneath his laptop and was dripping off the desk and onto his robe and slippers.

  He groaned and shook his head, face in hands, perhaps mourning the waste of so much fine liquor, or the negligent destruction of an expensive piece of technology, or the moment of weakness that had ended his five years sober–or perhaps the fact that he was facing all of these minor tragedies alone, in an empty house that was not large but was too large for just him, while somewhere beneath bright New Hampshire stars Clarissa-his-ex-wife slumbered sweetly beside Don the Handsome Salesman of Insurance, dreaming of who knew what, but certainly not of Dr. Gibbs. His head hurt and he could not catch his breath. He did not even attempt to wipe up the scotch–it was simply impossible to face this disaster until morning.

  Dr. Gibbs groped and stumbled blindly up to the bedroom. There was something else that he should do before he fell asleep. Brush his teeth? Lock the door? But these could wait. The warmth of the bed was impossibly inviting as he fell in, shoes and all.

  “Did you check the stove to make sure the gas was off?” asked Clarissa-in-his-head.

  “You used to ask me that every night,” he said out loud, reaching for the pillow next to him.

  * * *

  Derek struck the lighter, and an almond-shaped flame danced in the draft of the bathroom fan. The Suffering Decision lay face up in the sink, curving at the edges of the bowl like a man trying to sleep in a bathtub. Derek had first placed the book face down, as if sparing a condemned man from the sight of his executioner, but he could not bring open flame towards the portrait of Dr. Gibbs on the rear cover and had been forced to flip the book over.

  That picture must have been taken at least ten years ago–Dr. Gibbs’s face was thinner than Derek had ever seen it, and his hair and beard still showed some pepper mixed in with the salt. He was smiling in front of his garden, wearing a straw hat and leaning on a hoe or rake. His cheeks were dappled with sun. Derek suspected that his wife had snapped the photo.

  Derek would not have described his feelings towards Dr. Gibbs as a son’s feelings towards a father, but that was due more to a lack of relevant experience–almost a lack of vocabulary–than any lack of emotion. Derek had exactly one memory of his father: a round, bearded face aglow with the light of what Derek had deduced to be between 25 and 27 candles inclusive, sucking in the breath to blow them out.

  His father looked happy in this memory, and over time he had grown to look happier, as if he were slowly realizing just how delicious a chocolate cake from a Duncan Hines mix could actually be, or as if the memory were itself conscious, gradually accruing an older man’s understanding of just how good it actually was to be 25 to 27 years of age inclusive, blowing out the candles on the birthday cake your wife had made you, forever.

  In some of their earlier sessions Dr. Gibbs had made noises about Derek’s forgiving his father being an important step in breaking the Curse, but–to Derek’s relief–he had given that idea up. There was no world in which Derek could forgive his father for deserting his mother and himself, not because the hurt was too deep, or because Derek was not a forgiving person, but because he felt no injury to forgive. Derek had never known his father. He had never been tempted to track him down and seek his approval, and–not being skilled at or interested in hypotheticals–he had no concept of what life might have been like if his father had been present through it. His father had done injury not to Derek but to the notion of fatherhood, and it seemed to Derek that to absolve him would require not Derek’s forgiveness, but the forgiveness of every father’s son everywhere. It would have been like collecting signatures door to door.

  Whereas Derek forgave Dr. Gibbs without even noticing that he was doing so: forgave him for misguided notions like the above, for the professional arrogance that occasionally broke through, for his initial refusal to believe in the Curse and his continued inability to break it. Derek even forgave Dr. Gibbs for the failures and unhappiness in Dr. Gibbs’s own life (the weight the psychiatrist had still not stopped gaining, the increasingly unkempt beard, the loss of his wife–whose footsteps Derek never heard above anymore during sessions–as well as the rest of his practice).

  Or nearly the rest of his practice. There was someone else who still came to visit Dr. Gibbs–Derek could feel his presence. Dr. Gibbs asked patients to arrive at the front door and exit through the back, and on occasion Derek would hear the front door close as he opened the back, or vice versa. He had never seen the young man–for some reason Derek assumed that he was a young man–but he felt a kinship with him, as if their destinies were entangled, as if they were bound together by their mutual association with Dr. Gibbs. Derek had even begun to feel, or at least imagine, that the young man was crossing paths with him elsewhere: stepping off a subway just as Derek stepped on, or riding down the elevator adjacent to the one in which Derek was ascending.

  The flame was still dancing–the lighter had grown hot in Derek’s hand.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said out loud. “One book can’t possibly count for the Curse.”

  Lifting his thumb off the plunger, he threw the lighter into the trash and retrieved the book from the sink. He tossed it in the top drawer of the bedside table, right next to the Gideon Bible, and slammed the drawer shut.

  Then, one duffel bag in each hand, Derek headed out the door and down to the gaming floor.

  * *
*

  “Mmm,” said Shannon, taking her first bite, “I like the little crispiness they get on these things. You, sir, have good taste in pancakes.”

  The only other customers in the diner–a pair of drunk female club-goers–had paid their bill and stumbled out, giggling, before Maxwell and Shannon had even received their coffee. They were alone now except for the bored waitress who sat behind the counter, watching a mute presentation of The Princess Bride on the television mounted in the corner.

  “So what do you do?” asked Maxwell.

  “Ugh.”

  “Your job’s that bad?”

  “No, I mean ‘ugh’ that we’re at the ‘so what do you do’ part of the evening. I thought there were more interesting things we were going to talk about?”

  “All I really know about you is that you studied art and have a disturbing knack for cutting through my BS. I’d like to know a little more before spilling my guts.”

  “All right,” said Shannon, “time me, I’m going for the record. Ready? Born near Chicago–parents both teachers–one sister, older, yes we get along–hated school until college–studied art–tried painting, tried sculpting, accepted my own artistic mediocrity–now work as a graphic designer. Hobbies include fixing old cars and getting denied entrance to chic nightclubs. Time! How fast was I?”

  “I’m never going to live the club down, am I?”

  “Actually I don’t mind. Really I hate clubs. But I do like to dance, and clubs are the only place to do that.”

  “So is that your dream job?”

  “Dancing?” she said. “Maybe–I’d never considered it as a career.”

  “No, graphic design.”

  “I guess so. That doesn’t make it sound like it’s my dream job, does it? Don’t get me wrong, I like graphic design. It’s just that when I was younger I had this crazy idea that I’d be some kind of problem solver–maybe because I was obsessed with Encyclopedia Brown. You remember him?”

  “Of course. So you wanted to grow up to be a boy detective?”

  “You’re hilarious. No, I had this vision that I’d be in an office with, like, a plant, a window, and a database, and people would come to me with their problems, and I’d help them.”

  “What kind of plant?”

  “Either a fern or a ficus. I haven’t decided yet. So is working the door at Demonologie your dream job?”

  “I want to hear more about this plant and window and database.”

  “At some point,” said Shannon, pointing her fork at him, “you’re going to have to say something about yourself. If I recall, there was some ‘condition’ you were going to tell me about once I had my pancakes and coffee, which–let me check–yep, I’ve definitely got.”

  “I don’t know if that was such a great idea. Another time.”

  “Come on, Max. You can’t get lucky unless you roll the dice.”

  “I’m worried this is more like pulling the trigger in Russian roulette.”

  He made no more response until, after a few more bites of pancake, Shannon looked up at him, widening her eyes and making two circles in the air with her fork. The fluorescent light caught a ginger hair on her arm.

  Maxwell remembered the possibilities he had envisioned upon first seeing her as she jogged up to the door of Demonologie–the outright bolting, the false warmth, the concerned hand-hold, the undisguised, derisive laugh. In none of the eventualities he’d imagined had she looked like this, open and warm and matter-of-fact, urging him with her fork to come clean. For that matter, none of the women he’d confessed to had ever looked remotely like that either–even the kindest of them had been unable to hide discomfort around what he might be about to reveal.

  “All right,” he said, riding this sudden wave of hope before it could dissipate and allow intelligent self-preservation to reassert control, “what the hell.”

  * * *

  “In the room is a large wooden box with a door on one side. You enter the box alone, closing the door behind you. Inside there is only a bare bulb providing light, a trigger attached to the front wall and, mounted on the back wall, a gun.

  “Pulling the trigger will activate a device to measure some quantum state–let us say, whether a certain electron has an up spin or a down spin. If the spin is up, nothing will happen. If the spin is down, the gun fires a bullet. I neglected to mention that the gun has been carefully positioned so that the bullet will fire into your brain, killing you instantly.

  “You walk up to the trigger, take a deep breath, and pull it. What happens to you now depends on which dead white male with the European name was smarter–Werner Heisenberg or Erwin Schrödinger.”

  The laughter that rippled through the conference room was more than polite, which pleased Dr. Gibbs. Eventually he had to raise his hand to stop it.

  “If Heisenberg is right you are just flipping a coin–in the form of measuring an electron–and have a fifty-fifty chance of living or dying. According to him the quantum uncertainty about whether the electron’s spin is up or down is not an uncertainty in the nature of the universe, but in the measurement of the universe. Observations at quantum scale are just so difficult that they can only be described as probabilities. This is the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation, named for the city in which Heisenberg proposed it.

  “But if Schrödinger is right–and the uncertainty in quantum theory reflects not the difficulty of measuring quantum-sized events, but an actual fuzziness in the fabric of reality–then a far stranger fate befalls you. In the instant you pull that trigger the universe splits in two. In one universe, the spin of the electron is down, and you are killed instantly. In the other, the spin of the electron is up, and you survive.

  “Now in the universe where the gun went off, you will not be aware–because you will be dead. You will only be aware in the universe where you have survived, where you will think that you just got lucky–that the spin of the electron just happened to be up. But consider what happens now if you–or to be more precise, the ‘you’ who was fortunate enough to survive in the universe with the up-spinning electron–pulls the trigger again.

  “The universe splits again, and you with it. Again, one of you dies, unaware, and one survives, aware. Another pull on the trigger–yet another universe. And again, and again. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, if Schrödinger is right and the Copenhagen Interpretation wrong, you will be able to pull that trigger as many times as you like–or until your nerve runs out–and the ‘you’ that survives will experience nothing worse than the repeated clicking of the trigger–and, perhaps, some very understandable anxiety.”

  More laughter.

  “The thought experiment we have just described was originally proposed by another man with a European name–the futurist and technologist Hans Moravec–in 1987, as a method for disproving the Copenhagen Interpretation. He called his method ‘quantum suicide.’ Yes, there’s a question in the first row?”

  “Dr. Paul Sutherland, Yale University. So if I’m following you, quantum suicide–if it worked–could disprove the Copenhagen Interpretation to the subject in the box, since he only experiences the parallel universes in which he survives. But the subject is also leaving behind other universes in which he dies–and in those universes, the people outside the box hear a bang and run in to find him dead. So they’ll still believe that the Copenhagen Interpretation is true, no?”

  “An astute observation, Dr. Sutherland, and absolutely correct. Which leads us to the Hsiao Experiment, named for Liyan Hsiao, warden of the Tilanqiao Prison in Shanghai, the largest prison in China, and–when he took over–the most overpopulated.”

  * * *

  “23 red.”

  “Yes!” shouted Derek. He pumped his fist and turned to the old woman sitting next to him.

  “That right there,” he said, pointing at the stack of chips the croupier pushed his way, “is how baby gets new shoes.”

  She smiled politely, gathered up her own chips, and went to find another table. She had been the
last holdout–Derek now found himself alone, which suited him fine. He hummed a few bars of “Sussudio” as he stacked his winnings and prepared his next bet.

  “How we doing this evening, sir?” said the man behind him.

  Derek had not heard or seen the man approach–it was as if he had materialized there, and was now hovering just behind Derek’s left shoulder at the distance a tailor might maintain–measuring tape still around his shoulders–allowing a customer enough range of motion to test an adjustment while never letting him forget that the tailor was still in charge of his movements. Two other men stood further behind, arms folded, at about the same distance again.

  The man was short–perhaps five foot six–and almost as wide as he was tall. He wore his hair buzzed to the skull. An awkwardly placed scar, visible only when the light caught it, sloped very low across his cheek and chin, as if he’d been on the wrong end of a broken bottle in a bar fight. But he radiated a friendly and cheerful energy.

  “What’s the problem?” Derek asked, turning back to his chips.

  “There’s no problem, Mr. …”

  “Field. As in ‘Field of Dreams,’ as in the dream that I’m living right now. Oh yeah! Seventeen on the nose!”

  “There’s no problem at all, Mr. Field. I’m Mr. Esposito. I work for the casino.”

  “No shit?”

  “Let me buy you a drink in the bar.”

  “I can get a drink at the table. I’m on a hot streak, and you never walk away from the table on a hot streak.”

  “Well that’s the problem, Mr. Field …”

  “So there is a problem.”

  “Ha, I like that. You’re a sharp one, Mr. Field. You’d get along with my wife. What I mean is, that’s the thing I’d like to chat about–your hot streak.”

  “You’re not suggesting that I’m cheating?” said Derek, a little louder than he had intended.