Quantum Night Read Free Page B

her here to Winnipeg, and whenever it did, we hung out together.
    “Oh, come on,” she said. “Surely there’s a spectrum for psychopathy.”
    I shook my head. “Everyone wants everything to be on a spectrum these days. Autism is the classic example: ‘autism spectrum disorder.’ We have this desire for things to be analog, to have infinite gradations. But humans fundamentally
aren’t
analog; life isn’t analog. It’s digital. Granted, it’s not base-two binary; it’s base-four.
Literally
base-four: the four bases—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—that make up the genetic code. There’s nothing analog about that, and there’s nothing analog about most of the human condition: you’re either alive or dead; you either do or don’t have the genes for Alzheimer’s; and you either are or aren’t a psychopath.”
    “Okay, fine. So how do you know? What’s the binary test for psychopathy?”
    “You ever see
The Silence of the Lambs?”
    She nodded, honey-colored hair touching her shoulders as she did so. “Sure. Read the book, too.”
    I was curious as to whether she’d picked it up after she’d started dating Gustav. “When?” I asked offhandedly.
    “The movie? When I was in law school. The book? Maybe ten years ago.”
    I resisted shaking my head. Gustav had only been on the scene for six months now, but I was sure he was a psychopath. Not the violent sort that Thomas Harris had depicted in his novel—psychopathy was indeed binary, but it manifested itself in different ways; in Gustav’s case, that meant narcissistic, manipulative, and selfish behavior. A self-styled actor—IMDb had no entry for him—he apparently lived off a succession of professional women; my ever-kindhearted sister, so sharp in legal matters, seemed utterly oblivious to this. Or maybe not: I’d attempted to broach the topic a couple of times before, but she’d always shut me down, saying she was happy, all right?, and I should let her be.
    “Well,” I said, “in the movie
The Silence of the Lambs,
remember the first interview between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter? Anthony Hopkins absolutely nails one aspect of psychopaths—at least as much as someone who actually
isn’t
one can. He looks right at Clarice and says”—and here I did my best impersonation of Hopkins’s cultured hiss—“‘First principles, Clarice. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?’ And then, the most memorable part, as his eyes drill into her and he says, ‘What does he do, this . . . man . . . you . . . seek?’ Remember that?”
    Heather shuddered a little. “Oh, yes.”
    “Jodie Foster’s response—‘He kills women’—is supposed to be the chilling part, but it isn’t. It’s Lecter’s stare, the way he looks right at Clarice, unblinking, unflinching. I’ve seen that stare in the flesh, from real psychopaths in jails. It’s the most unnerving thing about them.”
    “I bet,” said Heather. She’d ordered mozzarella sticks as an appetizer; I’d been out with her and Gustav and seen him veto her choicesof anything fattening. She took one of the sticks now and dipped it in marinara sauce.
    “But, you know,” I said, “good as he is, Anthony Hopkins is only simulating the psychopathic stare. He can’t do it quite right.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “A real psychopath looks at you not just without blinking much—although that certainly adds to the reptilian effect—but also without performing microsaccades.”
    Heather had heard me talk about them before. Microsaccades are involuntary jerks as the eyeball rotates two degrees or less; they occur spontaneously whenever you stare at something for several seconds. Their purpose is debated although the most common theory is that they cause the neurons perceiving an object to refresh so that the image doesn’t fade.
    Heather’s eyebrows rose above her wire-frame glasses. “Really?”
    I nodded. “Yup. The paper’s coming