Quantum Night (2 page)

Several of my colleagues in the University of Manitoba’s psychology department considered teaching to be a nuisance—“the ineluctable evil,” as Menno Warkentin used to call it, resenting the time it took away from his research—but I loved it. Oh, maybe not as much as I loved bananas, or binge-watching old episodes of
Curb Your Enthusiasm
or
Arrested Development,
or photographing globular clusters with my telescope, but as far as things that people would actually pay me to do are concerned, it was right up there.

Granted, teaching first-year classes could be overwhelming: vast halls filled with stagnant air and row after row of angst-soaked teenagers. Although my own freshman year had been two decades ago, I vividly remembered signing up to take introductory psych in hopes of making sense of the bewildering mélange of anxiety and longing that swirled then—and pretty much now, too—within me.
Cogito ergo sum?
More like
sollicito ergo sum
—I fret, therefore I am.

But on this gray morning, I was teaching The Neuroscience of Morality, a third-year class with fewer students than February had days—and that allowed for not just lecturing but
dialog
.

Last session, we’d had a spirited discussion about Watson and Skinner, focusing on their notion that humans were nothing more than stimulus-response machines whose black-box brains simply spit out predictable reactions to inputs. But today, instead of continuing to demolish behaviorism, I felt compelled to take a dark detour, using the ceiling-mounted projector to show the Savannah Prison photos WikiLeaks had made public over the weekend.

Some were individual frames from security-camera video, the guards caught unawares from on high. Although what those depicted was brutal, they weren’t the most disturbing images. No, the really disquieting ones—the ones that knotted your stomach, that made you avert your eyes, that you just couldn’t fucking believe—were the
posed
photos: the picture of the officer with her boot on a prisoner’s back while she gave a jaunty thumbs-up to whatever asshole was holding the iPhone; the still of the two uniformed men tossing a naked, emaciated prisoner so hard against the ceiling that his skull, as x-rays would later show, had fractured in three places; the snapshot of the mustachioed sergeant straddling a downed man while defecating on his chest, one hand clamped over the inmate’s mouth, the other flashing a peace sign, the image then having been run through Instagram to make it look like an old-fashioned Polaroid, white frame and all.

My stomach roiled as I stepped through the slides, one atrocity giving way to the next. It was now sixteen years after Abu Ghraib, for God’s sake, and a half century since Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment. Not only were guards supposed to be trained about situational pressures and how to avoid succumbing to them, but two of those shown in the photos were studying to be wardens. They knew about Zimbardo; they were aware of Stanley Milgram’s shock-machine obedience-to-authority experiments; they’d read summaries of the Taguba Report on the Abu Ghraib atrocities.

And yet, despite being specifically taught to recognize and avoid the pitfalls—a word that at first seemed innocuous but, if one reflected upon it, suggested tumbling into the abyss, following
Lucifer into the very fires of hell—each of these men and women had dehumanized the perceived enemy, and, in the process, had lost their own humanity.

“All right,” I said to the shocked faces of my students. “What can we take from all this? Anyone?”

The first hand that went up belonged to Ashton, who still had acne and hadn’t yet learned that it was permissible to trim a beard. I pointed at him. “Yes?”

He spread his arms as if the truth were self-evident. “Simple,” he said, and he flicked his head toward the screen behind me, which I’d left on the last slide, the one showing a gangly guard named Devin Becker killing a naked prisoner by holding his head under water in a jail-cell sink. “You can’t change human nature.”

T
HE
call had come just about a year ago. “Hello?” I’d said into the black handset of my office phone.

“Professor James Marchuk?”

I swung my feet up on my reddish-brown desk and leaned back. “Speaking.”

“My name is Juan Garcia. I’m part of the defense team for Devin Becker, one of the Savannah Prison guards.”

I thought about saying, “Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you,” but instead simply prodded him to go on. “Yes?”

“My firm would like to engage you as an expert witness in Mr. Becker’s trial. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty. We’re likely to lose on the facts—the security-camera video is damning as hell—but we can at least keep Becker from being executed if we get the jury to agree that he couldn’t help himself.”

I frowned. “And you think he couldn’t because . . . ?”

“Because he’s a psychopath. You said it in your blog entry on Leopold and Loeb: you can’t execute someone for being who they are.”

I nodded although Garcia couldn’t see it. In 1924, two wealthy university students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, had killed a boy just for kicks. Leopold considered himself and Loeb to be exemplars of
Nietzsche’s
Übermenschen
and thus exempt from laws governing ordinary men. Supermen they weren’t, but psychopaths they surely were. Their parents engaged none other than Clarence Darrow to represent them. In a stunning twelve-hour-long closing argument, Darrow made the same defense Garcia was apparently now contemplating: claiming Becker couldn’t be executed for doing what his nature dictated he do.

I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward. “And
is
Becker a psychopath?” I asked.

“That’s the problem, Professor Marchuk,” said Garcia. “The D.A. had a Hare assessment done, which scored Becker at seventeen—way below what’s required for psychopathy. But we think their assessor is wrong; our guy squeaks him into psychopathy with a score of thirty-one. And, well, with your new procedure, we can prove to the jury that our score is the right one.”

“You know my test has never been accepted in a court of law?”

“I’m aware of that, Professor. I’m also aware that no one has even tried to introduce it into evidence yet. But I’ve got your paper in
Nature Neuroscience
right here. That it was published in such a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal gets our foot in the door; Georgia follows the Daubert standard for admissibility. But we need you—you personally, the lead author on the paper—to use your technique on Becker and testify about the results if we’ve got any chance of having the court accept the evidence.”

“What if I show that Becker
isn’t
a psychopath?”

“Then we’ll still pay you for your time.”

“And bury the results?”

“Professor, we’re confident of the outcome.”

It sounded worthwhile—but so was what I did here. “I have a busy teaching schedule, and—”

“I know you do, Professor. In fact, I’m looking at it right now on your university’s website. But the trial probably won’t come up until you’re on summer break, and, frankly, this is a chance to make a difference. I’ve read your
Reasonably Moral
blog. You’re against the death penalty; well, here’s a chance to help prevent someone from being executed.”

My computer happened to be displaying the lesson plan for that afternoon’s moral-psych class, in which I was planning to cite the study of Princeton seminary students who, while rushing to give a presentation on the parable of the Good Samaritan, passed by a man slumped over in an alleyway, ignoring him because they were in a hurry.

Practice what you teach, I always say. “All right. Count me in.”

—

Shortly after I came off the Jetway into the international terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, I went into a little shop to buy a bottle of Coke Zero—here, in Atlanta, headquarters of Coca-Cola, there was no sign of Pepsi anywhere. Without thinking, I handed the woman at the cash register a Canadian five.

“What’s this?” she said, taking it.

“Oh! Sorry.” I dug into my wallet—I always have to carefully look at US bills to make sure of the denomination, since they’re all the same color—and found one with Abe Lincoln’s face on it.

There was no one else waiting to buy anything, and the woman seemed intrigued by the blue polymer banknote I’d handed her. After examining it carefully, she looked up at me, and said, “There’s no mention of God. Ain’t you a God-fearing country up there?”

“Um, well, ah, we believe in the separation of church and state.”

She handed the bill back to me. “Honey,” she said, “there ain’t no such thing.” She frowned, as if recalling something. “Y’all are socialists up there, right?”

Actually, until recently, Canada had had a much more conservative leader than the United States did. When Stephen Harper came to office in 2006, George W. Bush had been in the White House and, to liberal Canadian sensibilities—the kind found on university campuses—he seemed the lesser of two evils. But once Barack Obama was elected, Canada had by far the more right-wing leader. Harper managed to hold on to power for almost a decade, but Canada was now ruled by a minority coalition between the Liberal Party and the socialist New Democratic Party.

“Kind of,” I said, although I suspected her understanding of the
term “socialism” was different from mine. I handed her the American five, got my Canadian bill back plus my change, and took my pop, or soda, or whatever it was here.

This was my first time flying in the States since Quinton Carroway had been sworn in as president, and I was surprised to hear that the constant warnings about terrorist threats over the public-address system were back; they’d disappeared under Obama but had returned with a vengeance. The old wording had invariably been, “The Homeland Security threat level is orange”—which was only semi-effective propaganda because you had to have memorized the code to know that orange was the new black—the thing white folk were supposed to fear most—being one step shy of an imminent attack. The new message, which played every three minutes or so, was much more direct, and, unless I missed my guess, the voice was the president’s own distinctive baritone: “Be on guard! A terrorist attack can occur at any time.”

And speaking of propaganda, despite Atlanta also being home to CNN, Fox News was on the big-screen TV hanging down like a steam-shovel scoop from the ceiling as I arrived at baggage claim. Orwell had been right that mind-controlling messages would be pumped twenty-four hours a day through telescreens, and he’d have recognized the ones in the airport with no way to turn them off. What would have astounded him is that many millions of people would voluntarily tune into them in their own homes, often for hours on end.

I recognized Megyn Kelly although I usually only saw her in unflattering clips on
The Daily Show.
“Look,” she said, “it
is
a fact that this guy was in our country illegally.”

“And for that he should have died?” said a man—clearly the day’s sacrificial liberal lamb.

“I’m not saying that,” said Kelly. “Obviously, what these three men did was not the way to handle it.”

“No?” said the man. “What they did was
exactly
what Governor McCharles intended, isn’t it?”

“Oh, come on!” snapped the other woman on the panel. “The Texas governor simply meant—”

“The whole point of the McCharles Act,” said the man, “was to
provoke attacks like this. Redefining homicide as the killing of a
legal
resident! What is that, except a wink-and-a-nod to every yahoo out there that the cops will look the other way if an undocumented immigrant turns up dead?”

“The point,” said the same woman, “was merely that these illegal aliens can’t flout the law and then expect to be protected by it.”

“For God’s sake!” said the man, who was getting red in the face. “McCharles is setting things up for a pogrom!”

I grabbed my bag, then headed off to find a taxi, grateful to be leaving the arguing panelists behind.

—

I beheld the monster.

One of them, anyway. There were six according to the indictments; nine, if you believed the
Huffington Post,
which argued that three other corrections officers who should also have been charged had gotten off scot-free. But this one, everyone agreed, had been the ringleader: Devin Becker was the man who had incited the other guards—and he was the only one who had actually killed somebody.

“Thirty minutes,” said a burly sergeant, as Becker folded his lanky form onto the metal seat. The irony wasn’t lost on me: Becker himself was now in the care of a prison guard.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who indeed watches the watchers?

Becker had high cheekbones, and the weight he’d lost since the notorious video had been recorded made them even more prominent. That the skin pulled taut across them was bone white only added to the ghastly appearance; put a black hood over his head, and he could have played chess for a man’s soul. “Who are you?” he asked, a slight drawl protracting his words.

“Jim Marchuk. I’m a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg.”