Other Copenhagens

by Edmund Jorgensen

  “I doubt it.”

  “Luke Warm.”

  “Amazing,” Maxwell said.

  “The Amazing Luke Warm? I think that’s too much. Just Luke Warm is better.”

  “No, I mean you’re amazing–I’m sorry, I don’t want to freak you out, or say the wrong thing, it’s just–you’re taking this unbelievably well. This is never how it goes when I tell a girl about my condition. At first they just think I’m crazy, and if I actually show them they look at me like the world’s biggest …”

  “I have hyperthymesia,” said Shannon.

  “Oh,” said Maxwell, his mind taking a moment to brake fully, “right. And that’s when … which one is that again?”

  * * *

  “But for us–as psychiatrists, therapists, and other tenders to mental health–the most important consequence of the Hsiao Experiment is what it means for our patients. For example, I assume that most of you have read my first book, The Suffering Decision, and understood its central message–that there can be no suffering without the decision to suffer. But if every decision we make means we split the universe in two–one in which we chose one way, one in which we chose the other–think of the mental health consequences!

  “Imagine being able to say to the relapsed alcoholic in front of you, bent almost double in his chair with shame, that in another universe he never took that drink the night before, and is, at that very moment, soberly and gratefully recalling his near miss?

  “Imagine gently explaining to a woman, wracked with guilt, that in some other version of our world she never left her loving husband–whose only crime was a certain emotional distance characteristic of overachievement–to run off to New Hampshire with a soulless insurance salesman.

  “For every version of us that decides to suffer, there is a version that refuses. For every version of us that ruins, injures, fails, there is one that repairs, heals, triumphs. Somewhere, we are each living the most perfect version of our lives.

  “Explaining these concepts, relating the abstract details of quantum theory to the everyday pains and neuroses of everyday people–this must become the foremost function of the allied mental health professions–this function will dominate ‘Psychiatry in a Post-Copenhagen World’–which, incidentally, is the sub-title of my book, available in the lobby or from any quality bookseller. There’s a question in the back.”

  “Yes, Clarissa-in-your-head, Your Head.”

  “Clarissa? What are you doing here?”

  “My question is this: isn’t it true that you, and all your arguments, are full of shit?”

  The crowd hissed and booed. Men and women turned in their seats, craning their necks to see who had spoken. A few even stood up. From the left someone shouted “Fie!”

  “Wait,” said Dr. Gibbs, holding out his hand to calm the crowd. “Quiet, please. Let us maintain academic decorum, even if she will not. Let her say what she has to say.”

  * * *

  “After what I’ve just seen,” Mr. Esposito said, “I’m not crazy about letting you back on the floor.”

  “I didn’t come here to win,” said Derek. “Those two bags I’ve got? I started the night with almost seven million dollars in there, and I plan to work my system until there’s nothing left.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Mr. Field, but–and don’t take this the wrong way–I’d like to understand why you want to give Mohegan Sun all your money.”

  “Aren’t all your guests here to give you their money? On average?”

  “That’s an interesting way to think about it, but usually they leave an element of chance in the equation.”

  Derek sighed.

  “Look,” said Mr. Esposito, “nothing would make me happier than to send you and your bags of cash back to the roulette wheel, but you freaked me out with all that coin flipping and number picking. I need to believe what you’re telling me here. I want to. Make me a believer.”

  “You said you’ve got a daughter. Are you married?” Derek asked.

  “For the moment, God help us both. You?”

  “I was married to my job.”

  “Which is?”

  “Was. Proprietary trader.”

  “You’re one of those guys?” said Mr. Esposito. “I have some words for you about my pension fund–or what’s left of it.”

  “I don’t understand how a man who works at a casino can complain about Wall Street with a straight face. But proprietary traders have nothing to do with your pension fund. We invest on behalf of companies. We take their stacks of cash and turn them into bigger stacks.”

  “Sounds like the job you were born for.”

  “Can I get one more of these?” said Derek to Bert the bartender. Then, to Mr. Esposito: “You said you were married. If you won the lottery tomorrow, would you worry about whether your wife only loved you for your money?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What if you found out tomorrow that you had won the lottery years ago, without realizing it, but she had known the whole time?”

  “I don’t get it–how could she have known I’d won the lottery if I didn’t even know?”

  “I don’t know, she saw the ticket in your drawer or something. It doesn’t matter–the point is, would you worry whether she had just married you for your money or not?”

  Derek let Mr. Esposito chew on that for a few seconds, but then continued before he could answer.

  “So now imagine you’re a proprietary trader, and you’re married to your job, and for years you think you’re the best at it. The best in New York, which means you’re the best in the world. And then one day your mother asks you to buy her a lottery ticket while you’re at the store–you would never buy one yourself, you think gambling is for degenerates–and you forget to give her the ticket. And it hits for seven million dollars.”

  “Wait, didn’t you give your mom the ticket when it won?”

  “Of course I gave her the ticket. But then I also bought another ticket, just as a joke. And I won again–the next week.”

  “And they didn’t arrest you both on the spot?”

  “They investigated my entire family, and now we’re all barred from the lottery for life. But you’re missing the point. I discovered that it wasn’t just the lottery. Any game of chance–tossing coins, picking horses, blackjack, all these games I’d never played before–whatever it was, I won, always, 100 percent of the time, whenever money was on the line. So if my job–the job I was married to–the job I thought I was the best in the world at–is to pick stocks, how can I know whether I’m really any good? If I’m cursed to always win, how can I know I’m not actually a loser? Just like if you’d been rich when you met your wife–how could you have ever known that she didn’t just love you for the money?”

  “I could give away all the money and see if she stuck around.”

  “Just what I tried. I gave everything to charity, but I got it all back. I was still cursed. I’ve tried rituals from Africa, meditation, prayer. I read a book by this psychiatrist, claiming that suffering happens to us because we decide to let it, and that we can only feel cursed, not be cursed–and I started seeing him three times a week, hoping he could show me how to decide not to feel cursed.”

  “And?”

  “Let’s say it didn’t work out that way. Now he has me flip unlucky coins and do these Native American cleansing chants. But I think finally–maybe–I’ve figured it out. With my roulette system the Curse is helpless–because I win every spin, but I lose money each time. It’s turning the Curse against itself, you see? Just burning it out, spin by spin by spin. Evaporating it away.”

  Derek stopped and looked at Mr. Esposito. He clasped his hand in front of his chin, almost in the manner of a supplicant, until he noticed what he was doing and stopped.

  “So what do you think?” Derek asked. “Are you a believer? Can I get back to that roulette table now?”

  Mr. Esposito stood up, buttoning his suit jacket.

  “Mr. Field, I still do
n’t know how to explain what I’ve seen here tonight–and I don’t really know whether I believe you or not,” he said, “but I know one thing: you’re sure as hell not going back to that roulette table.”

  * * *

  “My turn to star in this freak show, I guess.” said Shannon. “Name a date from our lifetimes, but not yesterday or anything–like, ten years ago or whenever.”

  “Okay, how about: June 3rd, 2002.”

  “Right. On June 3rd, 2002 I wake up and my clock says it’s 6:28, two minutes before my alarm, and I’m pissed off about missing the extra sleep. The sun is coming in through a gap in the cardboard that my mother has folded and stuffed on the left side of the window to seal off the air conditioner–I figure the sun on my face is what woke me up and for a second I feel angry with her until I remind myself she was only trying to help. There’s a glass of water half full on the nightstand next to my bed, which is white and has chips in the paint here, here, and here.” Shannon closed her eyes and pointed to relative positions on the table, almost sticking her finger into her pancakes in the process.

  “You have a photographic memory?” said Maxwell.

  “I wish. The 3rd is my sister’s birthday but we celebrated on the 2nd because both of us have to work, we got to the club at 11:22 and it was pretty empty. There’s a girl wearing a leather skirt I really like at the bar, and she shoots me an evil look that makes me wonder whether I’m looking especially good or bad–I’m thinner back then. The guy next to her has an Abercrombie & Fitch shirt on, it’s white with a blue collar. The next morning, the 3rd, my left toe is numb because of dancing in heels, and the numbness will last six days. It’s two days before Elizabeth Smart gets kidnapped–I’ll feel strange around the guy who does the lawn later that week–and five days before Serena beats Venus in straight sets at the French Open.”

  “Shannon.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You remember all that?”

  “I do.”

  “I mean … how?”

  “Pretty much anything that happens to me on a given date, I’ll remember forever. The alarm goes off while I’m still fuming about waking up early … sorry, once I get started it’s hard to stop.”

  “You must have breezed through school.”

  “No, actually I have a shit memory.”

  “Yeah, no kidding–remember how you just told me you remember everything?”

  “Everything that happens to me, not what I pay attention to. I remember what people wear, scores from baseball games I see, stuff like that. If I try to remember something on purpose, like what I read in a book, it’s really hard–it’s like there’s no space or energy left. I spend way too much time thinking about the past, and I can’t always control it–if someone names a date, or I see one written, it’s there all of a sudden–all the details in my head. I take meditation classes to help me focus on the present and just, you know, be in the moment. It helps. I think it helps.”

  “And you’ve always had this? You were born with hyper …”

  “Hyperthymesia. Yeah. It’s really rare–I’m one of like 21 cases ever documented. And I’m one of the lucky ones–mine is mild. Some people don’t just remember everything, they feel it all again like it’s happening for the first time. Can you imagine what that must be like? I mean, your cat dies and you can’t ever get over it. But for the most part I can deal. I find ways to manage it, like I organize everything into buckets–Wednesdays, times I was wearing green, days when the Red Sox lost, and so on. It helps me deal with the flood of …”

  “Information.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow,” said Maxwell, and immediately regretted it, though on reflection he could not think of anything better to have said. They both fell silent.

  “So,” said Shannon eventually.

  “So?”

  “This a deal-breaker? Too weird for you?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Maxwell. “After what I just told you?”

  “But your condition is harmless. And kind of cool. Mine is–it causes a lot of problems.”

  “Like?”

  “Well, I’m not saying that you and I are going to turn into, you know, a relationship or anything–but people around me get tired of my remembering everything they do and say, and always being right about it, and it’s worse with …”

  “Boyfriends?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what you’re saying,” said Maxwell, “is that if this works out I’ll never be able to tell the same joke twice.”

  Shannon stared at him for a moment and smiled.

  “Tell you what,” she said, reaching across the table and taking his mug. “If this works out, you can recycle all the jokes you want, as long as I get your coffee whenever mine gets cold. Deal?”

  “I’m going to need more than that if you get my coffee.”

  “Then counter-offer, jerk, I’m not going to negotiate with myself.”

  “I’ve got to carve out baseball stats. You can’t correct my baseball stats in front of other people, even when you know they’re wrong.”

  “I can live with that,” Shannon said. “Deal?”

  “Deal,” said Maxwell.

  They sat for a moment, suddenly awkward in each other’s presence, unable to meet each other’s eyes as Shannon sipped from Maxwell’s coffee. When their eyes finally did meet, his cheeks turned red.

  “You’re blushing,” said Shannon. “Can you feel it?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I mean, I can’t feel anything in my cheeks, but I can kind of–tell that I’m blushing.”

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s kind of a forward idea–for a first date, I mean.”

  “This doesn’t exactly feel like a first date, does it?” said Maxwell. “To me it feels more like …”

  “A third date?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then here’s my idea: let’s go back to your place and try a little competition. You try to make me forget what day it is, and I’ll try to see if I can’t change your temperature a little. Loser cooks breakfast.”

  “What’s that thing,” said Maxwell, clearing his throat, “that thing you’re supposed to say when you want the check?”

  “Check please?”

  “That’s it. You’ve got a good memory.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “Check please,” said Maxwell.

  * * *

  “Let’s start with the Hsiao Experiment itself,” said Clarissa-in-his-head. “The problem isn’t just that it’s immoral and inhumane–or even that no impartial scientist ever had the chance to examine the box that Hsiao used before it was dismantled. The problem is that the Hsiao Experiment doesn’t actually disprove the Copenhagen Interpretation.”

  “One in two to the 100th power isn’t enough for you?” asked Dr. Sutherland in the front row. “Find me after the keynote–I have some wagers I’d like to propose.” A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd until Dr. Gibbs shushed it.

  “The odds don’t matter,” said Clarissa-in-his-head, “because we have no way to tell whether the Copenhagen Interpretation is wrong, but we were just lucky enough to be in the one parallel universe where that prisoner survived 100 pulls of the trigger–or whether the Copenhagen Interpretation is right, and there’s just this one universe, in which this one prisoner was amazingly lucky.”

  “Impossibly lucky,” said Dr. Sutherland.

  “No more impossibly lucky than we would be to happen to inhabit the single universe, out of so many, in which he survived. The odds are one in two to the 100th in each case. We only know that one of them is the truth–it’s a coin flip which one it is.”

  The crowd muttered as they considered this with their neighbors.

  “I hate to admit it,” Dr. Sutherland said finally, “but she has a point. Dr. Gibbs, will you rebut?”

 
Cries of encouragement erupted from the audience.

  “Yes! Put her in her place!”

  “Teach her a thing or two, Dr. G!”

  “Does she even have an advanced degree, or did she stop after undergraduate?”

  “Maybe if she spent a little less time crunching cold numbers like her insurance salesman husband, and a little more being nurturing and supportive, she’d still be married to you!”

  Dr. Gibbs cleared his throat as if to speak, but without any idea what he would say.

  “I’m not finished yet,” said Clarissa-in-his-head. “Even if we stipulate that the Hsiao Experiment proves the existence of parallel universes, your so-called ‘therapeutic ideas’ are nonsense. You might just as well tell the relapsed alcoholic that in another universe he drank even more the night before and died in a gutter, while in another he drove home drunk and killed a teenager on the highway, while in yet another he had already relapsed the week before, and so on. For your one magical universe where everything has gone perfectly right for everyone, there are untold trillions of trillions where nearly everyone is mistaken, weak, and miserable nearly all the time. And this is what you hold up as your message of hope?”

  “She’s right,” said a voice from the middle of the crowd, causing a minor gasp. “There would have to be all those universes where things went even worse.”

  “And doesn’t it seem like there’s always more ways for things to go wrong than right?” said someone from further up front. “So I guess there would be more unhappy universes than happy ones.”

  “But just the fact that there is a universe where everything has gone right,” said Dr. Gibbs, “isn’t that comforting?”

  “You could even argue,” Paul Sutherland said, “that if the Copenhagen Interpretation is wrong, then any decision at all just creates suffering. If you choose wrong, you suffer in this universe–and if you choose right, you suffer in another.”