Dead Voices, page 17
Dr. Ray read a few tweets, took a few calls.
One caller sounded very distraught. She had lost her own daughter in her teens from brain cancer. She could understand how Joanna had lost all faith, but faith sometimes was all one had to get through such tragedies. The Almighty didn’t favour some over others, she said. Bad things just happened and it was up to us to handle it as best we could. Sometimes bad things in the short run could, perish the thought, turn out good in the long run. Who knew what the designs of the Almighty were?
Another caller said that maybe Joanna was fooling herself. Maybe she had done not a few things wrong that she wasn’t actually aware of. Maybe she was actually being punished. Who were we, mere mortals, to say what was fair or not? We just had to believe and remain steadfast. It was easy to believe when things were going good, she said, but when things went wrong that was the true test.
A third caller, a Jonathan from Markham, tried to put everything into perspective.
“I’m like you, Dr. Ray, not religious,” he said. “But I do look at Nature to guide me. I’m an environmentalist. Remember last week, the big ice storm we had in the city? It rained ice for two days. Things like that happen rarely, but when they happen it causes us to take note. Many trees and branches broke under the strain. The trees and branches collapsed over the power lines and many lost power. I was on my daily trek while this was happening and saw the branches and some trees fall with a mighty crack. And it occurred to me that not only the weak trees and branches were falling, but the strong ones as well. Nature wasn’t making any distinctions. Nature was just taking care of business. And, at the same time, it was giving us a warning, I think. In spite of our technical and scientific advances, maybe we aren’t as great as we think we are. Nature’s still the boss, as it were.”
Most callers and tweeters, however, offered their comfort and consolation. Though they couldn’t feel Joanna’s complete pain, they could feel some of it. In spite of her cynicism, her dark night, someone said, they wished her well. They would pray for her, or keep her in their thoughts, maybe even create some swelling of sympathy, one caller actually said, that would reach her through the air waves like a tongue of grace.
Dr. Ray asked a few callers what they thought Joanna had meant by her final comment. Most didn’t know and wouldn’t even hazard a guess. They didn’t want to go there. One caller, however, said it was simply a call for help. When one was thrashing about and drowning in the dark they were blind to the light.
Dr. Ray, however, was listening to the callers and to his own inner voice. The comment from the previous caller about the tongue of grace, for some inexplicable reason, stayed with him. Joanna’s call had elicited so many responses a plan was slowly forming in his mind. He could have Aaron set a special line and Twitter account. They could carry the ball a little longer on her call. They could set a support and comfort group. To show Joanna that she wasn’t alone. In spite of what she felt about the show, they could reach out and help her out.
Afterwards, the phone-in screen started to flash with callers. Instead of wanting to forgive themselves, they were all too ready to forgive someone else, someone who had wronged them. One’s own parents. A spouse. A son or daughter. A colleague at work. A friend or lover. Even people from the distant past.
Dr. Ray had to keep the calls as short as possible to air as many as possible. It seemed the whole concept of the show had blown open. Aaron was constantly gesturing to cut the lines with a big smile on his face. The monitor was glowing with calls — as if it had been lighted by a flame of forgiveness.
He had to hide his excitement, however. In one way it was amazing to see such a great outpouring of forgiveness from the listeners. But it was still a serious show. It was fine and dandy for the callers to say they forgave someone else, but did they really mean it? Were they afraid of suffering some sort of punishment if they didn’t forgive, or were they simply doing what made them feel good?
And he didn’t have enough time to give the callers the attention they needed.
After he signed out, he spoke to Aaron in the hallway outside the studio.
“The calls were too quick,” he said. “They’re too ready to forgive. What am I there for?”
“To listen,” Aaron said, all excited. “It’s beautiful. They’re forgiving themselves. That’s what you want, isn’t it? It opens everything up. It’s more democratic. The show will pick up now. This is just the beginning. It’s a new ball game now.”
“Yeah, but if they’re forgiving too easily, then it doesn’t mean much anymore, does it?”
“A little forgiveness is better than none. You wanna stay on the air, don’t you?”
Dr. Ray, however, wasn’t convinced. He drove home with a few questions playing on his mind. Would he merely be a Recon facilitator, letting the callers forgive others, or could he actually have some input? And what was the tongue of grace over the airwaves?
The Switch
Emma glanced on the floor beside her desk at the two silver suitcases. They held the Virtual Reality gear that Sam Breytenbach would use later in class.
It was close to the end of the long common lunch and she was waiting for Sam before the start of her class. Her windows looked out northward from the second floor over the football field to the new condos on the ridge of the hill, awash in the glare of the afternoon sun.
The back wall of the classroom had the colourful Bristol boards of various projects the kids had done on the Bible, as well as a few metal cabinets for supplies and books. To her right, suspended from the ceiling, was the TV monitor with the DVD player. Behind her and to her left were the white boards to avoid the chalk dust. On her desk, in front of the Bibles and concordances and dictionaries, were three piles of paper she had already marked. The highest pile was on the left, a very small pile in the middle, and two pages on the right.
While waiting for Sam, she picked up a few of the inclass assignments on the left and went over what the kids had written about the Trolley Switch Experiment.
The first paper, hardly legible, was by Brian Monez.
I would pull the switch because it is better to kill one person than five. Like, who wouldn’t? Even though this is a lame experiment, Miss. It would never happen in real life. We take stuff like this in school, they don’t happen in real life.
If Jesus were at the switch He’d probably do a miracle. I don’t know. Maybe like make a bridge go over the guys tied up on the track. He wouldn’t kill anyone, you can bet on it.
Megan Townsend had written the second paper in a neat large hand.
I’d pull the switch and divert the trolley in order to save the lives of five people. But I’d feel bad about causing the death of one person
The part about what Jesus is not fair, Miss. How could we ever put ourselves in the mind of Jesus? He’s already sacrificed himself for us. Like, it’s up to us from now on, isn’t it?
The others were in the same vein. They chose to pull the switch and save the lives of five people tied to the track and let the trolley run over the one person. The only other option, chosen by the kids in the middle pile, was to not touch the switch and let the trolley kill the five people.
God wouldn’t want us to kill anyone, one student wrote.
This is tricky, another student wrote. How do we know the trolley will kill five people? Are we sure? How can we ever be sure of what will happen in the future? Didn’t you tell us at the beginning of the semester that the means didn’t justify the end? If I was to kill one person to save five, wouldn’t I still be like killing someone? That’s just not right, Miss.
Robin Kwasek, one of the two papers in the third pile, wrote that it would all depend on who the people were. Suppose, he said, the five people were all pedophiles or psychos or degenerates. Then he’d take great delight in killing them. Suppose the one person on the other track would want to sacrifice his life to save the five others. Robin, the smart-ass and goofball, always tried to go outside the box, but it was totally impractical since the trolley was careering down the track out of control, leaving no time for conversation. She had made that plain.
For a few semesters now she had been giving the TSX, as she called it, in her senior Religion Course. She had it all illustrated in a cute cartoon fashion in a handout. The trolley was coming down a steep hill out of control towards five people who were tied to the track. Before them was a switch lever than could redirect the trolley to another track. One person was tied to the other track. The faces of all the people were indistinguishable in gender and age. The person at the switch lever was wearing a track suit, his or her face in a cute little smile.
IF YOU WERE AT THE SWITCH, WHAT OPTION WOULD YOU CHOOSE? it said at the bottom of the handout. IF JESUS WERE AT THE SWITCH, WHAT OPTION WOULD HE CHOOSE?
This semester, however, she had come up with a twist. A colleague in the English Department had told her about a friend of his at the western campus of the university who was doing research with the same moral option in virtual reality. It was an opportunity she couldn’t afford to miss, though she wasn’t exactly sure about the technical aspects of such research. All she knew about virtual reality was a few movies she had seen and what the kids had told her.
On the spur of the moment she had called the researcher up and found him quite receptive. Sam was in the Psychology Department and into creating and using Virtual Reality systems, he said. The Switch Study was a standard moral conundrum. He had been conducting his research for about a year now. He’d be glad to come over one afternoon, he said over the phone. It’d give him a chance to compare his results with younger students. Also, he’d do a little recruiting. Get the high school kids interested in psychology and neuroscience. Too many kids were going into business and engineering, he said, not knowing how exciting the human brain could be.
She couldn’t care less about the physical makeup of the human brain, unless she could redirect it towards some interest in religion. She taught kids who were apathetic and detached, their brains working at minimum wattage. Most of them didn’t even want to be in the course. It was mandatory in a Separate School. Teaching the Bible was hard enough. Teaching Church doctrine was impossible. She had to rack her mind at times to get them interested.
Some Religion teachers tried to make it easy on themselves by showing one movie after another to teach a moral lesson, they said. Right. Like showing one superhero movie after another to teach altruism. Which usually backfired. Not only did the students get bored with the movies, they lost respect for the teacher as well. Even the more modern Gospel movies — one depicting the sadistic torture of Christ and the other of his temptation to be a normal person — got boring. The kids needed loud sound tracks, outrageous special effects, or cynical scripts. They were the new breed. Hot-wired by the Internet and video games and smartphones. Half of them couldn’t write a correct sentence. They didn’t read. Except for Internet stuff — and even then it was a few seconds.
If it wasn’t entertaining and cut down to their attention spans, it was boring.
At least the TSX got them involved in some way. The purpose of the exercise was to choose the lesser of two evils, she told them. It wasn’t just a cutesy experiment. Life wasn’t cut and dried. Sometimes they had to make tough decisions. Like that between losing a few friends and taking drugs. Religion wasn’t just about going to church and observing the sacraments. It was about making choices and putting one’s faith into practice.
She herself wasn’t always sure about putting her own faith into practice, however. While she still enjoyed going to Mass and soaking up the atmosphere in a church, she wasn’t always in agreement with the priests who were giving the homilies. More and more of them were new immigrants steeped in old-world values. Besides, she didn’t always agree with Church doctrine. As far as she was concerned, the Church took care of women in the spirit, but it had a lot of work to do in taking care of women in the flesh. And these days a girl had to take care of herself in the flesh, no doubt about it.
To her surprise, Sam wasn’t what she expected at all. On the phone he had sounded meek and hesitant, with a bit of a South African accent. She pictured some bald academic in a lab coat and thick glasses who had lost all connection to reality. When he had come into her workroom, however, carrying his two large suitcases, he was tall and broad-shouldered and fit. He was in tight casual jeans and a blue polo shirt showing his biceps. She saw no ring on his finger. There was an athletic glow to him. His face, with its banged up nose, lean hollow cheeks, dark smouldering eyes, and big smile put the shiver in her. With his shortcropped hair and overall demeanour, he was one hot guy.
After depositing the suitcases in her empty classroom, she had taken him to the cafeteria servery where they had picked up some food and then gone outside to sit on the bleachers at the football field. She wasn’t going to bring him to the staff room and share him with anyone. Luckily she was wearing one of her better summer outfits that day, a nice blue skirt showing her long legs and a sleeveless floral-embroidered top.
He was very concerned about leaving the suitcases unattended, but she reassured him it was all right. They sat at the bottom rung of the bleachers, looking away from the field, so that they could use the rung above as a table. He had explained how he’d work the gear for the VR experiment, but she was hardly listening. His close proximity was sending all sorts of electrical interference. Slowly and gradually, she had turned the conversation to things personal. Yeah, he was originally from South Africa. His field was cognitive psychology. He had been at the university for a few years, after publishing a book on consciousness and the human will.
In his research he was studying how the will was partly unconscious and instinctual, partly conscious and volitional, coming from a binary-process brain, as he called it. One half heart, one half head, he said, with a big grin. Though it was possible the two sides could bleed into each other. The military was funding a large chunk of his research. No, he wasn’t married. He had been married at one time, but his wife, who had been in law school, had her own agenda, didn’t want kids, and couldn’t tolerate his schedule. They had been incompatible from the very beginning, he said, with a little smile, except in the bedroom. He spoke in a casual cavalier manner, as if they had known each other for years. The electrical interference had suddenly jacked up.
She understood, she had told him. It couldn’t just be physical. She herself had been in a few relationships that were only physical. Sure, there could be a lot of sparks, but what good were the sparks if they were snuffed out by the day-to-day reality of making a life for oneself? A couple couldn’t be self-centred. A relationship had to grow into kids and a family that was rock-solid at home so that both partners could pursue their own ambitions in their chosen field.
“If I’m hearing you correctly,” he said, “what you’re saying is that women have to be particular about their genetically optimal male.”
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “I’d never thought of it like that.”
“It’s called the MPI, the male parental investment.”
“It sounds like Dating for Accountants.”
“Yeah, I see.” He gave her a big smile. “But I’ve done other studies and found that women have these hidden detectors for good genes and high ongoing investment. The MPI.”
She couldn’t tell if he was putting her on. He sounded so serious.
She enjoyed teaching and interacting with the kids, and trying to light a fire underneath them, she told him. But teaching Religion was challenging. In high school the onus was on the teacher to get the kids interested. At the post-secondary level he had more motivated students.
“I don’t envy you,” he said, with his little smile.
She couldn’t read the smile. And there was a certain lilt to his tone, a certain detached quality that left her guessing. His South African background just added to his mystery.
“So, you don’t have any kids?” she asked him, with a side glance.
He shook his head.
“It’s never too late, is it?” she said, pushing back strands of her hair.
He gave her the smile again. She had to check herself, not be too nosey. Instead she talked about herself. How difficult it was to find the right guy, forget about the MPI. Some were still boys, some were all body and no brains, some were all brains and no body, most were just not her type.
“It’s probably all pheromones,” he said with a grin. “Your MPI instincts are probably very selective.”
Then he went back to the VR experiment. He couldn’t bring all the equipment from his lab at the school, of course, but enough to get the immersion needed. He had a headset helmet, a hand-held grip with buttons, and sensor devices on the legs. The students had to be forewarned that they would be totally immersed in the virtual environment, as if they were right inside a 3-D movie, with the tactile element, as well as the visual and auditory. Some kids would feel comfortable with that and some might not.
“Some of my students who’re into video games and such are not bothered at all,” he said.
“OK. We’ll give the kids the option. If they don’t want to participate, that’s fine. You only have one headset?”
“Yeah, but I can change the scenario with a click of the mouse.”
He also explained the scenario wasn’t exactly the same as her TSX. Instead of a trolley car, his scenario had loaded boxcars which were headed towards two narrow mine shafts. The boxcars were heading for the four persons who were walking into mine shaft A. Pulling the switch would redirect the boxcars into mineshaft B that had only one person. There was no room to avoid the boxcars. The thing was, you could see and hear the people as if they were alive. They weren’t just illustrations on a sheet of paper.
