“I phoned, but there was no dial tone. I told you before, plug your fucking phone in or I’ll hardwire it into the wall.” That was the Slavic way, too, deflect blame onto someone else. “I came by to check if you were enjoying tonight’s porn, take any requests for next week’s titles, get your vodka order, but I can see you’re in even worse shape than I thought. Thank God I came by. Listen, you need to get your fluids drained,” – Pig waved a thumb at Magda – “I can help you out with something a lot better than this … this … ebanatyipidaraz, this fucking grandmother. Shit, man, are you fucking blind as well as desperate? Half her girls look even worse than her.”
“Nice to see you, too, Pig,” Magda said. “Kor-rovie khuy-ee. Your mother sucks cow dicks.”
“Sloocha. Slut,” Pig acknowledged. “Sosi ebnataya suka. Suck it, you fucking whore. Look, I told you. What you do in town is your own business. In camp, selling whores is mine.”
“It’s a free country,” Magda said. “Ti ne podmakhivai. Mind your own fucking business.”
“No, it’s a capitalist one, khuyesos’. Nothing is free anymore. And in this camp, I’m the capitalist. So bugger off.”
“Dolboeb,” Magda cursed him. “Fuckhead.”
“Hey! I went to MGU. While you were slutting it out, I was hitting the books.”
“For lunch maybe,” Magda countered. “Plug your phone in and call me if you’re interested in what I said,” she tossed over her shoulder at Snow, no longer interested in being in the room. Without Snow noticing, she’d written the number on a scrap of paper she’d left on the table.
“Wed’ma. Witch,” Pig cursed her back as she left.
“You’re not watching the movie,” Pig accused Snow. “How are you going to learn about our culture if you don’t study our cinema?”
“From Shaving Raisa’s Privates?” Snow asked, raising one eyebrow doubtfully.
“You have to start somewhere. So, how many bottles of vodka you need? I’ll put you down for a case. I can get you wholesale that way. The good stuff, the same as last time?”
“Last time,” Snow complained, “I ordered the good stuff, I got this.” He showed Pig the remaining bottle in the fridge.
“Moskovaya,” Pig read. “Like I told you. The good stuff.”
“Right,” said Snow. “Since when does Moskovaya get spelled with two ‘v’s? If you’re going to sell bootleg shit, at least get the labels right.”
“Never mind. I got you wholesale. What do you want for that price? Now, what else you need? French ticklers? No, not you. Listen, I’m serious. I can get you women that are a lot nicer than that whore provides. What are you going to her for?”
“That’s not why she was here.”
“What then?”
“She came to see me about a book.”
“What do you want a book for? You already got one. Why do you need another? How many can you read at the same time? It’s not like a woman. At least they got two holes. Three, if you don’t mind the smell.
“Listen, you got to get the internet here in your porta-cabin. I’m going online. No more door to door and filling in paper forms. It’ll be all electronic soon. Payment by bank transfer once the web site is up. For now, I’ll take cash. Dollars, not that Russian shit. Delivery times guaranteed or you get a free woman for the night.”
After Pig left, Snow poured himself a drink, turned the TV on, watched Raisa (she must have been a gymnast before she was a … what? Actress didn’t seem quite the right word for it) for a while, then got bored and turned to something on The National Geographic channel. Fucking koala bears of all things. Sighing, he flipped through the channels but could only find soccer, or football as they called it here. Not knowing what else to do he stared at the stain of Baffin Island for a while. Drank another glass of vodka. Stared some more at the wall, then the light bulb, thoughts jumbling around like clothes tossed in the dryer, pain squeezing out of his soul like a garlic press.
Shit. The booze wasn’t working. He felt like his blood had been drained from his veins and replaced with crankcase sludge. Finally, he turned and smashed the already dented clock off the dressing table and against the porta-cabin wall. Not knowing what else to do, he plugged the phone in.
It rang sometime between three and four in the morning. Snow answered it on the first ring. He still wasn’t sleeping.
“Good morning, Canadian,” the voice on the other end said. “Trouble sleeping? ‘The mind is a monkey chasing its tail, suffering and desire going around in a circle like a merry-go-round.’” Then, it hung up without saying goodbye. Few Russians did on the telephone. Most surprising of all, it was said in flawless, atonal English.
Great! Just what he needed. A goddamn Mathabeautician quoting the Buddha to him. Furious, he yanked the plug out of the wall and sent the phone careening after the clock.
Amazing, is it not, The way our possessions end up owning us?
Take time for instance. Man invented time, thinking that it might be a useful tool. We chain it to our wrists, attempting to convince ourselves that we have mastered it. We could use it to make our day more efficient we told ourselves, allotting each of our activities a certain amount of Time, compartmentalizing each function into a certain part of each day.
What has happened? Time has ended up calling the shots. Supper-time, bed-time, recess-time, home-time: Time tells us what we can do and when we can do it. It has removed free choice. Not liking this, we spend most of our time trying to sneak past time.
We spend time, hoping to exhaust our supply of it. But time knows no bounds – its supply is infinite -- it will play that game until the cows come home (on time of course).
We take time. It ends up taking us.
We get lost in time, or lose track of Time. It manages to find us.
We tell time. It refuses to listen. It tells us.
We stretch time, bent on taking it past its point of elasticity, hoping to snap its hold on us. But time is amorphous, it will stretch as far as we take it, and then rebound to sting us.
We waste time, dropping little bits and pieces of it here and there as we go along, like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs in the forest. Too bad, there is a never-ending supply.
Jim Croce notwithstanding, we even try to save time (though not many of use bottles for this purpose. Most of those are already full of another terrible invention--alcohol). Oh, what a laugh time must get out of that. We should not be trying to save it, but to kill it!
Be honest. How many of you have tried to "kill" time? Do not answer too loudly. The cop that sleeps within all of us may be listening. He has not yet been killed. When he's not busy enforcing The Entropy Laws he keeps time in protective custody, ensuring its well-being from assassins like you.
We have created a monster in time. Like Frankenstein's ogre, it returns to pillage the countryside, wreaking destruction and drawing down a curtain of guilt wherever it passes, a curtain that the cop within us keeps drawn even once time has passed. Unlike Frankenstein, time is a three-headed monster, however, using past, present, and future to terrorize us. Time has become inescapable. There is no law in Physics which does not use it to explain the underlying reality of the physical world.
Still, there is some hope. Time has a big job ahead of it. Perhaps too big. Surely, there must be times when it dozes off. No, Time never gets a day off. It must be very tiring to be time. After all, time has to put in twenty four hour days, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, year after year. Christ, in Newfoundland, time even has to put in a half hour of overtime.
Twenty four hours is 86,400 seconds (the half hour of overtime adds an additional 1,800 seconds to the bill). A second is a very long time. If you don't believe this, consider that it takes only 1X10-20 seconds, or a quintillionth of a second, for that most important of all events, the recoil of an atomic nucleus leading to a nuclear explosion, to occur. Imagine what can happen in the rest of that second.
A bullet cap explodes in a millionth of a second. It
takes a thousandth of a second for a nerve impulse to cross a synapse. A human heartbeat takes one second, The average act of love but 180 seconds (for the lucky among us it lasts a lifetime). Light reaches the Earth from the Sun in 492 seconds. The Earth rotates on its axis once every 86,164.1 seconds. It completes an orbit around the Sun once every 31,472,329 seconds. The estimated age of the universe is 320,000,000,000,000,000 seconds. Time has been on the job for every one of them. Doesn't time ever go on strike for shorter hours?
Of course it doesn't. Time knows, as all fascists know, that it cannot release its grip on Man for one instant. Even in that most joyous of occasions, retirement, when we feel we have finally escaped from dead end jobs and can make time march to the beat of our drummer for a change, it reminds us who is in charge, lacking even the subtlety to soften the blow. What else would you call the final insult, the gift of a gold watch. Yes, time knows it can never release us. If it did, we might evolve beyond fear of physical violence to reasoned thought, and from reasoned thought to enlightened intuitiveness. Then we would have no use for time, or any of its fascist cousins.
At six forty five, Snow was in the Mess Hall drinking coffee, exhausted first thing in the morning, trying to jump-start his head and negate some of the effects of the vodka. Lately, he’d found he was having a hard time getting drunk; he could drink and drink and not feel any of the pleasant mood-altering effects, just all the physical complaints the next day. He nodded to some roughnecks at the table next to him. They didn’t know each other names. That was the way Snow wanted it. He didn’t want to know their names or anything else about them. He felt comfortable there in his cocoon.
It took him five minutes to walk the few hundred meters to his workplace. Pig had tried to give him a pickup for transportation around the camp the same time he’d made Snow take the phone. Snow had refused. He didn’t want to accept the responsibility of keeping it filled with gas and under repair. Right now, he had two keys on his key chain, one for the office and one for his porta-cabin. That was two keys too many in his opinion. Kolya religiously locked the door every night to protect his precious documents, so Snow had to keep that key ready. The one for his porta-cabin was dull from disuse, since the door was never locked.
At seven a.m. precisely he was at his station in Document Control, obediently playing his small role in the epic battle of chasing and turning decayed and pressurized mastodons into liquid hydrocarbons. Time would have been proud of him.
It had taken some time for Snow to find his current position working at Document Control in Noyabrsk. For Snow, it was the perfect job. He’d tried staying and working the ranch in Cowley, but it wasn’t the same after Jillian had her skull split open. Forced to carry on with consciousness when all he wanted to do was throw the off switch and fade to black, Snow’s head didn’t feel right unless he was sleeping or drunk. He couldn’t look at the coulees or a quarter-horse or a cougar sunning on the rocks by the Castle River without being reminded of her. He’d tried the rodeo circuit, but he wasn’t nearly good enough to make a career out of it. He had worked construction awhile in the boom towns across the West before he tried his own company selling construction and building supplies. By anyone’s reckoning he had done all right. It just took too much damn effort, smiling and greeting people and shaking hands and trying to pretend he gave a damn. It was only when he had been audited by the Revenue Department that he found his calling. Having to round up the various permits and invoices Revenue Canada had brought him into contact with the world of Document Control; being able to sit alone in room full of files and paperwork with no one else around and no one much bothering to come and visit was a godsend for him. Snow sold out his company and took up the trade, all things to all men but nothing to himself.
He had worked in Yokohama for the Japanese; in Jeddah, Aden and Tripoli for the Arabs; and was now in Noyabrsk for his sins. The other places hadn’t worked out. There were always too many people, too much … society. Other people’s realities had always been too much for Snow, his own not enough. Once he got to Noyabrsk, however, he started to feel better. That is, he started to feel less. He had made no friends, saved no money, gained nothing at all since coming to Russia except a new and harder picture of the world. But here, in the armpit of Europe, if not the world, at least he was alone, without family, commitment or responsibility; free to drink his slow way to nothingness.
A Document Controller is a person who manages documents for an organization, ensuring reliability, security, availability, archiving and, most importantly, a controlled and reliable audit trail. These could be blueprints, drawings, engineering designs, reports and minutes, records of safety meetings, or invoices. The Document Controller compiles them, numbers and files them, ensures their validity, and distributes items as needed. Compliance with regulatory procedures is a large part of the job.
Having to interact and talk with people is not. The vast majority of communication regarding the documents under Snow’s control was done electronically. The only person Snow saw most days was Kolya, who looked up at him laconically as Snow walked in now, knees clicking like castanets as he hobbled up the steps into the office.
“Hmmph,” Kolya grunted by way of greeting, satisfied that Snow had arrived on time. Kolya – Snow never knew his last name and Kolya never offered one – was a throwback from Soviet times, a devoted Communist who believed wholeheartedly in Marx and Lenin, admitting only that the system hadn’t worked because of the people implementing it, not the ideas themselves. Kolya had spent the years of the Soviet experiment managing documents for the Party. While others were purged and transferred and rehabilitated as the winds shifted, Kolya remained constant, his mastery of the information inside the files enough insurance to keep his enemies from pouncing. It was the same method Stalin had used to reach the top of the Bolshevik morass, making the obscure post of General Secretary (the keeper of the documents) the most powerful in the USSR.
“What were you?” was a common question Russians asked each other after the fall of Communism, when the command economy collapsed and doctors became ice cream vendors and physicists started driving taxis. Criminals became biznizmen, KGB officers presidents and communist apparatchik the new masters of capitalism.
All except for Kolya. Kolya never changed jobs at all. Documents were still his life. For Kolya, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the new Russia had been an unmitigated disaster. In his opinion, Yeltsin had managed to do in just a few years what the Bolsheviks had failed to do in seventy five: make the people long for Communism.
Kolya was wearing the same utilitarian blue suit he wore to work every day, saving Sunday to clean and press it. For Kolya, document control was God’s – strike that – Lenin’s work, the lifeblood of any controlled economy. Hands ribbed with blue veins the size of earthworms, his fingers lumbered over the keyboard, sorting out the priorities in the current day’s document shuffle.
“Had a visitor,” Kolya told Snow in as few words as possible. He never bothered looking up. He wouldn’t have offered even this much of an observation if the event wasn’t so unusual. No one came to Document Control unless they had to.
“Oh, yeah?” Snow offered disinterestedly, expecting Kolya to tell him who. When he didn’t, Snow felt obliged to ask.
“Not some lady, was it? Looked kind of like a refrigerator covered in donut sugar?” After last night, Snow was starting to feel stalked by Magda. First the visit, then the equally unwelcome phone call.
“Pig,” Kolya sneered. His opinion of the Camp Boss was clear in the single syllable. Kolya was of the opinion that anyone who could rise to the position of wealth and power Pig had attained in the new Russia without shaking hands with at least three kinds of devil knew nothing about the devil and probably even less about Russia.
“What did he want?”
“Documents,” shrugged Kolya. “What else?”
“Did you give them to him?”
“Told him he had to follow procedure just l
ike everyone else.”
Of course he would have. For Kolya, the rules were sacrosanct. The two of them spent the rest of their shift moving papers around, without saying so much as a word to the other, Pig’s visit, for the moment, forgotten. After work, Snow went back to the Mess Hall, nodded to the same two nameless roughnecks and pushed some food around his plate again uneaten. He had three or four hours to kill before he could drift off to dreamless sleep. He hoped Pig had made the vodka delivery.
On the way back to his porta-cabin, it was already dark, despite only being five p.m. Briefly, he paused to look up at the sky and saw the same stars he would see back home. The crisp, dry cold made images remarkably clear. He inhaled deeply, like a camper savouring the pine-scented air, and gagged on hydrocarbons. His gaze drifted up to the sky: Ursa Major. The pollution of the oil processing plant blotted out the fainter stars, but he could recognize brighter ones like the Big Bear. From his earlier life and reading the Bible with his mother, he knew Ursa Major had been mentioned as far back as the book of Job. People as far back as the Mesopotamians had recorded its presence. Different though his new life in Russia might be, the constellations were the same. It was still the North.
A Russian folk tale said that Polaris (the North Star) was really a maddened dog tied by an iron chain to the Little Bear, and that if the chain ever broke it would be end of the world. Snow could relate. Breaking his own chains would feel like the end of his world.
Snow had gotten as far as the major junior hockey level back home in Canada, the highest you can get before turning adult and either making a career out of hockey professionally or giving up and getting real work. He’d even been drafted by a pro team in his teens. He’d never make it farther, but he had had one brief shining moment along the way. He had been living in Northern B.C then -- you played in whatever place drafted you, you didn’t get to pick -- keeping his relationship with Jillian alive by letter and phone, when the call came from Calgary to join the big team while a regular was out with a bad groin. The catch was he had to be there in fourteen hours; thirteen hundred kilometres in fourteen hours. Plane service being what it was, flights were limited to once a week and that was three days off. Driving his coach's old pick-up non-stop through the night, he stopped only for gas and food he could eat in the cab on the way.
Pig: A Thriller Page 6
