When he pulled into Jasper, the halfway point, he had a decision to make. The road through the mountains could cut three hours off the ride. On the other hand, it was snowing and driving along a treacherous seven-percent mountain grade in the dark with no rest or sleep might mean he'd never make it at all. There wasn't really a choice. He did what any Canadian kid who'd give his left nut to make it in the big leagues would. He took the shortcut.
The road was worse than he thought, and he was sweating in the cold as he drove, the road reduced to a thin icicle banked on the sides by seven-foot walls of snow the bulldozers had cleared off the road. He didn't dare stop, knowing there was no way he'd work up enough traction on the ice to get going again. Besides, the cleared track was so narrow any oncoming traffic would plow right into him. He need not have worried, no one else was fool enough to try and make it over the pass in that weather at night. He was completely and utterly alone.
He drove that way for hours, barely coaxing the old pick-up beyond a stately fifty kilometres an hour against the unrelenting upward slope, until the road widened along a flat stretch and he felt confident enough to pull over and take care of the pressing business of his bladder. He eased the cab door open and was amazed: the sky was on fire, constellations he'd never heard of before playing hide-and-seek with the shimmering mauve and green quicksilver blankets of ions dancing around the Big Bear in the infinite night sky.
Living in the North you picked up a thing or two, and he knew that the Inuit believed if you whistled the Aurora would come down to you. Snow tried, blowing so long his fingers froze in the saliva. But no matter how long he blew, they stayed just out of reach. Only after his feet became so numb he feared they wouldn't be able to operate the clutch did he climb back into the truck. After that, he made good enough time to be in Calgary for the pre-game meal. Whether it was the Northern Lights or not, he'd played the best game of his life. He was sent back to the juniors when the regular recovered, but he'd made enough of an impression to get a contract for the next season with the big team. Then came the fucking poplar tree and he stopped thinking about hockey altogether. He’d seen where activities that involved taking your pants off had taken him on the ridge above the Castle River and had had quite enough, thank you.
“How heavy the days are. There is not a fire that can warm me, not a sun to laugh with me. Everything base. Everything cold and merciless. And even the beloved clear stars look desolately down.”
-- Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
Snow checked the freezer in his porta-cabin. No vodka delivery yet. That was another reason to leave the door unlocked. He didn’t have to be there to take possession. Grumpy over the lack of anything alcoholic to drink, he settled into a hollow in the lumpy cot and flipped the TV on. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Hmm, some porn. Tits A Wonderful Life. Huge pneumatic silicon tits that wouldn’t have been interesting even if Big Wilf were still interested in that sort of thing. It was early, still only seven-ish, but he was exhausted. Falling asleep was never the problem these days, staying asleep was. Inevitably, come three or four in the morning he’d be wide awake, thoughts racing like hornets around a hive attacked by a barn cat.
Snow used the remote to turn the TV off and noticed the case of Coffee Crisps from under his bed was gone. In its place was a note from Magda telling him she’d taken it and if he wanted it back he’d have to come get it. Not giving a shit, Snow rolled over and went to sleep…only to come wide awake with a start at two thirty in the morning from the light creeping into the room and thinking he’d gone to sleep with the light on only to realize it was the glare from the flares in the gas fields. For a moment there, he had thought his head might have been glowing in the dark. He spent the rest of the time until morning staring at the flares in the distance.
So he was awake when the phone rang, shattering the dark stillness. He picked it up on the first ring.
“‘The way is not in the sky,’” the disembodied voice said. “’The way is in the heart.’”
Then, it hung up.
At three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work -- and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
-- F. Scott Fitgerald, The Crack-Up
The next day, when he came back from work, his bedside clock was gone and the vodka supply was still empty. If Magda thought a missing clock was going to get him riled up – get him up at all -- she was wrong.
The third day, nothing new was missing. Even better, there had been a vodka delivery. Snow decided that he’d worry about Magda and her thefts tomorrow. In his state of mind, tomorrow could be considered long-range thinking.
On the fourth day, the TV was missing and replaced with a note from Pig saying Snow was expected to pay for it. This time, Snow was seriously pissed. At this rate, he wouldn’t even have a bed to not sleep on. Digging the note from three days ago out of garbage, he plugged the phone in and dialled the number.
“Where’s my fucking TV?” he demanded when Magda answered.
“If you really want it, come get it.”
“No,” Snow said. “You took it. You bring it here.”
Magda hung up.
Snow phoned back immediately. “Bring me my fucking TV,” he demanded.
“No,” Magda chuckled. “I will never set foot in the place you live again. Strike that. A few toiletries, some detritus of food, a morose television, no pictures, books, music, games or laughter? What you’re doing there can’t be called living at all. I told you. You want it, come get it.” She hung up again.
Snow tried to wait it out, but was so angry he finally got up and phoned again. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll come get it. Where do you live? The complex?” he asked, referring to the massive housing project typical of Russia that dominated Noyabrsk. People don’t boast they’re from Noyabrsk. “How do I get there?”
“No, not the complex, the simple.”
“Huh?”
“Look, when you get into town, just ask the first person you see where the whore lives.”
The evening was very cold, but not unpleasantly so. A light snow was falling. If this were Ireland and it were forty degrees warmer, they’d call it a “soft” day. But nothing was soft here in Noyabrsk. As usual, Snow walked. The exercise did him good. So did looking at the stars in the sky. For the past umpteen years, he had kept a barbed-wire fence around his soul, stuck like a mouse on a wheel, not letting any pleasure, anger or other threatening feelings to come into the cycle at any point, just an inner scratching inside his head that threatened worse was surely yet to come. The walk and the stars had calmed him down somewhat, eased the anger that was threatening to overload his system. The mouse wheel was back to manageable proportions.
At Magda’s place, he knocked. She was right. It had been easy to find. Everyone knew where it was. The flat was broad and squat like her, a bright coat of paint unable to conceal the truth that it had seen better days underneath. If there were truth-in-labelling laws in Russia, this part of town would be called shit. She answered the door almost immediately, Coffee Crisp in hand, his TV blaring in background.
Unbidden, the anger rose in him like a shark to chum: they would fight this one for hours before landing it, weighing and photographing it on the dock, talking about it over beers, mounting it for display later over the bar. His fingers curled into a fist and just before he struck her, Magda looked at him with her cool eyes and asked him how he felt.
His fist struck the wall beside her head, trailing plaster as he pulled it bleeding from the wall. “How do you think I feel,” he demanded. “Pisssed! What gives the right to take my stuff? I feel angry. Mad.” He was trembling, shaking, his body unready to handle the unfamiliar onslaught of unexpected feeling.
“At least you feel,” she said unexpectedly, gently catching his fist and bringing it to her lips. There was a different look in her eyes, something he’d seen often in the mirror: pai
n. “Come inside and I’ll bandage that.”
“I feel….” he sobbed, unable to continue.
“Yes, you feel,” she soothed. “How long has it been since you’ve been able to say that?”
“I don’t like it,” Snow sobbed.
“I didn’t take the clock,” Magda said. “Just so we’re clear.”
“The rest?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Come inside,” she replied.
“What do you think you were doing out there?” Magda asked.
“Knocking?” Snow said lamely, looking at his injured fist. He saw that he had gotten her wrong; he had been so eager to notice her cynicism he had forgotten to see her intelligence and caring. “Teach you how it’s done. In case you didn’t know.”
“A joke,” she applauded, clapping her hands together mockingly. “I am honoured. You see what progress we are making already? Only one day and I already have you making jokes. When was the last time you told a joke?”
Snow ignored her and looked around. The place smelled of freshly-made borscht. It was almost all kitchen, with a small partition on the side that doubled as sitting and bedroom. The walls were doing double duty, too, serving as the backbone of an elaborate system of bookshelves constructed from broken orange crates and twisted railroad ties. Books were interleaved with their open edges together, each marking a place in the other, and in worms of six or eight volumes with each spine thrust into the open edge of the next. Cards and sheets of paper, some of them covered with cryptic notes, marked other places. The room was nearly bursting with cartons of food, electronics and makeup people had brought for the Deficit Exchange Club. Besides the usual volumes of Marx, Engels, and Stalin, there were entire collections of poetry: Zamyiatin, Mandelstam, and Blok Other than the stove and the bed, the apartment was one huge bookshelf. The only exception was a picture of the crowds greeting Lenin outside Finland Station in 1917. And another of an elephant swimming.
"I take it you like to read," Snow commented, his eyes sweeping up and down the rows of books. The woman had more books in her than he had had hot meals. .
"What I really like is understanding,” Magda said. Two books were sitting on Magda’s kitchen table: The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital. As if she were trying to figure out for herself which one had it right. She walked over to the window and closed the blinds. “Not that I claim to. What I really wish is that people acted the way they do in books: cause and effect, cause and effect. Instead, they act like water bugs on a pond’s surface. You never know what crazy thing they will do. Like put their fist through my wall. You never know. At least in the books I know."
“What are you reading?” Snow asked.
“Right now, I’m reading War and Peace. I could lend it to you. There's a fair amount of action. Not a bad book. Quite a bit like Desperate Housewives, actually. You could make a great soap opera out of it. Will Natasha run off with the wicked Kuragin? Will Count Pierre survive the battle of Borodino? Will Kuragin's father's fortune survive Kuragin's gambling?
“No blizzards? No ice? Large empty expanses? If I did read – and I don’t – I think that’s what I’d like about Russian literature: the vast empty cold of the forest."
"If you think Russian literature about winter is really about winter you really are stupid. Here have some soup. It’s good for your soul.” Magda’s sense of resignation matched her sense of humour, copious, but not out of proportion. She had read perhaps too little Lenin and too much Dostoevsky.
“What kind?”
“You have more than one soul? Most people are lucky if they can find one.”
“What kind of soup?”
“Borscht. I am having beet soup. Slavs get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their fire from radishes, their seriousness from beets.”
“What I really want is a drink. Vodka.”
“No vodka. Eat your borscht. But not too much. You’re already too serious.”
“I’m sorry,” Snow apologized. “For losing it out there. Punching your wall.’
“‘You will not be punished for your anger,” Magda quoted. “You will be punished by your anger.’”
“Huh?”
“‘Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.’”
“The fucking Buddha again,” Snow complained.
“ I never know how you feel and I don’t think you know, either,” Magda complained. “The irony is you seem to understand perfectly how others feel and don’t have a clue about yourself. You’re smart. Damn smart. But you use your brain not to help others or further yourself but to separate yourself from the world.”
“And you think that’s wrong?”
“I think that’s a pity.”
“You don’t drink?” Snow said. “Why not?”
“Elephants.”
“Elephants again,” muttered Snow.
“Did you know that elephants eat one to two percent of their body weight each day?” Magda asked. “Most elephants spend twenty hours a day eating.”
“Coffee Crisps?” Snow teased.
“No, plants, tree bark, fruit, grass, leaves and peanuts. Marula fruit.”
“Did you know elephants have a complex social life? Magda asked him. “That they believe in an afterlife and spirituality?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Snow smiled. “Somehow, they forgot to tell me back at school in Cowley, Alberta.”
“They’re the only animals besides humans and chimpanzees who can recognize themselves in a mirror. And maybe dolphins,” conceded Magda. “They can even think about past and future. They mourn their dead and even form graveyards and have funerals. When one of the elephants gets ill, the rest of the herd takes care of it, giving it food and water. They’ll even guide blind elephants around. Male elephants will go hundreds of kilometres out of their way simply to meet and socialize, older elephants passing on wisdom to younger bulls.”
“You were going to tell my why you don’t drink,” Snow complained. “Not about elephants.”
“I am,” said Magda seriously. “The reason I don’t drink is because elephants don’t drink. Well, not to excess anyway. Part of being self-aware is the desire to take mood altering substances, to stretch the mind. So, yeah, elephants will go and eat the fermented durian fruit that falls off trees. They’ll even shake the trees to get more to fall down. What they won’t do is drink strong spirits. In the lab, they won’t drink anything stronger than ten percent alcohol by volume. They prefer fermentation at seven percent. Distillation is of no interest to them.”
“Why do you think that is?” Magda asked.
“I have no idea,” answered Snow. “But I’m sure you think you do.
“I do,” answered Magda.
“It’s simple. Wine is to love, as vodka is to porn.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Like most good ideas, it started off with good intentions. But you know what the road to hell is paved with, right?”
“Yeah, good intentions. This sounds like it’s going to be a long story. Give me some of the beet soup then.”
“Borscht. And have some mushrooms.” She slapped his hands reaching to break some of the buns into pieces that would fit into his mouth.
“What?” Snow complained.
“Don’t do that. Barbarian! Cut the bread with a knife, don’t break it with your hands. Otherwise, you life will be broken, too.”
Snow cut his eyes sharply at her. Wasn’t that the whole point, that his life was broken? Sighing, he reached for a knife. Fucking Russians and their fucking superstitions.
“Mankind’s quest for a good buzz is as old as History itself. Culture's quest for altered states begins in the Garden of Eden with the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Man wasn’t content being Man, he wanted the Food of the Gods, too. Modern, agricultural civilization was the result of that quest for a buzz, be it marijuana o
r hops. Plants are just as advanced as we are, you know, maybe more. Except that while we dedicated our energies to developing language, designing tools and extracting resources, plants focused on becoming chemical factories, needing only sunlight, water and trace minerals as feedstock. No legs or wings? Not able to move around and get access to those things? No problem, they just produced a variety of different chemicals providing flavour, nutrition or intoxication that lured humans into doing that for them.
“Where it went wrong was when we stopped using natural substances and started refining substances like distilled alcohol or sugar. Adam was the first substance abuser. God forbid him to eat the apple, but he went ahead and took it anyway. A classic case of addiction. He couldn’t stop himself even when God told him not to.
“From there, it just gets worse. According to The Bible, Noah was the first to discover the grape. Genesis says that shortly after the Great Flood receded that, ‘Noah was the first to plant a vineyard. And he drank of the wine and became drunk.’ So alcohol is supposed to be a gift to Noah from God. A kind of reward.
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