“Great. First elephants, now the Buddha. What’s next, vultures picking bones on top of the Himalayas?”
“No. Science. I told you. I’m a physicist. You haven’t gotten me talking about that yet.”
“What’s the difference between God and Pig?” Magda asked.
Snow shrugged.
“Easy,” answered Magda. “God doesn’t think he’s Pig.”
“He can’t be that bad,” Snow countered. “You talk about him like he doesn’t even have a soul.”
“Let me save you some time. Don’t bother looking for it. His soul was removed to make more room for his liver. Stop and listen to him. He recites rote facts about petroleum as if that equates intelligence. If Pig’s IQ were any lower, you’d have to water him. He never had an original thought that wasn’t criminal in his life. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, when he was playing the sincere Communist, Pig could dredge up quotations from seven decades of intensive socialist upbringing, reciting snippets of Marx, Lenin and Engels on private property's psychological and social evils. But don’t be fooled. He never thought any of those words related to himself. He once told me he would have joined the coup if it wasn’t led by, as he said, idiots. His real attitude came with his mother’s milk, a woman who loved her chickens the same way Donald Trump loves hotels. Because she could sell their eggs for money they meant more to her than her kids, who cost her money to feed. The most important thing she ever taught him was to always keep one pair of underwear and a pillowcase clean. You know, just in case you had to go out unexpectedly and lynch some black asses. ”
“Come on. Pig’s a peach.”
“He certainly has a stone in his heart.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Half the camp trips all over themselves to please him. A simple camp boss. That doesn’t strike you as peculiar? Don’t let the act fool you. Pig knows contraband the way I know a chopstick from a fork.”
“People like him. He holds the keys, can do things for them, get the heaters in their rooms fixed, extra supplies. My Mom used to tell me a story about a ranching neighbour who lost his crop to hail and his wife ran off with the hired hand all the in the same month. Instead of blaming the gods or either of them, he shook his fist at the sky and shouted, ‘Goddamn the CPR.’”
“Whatever that means. You can put as much makeup as you want on a pig. It’s still a pig. What does cardio-pulmonary resuscitation have to do with anything?”
“It stands for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Back home, farmers found a way to blame it for everything, not matter how ridiculous. The same way everyone is always blaming Pig over here.”
“I don’t know what the CPR is, but I know it’s sometimes to blame. And so is Pig. Maybe that’s why you don’t blame him. Before you can ruin your life, you have to have one.”
“I trust Pig.”
“You trust him? You, who couldn’t find beets in a bowl of borscht?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you couldn’t find Waldo if I let you take the book home for the weekend.”
“Okay, I get it. You don’t like him, you hate the Communists. They put you in the camps.”
“No, you don’t get it. Hatred doesn’t cease through more hatred. I’m just telling you who he is. Greed, the free market, is the altar Pig worships at. The same way Freud thought everything comes back to sex, Pig brings it all down to a single thought: how much? To him, everyone and everything has its price. He loves the thought of capitalism slightly more than he hates the idea of work. For him, it might as well be called ‘capital-jism. For him, getting rich is like getting off.
“It comes naturally to him because he treats treated people like tissue paper. He uses them and tosses them away and then expects them to pop out of the box fresh and clean the next time he might want to use them, the sort of man who treats women as sequels, not equals. He consumes them the way some folks eat popcorn.
“Look at his face and what do you see?”
“A complexion like concrete, a smile like Tom Cruise and eyes like Caligula, a brain that seems to run on Microsoft software running a constant stock ticker,” admitted Snow.” That doesn’t make him evil.”
“I’ll tell you what I see. I see festering hate, the kind of expression a newspaper would use to illustrate an article on ethnic cleansing in Chechnya or upright Soviet babushkas looking on with hate at the Georgians selling oranges in front of the subway stations. He’s evil. You don’t negotiate with evil. How do you play chess with the devil? Look at the Chris de Burg song.”
“Gosh, good thing you don’t hate him.”
“Have you ever watched him watching us? Sitting there in that office that looks out over the front gate so he can see everything that goes on in camp. Counting up and selling the souls?”
“That’s his job. To see things. He’s Camp Boss. ”
“That’s his official job. I’m talking about his real one. To not see them. He could referee professional wrestling he sees so little. Vince McMahon would love him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just watch. You’ll see what I mean.”
That night, Snow went home without his television. Magda was right. How could he watch it if he was over at her place all the time?
The next day, Pig came by Document Control and made a point of bypassing Kolya to step over to Snow.
“How’s the vodka?” he asked. “Real stuff this time. Check the label. Nothing but the best for our international friends.”
“Fine,” Snow answered. “Nice of you to put it straight into the freezer. I thought you were going to fix the door. People can undeliver vodka just as easily as they can deliver it when I’m not there you know. Or take TVs,” Snow said pointedly.
Pig waved vaguely as if this were some minor complaint. “Listen,” he began. “I need some documents. To fill out a report.”
“Sure,” said Snow. “Just fill out this form with the name, date and document number.” He passed one across the counter to the Camp Boss.
“My, my, aren’t we the little peredoviki,” mocked Pig admiringly. “First Kolya over there and now you.”
“What’s that mean, peredoviki?”
“A couple of virtual Stakhanovites, the both of you. Only ‘model workers’ toiling away here in Document Control. Just get me the documents, will you? Do I ask you to fill in a form every time you order vodka?”
“As a matter of fact, you do. You even told me I need to get the internet so I can fill it in online. You know the drill. A company this big is like the government. You have to feed the bureaucracy. It lives on paper.”
“Look, it’s alright,” Pig tried. “I’m part of camp administration. I’ll just take the document now and return it later. No need for a form. It’s okay. Ask your superiors.”
“You may have superiors,” Kolya said from across the room. “We have supervisors.”
“Just fill in the form,” Snow suggested.
“Who’s got the time,” Pig demurred. “Screw this. Can I do it electronically?”
“Sure,” Snow answered. “A link right off the company intranet site. Go to the home page and bring up the drop down menu for Forms and Documents.”
“What did I tell you?” Pig praised rhetorically. “Model workers, each and every one of you. Listen, I’m putting together this week’s movie schedule. It’s our Classics week. Which movie would you like to see the most: Lawrence of A Labia, Breast Side Story, Sorest Rump or Clitty Clitty Gang Bang?”
Behind him, Snow could feel the temperature rising in the room as Kolya did a slow burn. “Just go onto the camp website, the same place you put in your vodka order, and mark down your preferences. There’s a whole list there. Thanks for the hint about the intranet link with the electronic request forms.”
“Don’t be expecting that request to come in soon,” offered Kolya from behind Snow after Pig left.
“Why’s that?”
“I can count the
number of honest enterprises Pig is involved in on my clitoris.”
Snow looked at him puzzledly.
“Exactly,” said Kolya. “If it was something legal, he’d just fill in the request form and be done with it. He tried getting it secretly by going around channels, first through me and now you. Whatever’s in that document, he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s taken it.”
“Can you find it?” Snow asked. “Use the computer to get at what he wants?”
But Kolya just shook his head. “Technology is like foreigners,” he said. “Computers. Smart as hell until you understand the language. Once you do, you realize they're dumb as hell. Quick, sure. Obedient, okay. But smart? Fuck me. No, we’re going to find out some other way what Pig is up to. I doubt we’ll like it.”
For the next three days, it was easy for Snow to stay away from both the vodka and Magda. He felt so damn good, he even started to listen to music again, Corb Lund (from back home) and Johnny Cash (who needs no explanation). Mostly, he was able to just hear the ‘muse’ and not the ‘ick.’ Damn if the two of them weren’t better than Ian Tyson.
It was only during that brief time when his head felt right that he realized how bad it had felt before. People without depression would never be able to understand it; they simply have no experiential reference to compare it to. For someone who’d never experienced the weight of the Black Plague, it would be hard to explain the feeling, like trying to explain the concept of colour to a blind man or different tones or styles of music to someone who was deaf. It was far more than simply feeling “sad.” Sad was to depression as Sylvester the Cat was to a sabre-tooth tiger. He’d never be able to explain it accurately, but for Snow it was like a dark shroud invading his feelings, a caul that weighed down his thoughts and blocked out all but negative emotions, like being hurled down a dark chasm, into a swirling vortex of a black hole of despair from which nothing – light even, light especially – could escape and all hope was smothered.
Inside, his head hissed like a Coleman lantern. It didn’t feel right unless he was drunk or asleep, a steady throb throbbing through it like the naphtha being fed through the regulator, complete with the distinctive high-pitched pulsing sound. It began with a tightening of the back of his jaw and spread from there like radiation from Chernobyl to the other parts of his head until his thoughts and limbs became dark, leaden whorls of bristling steel wool scrubbing his brain’s insides instead of the smooth, pastel hues of everyday life. Somehow, his tongue didn’t fit in his head and he didn’t know where it did belong.
The best he could describe it was like rubbing tender lips over rough bearded stubble, black ice forming vicious, dirty spikes at the back of a car’s wheel-well as it sped down a grubby winter road. The smell was like burning rubber mixed with scorched human flesh. If he could taste it, it would be like burning tar with the texture of gritty sand, chewing on tin foil, the sound of screeching metal being torn apart.
Three days after his trip to Magda’s, that’s where Snow’s head was again and he was back to self-medicating on the vodka, attempting to dull the demons with its anaesthetizing properties. Whether it was Magda or the mushrooms, another three days and he was back knocking on her door.
“You’re back, Canadian. Welcome. What do you want, a haircut or a whore?” The smell of garlic permeated the air.
“What?”
“Or maybe you’re here for the deficit exchange club. What did you bring me and what do you want to exchange it for?”
Snow just stood on the doorstep and looked at Magda blankly.
“A girl’s got to make a living,” Magda justified, then sighed. “You look like shit. Come in. Did you bring any Coffee Crisps?”
“I’ll take some of that beet stuff. The soup. What did you call it? And the mushrooms.”
“And what will you give me in return?”
Snow looked at her blankly.
“It’s a Deficit Exchange Club,” Magda explained slowly, as if to a child. “What do you have to exchange?”
“Oh,” Snow said, and thought slowly for a few minutes. “I’ll give you your English lessons. Or find you that book, the one you wanted, about the elephants. What was it called again?”
“Do you think I need them? I speak English pretty well you said.”
“I thought you said you wanted the book? By some Canadian?”
“I do. Not that. The English lessons. You think I need them?”
“No, no. Your English is fine.”
“Liar. But thank you. What do you want the borscht for?”
“The bork? What do you mean?”
“The beets. The soup.”
“And the mushrooms. I want them, too.”
“Because?”
Snow paused, not knowing how to answer.
“Because there’s no food in the canteen over in the oil camp?” pursued Magda. “They don’t feed you over there? It’s a deficit exchange club. Deficit. For things there’re shortages of. One thing Russia isn’t short of is borscht.”
“What do you do to be happy?” asked Snow suddenly.
“Nothing,” replied Magda. “I’m not. It’s never occurred to me I could be”
“Well, not miserable then,” tried Snow. “How do you be not miserable?”
“Bad night?” asked Magda compassionately.
“Bad week,” Snow confessed.
“My father called it the ‘hour of the wolf,’” Magda sympathized. “That dark time around three or four a.m. when you’re lying in bed, worrying over how unrecognizable your life came to be. He used to get up and drink one big vodka to keep the wolf away. Then three little ones in case the wolf had had cubs while she was waiting.”
“Yeah, well, my wolf must have had a bigger litter. I drank the whole lot. But it doesn’t work. I feel like I’ve been living the hour of the wolf for years.”
“Look, Snow,” began Magda gently. “I’m sorry about last time. When you came over here.”
“I don’t care about the television,” Snow said.
“No, that’s not what I’m not sorry about. It’s the mushrooms. I’m sorry. I lied to you about them. There was nothing special in them.”
“No, they fixed me. For a few days anyway. Something happened after I ate them. The magic ones, with the drugs. I want to feel that way again. I felt good. Well, at least not bad.”
“Look, Snow. Like I said, I’m sorry. I lied to you. There was nothing special about those mushrooms. They were just puffballs and some other common varieties from the forest. Nothing pharmacological. Nothing much, anyway. Whatever happened here a week ago was all you.”
“Please,” Snow pleaded. “I don’t care if it’s illegal. They worked. They fixed me.”
“I don’t have all the answers, Snow. I can’t ‘fix’ you, as you put it. Only you can. I can’t get blood from a stone. Sometimes, I can’t even get milk from the fridge.”
“Do you take anything seriously?”
“Everything. Freud tells us there are no jokes. Of course, he was wrong. What else could he have been doing talking about penis envy?”
“No, it was there. For a few days anyway. It worked. But all I could get were glimpses, like flashes of trout in a stream. A quick dart and then it was gone.”
“What was there?”
“It was more what wasn’t there,” answered Snow thoughtfully. “A film, a weight, blocking everything else out.” He told her about his feeling about being sucked into a black hole.
“Bozhe moi,” Magda sighed. “Now you’ve gone and started me, haven’t you? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“What?”
“I told you last time. I used to be a physicist. I haven’t even started talking about that. It probably doesn’t help what they did to my brain in the hospital.”
“Hospital? I thought you said you were in the gulag?”
“I was. Inside the psikhushka -- psychiatric hospital -- in the gulag. It only made sense. By Soviet definition I must have been crazy since I
didn’t realize I was living in the worker’s paradise. They tried to scramble my brain back into ‘normality’ with drugs. Inside my head, the furniture got all re-arranged. After I got out, I kept ingesting things in an attempt to get the sofa back where it used to be. In the end, they got what they wanted. I didn't lose my marbles on the drugs, I learned to play with them. But the result end result is some pretty crazy scientific ideas. I was always poaching in the sciences.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were talking about black holes, right? They’re not all bad. They don’t just suck things in you know. I’ve got this theory about them. That they suck things in on one end and spit them out on the other side. What comes out creates a new universe. The world is full of multi-verses. Every time we have a new thought, make a new decision, we create another one. Everything up to the point we make a decision gets sucked into the black hole and everything after gets pushed out into a new alternate universe.”
“Whoa! I’m just a farm boy from Alberta. All this deep shit is hurting my brain. How is that ‘not all bad?’”
“You progressed far enough to stop self-medicating with vodka and drag yourself over here didn’t you?”
“So your saying instead of numbing myself with booze, I need to find myself with drugs? Like you did?”
“Just the opposite. More people need to lose themselves than need to find themselves. And you don’t need drugs to do that.”
“But the mushrooms—“
“Were just mushrooms.”
“Then how do you explain those three good days I had?”
“I told you, you did it yourself.”
“But I don’t know how!” wailed Snow.
“Think of your brain – not your mind, your brain -- as a kind of radio. The chemicals inside tune it to different radio stations. With ‘normal’ levels of serotonin, the brain is tuned the way most people’s brains are, to something called ‘consensual reality’ -- like the local pop or talk radio AM station, the one everyone listens to in the car on the way to work or getting the kids ready for school. Your depression has changed your brain chemistry, tuning it into the ‘black hole’ channel, as you put it. All you need to do is change the chemical mix and you change the channel to something that will make your life a life again.”
Pig: A Thriller Page 9
