One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, to the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.
-- Osip Mandelstam, Stalin Epigram
Magda had taken to spending her free time sitting beside the unconscious Snow and talking to him. Talking, not crying, just talking, because she had shed too many tears watching too many friends die to have any left. She just wasn’t ready to see this one go yet and thought she had to let him know. Beside him, Schrödinger dozed lightly. Anything dangerous came by, he was ready to put it in his mouth and eat it.
Did Snow consider her a friend? She didn’t know. Didn’t care, because it didn’t matter. Depressives did not have friends: they had family, colleagues, acquaintances, subordinates, bosses and responsibilities. But not friends. Friends took too much effort. So it didn’t matter if Snow considered her a friend, if he would have done the same thing for her. What mattered was that she had chosen him to be her friend. One thing you learned in the camps was how to choose your friends, In the gulag, it was not possible to survive alone. It needed collective strength to haul each woman through, so you were careful who you shared your strength with. Get stuck with a shirker, thief or lazybones and you were done for. Anyone who stole your strength, stole your life.
“We live in an age where it’s possible to live anywhere,” Magda said to the silent Snow. “Especially with a job like yours. But that's not necessarily good for you, being here. Being away from where you’re supposed to be, home. That’s where you belong, you know: home. What you don't realize is that you are Canadian. It's not something you can escape from. To divorce yourself from your roots is spiritual suicide. It's like having blue eyes. Accept it. Canada demands a great deal from its people and isn’t quick to offer a lot in return, unlike some countries. France demands a lot, too, but France offers gifts: food, wine, history, architecture. Russia? Shit, forget about Russia. Canada … well, let’s just say Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures. You’re supposed to bash each other over the heads with hockey sticks. Or wrap leather straps around bull testicles, then time how long you can stay sitting on one. So you weren’t ready for what happened to you up on the Castle ridge. When the tree fell. It left you with an empty feeling. Kind of like when the popcorn bowl has nothing left but hard kernels. You’re left wondering what it would be like if only they had popped, what would it be like if you had that life with the cowgirl you were planning on. But they didn’t pop. And they won’t. And you won’t have that life with her, either. But that’s okay. Life doesn’t end with popcorn. There’s pistachios. And pork. And papayas. You can learn to enjoy them all.
“You know why I love living in Siberia so much? Because nothing interesting ever happens at the centre. Everything interesting is out at the edges. Sparks kick up when opposing edges meet. Sometimes hot edges fuse, creating something wild and new. I imagine it’s the same out there where you are from, the foothills, the edge of where the prairies meet the mountains. If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up way too much space.”
Magda had to make do with the men’s room while visiting the clinic. There was a sign on the woman’s lavatory saying it was undergoing renovations and would be unavailable until it was repaired. The sign was dated several years before. Not to worry, the sign went on to reassure every one, this was just a temporal inconvenience. As if in confirmation, the clock on Snow’s bedside table mysteriously disappeared.
Unbeknownst to herself, Magda was right; a spark was there -- faint, barely glowing, in danger of going out altogether -- but alive nevertheless. It resided deep, far down in the depths, almost smothered in the murky, muddled whorls it was trapped in, but it was there, there in a world strange and unknown to those on the surface, creatures bizarre and mysterious ruling there. Comfortable as it was nestled undisturbed in the dark murky depths, Magda’s words were acting as a bellows to shape and help it grow, her words, her tone, her feelings, fanning the spark, keeping it alive. It came slowly, pausing every twenty meters or so, accustoming itself again to the new depths, almost as if it were decompressing, like a diver trying to avoid the bends by not ascending too quickly. There, at the next intermediary level, it would spend weeks, days, until the spark glowed a little stronger, and it would ascend one small level higher only to rest again, fanned and kept alive by the Aeon.
Faintly, slowly, the spark glowed and climbed. But, still, it rose.
“There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from.”
-- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“I see what you’re doing,” Magda told the comatose Snow, lathering his face and shaving off the latest growth of beard, the hands connected to her black, misshapen nails working just as well as any that were not deformed. His own fingers were as black and misshapen as her own now, from the frostbite. Perhaps keeping him shaved and groomed was in compensation for letting her own hair grow wild. As her sweatered arm brushed against the rough hospital blanket, static electricity set off sparks in the dry winter air. A clock was back on this bedside table, not the one she’d placed there, but a clock nonetheless.
“Don’t think I don’t. Know. Cutting yourself off. Hiding in the room. Self-medicating with the vodka. It only makes sense. You think you’re giving yourself freedom. Freedom from. Freedom from responsibility, freedom from personal relationships. But what you’re forgetting is that while you’re doing that, you’re stopping yourself from freedom to. Freedom to love, to hurt, to reach out and grow. What you forgot is freedom isn’t like being hungry. You can’t be a little bit free. It’s like being pregnant. You can be a little bit hungry but you can’t be a little bit pregnant. You either are or you aren’t. In order to be truly free, you have to have both freedom to and freedom from.
“Some people say the camps were hell. Well, they were. Some of us survived by fooling ourselves we had freedom. Freedom to pay for our sins, to pay off our crimes. Redemption. Freedom from starvation, from the temptation to cheat the State again. But we weren’t. Weren’t free. Because when it comes to freedom, you’ve got to want it all. That’s what you have to do. To let yourself out of your prison. To want more.”
“Here,” Magda said, turning on an IPod she’d picked up at the Deficit Exchange Club. “Listen to this. Maybe music is what you need. Music. Corb Lund. Johnny Cash. Some tunes an Alberta country boy can appreciate. Freedom from worrying about here. Freedom to remember what makes the foothills home. Listen. Listen to the music.”
“You know what I think you’ve got to do?” Magda told Snow after the music was finished. “Find your own perogy. You know, the dumpling where you take some dough and wrap it around a treat like some potatoes or sauerkraut or cottage cheese.” Schrödinger woke up long enough to look at her the way George Bush looked at broccoli. It didn’t sound like anything he’d want to put in his mouth and eat. “I’m just saying he needs to find something to wrap himself around and make it his own,” Magda told the cat. “Swallow it whole and ingest it until it’s a part of you. You?” she said, turning to Snow. “Your perogy is there, in Canada, not here. Near where you lost it. Up on that mountain ridge with the cow girl. Playing hockey and making love and getting fat. Go back there and find your world with beginner’s eyes: expect nothing, look at life without pre-suppositions, fresh and full of excitement like the first time. If I lose you, so what? Heisenberg always said that information in the quantum world is gained somewhere only by losing it someplace else. Gaining something in one world, impoverishes it in a parallel universe.
“I’m not saying your time here was wasted. Your family was originally Slavs, weren’t they? Maybe you had to come here to learn this. Russia is a place where the human spirit is made to struggle, becoming fuller as well as more repressed. It's not despite Russia's fated tragedy that warmth and emotion flourish here, but because of it. But now it’s time to go home.
Don’t you think?”
She looked at Snow as if she were expecting an answer. She didn’t get one. The conversation was one way. That was okay, too. Sustaining a conversation can be much harder than sustaining an erection. More important, too.
“‘Maybe I just need a vacation,’” you once said to me. “Do you remember how I answered? ‘You don’t need a vacation,’ I told you. ‘You need a journey.’ You asked me what the difference was and I told you, ‘Go on a vacation and it’s over after two weeks and you’re back to your sick, sad life. Go on a journey and you never have to come back.’”
The real profit in Magda’s Deficit Exchange Club came not in rubles, dollars or Coffee Crisp bars. The real currency she lined her pockets with was blat, or connections, influence. Anyone who was anybody came through Magda’s messy apartment at one point or another, including the most recent authorities, security personnel who weren’t necessarily tied into Pig’s grand larceny, because the more people he told, the more he had to divide up the soup.
But conversations between a Mathabeautician and the Special Prosecutor’s Office take time, especially when they have to isolate themselves from the rest of the police and judicial system so that the dupes drinking Pig’s soupy Kool Aid couldn’t inform him that he’d been caught out. Magda’s accusations had to be proven: rooms had to be bugged, electronic communication monitored, principals followed and their actions documented, samples taken from the Pigging Station and analyzed. The feeds from the camp’s security cameras were routed into the Prosecutor’s office. New, surreptitious cameras were placed and used to record activity. All of this, of course, took time, that evil bastard who could never be counted on to do what you needed him to.
Nearby, Doctor Bandar was administering a dose of Prussian Blue to the ailing Arkady, Arkady, who’d been doing double duty to replace the dead Missile at both the Lab and the Pigging Station on the pipeline, Arkady who had suddenly and mysteriously come up sick after the work change, one in long line of Noyabrsk workers who’d come down with the same symptoms. Slipping a 500-milligram capsule under Arkady’s tongue, the Doctor tipped his patient’s head back and helped him swallow the pill. Three times a day Magda had watched him do this, the active chemical absorbing the cesium in Arkady’s intestines and binding it to the medicine to get rid of it in his feces.
“Are you constipated?” the Doctor asked Arkady. “You’re shitting okay?” The Doctor was also administering a laxative daily.
“Sometimes,” Arkady said. “But when I do go, my shit is blue,” he complained.
“Don’t worry. It’s supposed to be. But if it turns red and green and has shiny lights all strung over it, it will mean Christmas is soon.”
“Prussian blue is a crystal lattice that exchanges potassium for cesium at the surface of the crystal. When given orally, it binds cesium that is secreted in the gut before it can be reabsorbed. Data suggest that in humans, Prussian blue can reduce cesium's half-life by approximately 43% and reduce total body burdens. Prussian blue is well tolerated at a dosage of 3 g/day with appropriate monitoring of serum potassium levels and observing for signs of constipation.”
-- U.S. National Library of Medicine
"Mushrooms," the Doctor suspected, watching the peaks of Snow’s E.E.G. dance in unusual and enchanting patterns not common to the ordinary consciousness, much less a coma patient. Just like the Russians he found himself living among, the Slavs caught up in that primitive, fungal passion, weekends found the Doctor in the woods clutching a pail, handkerchief, or just his hat in order to gather up the prized species of fungi. He came to talk, tell jokes, and drink. To be part of the forest, to walk in the snow, feel part of the earth and fulfil a basic instinct: to live off the land. To spend long hours alone with his friends the trees. More than food, they spoke of drizzling rain, the birch forest, quiet trails, long silences; they spoke of freedom.
The milk mushroom, he knew, was best with brown vodka, the little redheads, with clear vodka, chilled, but not so cold it numbed your sense of taste. Podberyozoviki, brown-capped mushrooms, were perfect for sauteeing in butter. Or with sour cream: gribi v smetane.
No man of science, the foreigner had obviously picked one of the psychedelic species instead of the seroyezhka they resembled so much. Oh well; soon, it wouldn’t matter much one way or another anyway.
Snow continued to come up slowly, rising through the bubbles, pausing every twenty meters or so to accustom himself to the pressure, not going too quickly, avoiding the bends. At one marker, he paused and thought he heard a gravelly voice saying, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” At the next, twenty days later, there was a whiff of wet cat; he still had a long way to go, but at least he was going. Going … where?
There was a crackling sound, like ripping cellophane -- crumbling up plastic wrap -- and an ascending tone could be heard. Geometric shapes changed and colours shifted. Boing! The Aeon was at play with coloured balls in the universe again. In this space, under the dome, there were simultaneous, contradictory feelings of both immense space and immense weight above Snow. Light was coming from … shit! He didn’t know where it was coming from. There were no fixtures of any kind visible. Snow thought that he was dead. For the first time in a long time, it wasn’t that he wished he were dead, he just thought he might be.
He was not alone.
Jeweled Pac Man icons – automated machine elves morphing from one form to another – were pushing around him like playful puppies, playful puppies pushing against his legs and thighs as if competing for his attention. Snow was a like a child at play with coloured balls. The Smurfs came rushing forward to play. Snow understood. Understood completely, which was strange, because the Pac Men did not communicate verbally. Language could not really be applied to what they were doing, it flowed off the concepts like water off of a duck’s back. The Smurfs’ messages were passed visually, like octopii who changed colour not for camouflage but for communication. Language appeared on their skin, like telepathy, in waves of colours and patterns, a naked nervous system, and somehow he understood as they literally sang things into existence, impossible things, hyperdimensional things, objects that couldn’t possibly exist in this reality, but whose models could.
At the same time they probed him, the icons were reassuring him -- don’t be afraid, they repeated in varying patterns and textures and colours -- encapsulating him into a secure environment, like a child lying in a cradle and looking up at a mobile constructed out of impossible-to-exist objects rotating overhead. What Snow understood was that these were toys; the Munchkins were there to trade hyper-spatial items from across the cosmos. As Snow watched, words changed into objects, objects into words, gnomes into objects, objects into beings, some of them into him, then back again. It was like a Bugs Bunny cartoon gone mad. Snow became aware that this strange environment was their idea of a safe place for a human being, a playpen as it were: warm, well-lit, womb-like, secure. If insane.
It was almost as if the Pac Men were trying to cut a deal, showing and offering him treasures in exchange for … what? What could it be he had that the gnomes would want?
Magda and Scrotum sat quietly by Snow’s side, comfortable enough in the silence not to have to fill it with words, unaware of what was going on behind Snow’s eyelids. Magda had just woken up; she’d taken to sleeping here overnight. It was the camps’ one gift to her, you learned to sleep anywhere. One? She owed everything to them. Absently, she scratched the cat on the top of his head. Scrotum blinked his eyes slowly in acceptance. “Hey, I know,” Magda said to him finally. “Let’s lick our bums.” Scrotum did. Magda did not, content to think she could if she had wanted. Meanwhile, she waited for the Special Prosecutor Office’s investigation to be completed. Unnoticed, the bedside clock had somehow ended up across the room by Kolya’s cot.
Snow offered the icons the only thing he had: his pain -- which they rejected out-of-hand as self-indulgent and of value only to himself – and Magda’s ideas on time. That, they accepted. And in return, off
ered a few nuggets on time of their own. Time is fractal, they told him – holographic, in effect – all times are really interference patterns created by other times interacting with each other. All times originated in a single end-state. Reality was not static, it was embedded in a process that was evolving towards a conclusion. The question was whether, at the end of History, which mushroom -- the mushroom of Hoffman and Leary or the mushroom of Oppenheimer and Teller – would be there. Without him knowing, they pulled out his knowledge of the I Ching, The Book of Changes, and its sixty-four hexagrams. “Interesting,” they told him. “We, too, are aware that time can be divided into a finite number of distinct elements, the same way Matter is divided into chemical elements.”
What was interesting was that as they “spoke,” the gnomes did not so much “turn” into clocks, as “become” clocks, melting -- Picasso-like – then re-forming and shifting and morphing from analog to digital, from numbers to a face with hands, a different time emblazoned on each, shifting into calendars, phases of the moon and the tilting of the globe according to seasons. “See?” they seemed to be saying. “You can be whatever form of time you want to be. Watch us and learn.”
Then, Snow popped up through the last few meters, surfacing through the top of the dome.
“Welcome back, peredoviki,” Pig smiled through his stainless-steel fillings.
Snow took a while to get his bearings. “Where am I?” he asked. He’d spent weeks submerged, much of it inside a Pac Man game.
Pig: A Thriller Page 20