“With drugs,” Snow said. “Like the mushrooms.”
“With anything,” corrected Magda. “Yes, drugs will work. But why do you need them? It’s pretty much the same as what you’re already doing with those pills you’ve been prescribed in your room. What they do is increase serotonin levels. Add something like psilocybin to the brain neurotransmitters and you can change the radio station your brain’s stuck on and begin to pick up things like jazz, Tibetan chants, or anything else that might give you pleasure. Your brain gets tuned differently, yet your mind, the perceiving core of the self, remains unaffected. In that sense, psychedelics -- unlike alcohol -- are not even intoxicating in the ordinary sense of the word.
“So, yes, drugs will do it. But so will a smile. Start with a smile. You’d be amazed how many endorphins a simple smile releases. Laugh. Hug somebody or something. Listen to music. Go for a walk. Sing. Find a lover. All of these things will change your brain chemistry.”
“That’s hard to do when all I want to do is fade to black. What about you? You never wanted to…”
“To what?”
“You know. Kill yourself. Put yourself out of your misery. End it all.”
“No. Never. We had a saying in the camps: nado zhits. You have to live. Otherwise, you let the bastards win.”
“In war, in the camps, and during the periods of terror, people think much less about death (let alone suicide) than when they are living normal lives. Whenever at some point on earth mortal terror and the pressure of utterly insoluble problems are present in a particularly intense form, general questions about the nature of being recede into the background.”
-- Nadezhda Mandelstam
“How did I get this way,” complained Snow. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t even know who I want to be. Look at you. You were in the gulag, but you’re more alive than anyone I know. You can talk about philosophy, religion, science, politics, art. Name an ‘ism’ and you know about it. All I know is most of the words to Corb Lund’s “The Truck Got Stuck” and how to turn wine into water through the magic of my kidney. How did I get this way? You know what I’m listed as on the Nastiuk family tree? Sap.”
It was true. In the hierarchy of the oil camp, if Pig was the Alpha male, Snow didn’t even rank as Beta. Probably more like Echo or Foxtrot. Maybe even Zulu.
“Pain, I’d guess. That’s how you got here. It’s been the major factor in your life: the mother who died even before giving you birth; a detached, silent Father; school teachers trying to hammer facts into you like nails; losing your first love, the one who replaced your mother in your mind; not being able to enjoy rodeo or playing hockey anymore. They’re all part of it.”
“I guess.”
“It’s the wrong question anyway. All that matters is you’re here. Get it out of your head that you’re special. You’re not. We all hurt in different ways.”
“Would it help if I found God?” Snow pleaded.
For once, Magda didn’t snort. She wasn’t religious – being in the woods was her religion -- but she had a healthy respect for the mystical, having seen the power it gave to believers in the gulag. If she didn’t have much use for religion, that didn’t mean she felt the same way about religious people. She possessed the kind of self-confidence that left oodles of room for self-doubt. How many times had she heard someone proclaim that there was no God, usually the same people who complained there was no sour cream in the refrigerator when it was there in the door hiding behind the butter the whole time?
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “I just know it’s the wrong question, asking how you got here.”
“What’s the right question, then?”
“How do you leave.”
“How do I leave?” Snow asked. “Seriously. Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Magda confessed. “I tell pasts, not futures.”
Besides running the Beauty Shop and the Deficit Exchange Club, running her string of whores, and doing odd accounting jobs, Magda the Mathabeautician had a sideline telling people’s pasts. Begun more as a campy kitsch activity designed to get the girls to let their hair down and have some fun, the idea had taken off. Half of Noyabrsk’s female population frequented Magda’s salon at some point not to see what the future had to store for them, but whether Magda could fathom the events that had already brought them this far to her door.
The events featured plastic garbage cans filled with flavoured vodka martinis and groaning tables of food which had the added benefit of being live advertisements for the Deficit Exchange Club. Magda would wear an old gypsy gown and peer into a filled goldfish bowl filled with guppies that represented a crystal ball and pretend to tell her clients’ pasts. The crowning touch, literally, was a tiara that Magda claimed had belonged to Catherine the Great, a claim that everyone good-naturedly pretended to believe. The crown in fact, was real. Almost. Catherine was the first to wear the Russian Great Imperial Crown, commissioned specifically for her coronation in 1762 and that impressive collection of jewels continues to be displayed in the Hermitage today. What is less known is that a similar but smaller crown for the tsarina was also fashioned at the time, which came to be known as the Lesser Imperial Crown. What is almost entirely unknown is that the great Peter Carl Faberge created replicas of both in the early 1900s. One of those was the crown that graced Magda’s head on her fortune telling days. When she wasn’t using it, it was given double duty as a garlic holder in her kitchen.
“But the past is absolute,” complained Snow. “It’s set. You can’t get around predicting what happened yesterday. It either happened or it didn’t.”
“Ha!” snorted Magda.
“Ha?” questioned Snow.
“Ha,” confirmed Magda.
“Time only exists because we do. We invented it.”
“Yeah, right. Who’s been into the mushrooms now?”
“Prove to me it exists,” Magda insisted stubbornly.
Snow pointed at the clock on Magda’s wall. He cupped a hand to his ear and put a finger up to his lips to tell her to be quiet. Silently, they waited. Then, Snow spoke. “There, that was a minute. You saw the second and minute hand move, you heard the ticking. Tell me that’s not real. Your own senses just confirmed the clock measuring it.”
“No,” denied Magda. “All I saw was a mechanical device measuring the tightness of its own springs, the slow de-torquing of a piece of metal placed there amid a nest of gears by little Swiss gremlins. Go back further and it’s just the same thing, the motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the beat of a heart. The international unit of time, the second, is defined by radiation emitted by cesium atoms.
“Time is like heat, which also doesn’t exist. It’s just the motion of molecules. We use time in equations to determine other things like velocity, but their own definitions depend on there actually being a time to begin with. Under such definitions, none of them exist; it’s just circular reasoning. Is the universe wearing a watch?
“Times zones don’t really exist either. Where were they hiding until 1879 when your fellow Canadian Sanford Fleming invented them? Under a rock somewhere? How come no one ever bumps into them travelling across the continent? Time, time zones, they’re both just inventions. As far back as the fifth century B.C., Parmenides said time was just a figment of our imaginations. The Earth seems stable to us, too, but it’s hurling around in space at terrifying speeds. Does God have a Tag Heur? Allah a Rolex? Humans may have a psychopathic need to classify and divide things, but Nature doesn’t. Nature knows no divisions by hundreds and thousands.”
“Who invented it, then? Time?”
“Henry Luce Booth.”
“Ha, ha, ha. I mean the real thing. Not the magazine.”
“No, you mean the non-existent thing. And when did he do it? Was it before his coffee break, or after? How long did it take him to invent it? An hour? What was he doing before he invented it? Was he thinking about inventing it? Maybe it was a committee effort, which explains why i
t’s such a mess.
“Sun dials,” Snow tried.
“Just measure the shadow created by lining up an object along the angle of the axis of the earth with the sun; the dial exists; does time? What kind of whack job looks at a dick-shaped rock casting a shadow in the dirt and says to himself, ‘Hmmm….I call this 12.’ Or maybe we have to say XII to take into account roman numerals. Is that where we get the phrase ‘tick-tock’ from? The dick rock? What happens if it’s cloudy?
“In Milton’s Paradise Lost, it was Eve, who brought it into the Garden of Eden and ruined everything for Mankind. What a surprise. Blame the woman, when it was really Newton who was at fault. Isaac Newton preached the world was mechanistic, a series of cause and effect, time a real and constant immutable quantity.”
"Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration. Relative, apparent, and common time is any sensible and external measure (precise or imprecise) of duration by means of motion; such a measure - for example, an hour, a day, a month, a year - is commonly used instead of true time."
--Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton
“Ok, then why?” asked Snow. “Necessity is supposed to be the mother of invention. So what made Newton think he needed to invent it? And what made everyone believe him?”
“Newton needed time to make his formulas work. And they did. Problem was Einstein and Bohr and all the others after Newton came along with new formulas that proved they didn’t always work. Just some of the time. That means we should be going back and questioning the whole idea, but we don’t.
“That’s what I asked. Why?”
“Same reason as the answer to your other question. Why’d the rest of us believe him? Money. Don’t forget. This was the start of the Industrial Revolution. The tragedy of the rise of capitalism was the commodification of time. Time is where mathematics meets society. People figured out they could make money off of it, divide it up and sell it, like ranch land when settling North America or condo shares in Florida. We ‘make time’ to do things, as if it could be manufactured. We buy it, lose it and bill for it. Time is money, right?”
“Yeah, but only in Switzerland, where they worship both watches and bankers.”
“The only reason we invented time was to keep everything from happening all at once. Believe Newton and believe that there is a finite amount of time in each of our lives. Each tick of the clock slices another piece off of our lives. Our relationship with time has gone from one of measurement to enslavement. What’s a watch other than a handcuff?”
“Einstein said that the problem of the ‘now’ worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter for painful but inevitable resignation.”
-- Rudolf Carnap
“The same way Newton ‘proved’ time is constant and immutable, Einstein ‘proved’ it wasn’t. It was relative to other things. Time was no longer linear, more like a river. It flowed, with rapids and eddies and currents and undertow. Within this current we can find niches, or spots. Time, along with its relative, Space, was a construct of the mind and not a separate entity unto itself. By the ‘time’ you reach the speed of light, there's no time at all. It doesn’t exist. It drops out of the equations. Steven Hawking says the universe will expand forever. If it is eternal, then it is timeless.”
“But all that’s just theoretical. It’s not real. Things can’t travel at the speed of light. It’s just math.”
“Can’t they? What about light? What speed does it travel at? Do you mean to say light’s not real? Anyway, until we reach that speed ourselves, how can we know what’s happening there?”
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
--Werner Heisenberg
“I thought you were going to read my past?” Snow said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s impossible. Past? Present? Future? It’s all the same thing. I thought you were listening. That’s why they call it the present; it’s a gift. Stop worrying about the future and past and enjoy now.”
“My head hurts,” Snow complained. “Not like before. In a different way.”
“You’re out of practice,” Magda nodded. “This is probably the longest period you’ve talked or listened to somebody since you got here. It’s been a big day for you. When was the last time you let yourself feel something, even if was just the urge to smash my head against the door?”
“A long time,” admitted Snow. “I’m tired. I’m going home. Thanks.”
“Good. Maybe your mind will stop running in circles and you’ll sleep. Here, take a book with you. It’ll give you something to do now that your TV is gone.”
“You’re not giving it back?”
“I told you. No. It’s mine. For services rendered. Now that you’re going to be over here all the time, it makes more sense to leave it.”
“What makes you think I’m going to be over here all the time?”
Magda shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“How will I watch Muffy the Vampire Layer back in my room?” Snow complained.
“Buy a new one. You’re a rich foreigner. You’re getting the big bucks. Spend some of it a new TV. It’s only money. If you were meant to save it, it’d have handles. What kind of book do you want?”
“Any suggestions?”
“What do you like?”
“The ranch. Hockey. Horses. All kinds of animals. What about this one? Animal Farm?”
“Good choice. I’m sure you’ll learn lots from it. About animals. And other things. Here. I’ve got something else for you.”
“Bork? The beet soup?”
“No, Schrödinger. He’s your new roommate.” She plopped a cat into his arms along with the book. “Here, take him home.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do with a cat? Cook him?”
“Hug him. Stroke him. Watch him lick himself clean. Feed him. Clean his poop. Be happy, be disgusted, be angry, mix up the chemicals in your head.”
“Great,” Snow said without enthusiasm. “Schrödinger, huh? What does that mean?”
“Name of my favourite physicist,” Magda smiled. “What else?”
“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.”
--Erwin Schrödinger
When Snow got back to the Oil Camp, he gently put Schrödinger down on his bed and the two stared at each other for a time until Snow finally blinked. Satisfied, the cat broke eye contact and began to lick its ass.
“What the hell did she call you?” Snow asked himself. “Hell if I can remember. Scrotum? Off my bed, Scrotum, you useless thing.” He shooed the cat off the bed and laid down to sleep. Scrotum found himself a spot on the bureau where the TV used to be. Neither of them was aware enough to notice that Snow’s missing alarm clock was back in the room beside his cot.
“A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.”
--Erwin Schrödinger
A couple of hours later, Snow was wakened by the harsh shrill of his phone.
“Hello,” he said, groggily, after perhaps a dozen rings.
“Good. You were asleep,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.
“Huh?” responded Snow brilliantly.
“Remember: ‘The un-aimed arrow never misses.’”
“Let me guess,” Snow groaned. “The Buddha.”
“No,” giggled Magda happily. “It’s me, Magda. Goodnight. How’s Schrödinger? Did
you remember to give him a hug?”
“Who?”
The next day, rather than rushing through dinner and heading straight for the vodka bottle in his cabin, for the first time ever, Snow lingered in the canteen after work, which should mean that hell would be freezing soon and fat, pink animals with curly tails would be flying through the sky if you looked up. The usual roughnecks he habitually nodded to were already gone. Snow was staring out the window aimlessly and enjoying an ice cream cone and watching some of the first flakes of the season drifting down. Already, it was getting cold, the nights longer. Even in the winter, Russian enjoyed their ice cream.
Kolya, a lifelong bachelor, also used the canteen. Kolya, also, preferred to sit alone. Kolya felt the same way about solitude the same way some did about Moscow Dynamo or some men did about their testicles. Kolya had never met a silence he didn't like. In the camp, it was said he had the ability to be silent in eleven languages. It was more than just being shy. Kolya held words in the same suspicion with which Woody Hayes viewed the forward pass.
Today, he’d had to share a table with the doctor – Bandar -- and a Westerner from the warehouse everyone called The Oracle because he not only thought he knew every possible fact about every possible topic under the sun, he wasn’t shy about sharing that knowledge. The canteen had been full earlier, the groups faces stamped with gulag expressions: boredom, apathy, bravado, sullen viciousness, and fear, tossing quips around with the crisp efficiency of baseball players warming up, avidly discussing which of the Seven Deadly Sins each of them were personally adept at. It was almost empty now. Before, Kolya had been unable to escape. Now, Kolya no longer wished to escape. The Oracle, a Smoggie from The People’s Republic of Teesside was telling a joke that Kolya, the dedicated Leninist without a sense of humour, was not about to take lying down. Oilmen were like cats. It was hard to know from the sound of them whether they were fighting or making love.
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