“The story talks about an unnamed traveler who decides to leave town,” sighed Magda. “Sound familiar so far?”
“Me?” asked Snow.
“You decide. He travels through a variety of strange and enchanting worlds until he ominously ends up somewhere called "The Waiting Place", which is addressed as being a place where everyone is always waiting for something to happen, a place where Time does not pass.”
“Noyabrsk?” Snow asked. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re crazy?”
“All the time,” confirmed Magda.
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“On the contrary. I take it as a point of pride. Because what they mean isn’t ‘insane.’ What they really mean is ‘unsane.’ Why do we see mental health as a measure of our relation to others? Being ‘normal’ means you fit in. You think the same as others. You act the same way. What’s so healthy about that? About being a sheep and refusing to stretch your mind? How about solitude? If you like to be alone, does that mean your insane? Or just unsane?”
“Insane, unsane, what does it matter? Either way, we’re nuts,” confirmed Snow. “You and I both, sister. We make quite a pair.”
“Shut up and eat your casserole, brother. And have another Coffee Crisp.”
Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn’t come neatly cut into even-sized lengths, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.
-- The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood
Psilocybin (O-phosphoryl-4-hydroxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine) is a prodrug that is converted into the pharmacologically active compound psilocin in the body by a dephosphorylation reaction, containing a ring configuration called an indole linked to an ethylamine substituent. It occurs naturally in varying concentrations in over 200 species of Basidiomycota mushrooms and bears a close structural resemblance to the brain neurotransmitter serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine), differing by just one single hydroxy molecule. In effect, the psilocybin and mushrooms are nearly mirror images of the primary neurotransmitters found in the human brain.
The effects of psilocybin are highly variable and dependent on the current mood and overall well-being by the individual. Initially the subject may begin to feel somewhat disoriented. At low doses hallucinatory effects may occur, including enhancement of colors and the animation of geometric shapes. Closed-eye hallucination may occur, where the affected individual may see multi-colored geometric shapes and vivid imaginative sequences. At higher doses, hallucinatory effects increase and experiences tend to be less social and more introspective, or entheogenic. Distortions in the experience of time in psilocybin-induced states have been subjectively reported,[and objectively measured. Users having a pleasant experience can feel ecstatic, a sense of connection to others, nature, the universe, and other feelings and emotions are often intensified. The term "bad trip" describes a reaction accompanied by fear. A variety of reasons may contribute to a psilocybin user experiencing a bad trip, including "tripping" during an emotional or physical low, or in a non-supportive environment.
Psilocybin-containing mushrooms are used both recreationally, and traditionally, for spiritual purposes, as entheogens, with a history of use spanning millennia. Proponents of its usage consider it to be an entheogen and a tool to supplement various types of practices for transcendence, including in meditation, psychonautics, and psychedelic psychotherapy. It is as if the mushroom is saying, “I require the nervous system of a mammal to communicate. Do you happen to have one handy?” This isn’t parasitism. Mushrooms and the human psyche have a symbiotic relationship. Humanity acquires insight from another spiritual level normally unavailable to itself. In return, the mushroom receives care, feeding and propagation as well as contact with the human mind, which was formed out of the nexus between plants and primates. Use of them was the religion of humans in Africa for the first million years. It stopped only 10,000 years ago with desertification and the creation of the Sahara, a transition from grassland and mushrooms growing in in cow dung to sand. The human nervous system is an antenna for the Gaian mind, which exists and is stored in pyschedelic mushrooms. The spores have to germinate somewhere. Then, when conscious organisms eat the mushrooms, the gain telepathic access to a completely separate realm. If the planet exploded, we could download ourselves into mushrooms.”
Three hours and thirteen minutes after the psilocybin molecule entered Snow’s brain, he was deposited back to the room where he had been before it entered his brain
“What do you think?” Magda asked.
Snow just shook his head, unable to describe the experience, unable to assimilate the experience.
“Exactly,” agreed Magda. “You just went into those multi-verses we were saying that Physics proves do actually exist. The ones you said were crazy. Insane.”
“Unsane,” corrected Snow. “Unsane.”
“Insanity simply means you’re the only person to live in your reality.”
-- Peggy La Cerra
“Reality is just a refuge for people who can't handle drugs.” -- Robin Williams
“If God dropped acid, would he see people?” -- Steven Wright
“I used to get high on life until I realized that life was cut with morons. -- Unknown
“So?” Magda asked.
“So what?”
“So what about me? Am I sane? Insane? Unsane? Just look at these curtains. They don’t even match the drapes.” Magda played ‘content’ like Jack Nicholson played crazy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
After Snow was quiet an impressive fifteen seconds, unsure how to answer, Magda continued for him. “And what about our little meal? The entheogens? What about them? Are psychedelics ‘good’ or ‘evil’?”
“I don’t know. But I do know they’re illegal.”
“Why? Are they harmful or are governments just afraid of the way we might start thinking after taking them? Every society sanctions the use of one or two accepted intoxicants and demonizes all the rest. They can’t even agree which is which; what’s legal in illegal in Riyadh is celebrated in Rotterdam and vice versa. It’s as if they know they can’t stop us completely, but they can at least limit us to the ones that keep us buying SUVs. In our cultures, these chemicals have been demonized. But shamans embrace them. They believe that besides space and time there are other dimensions accessible to us through trance or altered states of consciousness. Are our governments just afraid we might start thinking differently, stop punching time cards at the factory and buying the latest gadgets? Tryptamine hallucinogens fill the head with light. Serotonin, their near relative in brain chemistry, is transduced into melatonin by light. In other words, light enters the eyes and travels through the pineal gland where photons work a chemical change on brain serotonin into melatonin. Mushrooms are just filling your head with another spectrum of light.”
“Maybe we aren’t meant to think that way; that’s why these foods are so rare, so hard to find. And they’re not safe; maybe that’s why governments make them illegal; to keep us from hurting ourselves.”
“Rare? Fields of wild marijuana grow all over Siberia. It’s called anasha. Intoxication from ergot-infected rye was so common in Europe they had a special name for it: Saint Anthony’s fire. That’s what they make LSD out of. Magic mushrooms pop up in the taiga like … well … mushrooms … after a good rain. DMT is contained in almost everything. Spirit molecules … entheogens … aren’t rare. They’re just being exterminated. You know what I think?”
“I’m sure I will in a minute.”
“That Russia – no, scratch that, the world -- will only be saved when opiate becomes the religion of the people.”
"This drug is especially efficient in producing nightmares with hallucinations which may be alarming in their intensity. Another peculiar quality of it is to produce a strange and extremely degree of physical depression. An hour or two after it has been taken
a degree of sinking may cease upon the sufferer so that to speak is an effort. By miseries such as these the best years of life may be spoiled."
-- The Regis professor of physics at Cambridge, in, writing about tea in the early 20th century
Tired of waiting in the darkened office at night for the next break-in to occur, Kolya decided to do something constructive while he sat waiting in the dark for the thieves to return. By now, his injuries healed, he wasn’t sure which pissed him off more, getting whacked on the head earlier or the fact that someone was messing with his filing system. Because that’s the way Kolya thought of it, as “his” filing system.
Document Control is just that; it keeps control of the documents for large organizations, ensuring ready access to those authorized in the company to see them and keeping them out of the hands of those who are not. Documents not needed immediately are usually archived for a set regulatory period in a Records Management area, after which time they may be shredded. Whatever happens to them, every time a document is fed into the system, it leaves behind a record trail of its existence. Kolya was using that list now to cross-reference the documents that were supposed to exist with the ones that actually did exist in his and Snow’s office.
He’d been at it two weeks. Two weeks in the dark, the master list in one hand, a flashlight in the other, and a felt pen to cross off each item on the master list that actually existed. He expected to be at it another two weeks. Only then would he be able to say he’d made a start. Then, there’d be as many blocks of two-week chunks as he needed until he found the missing documents. Every time he finished a page from the catalogue, he would reward himself with a sip of tea from a flask he’d brought from home or a biscuit from the Mess Hall. He was humming a stanza from The Internationale and sipping tea Russian style – from a glass sweetened with jam and a spoon left inside to absorb the heat and keep the glass from shattering -- when the first bullet snicked through the glass in the window and lodged in his upper spine, the second into the base of his skull. The third missed entirely. Pig had sneezed.
C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain
This is the final struggle
Let us group together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race
-- La Internationale, Eugene Pottier
To an outside observer, not much would appear to be wrong with Snow. If you watched him at work – and Pig was, extremely carefully, after the incident with Kolya -- Snow was quiet, but serious; not only punctual but early, diligent, met all his due dates with very few mistakes. Surprisingly, people suffering from deep depression often make more productive workers than healthy people. Perfectionists with a deeply critical inner voice, they seldom need a supervisor standing over them to let them know where they were going wrong. They know where they are going wrong – everywhere – and will spend countless hours going over details to try and provide some self-worth in their lives.
Watching discreetly, Pig wouldn’t have been aware of the turmoil that Snow was going through if he had kept his observations of Snow to work. No one would ever mistake Snow for a stand-up comedian, but you wouldn’t think the inside of his head was a black hole, either. With Kolya gone, laid up in the clinic rather than at work in Document Control, you could see Snow was worried, quieter than normal, busier picking up the slack in the office, but you’d have no idea of the gaping chasm that existed centimetres under his skull. It was like a clock whose mechanism had failed; on the outside, not much looked different, but inside it was wrecked.
As Pig watched, Snow processed some well bore readings, carefully giving them a file entry number and entering it into the system, then copying them electronically and filing both versions under the correct designations and security clearances so that they would be both secure and easy to find. That’s what Pig saw from the outside. Inside, from within Snow’s perspective of what was going on, it was a much uglier picture.
Well bore readings…routine…must do a dozen a week…find the right well hole, then assign it a sequence number from where the last reading left off…SHIT …he’d been looking under the wrong well number … okay, never mind, here it was … FUCK …was he looking at the first or the second one? Had he closed the earlier one? He couldn’t remember…best to go right out of the system and start over again…there, he was at the start…what was he filing again?... well bore readings, right…which well number?... SHIT…he had to go back and check on the document again… okay, got it…his thoughts drifted off for a minute and when he became aware of what he was doing again, he saw his reflection in the monitor screen… what did he see?... a round, non-descript face that looked like a pumpkin left on the outside porch for three months after Halloween … jowly, thinning greyish-brown hair slightly receding... eyes dead … the plodding ennui of a man who had long ago given up on the world …someone who had spent most of his adult life trying to get a divorce from himself … the broken-backed slouch of a beaten man … what did Magda see, he wondered? …how could he fool himself that she could see any more …probably less… why was she bothering with him?... it was obvious…a charity case…pity, that’s all it was…he was pitiful, not popular … hopelessness staining him like a thick film on a glass shower curtain, so omni-present he sometimes forgot it was even there…
But Pig wasn’t confining his surveillance of Snow to work; he followed him home, first out to the Mess Hall, then to his squalid porta-cabin. It was there that he could see even from the outside that Snow was going off the rails. The effort of holding it together for eight hours in public was making him implode. At lunch, during dinner, he took the first entrée that was offered to him in line, eyes staring dead ahead, pushing the different portions around on his plate, then nodding to the bus boy that it was okay to dump it into the bin largely uneaten.
Pig watched him plod through the ruts of mud back to the porta-cabin, not bothering to look up and see the Northern Lights or constellations, ignoring those walking to their own trailers, not making eye contact or nodding in return. Pig listened as he himself phoned the room using his cell, listening to the rings … nine, ten, eleven … both through the phone and the thinly insulated walls, then hearing the connection cut the same time Snow screamed and Pig could hear the phone cord being ripped out of the wall.
Silence from inside the cabin, just the ghostly image of television shadows flitting across the windows, the voices of Tom and Jerry barely discernable through the fog. Snow wasn’t even tempted by that night’s porn offering, E3: The Extra Testicle. After a decent interval, Pig sent someone to knock on the door, but it went unanswered. He waited there in the rapidly cooling dark, toes starting to tingle, until he saw the shalava – dirty slut –first knock then push her way in through the door when Snow refused to answer. The conversation was one way, the shluha vokzal'naja – train station whore -- speaking and either nothing or a grunt or a monosyllabic reply in return. When Magda left for the night, so did Pig. His work here was done.
6:34 p.m. Lying alone on his thin mattress cot once again. New stains were forming on the wall from the condensation that came from the nightly cycle of frost forming, then melting, then freezing, then melting ad nauseam, obliterating the stain of Baffin Island Magda had pointed out earlier. But Snow was too torpid to give a damn and notice. More interested in pouring vodka down his throat. It didn’t work. Tuning the TV to the first channel it came to, not bothering to even notice what was on. Thoughts of Kolya and how it was his fault he had ended up that way tumbling over and over in his mind like clothes in a dryer. The shrill sound of the phone ringing. Finally noticing it on the third or fourth ring. Trying to ignore it for another four. Still another four until he was able to find the telephone cord and rip it out of the wall. Lying on the cot still more and staring up at the ceiling thinking of different ways to call himself useless. Lying there for an eternity. Looking at the clock ag
ain. 6:38 p.m. Tuning his senses onto the TV again. Star Trek. Wishing he had an off switch on the back of his like the android Lt. Commander Data did. Tuning out the TV again. Staring at the ceiling. Wondering if the light fixture would hold him if he strung a rope up there; knew he’d never have the focus and concentration to try. Realizing that he’d been fooling himself the last little while, thinking things were getting better. Sure, he could pretend he was alright when things were smooth, there was no stress, no need for him to actually get up and do anything. The first bit of stress and he’d relapsed back into his vodka shell.
Trying to think of all the swear words in Russian that applied to him: chuvak; meathead … koshka; piece of shit … zarasa; pain in the ass … pit’ zapoem; hopeless drunk … dolboeb; fuckhead … bakapor; dumbass … Hooy morzhovy; walrus dick … Perdoon stary; Old Fart …
…. Sudden loud knocking the door; easy to ignore, even when it continued on relentlessly … he couldn’t stop that by ripping anything out of the wall … couldn’t bring himself to get up and answer it either … that simple act was beyond his capacity to act; the amount of effort it would require was beyond him. Instead, he stayed there with pillows blocking out the world, rocking himself, trying not to think … to help himself, he repeated the swear words that applied to himself over again…finally, the knocking stopping…6:41 p.m. … some knocking again, then Magda pushing her way in through the door… gently placing a hand on his shoulder to get a reaction … his only reaction, no reaction … concern in her voice … monosyllabic grunts from him in return …. Somehow he’d lost the key in his back that could be wound up and keeping him going … the only part of him that was left was the part left on the cutting room floor … Magda leaving … smashing the vodka bottles on the ground on her way out … Scrotum climbing up on his chest to sit and purr …
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