Pig: A Thriller (21 page)

“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.”

             
“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.