Pig: A Thriller (40 page)

             
“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.