Pig: A Thriller (41 page)

             
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, offered 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. 

             
“The hospital,” Pig said. “In Noyabrsk. The Camp Clinic. You know who I am?”

             
“Yes, you’re the Pig, the camp boss. In Noyabrsk. The one who sells me my vodka and porn.”

             
“Shit! Now you’ve gone and done it,” Pig complained.

             
“Done what?”

             
“Gone and committed suicide. Again.” When Snow had been brought in from the cold, Pig had just wanted to let Snow die, maybe even get the Doctor to hurry it along a bit. The Doctor, however, worried by the high mortality rate in the clinic, had convinced Pig that Snow was unlikely to live anyway and even if he did, brain damage and amnesia would likely have made him forget everything he knew anyway.

             
“Again? I never tried to kill myself the first time.”

             
“Sure you did. You killed yourself when you started hanging out with the Skank, the fat slut. I tried to warn you about her, but you wouldn’t listen. And now you’ve gone and killed yourself. Twice.”

             
“Bullshit,” Snow said, looking around for the Doctor, Magda, anyone. The two of them, he and Pig, were completely alone. Magda had finally been called to the Special Prosecutor’s Office to come and bring them to the Oil Camp and advise on the upcoming arrests of Pig and his cabal. The Doctor, meanwhile was off doing whatever Pig told him to. Only Kolya was in his hospital bed, snoring lightly.

             
“Why are my fingers all black? Shit, my skin burns. Was there a fire?”

             
“No, but I did put one out. Congratulations, by the way.”

             
“Congratulations? For what?”

             
“You’re going home.”

             
“I’m not going home.”

             
“Yes, you are.
Vy
menya
panimayete
? Do you understand?”

             
“No,” said Snow. He wrinkled his brow trying to take it all in. There was a clock on his bedside table, but the time was all wrong.

             
“You’ve killed yourself by waking up and not being smart enough to be brain dead,” insisted Pig, slipping the pointy end of a syringe into the I.V. tube coming out of Snow’s arm. “Goodbye, Snowball. I wish I could say it had been a pleasure knowing you. It hasn’t. You were right all along.” Pig pushed the plunger on the end of the syringe. “You’re better off dead.”

             
Three hours later, officials from the Special Prosecutor’s Offices, accompanied by Magda, came to haul Pig, the Doctor, and their accomplices away. Although Magda wept at the timing, it was three hours Snow may not have wanted to change anyway. He had, after all, been promised he was going home.

SOMEWHEN

             
It begins.