Pig: A Thriller (2 page)

Snow’s
third
thought
is
tha
t it is not outside
the realm
of possibility that
he is
about to freeze to death
.

His
fourth thought is that
he doesn’t
much care.

There is no precise core temperature at which the human body
dies
. At Dachau, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a child it's
57. A one-year-old
native
Canadian
girl
was
found
in her backyard, wearing only a diaper, limbs frozen solid. She was
clinically dead, and her heart stopped beating for about two hours. The girl, nicknamed Miracle
--
because that’s what she was
--
made a complete recovery.

At
88 degrees, your blood thicken
s
like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your
metabolic rate
fall
s
by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process
the fluid
overload that occurs
when the blood vessels in your extremities constrict and squeeze fluids toward your center.
At 86 degrees,
your heart
becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the s
lowing metabolism of your brain
begin
to trigger
hallucinations.
Why else would he be seeing purple elves “speaking” to him not in words, but in colours and textures?
At 85 degrees,
many victims ironically begin to
rip off their clothes.
Maybe the hypothalamus,
the part of the brain that regulates body temperature
,
starts
malfunctioning
.
Or
maybe the
muscles contracting blood vessels become exhausted and relax, leading to a sudden surge of blood (and heat) to the extremities, fooling
you
into feeling warm
even as you’re freezing to death
.

And that’s how Snow felt, warm. Not just in body temperature, but in spirit and comfort.  Outside of normal
t
ime and reality, it was the first time in as long as he could remember he felt like he was where he belonged
, a child at play in the Aeon,
the gambolling sentient Pac Man family
there to help show him the way.

"Will he die?" Magda Timofeyeva Perskanski asked in the flat, mono
-
tonal accent of someone who had learned too many languages, red eyes set off in
the
pale face
of someone who no longer looked at the faces of clocks or calendars
, part of a group gathered around the bed sorting through reasons like old wom
en buying cabbage in the market.

Magda Perskanski had
been described as deep as a well and twice as dark, s
omeone
who looked like her grea
test monthly kitchen expense
s
were
butter
and
dill
. Perskanski may have sometimes confused rudeness with honesty, never honesty with anything else.
The average Soviet woman's laden
avoska
weighs just over one kilogram. The average Soviet woman's unencumbered heart, nine ounces. Most, however, are not so lucky. Magda, for example, had lived a life that regularly made her heart weigh in at a hefty multiple of that number. Today, the needle was threatening to tip the scales.

A decade in the camps had left
Magda’s
head so full of harrowing thoughts
her hair
had turned prematurely white. Now, she was just pissed that after fighting it for so long, Death h
ad finally caught up to her. Was it her fault?
Had she killed him?
Snow?
Goaded him into doing something he never would have done on his own?

In her grief, she’d forgotten what she’d told Snow over and over again: that there was no death, only different levels of life. If Pig hadn’t been there, she’d have been weeping softly. Blinking back the tears, she bent over to smear Chapstick first on her lips, then on
Snow’s
.
Sure beat the pork fat she’d had to use before she met him. If they’d been alone, she would have kissed him
, something she had never done before
. There was an alarm clock beside Snow’s bed, she noticed, and wondered how it had gotten there. Why would a man in a coma need to set the alarm?

There was no getting around it.
Magda Timofeyeva Perskanski
was worried.
Worried for Snow.
It was too easy to die when you were already dead.

Standing there waiting for something to happen, Magda noted that the walls of the clinic  were the colour of sturgeon grilled over a
wood stove in a sour cream
sauce. If she got out of here in time, she could stop at the market on her way home and pick up some
kohlrabi
to snack on in the evening.

“Fundamentally, he’s fine,” answered the Doctor. “It’s the last three syllables of that word I’m worried about.”

The Doctor was trying to appear calm, but Magda could tell the confident veneer was as thin as the first film of ice on the Itu-Yakha River
in late October
.

Pig looked at the doctor meaningfully. He wondered if he could trust him to keep Snow unconscio
us long enough. He had said he
stretch it out for as long as a
week, yet every week the earth turns seven times. Never mind. If it came to that, Pig knew how to keep the Doctor
i
n line. There w
eren’t many things that a good C
amp
B
oss didn’t know about every
single soul living in “his” camp.
Some
how, some way, sooner or later,
even the smallest fact became useful.
Time to
get the Doctor to a
dminister some Milk of Amnesia
to himself
.

             
They say that light rip
s
through the firmament at 300 million meters per second, the fastest thing known to Man. Snow knew the velocity of darkness far exceeded that speed. For him,
the
darkness -- Death -- was an old pair of slippers, a bit torn and frayed from wearing them so much, but the leather gripped the heels and snuggled his
toes so comfortably
the only time he noticed was when It wasn’t around. Snow was so comfortable with the idea of Death,
I
t didn’t scare him even a little bit. When it finally came, he felt it would be like slipping into a steaming hot bath rather than anything worrying.
It was
Life
, not Death, that
was
the
four-letter word
for Snow
; “trap” spelled another way.