Pig: A Thriller (20 page)

“What’s the difference between God and Pig?” Magda asked.

Snow shrugged.

“Easy,” answered Magda. “God doesn’t think he’s Pig.”

             
“He can’t be that bad,” Snow countered. “You talk about him like he doesn’t even have a soul.”

“Let me save you some time. Don’t bother looking for it. His soul was removed to make more room for his liver. Stop and listen to him. He recites rote facts about petroleum as if that equates intelligence. If Pig’s IQ were any lower, you’d have to water him.  He never had an original thought that wasn’t criminal in his life. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, when he was playing the sincere Communist, Pig could dredge up quotations from seven decades of intensive socialist upbringing, reciting snippets of Marx, Lenin and Engels on private property's psychological and social evils. But don’t be fooled. He never thought any of those words related to himself. He once told me he would have joined the coup if it wasn’t led by, as he said, idiots. His real attitude came with his mother’s milk, a woman who loved her chickens the same way Donald Trump loves hotels. Because she could sell their eggs for money they meant more to her than her kids, who cost her money to feed. The most important thing she ever taught him was to always keep one pair of underwear and a pillowcase clean. You know, just in case you had to go out unexpectedly and lynch some black asses. ”

“Come on. Pig’s a peach.”

“He certainly has a stone in his heart.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Half the camp trips all over themselves to please him. A simple camp boss. That doesn’t strike you as peculiar? Don’t let the act fool you. Pig knows contraband the way I know a chopstick from a fork.”

“People like him. He holds the keys, can do things for them, get the heaters in their rooms fixed, extra supplies. My Mom used to tell me a story about a ranching neighbour who lost his crop to hail and his wife ran off with the hired hand all the in the same month. Instead of blaming the gods or either of them, he shook his fist at the sky and shouted, ‘Goddamn the CPR.’”

“Whatever that means. You can put as much makeup as you want on a pig. It’s still a pig. What does cardio-pulmonary resuscitation have to do with anything?”

“It stands for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Back home, farmers found a way to blame it for everything, not matter how ridiculous. The same way everyone is always blaming Pig over here.”

“I don’t know what the CPR is, but I know it’s sometimes to blame. And so is Pig. Maybe that’s why you don’t blame him. Before you can ruin your life, you have to have one.”

“I trust Pig.”

“You trust him? You, who couldn’t find beets in a bowl of borscht?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you couldn’t find Waldo if I let you take the book home for the weekend.”

“Okay, I get it. You don’t like him, you hate the Communists. They put you in the camps.”

“No, you don’t get it. Hatred doesn’t cease through more hatred. I’m just telling you who he is. Greed, the free market, is the altar Pig worships at. The same way Freud thought everything comes back to sex, Pig brings it all down to a single thought: how much? To him, everyone and everything has its price. He loves the thought of capitalism slightly more than he hates the idea of work. For him, it might as well be called ‘capital-jism. For him, getting rich is like getting off.

“It comes naturally to him because he treats treated people like tissue paper. He uses them and tosses them away and then expects them to pop out of the box fresh and clean the next time he might want to use them, the sort of man who treats women as sequels, not equals. He consumes them the way some folks eat popcorn.

“Look at his face and what do you see?”

             
“A complexion like concrete, a smile like Tom Cruise and eyes like Caligula, a brain that seems to run on Microsoft software running a constant stock ticker,” admitted Snow.” That doesn’t make him evil.”

“I’ll tell you what I see. I see festering hate, the kind of expression a newspaper would use to illustrate an article on ethnic cleansing in Chechnya or upright Soviet
babushka
s looking on with hate at the Georgians selling oranges in front of the subway stations.  He’s evil. You don’t negotiate with evil. How do you play chess with the devil? Look at the Chris de Burg song.”

             
“Gosh, good thing you don’t hate him.”

             
“Have you ever watched him watching us? Sitting there in that office that looks out over the front gate so he can see everything that goes on in camp. Counting up and selling the souls?”

             
“That’s his job. To see things. He’s Camp Boss. ”

“That’s his official job. I’m talking about his real one. To not see them. He could referee professional wrestling he sees so little. Vince McMahon would love him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just watch. You’ll see what I mean.”

That night, Snow went home without his television. Magda was right. How could he watch it if he was over at her place all the time?

             
The next day, Pig came by Document Control and made a point of bypassing Kolya to step over to Snow.

             
“How’s the vodka?” he asked. “Real stuff this time. Check the label. Nothing but the best for our international friends.”

             
“Fine,” Snow answered. “Nice of you to put it straight into the freezer. I thought you were going to fix the door. People can undeliver vodka just as easily as they can deliver it when I’m not there you know. Or take TVs,” Snow said pointedly.

             
Pig waved vaguely as if this were some minor complaint. “Listen,” he began. “I need some documents. To fill out a report.”

             
“Sure,” said Snow. “Just fill out this form with the name, date and document number.” He passed one across the counter to the Camp Boss.

             
“My, my, aren’t we the little
peredoviki
,” mocked Pig admiringly. “First Kolya over there and now you.”

             
“What’s that mean,
peredoviki?
”

             
“A couple of  virtual Stakhanovites, the both of you. Only ‘model workers’ toiling away here in Document Control. Just get me the documents, will you? Do I ask you to fill in a form every time you order vodka?”

             
“As a matter of fact, you do. You even told me I need to get the internet so I can fill it in online. You know the drill. A company this big is like the government. You have to feed the bureaucracy. It lives on paper.”

             
“Look, it’s alright,” Pig tried. “I’m part of camp administration. I’ll just take the document now and return it later. No need for a form. It’s okay. Ask your superiors.”

             
“You may have superiors,” Kolya said from across the room. “We have supervisors.”

             
“Just fill in the form,” Snow suggested.

             
“Who’s got the time,” Pig demurred. “Screw this. Can I do it electronically?”

             
“Sure,” Snow answered. “A link right off the company intranet site. Go to the home page and bring up the drop down menu for Forms and Documents.”

             
“What did I tell you?” Pig praised rhetorically. “Model workers, each and every one of you. Listen, I’m putting together this week’s movie schedule. It’s our Classics week. Which movie would you like to see the most:
Lawrence of A Labia, Breast Side Story, Sorest Rump
or
Clitty Clitty Gang Bang?”

             
Behind him, Snow could feel the temperature rising in the room as Kolya did a slow burn.
             
“Just go onto the camp website, the same place you put in your vodka order, and mark down your preferences. There’s a whole list there. Thanks for the hint about the intranet link with the electronic request forms.”

             
“Don’t be expecting that request to come in soon,” offered Kolya from behind Snow after Pig left.

             
“Why’s that?”

             
“I can count the number of honest enterprises Pig is involved in on my clitoris.”

             
Snow looked at him puzzledly.

             
“Exactly,” said Kolya. “If it was something legal, he’d just fill in the request form and be done with it. He tried getting it secretly by going around channels, first through me and now you. Whatever’s in that document, he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s taken it.”

             
“Can you find it?” Snow asked. “Use the computer to get at what he wants?”

But Kolya just shook his head.  “Technology is like foreigners,” he said. “Computers. Smart as hell until you understand the language. Once you do, you realize they're dumb as hell. Quick, sure. Obedient, okay. But smart? Fuck me. No, we’re going to find out some other way what Pig is up to. I doubt we’ll like it.”

For the next three days, it was easy for Snow to stay away from both the vodka and Magda.  He felt so damn good, he even started to listen to music again, Corb Lund (from back home) and Johnny Cash (who needs no explanation).  Mostly, he was able to just hear the ‘muse’ and not the ‘ick.’ Damn if the two of them weren’t better than Ian Tyson.

It was only during that brief time when his head felt right that he realized how bad it had felt before. People without depression would never be able to understand it; they simply have no experiential reference to compare it to. For someone who’d never experienced the weight of the Black Plague, it would be hard to explain the feeling, like trying to explain the concept of colour to a blind man or different tones or styles of music to someone who was deaf. It was far more than simply feeling “sad.” Sad was to depression as Sylvester the Cat was to a sabre-tooth tiger. He’d never be able to explain it accurately, but for Snow it was like a dark shroud invading his feelings, a caul that weighed down his thoughts and blocked out all but negative emotions, like being hurled down a dark chasm, into a swirling vortex of a black hole of despair from which nothing – light even, light especially – could escape and all hope was smothered.

Inside, his head hissed like a Coleman lantern. It didn’t feel right unless he was drunk or asleep, a steady throb throbbing through it like the naphtha being fed through the regulator, complete with the distinctive high-pitched pulsing sound. It began with a tightening of the back of his jaw and spread from there like radiation from Chernobyl to the other parts of his head until his thoughts and limbs became dark, leaden whorls of bristling steel wool scrubbing his brain’s insides instead of the smooth, pastel hues of everyday life. Somehow, his tongue didn’t fit in his head and he didn’t know where it did belong.

The best he could describe it was like rubbing tender lips over rough bearded stubble, black  ice forming vicious, dirty spikes at the back of a car’s wheel-well as it sped down a grubby winter road. The smell was like burning rubber mixed with scorched human flesh. If he could taste it, it would be like burning tar with the texture of gritty sand, chewing on tin foil, the sound of screeching metal being torn apart.

Three days after his trip to Magda’s, that’s where Snow’s head was again and he was back to self-medicating on the vodka, attempting to dull the demons with its anaesthetizing properties. Whether it was Magda or the mushrooms, another three days and he was back knocking on her door.

“You’re back, Canadian. Welcome. What do you want, a haircut or a whore?” The smell of garlic permeated the air.