Pig: A Thriller (29 page)

             
The next night, Kolya supplemented his food cache with a supply of sunflower seeds. The third night, he tried black bread and hard cheese. The fourth night, he took off in order to do laundry, buy groceries and clean his room. That was the night the office was burgled again. Again, nothing could be found missing. All records seemed to remain intact.

             
Kolya decided to begin his vigil again. If you wait, he thought, they will come.

             
“‘The mind is a monkey chasing its tail, suffering and desire going around in a circle like a merry-go-round.’”

Magda had stopped by Snow’s porta-cabin unannounced with a casserole dish of mushroom stroganoff, bean salad and a bottle of homemade huckleberry brandy for supper.  “There, that’s your
koan
for the evening. Now I don’t have to phone you with one later.” As she spoke, Scrotum curled his body around her legs, then plopped onto his back for a belly rub. Magda happily complied.

News of Snow and Magda’s relationship had spread through camp like the smell of rotting eggs. Like most things, people assumed the worst, that the rich Westerner was bonking the vulnerable poverty-stricken Russian or that the whore was blatantly milking the fat foreigner. As with most things, neither impression was true.

“Damn cat thinks he’s a dog,” Snow commented. He was well aware he was no prize, nothing worth chasing, even with a Westerner’s fat oil pay cheque. There were others right here in the same camp far more alluring than him. Plain looking, dull of intellect and wit, body comfortably sagged into middle age, Snow told no jokes, had no great fame or talents; he wasn’t even good at being loving or devoted.

             
“Maybe a c-og,” Magda supplied. “A cat-dog.”  In truth, Scrotum was a cog, although Snow didn’t know it. A cog in his step to recovery.

             
“Look,” said Snow, holding out a bottle with a picture of an elephant on the label.

             
“What’s this?”

             
“Amarula. A liqueur made from South African fruit. I went online and found it. Then used Pig’s website to order some instead of the vodka. I’m amazed he even had it in stock.”

             
“Why has it got the picture of the elephant on it?”

             
“They wait ‘til the fruit ferments, then knock it off the tree and get sloshed.”

             
“Sold,” said Magda. “How can you resist a sales pitch like that? Get me a glass.”
             
Snow opened the lid on the casserole dish and sniffed inside. “Mushrooms?”

             
“Yes. And scalloped potatoes.”

             
Snow pushed the dish away. “Thanks anyway. Not hungry.”

             
“Eat,” commanded Magda, pushing the dish back.

             
“They’re turning blue!” complained Snow.

             
“Yes, they are,” smiled Magda in return. “They’re blue so you don’t have to be.”

There’s a mushroom that, when nibbled by an ant, will take over the insect’s nervous system, instruct its brain to walk over to the absolutely perfect spot for spreading its own spores, then kill the ant by growing a long tuber that snakes out of its head. Oyster mushrooms can be used to make up a killer pasta sauce—or clean up an oil spill. There’s a mushroom that, if you ate it, would make you pass water through every orifice in your body, including your ears. There are bioluminescent mushrooms that attract insects like “a bug disco.” There are also mushrooms that some claim can save the planet by cleansing toxic waste from the land, acting as nature’s recycling bin and detoxifier. The world’s largest living organism is an
armillaria
ostoyae
in the Blue Mountains of Oregon
that covers 2,200 acres and is at least 2,400 years old.

The mushroom is perfectly engineered to save wisdom and pass it through time and space. Some consider it as a device to preserve the world’s soul or consciousness, converting it into a format saved in an organism designed to prevent its loss. The mushroom, after all, is perfect for long-term duration and survival. Its mycelium is simply a cobweb in the soil of any planet and yet it synapses upon itself and is full of neurotransmitter-like psychedelic compounds. It’s like a thinking brain, yet it condenses itself down into a thing three microns long, of which several million per minute can be shed by a single carpophore. Spores are perfectly designed to travel in space. They can endure extremes of temperature. Their colour reflects UV radiation. The surfaces of spores are composed of the most radiation-impervious organic material known.
             

             
Mushrooms are pretty weird, just like the people who consume them. Some make you hallucinate, others make you horny, and a few are deadly. The “weird” people claim mushrooms are sentient beings—and possibly evolutionary hosts to an alien life form that came from outer space and provided the magic nutrient for human consciousness. “Psychonaut” Terence McKenna speculates that psilocybin helped primitive man evolve by enhancing his visual and mental acuity.

Who’s to say they’re wrong? Go ask Alice when you’re ten feet tall.

“Mushrooms are the fruit of the mycelium and this subterranean network is the real worldwide web. It’s all around us. We just don’t notice it.”

--Ron Mann, Director,
“Know Your Mushrooms”

“How do the mushrooms work?” Snow asked. “What’s going on? Scientifically, I mean.”

             
“Chemically, there’s all sorts of compounds being released. How they work isn’t that interesting. What they do is. People like Martin Luther or Lenin or Osama bin Laden want to change the world. But it’s not just revolutions and bombs that change the world. Quantum physics has already changed the way we think about time and space, even our daily lives. It’s forced us to see the world the way a Buddhist or Taoist sees it. Just like the mushrooms. We know lots about space, but sweet fuck all about time. The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. The feeling of being outside of time is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelics. The reason everybody from the Marxists to the Muslims to market capitalists all prohibit mind expanding drugs is because of the social effects they have, not any medical reasons. People who start munching mushrooms or drinking strange teas go on trips that start them thinking of reality in different ways. Suddenly, Mohammed or Marx or Milton Friedman don’t seem so important any more. Society starts to fear going out of business, ‘cause that’s the business it’s in,  keeping you inside a box it determines the dimensions of, working at an activity it decides is useful and buying the things it decides it needs to produce. It doesn’t want you sitting alone in your room making your own box, your own reality, your own rules.”

             
“You got this thing with time, don’t you? Every time I ask you a question, you bring it back to time.”

             
“I don’t. It does. Like the misunderstood child, it keeps butting in to tell me I need to get to know it better.”

             
“Why you?”

             
“Not just me. I think it’s screaming to the heavens, but maybe no one else but me is listening. Or maybe I’m just hearing voices in my head. I don’t know. I think the reason wrapping our heads around the concept of time is that it’s fractal; you know we never even invented that word until 1975; that shows how uncommon the concept is to us.”

             
“Fractal?”
             
“Fractals are non-regular geometric shapes that keep that same degree of non-regularity on all scales, whether you get bigger or smaller. Like how a stone at the foot of a mountain can resemble the peak it fell from. And vice versa.”

             
“You said shapes, not time.”

             
“Same idea. There’s a limited set of variables and then those keep getting repeated on the microscale, the macroscale, the human scale ... they're all operating on the same architectural constraints, just at different scales.”

             
“Non-regular; that means you think each measure of time is different from the other.”

“Well, it is, isn’t it? Newton’s idea of time as pure duration is just ridiculous. That time is a place we put things so they don’t happen all at once; like it’s flat, plain, featureless. Einstein proved it’s not, that space–time is curved when it’s around gravity.  What I’m saying is that even at our level, in our own lives, time is variable. I think we’re going to eventually discover that time is like matter. There’s a hundred and fifteen different elements we know about right now and we keep discovering more. I think we’re going to discover that time is the same.

“Think about it; there are times in your life where everything seems to go right and other times when it all goes wrong. You know, the way science works now, it’s all about repeatability; in other words, probability. If you want to know how much energy is flowing through a wire, you take a thousand measurements, you add them together and you divide by a thousand. And then you have the current flowing through the wire. But that that assumes that it doesn't matter what time you make the measurement. When you study statistics, the first thing they teach you is when you flip a coin the odds are fifty-fifty, heads or tails. If that were true – and it’s not -- the coin would land up on its edge every time. But that almost never happens. So what's really happening is that something else is affecting that coin. Why not time? There are zones in time where heads are favoured and zones in time where tails are favoured.