Pig: A Thriller (33 page)

“If God dropped acid, would he see people?” --
Steven Wright

“I used to get high on life until I realized that life was cut with morons. --
Unknown

“So?” Magda asked.

“So what?”

             
“So what about me? Am I sane? Insane? Unsane? Just look at these curtains. They don’t even match the drapes.” Magda played ‘content’ like Jack Nicholson played crazy in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
.

After Snow was quiet an impressive fifteen seconds, unsure how to answer, Magda continued for him. “And what about our little meal? The entheogens? What about them? Are psychedelics ‘good’ or ‘evil’?”

“I don’t know. But I do know they’re illegal.”

             
“Why? Are they harmful or are governments just afraid of the way we might start thinking after taking them? Every society sanctions the use of one or two accepted intoxicants and demonizes all the rest. They can’t even agree which is which; what’s legal in illegal in Riyadh is celebrated in Rotterdam and vice versa. It’s as if they know they can’t stop us completely, but they can at least limit us to the ones that keep us buying SUVs. In our cultures, these chemicals have been demonized. But shamans embrace them. They believe that besides space and time there are other dimensions accessible to us through trance or altered states of consciousness.  Are our governments just afraid we might start thinking differently, stop punching time cards at the factory and buying the latest gadgets?
Tryptamine hallucinogens fill the head with light. Serotonin, their near relative in brain chemistry, is transduced into melatonin by light. In other words, light enters the eyes and travels through the pineal gland where photons work a chemical change on brain serotonin into melatonin. Mushrooms are just filling your head with another spectrum of light.”

“Maybe we aren’t meant to think that way; that’s why these foods are so rare, so hard to find. And they’re not safe; maybe that’s why governments make them illegal; to keep us from hurting ourselves.”

“Rare? Fields of wild marijuana grow all over Siberia. It’s called
anasha
. Intoxication from ergot-infected rye was so common in Europe they had a special name for it: Saint Anthony’s fire. That’s what they make LSD out of. Magic mushrooms pop up in the
taiga
like  … well … mushrooms … after a good rain. DMT is contained in almost everything. Spirit molecules … entheogens … aren’t rare. They’re just being exterminated. You know what I think?”

“I’m sure I will in a minute.”

“That Russia – no, scratch that, the world -- will only be saved when opiate becomes the religion of the people.”

"This drug is especially efficient in producing nightmares with hallucinations which may be alarming in their intensity. Another peculiar quality of it is to produce a strange and extremely degree of physical depression. An hour or two after it has been taken a degree of sinking may cease upon the sufferer so that to speak is an effort. By miseries such as these the best years of life may be spoiled."

-- The Regis professor of physics at Cambridge, in, writing about tea in the early 20
th
century

             
Tired of waiting in the darkened office at night for the next break-in to occur, Kolya decided to do something constructive while he sat waiting in the dark for the thieves to return. By now, his injuries healed, he wasn’t sure which pissed him off more, getting whacked on the head earlier or the fact that someone was messing with his filing system. Because that’s the way Kolya thought of it, as “his” filing system. 

             
Document Control is just that; it keeps control of the documents for large organizations, ensuring ready access to those authorized in the company to see them and keeping them out of the hands of those who are not. Documents not needed immediately are usually archived for a set regulatory period in a Records Management area, after which time they may be shredded. Whatever happens to them, every time a document is fed into the system, it leaves behind a record trail of its existence. Kolya was using that list now to cross-reference the documents that were supposed to exist with the ones that actually did exist in his and Snow’s office.

             
He’d been at it two weeks. Two weeks in the dark, the master list in one hand, a flashlight in the other, and a felt pen to cross off each item on the master list that actually existed. He expected to be at it another two weeks. Only then would he be able to say he’d made a start.  Then, there’d be as many blocks of two-week chunks as he needed until he found the missing documents. Every time he finished a page from the catalogue, he would reward himself with a sip of tea from a flask he’d brought from home or a biscuit from the Mess Hall. He was humming a stanza from
The Internationale
  and sipping tea Russian style – from a glass sweetened with jam and a spoon left inside to absorb the heat and keep the glass from shattering -- when the first bullet snicked through the glass in the window and lodged in his upper spine, the second into the base of his skull. The third missed entirely. Pig had sneezed.

C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain
 

This is the final struggle
Let us group together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race

             
             
             
             
             
--
La Internationale,
Eugene Pottier

             
To an outside observer, not much would appear to be wrong with Snow. If you watched him at work – and Pig was, extremely carefully, after the incident with Kolya -- Snow was quiet, but serious; not only punctual but early, diligent, met all his due dates with very few mistakes. Surprisingly, people suffering from deep depression often make more productive workers than healthy people. Perfectionists with a deeply critical inner voice, they seldom need a supervisor standing over them to let them know where they were going wrong. They know where they are going wrong – everywhere – and will spend countless hours going over details to try and provide some self-worth in their lives.

Watching discreetly, Pig wouldn’t have been aware of the turmoil that Snow was going through if he had kept his observations of Snow to work. No one would ever mistake Snow for a stand-up comedian, but you wouldn’t think the inside of his head was a black hole, either. With Kolya gone, laid up in the clinic rather than at work in Document Control, you could see Snow was worried, quieter than normal, busier picking up the slack in the office, but you’d have no idea of the gaping chasm that existed centimetres under his skull. It was like a clock whose mechanism had failed; on the outside, not much looked different, but inside it was wrecked.

As Pig watched, Snow processed some well bore readings, carefully giving them a file entry number and entering it into the system, then copying them electronically and filing both versions under the correct designations and security clearances so that they would be both secure and easy to find. That’s what Pig saw from the outside. Inside, from within Snow’s perspective of what was going on, it was a much uglier picture.