Pig: A Thriller (35 page)

Life is not a walk across a field.”

             
             
             
             
             
             
             
--
Hamlet
, Boris Pasternak

“Why are you here? Why do you bother?”

Another evening, another visit from Magda. Snow was still going through the motions at work, but mostly comatose the rest of the time. There was a whole world of stuff out there for him and he wondered if it was churlish of him to complain he lacked just two things: a place to call home and someone to love.The only reason he was going in to work at all was because it was better than the hell of replaying the mistakes of his life alone in his room. Frost coating the inside of the room walls was threatening to distort Baffin Island out of recognition. Rust-coloured ice stalacmites hung from the water pipes that snaked along the ceiling. The weather was funny like that here in Noyabrsk. At first, you didn’t notice. A leaf fell. A few days later, you needed a jacket at certain times in the day. Within a week, it was trying to kill you.

“Because you need help. Anyone can see that. Anyone who cares.”

“Why do you care? I don’t.”

Magda blinked. Snow had a trait that Magda found irresistible: depth, hiddenness, whatever you wanted to call it. There was something there he kept hidden under the surface that made her want to dig it out. Living in a one room flat, subsiding on a diet of Dostoevsky, cabbage, and black tea sweetened with gooseberry jam, it hadn’t occurred to her that she had the option of not caring. She shivered; it was colder here, living in a poorly insulated trailer instead of a house; no wood stove either.

“Shut up,” she said, a wisp of steam condensing in front of her from her breath . Maybe I just like you.”

“Or maybe you’re just afraid the Coffee Crisp supply will leave when I do.”

“Maybe. Maybe some birds think they are worms.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe you could tell me. It sounded good the first time I heard it.”

“Maybe you like me the way you like dill in your sour cream.”

“Maybe I like you because you remind of my tea.”

“Black and sweet?”

“No, weak and green.”

“You drink Russian tea, not Chinese.”

“Exactly. I like it strong, strong enough to stand up for itself without anything having to be added.”

“You mean the medication. I remember the first day you barged in here without knocking and used my bathroom. How you rifled the medicine cabinet and found them. Don’t you want to go there again and see if they’re still there?”
             
“You remember too much,” Magda complained. “I don’t give a shit if you use medication or not. How does the Beatles song go? ‘Whatever gets you through the night.’ Anyway, I already peeked. The water in your toilet bowl is starting to freeze over. There’s a thin layer of ice forming on top. I don’t piss anywhere anymore unless it’s in comfort.

“Let me tell you a story. One I learned in the psychiatric ward. There was a Soviet psychologist, Alexander Luria, who had a patient whose memory had no limits.  He could memorize pages written in a foreign language he didn’t understand or memorize columns of random numbers and recite them seventeen years later without being told he’d be asked to. You’d think with a memory like that he’d be doing great things, right? No, what he was doing was going insane. He was a prisoner to his memories; he’d never learned to forget. That’s what you have to learn to do. Forget how to be miserable. You’re too attached to it. Like you’ve invested so much time in it you’re afraid to give it up.”

“It’s not my misery I’m afraid to give up.”

“I know. It’s her. The cowgirl. Look, I understand. When you get right down to it, all we really are is our memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built on shared memories we call history, science and culture. To give up a memory, to give up the past . . . would be like suicide.”

“Yeah,” agreed Snow slowly.

“Listen,” Magda began.

“Listen,” she insisted again when Snow wasn’t listening closely enough. “You set impossible rules for yourself. That’s why you’re such a mess. You didn’t kill her.  The cowgirl. The wind did. It was just random fucking chance she was lying there when the tree fell. And it was random fucking chance you got up to take a piss. You won’t kill her memory by letting yourself be happy again. You have to learn to forgive yourself.”

To avoid answering her, Snow used the remote control to click on the new TV, began flipping through the channels. A cold wind was blowing snow in through the crack in the front door. Scrotum got up and went around to the other side of the bed where it was warmer. Angrily, Magda grabbed the clicker and turned it off.

“They don’t call this stuff on TV ‘programming’ for nothing, you know,” she said. “What do you think they’re programming? They’re programming you. Turn it off and listen. You’ve programmed yourself to think the cowgirl’s death was your fault, that if you stop mourning her you’ll have killed her memory. No, what you do by learning to live is honour her memory.”

“Yeah?” challenged Snow, snot dripping from his nose and tears from his eyes. Jillian had been sweetness and light. Magda was something deeper, darker and much more dangerous. Like breathing. Or blood.  “If you know so much, tell me why fish get old but they don't age. They just keep on looking the same. Or why polar bears live twice as long as grizzlies. Forty five years instead of twenty five.

             
“I don’t claim to know everything,” Magda said gently. “Just this: you’re killing yourself. You’re killing yourself for no good reason. The cowgirl wouldn’t want it.
Nado
zits
! You’re behaving like a character in a fairy tale that’s been cursed with an evil spell and only the cowgirl saying ‘I forgive you’ can lift it. She can’t say it; she’s dead. But, you, you’re still alive. You have to say it. You have to forgive yourself. She’d want you to live, the cowgirl.
Nado
zits
.  You have to live.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

Snow didn’t know if that meant Jesus confided in her, she got messages through fillings in her teeth or watched Fox News. “How?” he asked again.

“My Dad,” Magda said. “Why do you think he kept sending me the elephants? As a message he wanted me to go on living even without him.”

“But … it’s different.” Snow said.
             
“How? How is it different?”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“And you didn’t kill her,” Magda repeated. “Now, start living.”

Snow remained silent.

“It’s not your fault,” Magda repeated. “You don’t have to forgive yourself because there’s nothing you have to forgive. The most important thing I learned as a scientist was not to mistake ‘how much’ for ‘why.’ Another was to stop putting myself at the centre of everything. The church wanted to kill Galileo for saying the Earth wasn’t at the centre of the universe. We know it’s not. We haven’t learned the same lesson about much else. The Earth’s warming up? Must be Man’s fault. Ocean currents changing? Hell, they couldn’t do that unless we had done something wrong, could they? A meteor’s coming? Must not have prayed enough. Maybe the women were wearing clothing that showed too much boob. Or the men wearing the wrong hat. The wind blew a tree over in the forest? Must be Snow’s fault.”

“So what am I supposed to do then?”

“Find the man with the rope.”

“The man with a rope?”

“Yeah, the man with a rope. You’re from a ranching family. You must have seen a cow get stuck in a swamp at some point in your life. What does it do? It struggles and bellows and fights and sinks deeper and deeper until it dies. Everyone goes, ‘Oh that poor cow,’ and feels sorry that the owner has to buy a new one. That’s scenario A. But there’s also scenario B. That’s when the cow gets stuck, but this time a man with a rope comes by and lassoes it around the cow’s horns and neck. He calls everyone around to pull, but everyone’s afraid the cow is going to die ‘cause the rope is too tight and choke to death before they pull it out. But then suddenly … shhlurp … the cow comes out, dripping with mud and mad as hell. You know what? The cow’s gonna have a sore neck for a while and maybe the people pulling are going to get rope burns from pulling and stiff shoulders from the effort.  But the cow’s out of the shit, isn’t it? All thanks to the man with the rope.”

Snow looked at Magda  like she was the greatest thing since spiced Clamato juice or she was the woman who had just discovered the secret of cold fusion. Make that “spiked” Clamato juice, a Bloody Caesar. “Maybe you’re the man with the rope.”

“Maybe I am. Maybe you don’t even need a man with a rope. Here’s another story. When I was a kid, I used to watch my
baba
take old sweaters apart so she could use the yarn on something new. She'd start with a shapeless wad, tugging at it here and there until suddenly she'd find the thread that would turn it into a long string. Maybe that’s what you need to do. Find the piece that takes your old life apart and then you can use the string to knit a new one. Men only stem suicide by imbedding themselves in systems of illusion: religion, war, patriotism, economics, fashion. Find your fantasy and hang on to it with the grip of a Jewish American Princess throwing herself at a doctor. ”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe what we need to do is form our own tribe. Me and you. You’re right. I don’t have all the answers. Maybe what we need to do is make our own reality, give up on the ‘normal’ world. The word ‘reality’ can only ever be written in quotation marks anyway. Just ask a married couple what the reality of a chapter of their life is. You’ll get two different ‘realities,’ both of them wrong. So maybe we make up our own. Or you make up yours and I make up mine. So what if they’re wrong. Just so long as they work. Reality is probably just a story we each invent to keep ourselves amused. Look at me; I’ve wrestled with reality for years and I’m happy. I finally won out over it, beat it into the ground. I do know this: sitting in a room staring at a light bulb and hating yourself for something you had nothing to do with doesn’t work.

“Think about it, will you?” Magda said. “I’ll be back at my place doing somebody’s hair.”

“And I’ll be right here disappointing you.”

After  Magda left, Snow got quietly drunk. Alone. Again. He found he felt a little sorry for himself, which, he guessed, was somewhat better than feeling a lot sorry for himself. When he was done, maybe he didn’t hate himself so much. Maybe he didn’t think he needed forgiveness for what happened back on that mountain ridge on the Castle range.

It was, as usual, a difficult night for Snow, not the kind a man should be making important decisions on. Nevertheless, Snow made one. He didn’t know what the dream had meant, but when he got to work, he’d do what it said. For, at some point during the night, he’d managed to fall asleep. And dream.