Pig: A Thriller (30 page)

“There’s a British scientist, Rupert Sheldrake, who believes everything has a kind of memory
-
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objects, organs, ideologies --  attached to it like an aura that follows them in time. It's almost as though organisms have a hyper-dimension ...  they're objects with time folded inside of them, and at death you simply withdraw back into whatever dimension you came from in the first place. It's not that it falls apart or dissolves, it's that it retracts from matter. It clothed itself with matter for some decades and now it's simply releasing its organizational power over matter. But it isn't destroyed. You can take a heart or kidney out of a dead body, but when you transplant it into another body, that person often takes on the personal characteristics of the donor. Even though the two people have never met and the recipient doesn’t get to know the donor’s identity. There’s documented evidence of that happening. You know why that is? Because time is fractal; the two auras, fields, whatever you want to call them, are resonating with each other. Resonance: action at a distance. You can play a note on a cello and a piano fifty feet across the room sound the same octave. Why should that just exist in music? It exists in time. Any given moment in time is a holographic interference pattern of all other moments in time. Together, they make up the whole. But they’re not all the same. That’s why different eras have their own fashions, styles, histories. The universe is just one giant hologram.”

“You mean like a Disney cartoon.”

“You’re joking, but yeah. Objective reality doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy agreed on. You know what a hologram is, right? It’s a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. That’s how you get that cool little identity square on your credit card.

“That’s not the cool thing, though. The really cool thing is that if a hologram of Dumbo the Elephant is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of Dumbo. Cut the halves again and each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image.
Unlike normal photographs,
every
 
part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
It’s fractal. Western science has always taught that the best way to understand something is to break it down, to take it apart. That’s why we dissect frogs and construct enormous atomic super-colliders to study neutrinos and quarks. And then we’re surprised it doesn’t work. We shouldn’t be. When we break things apart all we’re doing is getting smaller wholes. Atomic particles can exist in two places simultaneously or communicate with each other despite being light years apart because their separateness is an illusion; in reality, they’re not individual entities, but just extensions of the same fundamental something.

“What the brain really is is a filter that limits reception. In the ‘normal,’ ‘real’ world, serotonin and dopamine configure it to act as receptors that let only certain wavelengths in. Add the chemically similar psilocin and different wavelengths are received. You’re not hallucinating, you’re suddenly given another channel to watch on the cable package. It’s  only an accident of evolution that our nervous systems, and the version of reality they provide us through their chemical makeup, have come to be structure the way they are and to be accepted as the ‘real’ reality. Mushrooms change reception of brain to see things that are real but we normally can’t see. Dark matter consists of ninety five percent of the universe, known to exist but unable to be detected. Likewise, science only sees three percent of DNA as useful. Ninety seven percent is called junk DNA with no known purpose. Again, other realities and dimensions could be detected using that portion.

“We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. Our human brain acts as a threat-detection device, a filter separating us from that reality while we undergo this human experience. Mushrooms remove that filter. Dreams, too.

“Dreams? You’re saying they’re real, that that’s the true reality?”

“I’m saying that in our dreams the filter gets removed and we get back in contact with that oneness, that reality.”

“Just like with psychedelics? That dreaming is the same as getting high?”

“In a way, yeah. They’re both called ‘trips,’ aren’t they? We’ve talked about the psilocybin and chemicals in plants and what they can do. About how they’re naturally inside our own brains. So that governments are making illegal what’s already inside us. If you analyze cerebrospinal fluid, the greatest concentration of neurotransmitters present is between three and four o’clock in the morning, the same time we’re doing our most intense REM dreaming. That’s when the filter is being broken down, during our dreams. Just like during a mushroom trip. It is a mushroom trip.”

Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life. Myth is more individual and expresses more precisely than does Science. Whether or not the stories (of myth) are true is not the problem. The only question is what I tell is
my
fable,
my
truth. 

             
             
             
             
             
             
-- Carl Jung

“Black holes are where God divided by zero.”

             
             
             
             
             
             
--Comedian Stephen Wright

“Did you know an elephant consumes fifty tons of food per year? A four thousand kilogram elephant needs twenty five thousand calories for every meter it climbs vertically. That’s why you’ll never see them climbing an incline of five degrees or greater. Just a tooth alone can weigh five kilos, same as his testicles, which are the size of cantaloupes. The trunk by itself alone can weigh five hundred kilos.”

“The trunk, huh?”

             
“Yeah. There’s forty thousand muscles in there. Forty thousand! The entire human body only has six hundred and thirty nine. You know, the only thing most mammals use their noses is is for breathing. Elephants use their trunks for water storage and sucking up mud to clean themselves or cool off.  It can even just store four litres of water in there. It can siphon up to nine liters in a single sip, fifteen liters in just one minute.

The mushrooms weren’t having any effect yet. Magda was just excited. It can take up to half an hour after ingestion to feel any change in consciousness.

“Hey, do you know how to make an elephant float?” Magda asked.

“I give up,” Snow answered. “How do you make an elephant float?”

Magda smiled. “With two scoops of ice cream, a bottle of cream soda, and an elephant, silly.”

“Enough elephants,” said Snow. “What do you know about pigs?”

Magda spat on the cabin floor, never mind that it was tile and not dirt. “He’s a bastard. I know that much.”

“Not Pig. Pigs. Plural. I had the weirdest drum the other night. Everyone here in camp was some character in that book you gave me,
Animal
Farm
.”

“
‘No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal,’” Magda quoted. “‘He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?’"

“You know it? You’ve had the same dream?”

“Know it? I lived it. Anyone who lived in the Soviet Union has. “‘They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes,’" Magda quoted again.

“The camps,” Snow said.

“Yeah, the camps,” Magda confirmed. They weren’t laughing now. “Still, I guess I shouldn’t complain,” she said wryly. “Being there not only helped me rearrange my marbles, it taught me how to play with them.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“Miss Anne – misanthropy – Pig calls me here. It’s not the first time I got that nickname. In the camps, it was Miss Education. Because I was always studying something. Picking anyone’s brain I could find there who knew about something new. It kept me from giving up. Problem was, everyone kept telling me I was studying the wrong things – all those strange physics ideas I’ve been trying out on you. So Miss Education; miseducation. Now, it’s a habit. I can’t stop. I decided then and there never to let myself be defined as someone's widow, mother, or lover -- but only as myself.”

“And that’s why you knocked on my door. Because I was something new.”

“No.”

“That’s right, you didn’t knock. Just walked right in.”

“No, I meant that wasn’t the reason why.”

“Why then?”

“You know how to define an optimist in Russia? An optimist is a person who believes tomorrow will be better than the day after. People were talking about the poor Canadian schlep in his trailer and I was optimistic I could help. God knows, I couldn’t make it worse.”

“So you believe in God?”

“No, I believe in something much bigger. You’d know that. If you were listening.”

“I was listening.”
             

“Yeah? What’s my last name, then?”

“I was listening to the parts that were important. Not the details.”

“Perskanski.”

“Huh?”

“Perskanski. It’s my family name. Why Pig calls me ‘Skank.’”

“Well, that and ‘cause you’re a whore.”

“I’m not a whore. I’m a
madame
. There’s a difference.”