Pig: A Thriller (36 page)

             
Brazil, several decades ago, at least from the way people were dressed and spoke Portuguese. Two men scavenging through an abandoned hospital. They take away an unknown piece of equipment in a wheelbarrow. Later, they break it open and remove a capsule the size of a billiard ball and break that open, too. It is emitting a deep, blue light. They sell it to a scrap yard, the owner being intrigued by the glowing blue light. It would make a nice ring for his wife, he thought. He applies some as body paint to his brother’s body. He sells the strange glowing, blue powder to another scrap yard. The second scrap yard owner’s daughter is equally intrigued, applying the glowing blue powder to her body. Meanwhile, the wife of the first scrap yard owner notices a strange outbreak of sick people around her. She retrieves the blue powder and takes it to a hospital for analysis. Radioactivity is discovered. Contamination of people and objects is treated with a substance known as Prussian Blue. Four people die, roughly thirty are injured and over a hundred thousand are examined for contamination. Numerous sites have to be decontaminated.

In the next vignette, the deceased Frantisek Musil was covered in a glowing, blue powder. Movie production people were rushing around in the background. The set was mostly a large bedroom illuminated by klieg lights and with oil rigs, pumps and production facilities decorating the furniture. Oddly, all the animals from Animal Farm were present, too. Pig sat in the Director’s chair. In the background, out of sight of the lights, was a mysterious cabel of shady oligarchs constantly re-working the script. A system of pipes connected Pig to the shady group, a  projectile flowing back from one to the others repeatedly like messages in a pneumatic tube in a factory. Each time the tube made another cycle, everyone looked a little sicker. Doctor Bandar was in charge of catering, except the craft table didn’t have any shrimp or chicken salads, just plates and plates of a dish called Prussian Blue. The clapper clacked to start in the next scene of Pig’s fantastical production,
On Golden Blonde
. Magda’s employees were hired out as extras.

The clapper clacked again and the scene faded into black.

             
Reality broke, like a thin sheen of ice forming on a trout stream being shattered by a dropping pine cone, and Snow left his room, sucked at light speed into the spout of the samovar and out the other side, naked, enveloped by a warm, heavy liquid, bathed in intricate pastel patterns of yellow, red, and blue – primary colours cranked up to their fullest potential --  seductive lips sucking Snow in to embrace him, like bursting through a filmy membrane separating his stark porta-cabin and a brightly-lit Las Vegas casino, not a crossroads but a nexus, womb-like yet open, welcoming, liberating. Mauve-coloured fractals dance and sway around the edges of his perception, like looking through a kaleidoscopic mandala, seductive, flowering geometric patterns morphing from one form to another, shifting from foreground to background, two-dimensions to three to hyperdimensional. For a moment, Snow himself became the colour blue, not seeing but actually being a hydrangea flower.

             
The patterns morph into the circus, elf-like, miniature disco balls frolicking like puppies at Snow’s feet, dribbling themselves without benefit of human hand. They do not announce themselves, they just appear, as if they oozed out of the fabric of this new reality. The entire three-ring realm is populated by these self-actuated sprites and they are clearly pleased to welcome Snow there, wherever the hell “there” was. He senses all beings that ever existed or ever will are there with him; there were no individual beings, but he could sense each one of them there, dendrites reaching into every villi of this
Brobdingnagian cranium of existence. Each time his attention focused on one of the nodes, a new revelation of the nature of existence was shown to him,
pure and unadulterated reality, not a rough approximation made by faulty perception mechanisms.

Snow became aware that three of the forms separated themselves from the whole and glided towards him. He was shown in an onslaught of images, thoughts, impressions and feelings that everything in his life had been building to this moment. Giggling and jiggling in front of Snow, one of the self-actuating bouncing elves picked out an object it had been juggling in the air, indicating it was a present for him to play with.

"Take it," the jiggling, juggling, giggling, jugular, Jell-O, gigolo pixies prompted, not through words, but by communicating like octopi, their skins changing colours and pattern to impart their message. Spelled out in graphic font in beautiful English on their skins was the following:  "The past is history, the future a mystery -- but today is a gift. That's why they call it the present. It's a gift. Yours. To play with.”

Hanging from a colossal rear-view mirror that suddenly materialised in front of Snow were a pair of fuzzy hanging dice, Einstein’s dice.

"No dice," said Snow, and the elves giggled more, as if Snow’s refusal to accept them were somehow made up for by his use of the unintentional pun. Magically, the rear-view mirror transformed into a giant version of the clock in Snow’s porta-cabin, except instead of hours and minutes the numbers of the face were document numbers and the hands were pointing to a particular one. 

As suddenly as it had begun, the space collapsed in on itself, the periscope retracted, Snow feeling energy coursing through the base of his spine, an orgasm within his pineal gland and he was gently deposited back in his lumpy cot in his stark porta-cabin, no worse for wear. Snow’s twenty minutes were up. He could not deposit forty cents more the next three minutes. Time is funny like that; it insists saying who’s in charge.

Dreams are – after all -- the perfect crime. They involve no witnesses and no recording of their meaning, save that which you yourself give them. And then they are gone, leaving no record of themselves behind.

'The Aeon is a child at play with colo
u
red balls'. -- Heraclitus

             
Snow did not bother to wait until morning. He got his elbows up like Gordie Howe and chalked them the way Minnesota Fats used to doctor his pool cue and went straight to the Document Control room. He went to the right filing cabinet and looked up the document identified on the clock in his dream. It was gone. When the Archives clerk showed up a few hours later, Snow was waiting for her. He passed her the proper form requesting a copy of the document. Within minutes, he had it and spent a few minutes back at Document Control going over the form. Minutes only, because shortly after he put up a sign on the door stating the office was closed for the day. Back in his room, Snow put on his Personal Protection Equipment and dug out his security pass to get past the gate to the Operations side of the Noyabrsk oil production facility.

             
“Why?” Snow asked. After his trip into the bowels of the oil producing facility, he’d changed into his clothes again and gone off to Magda’s Deficit Exchange Club in town.

             
“Why what?” Magda was gutting a fish, taking a long thin-bladed knife and filleting the flesh from the backbone and skin. Carefully, she separated the meat from the guts and skin, setting aside the roe in a separate pile for her top-end customers. As she talked, she ran a fingernail along the spine to clear the blood. “I love my period,” she said, the blood reminding her of her menses, which had just started. “It's like once a month my body becomes a self-cleaning oven.

             
“Why would Pig steal documents that showed log results for the company pipeline? The only thing that runs through there is oil And how could you steal that? It goes in one end and out the other. There’s no way to siphon anything off.”

             
“Why? Why is the sky blue?”

             
“Because it defracts –“

             
“No, that’s how.  You told me you want to know why.” Magda had divided up the entrails into two bags, one which she set down for her own cat and the other which she handed over to Snow for Schrödinger. Scrotum. Whatever his name was now.

“According to Pig --” Snow started again.

“I don't think that ‘According to Pig,’ is ever going to acquire the authority of, say, ‘According to Dostoevsky,’ or ‘According to Lenin.’

“Never have sex with someone you don't want to be,” Magda continued, her mind still on the sex business. “Because in that moment, when the magic happens, when the two-backed beast rises, you become one. Even after it's over, after you’ve smoked your cigarettes and said the right things to each other, you retain the sensation of being the other person. Some of their atoms are now yours and some of yours are in them.”

One of the things Snow liked best about Magda – besides her honesty – was her complete lack of piercing or body art. Oddly, for someone who’d been in the camps, her skin was unstained from visible tattoos. Magda viewed tattoos as spilled ink, which, like all liquids, sought its lowest level, to be absorbed mostly by mobsters or motorcycle freaks.

             
“Sex for money, that’s different. It’s just business. Or biology. There’s no magic happening so you don’t have to worry about becoming the other person. I sent all my girls to the gynaecologist this week, you know. To get their tests done. Check all their fluids and make sure they’re clean. You know, it’s interesting, how one girl is popular with one guy but not the other. I think a pussy is like a musical instrument, with stops that play different notes. Did you get more Coffee Crisps in? The girls like them. ‘The world does what it pleases, whether we understand it or not.’” Magda quoted suddenly.

“The Buddha?” asked Snow.
             
“Shit. Hell if I know. I heard it from one of the girls. Could have come from anywhere by the time I got it. You heard the story about the wheelbarrows, right?” Magda asked, then continued without waiting for an answer. “Every day for years and years the same gentleman came through the customs post pushing a wheelbarrow in the morning and returning again every night. Every morning and every night, the agent diligently searched through it but could never find anything. Finally, when he was about to retire, the customs agent asked the guy, ‘We've become friends. I've searched your wheelbarrow every day for many years. I know you’re smuggling something but I can’t find what. Don’t let me go into retirement never knowing. What are you smuggling?’  ‘Wheelbarrows,’ answered the other man. ‘I am smuggling wheelbarrows.’”

“He’s not smuggling oil,” Snow said. “How could he be? It goes in one end and out the other. There’s no way to siphon anything off. The input and the output are both measured.”

“How can a heart so small contain so much evil?” Magda wondered aloud. “Some people choose evil because they don’t know any better; they don’t know the difference between goodness and wickedness. But Pig, he knows. And yet he chooses evil.”

But Snow wasn’t listening. An idea had come to him flopping and gasping like a fish. A whopper. They’d mount this one, put it over the fireplace and tell stories about it over the bar. He smelled something resembling a rotting carp and wasn’t going to be able to rest until he cleansed the idea from his system. Still in his protective gear, he went back to the pipeline, did what he had to do, and came back to Magda’s place.

A winter’s day. Deep and dark and depressing. It was barely th
ree in the afternoon, but already the sky was starting to darken.
Waiting to cross the six-lane road filtering traffic past the security gate of the Noyabrsk oil facilities to the Administration Offices, living areas, contractor work space or the pumping, refining and processing areas, where only those with special access passes were allowed to enter in order to prevent theft, sabotage or terrorism. Gazing from the stoplights regulating traffic through the spokes of the transportation system to the dismal scene before him.  Car exhaust kept from dissipating by a low pressure temperature inversion. Clunky wipers clogged by ice, fighting to clear ice from the windshield. Sundogs reflecting low on the horizon. Billows of steam issuing from any live part of the refinery warmer than the cold winter air. Ice crystals sparkling in the air. The windows on the security hut in the centre of the traffic lanes frosted over. Snow half obscuring the swaying traffic lights.  The hairs in his nostrils freezing, then snapping off like icicles when he rubbed his nose. Vehicles covered in salt and windshields half obscured with frost or dirt. A taste of poorly-combusted hydrocarbons biting through the smog. A stuck car spinning its wheels futilely in an ice rut.

Too busy thinking over what he’d found in the pipeline area, Snow crossed illegally against the red, not noticing a huge Aurok bearing down on him. Russian drivers granted pedestrians the same rights as the Soviet courts had to homosexual Gypsy Jews. Thinking his day had just brightened up, expecting Snow to scramble out of the way, the driver kept barrelling ahead, hoping to see the pedestrian scramble out of the way of the behemoth truck. Instead, Snow stopped dead in the middle of the road. Rather than slowing, the truck may have actually sped up and altered its course slightly to hit Snow head on instead of at an angle, all the while screaming on the air horn for Snow to clear off the road. Three stories high and carrying a four hundred ton load, he didn’t lose too many games of chicken.

He lost this one. Snow stood placidly staring at the truck bearing down on him until it was the driver who blinked and stomped on the air brakes, managing to bring the huge rig to a skidding stop centimetres from Snow’s chest. He climbed down the fourteen steps out of the cab to the road and started screaming and jabbing his finger at Snow’s chest.

“
Dalbaiyob
,” the trucker swore, shaking his fist at him. “You’re fucking crazy. I could have killed you.”

Unfazed, Snow shrugged in agreement and calmly finished crossing the road. He hadn’t even blinked, hadn’t even registered a sign of fear. The trucker was right. Either way, he didn’t much give a shit.

The incident did not go unobserved or unreported. Despite the fogged windows on the security hut in the middle of the traffic island, Pig’s bank of CCTV cameras were working perfectly.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Magda asked.

“You gave me the idea,” Snow said. He’d brought her back a small container of oil drawn from the camp’s pipeline.

“I told you to get me some Coffee Crisps, not this. You can’t even cook with this kind of oil.” The fish she’d filleted earlier was baking now, with lemon pepper and dill. Later, when it was done, she’d add sour cream to top it off. Magda’s navel -- fuzzy or not, she didn’t check – had already extended itself to make room.

“With the wheelbarrows and hiding things in plain sight. That, and getting your girls’ body fluids analyzed. So I went back to the pipeline. ‘What would you hide in plain sight in one?’ I asked myself. So I went to get some, open it up, see if maybe something was hidden inside, getting pushed along with the oil. There’s only one place you can go to do that.”

“The pig launcher,” Magda said. She was referring to a funnel-shaped Y section in the pipeline where it could be opened up for access. “Why do they call it that anyway?”

“From the squealing sound it makes going up and down the line. Or it could be an acronym for ‘Pipeline Inspection Gauge.’ You know, the electronic device that goes up and down the pipeline inspecting it for damage and cleaning it from the inside. Sometimes, they use them as plugs to separate one kind of oil from another inside the pipeline, stop the different products from getting mixed together.”

“Shut up. Who fucking cares? Tell me what you found.”

“Nothing. I thought they might have wrapped up some contraband and used the pressure of the oil in the line to push it down to someone waiting downstream. But nothing like that. That’s not what I found. What was strange was how close together the pigs were in the line. Usually, you’d use them to separate off thousands of barrels of different product from each other. But these were only gallons apart. There was no reason for it. Why separate a couple feet of oil off from the rest. There’s not supposed to be different products there, just one whole batch of sweet crude; the same content, the same provider, the same recipient. But something had to be different or why separate it off?”

             
“Why?” Magda asked.

             
“I don’t know,” Snow admitted. “But we can find out.”

             
“We?”