Pig: A Thriller (9 page)

BEFORE

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” -- Buddhist proverb

You know that guy everybody says they'd hate to be? As in, "I'd hate to be him?" Meet Snowden Nastiuk. Snow. Or Nasty, if you preferred. Snow slash Nasty was him. That guy. The one you’d hate to be. He lay there on his narrow, stained mattress in the dark having a Russian conversation with himself:

“It’s past dinner time. I should eat.”

Forget it. I’m not hungry.”

“I stink. Time to take a shower.

Too much trouble.”

“Turn the TV on?

Probably nothing worth watching.”

“Is there vodka in the freezer?

Too far to go and check.”

“I’m stuck in this hellhole.

Where else could I go?”

“I hate my job.

No, I hate myself.”

Not a pleasant place to be, inside Snow’s head. If, outside, it was night, inside it was, too. The nine-month midnight, as Whitman put it. Except in Snow’s case it had been longer, much longer. He’d lost track. Someone -- Pascal? -- once said that all man’s problems come from him being unable to sit alone quietly in a room. Snow didn’t suffer from that problem. There was nothing he liked more than to sit alone in his room. Alone. With his pain. An old friend. Like some lost soul sentenced to life in a Russian novel.

             
By 8:30 p.m., Snow was exhausted, crashed out on his cot. He’d actually gotten up and tried to eat a banana, but couldn’t muster up enough energy. It rested quietly on his pillow, smashed neatly onto his forehead, the tip peaking out from under the peel, as if it too were so tired it had tried to come out but only made it part way.  It had been a long time since Snow had cared what went into his mouth
, just so long as it was eighty-
proof.

He’d tried to force himself to turn on the TV and see what was on the satellite dish, but that didn’t work either.  Watching TV was just a way of passing time. If he were a kid, he’d have been watching cartoons. If he were a teenager, he’d have been masturbating. But time was not cooperating; it didn’t want Snow to pass it. Like most other nights, he hadn’t made it past nine. Unfortunately, he knew he’d be up around 2:00 a.m., still exhausted, as thoughts forced their way into his head like amoebic shit sluicing its way through a Western tourist on the third day living like a local in Doryobinsk after the dysentery outbreak. It was usually then, the hour of the wolf, that he started making a list and adding up all the failures he’d managed to accumulate over the past forty one years and try to think of reasons why he shouldn’t just give up. Maybe he had already.

An aggressive knock came from the door into the space where Snow did what others referred to as living. It didn’t take much willpower to ignore it, even once it had managed to wake him up. Ignoring things was what Snow did best. His porta-cabin was slovenly, dirty, smelling vaguely unpleasant and reminiscent of some different place, that place being Cowley, Alberta circa 1980. Forty-one going on sixty-two, Snow not only looked it, he acted like it. The face in the mirror was not the one he would have chosen for himself. Jowly, fleshy, hangdog, nondescript: there was nothing there that would attract anyone, man or woman. The lines around his eyes were made to squint into blizzards, not at office paper. He had an indoor complexion, no mean feat here in Siberia, where you made your living outside, off the land. Above white, rheumy eyes was stringy, slightly receding hair, much the same way his shoulders seemed to shrinking into his chest cavity. Tall, thin and balding with stooped shoulders, he had a face that looked like a truck just ran over his pet turtle, resembled a beaten old man in a rooming house. His beard was stubbled, un-trimmed, because it would have taken too much effort to shave. His hair was eighties-hockey-player-long, Jaroslav-Jagr-in-his-prime, Dougie-Gilmour coiffed, a mullet cut that would make a Hanson brother jealous. Over his top lip was a cheesy porn-star moustache. He might once have been a white man, but now he was grey. Grey, with all that implied. The only way Snowden Nastiuk would ever set  the world on fire was by accident.

Not that he cared what he looked like anyway. There wasn’t much to him but skin and bone, more from lack of hunger than from lack of eating. Lack of hunger for anything. What he ate mostly was his pain, dulled it and filled the hole inside with booze. The problem was, later, after the alcohol wore off, the pain was still there. It never went way, it just moved around.

Nasty did not have one single friend, which was by conscious effort. It was one of the few things besides his job he worked at. Being alone. Not having friends.

Not having friends wasn’t hard. You didn’t even have to be rude, just unresponsive. Snow had worked hard on shaping his face into the one of the guy on the bus or in the bank line that no one even noticed. You could forget what he looked like while you were still talking to him.

Snow looked away from the knock at the door to his fridge. He was sure there was some vodka in there along with the remains of wilted vegetables, mouldy cheese and stale bread crusts. He stared at the wall again, contemplating getting up to get a fresh bottle. He’d never subscribed to the notion that drinking alone was bad. On the contrary, he usually found it to be very good. There was a stain on the wallpaper that looked a little like Baffin Island. Getting up to answer the knock on the door never crossed his mind.

The knock came again. Louder. 

“
Uhodi
,” Snow growled in Russian. “Go away.”

Suddenly, the door was open, letting the chill October air in. Standing there, was a woman who looked vaguely familiar, the form somewhat resembling a refrigerator dusted with frosting from those little tiny donuts. The bitch had walked in without an invitation. Snow never locked it. Too much effort.

“I knock the door many times but no one never answering. So I coming in. I listen your breathing inside. It no lock.  Too much dangerous. Make you trouble some day.”

“Fuck off,” Snow said, turning away to face the wall. “You’ve got the wrong trailer. Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it. Try next door.”