Pig: A Thriller Read online

  For Boy

  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

  – Eric Blair (George Orwell), Animal Farm

  Although some of the characters in this book are real people and at times their actions reflect the true lives of their real life counterparts, the story is fictional. My account of the incidents of their lives is not intended to be a reflection of their characters, and is to be considered only as a work of the imagination.

  Copyright © 2012 by Darvin Babiuk

  PIG (pg): Noun

  1. farm animal with broad snout: Any of several mammals of the family suidae, having short legs, cloven hooves, bristly hair, and a cartilaginous snout used for digging, especially the domesticated hog, Sus scrofa domesticus, when young or of comparatively small size.

  2. greedy person: somebody who is regarded as slovenly, greedy, or gluttonous.

  3. coarse person: somebody who is thought to behave in a coarse, discourteous, or brutal manner.

  4. block of metal: a casting of metal in a basic shape suitable for storage or transportation.

  5. Offensive term: an offensive term that deliberately insults a woman’s morality (slang)

  6. offensive term: an offensive term for a member of the police force (slang).

  P.I.G. (Pipeline Inspection Gauge)

  Pigging refers to the practice of using pipeline inspection gauges, or ‘pigs,’ to perform various operations on a pipeline without stopping the flow of the product in the pipeline. Pigs get their name from the squealing sound they make while traveling through a pipeline. These operations include but are not limited to cleaning and inspection of the pipeline. This is accomplished by inserting the pig into a ‘pig launcher’ – a funnel-shaped Y section in the pipeline. The launcher is then closed and the pressure of the product in the pipeline is used to push it along down the pipe until it reaches the receiving trap – the ‘pig catcher.’ Pigs are also used in oil and gas pipelines; they are used to clean the pipes but there are also ‘smart pigs’ used to measure things like pipe thickness along the pipeline. They usually do not interrupt production, though some produce can be lost when the pig is extracted. They can also be used to separate different products in a multi-product pipeline.

  AFTER

  “Birth and death are easy. Life is hard.”

  -- Unknown

  Snowden Nastiuk needed work. By work, I don’t mean a job. He had one of those. Never been without one in his life. Right now, Snowden Nastiuk -- Snow, to those who liked him; Nasty to those who didn’t -- had a job just trying to stay alive. Problem was, he wasn’t sure he wanted it.Back to the work. Which Snow needed. Work on his being, his self, his existence. Which he’d never done. Not until now. Until he had time. Until the woman: Magda; Magda was probably the only reason Death wasn’t sure it was interested in Snow.

  Freezing to death is surprisingly peaceful. Snow steps outside his porta-cabin just outside Noyabrsk, Western Siberia in the middle of the night for a quick piss, his breath feathering out in wisps of steam. The water in his commode has frozen over again. There isn’t a Canadian man alive who hasn’t whipped out his dick and spelled his name in steaming piss in the snow. With the wind howling, he doesn’t hear the click of the lock behind him. He is dressed only in underwear. After he pisses, he turns to go back inside. The door is locked. At the time, his core body temperature is 98.6 degrees. His first thought is how embarrassing it is going to be when someone finds him. Cold slaps his naked face, squeezes tears from his eyes. He checks his watch: 0313 hours. His breath leaks from him in short, billowing steam puffs, creating a sharp catch deep in his chest as the cold air reaches his lungs. He hops up and down to try and keep warm as he thinks about what he’s supposed to do in situations like this. He spends precious time rushing from porta-cabin to porta-cabin, knocking on doors and trying to wake someone up. No luck. Either they’re asleep or passed out drunk. Already, his extremities are cold, the web of surface capillaries on his skin constricting, sending blood coursing inwards and deeper into his torso in order to keep vital organs warm. His temperature has now dropped below 97 degrees, his body covered in goose bumps.

  Snow’s second thought is that he doesn’t remember locking the door. He never locks it, in fact. The door jamb is so damaged, it can’t be shut completely and there’s nothing inside worth stealing anyway. His watch reads 0348. At least he thinks it does. He’s shivering too hard to read it correctly, a vain attempt to get muscles to generate additional body heat. He has trouble controlling his hands. His motor skills are seizing up. If there were a mirror nearby, he would see his lips turning blue. His body temperature is now less than 90 degrees. Soon, he has stopped shivering. Metabolic processes are shutting down. Amnesia is setting in. He will have a hard time remembering any of this later.

  Snow’s third thought is that it is not outside the realm of possibility that he is about to freeze to death.

  His fourth thought is that he doesn’t much care.

  There is no precise core temperature at which the human body dies. At Dachau, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a child it's 57. A one-year-old native Canadian girl was found in her backyard, wearing only a diaper, limbs frozen solid. She was clinically dead, and her heart stopped beating for about two hours. The girl, nicknamed Miracle -- because that’s what she was -- made a complete recovery.

  At 88 degrees, your blood thickens like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your metabolic rate falls by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurs when the blood vessels in your extremities constrict and squeeze fluids toward your center. At 86 degrees, your heart becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of your brain begin to trigger hallucinations. Why else would he be seeing purple elves “speaking” to him not in words, but in colours and textures? At 85 degrees, many victims ironically begin to rip off their clothes. Maybe the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates body temperature, starts malfunctioning. Or maybe the muscles contracting blood vessels become exhausted and relax, leading to a sudden surge of blood (and heat) to the extremities, fooling you into feeling warm even as you’re freezing to death.

  And that’s how Snow felt, warm. Not just in body temperature, but in spirit and comfort. Outside of normal time and reality, it was the first time in as long as he could remember he felt like he was where he belonged, a child at play in the Aeon, the gambolling sentient Pac Man family there to help show him the way.

  "Will he die?" Magda Timofeyeva Perskanski asked in the flat, mono-tonal accent of someone who had learned too many languages, red eyes set off in the pale face of someone who no longer looked at the faces of clocks or calendars, part of a group gathered around the bed sorting through reasons like old women buying cabbage in the market.

  Magda Perskanski had been described as deep as a well and twice as dark, someone who looked like her greatest monthly kitchen expenses were butter and dill. Perskanski may have sometimes confused rudeness with honesty, never honesty with anything else. The average Soviet woman's laden avoska weighs just over one kilogram. The average Soviet woman's unencumbered heart, nine ounces. Most, however, are not so lucky. Magda, for example, had lived a life that regularly made her heart weigh in at a hefty multiple of that number. Today, the needle was threatening to tip the scales.

  A decade in the camps had left Magda’s head so full of harrowing thoughts her hair had turned prematurely white. Now, she was just pissed that after fighting it for so long, Death had finally caught up to her. Was it her fault? Had she killed him? Snow? Goaded him into doing something
he never would have done on his own?

  In her grief, she’d forgotten what she’d told Snow over and over again: that there was no death, only different levels of life. If Pig hadn’t been there, she’d have been weeping softly. Blinking back the tears, she bent over to smear Chapstick first on her lips, then on Snow’s. Sure beat the pork fat she’d had to use before she met him. If they’d been alone, she would have kissed him, something she had never done before. There was an alarm clock beside Snow’s bed, she noticed, and wondered how it had gotten there. Why would a man in a coma need to set the alarm?

  There was no getting around it. Magda Timofeyeva Perskanski was worried. Worried for Snow. It was too easy to die when you were already dead.

  Standing there waiting for something to happen, Magda noted that the walls of the clinic were the colour of sturgeon grilled over a wood stove in a sour cream sauce. If she got out of here in time, she could stop at the market on her way home and pick up some kohlrabi to snack on in the evening.

  “Fundamentally, he’s fine,” answered the Doctor. “It’s the last three syllables of that word I’m worried about.”

  The Doctor was trying to appear calm, but Magda could tell the confident veneer was as thin as the first film of ice on the Itu-Yakha River in late October.

  Pig looked at the doctor meaningfully. He wondered if he could trust him to keep Snow unconscious long enough. He had said he stretch it out for as long as a week, yet every week the earth turns seven times. Never mind. If it came to that, Pig knew how to keep the Doctor in line. There weren’t many things that a good Camp Boss didn’t know about every single soul living in “his” camp. Somehow, some way, sooner or later, even the smallest fact became useful. Time to get the Doctor to administer some Milk of Amnesia to himself.

  They say that light rips through the firmament at 300 million meters per second, the fastest thing known to Man. Snow knew the velocity of darkness far exceeded that speed. For him, the darkness -- Death -- was an old pair of slippers, a bit torn and frayed from wearing them so much, but the leather gripped the heels and snuggled his toes so comfortably the only time he noticed was when It wasn’t around. Snow was so comfortable with the idea of Death, It didn’t scare him even a little bit. When it finally came, he felt it would be like slipping into a steaming hot bath rather than anything worrying. It was Life, not Death, that was the four-letter word for Snow; “trap” spelled another way.

  Paradoxically, the very cold that threatens to kill someone can also keep them alive. At such low temperatures, it shuts down metabolism. The lungs take in less oxygen, the heart pumps less blood. Under normal temperatures, this would produce brain damage. But the chilled brain, having slowed its own metabolism, needs far less oxygen-rich blood and can remain in this cold stasis, undamaged, for hours or days.

  Ideally, the doctor would have had access to a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, with which he could pump out Snow’s blood, re-warm and oxygenate it, and pump it back in again, safely raising the core temperature as much as one degree every three minutes. But such machines aren’t available in Noyabrsk, Siberia. Here, the Doctor had to rely on more primitive options. When Snow was brought in, he had slid a catheter into Snow’s abdominal cavity. Warm fluid began to flow from a suspended bag, flowing through his abdomen, and draining out through another catheter placed in another incision, much like a car radiator in reverse: the solution warmed the internal organs, and the warm blood in the organs was then pumped by the heart throughout the body.

  And Snow slowly responded. Another liter of saline was added to the I.V. tube. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, his temperature rose another degree. The immediate danger of cardiac fibrillation lessened as the heart and its thinning blood warmed. Frostbite could still cost Snow his fingers or an earlobe, but he appeared to have beaten back the worst of the freezing. For the next half hour, an E.M.T. had quietly called the readouts of the thermometer, marking progress towards a state of warmer, higher consciousness.

  "90.4...”

  "92.2..."

  And so on.

  At 98.6, the room relaxed.

  “Sell if it hits one hundred,” Pig joked. A former Communist functionary, he had taken to capitalism like a snake handler at a revival meeting.

  "He'll probably have amnesia," a voice said. “If he ever does come out of it.” Not many in Camp would feel sorry for him; they needed their full supply of pity for themselves.

  Pig smiled, satisfied with the results. Death , amnesia: either one would suit him fine.

  Watching, Magda Timofeyeva Perskanski thought that the smile didn’t fit, it was too big and the colours all wrong for him.

  "Never mind," Pig said. "He's strong. He'll live. And if he doesn’t, he’s just a fucking document clerk. It’s not like they cost much to replace. Six of one, 8.3 times 4.21 divided by 5.8 of the other." It was Pig’s opinion that Snow’s only skill was taking in cold water and pissing out hot. Peredoviki, “model worker,” he constantly mocked him.

  Blunter than a bathroom limerick, the Camp Boss, a man whom the blind might easily confuse for a home freezer, was rumoured to be able to throw a grenade seventy metres, do fifty chin-ups at a clip, and masturbate six times a day each and every day. It was also said that he had a woody that women could do chin-ups on. The only use he had for the word “sensitive” was on a condom wrapper.

  Pig always knew exactly what to do -- with utter conviction -- even when he was wrong, which was most of the time; a self-appointed expert on any subject you could name, he’d rather tell you his opinion than take your money; no, he’d rather do both. He was incapable of walking past a pie without sticking a finger in it Moody, gay, soulful, brave -- and very impressive -- he was a creature straight out of Russian literature. He could have played middle linebacker for the Roman Empire. All ego and testicles (ego-testicle; Magda would have to remember to ask Snow if it was a word when he came around. If he came around). The phrase described Pig to a “T.” As far as Magda was concerned, his character should be sent out and re-blocked, like a dented fedora, the parts had been forged in a shower of sparks on the devil’s anvil. Frowning, she plucked one of the flowers out of the vase someone had left next to Snow’s bed. Some idiot had given him twelve, an even dozen. Everyone knew that even numbers of flowers were only given at funerals; even numbers of flowers were for the dead, and Snow wasn’t dead yet.

  Magda wasn’t much to look at. You could pass her at the ballet, at the market, or on the Metro without a second glance. Kinky red-cum-white hair cascaded down a straight back that tapered down to earthy legs stout as birch trees, her skin the colour of sweet hickory smoke. Her hair stuck out everywhere like loose promises, even under her arms and out of her panty line.

  Once a hard-body in the gulag – through a combination of forced work and restricted calories -- Magda Perskanski now took great pride in being a “chub.” She was that most disconcerting of combinations, a closed face attached to an open mind. Pleasantly plump from living on perogies, pertsovka and perpetual disappointment, you could usually tell where she was by following the trail of Coffee Crisp wrappers left streaming behind her. It was a sign of defiance. She had gotten fat as a kind of revolt.

  Her face was unremarkable, plain but somehow very sensual. Perhaps it was the way she enjoyed each moment for itself, enjoying it for its own sake. She had a huge, heroic nose and a voice low and cat’s-tongue rough. Her breasts were too heavy for her to run with them unencumbered, pendulous and purple-tipped. When she did run – not often these days, she never used her body for much after the camps for much more than to carry her head around, which is where she lived most of the time now -- they jiggled in the natural shape of a figure eight. Under her skirt was a large, low-slung bottom, her large, dusky triangle beckoning like eggplant from beneath her hem. “Friends” in the camps had said Magda did too much thinking. Most of those were long dead.

  Soon after they’d met just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pig had asked Magda which political c
amp she belonged to, the Communists or the Capitalists.

  “The Kolyma camp,” she’d answered. As in Kolyma, home of the gulag. She had been given the gift of not having an ideology. A loose cannon in a camp of tight assholes, Magda Timofeyeva Perskanski was of the opinion that everything happened for a reason. Except maybe baseball, which she found utterly comprehensible. That’s why she never questioned why she had been sent to the prison camps or complained about wasting her youth in them.

  "You think you were too good for them," Pig had once accused her. “The camps.” Other than seeing them as useful receptacles for his semen, Pig was disgusted by women, trailing Kleenex and Tampax everywhere they went.She smelt the musk of diesel, vodka and something unidentifiable on him. It was not an aphrodisiac. If she was waiting for some show of pity out of him for Snow’s condition, she should have brought a sandwich.

  “Too good,” he’d accused. But instead of getting angry, Magda had only shaken her head and told him, no, what bothered her was that she hadn't been good enough. She hadn't earned it. Only Russia's best got to go to the gulag. She didn’t even belong in that class. All she’d done was to refuse to manipulate isotopes, not people.

  Being Slavic, Magda Perskanski disliked many other people, but never for anything as inconsequential as religion or the colour of their skin. People liked her because when it came to skin colour, nationality, ideology, social status, money, politics, sexual orientation or religion she truly did not care. Magda Perskanski didn’t give a shit whether you were white, red, black or maple walnut. The church to which she belonged was the one she carried deep inside herself.