The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  ‘So what do you do with the rest of your time?’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘I loiter about the streets, trying to pick up young women like you.’ Then, as if fearful of overstepping some puritanical conversational code, he added, ‘That’s a joke.’

  ‘I assumed so.’

  We walked to the end of the street. In those days Liberty was smaller than it is today – it’s not that long ago, but it has grown a lot in a short time. It was just a village then, really, a barracks-turned-village. There were hardly any of the things I remembered from old pre-Snow cities. There were cubes and cubes of accommodation, larger blocks for the communal sleeping spaces of the ordinary soldiers; prefab apartments for officers and their families; three churches built of panels with wooden roofs. There weren’t any bars, because the barracks had several messes. No: there was one bar, a single room that sold miniscule glasses of watered alcohol, coloured soft drinks, anything that could be brought out of the food-mines for ridiculously high prices. Or did that place open later? Ackroyd’s Liberty Bar, it was called. But I tell you, I can’t remember if that place opened later, or if it had always been open. When I married Crow I sometimes drank in the senior officers’ mess, and it’s not likely I would have frequented another bar. There were several shops, a big foodstore staffed by soldiers, and several smaller places. There was a noodle bar, although it could not, obviously, restrict itself to noodles, and served whatever food it could get hold of and heat up. There was a soup place, I remember. The little array of shops on the central main-street row: most sold clothes, but the affordable things were usually inappropriate (summer-wear, bikinis, that sort of thing), and the winter-wear was extremely expensive. There was a bunch of make-do-and-mend places; seven, or eight, that I can call to mind straight away. You took everything to one of these places sooner or later. Getting new stuff was expensive.

  On the far side of the city, out by the perimeter, were workshops. Mechanics worked on hovercraft and mining subs and anything the military needed. Because any money mined out of the snow, or flown out from the over-States, was government – which is to say, military – business could only make a living by attracting military custom. By the same token, it was all the grease monkeys, the mechanics who serviced the machines, who earned the most money, because these were the civilians who did most of the work for the army. They’d strut up and down main street with tremendous self-importance. They’d spend lavishly at this shop or that shop, and so the money would start its trickle down. At the same time there were a couple of doctors I knew, and they earned hardly anything. The barracks had their own medical orderlies, I guess, and civilians had better things to spend their money on than healthcare, especially when medicine and equipment was in such short supply that, often, the best a doctor could do would be to diagnose, not treat, a sickness. Doctors would stand in the chill looking through the display windows of the shops, like tramps, yearning but unable to pay for anything whilst grease monkeys swanked past in new coats with women on their arms. That was Liberty, in those days. Paper was so scarce that there was no newspaper, although there was an official sheet that was pasted up in front of the military-police block with government news on it, a sort-of-Pravda. There were no bookstores. There was a library, where you paid for each book, each day. I could rarely afford the lending fee, and when I did, the pleasure in reading was undercut by my sense of hurry, the feeling that I absolutely had to finish the book today so as not to incur another day’s fee.

  There’s a bookstore now. Lots of things have changed. I’ve changed, myself. I’ve all the paper I need to write this account, although of course that’s because I have chanced to be near the centre of important events, and NUSA wants a record of that. But of course, some things don’t change. You hardly need me to tell you that. Then, as now, everything in Liberty depended on the military. I don’t have the figures for the proportion of military to civilian inhabitants of the city when I was first living there: probably sixty-forty; maybe seventy-thirty. I don’t know. Half and half former-US and former-Brit, with the smallest proportion of other types (there was [Blank] of course, from Thailand, or Vietnam or somewhere; but he was so completely the exception rather than the rule). Almost all the faces you’d see were white. It was as if the human animal had adapted so as to be better camouflaged in the snow.

  The army ran everything. Wrongdoers were arrested by the military police, and served time in military lock-ups (reinforced prefabs on the edge of town). The political setup was entirely staffed by military types. They were in charge of the economy too. But the economy was so messed up – the military handled it poorly – it was tragic. They released a predetermined amount of money into society through purchases and so on, the amount increasing each year by something like 4%, so that inflation could not exceed that amount – it [expletive deleted] did, though, I’m sure of it. So much for the theory. One day a loaf of bread would be $5, the next week it could be $20, the week after that $8. Supply was not regular enough to guarantee the sort of economic tweaking the government believed in and pretended to practise. But people put up with it. What else could we do? It was an Emergency, with a big, pronged, capital ‘E’ and ice hanging in shaggy wedges from the cross-bars. Humanity was gripping on by its fingernails. So, you have to spend your whole weekly salary on a loaf of bread and a tin of corned beef? Make the best of it. And, I should say, in the interest of being honest, that I didn’t suffer the way plenty of people in the city did, because I was married to such a senior military man. But many people did. And since I’m pursuing the cause of honesty, I should add that – although we lived officially in a state of Emergency – people didn’t think of it that way. Emergencies don’t go on and on, month after month, year to year. They become the normal state of things; State of Normality. That’s how it felt. Everything got normalised. Even the billions of dead. It was as if they had stepped out of the picture for a while, and we were making do through an unusually cold and prolonged winter.

  Each city was supposed to be run by a Senator, with an administrative staff beneath him; the Senators were supposed to attend Senate back in one of the six over-States cities, I don’t remember which city. Our Senator was rarely in Liberty, I know, because people used to kvetch and complain about it. His deputy was a colonel, called [Blank] I think; or maybe [Blank]. I forget the exact details. He’s dead now, I know. He died in the first attack. No, the second attack – I can’t remember.

  Does it matter precisely which attack killed him? I don’t know how precise you want me to be. It was one of the early ones, at any rate.

  The Senate. When I got to know him a little better, when he became my lover and revealed his Che-Guevara side to me, [Blank] used to gush out scorn upon the Senate. ‘Some Senate!’ he would say. ‘A seven-man star chamber more like, with the IP sitting over them like a medieval baron. Accountability – that’s a joke. They’re all military, they’re none of them used to the idea of democracy. True democracy, I mean, not this sham.’ And so on. I used to think it sweet, that he had such passion. He acted like a nineteen-year old, like a revved-up student high on Justice and Right and so on, not like the bald fifty-something he actually was.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Let me go back to that day. [Blank] hailed me in the street, and said, ‘I loiter about the streets, trying to pick up young women like you,’ and smiled at me. We walked to the end of the street, and turned up a side-row. Past the Unity Church, and to the railing at the edge of town, and stood there for a while looking out at the blankness of the landscape. We both fumbled with our sunglasses in mittened hands, and fitted them onto our faces. Squaddies with great circular snowshoes on their feet were visible on the land outside the city, laying semi-dirigible slabs out on the snow, to form a temporary runway.

  ‘Plane coming in,’ I said.

  ‘Looks like it,’ said [Blank].

  I wasn’t sure why we were standing there, the two of us. But at the same time it seemed
natural, easy. We stood in a perfectly unawkward silence for a while. Then I turned and looked down the street. ‘That chapel,’ I said, without pointing.

  ‘Unity church,’ he said.

  ‘My husband attends regularly.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I see him there. But never you.’

  ‘I don’t like to go.’

  ‘I’d heard you were Catholic,’ said [Blank]. ‘There’s a Catholic church in New NY, where I lived before I came here. It’s big, nicely made. I’m,’ he added, cautiously, ‘Catholic, I used to be Catholic.’

  ‘Lapsed?’ I asked.

  ‘More complicated than that,’ he said. ‘It’s more complicated than lapsed or not lapsed. It’s a complicated thing, my relationship to Catholicism.’

  ‘I’m not a Catholic,’ I said. ‘I just don’t fancy it. Church, all that.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, easily. ‘It doesn’t really matter to me, one way or the other.’

  ‘Matters to my husband,’ I said.

  ‘He’s got a public reputation to maintain,’ said [Blank]. ‘That’s understandable.’

  ‘Understandable, but a pain in the arse.’

  ‘In the …?’

  ‘Ass, you call it.’

  [Blank] chuckled at this. ‘Yeah, I thought that’s what you said.’

  I turned to face him. ‘You’re not,’ I told him, ‘such a jerk as I thought.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he laughed.

  ‘I only mean, in your official I’m-chairing-this-meeting persona. Your there are fifty ways to build this tunnel, let’s run it up the flagpole see who salutes persona. But, actually you’re OK. Are you married?’

  He laughed more loudly at this.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Like I’m anywhere near rich enough to have a wife,’ he said. ‘Too old, too ugly – but, no, that ain’t the problem, too poor, that’s the rub.’

  ‘Is that how it is?’

  ‘It’s always been that way. It was that way before the Snow for many people. It’s just a more focused version of the same thing up here.’

  ‘You were married before the Snow?’

  ‘Married and divorced,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘Never married,’ I said. ‘I had a kid,’ I said. It all came out easy, as if I were chatting with a close friend, although I barely knew this man. ‘Don’t know where she is. Maybe she got out. I like to think so.’ Saying that made the tears tremble inside my skull, like pieces of glitter nudged in a snowglobe. But the tears didn’t come out.

  ‘Yeah, it’s possible,’ [Blank] said, leaning on the rail and looking over the whiteness.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked him. ‘Before, I mean? Were you always in the army?’

  ‘Jesus, no,’ he said. ‘No. I was a writer.’ He grinned a teenagery grin as he said this. ‘You believe that? Stupid profession.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I told him. ‘I love to read.’

  ‘I wasn’t that kind of writer,’ he said, rather mysteriously. He stared at the white landscape and said, ‘You had a kid? That’s great. I never had a kid. Sometimes wish I had.’

  ‘There’s still time,’ I told him.

  ‘That’s not the way it works up here,’ he said. ‘For non-military, for poor folk.’

  ‘I thought you were military, these days anyway. I thought you had a rank.’

  ‘It’s a courtesy rank. I was doing work for the military, writing speeches and press releases and stuff like that, when the Snow came. And, OK, yeah, this is a fairly big committee I’m chairing. Important, I concede it. I’m not a nobody – if I’m giving the impression I’m just a nobody, a bum, then I’m misrepresenting things. It’s just that, there’s a bunch of senior military staff, more senior and more rich, who come first in line before me when it comes to available women.’

  ‘It sounds like you’re angling for a charity [expletive deleted],’ I told him.

  He barked with laughter at this. ‘You’re not like any other officer’s wife,’ he said, grinning. ‘You see straight through me.’

  ‘It’s this light,’ I said, gazing out over the snowscape. ‘This penetrating light.’

  ‘This is some light,’ he agreed.

  I worked. The committee met from eight-thirty to one-thirty. The afternoons were mine, so I had plenty of time to myself.

  This is what I did with my spare time: I watched clouds. I’ll tell you: I became something of an expert cloud-watcher, a connoisseur. There were no birds to watch, and this was the next best thing. On the days when the sunlight was bright as a splash of cold water in your face, and the sky was blue without blot, I was less happy. But when the clouds came above me I watched them and a delight crept into my heart.

  It was partly the shapes of the clouds that fascinated me. As a child I had played the game that all children play, and conjured imaginary faces, maps, and monsters from the sky. It was as absorbing a game for an adult as it had been for a child. The sort of cloud that was pregnant with apparent texture, a fish-scale silver. Or the sort that seemingly carried bruises on their chubby white limbs that threatened heavier-than-usual snowfall. Or the sort, very high up, that looked exactly as if they were painting, such that you could actually see the brushstrokes.

  Why did clouds fascinate me so much? It’s hard to say. It’s hard for me to remember. If I were pressed to explain, I might say that there was some deep connection for me between clouds and memory. It is difficult to say why this should be. Why are clouds like memory? There’s a question. There’s a riddle.

  And, you know? – I’m tempted to produce intellectual answers to the riddle: because both memory and clouds are fluid, both fleeting, because they shift their shapes and allow you to map your imagination and desires onto them, because they are both very far away, and so on. But to say any of those things would simply be to rationalise after the fact. The sport of similes: find a connection between these apparently unconnected things. Why is memory like an onion? Why is memory like a piece of madeleine cake? Why is memory like a shark? (it must keep moving on or it dies – or, no, because it bites). Why is memory like a snowfall? It’s a soft smothering of the past, a slow erosion under the newly whitened page. But that, surely, is forgetting rather than memory.

  Well, this is only a sort of parlour game. Why was that raven like that writing desk? Because they both start with rr, no other reason. Why is a mantis like a twig? To catch its prey. Why is a glass of wine like a glass of blood? Because we’re all vampires, or rather because Catholics are. Why is liberty like tyranny? Because life isn’t structured in terms of choice. Why are women like men? Why is night like day? Why is sleep like death?

  The sense I had looking at the clouds was something much more visceral, not an intellectual parallelism. Something in the gut. Clouds thrummed my nerves as memory, the thing itself.

  There is some sort of connection here.

  At school we studied Hamlet in the sixth-form English classes. Then, in the proper manner of the contemporary English schoolchild, I had pretended uninterest in the class. It was expected of me by my peers. I giggled and bickered at the back of the class whilst the teacher whined at us from the front to be quiet and pay attention. I rolled my eyes in dumb mockery as he declaimed the famous speeches at us, his copy of the play perched on his hand like a bird. But despite the external ritual behaviour I was compelled to adopt, in my heart I loved the Shakespeare. I loved the text because it stroked my heart in an ineffably tender and thrilling and disturbing way. It caressed my heart with infinitely more skill than the boys I was seeing then caressed my flesh. I kept my secret love hidden, as I’m sure you can understand, but I loved it. And I remember being especially struck by the dialogue Hamlet has with Polonius about a cloud. You remember it? It goes like this.

  POLONIUS My lord the queen would speak with you presently.

  HAMLET Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?

  POLONIUS By th’ mass, and tis like a camel indeed.


  HAMLET Methinks it is like a weasel.

  POLONIUS It is backed like a weasel.

  HAMLET Or like a whale.

  POLONIUS Very like a whale.

  HAMLET Then I will come to my mother by and by. They fool me to the top of my bent.

  I wanted to get a copy of Shakespeare out of the City Library, to reread and remember, but it costs a dollar for three days and I don’t have a dollar.

  Maybe I’m misquoting. The point here, you might say, is that Hamlet is pretending to be mad – or perhaps he actually is mad. It’s the Turing-test thing; if a person acts mad with enough depth, even to himself, then he is indistinguishable from mad. This dialogue is the sort of disjointed thing that a mad person would say. But we read it on another level, and we see that Polonius, who is a sort of adviser to the king, is so completely in the habit of flattering the royal family that he’s prepared to say ridiculous things just to be ingratiating. ‘It looks like a camel,’ says Hamlet. ‘Yes it does!’ replies the puppy-Polonius. ‘It looks like a weasel!’ ‘Yes it does!’ ‘It looks like a whale!’ ‘Yes it does!’ Our English teacher, a Mr Stalybrook, was of the opinion that no cloud could look like a camel and a weasel and a whale all at once, and that Shakespeare was obviously mocking Polonius through this speech. The rest of the class didn’t care one way or the other, and I pretended not to care. But in my heart I wondered about this. Clouds can look like the funniest things, weird and amorphous. Don’t you think? I felt, I think, for Polonius.

  It was like my mother with my father, always agreeing with him to make life easier, regardless how self-contradicting his anger and frustration made his consecutive statements.

  ‘It looks like a camel.’

  ‘Well I suppose I can see why you might say so, my dear. Those blobs towards the end, they’re sort of like legs, and that could be a long neck with a smallish head on it. In a way it is rather camel-like.’

  ‘No – woman, must you contradict me? – It looks like a weasel.’