by Adam Roberts
That happened out in the snow, this thing I’ve just described, but when I talk about the explosions in the city itself maybe you should imagine something similar, a rapidly-expanding oval of orange fire, and smoke, and skeetering smoke-trailed trajectories of shrapnel.
But, as I said, I didn’t see either of the first two bombs going off. I didn’t see the explosion that blew up several engineering workshops on the northwest, in fourville and sixville. The perimeter suburbs are not named logically, one after the other, with oneville in the north, twoville northeast and threeville east and so on – nothing like that, that would be too straightforward for humanity. Oneville and twoville are north and south, fourville and threeville west and east, of centreville. Sixville is north west. So fourville and sixville are actually next to one another, and the engineering shops blown up were on the border between the two districts.
I didn’t see the second explosion, and because my office was in oneville east I didn’t really hear it either. I sort-of-heard it. I heard a clunking sound, like a huge door being slammed shut away in the distance. This was followed, after what seemed to me a very long pause, by a series of cracks, or shots, and then – odd detail – somebody out in the street yodelling, putting out this high-pitched wavery singing noise. But we knew something was wrong. Our sensitivities had been primed by the greenhouse bomb.
And running out of the office on to the street we could see people running; a police truck hurtling along the street in low gear with the engine howling, cops in the back with their rifles up like flagless flagpoles, the thunderous wheels of the truck spraying up ice and grit behind them. People approached people, faces slack with questioning, ‘what’s going on? – what’s going on?’
‘It’s another bomb,’ said somebody.
Of course it was.
The radio was quicker off the mark this time. ‘There has been another terrorist attack,’ said [Blank], the soft-grumble-voiced radio presenter who had become a celebrity simply by reading out government news headlines in the evenings. [Blank]’s smooth and sexy avuncular tones. ‘This is an emergency news announcement. There has been another terrorist attack. At eleven o’clock this morning a bomb was detonated on the edge of an army engineering shop in fourville. The explosion destroyed a mining combine. Fire spread quickly through the shop, and through two make-and-mend establishments in south sixville.’ Of course there would be fire – all that petrol and oil, that’s what those shops deal in. ‘The fire ignited military equipment causing further damage.’ Those were the additional bangs we heard, I said breathlessly to [Blank], a woman who sat next to me in committee. That was stuff exploding in the fire. What stuff I wonder? Military stuff, said [Blank]. ‘There has been another terrorist attack,’ the news repeated. ‘The government is calling for calm – the situation is under control. Arrests are imminent. The government is calling for calm.’
And [Blank] on the radio saying over and over There has been another terrorist attack was indeed, oddly, calming. We all felt privy to the government’s actions now, because the news was released officially on the radio at once, rather than in the papers the following day.
‘There have been casualties,’ said the news.
That night Crow was as close to depressed as I ever saw him. Because our marriage was merely play-acting it was difficult for me to offer consolation, to do what a normal wife would have found easy – hugs, gentle words, that sort of thing. We ate our supper (bread and four steamed carrots) in silence. Afterwards we sat in silence in the front room. We had the radio on for a while, but it was only news, and it was only the same news we’d been hearing all day, so we turned it off. Then Crow took off his shirt and did squat-thrusts in the middle of the floor, with his arms straight out in front of him and his legs folding and unfolding beneath him, like a sleepwalker bobbing up and down in one position.
‘It’s pretty terrible,’ I said. I can’t say I felt it to be terrible, in my own heart, but it seemed like the thing to say.
‘It makes,’ he said, bobbing down, puffing out a breath and coming up again, ‘my blood,’ bob, puff, up, ‘boil that,’ bob, puff, up, ‘citizens,’ bob, puff, up, ‘could be,’ bob, puff, up, ‘so evil.’ He stood tall, jogged on the spot on his toes for a bit. Then he put his shirt back on, and sat next to me again.
‘The radio,’ I said, ‘was talking about arrests.’ I was thinking of [Blank].
Crow sat perfectly still, looking ahead of himself. ‘I mean, Tira,’ he said, in a doleful voice, like a hurt child, ‘I really don’t understand it. I really don’t understand it at all.’
And I could see that he genuinely didn’t, innocent that he was. And at that moment I felt a thrum of almost-tenderness for him, this supposed trained killer, this soldier. I remembered everything that [Blank] had said about terror, and then I looked at this senior military man, my husband, and understood that he had no conception of terror at all. That he had devoted his life to being a warrior, to making war, and yet he could not comprehend terror. Everything was rules for him; rules (even!) of war. The parade ground as the type of the cosmos. You kill people according to the rules. Killing people outside the parameters of the rule book was not so much evil, though he called it so, as incomprehensible to him. It baffled his mind. A soldier acted a certain way because that was the way a soldier acted, and to act another way would mean that you weren’t a soldier. I don’t suppose he rationalised it to himself, but just such a circular pattern underlay everything about Crow. Let’s say you were a woman, and you married a general: that made you a general’s wife, and you acted in the ways appropriate to a general’s wife. But to act inappropriately, to swear and bitch, to reveal yourself as black (and what white general ever had a black wife, for crying out loud?) – all this was not so much reprehensible as simply beyond comprehension altogether. It was like that episode of Star Trek where the humans plot to destroy the machine intelligences by showing them a picture of a logically impossible polyhedron, such that they’ll take it into their brains and try to make sense of it and their minds will be corroded by their inability to rationalise it. Crow had something of that expression on his face, as if a worm were eating his consciousness.
‘I mean,’ he said, imploring me, ‘don’t we already have it hard enough? Doesn’t everybody already have it hard enough? We’re struggling for survival of everybody here – don’t these people see that? Are they crazy, or something? I mean, I could understand a death wish,’ he said, and I nodded although I didn’t think he could, ‘I could understand a death wish, but why try to take everybody down with you? Kill yourself, yeah, but kill everybody else with you? I don’t get it. What good is it? What good does it do? Why blow up the food and the engineering that everybody needs? I mean I literally can’t see, I literally can’t see what they think they’re going to achieve.’
He looked at me so imploringly, that I wanted to try and help him see.
‘I guess,’ I hesitated, and he seized on my words.
‘What? What?’
‘Well – it’s terrible,’ I said. ‘It’s really atrocious.’
‘Atrocious,’ he agreed, firmly. ‘Yeah, an atrocity. Eleven men died in fourville and sixville. What good is that?’
‘No good at all.’
‘No good,’ he said. ‘No good means evil. It’s an atrocity,’ he said again, as if having the word helped him understand things better. ‘Atrocity.’
‘But I guess,’ I said, trying to modulate my voice so it was coo-ish, trying not to inflame him with my contrary views. ‘I guess some people – not me, but some people – might see the greenhouses and the engineering shops differently from the rest of the city.’
‘What?’ he barked. ‘What? It’s a crime to grow food, is it? Everybody needs food – it’s not as if food is easy to come by up here.’
‘Sure, everybody needs food,’ I said, my voice growing a little firmer because his dogmatism was starting to rasp against my temper. ‘But who gets to eat the food from the greenhouses? R
ich people, only. You get a tomato, it costs forty dollars.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said.
‘Well OK, not forty dollars, but you know what I mean. It’s not like the food from the greenhouses gets very far into the general population. It’s food for the rich, a little delicacy to tickle the palates of the rich. It’s really really expensive, the food from those greenhouses.’
He looked at me as if I’d said this last speech in Swahili. ‘Expensive?’ he said, in a what has that got to do with anything? tone of voice.
‘And the engineers—’ I said.
‘No, no, wait up. Wait there. You’re saying that the greenhouses are legitimate targets because their food costs a little more than regular food?’
‘I never said they were legitimate targets.’
‘That’s insane. Of course it’s more expensive – it’s fresh food. Everybody wants to eat fresh food, and there are only so many greenhouses.’
‘OK,’ I said, trying to placate. ‘Forget about the greenhouses. You got to admit that some of the engineers …’
‘What?’ he snapped. ‘What about the engineers?’
‘Well, they’re pretty rich, some of them.’
‘Tira,’ he said, slowly. ‘Are you saying that this is some kind of anarchist anti-wealth thing?’
‘It’s not that,’ I said.
‘Like the globalisation protests used to be?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying that. But you got to admit – some of those engineers, making all that money on government contracts and whatnot. They do swank themselves around.’
‘They work hard,’ he said. ‘Essential work.’
‘Sure they work hard. But most all of us work hard. We’re all of us working hard. But most of us aren’t rich. Doctors are starving half to death and pressing their noses up against soup-restaurant windows whilst grease monkeys are walking around buying thousand-dollar coats and boots and fresh food.’
Crow looked at me. ‘For this they deserve to die?’
‘I didn’t say they deserved to die,’ I said, getting annoyed. ‘Will you just listen? I’m sorry I started this whole conversation now. I’m not saying these bombings are justified, I’m only saying.’
But Crow hopped off the sofa, in a state of obvious agitation. ‘I don’t get what you’re saying at all, Tira,’ he said, and dropped to the floor to start press-ups. He didn’t take off his shirt. ‘They’re evil,’ he said, to the floor. ‘Evil, that’s the only explanation. The Devil is behind it. You’ll laugh, but it’s the truth. He tried to destroy humanity with the Snow, and now he’s working his baleful evil in the hearts of a small minority to finish the job.’
I didn’t know what to say to this. I watched my husband’s rigid body flatten against the floor, raise itself briskly with piston-arms acting against the hinge of its toes until it subtended an arc of twenty-degrees, drop again, raise again, like a pulse.
Crow did fifty press-ups. When he hopped back to his feet afterwards his face was choler-red with the exertion.
He was outraged. Outrage became the mood of the city. People muttered platitudes about evil. Arrests, said Truth, had been made: six people, including one woman. This last detail provoked particular fury in [Blank], who sat next to me on the committee: a red-haired, wrinkled female of fifty. ‘A woman?’ she said to me. ‘How could a woman get herself caught up in this?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
None of it really touched me. I don’t mean to represent myself as a callous person. I’d like to think the antidepressants were responsible. But I didn’t feel the outrage, or the horror, the horror, or any of the other extreme emotional reactions of the people around me. It swam past me. I wasn’t indifferent, exactly. I think the word to describe it would be intrigued. It was interesting, a diversion, it made the day-to-day grind of coping with the cold and eating next-to-nothing and struggling through tedium – it gave all that a little bit of savour, a spark.
Nine
I wondered whether [Blank] had been one of the people arrested for the bombing, but after two days I saw him in the street, talking to two other people. I didn’t go over to him, partly because I was late for work, and partly because I wasn’t sure I wanted to be seen in his company.
After a week the outrage seemed to recede in our heads a little. Without TV it was hard to keep the fact of the bombing fresh in our minds. There seemed to be many more aircraft in the sky, skidding through the air, hovering over the snow outside the city. A man was shot in twoville by the police, I heard from an acquaintance, although the news didn’t report it. Was he a terrorist? I asked. My interlocutor looked dumbly at me, as if to say, of course, why else would he be shot? Conversation ran along a strictly limited number of lines. There was no weather to talk of, no rain, hardly any snowfall now; there was no natural world, no pets, cats, dogs, no birds. Very little happened in the human world except the same old routine. People talked about their food (what they had for supper last night, what they were going to have for supper this coming night, dwelling rather plaintively on every single detail of the meals). Sometimes they talked about their work (but there was little to say about that, for most people), or the radio (especially the radio-soap Liberty Family, an everyday story of everyday people) – and, after the bombs, people talked about terrorism. Each new snippet of news was chewed over and over, examined under the light of one or other of the three theories that were current. It was insiders, malcontents, evil-doers; it was the Russians; it was (whisper it) the Australians. Nobody had any hard evidence to support any of the theories, but people inclined temperamentally, as it were, either to the ‘insider’ or the ‘outsider’ theory. For example, the mysterious individual shot by the police in twoville was a lone lunatic, heading out towards the southern greenhouses with a bomb strapped to his torso. Or he was a Russian agent, parachuted into the city and trying to foster havoc. Or he was part of a secret army of terrorists inside the city, a group who had infiltrated Liberty and were now trying to destroy it from within. Or he was part of a dedicated Maoist cadre of extremists who were trying to bring down the democratically elected government. What do you think, Tara? What do you think?
I think it’s probably insiders, I said.
Twelve days after they bombed the engineering shops, they bombed the hospital. This was located in that part of town named, unimaginatively, Barracks, because the original barracks had been located there. Most of the troops were now housed in new buildings in threeville, spreading out onto the snow, east of the city, and the old barracks building had been adapted to become a factory, a hospital, and a relatively plush residential block.
This time I heard the detonation distinctly; a faint whistling noise, like tinnitus, that couldn’t be shaken from the ears. Then a swelling of sound to a moment of intensity, a sort of sonic folding-in, and a huge, complex, dry cracking sound mixed with an enormous gush of white noise. Two alarms were immediately set off – car alarms, they sounded like, except that nobody had car alarms any more – their high-pitched yaw-yawing keening distinctly in the air. I turned to my window and saw a funnel of smoke bubbling up through the air over the rooftops away to the south-east.
‘Not again,’ shrieked somebody in the room. [Blank], who was chairing the meeting, said in a clear voice, ‘Let me just jot that last figure down,’ as he scribbled something on the paper in front of him. Wasn’t that an odd thing to say? As if he were in an examination, and the invigilator had called time, and he just wanted to note down one last thing before standing up and coming to the window with all of us.
The hospital was the worst atrocity yet. Forty people died. In fact, I think that the number was even larger than that, forty-two, forty-three, something like that, I can’t remember the exact number. A lot, anyway. Dozens were injured. The bomb – a mortar, this time – fell onto and through the roof of the main ward and exploded inside. All the windows were blown out.
I went down there later that same day and walked right rou
nd the building, and all the glass from the windows was shattered and arranged on the ground outside – neatly, almost – in fan-shaped patterns. Inlaid into the snow beside each of the now gaping windows, like some kind of artwork. There was a smell from the shell of the building, a sort of wet-cardboard smell, and it was dark and charred in there. I discovered a hand. It was sticking out of the snow, with little shards of glass embedded along the backs of all the fingers like toy stegosaurus spines. At first I thought, alarmed, that somebody was buried in the snow, so I crouched down and tried to pull them free. I grasped the hand in my mitten and hauled, and tumbled backwards, because the hand was not attached to anything. I fell on my back, and rolled over and stood up holding this severed hand.
I felt like laughing, but I didn’t laugh. It was horrible. I wandered around in a circle for a few minutes, just holding the hand, and then, half-dazed, I wandered down to the main entrance where medics and MPs were milling around. ‘Hey,’ I called to one of the policemen. ‘Hey, I found this hand.’ He looked at me, looked at what I was carrying. ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked. ‘I found it over there,’ I said, holding out my hand to indicate where and inadvertently pointing, ghoulishly, with the severed hand as well. The policeman looked uncomfortable. ‘It looked like somebody was buried in the snow,’ I tried to explain, ‘and I pulled it, but it must have been blown through the window by the blast. Here it is,’ I said, offering it to him. ‘I don’t want it,’ he said, recoiling slightly with a pained expression on his face. I said: ‘Well, what should I do with it?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, turning away. ‘Lieutenant,’ he called, and a white-coated officer came over. He looked at the hand, at me. ‘It looked like somebody was buried in the snow,’ I said, and held the hand out to him. ‘What should she do with it?’ asked the squaddie. ‘You got glass on your jacket,’ the lieutenant said to me. Then: ‘Take it over there, where the medics are.’ So I went over to where the medics were standing, and they had a sort of bin in which (I didn’t look too closely) various body parts were being collected, and a medic wearing a blue balaclava and a florescent yellow jacket indicated that I should put the hand inside. It had looked, I explained to him, like somebody was buried in the snow.
