The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  I stepped away, but my heel caught the icy wooden bar of the shop’s step at the wrong angle and I lurched forward, hopping on my other foot and waving my arms like a loon to try and keep my balance. I didn’t want to fall over. I’d heard of a person who fell on a slippery pavement and cracked her spine, and was now in a wheelchair. For all I knew (I thought of this as I hopped over the ground flapping like a dodo) she’d been in the hospital when it was bombed. I didn’t want to fall. Six yards out I regained my balance, and looked over my shoulder to see if [Blank] had witnessed my behaviour. But he was still facing the wall. So I put my head down and hurried on. The way to walk on ice, you know, is to turn your toes in as you walk; so that your wide-spaced heels make it unlikely you’ll fall backwards, and if you tumble forwards you have more chance of being able to regain your balance.

  Eleven

  For five days after the hospital attack there were no further attacks. The army was on every street, patrolling in twos with their rifles angled towards the ground before them like metal detectors; trucks rumbling back and forth; occasional roof-skimmers helicoptering through the air. The radio announced that there had been more arrests. Senator [Blank] gave a speech over the airways in which he declared that the government was on top of the situation. ‘We know who the perpetrators are,’ he said, boomingly. ‘We are rounding up the troublemakers.’ After his speech he was interviewed by salad-voiced [Blank], the city’s radio presenter of choice. ‘Are these troublemakers Liberty citizens, or fifth-columnists who have infiltrated our city?’ ‘I’m not prepared to comment on that at this time,’ the Senator replied.

  On the sixth day there were three further explosions, one in centreville-south and two in twoville. Two further mortar attacks, destroying some shops and a housing development. There were only four casualties: the residence was empty because everybody was at work; two of the shops were empty. In the third, selling mink towels, the shop-owner and the customer were killed, but a second shop assistant escaped with only scratches. Two soldiers were caught in the blast. The fourth death was somebody hit by a falling wall two hours after the attack.

  That night there were three further attacks, again in twoville, on the edge of the city. Our apartment was in Barracks, almost all the way across town, but even I was woken by the clatter these explosions made. I went to the window, but couldn’t see anything. In the front room Crow was pulling on his uniform. He left that night, and although he told me he would be back in four days, I wasn’t to see him for many weeks. A message was delivered to me at work the next day: military business, an away mission, it said. That was all. I didn’t expect tenderness, or even the conventionalised sign-offs, miss you, love you, of course; but it was still, strangely, inexplicably, upsetting not to see them.

  The day after there was nothing. But the day after that three mortars hit the snow south-east of Liberty. ‘It’s as if,’ people said, ‘the range-finder for some long-distance weapon were slowly going off target.’ Bombs had traced a path right across the city, from the north-west to the southeast. The radio had nothing to say.

  Then there was a bout of ice-quakes. The snow trembled near continuously for forty-eight hours, little quaking bursts every ten or fifteen minutes. On main street the snow cracked right open, little crevasses forming lengthways, grins in the fabric of the ground. It was not obvious why. The radio announced that the bombs had destabilised the snow beneath the city, but that it wasn’t serious, but I couldn’t see how that could be. The explosions, after all, had been on the surface of the snow, not underneath it. But people were happy to ascribe every woe in their life to ‘terrorists’ now.

  ‘They arrested another dozen last night,’ said [Blank] one morning. We were in the committee room together, even though the meeting had been called off – the chairman had the flu, I think. But rather than loiter outside we tried to share our body warmth inside. ‘Another dozen.’

  ‘Good,’ said somebody else, with feeling.

  ‘That’s what I say too,’ said [Blank].

  ‘Too right,’ said [Blank], lifting the cuffs of her mitten to blow hot air in over her hands. ‘Hang them, make an exhibition of them.’

  ‘Evil,’ said somebody.

  ‘I heard,’ said [Blank], ‘that they are going to hang them. I heard that they’re going to hang them from helicopters and fly over and over the town, in a figure of eight, to show off the bodies.’

  We all contemplated this gratifyingly savage possibility. In my head I pictured only one man dangling from the airnoose, and I pictured him wearing a placard ‘lover of Tira’ around his neck. I shuddered; but that was the cold more than anything.

  My reality followed my fantasy. The next day I met a person in the cold street who told me, ‘You know [Blank], who used to chair our committee meetings?’ I said I knew him. My heart was boiling inside my cold chest. ‘He’s been arrested – he’s a terrorist. Fancy that!’ Terrist. Turrst. Really? ‘Yeah, they picked him up and a dozen more people last night around midnight – I just heard it from [Blank] who was in the swat team. Picked him up, bagged his head, took him away.’ Oh God, I said. ‘I know, isn’t it shocking? Terrorists everywhere – and he had army rank! He wasn’t actually in the army, of course, but he had a courtesy rank! Why would he do it? What could possibly drive him to do it?’

  I said I didn’t know.

  That night I ate alone, and wondered about [Blank]. I knew I would never see him again. I knew he would disappear. I tried to envision the small room, the single unshaded lightbulb hanging like a dead man from a cord in the ceiling. [Blank] strapped in a chair. A herd of angry bull-men all around him, their fists hard as stone, meteors smacking into the increasingly cratered, moon-like surface of his face. A red moon rising is an ill omen. But I couldn’t concentrate on those images. I knew [Blank] to be dead, already dead, like everybody else in the world. I felt him to be drifting downwards, slipping, drowning in snow and sinking down from the wreck of the Titanic on which we still grasped for existence, and tumbling through the opaque oceans of snow down and down until he came to rest on the bottom. All of us would eventually go down there eventually, all of us.

  I fell asleep easily. But after midnight the door was clanging and clanging, gong-like, with the knocking, and I staggered out of bed to open it. It was the military police, and they had come to arrest me. So that was how I ended up in custody. Which is the end of my story, I think. I don’t need to say more, because you’ll have my interrogation on file, won’t you. All the questions I was asked, and all the answers I gave. [Blank] had given them my name in the very first exchange, given it up without a blow being struck. Love, love. I’ve used all my paper up, close-written, both sides. I need more paper. This is the last line, and I’m having to squash my writing so that it looks compressed by the weight of words above – but if you give me more paper I can talk about the people behind the other bombings, the bombers ‘external’ to Liberty, those ones responsible for so much destruction – not [Blank] at all, but [illegible].

  Confession

  [Legal Document. One copy of the following document is held in central legal files/local judiciary secure holding [delete where applicable]. This document has legal weight and may not be destroyed or tampered with. Altering this document in any way after the judiciary seal has been placed upon it is a crime under the Legal Documents (Confessions and Accusations) Act of 2, punishable by a 2nd degree fine and up to fifteen years in prison, unless a Judge deem such tampering treasonable in intent, in which case it is punishable by a 1st degree fine, lifetime in prison, or state execution.]

  ADMISSION [this section is mandatory]: My signature below performs the act of my swearing that the following is wholly true. My name is Friedrich Gimmelfarb, and I reside ^^for a period not exceeding two years I have resided at^^ [text added] seven Dale Street, Liberty City, Over-UK. [Optional]: Previously to this I lived in New New York, and before that in Old New York. hout judicial special warrant>

  {MS notes, handwritten in margin: of course Gimmelfarb is not the name; family changed it when he was a kid in old USA. Likely breach of law here. Jerry, any update on this? His birth cert. may say Gimmelfarb but we know different. Can we prosecute for perjury here? KK.

  The law requires he give his real name here, that’s all. But what counts as ‘real’? JL

  I’m sure the court would surely argue that ‘real’ must mean ‘the name by which you are generally known’: and, clearly, Gimmelfarb was not the name by which he was generally known, at least not up here in the NUSA KK.}

  CRIME(S) [this section is mandatory]: Conspiracy to commit treason; conspiracy to commit terrorist act or acts; commission of terrorist act or acts.

  PLEA [this section is mandatory]: Guilty

  CO-CONSPIRATORS [Optional]:

  PERSONAL STATEMENT [Optional]: I chaired one committee in New London, on mining. I have given the army some names. I have been in custody now for a week, and I make the following statement of my free will.

  It started before the Snow, which means that – which is to say, I’m happy for it to mean that – I hereby waive my rights to pre-Snow anonymity. That’s nothing but a legalistic fiction anyway, let’s be honest, the notion that pre-Snow activities are magically erased by some statute of limitation, by some fiat. Everybody knows it’s not really like that. Everybody in the city judiciary has access to my military file; my pre-Snow life is no secret. But there are things not in my file, and I’d like to detail my pre-Snow revelation. It’s not too strong a word. It was with a revelation that my disaffection with the system began, with everything as it was constituted. When I was a young man, still with most of my hair, I worked for a time in Bridgeport CT, for a company called SponsorCam. A man called Bruce Kirkland got me the job. He’s dead now, dead and under the snow. They were a private TV-media company, but they were for a time very successful, and it’s possible that you’ve heard of them. I had done other TV work for other companies, banal stuff, live-competition, dial-in, ad tie-ins. But I took the SponsorCam job out of that same sense of idealism that had never really abandoned me, not since I’d left college. And the irony is that I believe Jeb Prior and Andy Creaton (pronounced Critten), the two people who established the company, had the same ideals. It was wholly axiomatic, it was the American way. Doing good for other people and making money for yourself were two sides of the same coin. More than that – making money for yourself was actually a way of doing good for other people. That’s what America meant. It’s not that American people were not any more greedy or soulless than any other people: only that money is a powerful lever. You knew that already. So I could see that people were starving in the world when my neighbors were so fat that one day they broke the stair-rail in the communal hall by just leaning against it. I could see that these people in Sudan or Afghanistan were starving, and I had the urge to do something about it. That’s not ignoble.

  SponsorCam sounded like a good idea. You sponsored a starving person from the comfort of your couch in Des Moines or Jersey or London, you paid the TV company and they passed money along (after taking their cut naturally) to the needy community. Their cut was the least you expected, and you didn’t think of that: you were actually buying something with your money, buying a unique televisual viewing experience. SponsorCam were just the facilitators, providing the reality television, but that’s just the medium, the important thing is the reality itself. As if there’s a difference between reality television and reality itself! I mean, maybe once-on-a-time, but now?

  This was the SponsorCam idea: you the viewer buy, effectively, the right to tune in to this person’s life in Sudan or Afghanistan. So SPTV set up a bunch of ten-dollar cams, and they were set running twenty-four-seven, and you bought the right to watch the feed from those cams. It was perfect: you buy entertainment – reality TV at its realest, the hottest commodity in the media. I remember thinking what a cool idea. You know? They get the money, the poorest people. They sell one of the few things they have left to sell, the TV rights to their lives, and those rights weren’t doing them any good as they starved to death. Those Sudanese, those Afghans, who draw the highest number of US viewers get the most money. Ratings-based charity TV, but not really charity because the recipients are genuinely selling something for their money: access, intimacy, entertainment. And they get a whole bunch more, or so the purists tell us: buildings, bridges, all the things the money from SPTV could do for them. No – it was more than that. More important than that, it was fleshing out the cliché of the starving sub-African with the reality, with actual people, people you get to know and get to care about. People whose name you know. Globalization via humanization. TV that helps you care about real things.

  But it didn’t work out that way. Could not. And as I came to understand that, my disaffection began. It still sounds like a good idea, of course it does. But it’s not, and here’s why: money flows where people’s desires make it flow. The money goes to those people who provide the entertainment that people want – and to be precise it’s not even want, it’s less active than that. But, look: people don’t want to pay to watch a person milling corn, even if it’s a person whose name they know. They don’t pay to watch somebody sitting around reading a book, or praying to Mecca, or whatever. You know? This is not what we can call entertainment. You know what? People preferred the violence. There was a big violence problem in all these regions before SPTV got involved, since violence naturally goes along with poverty. But it’s fair to say that SPTV didn’t help. Audiences wanted to watch the more televisual stuff. Put it this way: where did the ratings go? The ratings followed the members of the local militias, the gangs, the gun-guys; ratings did not go with the ordinary people living the dull lives. The gun-guys had dull parts to their lives too, I guess, and a lot of the time you’d see them reading a book, praying to Mecca, whatever – but there was always the chance that you’d see them get into a firefight. That was what brought in the viewers. People don’t want to watch farmers farming on TV. They want action. Action is simply what people want to watch. Which is all just a very elaborate way of saying: crime makes better TV than ordinary life. Result? The money pushed culture that way. These guys had nothing left to sell but entertainment, and the money told them that carrying a gun made better entertainment. That they’d get more viewers, more sponsors, if they pistol-whipped their neighbor, if they fought with passers-by, if they shot and killed a market trader, whatever. So that’s what they did.

  I thought that SPTV would improve life in those regions, but it made it much worse. Gun-toters acted up for the cameras because that way more people watched them, and more people watching them brought more money along. Ordinary people took to doing dangerous, crazy, violent things to try and draw the viewers. It was quite a scandal in the US media for the five months it ran. Any number of individual people would curse and call out shame-shame, and any number of individual people would insist that it wasn’t their fault the gun-crazies were getting audience, that they spent their evenings watching Abdulla or Ibrahim feeding pap to their children, or painting the front room, or reading a book by an unshaded electric light, or whatever. But no matter how many individuals claimed this, the audiences were not watching Abdulla or Ibrahim, they were watching members of the Mahdi gang shoot up a local coffee bar, with real people taking real bullets and twitching the way actors never quite get right in the movies. Violence went mad in the region, and ratings soared with it, and SponsorCam made a whole bunch of money, but we were all secretly glad when the government closed us down. I walked away with a pile of money, like everybody involved, but I did not feel clean. After a year I still did not feel clean, and that was when I was forced to consider the reasons why.

  You might think that I would have a different perspective on things now that the Snow has happened, but you’d be wrong. The superstructure may have changed, got snowed under, but the base remains the same.

  After SponsorCam broke
down as a company, and after the Congressional hearing, it was a straightforward matter for me to find other work in the TV industry. The pay was high, as were the social rewards; the parties, the drugs. Of course, I took drugs. What exactly are the anti-drugs laws up here in NUSA? Would there be any point in having such laws, when there are no drugs for people to abuse? But of course you have them. That’s your style.

  I worked as a writer for several years. I wrote The Lodging House of Love. Remember that? No? Well, it’s a transient medium, TV. I wrote Doctor Marigold with Jack Mahoney – that won a TV Selector award for 1999. I wrote two dozen episodes for a long-running soap called Holly Tree Hotel, set in Los Angeles in the early 1900s. I wrote the script for all ninety seconds of the Kimmeens ad, the one with the two women sitting on top of the skyscraper. I wrote that in a day, sitting in a hotel room trembling with the cocaine and the elation in my blood, and it earned me more than all the six episodes of Wonderful End that I wrote with Mare Obenreizer and Sandy Dean. I got married and got divorced in a year, blowing all the money I made from my writing in a blizzard of lifestyle. You know the kind of lifestyle I am talking about; the sort of lifestyle that gives America a bad name in less decadent parts of the world. I don’t want to rehearse all that again.

  Then I wrote the script for a TV movie about a life-boatman who lost his religious faith, and had it restored to him after he was able to rescue a family of five from their pleasure yacht during a perfect storm, ‘a miracle, I saw the lightning about the mast and it had the face of a man, a compassionate man’ and so on. I wrote it with Jez Morrison. That was based on a true story. Believe that? The real lifeboatman was a drunk in Lowell, separated from his wife, in a bad way, but we didn’t write that. We wrote it straight, only I had decided, in my coke-enhanced arrogance, that I was an artist. I wrote in long speeches on the nature of life, I tried to structure the whole thing in an experimental manner, I stretched narrative and filled the script with sea-symbolism. The lifeboatman’s name was Billy McCabe. The script was called McCabe’s Ocean and the Electrical Face. I thought I had written a masterpiece. The production company did not agree. They hired a third writer, a friend of mine called Poe Glancy, to rewrite the whole thing as a conventional Based On A True Story TV movie. They renamed it Lifeboat in a Storm. It was the TV Quick pick of the week, and my name was on the credits although little of my work remained. I tried to have my name taken off the credits in a fit of artistic pique. I was an asshole, but the industry was filled with assholes so nobody seemed very much to mind. Maybe I acted more of an asshole in the industry than I otherwise would have done, to fit in you see: but I was a good man when I wasn’t hanging out with the industry crowd. It sounds up-my-own-ass of me to say so, but that’s how I was: in the real world I donated nearly a hundred thousand dollars to charity. I worked for a while for a Shelter, manning the phones, until I had to quit because of time pressures. I went to political meetings, and doorstopped for liberal politicians. When Sally Boyden ran as minority candidate for New York mayor I endorsed her, gave her campaign money. When Pablo Elevado attempted to muster support for his bid to become the first Hispanic Democrat presidential candidate, I was a supporter, in a small way. I gave his campaign money too. I met Elevado several times, and for a while I hung out with Han Morales, George Christolides, Jenny Newport, all those people. I couldn’t exactly call them friends; but I supported the cause. It was the cause that was important. I still believed the world could be made a better world. You find that hard to credit?