The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  The one thing that turned me around more than any other was the declaration of the War on Terror. You remember that? ‘Terrorist’ became the word to describe any anti-government activist. Don’t misunderstand me; I was in New York (in New York state to be exact) on September 11th, and I was as shocked and as appalled as anybody else. But the War on Terror had nothing to do with that. How could it have anything to do with that? It was about definitions, about blanking out the page of history and starting again. After 9/11 any protestor, any freedom fighter, any contrarian, anybody exercising their rights to free speech and free thought – anybody who opposed the government at all – was scratched out and rewritten as ‘terrorist’. If the government had had this idea in the 1960s do you know what they would have done? Martin Luther King would have been a terrorist. Malcolm X certainly would have been a terrorist. The American Revolution was a terrorist act and George Washington was certainly a terrorist. Anti-war protestors were terrorists. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. John Garnier was a terrorist. Fucking Gandhi was a terrorist. Sesto Bruscantini was a terrorist. It was just, like, ridiculous.

  The government egregiously identified itself as antiterrorist. The only place an anti-governmentalist could go was to become an anti-anti-terrorist. To inhabit, in other words, terrorism, to reclaim it, to do it better. To force a sense on the people that Freedom must be fought for. Freedom is not something handed to us by our benign superiors; it’s something we claim, we seize in blood-stained hands. The AWP understood that. That’s how America was made, wasn’t it? You want to tell me it wasn’t?

  Now, I know this: you want names, and details, and conspiracies dissected and displayed to your gaze. I say again: no. Is that on the record?

  The AWP used to meet in rooms behind bars, in private houses. It was organized on a cadre basis, so I only knew maybe eight people in all my time hanging out with them. Henry Muller was one; another guy called Stramm, I knew him as Hoper Stramm and sometimes as Doper Stramm, I’m not sure of his first name. It may have been Karl or Carl. You can have those names; I’m assuming that they’re both under the snow, those guys. Two people who I know survived the snow who used to come to meetings were the Evanses, Robertson and Anne; I bumped into them in New NY; they were on their way somewhere and stopping in the barracks there for a week. Holland Coates. Benton Taney. Carolyn Usher. A guy called DeBoer from Canada (I saw the name DeBoer in a post-Snow document a while back, so if it’s the same guy maybe he survived the Snow too). It was like a family, the AWP, the cadre-sized groupings gave it that sort of scale. Not lecture halls filled with hundreds of Maoists with their fists in the air, but half a dozen people sitting round a kitchen table trying to figure out how to make the world a little better. Trying to figure out how to help people – maybe it does sound just a little pathetic when I put it in those terms, but after all what else were we trying to do but help people? What’s so wrong in that?

  They liked me because I had lots of money, but not only for that reason. I was excited, and committed, and I was good with words. Words were my skill, and a lot of my contribution. I wrote thousands of words for the party newsletters, and although it was anonymous (the Party spoke through me, I didn’t express my own ego) I have to say some of that writing was damn good. I also contributed direct action – it wasn’t just words. The party was the only good part of my life for a long time.

  I went to meet my wife. At this time she was staying in the apartment I’d bought her (Bridgeport NY) whilst I was staying in a hotel. This was before we divorced. We met in a restaurant called Tips which specialized in serving the juicy extremities of food rather than the whole shebang: tender wedges of chicken, asparagus-ends, the tips of carrots and leeks. I sat in the lot inside my car and sniffed up a quantity of powder from off of the back of a paperback novel and into my nose. Then I wiped the book clean and put it in my jacket pocket, because I was still reading. The novel was called The Eight Folds of Heaven, but I can’t remember who wrote it. I was wearing a black Boss jacket with a Matrix T-shirt under it, yellow corduroy pants, sneakers, no socks. Male-pattern baldness was already the most noticeable feature on my skull. My face was prematurely lined, because the coke meant I didn’t sleep much, and because it was wearing me out. I can be frank about that. So I sniffed up some more of the stuff preparatory to meeting my wife and got out of the car. It was dark in the parking lot.

  When the coke went up into my head this is what I experienced. First, I had a sensation of clenching inside my head, as if my skull were filled not with bone and brain but with pure muscle, and I was flexing that muscle inward all at once. Then there was the tingling, an abrupt warmth that was near-numbness and the urge to sneeze, an urge I resisted because I believed (I’m sure irrationally) that sneezing after snorting wasted some few crumbs of cocaine that had not yet been absorbed into my blood. So I sat there, wide eyes, head slightly back, as a sort-of equilibrium settled in my sinuses and I did not sneeze. But as I sat, there came along with the equilibrium a gathering sense of elation. I could feel confidence gelling inside me, awareness of the million possibilities of life and of my own ability to access them all. A crescendo. Immediately before taking the stuff I had been anxious, fretful: but that all went away. All my anxiety melted, washed out by self-confidence.

  I had been worried during my drive to the restaurant, because I had been cheating on my wife, and because I felt that my wife suspected this fact. I had been worried that the meeting was going to be awkward and upsetting. But now, as I looked again at the circumstance, I felt I could cakewalk it, I felt it was going to be easy. Fuck it. She might wail a time, but I’d bring her round, I’d sweet-talk her, promise her, I’d show her I loved her, that she was the one who mattered most to me. I’d whirl her away with sheer force of personality. What did a little fucking around matter? Everybody did it. It was all alright.

  She was sitting at the table by herself when I came into the restaurant. She looked up at me as I stood over her and said, ‘You’re high’, with a disgusted tone. I said, ‘Only at the fact of seeing you again, my love,’ speaking a little too rapidly. I was staring a little, looking at every single thing in the restaurant in quick order. Fidgeting a little. I sat down.

  For half an hour she said almost nothing. I gabbled my way through the menu, the drinks, the thing I was writing, the Fox guy who maybe would pick it up, the state of the world. She said very little. By the time the food came, and after a peck of wine, I could feel the high slipping away, but that only made me want to cling more desperately to it. I finished half of my food, but I wasn’t very hungry. I lit a cigarette, and she scowled at me. ‘Non-smoking,’ she said, pointing to the little plastic pyramid on the middle of the table upon which was drawn, diagrammatically, a smoking man’s profile inside a red circle with a red bar across it, cancelling him out, erasing him. I felt wobbly. The man in the red circle was me. The restaurant staff had put the sign there specifically as a message to me. I was being erased, wiped out of the picture. I extinguished my cigarette by dropping it in my nearly full glass of wine. The restaurant staff and my wife were plotting somehow. I waved down a waiter and insisted, noisily, angrily, that my wine be replaced, that my wine had a cigarette stub in it. My wife said, ‘Fred, what’s the matter with you?’ This was only a manner of speech, she wanted to rebuke me; she didn’t want actually to know what the matter was with me. The waiter, sullen, brought me a new glass. I grinned, I decided to brazen it out. I wolfed down a chocolate dessert, a mousse in a scalloped glass bowl. I said, ‘Tasty, tasty.’ Then I said, ‘Chocolatey, chocolatey.’ This struck me as funny, and I giggled. But my wife’s face was stern, and the hilarity left me. ‘I gotta go to the bathroom,’ I said, feeling in my inside jacket pocket for my little bag of powder. ‘You’re going to get high again,’ my wife said, dryly, ‘and we’ve only been here an hour.’

  ‘It’s the bathroom, honey,’ I told her. ‘When a man’s gotta go, he’s gotta go.’ I put a John-Wayney inflection on the word gotta. Western
. Shoot-from-the-hip. I stood up.

  ‘If you go off right now to snort in the men’s room,’ she said, looking up at me, ‘then I’m fucking out of here, I’m leaving you forever. Sit down, down.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘When I gotta go,’ I said, less certainly. ‘I gotta go.’ The John-Wayney vocal tic didn’t seem so funny this time.

  ‘I’m serious, Fred,’ she said. ‘I’m serious as divorce. I’m leaving you – if you break our meal to take more drugs.’

  I sat down. ‘You make it sound,’ I said, but I couldn’t think how to finish the sentence. I drank some more wine, brought out another cigarette, and then remembered about the man’s profile in the red circle with the erasure sign lancing through his cheek. I put the cigarette back in the pack. It occurred to me to say, ‘Jesus, tough crowd,’ in a low voice, as if that would be funny. My wife did not laugh.

  Then what happened was that all the exhilaration, all the self-belief and sense of possibility, flipped right about. If you’ve taken drugs you’ll know what I mean. It happens when you’re cocktailed on a number of chemicals, and when you’re tired, and when you’re in a no-way-out situation of whatever kind. You’ll brazen it, brazen it, and then suddenly you’ll be crying, begging, apologizing. I didn’t cry, at least. At least I did not actually cry. I said, ‘Look, Mary, Mary I’m sorry.’

  She quizzed me with her eyes. With her eyebrows only, actually.

  I slumped. I felt so exhausted I could have slept right there, at the table. At the same time I was twitchy, fidgety. ‘Look, I wanted to meet up with you,’ I said, ‘and I wanted to talk to you. I’ve got something to tell you. I guess you know about it. Maybe you do. But I love you. Let’s put that on the table right now, I love you. OK?’

  ‘You think I’m a fucking idiot,’ she said, but in a passionless sort of way.

  ‘It’s been a bit crazy with this Fox project, and before that with the, the, other thing, the thing. I’ve not been a brilliant, you know, husband, I know. But I decided, actually as I drive over, as I drove over, I decided to turn over a leaf. You’re right about the, stuff, about the gear. I’m going to cut down.’ Then, because her face seemed to darken as I said that, I said, hurriedly, ‘Cut down as a prelude to quitting, really giving it all up, it’s the best way, if you just flat quit then you’ve more chance of falling back off the cart, but if you pace it, cut down, gradually come down, then you’ll stay off it.’ There was a hiatus as a waiter took our plates, and I looked intensely at the tablecloth. When the waiter was gone, I said, ‘And I want to say something else, because, you know, to turn over a leaf I’ll need your support more than ever, so I don’t want there to be any secrets.’

  ‘Denise told me that she saw you and Caroline go into the viewing room together at the Frieland bash.’

  This information took a moment to assemble itself in my brain, my poor battered and leaky brain. ‘Uh,’ I said. ‘Caro, yes. I wanted to talk to you about Caroline.’

  ‘It was Caroline you wanted to talk to me about?’

  ‘Uh, yeah, I wanted to. It was that one time.’

  ‘It wasn’t that one time.’

  ‘No, there were other times. But it – look, this is going to sound cliché, inevitably, inevitably, but it was a stupid and a nothing thing. A fling. It was a fling.’

  ‘Have there been others?’

  ‘Look. Can I say that I’m sorry? Can I just say that?’

  ‘Don’t get mad at me.’

  ‘I wasn’t getting mad.’

  ‘You said can I say sorry in a angry sort of way.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, losing momentum, ‘I’m sorry I said sorry wrong, and I’m sorry about, uh, Caro. I stopped seeing her.’ But I had seen her that afternoon, and planned on seeing her the following day as well. The day before that I had seen a woman called Anna, from Hong Kong, who was visiting Warner. She had gone with me, I think, in the mistaken belief that I was an important bigshot studio type, and I didn’t like to disabuse her of her beliefs. Belief is important, after all, and disillusionment is the cruelest thing. I was also paying two women, on alternate weeks, to come to my hotel room so that I could have sex with them; one called Maria – like my wife, as I told her – and the other called Misty. I had enjoyed congress with Maria three days before. I had told her to lie on her front on the bed and read a copy of House Beautiful magazine that I happened to have in my room whilst I watched myself in the wall-to-floor mirror move back and forth on her with my belly against her back. I often instructed Maria to act in some seemingly bored manner when we were intimate: to act like a mannequin, to watch the TV, to hunch forward and paint her nails whilst I came into her from behind. I thought that was kind of a cool way of doing it. She was a squashed-face, skinny, Hispanic woman, and I bet she’s under the snow now, dead and frozen like all the rest of them.

  Before the Snow I more or less lived in hotels. I called my hotel room ‘my study’. I told people that I could only work in hotel rooms.

  I said to my wife, ‘I’m sorry, I really am.’

  She said: ‘Are you saying sorry because you’re genuinely penitent, or because you want to get sorry out of the way before going back to it?’ She may not have used the priest-phrase genuinely penitent, I may be embellishing my memory when I report that, but this was the gist of it.

  I was really struck by that, by what my wife said to me. Because that’s true, isn’t it? That saying sorry is only ever a going-through-the-motions, like in the confessional. It’s only form. I have said I am sorry, and what else is there to say? There’s nothing else to say, sorry doesn’t span the space between people. Being sorry is a wholly other thing, though. Saying is sinning, going to the confessional, and then sinning again the next day. Being sorry is not sinning any more. If you genuinely were sorry, in your inmost being, it would be almost vulgar, almost disgusting, to open yourself and show the world those emotional viscera.

  ‘Things,’ I told my wife, ‘have just really been getting on top of me lately. Everything’s been kind of getting on top of me.’

  ‘The drugs are on top of you,’ she said, with scorn. And as far as she was concerned, I knew, I was just dying under a massive drift of the white powder, crushed and killed and buried and dead. But I shook my head, ‘It’s not that, it’s not that.’

  ‘Would you like coffee?’ said the waiter, standing a little way off. I nodded, and then I said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and magically – as if by divine inspiration – there was a whole speech in my brain, a fluent, an eloquent and compelling speech. And the gist of the speech was this: that coffee was also a drug. Indeed that caffeine and cocaine were essentially, Platonically, chemically, practically the same thing, only one was black and one was white, only one was socially accepted and the other socially stigmatized. And that this sort of chemical-apartheid, this ridiculously arbitrary prejudice against one drug but not the other, was symptomatic of the insaneness of how society worked. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to take whatever chemicals they liked, if it didn’t harm others? How did the land founded on the notion of freedom get to be so fucking-nanny-like that it denied its citizens the freedom to do what they liked, if it didn’t harm others? How did my drinking this cup of coffee here, or sniffing this other miniature pyramid of white powder there, harm anybody but myself? Who had the right to tell me not to do either of these things? Because, when it all came down to it, there are only two things, there is only black and white, there is only freedom or fascism, and which was it to be? Which side to choose? It was all there, like a speech printed on vellum, and all I had to do was say it, and Mary would understand, and she would give me her blessing, and hug me.

  But I didn’t say a word of that. The words just did not come out of my mouth. My mouth felt dry, actually.

  Mary said: ‘We can do this thing through lawyers, or we can just do it. There’s a website where we can both log on, and they generate the legal papers, and I can, or you can, file them. It
’ll be cheaper.’

  ‘Cheaper,’ I said.

  ‘Not that money is an issue,’ she said, scornfully. ‘You got a pile of money, I know.’ I thought: how can she be so scornful of money? Isn’t money just another symbol of freedom?

  ‘Hey,’ I said, and I pressed both my palms flat against my face, my hands blade-to-blade to make a mask, my two little fingers against my nose, my thumbs on the side of my cheekbones.

  ‘Jesus,’ I heard her say, ‘why not just stop the amateur dramatics?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said between my hands.

  ‘Or hire lawyers if you want to,’ she said, getting up from the table. ‘If you want to. I only thought the website and all would be quicker and easier.’

  Lawyers: now, lawyers are part of the problem, don’t you think? Before the Snow or after. It’s not exactly an original position, attacking lawyers; but wouldn’t it be better, just better, if the Law were like the instructions to a blender? Instead of like the arcane mysteries of the temple of Bla-Bla that only the initiated high priests understand? Like the warranty on a blender: you claim, you get. Can you imagine how things would be if you had to hire a lawyer to claim when you bought a faulty blender from the store? As it is (as it used to be), you take the thing back and that same afternoon you get a new blender. But under the Law you’d spend thousands of dollars and the best part of a year and then you’d get your blender, or not if the store hired better lawyers. It’s so stupid we don’t even see how stupid it is anymore. We’re in the blizzard and we don’t see the blizzard, we think the world is just all white about us.