The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  I showered. I stood in the shower for a long time, but I hung my tote bag, with its cargo, on the hook on the back of the bathroom door where I could keep my eye on it. The individual threads of shower water coming down felt like nails at first, very hot and sharp, but after a while I ceased to notice them. It was just the shifting pressure of water on my head and shoulders and back, and the hissing like amplified silence, and the gurgling sounds of the plughole. I soaped myself and rinsed, soaped myself and rinsed, soaped myself and rinsed, all the time looking at the bag hanging on the back of the door.

  After that I shaved, dressed, and went back to my computer. I took a sachet of white powder from the drawer of the desk, tipped a little onto the surface of the desk, near the corner. There was a plastic component that I had detached from my laptop, a sort of plastic shoulder just next to the hinge where the screen opened and shut. I had pulled this off, or it had fallen off, I can’t remember; but it had two straight plastic edges, each an inch or so long, and I used one of these to marshal the powder into a neater hump. Then I squatted on the floor and positioned my nostril at the side of the desk and sniffed up two nostrilsful.

  After my head had settled, and after I had finished twitching and flexing my shoulders and my neck, I felt the joy inside me. My belief was that the joy was always inside me, like my soul, like the Holy Spirit, but it took the cocaine to release it, to give me access to it again.

  I turned on my laptop and called up the little icon of my 900KB file. I speared it with the white arrow that moved to my mouse’s command. I dragged it over the blue-check wallpaper and put it in the dustbin. My machine spoke to me, saying Are you sure you want to send ‘Memory’ to the Recycle Bin? I clicked yes. Then I opened the Recycle Bin and pulled down a menu to delete it. Another window popped up with a red exclamation mark: Are you sure you want to delete ‘Memory’? and I clicked yes again with a bubbly sense of elation. It was gone, and gone forever.

  Now the only version of the file was a hard copy, in my tote bag. So I sprayed myself with Helios, an eau de Cologne I sometimes used, and I walked out of my hotel room for the first time in weeks. I left the hotel and I walked through the streets of the city. I was elated. It is difficult to explain. My whole book was sealed and secret in a satchel slung over my shoulder. Nobody but I knew what was written on those pages. It was the purest form of secret. If somebody – the hotel cleaner, say – went into my room and turned on my laptop and tried to find the file, they would be unsuccessful. It was erased forever. (I later found that there are often ways of retrieving apparently erased files, but I did not know that then. I believed that everything I had written existed only in one hard-copy, portable form). And I was carrying it around with me, like a bomb, watching the passers-by, watching patrol cars cruise past me, watching for something, anything. I achieved a sort of bliss this way, wandering without plan through the city. Once I sat down in a café to have a drink, black coffee, and as I waited for the waiter to bring my drink to my table I became suddenly panicked, I became suddenly convinced that somebody was going to grab my tote-bag and make away with my manuscript. The thought was unbearable to me, that the manuscript would be taken out of my control, that they could take the thing and – I didn’t know, but – publish it, put in online, copy it a thousand times and hand it out on the subway. That would have killed me. That would have been more than I could have stood. So I popped up and shuffled round from behind the table, and hurried out before the drink was delivered. I went into a bathroom in a department store, into a cubicle, and sniffed up some more powder, spilling some on the floor. Then I washed my face from the cold tap, hunched over my satchel as I rinsed, clutching it to my belly like a freefalling human clutching his reserve parachute. Then I gobbled some pills that were in my jacket pocket, without knowing what they were. But I was seeking the revelation.

  Out on the street again, the gray grids of the city jammed at startling angles to one another, window-grids, street intersections, poles, trash cans. But over it all were great arch-shaped clouds of white. Spiritual white. People blurring past me, and I could feel a pain in my cheeks, in both of my cheeks, and this pain I deduced, after some thought, was because I was grinning so hard, grinning so wide. God was Spirit, in me. He was inspiration and joy and elation, energy, and not love at all. Fancy that – I would never have guessed it without that revelation. I’d been so often told He was love, and I’d believed He was love, but it turns out He’s not love at all.

  Blocks and towers everywhere all about me, black pyramids on top of gray towers, and in the sky the clouds seemed to mimic the city, cloudscapes firm as icebergs, towering towards heaven, tapering with the abruptness of the perspective. I was standing, pressing my tote-bag into my stomach with both my arms to keep it precious, and people jerked and flowed past me, jerked and flowed, and I was standing next to a Walk-Don’t-Walk, leaning against the pole. But I was looking up, and the clouds declared the majesty of unknowing – which is a pompous fucking way of putting it I know, but that’s what it was, really what it was. I had tailored myself. I had remade myself into white paper, and I was carrying myself in my own papoose, and the secret was so pure that nobody would ever know it but me. There was a kind of splash of understanding in my mind. You follow: I’m saying here it was as if my mind was a pool, and the clouds were reflected in the surface, and things moved in the underneath, and then I saw, and this is what I saw: the cloud that filled the sky before me, standing on the rooftops of the towers over the road, was a mountain. Then I saw it was the mountain of Purgatory, and the road wound round it from base to summit like the thread of a screw, and this was my path.

  It was a vision nobody could see but me.

  I’m not sure I’ve conveyed to you the joy of my tote-bag and my single copy of the manuscript. I could have destroyed it completely, do you see? I owned it, controlled it, nobody but I. Plus, I’ll admit, I was exhausted, drained, pepped-up, zinging, my head wasn’t quite right.

  There’s one more thing I have to tell you, and this will interest you because it was a terrorist act. You are interested in that. In the confession of it. Better, it concerns somebody still alive, a military somebody, an (whisper it) interim presidential somebody. The climax of my story.

  The plan was this: I was to work for the army. It’s ironic to think of it now, that this fact saved my life – my association with the army, my fortuitous presence at the barracks at the onset of the snow. And all this was only true because I was there to infiltrate the army, and assassinate Colonel Robinson. He’s still alive, as you know, Christ he’s the actual embodiment of military-presidential nexus rule, so you know that my attempt was unsuccessful. But it’s the intent, the intent, isn’t it?

  The army advertised, and I applied. They wanted a speech writer, a briefings writer, a civilian to work alongside the military scribblers. Some soldiers worked not on the front line or in catering but for Stars and Stripes, or preparing press releases and the like. But the army, in our increasingly media-savvy age, wanted to augment this body of men. They advertised, and Mo brought it to my attention. The cadre discussed it. I would get the job, and then I would have access to the barracks at Stafford County, where the job would be based. This would give the opportunity for a high-profile piece of direct action. I drove up to Stafford County Base and had an interview with two very mild-spoken uniforms, and shook hands with them both. One of them said he remembered Lifeboat in a Storm, which I’d put on my CV, that he’d really liked it. It was the TV piece about the lifeboatman who found Jesus. I nodded and smiled and thanked him.

  I got that job.

  So I started working at Stafford Base. I was not in the army as such, and I did not wear a uniform or do basic training. But I had a lapel badge that got me past the guards on the gate, and – although they swept under my car with metal sticks to check for limpet bombs – they never searched my personal bag. They didn’t even look in my trunk. I parked up, I went to an office, and I sat at a word processor and wrote wh
at they asked me to write: press release material, internal material. Sometimes I spent whole days just going over other people’s text and prettying it up. It was not exciting. It was not challenging.

  But I did not intend to stay there. I had applied for the job under my known name, the name under which I’d written all my TV scripts. But this was not the name on my driver’s license, not the birth-certificate name. When I hired vans for the movement I used that other name. I’d even taken out a credit card with that name on the plastic, and a spurious billing address, to cover my tracks. When I had appeared in court on the drugs thing I had given my birth-certificate name, and I’d been tried under my birth-certificate name. When I applied to the military I didn’t tell them the name on my birth-certificate was different. It was as if there were two different people. Two secret boxes, each hidden from the other.

  And then, after three weeks – so short a time – Mo came up from town and stayed in a motel near the base, and we met up to discuss the plan. We were to hit Colonel Robinson. He was due to give a speech, which I had helped write, to a bunch of journalists and others. He was going to stand at a podium in the auditorium at Stafford, and address a crowd of journalists about the defense of freedom. ‘This is the perfect time to hit him. Perfect.’

  We were drinking vodka and Kool-Aid. It was snowing outside.

  ‘I’ve only been in post three weeks,’ I said. ‘Is it too soon?’

  He waved this thought aside. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said.

  I packed a certain number of grams of plastique into a plastic tube the size of my thumb (a container that had once housed an expensive roll of low-ASA film), a golfball-sized plug like non-sticky Blu-tack. Then I put a wire into the top via a watch battery and a switch. We did this in the bathroom of Mo’s hotel room.

  The following morning I drove into the camp earlier than usual. It was a cold, bright day. The sun bounced off the snow as off a mirror. The guards smiled at me. They swept under my car with their metal brooms, and waved me on. I parked up and went inside. I made my way to the auditorium.

  The spindly paraphernalia of public speaking was stored in a little room appendixed to the main chamber. This I knew. The main auditorium was continually strafed by the lines-of-sight of three surveillance cameras. But the storeroom was blind. More, the surveillance cameras in the auditorium itself were not low-light devices. With the lights off I knew – from loitering in the security cockpit by the main entrance to the building pretending to chat to the guards there – that the cameras could see nothing but blocks of shadow layered on blocks of black. I knew in advance what the camera would record: a slant wedge of light as the door was eased open, the silhouette of a man – smooth outline of skull, no face visible – stepping in, the door shutting and the whole screen becoming dark again.

  I stood a moment by the door until my eyes adjusted to the dark. Then I stepped nimbly down the central auditorium aisle onto the little stage up front, and into the unlocked storeroom at the back. With the storeroom door shut behind me I could turn on the light, and it burst on with a sting to my dark-adjusted eye, the color and almost the flavor of unsweetened grapefruit juice. I fumbled with the microphone, unscrewed, unscrewed, not easily done in silk gloves but I managed it. And then it was open, and I tipped out its hard viscera and replaced them with my own package. I fiddled for a moment with tweezers to extract the wires from the phone’s on-off switch mechanism, and to poke my wires, my special wires, into the miniature sockets.

  The switch was a tiny cubic nubbin of black plastic on the side of the microphone. It was scored on its topside with three little ridges to aid finger purchase.

  I screwed the whole device back together again and renested it in its two-fingered perch. Then the light was off, and I was making my way back up the auditorium aisle, and through the main door again.

  For twenty minutes I was in another room mingling and drinking coffee with forty people: military, journalists, press officers. I smiled and shook hands, and listened to people saying how much they were looking forward to the colonel’s speech. I said, I’m looking forward to it myself – wrote it, after all! They laughed politely.

  Here is the point: for a certain space of time, less than an hour certainly, I knew, and nobody else did. Not even Mo Gaché, who was sitting in his motel ten miles away waiting for me to report back – even he could not know whether I had successfully planted the device or not. Nobody knew but me. As I laughed and nodded and chatted I felt precisely this elation, that there was a pure secret, an unadulterated secret. We filed through to the auditorium, and the ceiling lights were bright overhead, throwing down a brilliantly clear light. I had physically to prevent myself from looking up at the cameras. I knew I could not, that their electric retinas would have captured my face, its expression of triumph, my secret. So I kept my eyes lowered by an act of sheer will. I sat. I looked purposefully at the desk before me (undefiled by graffiti, this being a barracks and not a college lecture hall). I examined the backs of the close-cropped heads of the military people in front of me. I picked up my press-pack in its blue folder, and leafed through it, even though I had written most of it.

  Colonel Robinson was on the little stage, chatting with two other brass, and in only minutes he would be dead. The clock’s hands semaphored three o’clock. So it was time to begin. I was nodding in response to something the person sitting next to me was saying, but the words were fuzzy and indistinct. I wasn’t listening. Instead I was watching as a junior officer fetched a lectern from the store room and placed it midstage. Colonel Robinson’s interlocutors were removing themselves to their seats. The Colonel stood at the front, sizing up his audience, his speech folded under his arm. His junior officer had ducked back in the storeroom and reemerged with the microphone stand, with the microphone itself, and placed this in front of the lectern. This aide squatted, bent knees, straight back, to link the wire from the mike to a wire on the floor, and then he stood straight up again.

  He nodded to his superior. Colonel Robinson nodded back and took a step towards the lectern. The junior officer moved to one side, to take a seat in the front row. The moment neared.

  But then, as a last gesture, the junior officer stepped back to the lectern to turn on the microphone for the colonel. Of course, in the army, it is out of the question for a senior officer to do something as menial as flicking a small switch for himself. Rank has its privileges, and the first of those is that all such menial chores are handled by juniors. Of course. I should have realized. Or Mo should have realized, because he’d actually been in the fucking army.

  My smile was frozen on my face. Everything seemed sticky, everything went slowly. The colonel was six feet from the lectern. His junior was groping on the mike for the switch, took a step closer, brought his face towards the thing to locate the switch. His head drifted slow as a balloon towards the microphone. His thumb caught the nubbin, moved it a millimeter, and it seemed to take a very long time for the switch to cross that tiny distance. I stared. The starburst dazzle of the light caught in my eye, and time stretched.

  Time sagged.

  Then the gunshot crack brought time back up to speed.

  The junior officer was on his back. A ghost of smoke fled the scene towards the ceiling. The murmur of expectant talk had been instantly silenced. Colonel Robinson, standing six yards away, had flinched and frozen, his head withdrawn self-protectively a little way in between his shoulders.

  There was silence for the space of four seconds.

  Then people started yelling. People stood up. Some hurried to the front. Leather holsters were unbuttoned and pistols were brought out, as if a sniper had been standing at the back of the hall. Even when it became clear that no sniper had felled the lieutenant, the army people kept their pistols in their hands. A gun in the hand makes a certain sort of man feel calmer, like a baby’s pacifier.

  The explosion had broken the wire-mesh ball from the end of the microphone, and propelled it with force through the chee
kbone of Lieutenant Amos – because now, after this event, I was to learn his name, where before he was perfectly anonymous to me, and would have remained in that delicious state of obscurity had I never acted. I got up and rushed to the stage, but a cram of men had assembled around Amos’s prone body, and I couldn’t get a good look.

  I saw, afterwards, via the Argos-eyed medium of TV. I saw photographs, I saw computer-generated diagrams in which Amos’s head became a model of spindly neon lines, and the bolus from the end of the microphone a black ball that traveled along a dotted pathway in slow motion, breaking open skin and bone, embedding in the skull, collapsing the orbit of the right eye, snapping the head backwards, bouncing off the corner of the brain pan and traveling down to half-emerge through the roof of his mouth. He was flown that very evening through the falling snow to a military hospital at Godherst. It still wasn’t certain he would live. I stood on the concrete outside building 4 (or whichever it was), part of a huddle of a dozen soldiers, bowing as the chopper landed to save our faces from the downdraft, then uncurling ourselves as the stretcher was hurried into the belly of the machine. Snow flurried all around, gray rips and shreds of dusk stirred hugely by the rotor blades. Flakes prickled my face and stung my eyes. Amos was loaded into the machine.