by Adam Roberts
I screamed ‘Mo,’ and dived, and half-fell, half-slid down to the motel’s front door. Feet had cleared the threshold of snow, and my face was close to the lintel. Another poc, and brick tile from the doorstep disseminated itself through the air in a foot-wide cloud of tiny pieces. Fragments struck my face. That’s how close I was to it.
My first thought had been to get back inside the motel, but it flashed upon me then that Mo would simply follow me, chase me through corridors and rooms until he could finish me off. Better to stay outside, where it was more spacious, where there was more chance of eluding him. I thought of my car. The snow gleamed palely into the distance. But the path I had made coming was still visible – gouges in the snow, here a footstep, another, then a shallow and ragged trench. I hurried, scrabbling rabbit-like with all my limbs.
Once at the top of the drift I made sudden surprising purchase and I was away, heaving my legs to pull them out of the knee-high snow (and this was on a path I had already made), and struggling deeper into shadow and silence. Wading through snow is more like moving through quicksand than it is moving through water, although (ironically) the snow itself is water, and isn’t sand.
Away from the motel everything was covered by a shapeless shadow.
Snow was continually falling through the night. Flakes were all around me, shimmering with their own cold, falling only slowly. My eyes adjusted to the dark. I saw telegraph poles like Arctic trees and, blocky to my left, the indistinct shapes of buildings, snow-cloaked, not lit from within. I did not look behind until I came to the last spur of the road to have been cleared by the army plows, and striding down to my parked car. I had been away, at most, two hours, but the snow had wholly covered the vehicle, reducing its shape to a dolphin profile.
I scraped the door clear with my naked hands, and scooped snow from the windshield too, and got inside panting. The engine took four or five goes to start, and I drove off shudderingly, throwing off great foam-like masses of snow as I went. But I was panicked, still in shock, and my visibility was poor, and the road was markedly worse since I had last driven it. Going downhill as I was I soon lost control of my automobile. I slid over brake-blithe ice into the cliff of white at the side of the road. The impact was hard enough to jar my airbag into deploying.
This crash was too much for my already agitated state of being. I guess I could have emptied the bosom-like pillow of its air, I guess I could have restarted the car, driven off more carefully. But I didn’t do that. Instead I tore the door open and tumbled out into the snow, and then the fire-cold of snow against my bare hands galvanized me, the cold-burn up inside my trouser-legs above my socks, and in my face.
I ran.
I slipped and fell several times, but the snow caught me in its soft limbs. Its single, great, soft limb. And I picked myself up, and ran down to the interstate, and then I ran along that. There was no traffic. The street lighting threw elliptical buttresses of light onto the drifts at the side of the road. Patches of light stage-lit the road. I had eight shadows, like swollen spider’s legs, following me, stretching out in front of me, leaping up suddenly, swivelling around me as I moved on. The snow was up to my shins, up to my knees, even on this recently cleared stretch of roadway. And the flakes fell inexorably down and down. Packing around us all, packing us tight and safe like expanded polystyrene. All those snowflakes, all their miniaturized sawtooth profiles.
I stopped running after a while because I was too tired, and my heart was yammering in an alarming way. If I had a heart attack there, I told myself, I would die, I would be dead, nobody would get me to hospital, I’d be a frozen corpse. But as I moved on at walking pace I began to feel very cold, and that scared me more. Snow accumulated in my hair. My hands were dark with the chill. I started shivering uncontrollably. I could try and hold back the tremors, but they came anyway. I tried blowing into my cupped hands but my breath seemed to be coming out of my lungs cold. I couldn’t shake the suspicion that I was dead, that Mo had shot me, that I was not walking but haunting. My heart hurt with the physical effort I was making. It was very cold. I was very cold.
I walked and walked. I was tired, freezing. I lost feeling in my feet, in their stupid fucking silk socks and Lazzarone leather shoes. I wept, intermittently. I told myself I was going to get frostbite and lose my toes. I started to hallucinate a little, so that for instance it seemed to me that the road was slanting upwards with an increasing gradient, although in fact I was crossing a more or less perfectly horizontal terrain. I kept looking over my shoulder, thinking that Mo was there, and even though I could see that he wasn’t, even though I could see that I was alone except for the swarm of snowflakes all around, and my elastic swarm of shadows. But I couldn’t shake the sense that somebody else was with me. I was trudging now, pulling my leg muscles through the motions of walking with great effort. I said things to my invisible companion. I addressed him as Mo, as my wife, I don’t know what I said. I don’t know what I did. I don’t know how long it took me to get back to the camp. I don’t know anything. My mind is a perfect blank.
Eventually I reached the camp.
The guards were surprised to see me, but I told them my car had gone off the road into a drift, that I couldn’t get it out, that I’d been walking for hours to get back. They took me through, into the same infirmary where Lieutenant Amos had, earlier, had his wounded head examined. They wrapped me in blankets, gave me hot soup in a Styrofoam container. They gave me sanctuary. Isn’t it strange that my own people, that Mo, had been so unwelcoming? And that the people I was warring against, the military themselves, were being so good to me? This was an irony I had cause to consider and reconsider over the following months, as the snowfall became intolerable. I was treated for minor frostbite in my left little toe. I could not leave the base. Then nobody could leave the base. People, mostly soldiers, struggled through the continual blizzard to find sanctuary with us. Copters went out and came back with supplies and fuel, and throughout the whole time of the snow we only lost two of those machines. The base command formed an emergency committee, chaired by Colonel Robinson, the same man that I had failed to kill. The process began by which the base tore itself up, dug itself up to the surface of the snow and re-established itself on mesh and balloon-supported platforms. I don’t remember how many times that happened, except that I helped, I did what I could. Everything else was lost in the welter (that’s my kind of word, welter) of experiences. It was an exhausting, but also a glorious time. And contact with similar bases resulted, four months later, in the formation of New-New York, the augmentation of several platforms from around the area. And – I don’t need to tell you any of this – you were there, or you were in a similar base, somewhere else.
But I’ll say this: I meditated a great deal, in those days, on patterns I could see in the swirl all about me. For instance: the pattern made by, on the one hand, my failure to shoot the Colonel, the man who was then elected the first Interim President of our new fucking world order, and on the other, by Mo’s failure to shoot me in the motel that time. Another instance: my heart attack and the breakdown of my marriage, they’re facets of the same thing, the same over-stimulation, the same heart’s-pain. The surgeon’s account of my heart attack and my wife’s account of our marriage were equally unforgiving, but equally misguided (since, as for the doctor’s judgment, aren’t I still alive? He’s not. And, as for my wife, well, all I’ll say is that she was wrong, she was not right in her caricature account of our wedded life. We were happy, sometimes. We were in love, some of the time).
Another instance: the pattern made by my early career in reality TV, the camera eye always on its subjects, and God’s eye, which is always on us. Like the people in the SponsorCam experiment I guess we act up for God, we try to grab His attention. Jesus, notice me! Anything – murder, adultery, heresy, anything – is better than being ignored by God. How could anybody bear to be ignored by God? I’ll let you into a secret, too: the snowstorm that possessed the world for all those many,
many months, it seemed to me that this storm was nothing less than the Spirit itself, its ice-fire kiss as it swallowed our world whole. Of course most people were too sinful to endure that contact. Of course there were only one hundred and forty four thousand who survived – I’ve seen official figures, but I’ve never trusted official figures, I’ll go with my estimate, it comes from a higher source. I have been most struck by the prophetic element in my vision, the vision I saw that afternoon in old New York City – I was seeing the path that was destined humanity, the arduous but purifying climb up and up the snowy flanks of Purgatory. Isn’t that where we are? There’s nothing new in a man being inspired to prophesy by the Ghost of God. You shouldn’t be surprised that it happened to me. Perhaps I’ve been more reticent about it than some other prophets, but that’s because I understand the essential truth of God is His secrecy – why else does he hide from us, why else does he throw the myriad beauties of the world in our eyes except as a distraction, a smokescreen, to deflect our prying? So many people look at the world and can’t see God, and they don’t seem to understand that it’s precisely this hiddenness, it’s precisely this secrecy, that is the whole point of God. Imagine if God were visible to all, sitting in a triune throne in the heavens for all to see – how would the world be different?
You can’t answer me. It would be different – we’d all be dead of terror, we’d all be dead of shame, we’d all be cowed. But God hides in the snowstorm, and hides in the pillar of cloud, and hides in the cold fire of sunlight, and we can get on with our lives. That’s the secret of our existence.
You want me to boil it all down to a motto? You want me to Reader’s Digest it? Authority abuses. That’s what Authority does, it’s in its nature, it can’t help it. That’s why God, who is wise and compassionate, does not force His authority upon us. You’re in the army, I know, you’re in the actual army, so I guess you’ve sold yourself to that system, you accept the abuse, you bow down to the authority. Maybe you tell yourself that you believe in it, that authority can be good. But that doesn’t change the fact of it. In your heart you know the fact of it, it does no good, it abuses. So, the only question that remains for us to answer is: what are we to do in the teeth of this abuse? Should we take it? Should we resist?
The second one, of course.
I could simply scrawl that phrase, Authority Abuses, in ten-yard-high graffiti all over the base: that would testify to the truth of it. But people see words without reading them, they read them without understanding them, you have to find another way of expressing their truth, a way that cannot be so easily ignored.
And it seems to me now that the Spirit has indeed shaped my life, written it as a properly schematic, aesthetically harmonious whole. How else to explain so many parallels, such balance? It can’t be explained otherwise. Take my movie script, that I turned into a book, that got turned down by all the publishers (who are all fucking dead now and under the snow, so who’s triumphant in the end?) – I couldn’t understand, at the time, why nobody saw its genius. But now, with a longer perspective, I think I do see. I think I see that I was actually, proleptically, writing about the collapse of Corporation USA, whose collapse we are still in the process of witnessing – a few bombs in the greenhouses of New London to help that collapse on its way. But my book, that was truth, and the central character – fucked up, yes, addicted to gambling, not true to his woman, yes – was me, fucked up, yes, taking drugs, screwing around, yes. And the denouement of that script: I’d better tell you, you won’t know it otherwise, you certainly won’t have seen it on any Big Screen or read it in any airport bookshop. The denouement is that Paul pulls it together, that he saves the girl, that he disposes of the debt, and indeed ends up with millions in unmarked, non-sequential notes – that happy ending is what awaits me. I believe it. It’s not arrogance that tells me I’m untouchable. It’s not schizophrenia, or ego, or insanity, it’s the sheer beautiful harmonious truth of things. There are higher powers that look after me. I’m designed for something much more. You see, it’s not enough to care, you have to show you care – it’s not enough to hate the government, you must act on that hate. It’s not enough to love, you have to tell somebody you love them. Isn’t that right? Protest and survive.
Sometimes I look at the world and it looks like a drawing – you know what I mean? I mean a drawing, not a special effect or a hallucination, but like one of those super-intricate line drawings of the sort that an idiot-savant, Rain-Man autistic boy might draw, all miniature detail perfectly rendered and fantastically reduplicated.
Or what? I have to shave with a blade now. I used electric before. For a year I’ve been shaving with the same blade. The edge is practically crenulated. When I shave now it brings up a dozen red full stops under my chin. You think I’m happy about that? You know how expensive tissue paper is nowadays? Tissue paper, for Christ’s sake? I saw a man using his key as a letter-opener once. Not only that, I saw a soldier using his bayonet as a letter-opener once. What do you reckon that means?
Let me, for a moment, say one more thing, let me say something about alien encounter. Doesn’t it seem odd to you that, before the snow, aliens used to be so secretive about their abducting, their spread ’em, poke ’em, fuck-off encounters with humanity? Why so furtive? Why would they need to be so furtive? Aliens are always represented in sf and culture as superior beings, aren’t they? With the better tech, the higher foreheads, the less body hair as if body hair is the index of bestiality and those guys, those blue-skinned smooth-skinned space guys are just that much closer to pure mentation. You know? So why—?
Those invasive aliens. Those lurkers in the woodshed. They’re our superiors, they are above us in the cosmic hierarchy. They are like parents, we are like children. They are like government, we are like the governed. That’s the connection that’s made, isn’t it? The aliens come to Crossroads Missouri or to Blankville Idaho and steal some dozen bus drivers or farm workers or whatever from their beds, and the government covers it up. Nobody knows about these abductions because the government covers it up. In other words, the government is their secrecy. Why? Not to prevent cultural panic, for what could be less surprising or more anticipated than an official declaration of aliens among us? No, no, not for those reasons. The government covers up by reflex, because that’s what governments do. Two sides of the same coin. Aliens are government, government is alien. So why do they hide? They hide like God. They vanish like God. For the same reasons.
Here’s another question: if we have these devices that Seidensticker invented, why not bring them out in the open? Clear snow away, maybe, with them. Put them in reverse gear, undo the snow, why not?
I saw a tomato the other day, a ripe tomato just sitting there on the side like a bomb, its stalk the sparkle of the fuse burning down. Red is the danger colour, isn’t it. There’s too little red up here.
That’s all I want to say for now.
{MS notes, handwritten on verso of final sheet:
well there’s very little here that’s germane to the matter in hand – not without interest, though, from a legal point of view. And a political one, of course, with Robinson’s recent cancer diagnosis. Jerry, could you cross-check with other documentation about the holes in this account? Specif., his mysterious ‘something’ that he says happened in his childhood about which he is so reticent, presum. abuse, but forewarned is best about that sort of thing before it comes to trial – too often used as a premise for dimin. respon.
Also, why did his cadre leader try to kill him? Did I miss something? Or did he not say why? Tension in the organiz.? Does this have any bearing on his continuation of terrorist tactics in NUSA? This Gaché guy, are we sure he got swallowed by the snow? Please check. KK.
JL: Not abuse, it turns out – it’s a strange tale, actually – check doc 12–999B, you’ll need a Senatorial OK for clearance, but given the high profile of this case you’ll get it. But I can’t see the childhood events jeopardizing trial – assuming, like you say, trial
goes ahead in the current changing political situation. Do we wait and see whether you-know-who is elected next IP? Or do the wheels of justice grind on nevertheless? I mean do we act as if Robinson will last forever as IP even though we know he’s probably only got weeks? Please to excuse me my naïve questions. JL.
PS: File 08–999 is also relevant, personal statement by you-know-who’s wife, but it’s under seal, I haven’t seen it. Worth a subpoena? They might not give it you, but it could be worth trying anyway. JL.
PPS: Just checked with Harriet at records, she hasn’t of course seen the file (08–999) either, but she says it’s been through the censor, so it almost certainly won’t contain any names. Still worth a subpoena? What do you think? JL.
Text Title: [not specified] Text Code: 341–999
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My name is Tira Bojani Sahai. I have been asked by [This is a Sensitive Document under the terms of the Act of ’22. All proper names have been removed for one of the reasons specified in that Act. Access to this name requires Senate Level Clearance; apply to 7–24358–45432–1] to write a continuation to previous testimony already submitted to the Senate Committee, which I am prepared to do. Afterwards I have agreed to read through my testimony and sign each page as a guarantee of its accuracy of transcription.
