The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Oh no, Mum,’ said Minnie, with disdain in her voice. ‘He said that people sometimes say God is an old white man with a big white beard, but he said that God doesn’t look like that at all. He’s not an old white man, and he doesn’t have a white beard.’ Later on, as I cooked fish-fingers for our joint tea, she told me more about her theory of God. ‘I think he’s all wrapped about the Earth, cause he’s got to protect the whole world. He’s all around us, Mr Felber says. It’s kind of like the air, I think, covering the whole world. But some places in the world are covered by his, you know, face and things, and that’s better; and some places are covered by his toes and knees and things, and that’s not so good. So some people on the Earth are happy and rich, and some are sad and poor. That’s why.’

  This seemed to me a very good theology, or, at least, as good as any I had heard. Years later, when Minnie converted to Islam and then married an Islamic boy only a year older than herself, I sometimes baited her with this memory. I regret that now. I regret that because it taints the memory in my head. I like to think of the yellow-bodied alien-shaped creature, the Teletubby, curling itself around the world, cushioning and protecting us all with its yellow fur. The Teletubbies were, you see, these children’s-TV creatures, multicoloured baby-things living in a pure green landscape with a pure blue sky, and one of them was called La-la, possibly as an oblique religious critique, but, then again, possibly not. It’s a sweet memory in my mind. But later, when Minnie became more wilful, and more single-minded, I polluted that earlier memory. I did it myself. I railed at her. ‘You’re abandoning yourself to this Allah,’ I said. ‘You used to call Him La-la, you know.’ She denied that she had ever done so, and seemed genuinely to have no memory of it; but then a child’s memory works differently from an adult’s. And she was deeply wounded that I would accuse her of such a thing. ‘La-la, La-la,’ I would taunt her, in a sing-song voice. ‘So let us now praise your fantasy creature’ in a sonorous voice like a priest. ‘Like a [expletive deleted] space alien, up there in heaven, with Father Christmas and Rudolf the [expletive deleted] reindeer. Oh!’ I might say, as she wrapped her head up before going out, ‘Are you off to the temple to worship your La-la? Your big furry yellow god?’ For all the time we lived together after her conversion to Islam, which was the best part of a year, I baited her in this fashion. La-la. It upset her, genuinely, I think. Looking back on it now, I’m sorry for that. But I can’t say sorry to her about it, of course. That’s the difficulty, right there, that I can’t say sorry. Or that once I could have said sorry, but now I can no longer say sorry, the chance has gone. I look back and I am sorry, and I’m also faintly amazed at how juvenile I was. She was fifteen, and I was thirty-one, thirty-two, and yet we quarrelled and bickered on the same teenage level. I fought with her in the most juvenile ways. My regretting it won’t change it, of course.

  Seven

  Eventually the snowfall stopped altogether, and, quite quickly, the nature of the snow underfoot changed. Soon it became easy to walk on naked snow. Where, before, the unsettled snow had been like quicksand, sinking you hip-deep, or in some cases dragging you wholly down, the settled snow was more compact. It also developed a kind of frozen crust, a granulated icy carpet caused, as I understand it, by the actions of warm daytime sun and cold nights softening and then refreezing that surface layer. Snowshoes became unnecessary. Hovercraft were still used, but it became possible to run wheeled trucks and cars out on the surface of the snow. It became possible to expand the city beyond the supported base that had formed the core of Liberty; buildings could be placed directly on the ice, provided they weren’t too tall or heavy.

  Over the period of a year various physical restrictions faded away. Other ones came to fill their place. Food was a worry.

  Other things happened. [Blank]’s husband stood for the position of Senator, and lost, despite his expensive campaign – the printed cards, such as the one he had given me, the posters, the advertisements on the radio, all that. The incumbent, [Blank], won again, though with a reduced majority. Something like eleven thousand votes for him, eight thousand for [Blank], and a few thousand for [Blank], the third candidate. The IP elections approached, and Crow decided not to stand. Or his backers decided he shouldn’t stand. Radio was becoming a bigger thing; at first only military receivers had been salvaged from the Snow, but with every forage more things were coming up, and soon there were hundreds of radios, and then thousands. Soon most people knew somebody who had a radio; and with that a radio station was set up. Crow went on the air to talk about politics. ‘People have asked me,’ he said, ‘to run for IP. Good people, friends of mine, friends of Liberty, who think I can do a good job. But I’ve decided not to run against Interim President [Blank]. I’ve decided that this is not a time to rock the boat. Next election is soon enough for me.’

  Another thing Crow did: he started the talk of political parties. ‘We need more of the trappings of traditional democracy,’ he said, on air. ‘We need parties to which people can belong, that express their differing political affiliation.’ To begin with the idea was for a Democratic and a Republican party, like the old days. But there were so few Democrats. Most of the population were military, or had connections to the military, and so most of the population were Republicans. The Republican party was established, and [Blank] declared himself for it, which meant the sitting president put his weight behind the party. Then somebody decided to set up Free Republicans, a more libertarian sort of patriotic party. But the policy differences were tiny, really. Tiny.

  I can’t tell you how boring I found all this. It bored me then, and it bores me now to recall it. It seems like something of a crazy interlude, except that for that space of time – a year, was it? – it filled everybody’s lives. Politics. Hustings, street-corner meetings, radio debates, the paraphernalia. Then the attacks started, and politics vanished like breath into the wind. Suddenly voting was the last thing on our minds. We were all in the army, in one way or another. I mean that some of us were in uniform and others not, but we were all under attack. But I don’t need to tell you about the attacks. You’re not interested in them, so much as you want to know about [Blank].

  We all remember the attacks, of course.

  It’s a strange feature of the affair we had, [Blank] and I, but I could talk to him endlessly about books. After we’d made love, on our trysts, we would sometimes discuss books for ages, even though he had ‘never been much of reader’, as he put it. I told him it was daft, because he’d been a writer before the Snow. How could a writer not read many books? He said he’d written for the TV mostly, and hadn’t read books. But he’d read some, and we could talk and talk about it.

  Now, [Blank], on the other hand, was another matter: she was terribly literate, and terribly cultured. She had come from a wealthy Hamptons or Cherry County set or something like that, or so she said. Money. She’d been skiing in the Rockies when the snow started, and a group of them had holed up in a tent, and each day had dug themselves out and pulled the tent behind them and sat in it again until the snow covered it, until eventually they emerged on the top and found their way to an army base. That was her story. But the point is that no matter how much she boasted her reading, I couldn’t help myself dumbing down with her. I think she reminded me, with her long black hair and her vanity, of some of the girls I’d known at school, and so automatically I slid back into the ways of being to which I’d become habituated with them. I became, as the phrase goes, as a child again. It was almost ironic: with her I could have talked about the books I loved, but I felt I had to hide my passion or she would mock and degrade it; with him, though, I talked and talked and he smiled and hugged me even though he knew nothing at all about what I was saying.

  I was taking coffee one morning with her one time – a watery, third-rinse dregsy sort of coffee, and a poor imitation of that first cup I had taken at her apartment, it is true, but the important thing was the social occasion itself, I suppose. She smiled her scimitar smile, and
pushed her extraordinary hair over her shoulder with a gentle movement of her hand. ‘Do you know what?’ I said, my voice registering crassly even on my own ear. ‘Sometimes this life reminds me of that movie. You know the movie? It was about a plane that crashed in the mountains, I forget where. And the survivors lived in the wreckage, in the snow, for months and months, just living in this metal shell and eventually eating the dead bodies. That’s how it feels like, living in this place.’

  This was an inappropriate conversational gambit. The food situation was getting worse week by week, with food-miners digging out further and further to find necessary supplies. But, still, to suggest cannibalism. This was beneath the dignity of the occasion. Other people were there. There was Mrs [Blank], another senior wife. She died last month, I remember hearing about it, but she was vigorous enough on that occasion. I can’t remember the other person’s name; perhaps it was [Blank]. But, for sure, all of them looked a chilly look at me, and [Blank] laughed awkwardly and played with her long black hair, as if saying indulge my friend, she is not of our class.

  As the snow settled beneath us it sometimes sent tremors through the city. Window panes rattled in their frames. Snow was shaken like flour from cornices. Cups chattered to one another on table-tops. These miniature earthquakes would happen in batches. For two weeks they seemed to come every half hour, then for months they wouldn’t happen at all. Intermittent. They fed my intermittent paranoia that the snow was haunted; that these miniature quakes were the unquiet souls of the crushed and dead. The radio assured us that we should expect such trembles as the snow settled, even years after the cessation of snowfall, but this didn’t calm my subconscious.

  There’s a long pole, perhaps a communication antenna, ten metres tall, or more that I can see when I get up from my writing and walk in the yard. Its shadow is crisply laid over the snow by the morning sun. That shadow is precisely edged at the base, but grows marginally fuzzier further along its length until it becomes a vague wedge at the end. As if the shadow is greystone at the base, and raincloud at the top.

  For a long time I floated along, cloud-like, through life. My husband was a tremendous help. Isn’t that a funny thing? We were no longer husband and wife, yet he helped me with a persistent and rather touching tenderness. He used his position to obtain antidepressant drugs, and I took them. This started about a month after my vision of the snow as haunted, my vision of Minnie under the weight of snow. For a month, or so, I carried on, somehow. But each day was a struggle. Every single day. And – you know? – as I write that it strikes the wrong note, it really does. It implies too much effort to the process of being depressed; it gives the impression that depression is a strenuous, laborious business, fighting against the darkness, fighting to go on. But depression is not like that. The essence of that acute sort of melancholy is a lassitudinous disinclination to fight anything. It’s a grey arena, and you grapple with the problems of the day without any great belief in the value of your struggle, without hating your enemy, without craving victory. Sometimes it strikes you how strange it is, in a distant sort of way, that you are undertaking that struggle at all. You get out of bed, and it feels like you’ve climbed Everest. The sheets are splotched with wetness. Perhaps you were crying.

  Everest is below us now, of course.

  This modern world—

  So [Blank] fetched me some antidepressants from military-medical supplies. This was good of him, because I had been [expletive deleted] another man for several months. He wasn’t to know this, of course. But the secretive meetings with [Blank], the illicit connection with him, the sex, these meetings represented the few occasions when I felt the glimmer of something. Sometimes [Blank] would pull out of me and drop his tiny fall of white seed onto the mattress, or the floor. Sometimes he would come inside me, and I would chide him, remind him of the dangers we ran, but I wouldn’t do this very forcefully. I think I was telling myself, or not even telling myself but somehow registering down in my subconscious that I could make another baby, and that this would make some small amends for the loss of Minnie.

  We met, usually in [Blank]’s tiny apartment, and usually in the afternoons. We began super-cautious, anxious not to give ourselves away. As our affair continued, and weeks became months, we probably became more careless. We had a great deal of sex. On a regular basis we experienced that sensation of making ourselves hot, of even working up a sweat, and then lying side by side panting and feeling the sweat freeze on our skin. That is a strange sensation.

  You’ll tell me you’re not interested in our erotic grapplings, but in the terrorist plotting and scheming that [Blank] shared with me. I don’t believe you. I bet you’re fascinated with our love life. I just bet you are. Of course you are. But I shan’t press the point. For a time I was caught up in it all, excited at the prospect, fidgety with anticipation when [Blank] and I met up. [Text deleted]. But after a while the sex lost its savour. After I began taking the antidepressants my libido seemed to snag inside me somewhere, so that I couldn’t become aroused beyond a certain point. I don’t know why it should’ve happened that way. I stopped coming. Despite [Blank]’s best efforts, his increasingly red-faced struggles with me, I could not come. And then the whole sex connection seemed to recede from me, so that I felt as if I were observing the liaison third-hand, and the two semi-clad bodies wrestling like sea snakes became a kind of performance art, a disinterested athleticism, something in which I was not involved.

  Soon after that [Blank] and I stopped sleeping with one another. For a year, a little more, we were not lovers. That was it. We still met up, of course, from time to time; we talked, and bumped into one another in the streets – Liberty was a small place. And he would still press upon me, in discreet confabs, his conspiracy theories. But until the eve of the attacks these talks had a slightly conventionalised, heatless feel to them.

  When we were still lovers, [Blank] would proselytise. He’d be like an old-world preacher, eager and driven. ‘You see, it’s a conspiracy,’ he’d tell me. ‘The government is behind the whole disaster.’

  Sometimes I would pooh-pooh him. ‘I don’t believe that,’ I would say. ‘I’ve always believed history is cock-up, not conspiracy.’

  And he would shake his head slowly, with a tenderly patronising expression on his face. ‘You think those are mutually exclusive? Of course history proceeds by foul-ups. That’s why so much conspiracy is necessary to governments. You think the USA wanted to drown the world in snow? Of course not – it was a foul-up, of course it was. But now they’re hiding their part in that foul-up from the people. They’re hanging on to power. This memo, this document by the scientist called G S Seidensticker …’

  And on he would go. Sometimes I would believe him, just to go along with him. Weird stuff had happened; why not weird theories to explain the weird stuff? What did it really matter? Later, of course, I discovered it did indeed matter, but that was later.

  At the time I was less interested in this alleged government cover-up and more interested in the idea that the southern hemisphere was free of snow. It was a bolt-hole. It was the fantasy of escape. I gabbled and gabbled on and on about it. ‘Let’s get away,’ I would say, and the fog of depression would lift for a moment as I fantasised. ‘Let’s steal a truck and drive over the ice – to Australia.’

  ‘Drive around the world,’ [Blank] would say, shivering and drawing his clothes around his body again. ‘Sure, that’s a doable idea. Drive for three months, maybe. But the fuel? And eat – what? And get across crevasses, ice-cliffs – how?’

  But I didn’t want to get bogged down in the practicalities of it. I wasn’t interested in the practicalities of it, I just wanted the dream. Hot sun, yellow beach, the sound of the sea. [Blank] was always bringing the real world back in.

  ‘We could steal a plane,’ I would say.

  ‘A plane to fly around the whole world? And refuel it – where?’

  ‘Don’t be a downer,’ I’d plead. ‘Think of it! Think of starting a life
on firm ground, not on the ice. In the sunshine. Think of that!’

  ‘You got to think practically,’ he would grumble. ‘The government doesn’t want its citizens leaving en masse, now, does it?’

  ‘Always the government,’ I would say.

  ‘Sure,’ he’d reply. ‘Make fun. Go on. But it does all come down to the government. We change the government, and it all becomes possible. We take back the government – they’ve been lying to us, you see? Keeping us in the dark. If we overthrow them …’

  Does that get your attention? Yes, he did talk of overthrowing the government. He said that government should be by the people for the people and of the people, all that declaration-of-independence-stuff; and he really believed it. To me he sold it as a means to an end – with the government gone we could work out a concerted plan to move the whole populations south, devote all our resources to the trek, wagon trains like the Mormons, and talk like that. But I don’t think that was truly his motivation. I think it became a kind of obsession for him, an end in itself. I think he felt that if he could overthrow the government he would die happy. It was the purest revolutionary fervour.

  During the time of our affair he did not talk about terrorist stuff. That came later, when we were no longer lovers. A year later. I was on the antidepressants, and I was no longer getting a buzz from the illicit connection of it, the physical thrill, so I called it off.

  ‘Now—’ he used to say. ‘Your husband. You should talk to him about it. He’s going to be IP one day, that’s the rumour.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘That’s the rumour. But if we – if you – could talk to him …’

  ‘Talk?’

  ‘You know, persuade him.’

  ‘Isn’t he the enemy, as far as you’re concerned?’

  ‘But if!’ in a hurried voice. ‘But if he could be turned. Different. And if he could be placed, you know? If he could be shown the memo, the Seidensticker memo, shown that we know everything – threatened with public exposure, maybe, then he could be manoeuvred on our side. If you could talk to him, if you could persuade him! Imagine the advantage, if the IP himself was on our side!’ His eyes were wide, glistening, his breath short.