The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  I still believe that. If you don’t believe the same, that’s your loss.

  Did I tell you I was raised a Catholic? My father was a Polish Jew but he converted after he came to the States and he married a Catholic Pole, so I was taken to mass and confession and such when I was a kid. The only part of it I liked was confession. I liked the way that the priest couldn’t tell anybody else what you said to him, so no matter how shocking or powerful your words they could not travel outside the confessional. How long since your last confession? Father I killed a man, I killed two men. A silence. That grille, like an apothecary’s cabinet without the drawers. My son, I am saddened to hear you say so. Is this a joke? I must remind you that it is a great sin to mock God’s offices. God is not mocked. Are you gonna absolve me, or what? Chewing gum, kicking at the dark wood of the partition with my toes. Actually I killed more than two men, it was more like six men. I peed on them too, when they were dead, took a dump on them after they died. They’re all dead, pop, pop – my son, how old are you? I’m fifteen, father. Fred! (in a much sterner voice, for this was, after all, my priest and he knew me) I know you’re no more than twelve. I’ll not stand for this. Lie to a priest? Who do you think you’re fooling? Did you really harm some men? I don’t believe you did. You must listen to me when I say that your soul is in very severe danger with this sort of joking. The confessional is no place for joking. I am going to ask you to go away and think seriously about what you’ve done, I mean your levity and your disrespect for God, and you’ll come back tomorrow in a penitent frame of mind to say sorry to God and to me for this wickedness. It scared me, actually, because his voice was straining with suppressed anger, with actual anger, and it is an upsetting thing to realize that you have angered a priest. But when I was out of the church I felt a glorious sensation of transcendent levity begin to suffuse me, because I knew he could tell nobody about it. The secrecy of the confessional protected me. I could have hugged myself in glee; it seemed to my twelve-year-old mind to be the perfect crime. The victim had taken a vow never to give the perpetrator away. But when I got back home from school the next day, Father Terrell was sitting in the kitchen with my mother. They both looked very sternly at me when I came in, and all that buzzing and fearfulness frothed through my young body. It was a thrilling fizz in the solar plexus that I associated, even at that age, with sex. I knew he had told my Ma. I knew he had betrayed the most sacred of his vows in order to discipline a twelve-year-old tearaway who had done nothing more, for Christ’s sake, than prank about. This was terrifying in the most profound way. I was shaking – was actually shaking, like a spastic child. This was in part fear of my Ma’s wrath, for that could be a terrible thing, but it was also (I don’t think I’m being fatuous when I say this) the rending of the veil of the temple, the crumbling away of my trust in the Church. Father Terrell stood when I came in and said, ‘Fred, I’ve explained to your mother that you came to confession yesterday in a wholly inappropriate frame of mind.’ I couldn’t hold my words in. I positively squealed, ‘You can’t tell! You’re not allowed to tell!’

  ‘I have not told her the precise details,’ said the priest in a pained tone, but I knew in my heart that he had broken his vow, and I believe that he knew it too. He wouldn’t have made that temporizing statement otherwise. So then there was a lot more talk; my Ma grabbing my elbow and making me sit on my stool by the table and listen to a lecture on proper respect, and the wrong sort of friends, and God seeing everything. By then, of course, it was much too late. An adult might say that the church is not in its priests, but in God. I don’t know about that; maybe it’s true. But to a kid the church is a mysterious and polytheistic place, the Pope the chief god, bishops and priests lesser deities. Without wanting to sound bombastic, I knew that day what it felt like to be betrayed by one’s god.

  You might say that a person never quite gets away from it, the Church. A person never quite wants to. As an adult I refused to make public demonstrations of religious faith, but the sense of it still haunted my mind. I can be more precise: I hadn’t much time for the God of my youth, he seemed to me too patriarchal, too Jewish, too thou-shaltn’t. Christ – well, Christ was fine and such, but to my adult sensibilities he seemed too hippy, his love thing was too fluid, too free. I knew a guy at college called Henry Haglund, a sweet but sentimental gay man. He was Catholic too, I think, or maybe he was Lutheran, I can’t remember. But the point is that he was fixated on Christ, on Christ’s love, on (a poster in his room) the well-defined musculature of Christ’s abdomen as he strained on the cross – all the love, strenuous love and painful love, all that, the effort-reward ratio linked like that. That wasn’t for me. But the Holy Spirit, though – now there you have it, there you have something that still pushed my god-button. Nebulous, in a way, yet also precise: a cloud of unknowing that was also a dove with Persil-white wings and a beak sharp to shear the green branch. Sublime. In some sense I decided that the Sublime would be my god. I even thought that the Holy Spirit would be (this sort of hubris was common enough in the television industry) my Muse – for I was increasingly certain, inside my mind, that I was an artist. I would sit at my Mac and close my eyes, hold out my arms, palms flat down, and slow my breathing, trying consciously to open myself, to let the spirit flow into me and through me, a great, glorious streamer; so that I could become – let’s say – the comet, creating-creating-creating at the front in an incandescent nub, whilst behind me poured a great trail of light and spiritus sanctus and glory.

  Jesus, to think of it. And I really believed it. I believed I was making Art as I sat at my keyboard clicking and tapping, and writing dialogue between Paul and Paula, and blocking in long shot, cut to, dolly pan, sketching prissy little stage directions about images and actors’ movements. I was writing a screenplay, leaving the banality of TV behind for the hope of Hollywood and Oscars and respect and The Whole Thing. I had fantasies of a $60 million budget. I toyed with casting this or that current star in the key roles. The story (I think I believed this, it’s a little hazy in my memory, but I think I believed that) the story was literally being dictated to me directly by the Holy Spirit – by, let’s not forget, thirty three point three recurring of the Godhead. And that infinite recurrence also, in its way, a sublime and a mystic thing.

  This is the story:

  The opening scene is set in the Waldorf Astoria, in New York, on 19th November 2001. Enron’s bankers are assembled in these opulent surroundings. They are about to be told that to the $13 billion reported debts for the 3rd Quarter of 2001 must be added a previously undisclosed $25 billion of additional debt. The commercial behemoth, America’s eighth biggest corporation, is about to topple. It is on the very edge of falling. My three key protagonists are present in this hotel at this time: first, Paul ‘T-Bird’ Lanborn, an Enron junior manager. Second, his girlfriend Paula Potocki. And third, Marshall Porter, a senior Enron executive. Now, T-Bird, foolishly, has run up gambling debts of over a million dollars. He decides that the way to dispose of these debts is to fold them into Enron’s enormous losses, losing them in sums so vast that a few extra millions will not be noticed. ‘The perfect robbery,’ he says, ‘is the robbery where the stolen money is not even noticed, where it is lost in the welter of bankruptcy and disaster.’ I made a mental note to revise that word ‘welter’ in a future draft, it’s not really a Paul word (‘bunch’ would be a Paul word; ‘fucking mess’ would be Paul). If the mafia, from whom T-Bird had unwisely borrowed the money with which to gamble, don’t get it back by the end of the day then they will kill – not T-Bird himself, no no, but his woman, the beautiful Paula. Paula doesn’t know this; she believes it is her handsome T-Bird who is at risk from the mob. The situation is desperate. T-Bird decides that Paula will seduce Marshall, the senior exec guy, who is graying-depressed-burntout and whom they reason will be susceptible to Paula’s pneumatic charms. She will persuade him, blackmail him if necessary, to pass the required money to a company T-Bird has set up to that end, a purely notion
al company that will, by a complex legal maneuver, become another Enron satellite holding. Paula is not happy with the notion of bedding the old man, for he is not comely; but she wants to save her lover from what she thinks will be his grisly death, and so she goes along with this plan. The monetary transfer must happen before the bankers are informed of the desperate levels of Enron debt, and all assets are frozen, but it must happen close to the wire or it will be noticed in audit and the embezzlers will go to jail. There you have the ingredients; the deadline (which shrinks before the characters, as the story develops); the love triangle; Paula’s half-hearted decision to bed silver-haired Marshall for her boyfriend’s sake, little knowing that it is her own life on the line; T-Bird’s own agonized guilt at the duplicitous way he is handling Paula (whom he really loves, in his way), his worry that is at the same time feeding his addictive gambling personality. I wrote it all, sex, excitement, social comment, a twist in the end. I thought it genius. It was so much more than just a thriller. It was art. I wanted to call it not Gambler’s Luck or The Seduction Conspiracy or any Hollywood title like that, but rather In At The Death of the Whale, the whale being the corporation at the heart of the thing (one character in the script says ‘a whale is a weasel built by committee’). You see, the Ghost had inspired me to produce art. I even picked out an epigraph for the movie, to be shown as white characters on a plain blue backdrop before the opening shot. It was from George W Bush’s birthday letter to Kenneth Lay, the Enron chairman, in 1997 on the occasion of Lay’s fifty-fifth birthday: ‘55 years old! Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young and beautiful wife.’ That was a real letter. Bush actually sent that letter.

  I had the highest hopes for this project, I really did. But it was not picked up as a movie by any studio, no matter how many coca-fuelled lunches I sat through with contacts and friends (most of the coca, I should say, deposited inside my own nose during those lunches: Hollywood’s vibe in those days was health food and restraint, and most producers and movers and shakers that I met with ostentatiously did not indulge). I turned it into a TV serial, four episodes, one day, a sort of mini-24. When nobody bought this, I transformed it again into a TV series, stretching the action over several weeks to fill a pilot episode and twenty episodes. But no dice, no dice, nobody was interested.

  So I sat down again and rewrote it as a novel, a big 600-page thudder of a book, wedging in lengthy paragraphs of descriptive prose between the pre-existing dialog. I wrote in long bursts, 12-hour sessions, 20-hour sessions, followed by exhaustive collapse asleep in my clothes on top of the covers of my hotel bed. Into the descriptive passages of my novel I swept all the crumbs and litter of the zeitgeist. I devoured TV and magazines and newspapers for gobbets and snippets and flavor and cultural e-numbers to give the whole ragbag verisimilitude, for crying out loud – piling details and details onto my characters, an abusive childhood here, a dirt-colored wart on the brow there, live you fuckers, live. An article that I chanced to read in NY Day resulted in me allocating an obsession with chess to Marshall, a fascination with Bobby Fischer’s games and lifestyle, the 1974 match in which Karpov won the right to challenge Fischer as world champion, and took the title by default when Fischer didn’t show – checkerboard shirts in Marshall’s wardrobe, chess-piece-shaped topiary in his Hamptons place, and a mental tic of translating trading terms into chess notation in his head. I read a book about the Vilna ghetto and the camps in 1943–44 and gave Paula a Lithuanian Jew grandfather, and modern liberal Jew parents, and a yearning in her $200k per annum life to return one day to the old country, to get back before the Fall to the Old World’s brick towns and green fields and giant skies. The composition was all random, like this, but I told myself that this was OK because life is random. My coke-fizzing head felt sure that was the case. At the same time, and without finding the contradiction in the least discommoding, I also told myself that it was all part of a grander plan, that the Spirit was guiding me, that I was being inspired.

  I worked in a whole subplot about 9/11 and then changed it to March 11 Madrid, and then took it out again as too much the obvious gesture. I wrote vastly indulgent passages of descriptive prose and congratulated myself on their accomplishment. Marshall’s jowls sagged like an old woman’s breasts. Paula had a neatly trimmed mat of pubic hair, like the bristles of a black toothbrush. The snout of a jumbo on the runway looked like a white whale in sunglasses. The bags under Marshall’s eyes seemed, to Paul’s coked-up sensibilities, to be smiles, almost like mockery. I wrote a scene in a casino to give Paul backstory to highlight his gambling addiction: a croupier pulling cards from a boxed stack like a slatecutter working a slab to prise off wafers. The chips as fossilised money. The chips clinking as they are shunted over the baize like loose teeth. I tried to think myself inside the mind of a gambling addict, I made the mental effort to be Paul. The way the click of the ball as it rattled in the roulette was like something falling into place inside his head, how it was the perfectly tooled clockwork sound of rightness, the sound that released the catch of tension deep inside him and allowed his muscles to relax even as he strained forward in excitement to see where the ball was going to settle. Red carpets soft as sand underfoot. The air under the electric chandeliers balmy as a summer’s night. Croupiers and waitresses in black and white, discretion personified. Every player a lord of the earth, a princess, royalty in their own egos, all of them only ever one deal, one turn away from unimaginable wealth. What did I know? I’d never even been to a casino. I had seen them on the TV.

  Nobody bought my novel. It interested no publisher, and no agent was prepared to represent me. I became bitter. Why didn’t the cosmos understand my genius? Something was wrong somewhere, and my fundamental self-belief, my coke-arrogance, could not believe the wrongness was in any sense mine.

  You see, I felt I had art inside me, a beautiful superannuated fetus, and I felt it urgently, I felt it was spring-loaded for release. I thought I had to get it out somehow. I had to put it somewhere, I was itching, cocaine-itching to put it out there, somewhere, I no longer even cared where – like a fifteen year old, desperate to place his dick in something other than his right hand. Got to, got to. But nobody would take it, no cheerleader would indulge me, nobody was interested. I became bitter. The coke didn’t help. I probably became a little paranoid. Or more than a little.

  But there are other ways of expressing one’s creativity. Other modes of art. I found one. The 9/11 terrorists, to return to that wearisome subject, they were artists. They got it out there. Nobody ignored their genius.

  I haven’t taken cocaine for years now. Of course, I should say, I’m glad to be clean, I’m much better off without it, much smoother. And I can sleep properly, without waking in a sweat and a jolt. But at the same time I’m not glad. I’m far from glad. I miss it. If I found some I’d take it. If there were some right here, right now, I’d stop writing this and take it in a flash. Life with cocaine as opposed to life without it: soda water compared to regular tap water. You want tap water with your bourbon? No, you don’t.

  So, I can picture the disdain on your face as you read this, hey he thunk of his terrorism as art, hey he had pretensions in his bombing and murdering. But that’s not it at all. I tell you: the Spirit moved me. Are you going to contradict me? What good will that do? You think the Holy Spirit is mocked? It is not. You can’t joke it away. By this stage, however, it was no longer really the Holy Spirit, it wasn’t a Catholic thing to my conscious mind any more. It was a Catholic thing to my subconscious, maybe, but I’m not answerable for that. To my conscious mind it was now Hegel’s Geist, it was the Spirit of History. It was Destiny. What was wrong was the System? Everything was wrong. It had to be pulled down and rebuilt, entire. Freedom was supposed to be our reason for existing. You want to tell me we had freedom in the old USA? You want to tell me we have it now? Oh, yeah, you want to tell me that, but you can’t, because you know it is not true.

  I did my job, and it was crazily well paid.
Cleaners and nurses and front-line troops earned a few dollars a day, and I earned hundreds of thousands, which I spent at once, saving none of it, blowing it all on blow and hotel bills and extravagance. I wrote a kindergarten show about a kitchen in which puppeteers brought foam-built microwave and coffee-maker and pans to life to talk amongst themselves and have little adventures, called Kitchen Capers (title changed to The Kitchen Krew! by the studio). But at the same time I started chatting online to liberty-minded people – real liberty that is. I started going to face-to-face meetings. I joined the American Workers’ Party. I would have joined before but I had been timid at the prospect of my name coming to the attention of the industry as a Communist, I would have lost work. But I was able to join in secret, to pay the money and go to the meetings and nobody else knew.