by Adam Roberts
This is what Mo said, that time, about my drugs. ‘You’ve got some—’ he said when I came down from the bathroom, nudging one of his fat fingers at his own hairy upper lip, just below his right nostril, to show me where the traces of powder were on my face. ‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling embarrassed.
He could tell that I was embarrassed. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘don’t feel awkward on my account. Snort all you want. Who’s to tell you not to? Government scientists? Who gave them – who gave the police and the judiciary the right to peer up your ass? You want me to tell you what John Stuart Mill would say about that? About the gak?’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s my business.’
‘It don’t signify,’ he said.
The TV was on in the corner. Or perhaps this was another time – I think, on reflection, that this was a different time. Evening, not afternoon, and us sitting eating a meal off our laps, and drinking red wine, and watching the TV. It was a reality show. Reality TV was all over the media that season. We’d had American Idol, and The American House, and Big Brother, and Open Dating, and this show was called The Barracks. It followed twelve recruits in the army, real recruits, only their every hour and every action was captured by hidden cameras and broadcast to the nation. Usually the case in reality TV was that the public voted off the least-liked members of the cast. On this show that selection was undertaken by the army itself in its usual manner, but the principle was the same. The public chose favorites and tuned in nightly, or tuned into the weekly roundup, to see if this lean, shaven-headed African-American with the handsome face, or this tall and buff and blue-eyed Midwest boy with a winning smile, had survived the training. The public watched that training. The public watched them do everything except piss and shit.
‘It’s fucking pathological,’ said Mo. ‘Our obsession with this sort of stuff. It’s symptomatic of our culture. Something very wrong in our culture, man, that we’re so obsessed with this. Prurience, fuck.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘It’s like mobile phones,’ he said. This was another of his bugbears; the way everybody now was compelled, more or less pressured by our culture, into carrying a mobile phone, Mark of the Beast, so that they could be contacted at any hour of the day or night, no matter where they were. It struck me as a little cranky, this last animus, but for Mo it was all part of the larger picture.
‘I guess you could say,’ I said, ‘that they surrendered their privacy when they joined the army.’
‘You ever been in the services?’
This surprised me. I shook my head. ‘You?’
‘Four years. Man, you accept that the sergeant will force you open like a clam during parade and during exercises and – yeah. But at night, in your bed, with the light’s out? – that’s your own time.’ He gestured at the screen.
The image was from a low-light camera, that greenish Matrix-style color, the gritty, sandy texture of the images, thousands of dots of light and dark coarsely coalescing into the form of one of the soldiers in his bed. A hiss-filled soundtrack from a directional mike, picked up his whispered conversation with the guy in the bed next to him. He was talking about a medical worry he had. It was not clear to me if he knew the cameras and the microphones were privy to his comments.
‘This is the problem, right here,’ said Gaché. ‘The state is working as hard as it can to erode privacy.’ I had heard this speech before, but that didn’t bother me. I looked up to him. It was a good speech, and true. ‘Privacy is the enemy, because the individual cannot be controlled if he has a fucking little private space of his own. It’s George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. You ever read Foucault?’
‘I never did read Foucault.’
‘Bentham – English, from the nineteenth century – he invented the panopticon, which was a kind of prison, man, where everybody was on view all the time. Foucault says that’s the model of modern society, only it’s now the society of the Spectacle, we’re all on view, not just prisoners – or we’ll all prisoners and it’s all the time. There’s no privacy, so nobody can commit a crime. They’re shining the light inside our heads, so we can’t think in private any more, thought-crime is the only crime they’re interested in. Ideological control. What’s sick—’ and he gestured at the TV again ‘—is not that shows like this exist, but that people are so fucking eager to get on them. Fame is our drug. Fuck, we all want to be famous.’
‘Well, famous,’ I said. ‘But more rich. Yeah? And – you know, respected, and loved, no, adored.’
‘Famous,’ said Mo, firmly.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Famous.’
‘Man, we fucking queue up to strip and bend over and to say to the state, go on, take a good look up my ass. These kids—’ pointing at the TV ‘—they already gave up their body to the state, that’s what being a soldier is, but they got to give up their souls too?’
He drained his wine. He got up and waddled through to the kitchen to put more red in his glass. When he came back I said:
‘I used to work on a reality TV show,’
Gaché grunted. ‘That whole industry,’ he said, derisively.
‘It was called SponsorCam: Africa. You remember it?’
Gaché grunted again, meaning either yes he did, or no he didn’t.
‘We were going to call it SponsorCam: Sudan, since the first series was in the Sudan. But the management decided that we needed the word Africa in the title, to try and draw in some African-American demographic. That word’s a charm to that demographic. I said, when we do Afghanistan – we planned Afghanistan to be next, only Congress shut us down—’
Another snort of derision from the big man.
‘Anyway, I said, when we do Afghanistan are we going to call it SponsorCam: Asia? Of course not. Anyway,’ I said, losing my way a little, and swilling my wine in my glass as if that would sheepdog my thoughts back into their pen. The wine was a Chrysostom, a Cyprus wine. I remember thinking how strange to be drinking wine from Cyprus rather than California or France, but thinking nevertheless how pleasant it tasted; except that my taste was all shot to pieces by the drugs I was taking. It’s very hard to sense the nuances of taste when your nose has been sandblasted and bleached on the inside.
We did not make bombs in Mo’s basement, like some cack-handed amateurs. The AWP had a fair bit of money, some of that money mine. We made munitions in a property in the middle of Iowa specially bought for that purpose. We bought some of our ordnance openly – God bless America for that – and others through contacts we made at Midwest meetings, or through the internet.
On another occasion – or on the same occasion, I’m not sure – my memory is not as coherent as maybe it should be (I’m minded to blame the drugs, because constant drugs do make the mind sparser and gappier than it otherwise would be) – it may have been that same evening, watching the TV, drinking wine: only I remember another person there, a man called Benton Taney, who was also in the movement. Perhaps he came along later and joined us, or perhaps this whole conversation happened on another occasion. Anyway, Mo turned to me and asked: ‘You ever kill anybody before?’
We must have been discussing Direct Action. But it’s linked in my mind with my telling Mo about SponsorCam because, when he asked me that question, it was on the tip of my tongue to answer, ‘People died on account of me’ – that I felt guilt for my involvement in the whole SponsorCam project. I really did. At the time it happened I was so guilty I couldn’t sleep. I date my pills from that time. I remember very vividly a character called Tayyib, on that show, who borrowed money from his mother to buy a pistol, went out and shot a market trader with the pistol, took his takings – turned to grin at the camera he knew was watching him (the cameras in the market were on poles looking down) – gestured with the still-hot pistol in the direction of home, as if to say I’m going home now, tune in to the camera in my mother’s house to watch what I do next – and then went home and paid his mother back the money he had borrowed from her. Paid the money out
of the dead man’s purse. Of course his ratings went skyward; everybody switched to his mother’s camera, and then his own, to see how, or whether, he would explain himself to his mother, to see what he would do next, to see whether, or when, he next killed somebody. Jesus, that grin. He didn’t tell his mother anything; he paid her the money and took a glass of tea with her, and then went away again. I watched that in my apartment (this was before my staying-in-hotels period), and feeling ill, feeling a horrible sense of, like the Bridge over the River Kwai, My God What Have I Done? So what’s the thing to do then? To get up the next morning and just go on with your life? Pretend it didn’t happen? Deny it had anything to do with you? These did not work for me.
So when Mo said did you ever kill anyone? I didn’t say any of this to him, because I knew he would mock me. He had a temper on him, that man. He despised me, sometimes, I think. He turned to Benton and said:
‘Of course he fucking hasn’t. He’s a fucking tourist, this one. Watching the revolution from his sofa. Don’t worry, caballero,’ he turned back to me, ‘I know what it takes to kill a man, and so does Benton here, and we’ll do the dirty work.’
‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘Mo.’
‘Just – fucking – just—’ said Mo, suddenly immensely fierce, those portions of his cheeks visible above his beard blushing poppy-red with his ire, his pip-like eyes straining blue. His anger did sometimes swirl up like that, seemingly from nowhere.
‘Hey,’ I said, but in a small voice.
‘Shut up. Jesus you’re despicable, you’re despicable.’
It occurred to me to say, you take my fucking money though, but of course I didn’t say that. I loved him, despite his temper with me. I tell you what: he ridiculed me whenever there was a third party present. One time there was an activist from Detroit called Mary, or Mary-Ann, with us and we were discussing things, and suddenly Mo turned to Mary, or Mary-Ann, and said, ‘You know Fred’s nickname in the cadre? Worm-man. He’s a shit-eater.’ And he laughed, and told a long story about how the police had arrested me for hitting this other person’s car, and I had cried like a kid, and tried to confess everything, only I had so much snot in my mouth and my nose from my crying that the police couldn’t understand what I was saying. ‘Weak link, weak link,’ said Mo, laughing again with a thunderous laugh. None of this was true, of course; the police had not arrested me, they’d just questioned me. And I hadn’t mentioned anything about the Movement, and I hadn’t cried. I don’t know where Mo got that story from. From where he got that story, I should say.
And on another occasion he punched me. There was a meeting of the cadre, ten of us, in a CD warehouse in an industrial and trading zone on the outskirts of the city, and Mo was late. The rest of us just sat around, sat around, and David (who had the keys to the warehouse) got nervous and nanny-ish when people, bored, started picking at the shrink-wrapping of the slabs of CDs to see what the albums were, ‘Don’t do that, hey guys, don’t do that, my manager’ll crucify me,’ in a whiny voice. When Mo finally arrived I was keyed up, edgy, and I went over to him and said, ‘Where you been, man?’ – only that. He swiped at me with his fist, big as a baby’s head, and caught me on the side of my temples. I fell straight over, and I heard a pure angel-song ringing noise in my ears, and I saw the perspective of the floor at forty degrees, and people clustering around me. But I was alright again in a quarter of an hour, just a little sore, with a dime-sized bruise on my forehead. Whereas Mo dislocated one of his knuckles with the punch, and his big hand swelled up bigger. We went ahead with the meeting. It was not easy getting all the cadre together at one time, and we decided to go ahead with the meeting rather than reschedule. But Mo sat on a stack of CDs nursing his hurt fist and glowering at me like it was my fault.
Another time, he and I had to drive a van up to Rochester, NY, to pick up something or other. I hired the van under an alias with a false driver’s license I’d paid $1100 for, and we drove upstate, and I thought the afternoon was going well: the trees blood-red in their New York fall livery, the sunshine sharp but not too hot. I guess I chattered away somewhat, but Mo joined in as well. I thought we were chatting, chilling, I thought it was going well. Then he said, urgently, ‘Pull in, pull in at the rest-stop, at this pit-stop,’ and I figured he needed to piss. So we pulled in at this parking lane and he said, ‘Get out, get out,’ and I climbed out, a little worried. It crossed my mind that he was going to drive away and leave me there, but I told myself, I’ve got my wallet, I’ll walk to the nearest town and hire a car or get a taxi back home. But he didn’t abandon me beside the road. He got out too, and then he took off his belt, unthreading it from the loops at the rim of his trousers with exaggerated precision. I said, ‘Mo, what are you doing?’ Then – do you know what he did? He pushed me down on the ground, held me down with his giant hand on the back of my neck, he pulled down my fucking pants and whipped me with the belt. Like he was Dad and I was Junior, like he was disciplining me. It was so humiliating. Cars passed on the road, and we were both right there. They must have seen everything, one grown man whipping another at the side of the road. Nobody stopped, of course. He hit me six times. It hurt. Then he got up, put his belt back, and got back in the passenger side of the van’s cockpit. ‘Come on,’ he said, through the window, as I was picking myself up. ‘Come on, let’s get going.’
All for the rest of that journey I was trembling. I couldn’t even ask him why he’d done what he’d done. But he seemed happier. Chattier.
He acted like that, unpredictable. He was more than a little unhinged – he was touched.
But I loved him. You know why? For two things. For the first, a speech I heard him give to the cadre. He said this: ‘You may think of this cadre as family, but it’s not family, it’s much closer than that. We hold each others’ lives in our hands. If you tell anybody outside the family about Pa touching you a bad way or Sister fucking the postman, that’s OK, nobody is really hurt, nobody is dead. But you hear things in the cadre, you take them to the grave with you. Everybody must understand this. Nothing leaves the cadre. It is sealed, it is a sealed space. This goes beyond the meanings of the word secrecy you have previously come across. This is more than secrecy. Our lives depend on this. If you break this confidence, people die, people die, and – Jesus by Christ – I swear I’ll make sure you’re one of the people who die, if you break the confidence.’
This was the most beautiful speech I ever heard. Partly it was the ‘greater love hath no man’ vibe. But, I’ll tell you, it was more than that. On another occasion he told a meeting, ‘I’d die for you all, you’d all die for me, let’s not dwell on that – can’t we just take that for granted and move on?’ It was the taking it for granted that was so moving, as much as the fact of the readiness to sacrifice. But more even than that was the promise of a sanctuary space, a room out of which there would be no leakage. A sealed place, with sealed people, so perfectly insulated from the rest of the word, so friction-free and of itself, that you could spend two hours discussing how to bomb a government building and then zip up your coat and walk on to the sidewalk and marvel that the people you walked through had no idea what you had been talking about, planning, intending to put into action. That – that sensation, it was better even than cocaine. To smile at the ordinary people, and to talk to them, and for them not to know what was in your head. It’s hard to express. It’s a feeling of power, of superiority, but that sounds crude, like I was a bully or that I felt like a bully feels, and that’s not it. It’s more than that. Above all other things it is a feeling of containment. Can you understand how powerful that feeling can be? Of control, of wholeness, it is what it feels like to be a pure cell, to exist without pollution from outside, without the sense of bleeding one’s essence into the gutter, but to be, pure as a star. Clean. White. Like the blankness outside. There is such power in blankness. There is power in namelessness. Mo gave me that. It felt that way to me, that he gave me that. Everything else was secondary to that.
I told hi
m stuff, and he kept it to himself. Perhaps that was why he was so blithe about inventing stories about me, like the tale he told that woman about me crying in police custody. This might explain his impulse to fiction.
Here’s something I did after the occasion I mentioned earlier, when I had that sort of mini-breakdown – when I walked into that bookshop and started ripping up copies of my ex-wife’s book, Living With an Adulterer. After that I moved from my old hotel to a new one, because the old room reminded me of that whole shabby episode. I took up a new room in a new hotel, and plugged in my laptop, and set up my printer. This is what I did.
I wrote like a demon. I wrote and wrote, great slabs of prose like sculptor’s marble. I wrote in twenty-hour sessions, wrote until I fell asleep on the floor, or on top of the bed in my clothes, and then I’d get up so eager to write again that I didn’t even shower. Inspiration filled my head like great cirrus clouds inside that blue-painted chamber. I ate only room service, I shooed away the cleaners when they came to change the bedding in the morning, I wrote and wrote. The Spirit was in me then, as certainly as my heart or my liver. It streamed into me with all the myriad white particles I breathed in through my nose. White atoms, like the tiny white particles that accumulate to make clouds in the sky. It was the cloud of unknowing. I knew my past, and I wrote it out and made my knowledge unknowledge. I fixed the whole thing in letters, millions of letters. In three weeks I had my completed document, 900KB on my hard drive. This I printed out. I did not revise it, did not correct it in any way, I simply printed it out. It ran to 300 pages, a great brick of paper, that I elastic-banded together and put inside a large envelope. I put the envelope inside my tote bag, a little black vealskin backpack-type thing I used to carry when I was out shopping or whatever. What did I write? What was it about? You might think it was about my ex-wife, but it was hardly at all about that. I wrote about my childhood, my parents, my upbringing, about things that happened. I don’t want to say what I wrote. Things that happened, and a few things from later on, but mostly just me, with me as the central character. It was my early life, it was all of it. It was important. I finished it, and printed it out, and sealed it in manila and put the package in my tote bag.