New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  My desire for Simic was unsimple, but I want to try and put down here what was important about it. It’s not that I didn’t want to have sex with him. Of course I did. And it’s not as if I was the first gay man in history to fall in love with a straight man. Let’s not get into the business of embroidering that cliché. Love is something else, you see. Love is like a car on ice: it needs a little grit to get purchase.

  We’ve had this conversation more than once, Colonel. It was one of the first things you said to me, in fact. The two of us, grizzled old soldiers, bent and dinged and broken by war, and the first thing we talk about is the question of love. No, not as strange as you might think, I suppose. It all came about because you were so unreticent about your religious beliefs. I suspect you were trying to save me for Jesus. Sweet of you, though not needful. And your beliefs were exactly what we might expect a person such as yourself to hold. It fits your consciousness to think (naturally you didn’t put it in these terms) of God as hierarchical order, a supreme leader whose orders are passed down through the chain of command (archangels, angels, popes, bishops and priests, the godly and the ungodly) - so, so, then, if that is the way the cosmos is, then the cosmos is undemocratic, and democracy itself is a sort of violation of divine order. I believe you’re sincere in your inability to conceptualize a model of the divine that wasn’t like the feudal army to which you have dedicated your earthly life. I’m not trying to be offensive. But there are other ways of imagining the divine. It’s just that you can’t see them. I remember saying something like: ‘hard to believe that a religious system that is so hierarchical and autocratic could have done so well in a democracy like the United States.’ You didn’t bridle at this, because for you autocrat is not the term of abuse it is for me. It was when I started discussing the mendacity of calling fundamentally feudal and anti-democratic political systems things like Republic and Democracy that you bridled and became annoyed. Anyway, I remember you saying: ‘what you don’t understand,’ in that slightly pursed lip, vowel-flattened way you have, ‘what you don’t understand is that God is Love. A human supreme ruler would be a Hitler, a Stalin, yeah. I concede that. But a supreme ruler guided by love - a being that is pure Love - see, that purges authority of all negative possibility.’ I quote from memory and may not have got this quite right. But you’ll concede that’s, pretty much, how you speak.

  What can a rational human being say to that? I probably mumbled, and looked away, and adjusted my face-plate in that fidgety way I’ve gotten into the habit of doing. Yes, I’ve noticed myself doing that, as I know you have.

  What I probably didn’t say, or at least didn’t say with needful eloquence, is: love is obviously a wonderful thing for a human to experience; a self- and other-validating thing; an exciting and pleasurable thing. And actually we can say more, because in terms of, to use the Attenborovian phrase, Life on Earth - the successful transmission of genes - love is clearly an immensely useful thing. But that’s not what I’m trying to get at. Maybe I can put it this way: what might an alien civilization that had no concept of love think, observing the way we elevate Love to transcendental, cosmic and godly proportions? Might they not think it a little self-regarding? A little peculiar? As if because I enjoy eating beefsteaks, and because beefsteaks serve the useful purpose of keeping me alive, I therefore declared the universe to be beefsteak, God a beefsteak and beefsteak the universal core value of everything?

  There are plenty of religious people in our NMA, and I would not want to generalize about their beliefs. But I’d hazard this: they don’t worship a Fuehrer God. Who but a slave could love such a concept?

  Did I say so? Were you offended? I can’t remember. I may have been, I suppose, a little belligerent. It was early in our relationship.

  There was another conversation of ours that I do remember. You told me that your troops fight with discipline, and that our people didn’t know what discipline was. I said that free men fought better than did automata. And you did get a little riled at that, and said that being dedicated to service didn’t mean that your men lacked passion. Do you remember that? Maybe that was even part of that same conversation as before. Perhaps I’d said that your army is an army of slaves, because everybody is bound by the hierarchy in which they live. And you of course wouldn’t have conceded the point about slavery. But you would counter it by saying that provided they fight with passion it doesn’t matter if troops are following orders from above, or debating their own strategies with their fellows. This is what I said: I said the word passion is linked etymologically to concepts of passivity. We don’t think of it this way any more of course: we think of passion as a positive force (a positive good, often). That’s a wish fulfilment thing. ‘I feel passionately about this . . .’ ‘I feel passionately about you . . .’ These expressions actually mean ‘I have surrendered the agency and activity of my feelings; I am in a merely reactive and passive state.’ Dominoes fall with exactly this passion.

  But - and this is my whole point - it does not follow from this that we should cultivate a stoic imperative to escape our passions. To attempt to be free of passions is to be seduced by a dream of perfect independence: power, active control, the ideally circulating Unaccommodated Man. But that’s a false flicker. Passion is a relational term, and it is our relations to others that define us as fully human. That’s the great truth at the heart of democracy. Nobody can be passionate about themselves (I mean passionate in the conventional sense) - you can be enthusiastic, excited maybe, but not passionate, any more than the universe could ever passively react to the universe, or the Singularity be passionate about the Singularity. It’s a misunderstanding of the term.

  The original meaning of the word is now only recalled in archaic linguistic fossils. That Mel Gibson film you think so highly of, The Passion of the Christ. People don’t understand what the title means. It’s not about the furious or intense desire of Christ. It is about the period of agonizingly passive suffering of the Christ. But even here the modern and original senses blur, semantically: for in Gibson’s film the quasi-erotic objectification of Christ’s naked body in pain parlays passivity into the passionate lust-for-pain which is so much the currency of contemporary cinema.

  This is a roundabout way of saying I prefer that the individual organs of our NMAs not be seduced by rhetoric of passion. Our giant, I know, is not a passionate giant. Our giant has his seven views of Jerusalem.

  So, yes, there I was, in Hammersmith, with the man I loved most in all the world; and with other friends, too, present physically or present virtually. And I was part of a single organism, a Pantegral being, and was gifted with purpose and meaning and strength and agency in my life. It is true that Pantegral had reached his arm over the bridge at Hampton Court and received, unexpected, a savage slice from a sabre. This had opened the skin and severed some of the fibres of the meat. But he had struck back at once. And now this Pantegral creature was lying and gathering his strength. And in the morning we would rise up, mightily. For the heart of our creed is: rejoice not against me, o my enemy.

  16

  The rain fell hard all night, and I lay in the darkness in the chaste embrace of my Simic, sometimes dozing and sometimes waking with the sheer pressure of happiness.

  By morning the shower had reduced in intensity, although rain was still falling, and it washed dawn in greys and silvers. We roused ourselves and ate some food. We opened the window to clear the fug accumulated from half a dozen bodies in a small room. From the window, the sound of water pouring ceaselessly from a drainpipe on to the flags of the pavement: an endless sheet of silk being continuously ripped in two.

  ‘This place is pretty much empty,’ said Simic, coming to stand alongside me. He meant: the civilians had pretty much vacated Hammersmith.

  It stopped raining. The sun came out.

  We moved out and made our way through streets that were all oil-glisteny in the aftermath of the rainfall. Versions of ourselves, painted in fat sines and cosines, walked upsidedown t
hrough the ground beneath us. We made our way house to house, and updated the wiki, and tooted other squads in the ground. ‘[We need to clear our,]’ said a trooper called Armistead. ‘[There are no civilians in a mile in any direction.]’

  I saw one civilian, lurking in a doorway, and I almost contradicted him, ‘Not all the civvies have vacated the theatre of operations, I just saw—’. But I looked again, and it was the boy with the key.

  We came to the elevated section of the motorway, and trotted up a sliproad to check the lay of the city from up there, looking east. East, in the heart of the town, was where the wiki said most of the enemy troops were concentrated. Without civvies to shield us we all felt exposed and vulnerable to air attack. Traffic was not moving, of course. Cars were abandoned irregularly along its length; not parked neatly at the side as I had seen on the M25. There was a line of street lamps down the middle and each pole crossed with two metre-length light-casings. Upon every one of these casings sat perched a dozen birds, silhouetted before against the dawn and looking exactly like eyelashes against the apricot sky. ‘Quiet, ain’t it,’ said Simic.

  We kept checking the sky for airborne ordnance. Personally I figured that the British would prefer not to destroy acres of prime London real estate just to liquidate a couple of hundred NMA soldiers; but - Coates made this point - the British didn’t necessary know that our numbers were so few. Also we had fired an atomic bullet, and that might well have changed the game. Might have moved it out of the realm of rationality.

  There was a great amount of e-chatter, but nobody had enough of a sense of things to put a formal proposal to the whole corpus. Only a few groups were engaging the enemy; most of us were moving through a deserted cityscape. This gave the debates a longer, more prolix quality - there’s nothing like being in the middle of a combat situation to focus democratic debate. By mid morning a consensus was emerging: majority view - the enemy were gathering themselves for a counterattack from the east. Minority view, they were stunned that a nuclear cap had snapped in their own back garden, and just sitting there in shock. The point of the minority view was that this was the chance to press a negotiation angle. But I cleaved to the majority view - correctly, as I can now say, with hindsight. My reasoning was thus: the British knew that they would have to negotiate, but they couldn’t not react to the bullet, and the only reaction that counted in such circumstances was a great deal of boom-boom and bang-bang. Give them a week of smashing about and things would calm a little. Meanwhile we could vanish, dissolve before their advance and give them nothing to fight. There were three thousand of us, give or take, in the northern portion of the city. Three thousand people can vanish like breath into the wind in a city that size.

  Then, a little before lunchtime, the British forced the issue. A bombardment opened from the east, and a massive advance - tanks, many thousands of troops, with air support - began moving west through the central city. A quick proposal didn’t meet with any counter-prop: we would fall back and give way. This meant (it was hardly the first time we had done this) putting up enough resistance for the enemy to think they had a proper fight on their hands in order to give people time to slip away. Then we would let things settle down, a little while, before recoalescing and striking back. But we had to handle this carefully, or Houdini disappearance would become a rout.

  A couple of hundred of us picked out likely looking spots, and checked the wiki, and noted the advance. The British were moving cautiously, but in massive numbers; and they were taking particular pains to knock down our toy planes and limit our surveillance. This wasn’t too much of a problem. You can’t keep the advance of many many thousand men a secret, after all.

  Simic and I went into a multi-storey car park to set up an automatic cannon. This was a small part of the general strategy of covering our disappearance.

  ‘Where will you go?’ Simic asked me, as we climbed the car park’s urinous, grey stairwell. It was the two of us, none else. We could have done with a few extra hands, actually, to help lug up the canvas bags of ordnance.

  ‘Cambridge,’ I said. ‘I’ll put up with a friend there. He’ll tolerate me for a few days, at any rate. A couple of days. You want to come?’

  ‘I’ll go south and round I think. My girlfriend has a place in Canterbury.’

  ‘Girlfriend,’ I grunted.

  ‘I told you about her.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, in my Omar voice, ‘indeed.’

  We came out into the penultimate level, and dragged our bags across the concrete floor, over the oil stains and the enormous white-painted arrows, to the edge. The boy with the key was sitting on the bonnet of one of the parked cars - there weren’t many cars inside, actually, and he had picked one of the cleanest. A Range Rover. I tried not to catch his eye. I had work to do, after all. I wanted to concentrate upon that. Actually there was something strangely insistent in his presence. I say strangely because it’s hard to pin down precisely by what means he communicated insistence. He did not speak, of course; and he did not seem any more agitated than usual. But somehow I sensed something amiss.

  Still, as I said, we had a job to do. The concrete balustrade was rough-textured, and the stone ceiling loomed overhead. We had a good view down towards Westminster. Some token fighting was happening in that direction. The sounds of detonations carried easily; I could even see little cigar-puffs of grey and brown in amongst the clutter of roofs and office blocks.

  I set up one of the automatic cannon, fiddling with its tripod legs. Simic did the other one. Stupid thoughts kept crowding into my head. I remember this with peculiar vividness - the daftness of the thoughts, I mean. I ignored key-boy. I looked back across the mostly deserted parking tier, and thought: it’s a pity those white painted arrows are bent - they were curved, you see, to direct traffic round and up the ramp, or else round and down - or they’d go nicely in the quiver of the same giant who wields the moon for shield. But there’s no point in broken arrows. No military point, I mean.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘Is your girlfriend going to be OK about stowing your kit at her place?’

  This was on my mind. I was wondering if it was going to be a problem for me in Cambridge. Not that I expected Harry to be a problem. I was confident he wouldn’t try and turn me in, given our history. But Harry had a new partner now, and he - on the few occasions we had met - had manifested a focused and intense hostility towards me, a hatred that was prompted by more than the fact that Harry and I had once been a couple. I don’t know where the loathing came from: not the severity of it, I mean. I can’t say I cared. The point was: Harry would accept me for a few days; but Joram might well call the police as soon as I turned up.

  ‘She’ll be OK with that,’ Simic said. ‘She’s pretty boho.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘She’s in a band.’

  ‘I don’t mean,’ I said, sighting the cannon and twisting the dial to angle the barrel further downwards, ‘what she does in her spare time.’

  ‘Seriously,’ he said. He was checking the wiki, noting the advancing line of enemy. ‘That’s her job.’

  ‘Your girlfriend is a rock star?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She has no day job?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fuck off. She knows you’re NMA?’

  He didn’t answer that. So I tried: ‘What’s her band called?’

  ‘They’re called Monkey Fetus.’

  ‘And I have never heard of them.’

  ‘Unsurprisingly, since you refuse to listen to any music released after 1979.’

  ‘Not true!’ The webcam refused to settle into its bracket, and I fiddled with it, and swore, and fiddled with it. ‘I own, uh, dozens of post 79 albums.’ The webcam went into its slot.

  ‘Dozens?’

  ‘Well. Some.’

  ‘We’re set here,’ said Simic.

  We jogged back to the stairwell. The aerial growling noise of jets had swelled a little. Distant silhouettes dashing about the sky like blown leaves:
it was the royal air force bashing their snouts on the firmament. I was singing as we went:And what can a poor boy do?

  ’Cept to sing for a rock and roll band?

  ’Cos in sleepy London—

  At that moment the world exploded around me.

  It must have been like this inside the Twin Towers, when the world changed. One minute you are moving through an interior space, designed as such things are to fit neatly about a human being, enveloping without being claustrophobic. The next, with a roar and a hugely forceful compression, a snapping-over of the air upon itself, everything disintegrates. It’s all dark, suddenly and you feel (your heart like an epileptic doing its fish-flop on the hard ground) that it will be dark for ever now. The walls have turned into a sandstorm, and the ceiling comes down, and the floor turns to fire, and everything clatters and shears and burns.

  Darkness.

  A cosmic finger had flicked the Great Mute Switch and all the sounds of existence had been instantly eliminated - all sound with once exception: for there was one lone football referee, standing on some impossible drizzly school football pitch somewhere, and blowing on his whistle with impressive force and consistency.