by James Smythe
Katy Kasher, high school student, Orlando
Mom had grounded me even though I didn’t actually do anything wrong. She was so scared about what it meant, that I didn’t hear The Broadcast, and she and my dad wanted to spend all their time either in church or praying, anyway. I thought she’d drag me along to church, try to get me healed, but I think she was ashamed. I had the internet, though, so I spent my time trying to find anything about people who didn’t hear The Broadcast. I figured that I couldn’t be the only one, and it took me ages to find anybody else, then I found this site, just some blog where somebody was asking if there was anybody else who hadn’t heard it, and it said to leave a comment, so I did, with my email address. She got back to me, like, a minute later, maybe.
Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh
I put the thing up on the web in the middle of the night, thinking, Well, it’ll take a few days for it to spread around Google, so I won’t hear anything for ages, but it fucking exploded, and I had hundreds of comments, which … God, I was so excited. Because I’d been thinking that I was all on my own there, for a while. Then I read the comments, and my God, that was an eye-opener. They were all from these religious whackos, saying, Oh, you’ll burn in hell, Oh, why doesn’t God love you, what did you do, Oh, guess we won’t be seeing you in heaven, all that sort of shite. It was like somebody took my spam filter and swapped cock references for ones to religion. I read through hundreds of them, and all just to find the one response I was after – the one that I needed, I reckon, to stop me from going completely batshit – from Katy, this girl in Orlando. Her email was amazing: Hello, I think I’m like you because I didn’t hear it either, everything here’s falling apart, here’s my Facebook page. She seemed like a sweet girl. I have no idea how I would have dealt with it when I was her age, feeling that alone. And it was really very trusting of her, maybe even stupidly so; I could have been anybody, and if any of those wankers thinking I should die because I didn’t hear The Broadcast, if any of them got a hold of her, fuck knows what they would do.
We swapped emails back and forth a bit, so I could check she wasn’t just another crazy, and then she sent me her phone number, so I called her and we swapped stories. I didn’t even know if you were real, she said. I assured her I was, and we chatted for ages and ages, about what it felt like, about the craziness of our parents – hers were proper Crazy Christians, mine were Catholic, and both our mothers had spent the last few days sellotaped to the pews in their churches. I was scared it was just me, she said. Me too, I told her, but this is better, because now we can just be scared together, eh? I gave her my details, told her I’d stay in touch, that she should call me if she wanted. About ten minutes after I hung up I saw this thing on the TV about the Mormons, and I wondered what the chances were of finding two other people who didn’t hear it in one day, because they had to be pretty fucking slim.
Joseph Jessop, farmer, Colorado City
My father, when he was alive, had been a tremendous man: full of vim, vigour, and he was righteous. He was the model for fatherhood, how I wanted to be for my children. I only ended up with the one child, in the end, though not from want of trying. I was my father’s first-born, so I had his name, a name that I gave to my own son as well. It’s the way that the line works. My second wife Eleanor always said that I was born to be a father; unfortunately, I was unable to give her the children that she desired, which meant we never grew as close as I would have liked, certainly not as close as Jennifer and I were. We had little Joseph – Joe – and that really sealed our marriage. I still wondered why I had been struck with the infertility, after my first child, but Ervil Smith, the Prophet, told me to wait. He was the conduit to God, the voice of our people, able to speak to God, to gain His counsel on matters that affected us all. When we first heard The Broadcast, it was Ervil Smith who told us that it was God’s way of testing the rest of the world, providing them with the opportunity to come and seek us out, to seek out the true way to His path. He said that we shouldn’t be afraid, and then The Broadcast returned, told us the same thing, and we all believed. Only, Joe didn’t hear God’s words.
We had always known that those who didn’t believe in the Lord would not be saved; that heaven was reserved solely for those people who trusted in the true word of the Lord Jesus Christ, His Father, and the Prophet Joseph Smith (who I was, myself, named for). When I was a younger man, my father had taken me to a mall in Tuscon, and we had spoken to anybody willing to listen to us about the word of the Prophet, no matter their religion: Christian, Jew, Church of the Latter-Day Saints. We had asked them why they believed as they did, and mostly they said, Well, it’s what we were taught to believe. My father told me that this was indoctrination; that they were swayed by older voices than ours telling them the way. If they’ll believe their parents, and their parents’ parents, surely they’ll believe the words of the true Prophet? So I went around and asked them to listen to the word of the true God, to be saved, but they turned me away. On the way back home that evening my father explained that they were just scared, afraid to hear the truth, and that it wasn’t their fault. It’s the will of God that they don’t hear Him, he told me, because God only speaks to those who He wants in His kingdom. That’s why we have the Godless. When the reckoning comes, they’ll learn and try to repent their ways, but we will have spent our lives earning our guarantees into His heaven, at His side. So when Joe couldn’t hear the voice, I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew that Ervil would; or that God would, and Ervil could ask Him.
I waited outside his office to see him for over an hour, because I wanted to speak to him at the first possible opportunity. Emma-Louise, his first wife, made me lemonade while I waited, spoke to me about my family, asked how we all were, and I did the same for her. She was one of eight wives, so it took her longer, but that was fine, because it kept my mind off the conversation that I knew was coming. Ervil didn’t like being asked to commune with the Lord, unless it was of highest importance. Eventually he opened his office door, invited me in. He wasn’t fully dressed; his tie hung around his neck, and he was buttoning his cuffs when I entered. Are you sure? I asked, and he waved my concern away. You’ve seen me swimming in the lake, Joseph; I’m sure you can stomach me doing up my tie in front of you. Everything fine in the shop? he asked, and I told him that it was. Excellent news, he said, but that means that there must be another issue. He smiled, cocked his head, and I wondered if he knew already, if this was his way of testing me. It’s Joseph, my son, I said. Young Joe. Still no reaction from him. When we heard God speak, he didn’t hear it.
Ervil sat bolt forward as if I had scored him. He heard nothing? His whole manner changed, kindly to fractious, friendly to formal. I wondered if you would confer with the Lord about this, to find out if there’s a special reason for this, I asked. He got up from his chair and paced the back of the room. I hated it when he paced. I’ll speak to him, he said, I’ll do it now. Meet me with the boy in ten minutes outside the front of this building, when we’ll have an answer to what we should do for your family. I fetched Joe from eating his breakfast, cleaned his face for him. He wasn’t much of a talker, but I told him to be on his best behaviour. Whatever the Prophet says to you, you tell him how much you love God, you hear? He nodded. You’re going to be fine, I told him.
The Prophet was already outside his house when we got there, but he didn’t say anything as we approached, just stood there like a cowboy, braced. God says that He knows of your boy, he told us. He says that, by not hearing His divine words, he is an abomination of His creation. He says that I am to punish the boy. Joe hid behind my legs, and I told Ervil that he had to be sure about this. It’s punishment, Joseph, he said, and then the boy will hear the words of the Lord. This is God’s word, Joseph. Do you really want to go against God’s word? He reached around my body, grabbed at the nape of my son’s neck, threw him down onto the soil, sending puffs of dust up all around us. You will learn from this punishment, boy, he said, you will learn that there is
a true Father, and when He speaks to you, you will listen. Jennifer had to hold me back, but a crowd was swelling, people on their way to work, or just milling around, and they left a circle around Ervil and Joe, like it was some sort of dance. Get up, boy, Ervil said. He was crying the whole time, that’s important, sobbing and snivelling, snot running down his face. Ervil slapped him. Stop crying, boy, and take this like a man. Another slap, another, and this one made Joe fall down again. God told me to lash the boy! shouted Ervil, ever the showman. He had a box with him, a case, that I didn’t see until that moment, and he opened it and pulled out a bullwhip, thick and tarred and cracked from tip to tassel. I stepped in. You will not use that on my son, I said, and that made the Prophet angry. You’re questioning the word of God? he asked. Maybe you need some as well. He snapped it backwards – it flew out, must have been two whole body-lengths of a man – then forward, in a swoop, and the tail drew itself across my legs. Your son has a demon in him! Ervil shouted. God would have me strike the demon out! He raised the whip again, to strike at Joe this time, and I grabbed it, stopped him. Leave my son alone, I said. He bared his teeth, so I pushed him backwards, to keep space between us.
He’s only a child, I said, loud enough that the crowd would hear us, he doesn’t have a demon. You would question God’s word this blatantly? asked Ervil, and I replied that God had spoken to us all, and that it was obvious to me now that none of this – of Colorado City, of the book of Mormon, of Ervil’s speaking to God – none of it was real. Ervil acted as if he had received an arrow to his heart. You must have a devil in you as well, Joseph Jessop, so I will whip it out for you. He swung for me and I stepped forward again, punched him in his eye, and he flopped backwards like he was made out of straw. We’re leaving, I said, because this is no way to treat a child. It’s no way.
Jennifer and I packed the car, got Joe on the back seat. She sat with him, to comfort him, and I drove. We barely had any money, very few clothes; most of what we had was shared, or traded. We asked Eleanor if she wanted to come, and she said that she did not; and because we hadn’t had any children, there was nothing to make her. So I wished her well, and we drove away from Colorado City. We stopped in a diner on the outskirts of one of the nearby towns, ate food quietly. They had a television on in the background, and when I went to use the washroom I noticed an advertisement for a show, saying that they wanted to hear from people whose lives had been changed because of what they were all calling The Broadcast. They were willing to pay handsomely, the lady on the promotion said, so I noted the telephone number and called them from the payphone right outside the diner. They said that they wanted to see us in California as soon as we could drive there. I said that we could be there by the following morning, if I drove through the night.
Angelica Role, television presenter, Los Angeles
The post-Broadcast times represented my highest ratings period since we pulled out of Iraq five years ago. Then we had a two-week Coming Home! celebration, interviews and video journals and reuniting families live on air, and the ratings were a solid 3, going to a 4.2 in the Female 25-to-40 bracket, a 4.6 in the Female 40-plus. Those were Oprah-retirement numbers, and we knew – we thought – that we wouldn’t see numbers like that again, then The Broadcast happened. We had a week of solid reaction pieces booked, mostly people talking about where they were, what they were doing, what they felt The Broadcast had been telling them, talking about the suicides, the aftermath, we had atheists spinning it, we had everything; but we needed something extra-special to end the week on. The easiest people to get on the show were experts, because they wanted to talk about what they knew, or thought they knew, and there was only so much religious posturing that an audience could take. Nobody liked to watch people argue about their beliefs; they wanted gossip and villains. You want the viewer to feel better about themselves, and feel sorry for somebody else; that’s where you hit the golden ratio, the midway point between feeling smug and piteous. So I had the researchers working twenty-four-seven to find somebody who had a different spin on it all, something that might get the numbers up a teensy bit higher than they already were, and on the Thursday night the Jessops fell into our lap.
It was perfect, really: a religion that most people didn’t understand, faded in recent years but still there, little more than a cult; a villain, in Ervil Smith, the leader of the place, a deranged old figurehead; a hero in the Jessop family, running away because the youngest boy was in danger, abandoning their belief system in favour of what is right; and, last but not least, a boy who … You know, I was about to write that he had something almost supernatural about him, because he didn’t hear the voice of God. That’s so strange. But he didn’t, and that was something completely different. He gave us every one of our tick-boxes and more, so I wiped the slate for the Friday show, completely blocked it out for them, and we started running advertisements the evening before about it. Tomorrow, on The Role Call, we’ll show you something you’ve never seen: the boy that God forgot.
SECOND COMINGS AND DRAGONS
Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East
We stayed in Bodrum for that week, keeping as low a profile as possible, packed into a hotel near the airport while they worked out what to do with us. It was one of the bonuses of not working for the army in a traditional sense: you got to stay in hotels, because there was actually a budget assigned to your excursion. When word came through that they wanted us to move, we were on the road within half an hour, because that’s the way we did it; we got bonuses for being prompt, for getting to destinations on time, for other aspects, mostly casualty- or control-related. We were accompanying some of the regular army boys, and it was sad to see their APCs, which weren’t much more than vans with benches in the back. We were in fully reinforced hummers for this part; we had air conditioning. It bred resentment between them and us, but we couldn’t help that; if they were in our position, they’d have done the same. We headed to Yüksekova, tiny place, where we made camp just on the outskirts (on land covered in so much dry bloody brush that it would have gone up in seconds if you so much as broke a glass there), and the whole time the villagers stood watching us. One of them offered to bring us food, so we said alright, and we got these awful dog-on-a-stick type things, gave us all the shits. Last thing you want when there’s not even any bloody bushes around the place; squatting over sand’s one of the most ignominious things you can suffer. We got a field kitchen set up, put some tents up for the sleepers, spoke to some of the locals – we were always nice, always friendly, because that didn’t cost anything – and we waited. The army boys had already moved on, headed right into Iran on whatever their mission was, but we were held back. That was another perk of being with a private military contractor: you got to bide your time, because you weren’t as expendable. Sad fact, but a true one. If you died, somebody somewhere lost money. If an army boy dies, it’s a casualty of war, a name on a plaque near a statue; PMC lads were a far more costly expense.
Turkey was a trick, of course, because the Muslim thing ran through there as well. You could see it in their Prime Minister’s face on the telly when he pledged his allegiance to the rest of Europe, asking himself what mattered more: a possibility of religious sanity, or the delicate fragility of the European Alliance? So he gave us permission to use the country as we pleased, and the British government got their boys here, another five or six of us PMCs, all in case this situation exploded in the West’s face. They were worried about Iran – or Iraq, or even Pakistan, at a push – reacting badly to The Broadcast, so we waited to see what would happen. Don’t think they counted on the Yanks throwing their weight around the way they did, and that made our orders shift slightly: if Iran looked like it was going to launch something, we were to step in. If the Americans looked like they were going to launch something? We ran like fuck. We had to sit and wait until something happened, so we did. We played cricket on the dusty fields – dust so bad you couldn’t see the ball coming towards you if the b
all was too fast, so we had to do it underarm, slowly – and we played football with the kids from the village, but they were vicious little fuckers, slicing your feet out from under you at a moment’s notice. One of them, Urkhan, was a shover, and he didn’t care if he went down with you, as long as you didn’t score. The ground was so rocky it’d tear chunks out of your knees, but they all escaped unscathed, because the skin on their knees was so scarred and hard already, from years of playing there. We spent post-match sitting on the side pouring iodine over ours. Urkhan wanted to be a waiter, to move to Istanbul, so he was learning English, one of the few that could understand us. When we got our orders to move out, to head into Iran, we told him, told him to thank the rest of the village for their hospitality. Don’t die, he said, and he grinned like the scar-riddled little shit that he was.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
We managed to intercept a bomb in the Rockefeller Center, and that was really the last one we were willing to let through the cracks. POTUS wanted to know how it was happening, how we hadn’t stopped the terrorists making it into the country. The best we had was that they had been there all along, sitting, waiting. They might even have been born here, I said, and that terrified him. The acceptable face of terrorism was the stereotype. They flew over on a plane, C4 packed into their turbans; the thought that they could be here already was far worse. Why are they doing this? he asked, and again, I didn’t know. If I knew we’d have been able to end it all much sooner, but I didn’t, so we couldn’t.
I’ve never had issues with decision-making. It’s easy: you make a decision, you stand by it, and you refuse to let that decision define you. That was Obama’s mistake, W’s mistake, Clinton’s mistake. They let their indecision define them, define their presidency, and that was something that we wanted to avoid. So I could feel as guilty as I wanted about what we did, what we ordered, but we had to live with it and work from that point forward rather than worrying if it was the right choice in the first place. The UN was stepping in, asking us to wait it out, saying that we were stepping over our jurisdiction, but there’s a point comes where decorum and diplomacy become moot. We had terrorist threats against our people, and there was only one language that those people understood.
