The Testimony

by James Smythe

  As the day went on a message started coming out from some of the US groups, demanding the removal of their President, that he be put on trial for war crimes. In the UK we crossed our fingers, because it looked like they might actually have a point.

  Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

  We called the National Guard into action, sending units to as many of the riots as we could, and what we got was about 60 per cent of them willing to do their jobs. The rest just didn’t turn up for work. The UN told us to withdraw from Iran; we told them that we wouldn’t be doing it, that they were welcome to send in peace-keepers to help us out, but that without us policing it, the chances of Iranian insurgents gaining access to their weapons – their nukes, we meant, because we damn well knew that there were silos, and that they had had those silos for nearly a decade – the chances of them trying to blow us up were very high indeed.

  The news stations started speculating that POTUS would step down, but there wasn’t a chance of that. He was voted in to keep the United States safe, and he did just that. He would have to answer to Congress, we knew – especially because they weren’t consulted before we attacked, and there’d be hell to pay for that – and our approval rating would be zapped, but we had another three years to worry about wrenching that up; and we would, once people saw that what we did was for the best.

  Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

  I didn’t hear from Leonard all day. He said that I should stay home, make sure to record him if he ended up on the news, but he didn’t. There were far too many people for that to happen, and his protest was just a drop against the sheer scale of some of the others. I kept checking his blog, updating people as to where he was, but most of New York was a sea of signs and chants that day, so there was no way that anybody was going to find anybody else. And the videos of them on the internet! Every possible cause you can think of, somebody somewhere was marching for it. For every Leonard there was somebody screaming for the death of any and all of what they called Sand-niggers. It was grotesque, it really was.

  I didn’t actually think about that terrorist’s threat all day, not really, not until one news report not long before I went to bed, where some woman in the crowd shouted something about how, if we left Iran now, they might not release the weapon in the video. I didn’t even think about it until then, that it was a threat that people were really taking seriously. Poor thing looked terrified, I remember. Of course, they kept saying, on the news, that there was no such weapon; they had specialists on, people in the know, and they all laughed at the prospect. A week before, though, and all those scientists would have been laughing at the concept of God, so what did they know?

  Leonard managed to get a phone call through to me eventually, to tell me that he wasn’t going to be home. The networks were jammed tight, and it seemed like I couldn’t use my cell all day, but he managed to get through just as I was starting to worry. They’re probably jamming the calls, he said, ever the conspiracy theorist, to stop us organizing ourselves. Probably, I agreed, but I didn’t actually think that was true. We’re going to stay on the far side of Central Park, he said, and we’re going to pick this up again tomorrow, and we won’t stop until we’ve got what we want. I didn’t ask what it was that they actually wanted, because I was a realist, and I knew that they didn’t have a cat’s chance of actually getting it. When he had hung up I sat in the living room and said some prayers, to nobody in particular – I didn’t know which God I was praying to, certainly – but I said them, and hoped that that would be enough.

  Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow

  Anastasia was out at the university, because she was insistent that our lives continued, went on as before, but, of course, I did nothing – she always said that was my problem. Everybody that I know watched the news that day, did nothing else but watch the news, especially if they still lived here. The government kept making statements to us, to reassure us, but I think that they were nervous. It wasn’t that long ago that we were the biggest enemies of America, before the Arabs took over from us – I mean, I’m not saying we were the same threat, but my father always used to tell about the 1980s, and how it was hard for a while there. (There was a list of Hollywood films that he banned me from seeing, because he told me that the image of young Russians with guns, being so aggressive, would only run the risk of warping my mind.) The government kept telling us that we were fine, reinforcing our relationship with the United States – that was an exact phrase that was used, reinforcing – and saying that nothing would happen to us. When Anastasia got home, we said hello, like always, and I tried to ask her about her day, but she only wanted to watch the news as well. There were no classes, she said. The people at the university are starting to get restless, because the government aren’t telling us anything about The Broadcast, about what they are. To which I said, Well, of course they’re not, because they don’t know. Do you really think there’s anything they don’t know? she replied. Or if not our government, then the Americans? And I had to admit, she had a point.

  Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

  I was on the road heading toward LA when the footage of the terrorist hit the news, so I didn’t actually manage to hear about it. It made me laugh, when I finally did, stopping to sleep after twelve hours of constant movement; I kept thinking about how I missed everything when it happened. I was perpetually playing catch-up.

  Katy Kasher, high school student, Orlando

  Even with everything going haywire all around us, Mom couldn’t stop worrying about The Broadcast, or worrying about my not hearing it. I don’t think that the two were separated for her. We were gonna have Grammy and Gramps staying with us, because they had an apartment right in the centre of Miami, and Mom was worrying about the protests there, so she sent Dad to go and pick them up, and Mom and I sat on the sofa and watched The View and waited for them. They were talking about the war, and then the blonde one – the religious one – said something about how we were forgetting that Christ told us not to be afraid, that maybe we should trust our government. The other women on there went mad at that – It wasn’t Christ talking, We don’t know what it was, that kind of thing – and then Mom turned to me, asked me if I’d been reading my Bible. She had given me a copy – a second copy, her copy, that she knew worked, like mine might have something broken with it, or might not be quite holy enough to have the right effect – and wanted me to pray with it at night, before bed. I have, I said (even though I hadn’t), and then she said, I just want to know what it is that you did to affront Him, Katy. You’re such a good girl, and then this? There are paedophiles and murderers and rapists out there – there are terrorists out there! – who heard Him speaking to us, and you didn’t? What did you do?

  I ran to my room and called Ally, but she wasn’t there, so I locked my door and waited for her to call me back.

  Isabella Dulli, nun, Vatican City

  If there was one good thing about being in Vatican City when it happened, it was that there were no riots, no tension, not like there was everywhere else. Everywhere else, there was violence. When all the people are worshipping the same way, like they are drunk together and happy, singing, it’s a better situation than the alternative.

  BREAKDOWN

  Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

  The press referred to the incident as my having a breakdown, but it was actually the complete opposite: it was the clearest that my mind had been in years.

  We had another emergency Cabinet meeting because of the hospital situation, and they told us about people falling ill, getting sick, dying. There were some men in lab coats delivering a report to us, but they didn’t seem to have anything concrete. People are dying at an exponentially higher rate than in previous days or weeks, one of them said. What’s causing it? somebody asked, and they said, It’s a variety of things: some are dying from pre-existing conditions, cancers, diseases we knew that they had, and some have died of what we’d term n
atural causes. And the flu, the other lab coat said, some have died from complications arising from the flu. What do we do? the Deputy PM asked, and they suggested telling people to remain calm. We’re doing tests, they said, and we don’t know how long it’ll be before we know what’s happened. Could it be one of those animal flus, like we had at the start of the decade? somebody asked, and they shrugged. Could be, they said. When they had gone we discussed a curfew, to keep everybody under control; all the schools and businesses were shut anyway, so a curfew wasn’t far off. If there is something we need to stop it spreading, was the general logic, and you can’t argue with that. My mother’s ill, and she won’t last long, somebody said, so we really should think about ways that we can find out what this is. That was my breaking point, if memory serves. I stood up, and told them all that they were – and I rarely swear, but – fucking insane. We’re paddling a leaky raft, I said, and it’s clearly bloody sinking, so let’s either patch it or just abandon ship, yes? They all looked blank then, and the Deputy PM said, Well, Simon, we’re talking about ways to fix this, but we have to err on the side of caution. He smiled, as if that made it all alright.

  Then I quit, I said. We’ve let the Americans bomb a country that hadn’t done anything wrong; we’ve got riots and protests all over the country; people flooding to churches because they heard something speaking to them, something that might be scientifically plausible, or might actually be a fat man with a beard in the sky; and we’re sitting here discussing the latest turn of events, that people are dying for no bloody good reason, and we’re talking about it the same way that we fanny about discussing every other bloody thing that crosses our desks. We never get anywhere, with anything; we just bide our time until we have to make decisions. I think we’ve proven exactly how useless we are, so I quit. I walked out, down the stairs, shouted my resignation to the press and jumped into the first car I saw, told the driver to take me to my offices.

  I told my assistant what I had done as I packed my boxes, and she swore blue murder at me, because I had promised her a rise and now clearly wasn’t going to deliver it. Go home and observe the impending curfew! I said, and she stormed off. I went home before the paps turned up, didn’t put the news on. Instead I cooked a crispy duck from the freezer that I had been saving, finished reading a book on Orson Welles that I’d been putting off before because I never had the time.

  Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

  The day was the longest I had in my planner, packed full of appointments. It always gets like this, the receptionist told me, which I think she meant to sound reassuring, but I took it there and then that she was telling me to leave; maybe she had a spurned lover who was the doctor that I replaced, and he wanted his job back. My appointment for before lunch – which didn’t happen anyway, as lunch was always pushed back, and I ended up with room-temperature egg sandwiches from a machine that they had installed in the waiting rooms – was an emergency, it said, somebody who didn’t live in Bangalore. I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the man with the foot, but I was: as I forgot (or tried to forget) about Adele, I forgot about everything else in Bankipore – the smell, the dirt, the hotel, the camera crew, my family. That patient, and his dying, necrotic foot.

  He bundled into the room on crutches, dragging the foot behind him. Well now! he said, sounding almost happy to see me, this is a fortunate surprise! I said hello to him – I cannot remember his name now, another of the things that I forget – and he sat in the chair, lowering himself so clumsily. I stood and held my hands out as if I was going to help him sit, but I didn’t, though I don’t know why. I had touched so many people with worse illnesses over my life, but his foot … I could smell it through the bandage, through the air conditioning in the room, air conditioning which usually dragged every smell away apart from the strict stink of the disinfectant they used on the floors and surfaces. I tried to not vomit at the smell. Listen, the man said, my foot has got worse, you wouldn’t believe it. What are you doing here? I asked him, and he said, My daughter lives here, she paid for me to get the train here and visit her while I was sick, because I can’t walk well, you know. I saw that the bandage was the same one that I had put on him last; he noticed me looking at it. No, no, he said, sounding embarrassed, my daughter has washed the bandage you gave me, I have used antiseptic on the wound and kept it clean, like you said. He held his leg up, his foot out, as if he wanted me to take it. When I didn’t – because, I can’t tell you about the smell enough, how strong and revolting it was – he shrugged, crossed it over his good leg, started unwrapping the bandage. When it was done, I had never seen anything like it. I know it’s bad, he said; he kept eye contact, his eyes red, and he didn’t want to look at it. I’m sure it will be absolutely fine, I told him, there are very few problems like this that can’t be fixed. I was lying. You’ll need to go to the hospital, though; I can refer you. Can I call your daughter, get her to take you? No, he said, don’t bother her, I’ll go tomorrow morning. I can take you now, I said, you really should go, and I’ll make sure you get seen straight away. No, no, he said, but I insisted. I called for a taxi, told the receptionist where I was going, to cancel my appointments for the afternoon. I gave him a clean towel to wrap around his foot – I told him that it was because I wanted to keep it getting air, but really, I couldn’t bear to touch the limb in order to wrap real bandages on it – and we got in the back of the car. The journey only took a few minutes, but neither of us spoke, so it seemed like an eternity.

  The hospital wasn’t busy at all, and they rushed the man through. What’s his name? one of the nurses asked me when they were looking at him. I don’t remember, I said. You’re not family? No, no, I told her, I’m his doctor, at a clinic. I told her the name of the district I worked in and she nodded. Okay, we’ll let you know how he is. I can’t come through? I asked, but she shook her head. You can leave, or you can sit and wait. I chose to sit and wait. I telephoned the receptionist – Oh, you should stay there for the day, watch over him, she said, and I thought of her sneaking her lover back into my office, his old office, and letting him take on my workload – and then I put myself on those awful chairs in the corner of the room, near to the door through to the surgical wing so that the nurses wouldn’t forget that I was there. Once, the same nurse walked past me and smiled, and I said, I told him to come and see you days and days ago, before it got this bad, but he wouldn’t listen to me; what can you do? She didn’t answer me.

  Night came, and I asked them again, How is the man I came in with? He’s in surgery, the nurse told me. What for, what are they doing to him? I don’t know, she said. I’ll try and find somebody to let you know. But she didn’t, so I ended up lying on those chairs and trying to go to sleep.

  Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

  David’s funeral was very different to Patrice’s, first of all because it nearly didn’t happen. The churches were so busy that they said it would be weeks and weeks before they even thought about it, and the hospital wouldn’t keep the body in the morgue for long. It’ll need to be disposed of, they said, we’re too busy, too many bodies. They broke it down to something that basic; no room here, move along. David’s parents wouldn’t stop crying. We want to bury our son! they said, so we went to one of the private cemeteries, negotiated a price for a space. Jacques went to pick up his body by himself, driving David’s parents’ car. I offered to go, but he said that I should stay with them.

  Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

  I stood over his body and tried to tell myself that it wasn’t my fault, that he would have killed himself anyway, found a way to; but that gun. I kept seeing it, seeing the guy holding it up, the crazy guy with the beard, and then me taking it, because I thought it was, what? Funny? When I moved David’s body I had to do it by myself, put it on a trolley and wheel it to the car and bundle the black sack onto the back seat like I was a grave-robber, and the whole drive back I kept thinking that if I looked in th
e rear-view mirror he would be sitting there, hole in his face, begging me to stop it from ever happening.

  Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

  We buried him without any sort of religious service. He has come to us, proven Himself to us, and then David did this? We can’t do this in God’s name, in His light. We dug the hole and we put his body in, without a coffin, just in the ground. This is probably illegal, Jacques said, and he was right, I think, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that David was laid to rest. Even though they didn’t want it, I said a prayer as we threw the soil on, only whispered it, so nobody heard me saying it. Jolie came down with us, read something – she and David had a thing a while back, didn’t turn to anything, but she knew what he liked. She read a poem he used to love by Claude Royet-Journoud. It was a poem that sounded like it wasn’t meant to be read, you know? Of course, we didn’t even know he liked poetry in the first place. When the service was over, or when we were finished, Jacques stormed off. I chased after him but he had disappeared.