The Testimony

by James Smythe

  The first bomb in the city went off somewhere down toward Brooklyn, and we heard it just before the second, which was at the Islamic Center, down by Ground Zero. The third was at the corner of 23rd and 5th, and that’s the one we physically felt, that shook the building. We have to get out, I said to everybody who was left in the studio – four of us? five? – and I grabbed a satchel, some batteries, one of the portable Super-HD cameras, got my producer to switch the live feed to sync with the camera. It would be the only footage worth watching, I knew that, so we owed it to ourselves, to the people, to keep it on the air. I was a runner in high school – had the mile down to four-oh-three, at best – and so I took the camera myself, one of the production staff, and we went down to the streets and headed toward the blast. I don’t even think we locked the doors to the studio when we left.

  Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

  I stayed under the desk for minutes and minutes, even well after the shaking stopped, because I was too terrified to move. I could just hear the screaming and the car alarms, and I didn’t know what was happening.

  Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

  They threw their bombs at us to counteract the missiles that we had heading their way. They didn’t have warheads, didn’t have silos, so they went back to basics, had men on the streets to hammer away with bombs, bringing us to our knees. We knew that they couldn’t win (if you wanted to think about it in those terms), and they probably knew it as well, so this was about damaging us, which it did. It was tic-tac-toe: you fire what you’ve got at us, we’ll retaliate.

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

  We want power. It’s all we care about, as heavy-handed a concept as that is. It’s why cities fall, economies collapse, toys get stolen on school playgrounds. We saw that He was gone, if He was ever there in the first place, and we said, I want that, so we tried to take it. When we went to the moon we planted a flag and claimed it as ours; not a flag of the world, but a flag of the United States of America. You could bet that, if push came to shove and we were dividing that rock up, we’d claim ownership.

  We had a boat on Lake Ontario. It was Livvy’s favourite place in the world, she always said, so I took her there and we unmoored, went out a ways into the lake. We had enough food for a few weeks on the water without worrying about coming back – there was a decent-size freezer, and we always kept it stocked with dinners, meat for the barbecue – so we set the anchor down a hundred feet from shore and stood on the deck. Couldn’t hear a sound from anything but us and the birds in the trees. They won’t get us here, I told Livvy, but she didn’t look like she believed me. We both took the medicine Meany gave me, gulped it down with champagne – seemed right, because we were both still there, and we didn’t know how long that would last – and we toasted POTUS, toasted our own good health, and crossed our fingers.

  Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

  After an hour I could still hear the screams from the street, the apartment grey with all the dust that was flying around, so I decided to go down to the street, to see what was going on. It took me ten minutes to get out from under the desk; I’ve never been a fraidy cat, but that day … We lived on West 81st, only a block over from the Museum of Natural History, and that was where the screams and dust seemed to be coming from, so I ran down the road – I mean, I don’t run, but I can walk damned quickly when I need to – and then I saw it, or what used to be it. People were screaming and climbing over the rubble, and I say rubble, but we’re talking about chunks of the building the size of boulders, of cars, and people scrambling over them. I helped a woman climb down and she started shouting about her daughter, saying she was somewhere under the rubble, pulled away from me, climbed back up the way that she’d come. I walked around to the front and saw that the whole building was gone, along with most of the houses on the front of the block, and as I went another one started to splinter off. Standing on the street was a man with a placard, like one of Leonard’s protestor friends, just days and days too late to do any actual protesting. The End Is Nigh, the sign said, so I shouted at him, What did this? Did you see anything? and he replied, It was a bomber, ma’am, and then he stood aside, like a magician pulling back a curtain, to show the hole behind the museum, where the houses had pulled themselves down, splayed themselves across the road, into the park, even. In the park I could see how roofs had smashed into hillocks and had pulled apart one of the bridges, debris over the road that runs through, the courts, a playground, the stage. It was everywhere; I couldn’t see where it ended. The man with the sign was standing behind me and I asked him if this was the only bomb that had gone off, and he said, There are another three or four, I think. I heard the bangs, one after another. Like dominos, I said, and he said, Yes, I suppose. We both looked at the museum, looking like it had been crushed by one of those Monty Python feet. My name’s Meredith, I said, and he said, Pleasure to meet you, Meredith, but then didn’t tell me his name, and I thought that it might be rude to ask, if he didn’t want to offer it.

  Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

  Everything looks different from street level, and that’s something that you forget when you’re up in the studio, talking about everything almost – almost – hypothetically. The people look sparse from the studio, and then you get down there, they’re still around, the panic making them run from their hotels and apartments. I’d almost forgotten that the city wasn’t just me and the crew for a while. Everybody exists in the microcosm of New York, isn’t that what they say? Every type of person? They were all there with me, and none of them had a clue what was happening, and they were all running the way that I wasn’t. I went toward the smoke, filming everything, the people running, the cracks in the road, and then I was there when the bomb blew in Trump Tower, and I managed to be there as it collapsed in on itself, this mass of tar-black glass and steel plunging forward. I got it all on digital, every single second: from the moment that it broke, to the moment that the dust threw itself up, to the moment that we were engulfed in it.

  Katy Kasher, high school student, Orlando

  I told Ally I wanted to give up on the planes, that there wasn’t anything going to be leaving any time soon. She already knew that, but she was hanging on for me. There was a man in the airport watching something on his phone, saying that there were bombs going off in NYC, and that more were expected, and that the government had launched missiles or something. It says that we should expect massive casualties, the guy said, they’re telling everybody to stay inside, get under doorframes if anything goes off near where you are. That made us worry; five minutes later he said that they were evacuating New York City, and I told Ally that we should leave. Alright, Ally said, we’ll go back to the flat, see what we can do, try and phone your mother again. We were halfway back along the road when she said, I’ve got an idea, and she took an exit, headed toward the freeway, the signs for England. Where are we going? I asked, and she said, Liverpool. What’s there? Boats, she said.

  Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow

  The roads to Inta were clogged, all the buses down, and the rail was gone, so I stole a car – which, I am not ashamed to say, was something that I learned to do as a youth, when it seemed like something that was cool to do. I stole one of those big ones with the show grip at the front, and when it was fitted it looked like some sort of tank. I stole it from a car lot. I didn’t know how far the petrol would get me, so I stole a few large bottles of that as well – another trick I picked up as a wayward youth, siphoning them off from the other cars with a hose – and kept them on the back seat. The roads were hellish all through Moscow, either with the people still leaving or just from their abandoned cars along the roads, so it was slow, but I made it eventually. The drive to Inta was horrific, because the snow hit as I got further north – this was after maybe a full day of driving – and I had to stop and rest, sleep. I found a garage that was shut in a village, but it had a v
ending machine, so I had potato chips, four bags, and drank soda, and then I slept in the car, parked next to the petrol pumps, under the roof, even though I had to leave the heating on to stop myself freezing. (That made me worry about the battery in the car, but it was that or freeze to death, so.) In fact, I got so hot that I woke up in the night sweating, dreaming about the people in the church. I didn’t go back to sleep, even though it was still dark. The snow made me worry that I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, but the tank attachment made driving through the snow easy. I knew that it would take me the rest of the day to drive home, so I got on with it.

  Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

  Piers and I got a Starbucks from some enterprisingly illustrious – or foolish, such are the blurred lines – young lady who had taken over a branch by herself, using her family as baristas. They didn’t run the tills, and cash went straight into pockets. Five pounds, she said when I went to pay, and I gave her a note. She didn’t even look up; straight into the apron pocket. Fair enough, I said. We sat in the park and drank them and Piers told me about himself, who he was, what he did; and I did the same, only I didn’t tell him about Dotty, that she had died. I didn’t want sympathy. We had a brief moment where we both wondered if the other didn’t know more about the situation – the bombings, the sickness – than we were letting on, he being a soldier, me being a politician. (Sounds like the fine beginnings of a musical, I joked.) But, of course, neither of us knew anything; why should we have been any different from the rest of the populace?

  We walked back along the river, because Piers asked about Westminster, and I said that we should go and have a look. We walked for most of the afternoon, and I said something about how much I had been walking the past few days, back and forth, to and fro, and I said, It’s a miracle that I’m still as chubby as I am, and Piers said, completely off the cuff, that I wasn’t at all fat, told me not to be stupid, and I thought how absolutely implausible it was that there, then, I might actually meet somebody.

  Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East

  When we got to the site Simon flashed his pass, and after some arguing and fuss about having to get something from the far end of the building it still worked. It was empty, totally empty. That building is eerie when it’s empty. He took me to the House of Lords and we sat on the benches and laughed. If there’s nobody here, and there’s nobody in the Commons, who’s running this place? I asked, and Simon said, Well, I suppose we are. He was joking, but it took me a few seconds to get it.

  Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

  The man with the placard and I were in Central Park along with the rest of New York City, it seemed; the order had been given to evacuate Manhattan, and people were assembling in the park as if this were the world’s biggest fire safety point. Do you think that it’s the end of days? asked the man, and I was about to answer when we heard the snap. (It took me back to when Leonard and I had just married; we went on holiday to Greece, and we did walks, walked everywhere. I fell down a slope on the second-to-last day, landed funny, and heard the snap of a stick before I hit the bottom. Leonard raced down, asked me if I was alright, and I said that I was fine, and then I tried to stand and couldn’t. Don’t look! Leonard said, but it didn’t hurt, so I did, I looked, and my bone was right through the skin. That was the noise I heard, the same snap, but louder, coming from the direction of Manhattan, and I realized there and then that most everything would remind me of Leonard from that point onward, I suppose.) Run, the man with the sign said, We have to run, and then we saw the first of the buildings on the edge of the park fall, down by where the Apple Store used to be, the site of the very first attack we had days – weeks? months? it felt like – before. It began with a whimper, not a howl, as Leonard would have said; the building, I couldn’t even tell you what it was, some tower block of offices, but it collapsed in on itself, and the smoke began to roar down the streets like this was some awful movie. This wasn’t the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building; it was just a faceless office block, and it looked like it had been pulled out of the dirt and daintily tossed aside, toward the park. It happened so slowly. Run, the man said again, and we did. Everyone in the park did, or they just stood there, staring, but you have two choices in that situation, and my logic was, This could be life or death, and I wasn’t ready to join Leonard, not yet. We ran back to where my apartment was, because that was the only place that I could think to go.

  Do you have a car? the man asked, and I did. It was Leonard’s; I hadn’t driven in years. Can you drive? I asked, and he shook his head, but, right then, driving was going to be faster than running, so we climbed in and I took the wheel, and we went. Are you scared? I asked the man, and he looked at me, blank, and I smiled. Because of my driving, I said, and I realized that that, then, there, was the first joke that I had made in a long time.

  Do you think that God’s abandoned you? asked the man as I drove, clinging to the wheel, and I said, Honestly? If He was here in the first place, I don’t see how He could give up on us now. The man nodded, as if that placated him.

  Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

  When it became obvious that my sister wasn’t coming back, that she wasn’t going to make contact or reply to messages I left on her mobile, I tried to call Audrey. I don’t know what came over me, what I was going to say, but I dialled the number and she wasn’t there, so I tried calling my place, still no answer. I don’t know why it mattered to me, to speak to her then, but it did, so I left a message on my own machine telling her to call me, telling her where I was. As I was talking my mouth was full of blood, so I ran my finger along my gumline and my teeth pushed themselves out one by one. It was like they had never been fixed in in the first place. I found mouthwash in my sister’s bathroom, swilled to get rid of the taste, counted the teeth that I had left – nearly single digits – and then got on my bike again. I was going down her road when I remember a car coming out of a driveway, and I swerved but I wasn’t quick enough, and it thrashed into me, sent me sideways and forwards. I remember – it took hours, it felt like, because I had so many things going through my head – but I remember that I knew it was the end, because with the world the way that it was, with people dying from colds, with their bodies not healing from injuries, where I thought that I would die from just the blood in my mouth where my teeth used to be; I knew that a crash like that would be enough to end it all for me.

  Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

  I woke up, showered, got out and was dressing when my phone buzzed. It was Ally, sending me a picture of her and a girl that I guessed must have been Katy, standing and looking freezing cold in front of a gigantic ship, one of those ocean liners, white and blue. We’ll land in a week, said the note with the picture.

  I went down the bus to show the Jessops, and I realized that Jennifer wasn’t in bed any more: she was at the stove, cooking eggs. You would not believe how much better I feel, she said, and Joseph said the same, that his cough was gone. You think it’s over? he asked.

  Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

  As soon as I woke up I knew that I should have died; that I had taken enough pills to kill me, that I should have been a goner. I was covered in sick – mine, I assumed – and soaking wet from sweat, from where I had pissed myself, but I was alive. I pushed myself up to kneeling, to all fours, and I heaved again, this black-red mess of bile, half-caps of tablet shells drifting in it like buoys. The door was still shut; it was night-time, and I couldn’t see anything, no light from anywhere but the emergency exit sign barely visible at the far end of the hall, and it was silent, absolutely silent. That part was too much to deal with, so I started making noises to myself, little grunts as I used the wall to get to my feet, started talking myself through what I was going to do. I’m alive, I said.

  I went to the window I had come in through, looked out, put my hands on the sill to help heave myself out of the room and realized tha
t my bad hand, somehow, God knows how, didn’t hurt, wasn’t even half as swollen as it had been. I pulled the condom off it, unwrapped the bandages and there it was, pink again, still covered in blood and pus, but there, under it all was the beginnings of a scab; thin, new, fragile, but a scab all the same.