by James Smythe
ANIMALS IN THE DARK
Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh
I get seasick something rotten, which I didn’t tell Katy, partly because I forgot, partly because I didn’t want to make her worry about it, because that makes me even more sick. Nobody wanted me to be more sick than I already was, I’ll tell you that for nothing. We got onto the boat by using Katy again, getting her to beg with the man on the dock, saying that her family were at home. The boat wasn’t charging the passengers, even; it was a mercy run, they called it, to get people back home. Like a hijack, I joked, but I don’t think it was that far from the truth. Everybody involved was employed by the company that owned the boats, but still. Even the captain seemed hazy on the legality of taking the boat out like that, but we didn’t argue. I’m a lawyer, I said; any problems, I’ll fight your case. They packed us all on, nearly four thousand of us – and there was a thing on the wall that said the boat was licensed to carry two and a half thousand, so that made me worry that we were going to just start sinking somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic – and most didn’t have a room or anything; Katy and I found a spot in one of the dining halls, set ourselves up in a corner. I’d taken the sleeping bags from the boot of the car, some sandwiches, a positively grotesque amount of digestives we got from a service station that was still, somehow, operating, and we settled in. There was water, there were vending machines, there were people offering to head to the kitchens and cook some meals up; it was all rather chummy, actually. Very World War 2. We were by the loos as well, in case I needed to dash for them, and after I was sick the first time Katy asked me if it was because of the man stationed next to us, this fat, lumbering oaf of a creature, stuffed to the gills with underarm sweat and with only a single pair of socks to his name. That made me laugh so much I nearly chucked again. The captain made announcements and apologized about the lack of entertainment on the ship. I’m sure you understand, he said, which we did, of course, and we weren’t even paying, so we were all pretty forgiving. Still, a seven-day trip with chuff-all to do but play cards? This is already dull, Katy said when we weren’t even neck-and-neck with Ireland.
After I was sick for the sixth or seventh time that day – which was pretty fucking tiresome, let me tell you – I lay on the floor with my eyes shut and listened as Katy struck up a conversation with fat-and-smelly. I shut my eyes and just listened. He asked her why we were travelling, and she said that she was heading home, because she couldn’t get hold of her parents, and she was worried, and he said that he was sorry, that he had somebody die as well. Katy said, No, they’re not dead. The sweaty man then told her that if they were dead, it was probably because of their lack of faith. He told her about the Church of the One True God, how they thought that, when God left, everybody who didn’t believe in him in their heart of hearts died, that was what the illness was. I had a wife, he said, and she didn’t believe, not truly. She twisted her ankle, and the next day she didn’t wake up. I could smell him as he talked, big fucking sweaty bastard. God works in mysterious ways, young lady, he said. I was worried that Katy would set off, say something, but she just turned to me, leant over and whispered, I’ll bet he used to be Catholic, which made me laugh, only because I was, technically, and she just hadn’t ever asked.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
I was down by myself in the labs, because everybody else was still helping upstairs. True to form, I wasn’t making progress – that whole period of time was the most sterile part of my career in terms of actually being able to do what I was paid to do, what I loved doing – but I wasn’t going to waste even more time moving satellites and punching numbers. I was getting messages flagged every few minutes on the intranet: possible contagious agents released in Iran; lists of where the bombs were going off; lists of possible targets, places that should up their security; lists of where the US government was going to attack next; and, finally, intel about Israel, of all places, saying that they were gearing up to launch something, and recommending that pre-emptive measures be taken. Brubaker had left, that was common knowledge at that point, and he had been my only contact; I didn’t know anybody else that I could phone and ask what the fuck they were doing.
Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City
We didn’t know any of this at the time, because we were on the streets, barely alive; my producer was coughing up her lungs, and I was trying to check that the camera was okay, scrabbling around like animals in the dark. The dust – the smoke, really – was so thick it was everywhere, like sand, but I persevered, and we had it running, though I didn’t know if the signal to the broadcasting station was still working. I filmed anyway. But we didn’t know about Israel, about what was happening there. If you put together a timeline, it’s even hazy as to when we launched against them. Afterwards, it would be claimed that it was a mistake, a huge mistake, a malfunction, but I didn’t believe that, because we managed to destroy half of the West Bank, most of Jerusalem. It was targeted, because there was a silo there, the one that they claimed they didn’t have but the whole world knew that they did.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
When you remove the humanity from government you’re left with decisions made behind closed doors, and opportunities grasped with both hands. To this day nobody knows who ordered the attack on Israel, if there was an attack ordered; everybody claims it was a mistake, even my most trusted contacts, the ones who have told me everything else that happened. I pushed everybody who ever trusted me, and there’s nothing. It was a mistake, they all say. We didn’t mean to hit them. What reason could we have had to attack Israel? How about, I say, the fact that we did nothing but worry about their nuclear capabilities since before Obama was in power, even? That we spent billions of dollars on intel and spies and research into exactly what they were doing? That every head of every country would have breathed a sigh of relief when they found out that the nukes we knew that they had were destroyed?
Sad truth is, it helped in the long run. They were in no position to do anything about it, because the missiles we fired only blew up land that wasn’t doing anything – officially, according to Israel – and that, technically, didn’t have silos or research factories on it. They admitted that those things did exist, we had them over a barrel. It was an opportunity, and somebody seized it. That’s the constant, ongoing truth of war, right? They could blame it all on the Vice President, but nobody’s saying a word. We didn’t find out that he was dead until a few days after it was all over, so he might not have even been in power when the attack was ordered. I don’t suppose it matters; somebody was in power, and they made choices. We live with them. Israel had nukes, chemical weapons, biological warfare. They refused to sign treaties, refused to turn over their materials, their research. They were a constant potential threat to pretty much every nation of the globe, so something would have had to have been done eventually. Maybe it was pre-emptive; maybe it was the accident they claimed it was. Either way, it was a problem solved with no risk of another war at the other end of it. What would I have done in the same position? No idea. Really, none.
Livvy and I were making the bed, trying to get the boat habitable when we heard the bang, and I screamed at her to get down, a reaction based on years and years of security-awareness training. We watched out of the windows of the bedroom as something – and it was a beautiful, clear day, the sort you get once a year, when everything is just blue – but something was rising, in the distance. Livvy asked if it was DC, but we couldn’t see that far, so I guessed it was Pittsburgh, probably, maybe Akron. Livvy said that it was the colour of sunflowers, but … I don’t know. I don’t know, if knowing exactly what the colour really was – the damage it could cause, the numbers of deaths it would bring about, because I had that information on sheets of paper in the drawers of my old office – I don’t know if that made it tainted, because to me it was the most rancid fucking yellow I’d ever seen.
Dafni Haza, politi
cal speechwriter, Tel Aviv
My mother and I watched the news as Jerusalem was destroyed, as most of the West Bank was set on fire. We didn’t know if we were far enough away, and we couldn’t get any of the local or national channels, but my mother had a satellite, which was how we knew it was happening. My mother asked why they attacked there, and the Americans said, it was a mistake, but it seemed direct, and we all knew that they never made mistakes, not like that. The Americans spent so many years working on their weapons, they weren’t likely to make mistakes like that. And the world had always speculated about the West Bank, about why it was so important to us, to Israel. That the part we owned should be attacked, then? It was so easy to wonder if the rumours were true. They showed the buildings destroyed, all the Knesset buildings and the government offices, and I remembered Lev, that he was probably there, or would have been when they went down. I put him in the building, got him arrested and trapped there, and then he would have been killed by a missile for no reason at all.
We should leave, I said to my mother, so we got into the car and drove north, toward Beirut, because it was safer. That made my mother laugh, when I told her where we were going. Beirut! Safe! Never in my lifetime did I think I would see that, she said.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system out of equilibrium will constantly increase; in other words, the more you leave something in chaos, the worse that chaos will become, given time.
Six nuclear power plants were hit at roughly the same time: Beaver Valley, Diablo Cyn, Palo Verde, Shoreham, Indian Point, and Calvert Cliffs. It was the last two that mattered most (though they all caused chaos, casualties); Calvert Cliffs was built in the mid-Eighties, it was forty-five miles from DC, and wouldn’t have been an issue, were it not for the rebuild ten years back, as a way of making it more efficient, a rebuild that meant it was twice the size, twice as dangerous. When you think about it, forty-five miles isn’t far, as the crow flies, and it’s even less distance still when there’s strong winds coming from the north-east, pushing it toward you. Indian Point was twenty-four miles north of New York City, and that was too close. Now, looking back, I can’t even tell why they built it. Chernobyl, when it blew, left a thirty-kilometre zone – that’s eighteen miles – where nobody could live, nobody could even enter. It was half the size of Indian Point. They had already ordered evacuations of Manhattan, but this made it the whole of the city, most of the south-easterly part of the state. DC was done as well, evacuated just in case – and it was a good job, because we were hit, it did get to the city. They told us on the intranet, said to make our way to ground level, and there would be buses to take us out of the city. I didn’t run, because there was too much stuff there in the basement that I had to take. I started packing up a brown cardboard box, like it was my last day, and I had been told to clear my desk. I didn’t think it would be that urgent, for some reason. They didn’t even sound the fire alarms.
Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London
When we left Westminster we stood on the side of the river, trying to work out what to do, and we ended up in front of that grotesque screen that they put up for the Olympics, useless ever since, relegated to the occasional football match and episodes of Eastenders. The news was on, and the footage of bombs exploding across America, culminating in the smoking remains of one of the power stations, I forget which. The one in New York, I think. The British government had made a statement, a plea to the terror group responsible – we still had no names, of the group or the leader or any of the cells, not a peep – a plea to leave us alone. We want no part of this war, the Deputy PM was saying. Chicken, Piers said. We can’t stand with our friends in America at this time, because the legality of their position is in question. The newsreaders seemed scared of what could happen. With what had happened in Israel, I didn’t blame him. You want to leave London? Piers asked, and I said, God, yes, please.
Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East
That night, trying to go to sleep, I told Simon about my parents’ house, in Brecon. He listened, and then said that it sounded perfect. Will your parents mind? They’re dead, I said, and I told him the story, and we agreed that it sounded like the perfect place. Sometime in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I went and watched television and drank chamomile, and saw that London was on fire, a home-made bomb – unrelated to the attacks in the US, the press jabbered to tell us, to keep us all calm – having hit Leicester Square, starting a fire on a gas main, gutting outwards on the points from that, up Charing Cross Road, towards Covent Garden, towards Piccadilly Circus. Let’s just leave, I said to Simon when I got back to bed, first thing. We’ve just got to get out of here.
Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh
They didn’t formally tell us about how bad the attacks got for the entire journey. We didn’t know about the evacuations until we docked, you believe that? They knew – when we got off, we worked out that they must have known, because they had radios, and were in touch with people at the docks – but we didn’t have a clue. We were on a boat in the middle of the sea. None of us had phone reception or internet or anything, and the radios were down. But the crew knew, and gossip started, but none of them would confirm anything. We didn’t exactly see much of them anyway – they were pretty conspicuous by their absence for the most part. We sat there for seven days, me being sick, Katy worrying, fucking rocky ship on those fucking waves. What did you do during the war, Mummy? Well, I sat on my arse trying to think about anything other than spewing in my handbag, actually.
Two days in Katy asked me if my being sick might be classed as a symptom of whatever it was that people were dying of, and I suddenly realized that we’d not had a single death on the ship yet. I asked around, but there wasn’t a one, so we had a chat about it in the room we were in. This tiny little woman at the back – I mean, honestly, looking at her from behind you would think she was a child, she was so wee – piped up and said, Maybe whatever it was that those terrorists put into our air, maybe it’s finally dispersed? Aye, probably, I said, knowing full well that those things weren’t exactly a science, that sort of weapon, and then, sweaty man said, Or, what if people were dying because He abandoned us, and now, in His infinite wisdom, He has returned?
And the worst part was, there was no argument for either side of that. Fucking logic.
Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City
I looked back behind me, in the rear-view mirror, just for a second, and I saw the light as it hit out from behind New York, spread like a bloom, like a flower, a halo, and I kept driving. Because I knew, right then, that there wasn’t going to be any going back. I don’t know how far from New York we were when the plant blew, but far enough, I hoped.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
We didn’t have body counts of the numbers of dead when I left office; we didn’t have estimates, even, because there were so many. Worldwide? We were expecting the results – this was, assuming that we picked ourselves up afterwards, dusted ourselves off, counted the dead, assuming that we were in any shape to do math – but we were expecting the results to be catastrophic. We didn’t talk about it, not in these exact terms, but we were expecting the numbers to nod toward what we usually use the Torino scale to measure. We use that scale for asteroid impacts, looking at the numbers of deaths it might cause were a collision to happen. Our best estimate, based on the illnesses we did keep track of in the US, was a billion people, accounting for everybody who might have died in countries with less health-care than we had. If you stopped and thought about it for a second, about the implications of that number, it was heart-breaking. We take everything for granted, and then we watch telethons and we see starving people in Africa, or homeless people on our own streets, and we say, Sure, give them $10, because it appeases our conscience, because it makes us think that we’ve saved our bro
thers. But when somebody thinks that you might have lost a sixth of the world’s population, more, if it was a bad day, that’s something else. You can’t even compute that.
Livvy and I stayed below decks and watched as the cloud from the ground sat in the sky, the colour of piss and bile, and we held each other. The water shook, little waves coming from the shore even though we were the only people there, and it’s always still, as still as anything you’ve ever seen, but we watched it ripple from the edges, and we felt the boat rock slightly. We sat still and waited and waited, because we didn’t know what was happening or when it would stop.
I’ve never felt so useless, I said to Livvy – I had, at that point, been in service to my country in one form or another for nearly twenty years – and she said, At least you’re alive. And that was something, I suppose. At least I was alive.
Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London
In the morning we watched the evacuation of America – alright, of key cities, but it felt like something bigger, I have to say – we watched it as we ate breakfast. This was Piers’ version of morning, of course, some revoltingly vulgar hour that I only ever saw on the clock when I was slam in the middle of electioneering; but he made eggs Benedict after bullying me out of bed, so I forgave him. I was thrilled that we were leaving, and I told him that as he packed his bag. He had adopted one of my old hiking rucksacks as his practical bag, and was stuffing it with tinned food from the cupboards. I don’t want to end it here, like this, I said. He thought that I meant us when I said that, and I did; but I meant everything else as well. I meant that I didn’t want to end my life sitting in a dingy little house wondering what could have been; it felt like everything was coming to a close, and I wanted to spend my last few days surrounded by beauty instead of chaos and memories.
