by James Smythe
My mum and dad ask me why I don’t go and visit him, see if we can’t work things out, and I just say that I don’t want to. I sit instead and read on the internet. People think that He came back. Suddenly they stopped being ill, and people stopped dying, so they think that He came back, and if He did, He’ll let us know. Or, you know, they argue that it was a biological weapon, and it just blew away, on the breeze, but when have you ever heard of that happening? So, I sit and I wait for another one, for The Broadcast to happen again; because, if He did come back, if He is here, you’d think that He would let us know, right?
Elijah Said, prisoner on Death Row, Chicago
I lay there on the floor of the prison for hours or days, I don’t know, shaking and passing out, shaking and passing out; until finally the doors at the far end of the corridor opened, and I heard soldiers – or police, maybe – with their guns, come to see what had happened. They took me away in a van, not cuffed, along with five other prisoners that they had found, all of whom had chosen to stay. The warden had thrown the doors open, they told me, and you guys didn’t run. This’ll count for something; I’d expect retrials, even. One of the soldiers looked at me, I think, his helmet covering his eyes, but I’m sure he was looking at me. Might even get you a stay of whatever they were going to do to you in there, he said. that’s what happens for good behaviour, right? His accent was southern, relaxing. We’ll see; either way, gonna be weeks before we’re back anywhere even close to normalcy.
We drove past a church; the sign outside read, We are at the end of days. I ground my fist in my palm, and wondered if Janelle and Clarice were alright.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
When everything ended, there wasn’t a reason for it. I wish I could say that somebody found a cure for the sickness in a lab, that they had a sample of something and then, all of a sudden they watched that sample heal itself, or start to rebuild, or kill off the bad cells that mingled around with the tissue; but it wasn’t. Nobody knew that it was getting better until it was, until reports started coming in that people weren’t staying ill, that there were people having heart attacks and not dying. Within days everybody was healthy again. There were people who had diseases who were plunging toward death, and those diseases went into remission; people who had flu that would have killed them, and they woke up the day after it ended right as rain. When it was all over, and nobody was sick any more, there wasn’t even anything to test, so the press started talking about it in terms that we – the public – could understand. Remember Swine Flu? Remember Bird Flu? It was another of those, the worst that we ever saw. Governments are starting plans to provide everybody with jabs to help prevent future outbreaks, they said, but, of course, the jabs never came. We forgot about it. We forgot about the sickness – not the dead, never forgot the dead, but forgot that we never knew why they died – just as we forgot about The Broadcast. It became another thing, something that got taught in Religious Study classes, the word of God if you were religious, an anomaly if you weren’t.
What do I think The Broadcast was? I had this theory way back, that it was television or radio, stuff we sent into space or back from space during the Apollo missions, maybe. I still maintain that’s the most likely. Because, it makes no sense. I mean, nothing that happened makes sense, not really, but especially that. I know – I know – that it wasn’t anything unexplainable, because everything is explainable. You just have to know what you’re looking for.
Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore
I knew that it was over when the television – which had been on a screen telling me that there was a problem, but that they were working on it – came back on, and they started telling us everything that had happened. It was the local reporters, and they were talking about everything happening around the rest of India, all the problems, all the people dead. The reporters were so quiet I had to turn my volume up on the television; I was still so hot that my fingers dripped sweat onto the buttons of the remote control. The worst seems to have passed, they said; I put my air conditioning on, tore the sheets off the bed and lay on the mattress to cool down.
After a while they said they were showing a reporter in Bangalore, so I watched again. They were at the hospital where I had left the man, and they were bringing bodies out on stretchers. There’s still so much work to be done with clearing this all, putting our lives back to normal; that starts with healing those who are still sick. They didn’t mention God, or Brahma, or whatever you want to call what we heard. There were no answers. That was when I saw him, the man without his foot. I wish I could say that he was sitting up, but he wasn’t. It was a body, under a sheet, and I only recognized him because of the way the sheet lay flat across his whole body, peaked and troughed like a mountain range, before falling away in the space where his leg should have been, leaving absolutely nothing there to see, nothing to fill the hole in the sheet.
María Marcos Callas, housewife, Barcelona
What was The Broadcast? In the Church of the One True God we don’t even call it that, not any more. We just call it what it was: the voice of God.
Dominick Volker, drug dealer, Johannesburg
If one thing never fucking changes it’s an addict. I did that whole thing, you know: I’m out, I’ve lost my wife and kid, all that, but that didn’t stick, because it was there, waiting for me. Everybody was in pain, and they wanted medication. I had a garage full of stuff to sell. I didn’t hear from most of the dealers, so I sold it myself. I sold the house, bought an apartment in Yeoville, started selling from there. You hear all these stories on the news, about mompies turning their lives around after The Broadcast, but nobody ever actually does, nobody changes. It’s not in our nature, I don’t reckon.
Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow
I joined the army when it was all over. The Russian army wasn’t what it had once been, because there was no need for it. The time after The Broadcast proved that, I think; nothing was on the ground, everything was over almost before it began. But it gave me a place to be, a place to spend my time. I didn’t want to go back to Moscow, or to even think about the place, and I couldn’t stay in Inta. Too many memories, and they said that the army is good for forgetting. It was, I suppose; although, how much of something so big can you forget?
Dafni Haza, political speechwriter, Tel Aviv
My mother and I managed to get a boat to Cyprus from Beirut, and from there we got to the mainland. There was no heading back to Israel; they told us the areas that were out of bounds. My job was gone; the Prime Minister was dead, and the Knesset had assigned somebody else to the position, a man who was with the army before, and would offer stability. A year after we arrived in Greece my mother was diagnosed with cancer, blood cancer. She had radiotherapy, which I paid for, because I wanted her to have the best possible treatment. She’s still alive, but still sick. I work for the government. I’ve learned Greek, and I have Greek blood, and they love a strong woman. They call me The Bull, because I don’t take their shit. I tell them how to act. I am going to run for office, just local office at first, an economic stance. I am studying economics at night, after my Greek classes. I take every Wednesday night off in order to take my mother to the hospital, and when she has her treatments I sometimes take a full day, and we sit in the apartment together while she rests. My mother eventually asked about Lev, and I told her that he left me, and she consoles me, like I’m sad about it. I have to act slightly sad about it, but she’s proud. You’re such a strong woman, she says. My mother tells me that everything happens for a reason; that I was there for reasons that I cannot comprehend, maybe, but that it had a purpose, and had meaning.
Hameed Yusuf Ahmed, imam, Leeds
Months after it all ended, I went back to the Jamea Masjid for the first time. It was sometime after four in the morning, and I hadn’t been able to sleep properly since Samia died. That one night I lay in bed, totally lost, and I realized that I had lost, that it was me that had given up. I got dress
ed, made my hot lemon – that space where Samia had lain, that stayed empty, her side of the blanket tucked in under the mattress, so that I couldn’t disturb it – and I went to the mosque. The door was locked with a padlock that I didn’t have the key to – the actual lock was melted away, the door splintering and charred – so I climbed the little wall at the side, let myself into the door at the back that was still intact, let myself into the library-office. The books were still whole; the room was fine, exactly how I left it. All those teachings, bigger than me, more important, were still fine, somehow survived the fire. I went into the main room, all alone, and I started to pray.
Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City
I met a man. Not like when I met the man with the placard, when I met David, but a man. His name was Byron. Byron! I met him after I left Rochester, when I decided that I wanted to head to parts I loved from my youth. I used to love skiing holidays with my parents in Vermont. There was a little town called Killington – I remember it as a town, but, of course, it was more a resort, when push came to shove – but I decided that I’d go there, for want of anything better to do. I got there, took a room in a hotel – it was off-season, so most places were quieter, because they shifted from skiing to walking, adventure pursuits, they called it – and I was wandering around the town when I met Byron. He owned a health food store there, like a Whole Foods but, you know, without the branding, and I stopped in there for apples. He served me, asked where I’d journeyed from, I told him, we chewed the cud, as he would say, and then he asked if I wanted to have a drink with him. I said that I would love to, and he apologized, said that the bar across the road was still shut – the owners don’t open for off-season, he told me, though I suspect that they were dead, from the way that he said it – so we went to the back of the shop, fetched a foldable picnic chair set from the shelves, made ourselves cosy in the wine aisle, and we had a drink, like we might have done before all of this happened.
I had to remind myself about Leonard, of course, because it actually wasn’t that much time since he had passed, but it felt longer. It felt like years, somehow. So, I told Byron, we have to take this slowly, and he agreed. I lost my wife myself, he said, and that was that. We became – and, gosh, I am loath to use the word, but – we became companions. He wanted to leave the shop. There are people that need far more help than I do, he said, and he had a lot of money in the bank, he said. So did I, for that matter. We packed up his car with food and provisions and we left at the end of the week, not knowing where we were going. We found it as we headed closer toward New York; we went through Springfield, and it was like nothing I had ever seen outside of my television, people set up in little huts along the side of the roads, in the parking lots of the outlet malls. They were all from the city, we discovered, all those people just having to get as far away from what used to be their home as possible. Some of them were whole families, but a lot weren’t. A lot of them had lost people, in the plague before. There were graves, as well. They didn’t talk about them on the news much, but they existed. Most of the cemeteries were full, or couldn’t cope with the amount of bodies that there were. So behind a lot of these villages – that’s what you could call them, even though they were much closer to towns or cities, the amount of people living in them – behind a lot of them there were graves, fields that were dug up for the bodies. For a while, we tried to help some of those people out. Many of them got services, burials – done by the Church of the One God people, or other religions, or just families remembering their loved ones (and those broke my heart, they really did, because I never had the chance to do the same for Leonard). Some of them had nobody; they were just bodies, no names, or no family, the homeless and afflicted who passed away. Those that weren’t cremated were buried by us, and we tried to give them the best we could. Some people wouldn’t touch them, because they were worried that the plague would come back. That never even crossed our minds. It felt less important.
(They called it the plague, not me. I still don’t know what it was, and I don’t suppose that I ever will. I don’t suppose that it matters, not really, but they all thought of it as a plague. That’s what will be written in the history books now: that there was a terrorist attack, and a plague, and it killed hundreds of millions of people, then the world was bombed as part of what we now call World War 3, a name that still feels presumptive, even, calling it a war. Almost everybody knew somebody who had died, and we all grieved, knowing that, in time, we’d heal. Part of that healing would be attributing blame, and so we all decided, by proxy, seemingly, that we’d put that blame firmly on the terrorists, because they were real, tangible. If we didn’t blame them, we blamed the government, or ourselves, and those were harder to deal with. But terrorists? We could hunt them and put them on trial, and punish them – even kill them, for the bloodthirsty few among us – if we caught them. The alternative was … it was unthinkable, for most.)
Byron and I decided to stay, to help them all out. There were initiatives to get houses built, to get proper shelter sorted – and worse jobs, like organizing the landfills, but we stayed away from those, because I’m not sure that I would have been able to cope. We worked on projects to build some housing at the back of a Walmart, on their spare land that they donated, if you can believe that, and then Byron said, There must be other places that need this, so we went to some other towns in the area, found the same thing, only on a smaller scale, and we offered our help. We set up a company – Residence, we called it, and I say that we set it up as a company, but we just named it and started it, no paperwork, no fuss – and we started helping out families who were sleeping on floors, or worse. We run it, now, for people who need help, mostly; we organize the housing, run it. I don’t know, Byron says that it’s like guest-houses. We have a field and we grow vegetables, and we share that out. Byron jokes that we’re like the Amish.
Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai
Mr Ts’ao died a few weeks after everything finished, after life went back to normal. We don’t know why – and Mrs Ts’ao worried that it was the plague again, come back, because she kept saying, He was so healthy, he was so healthy! but he really wasn’t. He ate fried shrimp for almost every meal, and fried chicken when there wasn’t the shrimp to be had. And he drank so much milk! He’s got a taste for it, Mrs Ts’ao used to say. We both have, but after he died I never saw her with a glass of the stuff. We stuck together as well, and she asked me to go with her back to where she grew up, in Fuzhou, down the coast. She had a daughter, apparently, but they hadn’t spoken to her in years – an argument, they would not say what about – and she wanted to find her. We didn’t. I remember sitting in the offices of the police, reporting her as missing, but even the police didn’t seem optimistic. She’s probably dead, one of them told me when she was out of earshot, you should prepare her for that. I don’t think we’ll find the girl. I helped Mrs Ts’ao look for her for a few months, and finally we ended up going to her sister’s house, which is where I left her. I’m sorry, Mrs Ts’ao, I said, but I can’t stay here. It’s not for me. So I got a boat to Bali, of all places. I had always wanted to travel, and I went around all the countries I could that didn’t involve flying (which has always scared me too much). I didn’t see the cities, because, for the most part, I couldn’t; I saw the countrysides.
When that was done – when I got bored, as awful as that is to say – I went to Tokyo. Tokyo seemed exactly the same, like they were pretending that The Broadcast never happened. They were the least involved country out of us all, I think! The Japanese kept their noses clean, out of everybody’s business, and nobody shot at them. Whatever, Japan was fine, and thriving. After that I went back home, back to Shanghai. My apartment was gone, re-let, and I didn’t have any money, so I went to stay with some friends I knew from a forum. We had five of us in a three-bedroom apartment, but it was awesome. We put up fake walls with food boxes, fixed them in, had mattresses from bunk-beds on the floors. They had faster internet than my o
ld connection, and I got back online. My character was still going, and my guild. They still hadn’t finished the game. We still haven’t.
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
I go and visit their grave every month. It’s like a ritual: flowers for them both, tell them what’s been happening. Sooner or later it’ll become a yearly thing, I know, or when I feel like it, and that’ll be fine, because it’ll have to be. I don’t have a house yet, and I don’t know when I will. My mother and I are living together; I’m back in my old bedroom, which they had decorated into a spare room, but I’ve got some things in there to make it feel more like mine. My age, and back home. Jesus. My hand still twinges, and it still makes me think of Karen and Jess, every single time.
I don’t believe in God now, and if I ever did before all this, before The Broadcast, I can’t remember that either. Some bloke in a pub once said to me, when I was drunk, crying over everything I had lost, that God abandoned us and then came back. We’re His children, they told me, and no parent can every truly abandon their child. Could you? they asked, and I just fucking decked them.
Katy Kasher, high school student, Orlando
My mom and dad were still totally into God, and I wasn’t – my mom, when she thought I couldn’t hear, kept saying that it was Ally’s influence, that I had my faith until I met her or something, but she didn’t know. And we didn’t speak about why I didn’t hear The Broadcast, because I think she was worried about what it might mean. I wasn’t worried; Mark had a theory.
