The Testimony

DIRECT FEED

Isabella Dulli, nun, Vatican City

Even as word started coming through to Vatican City about what was happening – there were so many people there, I can’t even begin to tell you – it was already being written off by so many as righteous and just. Our God has stepped forward and filled us with His love, and we must spread that love through any means. The Holy Father did an address from his balcony – I didn’t see it, because I was in my quarters, lying on my bed, but I could hear it, everybody heard it, as if it were trying to outmatch The Broadcast itself.

And He said unto them: go ye into the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. The Pope preached these words from his balcony, and the crowd heard them as validation for the sins of the world. I cried to our Lord to help us, to instruct us; but again, there was no reply.

Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

I handed in my notice at the clinic – which really only meant saying I was leaving, as they did not fight for me to stay, because they were preoccupied by that point. I got on the train, which was filthy and busy, and our stereotype was absolutely reinforced, and I thought about Adele and her camera crew, and how she had to take them around to see things that were worth filming, things that they would already have known everything about. She was talking to them about what she needed, and they had to follow her around and listen to her. She could have interviewed them, but they had to be quiet and point their camera at what she saw, and let her report it even if it was not true. They told me, We had to see what she saw, and not what we saw; they were very different things. That’s always the way, though, isn’t it? I said. Look now, at the people on the television. (They were talking about the missiles, about what America was going to do to the world; they had people on the street in cities crying about their losses, rubbing their eyes, tears on their faces.) They’re acting up for this, aren’t they? It’s all they ever do, now.

In my new hotel in Bangalore – which was empty, I was the only guest for some reason – I watched the news. On the BBC they spoke about Adele, only a mention, because she was, they said, a dear friend. They showed a picture of her when she was much younger, standing outside a grey, concrete building, the walls slick, as if it had been raining just before, and they said that she had been in India, putting together a report on the state of our transport system going into another decade without upgrading or changing it. In that sentence they told us the entire point of her report, and rendered anything she might have found useless, because suddenly the world knew, once again, that we had failed to do what had been promised. Adele’s efforts were for nothing, but I don’t think that I cared about it, because it didn’t stop me sleeping, and I didn’t see her face, and the news reporters didn’t mention her again because there was so much more happening.

Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

The same day as the bombs footage was everywhere, so were the Jessops. The clips of them on that awful Role Call chat show – talking about the whipping incident, about being Mormons, about the son’s autism, how they fled – were all over YouTube, even despite the war stuff going on everywhere else. There’s a certain group of people who don’t care about the news; they care about the pop culture entertainment shite, and the two are very different. It was that lot I had to thank for seeing about Joseph and his son as fast as I did. It was the worst, seeing them portrayed so horrifically. The show was obviously recorded before the Americans attacked Tehran, so they didn’t even mention that stuff; they did nothing but talk about the fact that – in the words of the TV people – God ignored Joe Jessop. They didn’t fuss over what else The Broadcast might have been. They just assumed it was God, and the audience were all happy to go along with that. There was a woman at the front, and the camera kept focusing in on her; she had a rosary around her neck, one of those with big fake-ruby stones on a chain, and she clutched at it all the way through Joe’s interview, as he said what he didn’t hear. The clips of him would have been the main news story, but they were bumped for the stuff in Tehran – and rightfully so – but I kept thinking, if it had been a bigger story, we might have found hundreds of people in the same boat. As it was, the news buried it. Or, no, rather, nearly buried it. There was Mark, as well.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

I decided that I didn’t want to watch the news, so I flicked the channels to find anything else. That’s when I saw the Jessops: the kid terrified, crying, all these women in the audience pawing at him, and that awful fucking host standing back, watching it all, not stepping in. When the show ended they flashed a number up on the screen, and the voice-over man asked that anybody else who didn’t hear the voice of God come forward, talk about their experiences. There was a toll-free number, and I wrote it down. I figured that it was my best chance of meeting other people in the same situation.

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

I remember that my hand was getting better; I could use it more, certainly, even though the bruise was still there. It didn’t hurt me to hold my spoon as I ate my cereal, and it didn’t hurt me to drive. Karen was working constant shifts, it felt like, because they were understaffed. It’s taking three times as long as it should to get people through, she told me. The day before, all the X-ray department were gone, so they were relying on nurses to run the scans, and that slowed them exponentially. She asked me to run her into work, so I obliged. Aside from The Broadcast, and the fact that the Americans had lost their marbles, it felt like we might start getting back to normal sooner or later. Karen asked me to a wait a few minutes – she’d left some changes of uniform at work, wanted me to take them home for her, get them in the wash – so I stood in the waiting room and paced slightly as she went off to get them.

Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

It was not hard to find a job, because some people had abandoned their places. I called my old professor and he knew somebody, and they had me at work that afternoon, because they were understaffed. My pay was ridiculously low, because it was a temporary wage, but it didn’t matter, because it was a job, and I was back in a proper city again. They filled my temporary appointment calendar with their waiting lists, and my days became full, and I could look at the plan for my temporary future there, and see it all laid out.

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

There was a process that had to be followed when the station received something potentially serious, like a threat, or information that could jeopardize a case. People speak about the press like it’s the devil, but, really, we just did what we could. If the press didn’t do it, somebody else would, but that didn’t mean we were without morals. If we received a piece of information about a story that we didn’t know, if the story was a murder case or something, we would check with the police that it wasn’t something they were withholding from the public before we aired it. It’s fine to let the people know who’s out there being bad, but not at the risk of them not being caught. Or, worse still, at the risk of people getting hurt. If we got something more serious, there was a process where we called the cops, the heads of the network, lawyers. We didn’t just air any old shit; that would be idiotic.

The DVD came in before the post, even; it was there when I turned up for the morning shift, addressed to me. It had been scanned by security so they knew it wasn’t a bomb or anything, and I watched it in make-up as they got me ready. I was only two or three sentences into the video when I told one of the runners to call Jack Roscoe, who was the station head, and to call for the detective we always spoke to about those things, and we all assembled in the viewing room (which was this almost cinema we had, for screenings). I told the guys who were anchoring before me to fill in, and myself and the rest of the news team, along with three guys from the NYPD, two from the FBI and what amounted to most of the board of directors, sat and watched it like it was some red-carpet premiere.

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

I was getting a chocolate bar from the machine in the waiting room when it came on the TV – previously they’d been showing one of the awful morning shows, so I hadn’t been paying it any attention – and they said it was direct feed video from the US, where the clip had just been handed in to a news station. It was that terrorist, the one we never found out the name of, sitting by himself in a room in a cave just talking. The message seemed clear enough: it was a promise that we were all going to die.

(Incidentally, if you ever get the chance to be in a hospital waiting room – a hospital room where everybody is already worrying about what’s wrong with them, wondering why they haven’t been seen yet, hoping that the person sitting opposite them isn’t contagious – when they announce that there’s a biological agent been released by terrorists, turn it down. Just get out of there. It turned to chaos within minutes, and it took until the police turned up to put a lid on it. Karen came back with her bags of clothes minutes later, fought through the crowd to get them to me, and told me not to wait up.)

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

The guy in the video was a typical… He looked a certain type, you know? He was dressed in black, long grey beard, black turban, older. His eyes were doing that thing of being pitted, like they’d actually dropped in his face. We didn’t know who he was – the FBI ran their face-check software, nothing came up – but he spoke like we did, like he didn’t need an introduction. He spoke directly to the camera – if I didn’t know better I would swear that he was media-trained, because he never took his eyes off the lens – and there was already a translation on the bottom of the picture, where they had put subtitles on for us. It was, as far as these things went, a professional job. It was filmed in HD, which was a step up from the usual terror video, and some of the guys in the booth reckoned it was made with Final Cut Pro. He claimed responsibility for the bombs we’d had, for the blowing up of that school, and said that it wasn’t over. We are preparing an attack stronger, more devastating, than anything you have ever seen, he said, and we will make you pay with weapons that you’ve never imagined. We will punish every false believer in your lands, and you will tremble before us. Nobody will be saved, the terrorist said. You made your God tell you to not be afraid; instead, we will give you that of which you are most afraid. There was a debate about whether we should air the tape at all; the FBI guys were adamant that it was a bluff, a hoax. They can’t attack on that scale. We’ve got eyes everywhere, and some slip through, and that’s what happened today. But more than this? Every city? Nah, they said, not a chance. That’s fairy tales. It always happens, people claiming responsibility for stuff they didn’t do. We’ll sit on it and wait.

We didn’t want to cause panic, so we discussed it in the viewing room, decided to keep it under our hats. Then we heard that other networks had the video as well, and it was on the air right at that moment, which pretty much meant that any chance we had of keeping it under control was out the window. From that point it was damage limitation; working out ways to minimize panic, to keep the public calm, and to reassure them that, should such an agent be released, their safety and preservation was our number-one concern. People think we’re all about, Get it on the air, get it on the air!, but the reality is that there’s bigger stuff to worry about, sometimes. Sometimes we could actually help, soothe the beast by delivering the information in the right way.

Of course, nobody gave a shit what we said. They were always going to panic. There was no control there.

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

We immediately sealed off the White House, got our best scientists – Meany sent a bunch over – to start scanning for anything that might make it through. Nobody got in or out of the building’s security gates. We were on lock-down, only as a precaution. At that moment, we didn’t have a clue if this secret magic gas even existed or not, but it was better – for us – to be safe than sorry. We kept getting figures about the death tolls in Iran, and we were doing fine until somebody discovered that, with one of the blasts, we misjudged, and we took out an area that wasn’t doing anybody any harm: a hospital, some residential streets. We were talking about ways to spin it – we had the idea to mock up footage of Iranian soldiers, maybe, retaliating, keep the Iranians on the back foot – when the news broke to the press. We just had to ride it out.

Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East

We ended up camping in this fox-hole we made on the Turkish borders, because we couldn’t make it any further. The Americans were all along the borders, so we were waiting for HQ to give us a new pick-up destination. We knew they were flying planes regularly, getting people out; we just had to wait our turn. One of the lads started having a little panic, a little fit, and it was a pretty hairy one, so we sedated him. (Sedated him the good old-fashioned way, that is: swift fist to the side of the jaw, knock him out for a little while.) We got word from one of the locals that people had made it out of Tehran, and then they passed us as they tried to get anywhere. One man had a car full of people, and he stopped near us, fell out of the door, looking more ill than anybody I’ve ever known, kept saying something over and over. The translator told us that he was talking about the bodies in the roads. By the time we woke up – or by the time it got light, because none of us slept, apart from knocked-out Dennis, who got nearly four hours – the man was dead himself, still on the side of the road. Nobody wanted to touch his body so they left him there. By the time we got back to base camp they still didn’t have an ETA on when we would be leaving, so we sat and waited for the plane to come.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

Jesus Harry Corbett, what were we going to do with the Americans? I’d never seen protests like it. The one in Washington, DC was bigger than any papal announcement, state funeral, coronation; bigger than them all combined, I’d guess. They estimated the number being five million people protesting in the US alone when they started. I think it was much, much more, but of course they were going to play it down. And there were protests everywhere, but nothing like the ones on American soil. On that day, of course, the war – if you could even call it that – was over, but the threat remained, both from the American government, and the unnamed terrorist in the video. Regardless, this was a crowd filled to bursting with anger, larger than any police force could hope to contain, especially given that the public services – police, hospitals, fire – were still suffering from losses factored in after The Broadcast, the God-squad claiming their victims in every church across the world. They rushed and drove back everything in their way – cars, police, soldiers, horses, a tank – and it looked like there wasn’t going to be any way to stop their numbers swelling.

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.