The Testimony

THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

At four in the morning we had a roundtable, representatives from all major faiths. The point was to find an order, a structure. We were under instructions from the government – stepping in in a way that I hadn’t seen them do since we left Iraq – to represent as many faiths as we could get our hands on. There was unrest in lots of the communities, people who didn’t necessarily worship the same deities as everybody else – let alone speak English – and we had to make sure that everybody was catered for. Only problem was, that was one hell of a lot of people, and we had to give them all a slot. Fine. But before they went on air, they all had to sit in a room together and wait their turn. It was all okay – even civil, I’d say – until the atheist guy, some scientist from MIT who wrote some books, had his fifteen minutes, until he started yamming on and on about how stupid everybody else was being. I can’t believe, he kept saying at the start of his sentences: I can’t believe that you people think this could be real; I can’t believe that you’re all so lonely as to believe that God exists, and wants to speak to you; I can’t believe that you’re falling for this. The priests and rabbis and guys in headdresses, they argued blind with him after a while, but then they were arguing with each other, because they had cases for why it was their God, why it wasn’t Christianity’s. Eventually the atheist started getting really annoyed, shouted at the Catholic priest. I can’t believe that you think some man in the clouds is just going to start speaking to us all, and the priest said, Explain what it was then, if it wasn’t that.

That was the crux of the argument. There was no other explanation, nothing at all; the Catholic guy sat back and smiled, just like he knew that he was right. That was when I was called out of the room, and we were told that there was something happening uptown, and that I should get ready to get back on the air.

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

I had five minutes free, so Livvy came by and I sat down with her in the gardens and we ate a sandwich she brought along, sharing it. That was nice. I hadn’t even finished when my phone rang, and the pass that they used – The Sparrows Are Flying – meant that I had no choice but to drop it, shout goodbye to her, run inside. The code meant that we had a serious threat. By the time I made it into The Danger Room, it wasn’t just a threat: it was confirmed, going to happen, and we had to accept that.

The New York Times had printed this article in the morning that we should all, collectively, put an end to war. We don’t need to fight any more, the editorial said, because this is it; proof. Every war has been caused by religion, they wrote (which isn’t strictly true, but difficult to argue with). We can end this, because there’s no need to fight any more. It was idealistic nonsense written by idiots. Religion might have started off the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, but we never involved ourselves for religious purposes. People could throw a lot at our motives in the past – oil, money, power – but we, America, hadn’t ever gone to war in the name of God. It had been hundreds of years since the crusades, nearly thousands, but people didn’t forget, apparently. I can’t say for sure that the article was a catalyst, but it ended with a line about Our God, meaning America, meaning Christianity, and that was the biggest issue we had: where to attribute The Broadcast to. Or who, maybe. It was English-speaking, and the accent hard to pin down, but it sounded… It sounded like one of us.

That was POTUS’ first proper terrorist threat, as well. I had been at the White House for the tail years of the Obama administration, I had seen these before, but one this big hadn’t happened yet during this presidency. The threat had come in as being for a targeted attack on New York, and we had word that a device had been left on the corner of 59th and 5th. We didn’t get that info until seconds before it went off; there wasn’t any time for POTUS to even ask what he should do. It was designed to hit foot-fall traffic, tourists, people on their way home. It wasn’t a huge strike; early reports had casualties in the sub-triple-figures category, but that was only because there were far fewer people on the streets than usual. On an average day it would have hit thousands, potentially. More. POTUS was devastated that we didn’t get to it in time. I reassured him; we were given a warning that there was a bomb, not an opportunity to do anything about it, and the two were vastly different.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

The bomb was reported live. It wasn’t like some terrorist attacks, where it’s all whispers until they get footage; Fox, CBS, NBC, they all had people on the streets with cameras. They all filmed the smoke, they all got as close as safety or the police would let them. Honestly? For a second, it just felt good having something else to talk about. I know that’s an awful thing to say, but I had spent every minute since that first static wondering why I didn’t hear it, and this… It was something that I could relate to. I used to live in New York City, before I moved to Des Moines. I had worked there, and every bit of it had memories. And the bomb itself, I got that; I had been a street cop for a few years, back before the office job, before I knew what I wanted to actually do. I had worked bombsites, standing there, keeping the crowds back. I recognized the faces of the guys working the scene, in the background of all the footage. I was back in the bar, because I didn’t have anywhere else to be, but this time everybody was asking me questions, about protocol, procedure. Would they have known it was gonna blow? Max asked me. I don’t know, I said. How did it get through? Why didn’t they catch it? That was the biggest question; the next was about who was responsible, and I didn’t have an answer for either.

I hadn’t said anything about not hearing The Broadcast. I didn’t know what it meant, and nobody else would know either. Most people assumed that it was God, and I suspect that they wouldn’t have been thrilled that I didn’t hear him. I kept asking myself, if it was God, what did that mean? I’m not a bad person; I’ve never ruined anybody’s life. Mostly, I’ve stayed quiet, to myself. I had one vice, and it was nowhere near as bad as those some people who had heard The Broadcast were walking around with. I kept quiet about that, and concentrated on the bomb, and that filled about two hours, then the news cycle began flitting between the two: on the one hand we have a specialist telling us what the presence of a God might do to our evolution as a species, our progress; on the other, we have the shocking footage of the inside of the Apple Store, the hole in New York that left numerous people dead, footage of the smoke, the rubble, the bodies. The news channels flitted between the two as if it was a tennis match.

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

We had POTUS ready to speak to the nation within the hour. I wrote the speech for him, because it had to be ready to go direct to air: we, America, have to stay strong until we have answers. The grotesque act of terrorism toward us will not go unpunished, and right now, we’re closing in on the perpetrators. We’ll do our best to keep you safe, America.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

Leonard was furious, watching the President give that speech. They’re going to attack somebody, he said, they’re going to attack somebody, you just watch. I made him go to bed early that night, because he was so on edge, and he was making me irritable, but I couldn’t sleep because he wouldn’t stop grinding his teeth.

Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai

We went down to fourteen when we lost a Goblin Wizard called Stryfe, because he said there was something happening in New York, something about the emergency services. He was lucky we weren’t on a role-playing server. On those games, you even mention a real-world place, you can get banned, or at least shouted out of town. He quit halfway through killing the dragon, leaving us one healer down, but we weren’t angry with him. He told us that there was a bomb or something before he quit, so we knew what was going on a few minutes before the news channels even did.

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

The most important thing is to keep control. In a situation where you could just lose it, where it’s ready to slip away at a moment’s notice, you cling on and pray. Straight after his TV statement we were in The Danger Room asking if there were any more coming; we had every informant we knew reporting in with what they knew. We have to know who’s responsible, POTUS kept saying, because this cannot go unpunished. He sat at the table as we all told him what we knew, and he acted like the sort of President you see on TV, gritting his teeth, his hands in fists on the table. Calm down, I told him. You can’t do anything if you’re this stressed. Somebody asked if we should get the Vice President along. Does he know about what happened? I asked, and they said that he did. Well, that’s good enough, I told them. Last thing we needed was him storming the hallways; that would have sent POTUS’ blood pressure through the damn roof.

We knew a lot about the attacks, because of the delivery, the trigger we found at the scene, the body. I call it a body; it was shreds of skin burned into the flame-retardant belt that the IED had been strapped to. DNA markers told us that the attacker was from Iran, or the region; we just needed to know who he was working for. Over the few years before Iran had become more of a problem, or their people had, the amount of smaller attacks attributed to cells started in the country had grown exponentially. Nothing serious – car bombs here and there, more threats than actual successful attacks – but Iran, they were the buzzword. Twenty years ago it was all Iraq and Afghanistan; now it was Iran. We didn’t announce where he came from. People were making assumptions, and they were assuming correctly, but assumptions were still far less dangerous than them actually knowing.

We had moved up to Orange alert as a reaction, without us having to even make an announcement when we heard The Broadcast, just in case. Then the bomb went off in Nevada, and the ones in Omaha and Baltimore, and before we could even breathe we kicked it up to Red. (But as the press pointed out, we’d never been at anything less than Yellow, not since we introduced the scale back at the start of the century, so it shouldn’t be a shock that we were so willing to move on it.)

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

We all had friends in the Nevada office; most of us used to work with guys who were stationed there. We didn’t know what they were working on, but as soon as it blew we were told that we weren’t to say a word to anybody about it. We were all under the heaviest NDAs that ever existed anyway, so it wasn’t like any of us were in the habit of casually speaking to the press. If anything leaked out of that administration, it was meant to. The rest of the stuff? It never made it to the public. When we saw POTUS making a statement a few minutes later, he said that the Nevada office was a basic science lab; he didn’t mention the links with the army it had. He might not have even known; so much was run without going through POTUS, so that he had plausible deniability. I mean, Jesus, stuff was run through with Brubaker’s knowledge, if it had the right clearance. Sometimes, everybody had to be kept in the dark. Even then, when everything was in danger of going to shit, the most important thing was that we kept our secrets in place.

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

We lost a town hall in Baltimore, a (mercifully near-empty) mall in Houston, injuries not deaths. And we lost a research facility in Nevada, so there were clean-up crews sent in to deal with that. Why those targets? We had no idea. The MO was different at each one, as well; if they didn’t all hit at the same time we’d have questioned whether they were even related. One of the joint chiefs suggested that whoever did the attack – meaning, the organization rather than the individuals – that they had been waiting for this, or that they were all in place already, waiting for something. If they were responsible for The Broadcast, he said, this was superbly orchestrated; if they weren’t, it was just incredible. We’ll worry about those, he said, and he put a staffer on it. They’ll need clean-up crews; you’ve got bigger things on your plate. I did.

We’re at Homeland Security Level Red, POTUS told the people, which means that there is a severe threat of terror upon our great nation. Our freedom is being threatened, but the terrorists will not hold us down. Until we have caught these criminals, we will not rest. He announced that the terror level changing meant that all forms of public transport were to be locked down; that all municipal and public buildings were to be shut, with the exception of emergency service buildings; that houses and private property could be subject to police and army checks without need for warrants. We request that you stay in your homes, he said, and if you see anything suspicious, report it to the local authorities. We know you’re exercising your right to religion, but we request that, for your own safety, you keep your prayers at home rather than in the church. Get a good night’s sleep, America, he said.

Then we heard The Broadcast again and we knew that there wasn’t a chance of anything he asked actually happening.

Jesús Santiago, preacher, New Mexico

When I went to unlock the church doors there was already a crowd outside. I did not have the building open for worshipping on Mondays, only on Tuesday, Wednesday, all the other days of the week. There were forty people, maybe, waiting, all the usual congregation, so I told Juanita to calm them down, park the car at the back and then go and talk to them, keep them patient. Enough, enough, I told the crowd. You have been very patient, so I will open the church in a few moments. It was so hot outside – a hundred degrees, the man on the television said – so they were sweating, fanning themselves, drinking water. Inside, the building was air-conditioned. They would have to wait for this, slightly, as I had to pack up the office in the boxes that I took over the night before; this was going to be my final sermon.

I never meant to lie to people, I kept telling Juanita. It was never my intention to cause pain, or disrupt their lives. All I wanted was to give them something, eh? Something that they could keep and hold close to their hearts. Religion, worshipping God, before The Broadcast it was something that people did because it was there, or because they wanted to feel better about themselves; like, Somebody is watching me, I am doing this for Him. I made that more real for them. My pappi, my father, also named Jesús, from the day I was born he told me that we were descended from the family of Christ. He showed me maps and drawings that his pappi showed him, drawings of our family tree, how He travelled across His lands, across Europe, across the sea to South America, and He married a woman, and they had children together, and their children had children, and so on, and that led to me. When I was growing up, that is what I knew to be true. When he died, pappi told me that it was all a lie, that he invented it all for the sake of his church; but by then I had my own church, and I had a congregation, and they knew when they looked at me that they were closer to God than they were the days before. And the money! They donated money, to run the church, to show how much their faith was worth, and I became accustomed to it. Juanita and the children, they always wanted more, more clothes, a bigger house, so I kept it up. It was not a lie; it was the way things were.

When The Broadcast came, I knew that it was over. If they have the real thing, they do not need a phoney to make them feel better, so I knew that they would turn against me, sooner or later. I came in to get the money that I left – it was in notes, all of it, and I kept it under the floor of the altar, the safest place in the city, because nobody would dare to damage an altar, nobody, not in this city. I put the money into bags, and when I was done I took them to the car, put them in the trunk, came back and opened the doors. We’re ready for you, I said, come in and worship Him on this, the best day of your lives! They came inside, and there were so many of them that they were in every seat, standing in every space they could, standing even in the doorways, until I pushed some of them back. We have to have the doors shut, I said, because otherwise the air conditioning will not work. I think that they understood.

When we were doing a blessing, near the end of the service – an old lady who could not walk, but believed that by touching me she would be cured by the Lord, listening to all of her prayers – the doors opened, and in walked Jorge Delgado, who never liked me, never came to church. He pushed through the crowd, until he was in the aisle. Nobody wanted to stand next to him, because he was dripping with sweat, and he looked ill. Jesús, he shouted, and everybody turned to look at him. Jesús, what do you have to say about this? I greeted him: Hello, Jorge, welcome to this celebration. Jesús, what do you have to say about hearing your great-great-grandpappi, eh? What do you have to say now? Jorge never believed me, always said that I was a fraud, and I knew that this would be one of those times. Sit down, I said, and we can talk when this is over, but he didn’t. It was the morning, not even twelve yet, and he was drunk. His shirt was yellow around the neck. Eh, fuck you, Jesús. You’ve been taking these people’s money for years, and now they can ask God themselves, they can ask Him if He even saw so much as a penny of it. Let’s watch you sweat now, Jesús. He pushed some people along one of the aisles, made them cram in more, sat down and put his feet up on the bench in front. I tried to ignore him, but he was there for the rest of the service, smiling at me. He looked like a wolf, I kept thinking.

When it was over – There will be no collection today, I announced, go home and just pray to our Father that we might hear from Him again soon – all the congregation left. You’re so lucky, one of them said to me, that you can be so close to Him, we are all so jealous. I know, I said, I am the luckiest man alive. When they were all gone, it was just Juanita and I and Jorge, who didn’t move. I told Juanita to wait in the car. You send her away, Jorge said, we need to talk man to man. Very sensible man, you are, which makes sense, because you have got perfect genetics, eh?

As soon as Juanita was gone, Jorge came over to me. His breath smelt of marijuana and alcohol, and the rest of his body smelt of sweat, like he hadn’t bathed in days. You are a fraud, Jesús. You’re a fraud, and I know it, because God would never have a relation like you. You give me back my mother’s money, and I will leave you alone. (His mother used to come to church, before she died; she was one of the biggest benefactors, and was much loved by the community. When she died, she left Jorge with nothing.) You give me every single bit of that money and I will not tell the news channels what a fraud you are. Of course, this made me laugh, because he had no evidence, no proof, so we were in the same situation, his word against mine. Jorge, I said, your mother’s money went to help the needy; it is not here any more, and so you cannot have it. I am sorry, but she loved you very much. God damn it, Jesús, he shouted, I want that money. There is nothing more important to me than getting that off you, and I will die before I see you leave here! Do not be a fool, I said; the devil reasons like a man, but God? He thinks of eternity. I stole that line from a film, and it made him think, for a second, before he hit me. He threw his fists at me, over and over, but I am not a fighter; I could not defend myself. He dragged me to the altar, screaming, Where is it? Where is it? but I would not say. He gave up after a while and left me there on the floor. I cannot remember much; Juanita said that my face was terrible, but the cuts were all in the flesh, all just on the skin. She watched Jorge leave the church and kick the wall as he left. I’ll be back, he kept shouting. Eventually she came inside, helped me to the car, got the money, and we left that afternoon. We didn’t lock the church, because at least that way the community could use it, and she had to drive, because I could not see. We collected the children from their school, and we drove toward the East Coast, where Juanita’s sister lived, and we could start again.

The bombs started going off as we were driving, and we stopped and spoke about it. Do we go there? she asked, Won’t it be too unsafe? I said, No, we’ll be fine; nobody will think of attacking Virginia. It’s not New York, I said. Besides, God will protect us. Thirty minutes later we heard about the next bomb, and the next, and we turned around because Juanita told me that if we didn’t, she was going to open the car door and just get out there in the middle of the road, and we headed south, toward the border, back where we had sworn we would never go.