The Testimony

THE FIRST BROADCAST

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

I was getting ready to leave the bar – it was still open, daylight outside, or it just hadn’t shut, maybe, because Max was just as interested in watching the TV as the rest of us – when The Broadcast came, the My Children message. I didn’t know about it at first; I noticed that everybody in the bar suddenly went completely silent, and then I saw it on the TV, as the hosts did exactly the same. Can you hear this? one of them asked. Oh my God, can you hear this? Everybody had that same vacant look on their faces, and I was out of the loop again. I still didn’t hear a thing, and then it was over.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

That first day, we changed, as people. I am all too well aware how terribly melodramatic that sounds, but it’s a truth. Whatever it was that spoke to us during that first Broadcast, everybody – or nearly everybody, I always forget about those few that didn’t hear it – but nearly everybody was joined in something common. Regardless of the truth, it joined us for those brief moments that we were listening to it. If there was any doubt in the minds of the religious, that opening gambit, My Children… it was powerful.

I was hanging around on the South Bank when it happened. It was just starting to rain, and all of a sudden we heard it, and as soon as it finished, there was this cheer, as if we had finally won the World Cup or something, coming from St Paul’s. I couldn’t even begin to head over there, because the streets were so busy, and everybody started rushing that way, as if they were trying to make up for all those years that they spent not praying. I stayed where I was, because I’m rational; because My Children could be the call of any one of billions of parents, not necessarily a deity.

I mean, maybe we’d just tapped into somebody’s angry mother, for a second?

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

As soon as we heard the static start up again, I tried to write down every detail that I could hear, that I could pick out from it. I tried to write down the phonetics of the static, you see, to try and see if there was anything in it, running them by Patrice as they came out, to see if he agreed with them. He was off his game, I thought, but he did it, helped me out, and by the time that the voice spoke the page was full of noises and sounds, and then we heard My Children, and I wrote that down as well, and then it ended. We didn’t say anything for ages, not for the longest time, and then I realized that we had the punch line, finally; and maybe the stuff before it, the noises, the static, that was the joke, or the puzzle? I got the team around, said that we had to work on it, but all I really wanted to do was to call my parents (but I knew that they would be at church). It took us a minute or so before somebody remarked that the words were in English. We all understood English perfectly, so I didn’t really notice it, but it was English words that I’d written on the page, and English words that The Broadcast spoke. So then it became, well, why was it in English? Where did it come from?

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

I laughed, and said that if it was English, it clearly wasn’t God, because He would speak in, I don’t know, Aramaic, probably, or something that we didn’t understand. (Or, even better, something that everybody in the whole world understood, their own language, like a magic trick.) Audrey snorted at that, because she wanted to believe that it was God so badly. Maybe it’s because most of the people who pray to Him now speak English? she said. So He chose that language to meet the majority of the people.

The most spoken language is Mandarin, I said, Why didn’t He choose that? Well, maybe He’s not Buddha, Audrey said. Maybe He’s actually our God?

Dominick Volker, drug dealer, Johannesburg

I was in the back of a car being taken to, I don’t know, one of the Jo’burg kêrel houses or other, I forget which. I had been caught taking my money from one of my dealers in Lavender Hill – well out of my usual area, but he had a lot on him, so I had to go down there – and they were taking me off, hoping to pin something on me afterwards. It wouldn’t stick, so I wasn’t worried. There was too much chaos that day for anything to stick.

We passed this group of bergies on the side of the road and the kêrel locks the doors – locks his doors, because all of a sudden he’s afraid! Rough area, this, he says, and I don’t answer. Not talking? You some sort of mompie? No, I tell him, I just don’t want to talk to you, eh? Then he gets a call and pulls over down the road, outside a house, and he comes back two minutes later with this grinning fucking kont, stinking of dagga. This guy laughs as he gets in the back next to me. He does that click thing with his teeth. Fuck’s sake, I say, do I have to sit next to this one? The policeman tells me to shut it, and he starts off again. We’re two minutes down the road – the guy next to me hasn’t stopped smiling the entire time – and then we all start to hear the static again. I thought this was over, the stoner says, and then it gets louder. The guy in front pulls over, stops the engine, and we all just listen, and then we hear it. God. Then the kêrel unlocks his door, gets out, and just walks off, leaving me and this fucking reefer-stinking loser just sitting there, doors locked, right down the road from them fucking bergies. It’s a bloody miracle we made it out alive.

Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

It was first thing in the morning, which was my busiest time, because everybody came before they went to work. Lots of the jobs started early and ended earlier, so I was always busy, it seemed. This one day there wasn’t a queue, which was rare, or so it seemed; I never had a chance to actually look outside to see, but there was always somebody at the door as soon as one patient had left, always another waiting to tell me about their illnesses. That morning I had the man with the bad foot back in, and he had put it up on my table. I took care of it, he said, I swear to you, I swear. You didn’t, I said to him, because if you had, you wouldn’t be back here. Did you go to the hospital? I asked. No, he said. The parts where I had cut it, tested it, drained it, they were black around the holes; The flesh has turned necrotic, I told him. What does that mean? It means that you have to have it cut off; not the foot, just the dead flesh, before it spreads. You’ll have to go to the hospital right now; I’ll take you there myself if you can’t walk or drive. No, he said, no, it’s fine. You cut the dead flesh off yourself. I trust you. I told him that I wasn’t equipped, but he insisted, pointing at the scalpel that was in the medical kit on my desk. You can use that, I have a strong pain threshold, I can take it. I had lifted the scalpel, and I was dangling it over his foot – because I knew this man, and I knew that he wouldn’t leave until he was satisfied, or he would leave and he would hobble around on his rotting foot until it was forcibly removed from his body, which would be the eventual outcome – and then The Broadcast happened. I sat there with the scalpel against his skin and listened to it, and he went quiet as well, for a while. When it was done he said, Well? Are you going to cut it off then? I will, I told him, just later. I went out onto the street to see what was going on – because it was inconceivable that it was in my head, no matter what it felt like – and it was… It was like a fly, buzzing around. Everybody was looking around for it, looking up in the sky to see if there would be something there to give them answers.

Isabella Dulli, nun, Vatican City

After the static, because they didn’t know what it was, they stopped the tourists from going into the Basilica, and certainly from going down into the tomb. It is so fragile; they only let 200 people in every month, that is why it gets so busy, why the tourists are so desperate to see it when we do let them, why they queue all night, sometimes, travel from hundreds of miles away. The tour guides took them away from the queue, told them to head up to the square, that they would have to come back. Most of them said it was fine; some of them complained. There’s no way you can come in, because it might be unstable. Then, we didn’t know if it was just from the building, or the electrics. I went down into the Basilica anyway, because I had been looking forward to it for days. It smelled so old, still, even with all the cleaning that they did, for preservation. It smelled of stone and dust, and there were very few places I loved more in the world, partly because of that very smell. I went down into the darkness – because the lights are so dim, it is always dark in the tomb, and there are always guides, because the ground is still unstable, like a building site in so many ways – and I knelt in front of the tomb itself to pray to the father of our church. I wasn’t praying for anything at all; only praying as I always did, out of love. Then I heard it, His voice, so strong through the darkness, but not the darkness of the tomb, the darkness of my heart, of the world; it was not frightening, or threatening. It was just all that I could hear. I thought of all of the faithful written about through history who He spoke to, His voice so strong; and I thought, and me. I was joining those whom He loved the most, who He was so close to as to spread His word directly, to fortify belief and to set His awe in the minds of His people. I cried in the darkness; my tears patted the stone of the tomb, and I was so happy right then, knowing that this was the happiest moment of my life; everything built up to that, and I would never be alone again. It was me and my God, and we were together.

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

As senior anchor I had certain privileges. I got to pull rank on shifts, and as mine came to an end, after a very long day, My Children hit, and I decided that I wasn’t going anywhere. As soon as we heard what The Broadcast was saying, I knew that this could be the biggest news story of all time.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

The priests on the news after that first Broadcast looked so smug. There is nothing worse than a smug priest, Leonard said. He got so angry with one of them – I told you so, I said this was the case, the priest kept saying to the reporter; This is the Lord come back to speak to us – that he threw a tangerine at the television. It split all over the screen, burst like a water bomb. He cleaned it down – his temper never lasted for more than a single, regrettable second – but the apartment smelt of it all day, of that sharp citrus smell. It’s nice when it comes from a scented air freshener; it’s horrid to live with it all day when it’s not, so sweet and bitter and real.

Leonard and I used to be Jews. We’re Ex-jews, he would say whenever anybody asked, Capital E, lower-case j, as if that hammered home his point: I’ve got my own emphasis for these things. He liked having things in his life and then renouncing them, that was another of his things. (I’ve realized recently, thinking about it, how many things he used to have.) We stopped being Jews in the late Nineties, not long after we first started seeing each other. He had just left his first wife, an awful woman called Estelle, and we found each other in a bar one night. We spent hours talking about everything and anything, and that pattern stuck. On our fourth date we got onto religion, and discovered that we felt the same way – disheartened, mostly – and that was that. We woke up the next day and decided to not bother any more. We already both used to celebrate Christmas more than we did Hanukkah, so it didn’t affect us there, and all the other stuff, it just felt natural to ignore it. We did that until the end of the next decade, when Leonard got his cancer, and then I started to think about it, to wonder. He never did, of course; cancer was a fight, and it could be beaten by hard work and perspiration, as far as Leonard was concerned, but I didn’t feel that way. It was diagnosed in the late stages, and the doctor told us that if he operated the next day, Leonard might be lucky. Might be lucky, he said. That’s a chance of a chance, outside odds at best, I figured. I had to drive home to fetch Leonard his pyjamas and a book, and on the way I passed the synagogue on Willet, so I stopped the car and waited until the next service started. I remembered every part of it – it was so ingrained, even after over a decade of not thinking about it even once – as if it were deeper than memory, like it was a part of my DNA, even – and I prayed for Leonard to get better. I prayed for an extra edge over the Might be lucky. And he was lucky. They cut the cancer out, they did radiotherapy, he was sick for a while, weak as the old man that he never wanted to be, and then he started to get better. I don’t know what saved him, whether it was the luck, the doctors, the prayer, but something did. I carried on going to synagogue, once a month, maybe less, and Leonard stayed healthy. That felt like a fair deal, and I never told Leonard. Every relationship has its secrets.

After he threw the tangerine he kept on shouting at the TV. It doesn’t mean anything, he kept saying. It means sweet f-a! It’s a voice, could have come from anywhere. The priests were sure that it was God making contact. In the book of Revelation, it says that our God will return to us, speak to us again. This is simply Him making good on His promise. Sanctimonious pricks! Leonard kept shouting. They’re acting like this is definitive proof!

I didn’t say it, of course, but I wanted to ask him how he was so positive that it wasn’t.

Hameed Yusuf Ahmed, imam, Leeds

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter where you were when you heard it. It doesn’t. What does matter is how you dealt with it afterwards, how you reacted, if you panicked; or if you got on with your life, your responsibilities. I wasn’t asleep during the static before, because I was leading prayers already. How did we react? We got on with it. God is present every day; that’s why we pray to Him, because He is there. If He wasn’t there, we wouldn’t pray, you see? It’s easy. When the static came, I was in the mosque, half past four, just as it was nearly light – and I mean that, it was that red sky outside, that sort of colour where the sky looks like blood in water – and we were praying. We carried on after it, because if it was God speaking to us – that was what the televisions said, what they all wanted us to believe – if it was, He would make it clear. We had jobs, duties; you cannot be distracted by a noise, just a noise and nothing more. Now, The Broadcast, that was different. Again, we were at prayer. This could be a trend, I thought when we heard the static for the second time, before the voice came through, this could be a trend. I carried on leading the prayer, because that was what we did. When we heard the voice, that was the first time in over twenty years that I broke prayer. It was only because there were others praying who panicked before I did, standing up, leaving. That level of disruption, none of us could ignore it. Please, be calm, I said – the first words I ever broke outside the prayer, can you fathom that? To instil a sense of calm? – but that didn’t help. I mean, the people might have trusted me to guide them when they were in control, but I think that was the hard part about The Broadcast for some: the lack of that control. To have something so rigid – a life, a belief – and to see, to feel it slipping away as soon as you hear something that you cannot explain… I finished the prayer, but so many left while I spoke I couldn’t even count, so I kept my eyes shut; I didn’t need them to know what I was doing, what I was saying.

I was in the offices afterwards. We called them offices, but they were just a room at the back of the mosque where I kept my papers, some books, had meetings with some of the community. If they needed guidance, that’s where they would see me. The room itself was awful, a little white-walled box with peeling paint, because it didn’t warrant upkeep. I called it the library, because it sounded better, and because there were shelves with books upon them, and all the books offered more than the rest of the room, the rest of the mosque – than the entirety of my knowledge: His teachings written forever, indelible, because words never die, never lose their meaning. Everything I taught, everything I am, it comes from those books, from those teachings. When I die, all that I am and all that I think dies with me; the teachings live on. You ask yourself what should be the most important of those, then: me, or those books. I was to stay in the library all day, because that was when the Muslim people of Leeds needed their council the most; it suited me, because I opened my books and read them. There was no television in the library so I didn’t know what was going on outside – how much they were making it about God, or about the Christian God – but I did know that I had a full diary of appointments, and none of them arrived for the meeting, so I continually sat and read my books. There was always more to learn. I led a prayer a couple of hours afterwards, and then I got myself ready to go home, locked the office. When I got outside I saw him for the first time, young boy, only eighteen, nineteen, maybe even younger. He had that fur around his face, not like anything you could call a beard or a moustache, but he was growing it. Perseverance in the face of adversity; always made me happy. Assalamu alaikum, I said. Can I help? He said, I don’t know; maybe, I don’t know. You want to have a talk? I asked. He nodded, so I unlocked everything again – this is what we do – and we went back to the library.

He sat in the chair I usually sit in, which was strange, to begin with; but he wasn’t to know. I didn’t recognize him, which wasn’t such a surprise, because he was younger, and it was getting harder and harder to persuade young people to actually come and be a part of their community. Actually, no, persuade is the wrong word, because it’s not like that. Not enough families were actually involving their young. There shouldn’t have had to be persuading. He sat in the chair I usually used – I am hesitant to call it my chair, because it wasn’t mine, but that’s how I thought of it, because it fitted me, because I sat in it every single day – and rubbed his hands together. Who’s your father? I asked him. My father? Why do you want to know? It’s important, I said; maybe I know him, because I can’t place your face. That’s right, he said, I’m not from here. I’m staying here for the week, he said, with a friend. (I forget what it was like, having religion when I was his age. Did I have it? I’m sure I must have, because it was everything to my father. He was an imam in Algeria, if you can believe that, and he came to England when I was only a few weeks old. That changed him, because in Algeria it was just his life; here, it was an uphill struggle, he used to say. God wants you to prove your love, and there is no better place, he said. He fought for this, and then he died. He – I have to be careful about how I say this, because it’s so easily taken the wrong way – he seemed to get a second wind for the fight after September 11th, even though he was so old, his breath failing him. Some days he could barely speak through his breathing, and he still attended every prayer, still staunchly defended our rights. He was in his element. He hated what was done, hated everything about it – I have never seen him so angry as I did in those days after it happened – but he wanted to challenge misconceptions. Is that wrong? He wanted to show that not everybody is capable of what those people did. I was already on my path, but his belief – which was stronger than any love he had, for better or for worse – was inspiring. I read to him from the Qur’an as he died, and I will never have any regrets for that.) Listen, he said, this is not my mosque, right? I’ve come to you because I can’t go there. Why can’t you talk to your friends and family, your own imam? I asked him, and he shook his head. He won’t understand, none of them will. Won’t understand what? I hadn’t sat down the whole time, waiting for my own chair; I sat opposite, because it felt important. This was my fault, he said. This voice, the static. He was crying, shaking; I put my hand out to him, took his hand in mine. Don’t be a fool, I said, we don’t even know what it is. I committed zina, he said, right at the time of the first static. You had intercourse? I said, and he nodded. That’s who I came to see, he said, still crying, a girl. And you think that you made this happen? I would have smiled if zina wasn’t important, if this wasn’t something that seemed to matter so much to him. (And I was pleased that it did mean so much, even if it took something as strange as The Broadcast to make it so.)

You haven’t seen what they’re saying? he asked. On the news and everything, they’re all saying it’s God, actually God. They don’t know, I said, but he shook his head. No, no, you don’t understand, they sound like they do know. It’s God, and He’s here because we sinned too much, and I was the last sin, the last straw. And I said, God inspires those who love Him to sound convinced, because it’s what they believe. But if it is God, a sin like zina won’t be reason for you to be punished. He dried his eyes. But that’s what we’ve always been told, he said, my father told me. People tell others a lot of things for their benefits, I said. But this? We’ll wait and see how this works out, okay?

Peter Johns, biologist, Auckland

Those mentals you see living on the streets, with their thinking that they had a direct line to God, or saying that they were hearing voices? Suddenly, we were all in that same damn boat.