James Smythe: The Testimony

We tried to stay focused, to get on with what we were doing before. (Now, I can’t even remember what that was. Something… No, I can’t remember.) We weren’t all happy to be there, though; some people around the offices wanted to leave, some wanted to stay. I wanted to stay, because I knew that Jacques wasn’t going to go anywhere, and I didn’t want to leave him alone. If everything was going to be fine, then there was no reason that I wouldn’t just stay there with him; and if everything wasn’t fine, then I wanted to be right there as well.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

Some of us wanted to run away there and then – which made me so angry, because there was nothing to run from in the first place – but I persuaded them all to spend the night there, or that we should prepare to spend the night. The trains and buses weren’t running properly, and I only had my bike, so I couldn’t exactly give everybody a lift home. What we – David and I – decided was that we needed to have some booze there, have a bit of a party, so we offered to go and get supplies. Nobody was going to make it home that evening; Audrey lived in Aix, David was from Avignon, Patrice was from Carpentras, I think, so it was pretty much out of the question. David and I told the others that we would go to the supermarket, get some stuff – Be the hunters, Audrey said – and we left the other three in the offices.

Everything on the way to the supermarket was closed, which must have been because of the static. It was a Monday, there was no reason for anything to be shut, and the supermarket was 24 hours anyway, so we thought it would be fine. When we got there though, there weren’t any members of staff around, and the front door had been opened – David noticed it – forced back, we reckoned. The place was full – if you weren’t at church you were shopping, right? – and everybody was just grabbing at the meats and fish, and those aisles were pretty bare, so we headed straight for the tinned stuff, baked beans and soups and tins of olives and anchovies – anything that we could eat cold, basically – and then ran to the wine, got what we could. We weren’t fussy – it was to get pissed, not worry about the quality of the grape – so we took the German shit, the Rieslings, the Blue Nun, the sweet stuff that nobody else wanted. I found some German ‘champagne’ and showed it to David, and we both laughed but we took it anyway, because it was free, and it would do the job.

Then we heard people screaming by the front and there was this guy with an enormous white beard, down to his chest, and he was waving this old rifle around, that looked like it was an antique, even. Oh my God! David shouted (and we found that pretty funny when we left, and thought about it). The old man was threatening to shoot people unless they left the supermarket – You will all repent! he kept shouting – so we took that as our cue to run. The glass by the wine had been smashed along the front of the shop, so we picked the trolley up, lifted it over, and we started to run with it up the street. The guy saw us and chased after us – he was barefoot, and he cut himself over the glass, and I shouted back, Stop and fix yourself! and then he screamed, Take this! and we both stopped and braced ourselves, because we thought he was going to shoot at us. (I don’t know why we stopped running; seems pretty stupid, thinking about it now.) But he didn’t fire; he threw the gun at us instead, at our feet, and I went and picked it up, put it in the trolley. You never know, I said. When we had made it to the top of the hill I took it out to look at it, stared down the barrel, made pew-pew noises. We opened a box of the wine, started guzzling it as we walked back – much slower than the walk there – and when we got in David took the gun to hide it before Audrey saw it, because she would have totally freaked out.

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

We had a statement prepared that POTUS was going to go on air with. It was the fourth or fifth draft, maybe, and we never wrote that many. We were a two-draft administration – the writing staff getting one out, then I made changes, sometimes POTUS changed a word or two. That was usually it, but this one, POTUS insisted on going over everything himself. And it kept changing. The first draft was about how we didn’t have the right answers but we had our best men working on it; the second was about how the answer might not be the important thing, and maybe the question that it raised was what mattered; the third draft was about speculation being a dangerous thing (and that was aimed at both the press and every other country across the entire god-damned world); the fourth draft was just begging people to keep themselves under control. We had to face the rioting head on, we knew that. What we heard – the static, whatever – was still there, but suddenly we, as an administration, didn’t care as much what it was, because reports were coming in from LA, from Texas, from Chicago, reports about the people of America becoming restless.

You know, actually, that’s not true. They were restless before the static happened. We’d spent nearly twenty years going no lower than a Yellow alert level. That is, by definition, telling the people that there’s a Significant Risk of Terrorist Attacks . We went up to Orange for almost every holiday, it felt like, and that was High Risk . We even hit Red once, near the end of Obama’s first term, when we had intel about a much larger attack that never happened, something to do with our relationship with Iran. That wasn’t the only alert: every few years somebody stepped forward with a car bomb and a promise, threatening something worse, and they did their damage – sometimes only emotional, because we were fragile, as a nation – and we never heard from them again. We got coded messages, grainy cell-phone footage of somebody that they tried to make the new Bin Laden, but nothing ever stuck. All it did was make half the people nervous, the other half complacent. So, yeah, the natives were restless to begin with, and we didn’t have an excuse or an explanation for the static, not even close. POTUS’ statement was the best we could manage, asking people to stay calm, to try and get back to normality. He asked that the people going to worship stayed as civil as possible, and remembered that everybody had their own ways of worship, we were a multicultural society, you know the sort of thing. He said, If you think that there’s a chance you could be involved in a riotous act – I absolutely cringed, because we should have caught that word, stopped it sounding like he was talking about a fucking party – just walk away, and let the authorities deal with it. It was those riots we were most worried about, because they were starting up as reports of small groups breaking the front windows of shops, smashing up parked cars, but we knew how they ended.

When he had read the statement – straight down the line in the press briefing room, straight into Camera 1, just as he was trained to do – he took some questions, and one of the reporters asked him why he thought that people were rioting. We understand that hearing what we heard played with everybody’s emotions, she said to him, but why do you think some people have turned to violence? Shouldn’t we all be trying to get into God’s good books?

That raised a laugh around the room from everybody but POTUS. The first thing is, he said, we don’t know if it actually was a God, or indeed what it was. We’d be fools to jump to the conclusion that it’s any sort of higher power; it’s just as likely, if not more likely, to be something entirely explainable, and we’ve got our best people on it. I knew what was coming after that answer, so I made my way to the side of the room, tried to get somebody to get him off the podium, but it was too late. He was saying something about people and zealotry, and Jesus fucking Christ, that was going to hurt us, I knew, and then that same journalist asked the killer question, the one that we had danced around for so long. Mr President, she asked, do you believe in God? We had avoided it the whole way through the campaign, getting him to swear on Bibles and go to church and be a total hypocrite in service to his country – and we had the most right-wing running mate we could find, in bed with so many churches and anti-abortion clinics that it made most of us feel sick – but nobody had ever asked him outright. It was like Scooby-Doo ; we would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for that meddling journalist. Don’t answer, I said, over and over, but he did, because he was the President, and Presidents always answered questions honestly in times of strife, right?