James Smythe - The Testimony

Peter Johns, biologist, Auckland

We were all back at work by the Monday, and by the Wednesday, we’d found somebody to take over Trig’s job. The Tieke bird that bit him survived, and the others hatched not long after, all healthy. We called one of them after Trig, which I didn’t want to do – wasn’t my idea – but that’s the way people do things.

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

Life abides, that’s what they say, isn’t it? Life abides, we move on. I moved up here, back in with my parents, pretended that the last few years – that my work, my career, my relationships – never happened. It wasn’t easy to forget about Jacques, of course, not at first, and especially not after he ended up being on the television as much as he was. We’re all really into the Church of the One True God, and we go to church every day, sometimes twice, occasionally more. I sleep in my old bedroom.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

It wasn’t for days and days that they managed to get an ambulance to take me to a proper hospital, in Lyon. The place that I had been in? It was a plastic surgeon’s, the man that operated on me was a specialist in nips and tucks. I laughed when they told me! Eventually they got one of the nurses to drive me to Lyon, to the hospital there, to get me checked out properly, and they poked and prodded me, ran tests, checked I wasn’t infected. I was fine, they said, physically. Psychologically? You’ve been through a lot, the doctor told me. You need to take it easy, relax, go through rehabilitation. It’s a hard time for us all, but for you? It will be doubly hard.

I was walking the grounds a couple of mornings later, as they tried to track down my sister, to ask her to come and pick me up, when I got talking to a journalist, mentioned what I had gone through – mentioned it, in passing, like, How is the weather, or, Oh, God abandoned us and then I nearly died – and she asked me if she could write a story about me. She wanted case studies, of survivors, she said. We’re all post-9/11, or post-Katrina; we should all tell our tales, and yours is a good one. Sure, I said, sure, and I told her it all. I left Audrey out of the story completely. I didn’t think it was fair to drag her into this.

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

Every time he tells his little story about this – about how he tried to work out where the signal was coming from with his linguistic skills, about how he saw his friends kill themselves, about how he went to find his sister – not ran away, like a fucking coward, but went to find her, like it was an adventure – every time I see him tell that story, which is a lot, because we French people are still not bored of it, apparently, not bored of talking about it; every time I hear it, it makes me want to vomit. He has his new false teeth and his fucking plastic arm, and I hate him, so, so much.

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.