The Testimony. James Smythe

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СКАЧАТЬ Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

      We ran so many tests. I mean, we were into tests up to our asses, you have no idea. Picture this: there were seven individual departments of governmental science, and they each had sub-departments, three or four apiece. Each sub-department was running its own tests, so there were tests on background noise levels, radiation levels, NASA stuff, security stuff, tests to do with animals, asking people what they thought it could be. I mean, anything you can imagine, we were testing for it somewhere. There were only a couple of divisions not working on it, because they worked on the stuff nobody knew about – plausible deniability and all that jazz. We were sending out single-sentence press releases through the White House press office when we eliminated something from the running, just to try and get everything under control. Everything else was standing still. Two minutes after POTUS told us to start running the tests (even though we had already started, clearly, because we weren’t the sort of assholes who waited for a go-order from somebody who had no idea what we were actually doing) there were statements put out to the press to calm the nation, urge the emergency services to keep going, to go to work as normal. We couldn’t risk a shutdown of them, all of us knew that. So he asked everybody to keep going as normal, and I think most people did, that day. We did; the TV stations did, and I’m betting that every 7-Eleven was still selling Slushies.

       Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

      I can’t remember how long I sat in that bar and watched the TV. Hours, probably. Max, the barman, kept putting drinks in my hand, and I kept drinking them. I didn’t say anything, that I didn’t hear it, and we all just watched the news as it rolled in. They went on about the aliens for an hour, maybe more, and then finally they started asking, well, what else could it be? One of the early theories was something to do with cell phones, like that beep you get when you leave it on top of a speaker? But it didn’t stick, and that became the news cycle. What is it, what is it, over and over. An hour later, every station was answering that question by sticking anybody with an even vaguely religious background on their shows.

       Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

      How to divide the world into three camps over a single hour: make them pick between science, fantasy and religion. Give them a situation, a hypothetical situation, then give them three possible reasons for it happening – could be aliens, could be God, could be something we made ourselves and just haven’t worked out what yet – and ask them to choose. You choose the wrong one, the worst that happens is you choose again. So, we all took a stance, and there was a part of it that day – I’m not ashamed to tell you – that felt a bit like choosing between the side of the sane, and the side of … well, the other.

       Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

      There was a priest on the sofa with the BBC presenters saying that it was God speaking to us for the first time in two thousand years. (Since He first spoke to us through his son Jesus Christ, I think those were his exact words.) We can hear his voice, but of course we cannot comprehend it, he argued. The priest was old, set in his ways, you could tell. We can’t comprehend it because He’s speaking in tongues. Then he reeled off quotes from the Bible that seemed to back up his idea, if you squinted, and said that all good Christians should go to church and pray. If you believe, he said, you’ll go, because that is how you can tell God exactly how much you love Him. He’s made contact, the priest said; now it’s your turn to answer back. That just killed it. Half the office had gone by that point, trying to beat the traffic and make it home for the day; that took most of the rest. Ten minutes later, people everywhere were flooding to their nearest church. And I mean that, it’s not me being over-emphatic; the streets were clogged.

       Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

      Leonard wasn’t a fickle man. He was a man of conviction; that’s one of the things that I most liked about him, that most attracted me to him. He knew who he was. We saw the news reports about people flocking to their churches and synagogues or what have you, and he didn’t even blink. And our closest synagogue was only minutes away, so it would have been all too easy for him to fall back on old habits.

      We watched them on TV as they divided it up – and gosh, it seems like all we did that morning was watch things happening, when you really break it down. CNN had figureheads from all major religions on within an hour, and they fought over what the static was. They didn’t say it, because I suppose they couldn’t, but it actually felt as if they were fighting about whose God it was. The Greek Orthodox priest kept nearly saying something, you could tell, then holding it back; he finally spat it out as the segment was coming to a close. What if it’s Allah, he said, or somebody else, Ganesh, Buddha; just not whoever it is that you already worship? What if you’ve got it wrong? There was this look that went across them all, then, because I don’t think that they had even considered that possibility. Typical, Leonard said. An hour spent in the presence of the maker, and already they’re starting to wonder if they picked the right team.

       Dafni Haza, political speechwriter, Tel Aviv

      My husband called me so many times that day that I had to put my phone onto silent, and even then the sound of the vibrations against other things in my bag was irritating, so I hid it in a drawer and then forgot about it for a while. When he actually got hold of me he was frantic. What was that? he asked me, and I said that I didn’t know. Why didn’t you answer your phone? Because I’m busy, I told him. That was a common argument we had, because … There was a time that I was with somebody else, after I was married to him. Nobody else knew but the man and my husband, and it was only once, but the trust didn’t come back. So he thought that I was seeing him again, or maybe somebody else, I don’t know. He whined about it all the time. He didn’t like that I had taken the new job, anyway. (The government in Tel Aviv is full of men, he said, when we argued about it; what he meant was, powerful men – the man I had cheated with was a powerful man, and it was a new theme, because when I had met Lev and fallen in love with him, he had been powerful too.) Look, he said, I just want to know what the static was. I’ll tell you when we know something, I said, and he said, Come on, you know now, you’re on the inside, you can tell me. I told you that I don’t know, I said, but I do know that I have work to do. You’ll tell me as soon as you find out more, okay? he asked, and I said, Fine. I love you, he said.

       Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

      It became this gospel, that it was the voice of God talking to us, you know? It was a definitive, apparently, because there was no other answer. We were watching the priests on the news, and the phone rang, and it was some Church-funded organization near Lyon, asking us to go and do some translation work for them. I asked them what they wanted us to translate, and the man said, Well, what He said to us, of course. I slammed the phone down, and Audrey said, What? What?, and I said, It was fucking static! You can’t translate static! Audrey said I was cutting off my nose, blah blah blah, that we could get funding out of it, somehow, that it would help the university’s reputation … I said to her, If you start going and working for these people and then you’re wrong – if it is just static – then it’s you that looks the imbecile.

      I didn’t ask her, because there were other people around, but I think she thought it actually was God, you know.

       Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

      Jacques СКАЧАТЬ