Petty bureaucracy reigned. The Deputy PM, elevated to power by virtue of resignation, decided that we needed to address the situation with the US, with where we stood. We haven’t been attacked, he said, and we don’t know all the facts. It was casual government at its finest, as he danced around and tried to be as non-committal as possible, but the message was clear: we weren’t going to help them. Frankly, I was relieved, because the Americans were getting into it so quickly that I didn’t know how long it would be before they were ankle deep with no way out. Usually these things – the process of terrorist attacks, of threats of retaliation, of that actually escalating to action – they took weeks. This time it could be counted in hours, and that put us all in a very dangerous situation indeed. There’s a real worry that we’ll actually manage to hold the country together in all this chaos, the Deputy PM said, so there’s no point in shitting in the bed just because we don’t want to go to sleep. (Some of the back-benchers laughed at that like naughty school-children, which only served to remind me, once again, how old I was.) We spoke about it, but there was a consensus: America was, for the time being, on their own with this one.
And then there was the matter of the Church of England to deal with. Before The Broadcast, of course, Church and State were constitutionally separated (unless something required them to be curiously conjoined, in which case we treated them as one and the same). But in this case they were very much kept in their own paddocks. People spoke about the potential God being Christian, but what they really meant was that he was Catholic, or some derivation thereof. The C of E, for all its faults, was in a bit of a pickle. If it was God and he was the Catholic chap, their main source of funding – being the people of England and her provinces – was in serious danger of disappearing. Why invest in a company that’s failing, where the product has been proven faulty and the CEO was only invented 600 years ago to help clear up a messy divorce?
I cried out of an afternoon sitting listening to archbishops selling their stock in favour of lunch, by myself, from the McDonald’s down by the Thames, a guilty pleasure of mine that I never tired of, and I had just noticed that the Wheel wasn’t turning when my telephone rang. It was Waitrose in Putney; my sister was there, collapsed at the till. She’s drunk, the man said, and I think she’s had an accident. He said that last part quietly, hushed. I didn’t know what he expected me to do about that; he was the one surrounded by shelves full of cleaning products.
By the time I arrived Dotty was propped up on a chair at the side, under the telephone station. Come on old girl, I said, and that set her off crying. She wept the whole cab ride back, and I had to give the driver extra money to stop him worrying about her throwing up on his seats. He kept staring at us in the mirror, though, which I hate. When we got back I put her to bed, but she wouldn’t stay lying down. What the hell is the matter with you? I asked her, and she said, I just can’t deal with it, Sim. What? With this, she said, with it. She waved her hands above her head, then opened the top of her shirt to show me a crucifix on a gold chain, one of those overly detailed ones with the miniature body of Christ, tiny nails through His hands, tiny crown of thorns on His head. Lovely detailing. I never knew that He was real, she said, and she pulled the cross off her neck. I’ve done such things, so many things that He said we shouldn’t do. I didn’t dare ask any more, so I put her to bed again, told her I’d be back.
I phoned Clive from the living room. Clive was her husband, and I wanted to know why on earth he wasn’t called, or if he had been called, why he didn’t get out to help her. He said that he didn’t have a clue that she was there. I thought she was at home all day, he said. Well, I told him, you really should come back here, because she’s a danger to herself like this. She needs to be looked after. He asked me to wait for him, so I said that I would. It took him nearly two hours to get back, even though he only worked in Hammersmith, only across the bridge, and when he walked in he absolutely stank of whisky.
I was doing a conference, detailing the strikes we had made, talking about the fact that we were certain of a swift end to the conflict. I said something like, When the terror cells and the nations involved in harbouring the criminals involved come to their senses, see the opposition facing them, we’re confident that this will all be over swiftly; and the reporter from The Times piped up, interrupted – which wasn’t done, not in the press room, not during a statement – and asked me why we were even at war. We were attacked, our freedom was attacked, I said, and he said, Sure, but by what we can only assume are religious zealots. Why did the US retaliate against Iran? This guy thought he had something, and I wanted to prove to him that he didn’t, so I answered. The government of Iran refused to hand over the criminals responsible when we requested them, and we had warned them that if they didn’t, we would be forced to retaliate, and then we did. Yeah, and I understand that, he said, but did you have evidence that the government even had the criminals? Did you have actual proof? Because we’ve been doing this with Iran for years now, haven’t we? Assuming things? Was this just another case of the US government jumping to conclusions? I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t have an answer. He continued: Because, the terrorists, they were probably just jumping to conclusions as well, after The Broadcast. They probably just panicked, just scared that their entire belief system might be crumbling. It’s not totally unfair to think it could have been some sort of attack on them, right?
That was where I chose to end the press conference, because he was right. He was completely right, but we were too far gone for that sort of logic. As soon as I was out of the room I heard that the British had decided to refuse our call for solidarity, and that we were having issues with other members of the UN, countries who didn’t agree with our decision to jump in as quickly as we did. I prayed to whatever it was that spoke to us then that Iran didn’t fight back any more, that they gave us the terrorists, and that we could just end it all as quickly as it started.
Leonard was so angry when the news started showing the British Deputy Prime Minister – apparently they were having some trouble with the real one, disappeared somewhere, the newsreaders said – when they showed him saying that the UK didn’t support our President’s decision to attack Iran. Leonard was so, so angry. I can’t believe that we asked for their help, he shouted, this situation shouldn’t have even existed! How dare we beg other people to get into this mess with us!
New York was different to the rest of the US anyway, because we have a thing about terrorism. We band together in times of national stress; it’s what makes us unique, and that always appealed to Leonard, that New Yorkers had this built-in sense of a sort of protective morality. They’ll all know this is wrong, he said to me. I should organize something to show the government what we think of them. We were all too aware of the protests – which had turned to riots across the globe, as the situation in Moscow had shown – but Leonard wanted to make this one different. He went onto his blog – he kept a political blog, which I gather quite a few people used to read – and he started planning. As far as I was concerned it was a good project for him, something to keep him busy.
I snuck out and went to the synagogue. It was so busy that I couldn’t actually get in for the service, so I had to join the queue to get into the next one along. Apparently they were going to start doing blessings on the lawns of Central Park, just to fit everybody in, as if it were some sort of rock festival, and the rabbis were playing guitars with their teeth.
Nobody missed me when I was down in the tomb, and it wasn’t until somebody came down to pray to St Peter that they realized I was there. The lights came on and woke me up. I was sleeping in the dirt on the floor, so close to Him, trying to get closer. Sister Dulli, are you okay? It was one of the Cardinals, one I didn’t really know, but he knew my name. He was Spanish, I think, and he spoke to me in creaky Italian that I had to strain to understand. Let me help you up. He was older than I was, and frailer; I think I remember that he had ill health, something to do with his breathing. He wheezed, certainly, all that dead air down in the tomb. He tried to let me use him to pull myself to my feet, but I did most of the work myself, truth be told. How long have you been down here? He seemed genuinely concerned. Not long, I said. He didn’t ask why I was there; when I was upright he leaned back against one of the guard railings that we put up to keep the tourists back. It’s amazing, isn’t it? To think that this is all validated now.
What do you mean? I asked him, and he smiled. Well, you know. People say you’re insane for believing this. The last few years, you know how it’s been. Harder to follow Him, eh? The Cardinal must have seen my face then, whatever I looked like. It wasn’t harder for you, I understand. Faith is all subjective, eh? You didn’t believe? I asked. He shook his head. No, no, I did. Something is lost in the translation, I think. I believed, but there was always a worry, a wonder. A question, eh? He smiled, because he thought that this was normal, but I wanted to shake him, tell him that I never questioned it. And The Broadcast, it wasn’t validation, it was a lie. Evidence isn’t a voice in the darkness, I said, you can’t really believe that it is. No, he said, of course not, of course not. We both stood in and looked at the tomb, at the other graves that they unearthed over the years, until I couldn’t stand it any more. I need to get fresh air, I said. He nodded. It’s a wonderful day, he said. I didn’t reply.
Outside, the light was so much brighter than I expected, and it took me a few seconds there, in the Basilica itself, to get accustomed. It was so busy, people crowding like they did in the queues outside, like they did when there was a mass or the Pope’s birthday, or even a new Pope’s address, when they spoke to the people for the first time and told them that they were God’s chosen one, His representative here, His heart, His voice. I couldn’t see for them for the first few seconds before they parted briefly, and the light from behind the Baldaccino was so bright. Everybody was singing hymns again, but it all dropped away. They listened for the voice, for that blunt reassurance; I saw the light of the Lord, and that was all I needed. I fell to my knees and wept; they crowded me, putting their arms around me. We know, they said, it’s a miracle, a miracle. You don’t know, I told them, don’t tell me what you think you know.
France was in really good shape, actually. Before The Broadcast we were sort of a joke, I think, sitting in the middle of Europe, just bloated and holding all these other places together, like a hub. And as people, we have a reputation. But we only had a couple of days of looting and the suicides, no different to everywhere else, and then we recovered and settled down. We didn’t have the panic that the Americans had, shutting down all their transport links, shutting schools and malls; we just got on with it. Jacques and I decided that we should go on a date, because I couldn’t stop thinking about Patrice, thinking about if I could have stopped him. You need cheering up, Jacques said, we should go and get some dinner. He knew just the place, apparently, down in L’Estaque, past the port itself, right by the seafront. We got a table by the window – business was slow everywhere still, that much hadn’t recovered, so we got one of the best tables easily – and we watched some of the ships, the fishermen off as if this all never happened, and we ate mussels and fries and drank this strong pear cider that Jacques loved. We spoke about The Broadcast, because it was still so there, and so important. Jacques liked to debate about it, talk about the possibilities, what it could mean. We were totally hung up on the Americans attacking Iran that evening, the conversation being about America’s ownership – Jacques’ word – of The Broadcast. In many ways, he said, it’s like they’re actually saying that they own this version of God, you know? That’s typical of them, steam-rolling over everything.
There was a man behind us having dinner with his wife, and they were both stinking drunk when we arrived, not even started eating yet. Halfway through the meal she stopped drinking but he carried on, and I had to watch them the whole time whilst I tried to eat, watch him as he gulped at his wine, as he slopped cream sauce over his shirt. Our dessert had just arrived when he leaned over toward us. His wife tried to stop him, shooing him off, Don’t say anything, that sort of thing, but he leant in as far as his chair would let him. Hey, he said, so Jacques turned to look at him. Hey, you think everybody here will get into heaven? I don’t know, Jacques said. We’ll have to wait and see. Hey, no, listen, the man said; What I mean is, you think even you niggers will get in? You think that God will have a vetting policy, maybe, stop you getting in before you fuck all our women up there as well? He was looking at me when he said that, and that made Jacques even angrier. Shut up, Jacques told him. He gave him a chance. Hey, I know, the fat drunk said, why not just end it all now, see if you get in, and then you can let all your other brothers know, yeah? So Jacques stood up and punched him first, threw his fist into the man’s face before the manager ran over with a waiter and they pulled them off each other, pushed them both onto the street. I went to watch but the fat drunk’s wife didn’t bother.
I’d never seen an actual fight before. In the movies it’s all speed and repetition, thumping a face over and over, but in real life it’s much slower. After just two or three punches and some things that looked like kicks but didn’t connect both of them were slower, panting, but Jacques was clearly winning (if it could be called that). I wondered if I shouldn’t be cheering him on, you know? Eventually he just stopped, left the fat drunk on the floor. You’re not worth it, Jacques said, and he spat on the man, this big ball of blood. He had lost a tooth, and his mouth sounded mushy when he talked. No cabs stopped, probably because of the blood, so we waited for a bus back. We sat on the back seats and I put antibacterial gel on his cuts, kept them clean.
When we got back to his place he took a shower, and I watched him through the open door with his head tilted back, mouth hanging open, the water running in and then dribbling out again, red from his gums. When he got out he told me how bad it was. I’ve lost some teeth, he said. How many? I don’t know, a few. Three or four. I’ll go and see the dentist tomorrow. On the television there was a drama about The Broadcast, the fastest that I had ever seen a programme made, about this man who was doubting God and then heard it and then turned his life around, stopped him from killing himself. It was awful, but it said Based On A True Story at the start, and I thought, Jesus, isn’t everything, almost? In bed, Jacques kissed me and I forgot about the holes in his mouth, and I suddenly got that metal taste on my tongue, so I told him that I was tired and that I had to go to sleep. I just lay there feeling sick, because all I could taste was his blood.
I woke up to the news that we’d had another warning; that there was a school right here in DC with a bomb planted. We hadn’t closed schools, because they were off limits, as far as we were concerned. It wasn’t a game, exactly, but there were rules with this sort of thing.
I mean, Jesus Christ. Who fucking blows up a school? Who thinks that’s fair?
Only half the class was in, because the kids’ parents were so worried about possibilities, or they had the days off themselves. Lots of people couldn’t get to work when the trains stopped running, and I think they liked the excuse, so they kept their kids at home. I lived five minutes away, and that was walking, so I didn’t have any excuse, and a lot of the kids were just as local. We were concentrating on reading, working through a book together, all these fairy tales but updated to be about more modern concerns, so Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a bottle of water from the shop there, that kind of thing. We were reading that together, slowly, so we picked that up where we left off. I didn’t notice the extra car in the lot, because nobody would ever notice that sort of thing, even though afterward, the police insisted that I would have seen it as I walked in. I didn’t notice it, it was a car, parked with fifteen, twenty others. We were halfway through the class, and Jennifer Pritchard was reading, and I was about to pass the reading over to Jon Bayliss when the building shook. I remember that I went under my desk as fast as I could, because I grew up in California, and we were quake-trained. We knew, the room shakes, you get under a table or in the frame of a doorway, just do it. I didn’t even think. When I was under I shouted out to the kids to do the same, because by that point I couldn’t even stick my head up to see what was happening; the digi-board had fallen down on top of my desk, and I could hear windows smashing, and children screaming, and I couldn’t do anything. Even when the shaking stopped I could hear the screaming still, and everything got hot, and I knew that we were on fire somewhere, probably the hallway. Shout to me, I screamed, tell me if you’re hurt or alright, but all I got back was screaming.
My classroom was the other end of the building to the lot, so we got off the best, or the least-bad, that’s a better way to put it. I managed to kick the board away after a few minutes, because I knew that if I didn’t I could die there, when the flames hit the desk. I didn’t stop to look at the bodies in my room. There weren’t as many as there had been kids, so I assumed that some of them made it out, but there were a few. I didn’t stop. Is that awful? I think that I knew they were dead already, and I wanted to get out. Is that awful?
The exit was next to my classroom, out the back, onto the playground, and the rest of the kids from the school were there on the grass at the back, lying on their backs, some of them coughing, some of them completely still. I knew that I should go over and help them but I couldn’t; I sat on a bench at the side and coughed and cried until the paramedics asked if I was alright. I told them that I wasn’t, so they took me to their ambulance out the side, on the road, away from all those kids. Is that awful? I just couldn’t stand to be there with them.
The official response was that a terror cell, fuelled by hatred, had decided to take out their anger on our country. We didn’t sell it as a retaliation for what we had done, because we had attacked their training camps, and we knew that there was a chance that those camps had kids in them, had mothers, whole families. They’re not civilian areas, they’re training camps; we didn’t bomb cities or villages or hospitals or schools. There’s always a chance that people will be in them that you wouldn’t want to kill, but they’re training camps, and you just have to live with that chance. But we didn’t do anything to their families and children on purpose, and they did. Stuff like that? It really helps you to reinforce that you know what side you’re on. We decided that we weren’t going to sit around and wait for it to come to us; we weren’t going to let them make another strike.
It was like a new motto: We’re America, and you really shouldn’t fuck with us.
One of the prats who works for me turned up at the house. He rang the doorbell, so I asked on the intercom who it was, he said, It’s Mick, so I let him in. He was a student, bit of a stropper, but better than some of the tsotsis I worked with from the rougher bits of the city. I knew he wouldn’t be there to cause me any grief, at least. What’s the problem? I asked him over the intercom. (I was only half-listening because of the news, with the kiddie school being bombed.) There’s a fucking riot, he said, over in Yeoville. Alright, I said, I’m coming, I’ll drive us. He looked a fucking state. I hadn’t seen him in weeks, and he was using, I could tell. He had to make a payment soon, and I knew as soon as I saw him he wasn’t going to make it, so I thought, what a fucking prat for coming to see me. We got into my car, because it was a trek to Yeoville, and we were in the seats when he suddenly pulled a gun out, stuck it in my belly. Right, he said, where do you keep your supply? Ha ha! I laughed at him. Nê? This is really how you want to play this? You want to have a stick-up, right? I mean, I could tell he wasn’t going to hold it on, because he was sweating, kept glancing over my shoulder. You can drive us there, he said, and I said, don’t be so fucking stupid. I said drive! he shouted, so I did. Alright, you’re the boss, I said. You’re the boss, boss.
I drove around the block a few times, and he didn’t even seem to realize, then when we came to some robots I drove slowly until they went red, pulled up and waited. I grabbed his head, slammed it down onto the dashboard, punched him in the nose two or three times, until I saw blood, grabbed his gun, held it into his gut and pulled the trigger. It sounded like a car exhaust, you know? And there was never crime where we lived – as I said, it was a nice area. There, you motherfucker, I said, there’s your fucking stash. Hope you fucking rot. I opened his door and pushed him out, leaving him in the road. It was quiet, nobody saw me. When I got home I looked on the news to see if there really was something happening in Yeoville or not, but they didn’t say anything, and they didn’t mention that kont dealer, because nobody would have given even half a shit about him. My old lady asked what had happened, so I told her that he was just confused, wanted some advice on something. She didn’t care; she was just being polite, I reckon.
The girl from the reception desk ran to find me when they found Adele’s body in her bedroom, because her camera crew had come in again – I remember now, she was making a documentary on the railway, because they were putting new trains out, and that was something that we – our country – was famous for, the people hanging off the backs of trains, packed into the carriages, and the poverty of the trains, what it meant to be packed in like that, crushed up against yourself – and they couldn’t get her to open her bedroom door. It felt like an age since I had tried to get her to. I had even started telling myself that she had left Bankipore completely, because the girl on reception, when I had asked that morning, didn’t even think that she had been out of her room at all. So when they came to fetch me, I was surprised.
There’s a woman and she needs a doctor, the porters shouted, you have to come and save her! I ran up the stairs behind them, before I even knew it was Adele, and they had already moved her from the floor where they found her – I knew this because of the vomit on the carpet, barely visible when I first went into the room because it was so pale – and then I realized that I was in her room, the room I had knocked on the door of so many times over the past couple of days. I checked her body, but she had been dead for hours. You can tell as soon as you see one, because of the eyes, the temperature of the body, the way it lies there – this is one of the first things that they teach you in medical school, because in Bangalore they show you a dead body on your first day so that you’re prepared for anything, so that you know what you will have to deal with – and I could tell that it was pointless trying with Adele. But, still, it’s what is expected of a doctor. The camera crew stood at the back of the room, lined up along the wall, and watched me as I went through the motions of feeling her wrist, looking at her eyes. She’s dead, I said; they left me to pull the bed-sheet away from the mattress, where it was tightly tucked in, and covered her body and face. You should call for an ambulance, I said to the porters. Can’t you do it? one of them asked. They’ll listen to you.
Fine, yes, I said, I’ll do it. I called them from the lobby, because I didn’t want to be near her, and then I went to the bar and drank juice. After a while the camera crew sat with me. Haven’t you got somewhere to be? I asked them, and they said that they didn’t, that their time had been paid for already. They ordered drinks as well and sat with me, and it felt like hours before any of us spoke.
Cable television kept me sane. Everybody else seemed to be getting on with their lives – these new lives, in the wake of their sudden exposure to whatever it was – and I was stuck with mine being exactly as it was. I couldn’t face going out to drink, so I got some from the shop and sat there with the TV flicking through repeats of old baseball game highlights, episodes of sitcoms, food channel shows, with the beers in my hand or in the freezer.
Later that day, drunk, I found the chip I got given a year before, that I then ignored when I fell off the wagon again, and I wondered if I couldn’t find a meeting, try to pick up where I left off. I was looking for the nearest one, on the net, when I realized that it would be full of people talking about how The Broadcast reaffirmed their belief in what they were doing, so instead I forgot about it, and decided to just stay as I was.
Mom had grounded me even though I didn’t actually do anything wrong. She was so scared about what it meant, that I didn’t hear The Broadcast, and she and my dad wanted to spend all their time either in church or praying, anyway. I thought she’d drag me along to church, try to get me healed, but I think she was ashamed. I had the internet, though, so I spent my time trying to find anything about people who didn’t hear The Broadcast. I figured that I couldn’t be the only one, and it took me ages to find anybody else, then I found this site, just some blog where somebody was asking if there was anybody else who hadn’t heard it, and it said to leave a comment, so I did, with my email address. She got back to me, like, a minute later, maybe.
I put the thing up on the web in the middle of the night, thinking, Well, it’ll take a few days for it to spread around Google, so I won’t hear anything for ages, but it fucking exploded, and I had hundreds of comments, which … God, I was so excited. Because I’d been thinking that I was all on my own there, for a while. Then I read the comments, and my God, that was an eye-opener. They were all from these religious whackos, saying, Oh, you’ll burn in hell, Oh, why doesn’t God love you, what did you do, Oh, guess we won’t be seeing you in heaven, all that sort of shite. It was like somebody took my spam filter and swapped cock references for ones to religion. I read through hundreds of them, and all just to find the one response I was after – the one that I needed, I reckon, to stop me from going completely batshit – from Katy, this girl in Orlando. Her email was amazing: Hello, I think I’m like you because I didn’t hear it either, everything here’s falling apart, here’s my Facebook page. She seemed like a sweet girl. I have no idea how I would have dealt with it when I was her age, feeling that alone. And it was really very trusting of her, maybe even stupidly so; I could have been anybody, and if any of those wankers thinking I should die because I didn’t hear The Broadcast, if any of them got a hold of her, fuck knows what they would do.
We swapped emails back and forth a bit, so I could check she wasn’t just another crazy, and then she sent me her phone number, so I called her and we swapped stories. I didn’t even know if you were real, she said. I assured her I was, and we chatted for ages and ages, about what it felt like, about the craziness of our parents – hers were proper Crazy Christians, mine were Catholic, and both our mothers had spent the last few days sellotaped to the pews in their churches. I was scared it was just me, she said. Me too, I told her, but this is better, because now we can just be scared together, eh? I gave her my details, told her I’d stay in touch, that she should call me if she wanted. About ten minutes after I hung up I saw this thing on the TV about the Mormons, and I wondered what the chances were of finding two other people who didn’t hear it in one day, because they had to be pretty fucking slim.
My father, when he was alive, had been a tremendous man: full of vim, vigour, and he was righteous. He was the model for fatherhood, how I wanted to be for my children. I only ended up with the one child, in the end, though not from want of trying. I was my father’s first-born, so I had his name, a name that I gave to my own son as well. It’s the way that the line works. My second wife Eleanor always said that I was born to be a father; unfortunately, I was unable to give her the children that she desired, which meant we never grew as close as I would have liked, certainly not as close as Jennifer and I were. We had little Joseph – Joe – and that really sealed our marriage. I still wondered why I had been struck with the infertility, after my first child, but Ervil Smith, the Prophet, told me to wait. He was the conduit to God, the voice of our people, able to speak to God, to gain His counsel on matters that affected us all. When we first heard The Broadcast, it was Ervil Smith who told us that it was God’s way of testing the rest of the world, providing them with the opportunity to come and seek us out, to seek out the true way to His path. He said that we shouldn’t be afraid, and then The Broadcast returned, told us the same thing, and we all believed. Only, Joe didn’t hear God’s words.
We had always known that those who didn’t believe in the Lord would not be saved; that heaven was reserved solely for those people who trusted in the true word of the Lord Jesus Christ, His Father, and the Prophet Joseph Smith (who I was, myself, named for). When I was a younger man, my father had taken me to a mall in Tuscon, and we had spoken to anybody willing to listen to us about the word of the Prophet, no matter their religion: Christian, Jew, Church of the Latter-Day Saints. We had asked them why they believed as they did, and mostly they said, Well, it’s what we were taught to believe. My father told me that this was indoctrination; that they were swayed by older voices than ours telling them the way. If they’ll believe their parents, and their parents’ parents, surely they’ll believe the words of the true Prophet? So I went around and asked them to listen to the word of the true God, to be saved, but they turned me away. On the way back home that evening my father explained that they were just scared, afraid to hear the truth, and that it wasn’t their fault. It’s the will of God that they don’t hear Him, he told me, because God only speaks to those who He wants in His kingdom. That’s why we have the Godless. When the reckoning comes, they’ll learn and try to repent their ways, but we will have spent our lives earning our guarantees into His heaven, at His side. So when Joe couldn’t hear the voice, I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew that Ervil would; or that God would, and Ervil could ask Him.
I waited outside his office to see him for over an hour, because I wanted to speak to him at the first possible opportunity. Emma-Louise, his first wife, made me lemonade while I waited, spoke to me about my family, asked how we all were, and I did the same for her. She was one of eight wives, so it took her longer, but that was fine, because it kept my mind off the conversation that I knew was coming. Ervil didn’t like being asked to commune with the Lord, unless it was of highest importance. Eventually he opened his office door, invited me in. He wasn’t fully dressed; his tie hung around his neck, and he was buttoning his cuffs when I entered. Are you sure? I asked, and he waved my concern away. You’ve seen me swimming in the lake, Joseph; I’m sure you can stomach me doing up my tie in front of you. Everything fine in the shop? he asked, and I told him that it was. Excellent news, he said, but that means that there must be another issue. He smiled, cocked his head, and I wondered if he knew already, if this was his way of testing me. It’s Joseph, my son, I said. Young Joe. Still no reaction from him. When we heard God speak, he didn’t hear it.
Ervil sat bolt forward as if I had scored him. He heard nothing? His whole manner changed, kindly to fractious, friendly to formal. I wondered if you would confer with the Lord about this, to find out if there’s a special reason for this, I asked. He got up from his chair and paced the back of the room. I hated it when he paced. I’ll speak to him, he said, I’ll do it now. Meet me with the boy in ten minutes outside the front of this building, when we’ll have an answer to what we should do for your family. I fetched Joe from eating his breakfast, cleaned his face for him. He wasn’t much of a talker, but I told him to be on his best behaviour. Whatever the Prophet says to you, you tell him how much you love God, you hear? He nodded. You’re going to be fine, I told him.
The Prophet was already outside his house when we got there, but he didn’t say anything as we approached, just stood there like a cowboy, braced. God says that He knows of your boy, he told us. He says that, by not hearing His divine words, he is an abomination of His creation. He says that I am to punish the boy. Joe hid behind my legs, and I told Ervil that he had to be sure about this. It’s punishment, Joseph, he said, and then the boy will hear the words of the Lord. This is God’s word, Joseph. Do you really want to go against God’s word? He reached around my body, grabbed at the nape of my son’s neck, threw him down onto the soil, sending puffs of dust up all around us. You will learn from this punishment, boy, he said, you will learn that there is a true Father, and when He speaks to you, you will listen. Jennifer had to hold me back, but a crowd was swelling, people on their way to work, or just milling around, and they left a circle around Ervil and Joe, like it was some sort of dance. Get up, boy, Ervil said. He was crying the whole time, that’s important, sobbing and snivelling, snot running down his face. Ervil slapped him. Stop crying, boy, and take this like a man. Another slap, another, and this one made Joe fall down again. God told me to lash the boy! shouted Ervil, ever the showman. He had a box with him, a case, that I didn’t see until that moment, and he opened it and pulled out a bullwhip, thick and tarred and cracked from tip to tassel. I stepped in. You will not use that on my son, I said, and that made the Prophet angry. You’re questioning the word of God? he asked. Maybe you need some as well. He snapped it backwards – it flew out, must have been two whole body-lengths of a man – then forward, in a swoop, and the tail drew itself across my legs. Your son has a demon in him! Ervil shouted. God would have me strike the demon out! He raised the whip again, to strike at Joe this time, and I grabbed it, stopped him. Leave my son alone, I said. He bared his teeth, so I pushed him backwards, to keep space between us.
He’s only a child, I said, loud enough that the crowd would hear us, he doesn’t have a demon. You would question God’s word this blatantly? asked Ervil, and I replied that God had spoken to us all, and that it was obvious to me now that none of this – of Colorado City, of the book of Mormon, of Ervil’s speaking to God – none of it was real. Ervil acted as if he had received an arrow to his heart. You must have a devil in you as well, Joseph Jessop, so I will whip it out for you. He swung for me and I stepped forward again, punched him in his eye, and he flopped backwards like he was made out of straw. We’re leaving, I said, because this is no way to treat a child. It’s no way.
Jennifer and I packed the car, got Joe on the back seat. She sat with him, to comfort him, and I drove. We barely had any money, very few clothes; most of what we had was shared, or traded. We asked Eleanor if she wanted to come, and she said that she did not; and because we hadn’t had any children, there was nothing to make her. So I wished her well, and we drove away from Colorado City. We stopped in a diner on the outskirts of one of the nearby towns, ate food quietly. They had a television on in the background, and when I went to use the washroom I noticed an advertisement for a show, saying that they wanted to hear from people whose lives had been changed because of what they were all calling The Broadcast. They were willing to pay handsomely, the lady on the promotion said, so I noted the telephone number and called them from the payphone right outside the diner. They said that they wanted to see us in California as soon as we could drive there. I said that we could be there by the following morning, if I drove through the night.
The post-Broadcast times represented my highest ratings period since we pulled out of Iraq five years ago. Then we had a two-week Coming Home! celebration, interviews and video journals and reuniting families live on air, and the ratings were a solid 3, going to a 4.2 in the Female 25-to-40 bracket, a 4.6 in the Female 40-plus. Those were Oprah-retirement numbers, and we knew – we thought – that we wouldn’t see numbers like that again, then The Broadcast happened. We had a week of solid reaction pieces booked, mostly people talking about where they were, what they were doing, what they felt The Broadcast had been telling them, talking about the suicides, the aftermath, we had atheists spinning it, we had everything; but we needed something extra-special to end the week on. The easiest people to get on the show were experts, because they wanted to talk about what they knew, or thought they knew, and there was only so much religious posturing that an audience could take. Nobody liked to watch people argue about their beliefs; they wanted gossip and villains. You want the viewer to feel better about themselves, and feel sorry for somebody else; that’s where you hit the golden ratio, the midway point between feeling smug and piteous. So I had the researchers working twenty-four-seven to find somebody who had a different spin on it all, something that might get the numbers up a teensy bit higher than they already were, and on the Thursday night the Jessops fell into our lap.
It was perfect, really: a religion that most people didn’t understand, faded in recent years but still there, little more than a cult; a villain, in Ervil Smith, the leader of the place, a deranged old figurehead; a hero in the Jessop family, running away because the youngest boy was in danger, abandoning their belief system in favour of what is right; and, last but not least, a boy who … You know, I was about to write that he had something almost supernatural about him, because he didn’t hear the voice of God. That’s so strange. But he didn’t, and that was something completely different. He gave us every one of our tick-boxes and more, so I wiped the slate for the Friday show, completely blocked it out for them, and we started running advertisements the evening before about it. Tomorrow, on The Role Call, we’ll show you something you’ve never seen: the boy that God forgot.