The Testimony. James Smythe
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in shade. I went over to her, and she was the one who told us what they were doing there, and I thought, Some day I’ll persuade them to film me. After that, my plan, of course, was to leave Bankipore and go somewhere else – of course, dreaming of Mumbai – and to be on camera. I never went, because nobody ever does. Instead, I worked hard at school, and then went to Bangalore and I became a doctor, and then I moved back to Bankipore, because I thought that I could do some good here. That is what all my doctor friends said, if they weren’t going overseas; they were going home to do some good. Then, when the static happened and the cameras were there, I was the person standing closest to them, trying to see what they were there for. The woman talking to the camera, I recognized her from the international news television channel they showed in the hotel restaurant-bar – I lived out of hotels for a while. I was outside when the static happened, and the woman came over to me, saw that I was smartly dressed – I wore a shirt and tie to work every day, because it established a rule from the second I saw a patient, that I was a doctor, an authority – and she asked me if I heard the static as well; she wanted to check that it wasn’t coming from their equipment. I told her, Yes, of course I did.
Is it a noise that’s common here? she asked. A nearby factory or something? I said, No, I have never heard it before. I asked some of the children – who were over by my offices, by the wall, lined up as if they were waiting for their turn to be spoken to by the woman – and they said that they had not heard it before either. I am sorry, I told the woman. Will you say something about it on camera, just in case? she asked, and I said, Of course I will. She went back to her crew, who were all Indian as well, but they weren’t local, because nobody from Bankipore had that sort of equipment (that I knew of), and they all came over, set up in front of me. What do you think it was? she asked me, and I said, seeing myself reflected in the camera lens, that I thought it was probably nothing, because we couldn’t explain what it was. I am a man of science; there has to be an explanation for me to believe it, I said. Thank you, she said, and she moved on.
Elijah Said, prisoner on Death Row, Chicago
I was asleep when I first heard the static, in my cot. They called them cots, like we were babies. Lots of people in there didn’t sleep, defiantly staying awake, rattling anything they could against the bars, or howling their way through the nights. They would try to make sure that nobody could forget who they were, or where they were. I am a murderer, their actions called out, you would do well to remember who it is that I am, what I am capable of. It is within me to commit horrors upon you, and for that reason, I do not sleep when you tell me to; I sleep on my own timescale. On the corridor, we didn’t get exercise like the rest, didn’t get library time. Our meals were visited upon us, delivered on trays, always hot, always neatly plated, our cutlery thin shards of blunt plastic that was counted back when we were finished with our meals. If we tried anything – and I did not, but I watched as others did, unrepentant in their drive for freedom, or revenge – the cutlery was removed completely, and the prisoner ate with their hands, like a primate, free yet ignorant. The guards would laugh as they spooned potato into their mouths, with the gravy dripping through their fingers; that’s your punishment, they would say. No, I say: their punishment was both being there in the first place, behind those bars; and also would be delivered by Allah upon their death, a death that they entirely deserved for the crimes that they had committed toward their fellow man. They howled in the nights, dogs, desperate for their creator to put them out of their misery.
I could sleep through the catcalling, the constant abuse; but when a noise was unknown it would rouse me from even the deepest sleep. The static had us all on our feet, demanding to know what was happening. The guards ignored us, and left us alone. That was the first time I could remember the corridor being left unguarded; no matter how loud the shouts came for the next few minutes, the guards didn’t return, and we were briefly free from their watch to do as we pleased within those confines; for my part, I was on my musalla, praying.
The guards returned after a few minutes, when I was still praying, and they put the lights on along the corridor, demanded that we turn out. They were on edge, frantic as mice. As always, I stood back, allowed them into my cell. As always, they invaded my privacy, their trust of my people so low that they felt no shame in their intrusions. They searched under my cot, in the metal basin they called a toilet, around my person. They searched my mat, which they were forbidden to do, and they provoked me, prodded me like I was cattle, all to get a reaction. You don’t say much, do you? they asked, and I did not reply: No, I do not.
When they were gone, and the corridor was quiet again – a comparative quiet, a quiet that is still loud with shouting, but constant, our own personal take on the tranquil – my neighbour, a murderer by the name of Finkler, spoke to me. Hey, brother, he said, because he called everybody of colour that name – as if he were saying, I am one of you, the oppressed, the downtrodden, we are in this together – you know what that was? No, I replied. He carried on, even though the lights were now out, and the guards demanded silence from us: What d’you reckon it was, then? Allah will deliver answers, I said. He went quiet. Even in here he knew I could still kill him, if he didn’t go at the hands of the state first.
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
As soon as the TV broadcasts came back online, we expected there to be answers. There weren’t any. They actually only seemed to know as much as we did. In some ways, that was a relief, actually. I think some people expected the noise to be a signal, a warning. Some people thought it meant that we were being attacked, and who could blame them for thinking that? Biological, that was the biggest threat, but anything else, really. Nuclear, Semtex, we didn’t care. We were all so on edge because it had been what, ten years since an attack? And there were constant whispers about terrorists holing themselves up, waiting for chances. I mean, there were rumours about everything, actually, especially about the new American president (that he was, despite his campaign promises, actually more anti-war than even Obama was, a couple of terms back) and about the threat from Iran. When it was done we left the windows and switched the telly on, and it had that We’re Having Problems screen on the BBC – Aren’t we just, I said out loud, but nobody laughed – and then a minute or so later it kicked back in. It wasn’t a regular newsreader – they were interrupting whatever had been on previously, so I suppose it was whoever they had to hand, dragged up from Newsround like it was work experience week – and then they reported what had happened, that we all heard something. They went to somebody outside BT Tower, asking for opinions. Everybody they spoke to was just confused. It was strange, actually; that corner is usually a flow of people moving between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, but nobody was moving. They were just milling around, looking terrified or elated or whatever. Bemused, that’s the word. Most of them looked bemused.
Bill hadn’t come back from downstairs, so everybody started to look to me for answers. (I wasn’t even second in command, but if in doubt ask marketing, right?) I didn’t have a clue, so I told everybody to take the rest of the day off. Go home; see you tomorrow. Traffic’ll be shitty, you should all get a head start. Nobody left though, not immediately. We went back to the windows and watched the streets, kept the news on in the background, and waited to see if anybody could work out what the noise was.
Peter Johns, biologist, Auckland
I remember thinking, Hang on, because the scientists’ll announce something any second, tell us that they fucked up and that they’ve got it all under control. We was in this bar in Auckland and we missed the last boat back to the island because of the noise – I mean, who in their right mind is gonna get on a boat after hearing something like that? We didn’t know what it was, so we waited. Trigger, my assistant, got behind the bar after the manager didn’t want to serve us any more and just started pouring them out. The manager didn’t even care; he was out in the street seeing if anybody knew what the heck was going on. We must have been in there drinking