The Testimony. James Smythe
of them said it was fine; some of them complained. There’s no way you can come in, because it might be unstable. Then, we didn’t know if it was just from the building, or the electrics. I went down into the Basilica anyway, because I had been looking forward to it for days. It smelled so old, still, even with all the cleaning that they did, for preservation. It smelled of stone and dust, and there were very few places I loved more in the world, partly because of that very smell. I went down into the darkness – because the lights are so dim, it is always dark in the tomb, and there are always guides, because the ground is still unstable, like a building site in so many ways – and I knelt in front of the tomb itself to pray to the father of our church. I wasn’t praying for anything at all; only praying as I always did, out of love. Then I heard it, His voice, so strong through the darkness, but not the darkness of the tomb, the darkness of my heart, of the world; it was not frightening, or threatening. It was just all that I could hear. I thought of all of the faithful written about through history who He spoke to, His voice so strong; and I thought, and me. I was joining those whom He loved the most, who He was so close to as to spread His word directly, to fortify belief and to set His awe in the minds of His people. I cried in the darkness; my tears patted the stone of the tomb, and I was so happy right then, knowing that this was the happiest moment of my life; everything built up to that, and I would never be alone again. It was me and my God, and we were together.
Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City
As senior anchor I had certain privileges. I got to pull rank on shifts, and as mine came to an end, after a very long day, My Children hit, and I decided that I wasn’t going anywhere. As soon as we heard what The Broadcast was saying, I knew that this could be the biggest news story of all time.
Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City
The priests on the news after that first Broadcast looked so smug. There is nothing worse than a smug priest, Leonard said. He got so angry with one of them – I told you so, I said this was the case, the priest kept saying to the reporter; This is the Lord come back to speak to us – that he threw a tangerine at the television. It split all over the screen, burst like a water bomb. He cleaned it down – his temper never lasted for more than a single, regrettable second – but the apartment smelt of it all day, of that sharp citrus smell. It’s nice when it comes from a scented air freshener; it’s horrid to live with it all day when it’s not, so sweet and bitter and real.
Leonard and I used to be Jews. We’re Ex-jews, he would say whenever anybody asked, Capital E, lower-case j, as if that hammered home his point: I’ve got my own emphasis for these things. He liked having things in his life and then renouncing them, that was another of his things. (I’ve realized recently, thinking about it, how many things he used to have.) We stopped being Jews in the late Nineties, not long after we first started seeing each other. He had just left his first wife, an awful woman called Estelle, and we found each other in a bar one night. We spent hours talking about everything and anything, and that pattern stuck. On our fourth date we got onto religion, and discovered that we felt the same way – disheartened, mostly – and that was that. We woke up the next day and decided to not bother any more. We already both used to celebrate Christmas more than we did Hanukkah, so it didn’t affect us there, and all the other stuff, it just felt natural to ignore it. We did that until the end of the next decade, when Leonard got his cancer, and then I started to think about it, to wonder. He never did, of course; cancer was a fight, and it could be beaten by hard work and perspiration, as far as Leonard was concerned, but I didn’t feel that way. It was diagnosed in the late stages, and the doctor told us that if he operated the next day, Leonard might be lucky. Might be lucky, he said. That’s a chance of a chance, outside odds at best, I figured. I had to drive home to fetch Leonard his pyjamas and a book, and on the way I passed the synagogue on Willet, so I stopped the car and waited until the next service started. I remembered every part of it – it was so ingrained, even after over a decade of not thinking about it even once – as if it were deeper than memory, like it was a part of my DNA, even – and I prayed for Leonard to get better. I prayed for an extra edge over the Might be lucky. And he was lucky. They cut the cancer out, they did radiotherapy, he was sick for a while, weak as the old man that he never wanted to be, and then he started to get better. I don’t know what saved him, whether it was the luck, the doctors, the prayer, but something did. I carried on going to synagogue, once a month, maybe less, and Leonard stayed healthy. That felt like a fair deal, and I never told Leonard. Every relationship has its secrets.
After he threw the tangerine he kept on shouting at the TV. It doesn’t mean anything, he kept saying. It means sweet f-a! It’s a voice, could have come from anywhere. The priests were sure that it was God making contact. In the book of Revelation, it says that our God will return to us, speak to us again. This is simply Him making good on His promise. Sanctimonious pricks! Leonard kept shouting. They’re acting like this is definitive proof!
I didn’t say it, of course, but I wanted to ask him how he was so positive that it wasn’t.
Hameed Yusuf Ahmed, imam, Leeds
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter where you were when you heard it. It doesn’t. What does matter is how you dealt with it afterwards, how you reacted, if you panicked; or if you got on with your life, your responsibilities. I wasn’t asleep during the static before, because I was leading prayers already. How did we react? We got on with it. God is present every day; that’s why we pray to Him, because He is there. If He wasn’t there, we wouldn’t pray, you see? It’s easy. When the static came, I was in the mosque, half past four, just as it was nearly light – and I mean that, it was that red sky outside, that sort of colour where the sky looks like blood in water – and we were praying. We carried on after it, because if it was God speaking to us – that was what the televisions said, what they all wanted us to believe – if it was, He would make it clear. We had jobs, duties; you cannot be distracted by a noise, just a noise and nothing more. Now, The Broadcast, that was different. Again, we were at prayer. This could be a trend, I thought when we heard the static for the second time, before the voice came through, this could be a trend. I carried on leading the prayer, because that was what we did. When we heard the voice, that was the first time in over twenty years that I broke prayer. It was only because there were others praying who panicked before I did, standing up, leaving. That level of disruption, none of us could ignore it. Please, be calm, I said – the first words I ever broke outside the prayer, can you fathom that? To instil a sense of calm? – but that didn’t help. I mean, the people might have trusted me to guide them when they were in control, but I think that was the hard part about The Broadcast for some: the lack of that control. To have something so rigid – a life, a belief – and to see, to feel it slipping away as soon as you hear something that you cannot explain … I finished the prayer, but so many left while I spoke I couldn’t even count, so I kept my eyes shut; I didn’t need them to know what I was doing, what I was saying.
I was in the offices afterwards. We called them offices, but they were just a room at the back of the mosque where I kept my papers, some books, had meetings with some of the community. If they needed guidance, that’s where they would see me. The room itself was awful, a little white-walled box with peeling paint, because it didn’t warrant upkeep. I called it the library, because it sounded better, and because there were shelves with books upon them, and all the books offered more than the rest of the room, the rest of the mosque – than the entirety of my knowledge: His teachings written forever, indelible, because words never die, never lose their meaning. Everything I taught, everything I am, it comes from those books, from those teachings. When I die, all that I am and all that I think dies with me; the teachings live on. You ask yourself what should be the most important of those, then: me, or those books. I was to stay in the library all day, because that was when the Muslim people of Leeds needed their council the most; it suited me, because I opened my books and read them. There was no television in the library so I didn’t know what was going on outside – how much they were making it about God, or about the Christian