Читать книгу The Testimony - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 36

We had a statement prepared that POTUS was going to go on air with. It was the fourth or fifth draft, maybe, and we never wrote that many. We were a two-draft administration – the writing staff getting one out, then I made changes, sometimes POTUS changed a word or two. That was usually it, but this one, POTUS insisted on going over everything himself. And it kept changing. The first draft was about how we didn’t have the right answers but we had our best men working on it; the second was about how the answer might not be the important thing, and maybe the question that it raised was what mattered; the third draft was about speculation being a dangerous thing (and that was aimed at both the press and every other country across the entire god-damned world); the fourth draft was just begging people to keep themselves under control. We had to face the rioting head on, we knew that. What we heard – the static, whatever – was still there, but suddenly we, as an administration, didn’t care as much what it was, because reports were coming in from LA, from Texas, from Chicago, reports about the people of America becoming restless.

You know, actually, that’s not true. They were restless before the static happened. We’d spent nearly twenty years going no lower than a Yellow alert level. That is, by definition, telling the people that there’s a Significant Risk of Terrorist Attacks. We went up to Orange for almost every holiday, it felt like, and that was High Risk. We even hit Red once, near the end of Obama’s first term, when we had intel about a much larger attack that never happened, something to do with our relationship with Iran. That wasn’t the only alert: every few years somebody stepped forward with a car bomb and a promise, threatening something worse, and they did their damage – sometimes only emotional, because we were fragile, as a nation – and we never heard from them again. We got coded messages, grainy cell-phone footage of somebody that they tried to make the new Bin Laden, but nothing ever stuck. All it did was make half the people nervous, the other half complacent. So, yeah, the natives were restless to begin with, and we didn’t have an excuse or an explanation for the static, not even close. POTUS’ statement was the best we could manage, asking people to stay calm, to try and get back to normality. He asked that the people going to worship stayed as civil as possible, and remembered that everybody had their own ways of worship, we were a multicultural society, you know the sort of thing. He said, If you think that there’s a chance you could be involved in a riotous act – I absolutely cringed, because we should have caught that word, stopped it sounding like he was talking about a fucking party – just walk away, and let the authorities deal with it. It was those riots we were most worried about, because they were starting up as reports of small groups breaking the front windows of shops, smashing up parked cars, but we knew how they ended.

When he had read the statement – straight down the line in the press briefing room, straight into Camera 1, just as he was trained to do – he took some questions, and one of the reporters asked him why he thought that people were rioting. We understand that hearing what we heard played with everybody’s emotions, she said to him, but why do you think some people have turned to violence? Shouldn’t we all be trying to get into God’s good books?

That raised a laugh around the room from everybody but POTUS. The first thing is, he said, we don’t know if it actually was a God, or indeed what it was. We’d be fools to jump to the conclusion that it’s any sort of higher power; it’s just as likely, if not more likely, to be something entirely explainable, and we’ve got our best people on it. I knew what was coming after that answer, so I made my way to the side of the room, tried to get somebody to get him off the podium, but it was too late. He was saying something about people and zealotry, and Jesus fucking Christ, that was going to hurt us, I knew, and then that same journalist asked the killer question, the one that we had danced around for so long. Mr President, she asked, do you believe in God? We had avoided it the whole way through the campaign, getting him to swear on Bibles and go to church and be a total hypocrite in service to his country – and we had the most right-wing running mate we could find, in bed with so many churches and anti-abortion clinics that it made most of us feel sick – but nobody had ever asked him outright. It was like Scooby-Doo; we would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for that meddling journalist. Don’t answer, I said, over and over, but he did, because he was the President, and Presidents always answered questions honestly in times of strife, right?

I am not a man of faith, he said, and then all you could see or hear were flashbulbs and shouts of follow-ups. Looking back now, it helped: it moved the news cycle on past the riots, just for a second.