The Power(54)

‘In a stunning victory,’ says the blonde woman on the TV screen, ‘one which has shocked pundits and voters alike …’ Morrison doesn’t want to listen any more but can’t make himself turn it off. The candidate is interviewed again – he’s saddened that the voters of this great state did not choose to return him to office as their Governor, but he bows before their wisdom. That’s good. Don’t give reasons; never give reasons. They’ll ask you why you think you lost, but never tell them, they’re trying to back you into criticizing yourself. He wishes his opponent every success in office – and he’ll be watching her every step of the way, ready to call her out if she forgets for a moment about the voters of this great state.

Morrison watches Margot Cleary on the screen – now the Governor of this great state – as she accepts her plaudits and says that she’ll be a humble, hard-working public servant, grateful for the second chance she’s been given. She also hasn’t understood what’s happened here. She thinks she needs to ask forgiveness, still, for the thing that brought her into office. She’s wrong.





Tunde



‘Tell me,’ says Tunde, ‘what it is you want.’

One of the men on the protest line waggles his banner in the air. The banner reads: ‘Justice for men’. The others give out a rattling, ragged cheer and fetch another round of brewskies from the cooler.

‘What it says,’ one of them opines: ‘we want justice. It’s the government did this, and the government has to put it right.’

It’s a slow afternoon, the air is syrupy and it’s going to hit 104 in the shade out here. It is not the best day to be at a protest at a mall in Tucson, Arizona. He only came because he’d had an anonymous tip-off that something was going to happen here today. It had sounded pretty convincing, but it’s panning out into nothing at all.

‘Any of you guys involved with the internet at all? Badshitcrazy.com, BabeTruth, UrbanDox – any of that online stuff?’

The guys shake their heads.

‘I saw an article in the newspaper,’ says one of them – a man who apparently decided to shave only the left half of his face this morning – ‘says that new country, Bessapara, is chemically castrating all the men. That’s what they’re gonna do to all of us.’

‘I … don’t think that’s true,’ says Tunde.

‘Look – I cut the piece out in the paper.’ The guy starts to rummage in his satchel. A bunch of old receipts and empty packets of chips tumble out on to the asphalt.

‘Shit,’ he says, and chases after his litter. Tunde films him idly on his camera phone.

There are so many other stories he could be working on. He should have gone to Bolivia; they’ve proclaimed their own female Pope. The progressive government in Saudi Arabia is starting to look vulnerable to religious extremism; he could be back there doing a follow-up on his original story. There are even gossip stories more interesting than this: the daughter of a newly elected Governor in New England has been photographed with a boy – a boy, apparently, with a visible skein. Tunde’s heard about this. He did a piece where he spoke to doctors about treating girls with skein deformations and problems. Not all girls have it; contrary to early thinking, about five girls in a thousand are born without. Some of the girls don’t want it, and try to cut it out of themselves; one of them tried with scissors, the doctor said. Eleven years old. Scissors. Snipping at herself like a paper cut-out doll. And there are a few boys with chromosome irregularities who have it, too. Sometimes they like it, and sometimes they don’t. Some boys ask the doctors if they can have theirs removed. The doctor has to tell them, no, they don’t know how to do that. More than 50 per cent of the time, if a skein is severed, the person dies. They don’t know why; it’s not a vital organ. The current theory is that it is connected to the electrical rhythm of the heart and its removal disrupts something there. They can remove some of the strands of it, to make it less powerful, less noticeable, but, once you have it, you’ve got it.

Tunde tries to imagine what it’d be like to have one. A power you can’t give away or trade. He feels himself yearning for it, repulsed by it. He reads online forums where men say that if all the men in the world had one everything would be back the way it ought to be. They’re angry and afraid. He understands that. Since Delhi, he’s been afraid, too. He joins UrbanDoxSpeaks.com under a pseudonym and posts a few comments and questions. He comes across a sub-forum discussing his own work. They call him a gender-traitor there because he did that story about Awadi-Atif rather than keeping it secret, and he’s not reporting on the men’s movement, and on their particular conspiracy theories. When he got the email saying something was going to happen here today he thought … he doesn’t know what he thought. That maybe there was something here for him. Not just the news, but something that would explain a feeling he’s having these days. But this is nothing. He’s succumbed to fear is all it is; since Delhi, he’s running away from the story, not towards it. He’ll get online in his hotel this evening and see if there’s still anything to report in Sucre, see when the next plane down is.

There is a sound like thunder. Tunde looks towards the mountains, expecting to see storm clouds. But it’s not a storm, and it’s not thunder. The sound comes again, louder, and a huge cloud of smoke erupts from the far end of the mall, and there’s screaming.