The Power(6)
It is this video which, when he puts it online, starts the business of the Day of the Girls.
Margot
‘It has to be fake.’
‘Fox News is saying not.’
‘Fox News would say whatever makes the most people tune in to Fox News.’
‘Sure. Still.’
‘What are these lines coming out of her hands?’
‘Electricity.’
‘But that’s just … I mean …’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where’d it come from?’
‘Nigeria, I think. Went up yesterday.’
‘There are a lot of nut-jobs out there, Daniel. Fakers. Scammers.’
‘There are more videos. Since this one went out, there have been … four or five.’
‘Faked. People get excited about these things. It’s a what-they-call-it – a meme. You heard about that thing Slender Man? Some girls tried to kill their friend as a tribute to him. It. Terrible.’
‘It’s four or five videos every hour, Margot.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Yup.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’
‘Close the schools.’
‘Can you even imagine what I’ll get from the parents? Can you imagine the millions of voting parents and what they’ll do if I send all their kids home today?’
‘Can you imagine what you’ll get from the teachers’ unions if one of their membership is injured? Crippled? Killed? Imagine the liability.’
‘Killed?’
‘Can’t be certain.’
Margot stares down at her hands, clutching the edge of the desk. She’s going to look like an idiot, going along with this. It has to be a stunt for a TV show. She’ll be the shit-for-brains, the Mayor who closed the schools of this major metropolitan area because of a fucking practical joke. But if she doesn’t close them and something happens … Daniel will get to be the Governor of this great state, who warned the Mayor, who tried to convince her to do something, but all to no avail. She can practically see the tears running down his cheeks as he gives his interview via live feed from the Governor’s Mansion. Fuck.
Daniel checks his phone. ‘They’ve announced closures in Iowa and Delaware,’ he says.
‘Fine.’
‘“Fine” meaning?’
‘“Fine” meaning “fine”. Do it. Fine, I’ll close them.’
There are four or five days where she barely goes home. She doesn’t remember leaving the office, or driving back, or crawling into bed, although she supposes she must have done these things. The phone doesn’t stop. She goes to bed clutching it and wakes up holding it. Bobby has the girls so she doesn’t need to think about them and, God forgive her, they don’t cross her mind.
This thing has broken out across the world and no one knows what the fuck is going on.
To start with, there were confident faces on the TV, spokespeople from the CDC saying it was a virus, not very severe, most of the people recovered fine, and it just looked like young girls were electrocuting people with their hands. We all know that’s impossible, right, that’s crazy – the news anchors laughed so hard they cracked their makeup. Just for fun, they brought in a couple of marine biologists to talk about electric eels and their body pattern. A guy with a beard, a gal with glasses, aquarium fish in a tank – makes for a solid morning segment. Did you know the guy who invented the battery was inspired by looking at the bodies of electric eels? I did not know that, Tom, that is fascinating. I’ve heard they can fell a horse. You’re kidding, I’d never have imagined it. Apparently, a lab in Japan powered their Christmas-tree lights from a tank of electric eels. We can’t do that with these girls, now, can we? I would think not, Kristen, I would think not. Although doesn’t Christmas seem to come earlier every year? And now the weather on the ones.
Margot and the office of the Mayor take it seriously days before the news desks understand that it’s real. They’re the ones who get the early reports of fighting in the playgrounds. A strange new kind of fighting which leaves boys – mostly boys, sometimes girls – breathless and twitching, with scars like unfurling leaves winding up their arms or legs or across the soft flesh of their middles. Their first thought after disease is a new weapon, something these kids are bringing into school, but as the first week trickles into the second they know that’s not it.
They latch on to any crazy theory going, not knowing how to tell the plausible from the ridiculous. Late at night, Margot reads a report from a team in Delhi who are the first to discover the strip of striated muscle across the girls’ collarbones which they name the organ of electricity, or the skein for its twisted strands. At the points of the collar are electro-receptors enabling, they theorize, a form of electric echo-location. The buds of the skein have been observed using MRI scans in the collarbones of newborn infant girls. Margot photocopies this report and has it emailed to every school in the state; for days, it’s the only good science in a host of garbled interpretation. Even Daniel’s momentarily grateful, before he remembers that he hates her.
An Israeli anthropologist suggests that the development of this organ in humans is proof positive of the aquatic-ape hypothesis; that we are naked of hair because we came from the oceans, not the jungle, where once we terrified the deeps like the electric eel, the electric ray. Preachers and televangelists grab the news and squeeze it, finding in the sticky entrails the unmistakable signs of the impending end of days. A fist fight breaks out on a popular news discussion programme between a scientist who demands that the Electric Girls be investigated surgically and a man of God who believes they are a harbinger of the apocalypse and must not be touched by human hand. There is an argument already about whether this thing was always latent in the human genome and has been reawoken or whether it is a mutation, a terrible deformity.