Yes, that was me, the jaded agnostic, speaking.
I didn’t try to go to sleep and instead turned on my tablet and began to write. I included it all—the written and spoken testimony of everyone involved—as you have just read. When I was done, three days later, I turned the old leather “Selçuk diary” back to il Vettore to keep. It rightfully belonged to her as the only surviving member of the Great Experiment.
I wrote a much-abbreviated news story. The earthquake had ravaged everything on the mountain, but I was able to make my way back down to the shattered village after I’d finished.
First thing I did was check the roll of the dead that the Red Cross had compiled. “We think everyone has been accounted for,” the man in charge told me.
I read and reread every name. There was no Yusef Pantera, or Edward, Edouard, or Ed or even Eddie Gibbon—yes, I had finally made the connection that he’d been the one who had probably sent me those Italian e-mails.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked.
“We think so. But there’s a tent set up to treat the injured,” he said, pointing to the Red Cross tent that had been erected in the town square.
I rushed over and walked the long aisles of the tent. He wasn’t there.
What the hell? I saw him die.
The Red Cross mobile truck had a wireless signal, so I logged in, attached my story, and sent it to Dona, whom I prayed was still alive in the war zone that had become the United Nations Plaza. Then I sent holographic photos and the laboratory results to Donald, who was, I knew, too slick to die.
Within an hour, both the story and the proof were blasted around the world.
God bless the news media. Even when the world is collapsing, it still seems to figure out how to exist, and to report on the end of the world.
The Standard online edition gave my story the front “page.”
Me, who had been fired. Me, the accused killer.
This time The Standard ran my story intact, with a headline that screamed: THE NEWEST TESTAMENT, with this byline: By Alessandra Russo (aka Alazais Roussel).
The subhead was tabloid, baby, all the way: PROPHET OR NUT JOB?
But you know all that already.