Mother Eve holds up her hands for silence, showing the eyes in the centre of her palms.
‘Will the greatest nation on the Earth, the land where I was born and raised, look on while innocent women are slaughtered and while freedom is destroyed? Will they watch in silence while we burn? If they abandon us, who will they not abandon? I call on women across the world to bear witness to what happens here. Bear witness and learn what you can expect to happen to you. If there are women in your government, hold them to account, call on them to act.’
Convent walls are thick, and convent women are clever, and when Mother Eve warns them that the apocalypse is near at hand and only the righteous will be saved, she can call the world to a new order.
The end of all flesh is near, because the Earth is filled with violence. Therefore, build an ark.
It will be simple. That is all they want.
There are days that follow one after the next after the next. While Jocelyn heals, and while it becomes clear that she will never fully heal, and while something hardens in Margot’s heart.
She appears on the television to talk about Jos’s injuries. She says, ‘Terrorism can strike anywhere, at home or abroad.’ She says, ‘The most important thing is that our enemies, both global and domestic, must know that we are strong and that we will retaliate.’
She looks down the camera lens and says, ‘Whoever you are, we will retaliate.’
She can’t afford to look weak, not at a time like this.
It’s not long after that when the phone call comes. They say there’s been a credible threat from an extremist group. They’ve gotten hold somehow of pictures from inside the Republic of the Women. Pasted them all over the internet, saying they were taken by a guy we all know has been dead for weeks. Terrible pictures. Probably Photoshopped, can’t be real. They’re not even making demands, just rage and fear and threats of attacks unless – God, I don’t know, Margot – unless something is done, I guess. The North is already threatening Bessapara with missiles over it.
Margot says, ‘We should do something.’
The President says, ‘I don’t know. I feel like I should extend an olive branch.’
And Margot says, ‘Believe me, at a moment like this you need to appear stronger than ever. A strong leader. If that nation has been assisting and radicalizing our home-grown terrorists, we must send them a message. The world must know that the United States is willing to escalate. If you hit us with one jolt, we will hit you with two.’
The President says, ‘I can’t tell you how much I respect you, Margot, for the way you can carry on, even with what’s happened.’
Margot says, ‘My country comes first. We need strong leadership.’
There is a bonus in her contract if NorthStar deployments around the world top fifty thousand women this year. The bonus would buy her a private island.
The President says, ‘You know there are those rumours they got hold of ex-Soviet chemical weapons.’
And Margot thinks in her heart: Burn it all down.
There is a thought in those days. It is that five thousand years is not a very long time. Something has been started now that must find its conclusion. When a person has taken a wrong turn, must she not retrace her steps, is that not wise? After all, we’ve done it before. We can do it again. Different this time, better this time. Dismantle the old house and begin again.
When the historians talk of this moment they talk about ‘tensions’ and ‘global instability’. They posit the ‘resurgence of old structures’ and the ‘inflexibility of existing belief patterns’. Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her.
When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised. To the woman with a skein, everything looks like a fight.
UrbanDox says: Do it.
Margot says: Do it.
Awadi-Atif says: Do it.
Mother Eve says: Do it.
And can you call back the lightning? Or does it return to your hand?
Roxy sits with her father on the balcony, looking out at the ocean. It’s nice to think that, whatever happens, the sea will always be here.
‘Well, Dad,’ says Roxy, ‘you fucked that one up, didn’t you?’
Bernie looks at his hands, palms and back. Roxy remembers when those hands were the most terrifying thing in the world to her.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Suppose so.’
Roxy says, with a smile in her voice, ‘Learned your lesson, have you? You’ll do it differently next time?’
And they’re both laughing, Bernie’s head tipped back to the sky and all his nicotine-stained teeth and fillings showing.
‘I should kill you, really,’ says Roxy.
‘Yeah. You should, really. Can’t afford to be soft, girl.’
‘That’s what they keep telling me. Maybe I’ve learned my lesson. Took me long enough.’
At the horizon, there is a flash across the skyline. Pink and brown, although it is nearly midnight.
‘Bit of nice news,’ she says. ‘I think I’ve met a bloke.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Early days,’ she says, ‘and with all this, it’s a bit complicated. But yeah, maybe. I like him. He likes me.’ She laughs her old, throaty growl. ‘I got him out of a country full of mad women trying to kill him, and I own an underground bunker, so obviously he likes me.’
‘Grandchildren?’ says Bernie, hopefully.
Darrell and Terry are gone. Ricky’s not going to be able to do anything in that department ever again.
Roxy shrugs. ‘Might do. Someone’s got to survive these things, haven’t they?’
A thought occurs to her. She smiles. ‘Bet if I had a daughter she’d be strong as fuck.’
They have another drink before they go down.
Apocrypha excluded from the Book of Eve
Discovered in a cave in Cappadocia, c. 1,500 years old.
The shape of power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it is alive like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is a multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws. No one can observe the acorn and extrapolate each vein in each leaf of the oak crown. The closer you look, the more various it becomes. However complex you think it is, it is more complex than that. Like the rivers to the ocean, like the lightning strike, it is obscene and uncontained.
A human being is made not by our own will but by that same organic, inconceivable, unpredictable, uncontrollable process that drives the unfurling leaves in season and the tiny twigs to bud and the roots to spread in tangled complications.
Even a stone is not the same as any other stone.
There is no shape to anything except the shape it has.
Every name we give ourselves is wrong.
Our dreams are more true than our waking.