The Power by Naomi Alderman

Author:Naomi Alderman [Alderman, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780670919970
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

To: [email protected]

We saw your reporting from the mall in Arizona, we read your essay about what happened to you in Delhi. We are on the same side; we’re on the side of all men. If you’ve seen what happened in the Cleary election, you’ve understood what we’re fighting for. Come and talk to us, on the record. We want you on our team.

UrbanDox

It’s not even a question. There’s still his book to be written; the book, those nine hundred pages of chronicle and explanation. He has it all with him on his laptop all the time. There’s no question about this. A meeting with UrbanDox? Of course he will.

The theatrics around it are ridiculous. He can’t bring his own equipment. ‘We’ll give you a phone to record the interview,’ they tell him. For God’s sake. ‘I understand,’ he writes back. ‘You can’t compromise your position.’ They like that. It feeds into their sense of who they are. ‘You’re the only one we trust,’ they say. ‘You tell the truth. You have seen the chaos for what it is. You were invited to the action in Arizona and you came. You are the one we want.’ The way they talk is positively messianic. ‘Yes,’ he emails back. ‘I have wanted to talk to you for a long time.’

Of course, there’s a meeting point in the parking lot of a Denny’s. Of course there is. Of course, there’s a blindfold ride in a jeep and men wearing black – all white men – with balaclavas over their faces. These are men who’ve watched too many movies. This has become a thing now: men’s movie clubs, in living rooms and back rooms of bars. Watching particular kinds of movie over and over again: the ones with explosions and helicopter crashes and guns and muscles and punching. Guy flicks.

After all this, when they take off his blindfold, he’s in a storage locker. It’s dusty. There’s someone’s old boxes of VHS cassettes labelled ‘A-Team’ in the corner. And there’s UrbanDox, sitting in a chair, smiling.

He looks different to his profile pictures. He’s in his mid-fifties. He’s bleached his hair so that it’s very pale, almost white. His eyes are a pallid, watery blue. Tunde’s read some things about this man; there was, by all accounts, a terrible childhood, violence, racial hatred. There was a string of failed businesses, leaving dozens of people owed thousands of dollars each. There was, eventually, a night-school law degree and a reinvention as a blogger. He’s well-built for a man of his age, though his face is faintly grey. The great change in the tide of things has been good for UrbanDox. He’d been blogging his mean-spirited, semi-literate, bigoted, angry rhetoric for years but, recently, more and more people – men and, indeed, some women – have started to listen. He’s denied over and over again being tied to the violent splinter groups that have bombed shopping malls and public parks in half a dozen states now. But, if he’s not linked to them, they like to link themselves to him.

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