by J. T. Marsh
But with this woman, things are different. She’ll come to be the focus of his life, and he the focus of hers, even as the coming war should seek to tear them apart and pit them against one another as war has been so tearing apart lovers and turning them against one another since time immemorial. For you see, theirs is not a unique love, and we focus on it, in part, through the coming war not because they are special but precisely because theirs is a love ordinary, almost mundane and pedestrian in its expression. At work the day after Valeri had made the turn against over the edge, in the aisles between the racks of pallets reaching three or four stories high he comes across this woman, trading glances with her, at once reaching an understanding that theirs is a connection taboo yet entirely unremarkable. We should celebrate the mundane, the pedestrian, and in time, we will. But first, we must live through this before-period, in which Valeri must navigate a complicated course through the psyche of a working class on the verge of self-actualization, and with it, an apocalypse rising.
In the middle of the night, as the rest of his world sleeps, the Valeri sometimes sits alone on the windowsill in his little flat’s bedroom and smokes a cigarette, looking out into the darkness of the night and allowing himself the subversive pleasure of imagining a near-future where not all is for nought. In the streets there`s a nascent consciousness, perceptible only as a series of random events, of happenings in the shadows soon to be moved out into the light. Men like Valeri don`t yet realize it, but the salvation of the worker lies not in the intellect of the learned but in the pain and suffering of the lowest, the most pathetic among him. To lead the way to the future, painted as it should be with the blood of they who would seek to oppress, to humiliate, to degrade us all. After the failed rising fifteen years ago, the working man`s parties fragmented in defeat, leaving only sporadic acts of resistance by men here and there, acts like the brief, hardly perceptible slowing of work by Valeri and a few of his fellow workers. But from the ashes of defeat there should rise our apocalypse, the instrument of liberation to form from nothing at all.
This near-future has been gathering strength for much longer than he’s been alive, for so long as there’s been history to advance. As all will come to see, these sorts of things have a way of finding an outlet for expression, and in so finding make use of what they have been given to change the course of all our histories forever. Here in London, not altogether far from the exact spot where the industrial age was born, such a small thing as a group of dedicated workers can foment the rise of the apocalypse. From the hopelessness and from the despair that’d consumed Valeri’s mother and father fifteen years ago there will soon come the advent of the next stage, the birthplace of this stage also the birthplace of the next. It should just so happen that Valeri will come to join this dedicated group of workers, the few soon to become the many and emerge from out of their individual weakness form a collective strength. In the meanwhile, men like Valeri will experience an awakening, already the ground sown by experience, to be reaped when the time is right by forces set into motion on a night not unlike the night after Valeri had turned from one state of mind to the next.
An explosion, it takes for the working man to realize his place, a series of bright lights atop towering heights bursting into flames all at once, as the working man sees into the future from his vantage point above the darkness of the night and imagines something more. Earlier in the day, not long after most of his co-workers have already left, there appears on the floor that small, slender, half-Asian and half-European woman who would turn out to be named Sydney Harrington. But circumstances soon conspire to push them together. As a greater and greater number of people become forced into smaller and smaller spaces, these things come to happen with an increasingly alarming frequency, as if there’s a hidden actor in play. It’s a fraudulent notion, the temptation on the working man’s part to concoct elaborate conspiracies in explaining his current crisis, his current predicament. The working man sometimes walks along the side of the street, a rare day of leisure permitting him a lonely moment surrounded by a sea of people. Lacking in the spirit which once characterized his people, the working man, now, can only look into the sky and imagine the towers that have yet to be built in the very quarters where he is now permitted to congregate with his own. But as he looks on the city which has always been his home, the thought seems irresistible that it may no longer be, that the energy flowing from within the streets themselves is slowly fading into the steadily darkening night. Still as we are in this early period, the working man has not yet committed to the path of rebellion, memories of the war fifteen years ago lingering in his mind like a waking nightmare.
They don’t speak that night, and it’s only from the way she’s glanced at him a half-second too long that he knows she’s a young vixen who may enjoy the playing of games rather than the joy of a sincere companion. After their first night together, she stands at the open window in his little working-class apartment and casts a look over the alley running behind the building. In the night, they talk, about life, about love, something in this young woman moving Valeri to bare himself to her in ways he’d never bared himself to anyone. And she, in turn, reveals herself in kind, in the night all laid out for either to see. As distant gunfire rattles into the night, the fires of liberation burn, and in those fires there burns the essence of the working man’s need for a release from this prison he’s trapped in. Already on course with the rest of his life, in time Valeri will come to make himself one with the apocalypse already rising in the streets.
Turning against one another, Valeri and Sydney take in the sight of the darkened night’s sky turns a dull, faded amber by the fires in the streets, sharing an embrace before parting ways. If what Sydney has told Valeri is true, then she will prove to be a righteous ally in the war for dignity and compassion, for liberation and intimidation. For, you see, when they were sitting on that little nook behind the window overlooking the alley, she had turned to him and, in the kind of hushed voice that indicated she was unsure not of him but of herself, said, “I love you.” And he, almost reflexively, turned back and said, “I love you.” At that moment she’d crossed over and fully embraced his way of life, in spirit if not in form. Still in the twilight of his youth, Valeri has the advantage of recalling the idealistic passion of his younger years yet able to look ahead with pragmatism to see the way through to a future better for all. Now, the challenge facing Valeri and all the other working men in Britain is the simplest yet most difficult any have ever faced: rise!
In the morning after Valeri and Sydney have each other for the first time, he visits the cemetery where his parents were buried after dying in the failed uprising fifteen years ago. Not far from the apartment block where Valeri lives, they’re buried in a small plot with a simple headstone. Every year for the past ten years he’s visited, but only on this very day in the early summer. This time, he kneels on the ground before their headstone, then places a lily upright against it. Many different kinds of people died on the day they died, mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sisters, all cut from the same cloth as his parents. Valeri stands, and before he leaves he says, “I’ll make you proud.”
2. In Union
Life in London’s working class districts is never easy, and since the failed rising fifteen years ago it’s only become harder for all. Around the city and across the country, the life which had once so dominated every minute of every day has all but ceased, its place taken by a muted despair. Where once the wealthy man had stored his ill-gotten wealth in the form of a mad rush to build, build, build, now he stashes it away in secret holdings, inaccessible to all but the most intrepid of inquisitors, hiding behind assumed names and front after front, only hoarding what never belonged to him for so long as he believes it’s absolutely necessary. Inevitably, he’ll make a mistake, he’ll let slip some key piece of information to exactly the wrong person, his scandal soon to flash across the screens of millions of the working man’s own. And when that moment comes, the rebel im
mediately seizes on it, pointing to the wealthy man’s stashing of wealth and voracious appetite for his own profit even as the world’s falling apart around us all. But then, nothing will happen, nothing apparent to the public eye. It’s as though the wealthy man’s ashamed of his corruption, compelled by his self-consciousness to hide his true character even as the better part of him fully understands all can see it anyways. As for the working man’s own concerns, he might be forgiven for looking ahead and seeing only still more bare cupboards and empty stores, but this time, this time he looks back and wonders where this long and confusing path has led him, never more assured of his own denial. Like all working men, Valeri is consumed in surviving from day to day; but like all working men, he dreams himself close to the day when he’ll have his chance to strike back. Too consumed he is with his own day to day survival to see his chance is sooner than he thinks.
Despite the unrest and all the hardships that’ve come about since the failed rising fifteen years ago, London and all the other cities in Britain have seen much change. Finding work here, finding work there, the working man sees only the way from one day through to the next fraught with peril, with broken bodies and with broken minds. Sometimes, as he’s working through the day, each muscle smoothly contracting and expanding a thousand times over like the hydraulics of the machines he operates, he wonders if it’s all been worth it, an insidious, corrosive line of thought, he knows, that can only take him into a place of deeper, darker suffering than ever before. No, as the working man finds just enough work to keep a roof over his head and food on his table, he comes to realize he owes it not only to himself but to his children, and their children, and their children as well to push through this hardship, this poverty of values and of vice so as to provide for them in the future what he could never provide for them now: a new beginning, a better tomorrow, a world in which they will never have to fear eviction from their own homes, a world in which they will claim as theirs a dignity never before afforded to them, a world in which the last vestiges of the wealthy man’s excess will have been long ago purged. In surviving for so long as he has, Valeri has learned working men like him must earn everything they have, must fight for every scrap of meat and for every thread of clothing on his back. For him, it’s been this way for as long as he can remember, but there’s a better way.
But there’s trouble afoot which’ll awaken in him an instinct. Our history is replete with examples of men like Valeri, young men or men who were at one time young and became old not by virtue of having aged but in being made to surrender their dignity to their wealthy paymasters. Once home, Valeri spares a glance in looking for that little old lady, but she’s not there, at least not in the hall or in the lobby. Once inside, he comforts himself amid distressing thoughts of the coming strike by reaching for a space on his bookshelf where there’s one of his copies of that little red book, turning through its pages, imagining himself immersed in the ideas it represents. No one knows exactly where or by whom it was written; some insist they’ve worked it out, but their various theories are all wrong. Yet Valeri finds a certain solace in reading it, still in his dirty, ratty work clothes as he lies back and takes in these forbidden ideas. At work, the working man finds his use, but not his purpose, trapped as he is in a relentless nightmare of routine drudgery. Every day he rises in the morning and every day he returns home in the evening, never any further ahead than when he’d started, all the while enriching the wealthy man by way of selling his labour for the pittance he’s offered. At work is where the working man finds his temporary escape from the madness of the way of things, under the harsh, fluorescent lights and under the slowly spinning industrial fans his momentary peace arriving. His is feeling like a piece of machinery the same as the equipment he operates all day. On the wealthy man’s time, he becomes a machine, his body having learned to recite its movements from memory, leaving his mind free to wander. He allows his mind to fill with elaborate fantasies, of running wild and free, free not from the burden of work but from the limits imposed on him by his reduction to the level of a cog in the machine. He half-listens to the sound of gears whirring and hydraulics smoothly expanding and contracting and he wonders on his lot in life, on his future, on no future at all, on a fighting back that’s been in the works for a long time. The subversive thrill makes it seem, to him, as though it’s all new; but he’s been thinking of fighting back for a long time, as he’s been fighting back for a long time, for so long as there’s been the working man there’s been a fight for what’s his. But it’s trapped inside that the working many hears the call of the rebel, a call that speaks to a common thrumming of our universal pulse. Inside, the working man works diligently through the day, ending with muck on his face and a wound on his heart, but still yet unbeaten as he’s spent that day preparing himself to be part of something greater than he is. Outside, the seeds of rebellion, long ago planted, have been growing for a while, for so long as there’s been exploitation of man by man a rebellion fighting it in kind, now sprouting a stem which should form the basis for that next, decisive rise. But we’re not quite there yet; it’ll be some time before we make good across the distance between where we are and where we seek to be. In the midst of the evils of the world eating away at all that is good and pure, the working man will soon have at his masters, and in so having at them he’ll change the world.
Though Valeri doesn’t know it, not yet, the police have stepped up their disappearings, seeking to head off the coming uprising even as they unwittingly yet actively work to foment it. “Don’t upset your father,” his mother would say when he was a small child before sending him off to school for the day, “be good.” But he never would, always finding some trouble to get himself in, on returning home his father there to tell him, “you must learn to be better than anyone else. It’s the only way people like us can survive.” It’s only in this time of radical ideas and violent upheavals that Valeri will come to learn what his father meant. For weeks after Sydney started working here, Valeri had been certain she was there to pick and choose the workers who were to be terminated in the company’s latest bid to make more from less. As he arrives that day and takes to the shop’s floor, he arrives to find the machines out of order again, but this time with one of his fellow workers having been among the disappeared that morning. He’s a younger man named Jack Kingston, and Valeri doesn’t learn right away he’s been disappeared; it comes out later, the company having informed on the activities of one of its workers to the police. In the afterward of the failed rising, this became the new norm. Whenever some worker fails to turn up for his shift, it’s assumed he’s been disappeared. The assumption is right more often than it’s wrong.
It seems like the sort of thing you’d only hear about in a tyrannical regime, and perhaps it is. It’s not nearly as dramatic as it sounds. The police who drive about in their lorries looking for trouble and making it wherever it’s not found are neither all-knowing nor all-powerful even as they seem to leap on trouble before it can begin. But as he and Sydney lie in bed after their first night together, she turns onto her side and says, “do you know I’ve been planning my route around the floor to get a look at you?” Valeri thinks for a moment and then says, “well, I do now.” It’s a small moment, one which promises something much more. But events in the world around them are about to overtake their budding affair and turn it on its head. In the morning, Valeri comes to realize what a fool he’s been all along, and after Sydney has bid him farewell for the day he regrets the wages he’s spent pursuing this affair; fulfilling and exhilarating though it may be, the adult in him knows emotional fulfillment and exhilaration mean little when his stomach growls and when his clothes are threadbare. But Valeri sees the diversion of a tryst with a virtual stranger as an outlet in times of need. Like all working men in Britain and across Europe, he’s learned to start fast with his love, lest any given woman be disappeared suddenly in the night like all the others.
In the morning, Valeri searches through his ki
tchen for something to eat, reaching for the top cupboards and feeling around the bottom, finding them bare. He looks through his wardrobe and picks out the shirt not with the fewest holes but the shirt with the most, pulling it on and straightening it as best he can. He downs a mug of coffee thick and black as toxic sludge. His is a routine overshadowed by the strain of a night’s sleep spent unslept. But his is hardly a unique situation, the working man around London and across Britain faced with the kind of privation and hunger that coexists alongside the abundance and the luxury of the working man’s nemesis, the wealthy man, who lives not far away but whose presence is felt by the working man in everything he does, everything he sees. Sometimes Valeri stops and wonders what his parents would think of his life now, even worse than the lives which prompted them to join the millions in their failed rising. More and more, lately this wondering has made him feel shame gnawing at the back of his mind, stronger still, soon enough to compel him to do things he’d never thought he’d do.
After the war fifteen years ago, still there are many working men who work themselves tired and sore every day and who return home to bare cupboards, broken windows, and faulty switches, as if his rising has only prompted a new wave of anger and discord in the hearts of they who would deign to fight back. This, Valeri knows; as the hot and sticky early-summer’s morning makes him sweat, he goes to his apartment building’s shared washroom and turns on the shower’s tap only to find nothing comes out. On the door, on his way out, he notices a sign declaring the building’s water out for an indeterminate length of time. Valeri sighs and returns to his unit to give himself a sponge bath using jugs of water kept in the kitchen cupboard for exactly these occasions. “Save some of that for washing the clothes,” says a woman, “if you ever plan on washing them, that is.” She thinks nothing of approaching Valeri even as he’s nude. And he thinks nothing of being nude in front of her, not even bothering to turn to face her much less conceal himself behind his towel. Life in Britain’s crowded working class flats has become too hard for embarrassment over such things.
