by J. T. Marsh
In the future, this sort of action will take place on a grander scale, but as it’s already come to be. While these workers have ended their occupation and returned to their homes, fires burn across the country and around the world. The wealthy man continues his campaign to cram the working man into steadily shrinking plots of land, in the urban landscape so many made to live in steadily fewer neighbourhoods, no new homes in these forcing the working man into ghettoes, driving the working man not by force of arms but by force of politics. An explosion, sudden, lights up the night in a burst of orange and golden flame, the imminent arrival of storm troopers met with rifle fire, scattering blood and bone across the city’s street. It lasts only a moment, but in that moment another life’s taken, another young man cut down in the prime of his life. Sirens wail, ambulances speed here and there, the local hospital is overwhelmed with casualties, with broken bones and shattered backs and gunshot wounds piercing right through shoulders and arms and necks, tiled floors and gloved hands soon drenched in blood as nurses work frantically to save lives. Amid the chaos a stale smell rises into the air, from the burnt-out storefronts and from the charred remains of upturned trucks and buses the acrid stench lingering like the memory of a still-fading nightmare in the early hours of a long afternoon. “I don’t know if I can answer that,” Sydney says. Valeri had asked her if she’d stay with him until the end. She’s been here all along; in fact, it’s she who brought Valeri to this church and introduced him personally to the pastor. Valeri’s not been a religious man much in his life, but still he clings in his heart to the hope offered in a spiritual awakening. An essential moment has been reached, if only men like Valeri could know it. Amid the exploding of bombs and the rattling of gunfire in the night, there’s hope, there’s always hope. It’s at this church, which Valeri will never attend again, that he meets Sergei, one of Sydney’s childhood friends. They shake hands firmly, and at once Valeri senses Sergei’s a man to be trusted, a good friend. Later that night, Sydney tells him how she and Sergei had grown up together, attended all the same schools, kept in touch even as adulthood separates so many good childhood friends. He’ll die, later, a tragedy hardly unique in these troubled times.
In the ranks of the striking workers there’s a young woman named Andrea Newman, and she works not because she needs to earn an income but because she needs to sell her labour to feed her family. But as she’s become lost in a hopeless depression, she can only muster the energy to force herself through each day at her thankless job waiting tables at a restaurant attached to a casino. Sometimes, she sees the columns of black smoke rising from fires halfway across the city, juxtaposed against a screen somewhere nearby broadcasting news of the latest factory’s closure, the smiling, perfectly-groomed talking heads briefly mentioning the workers to be put out of work. Sometimes, she sees the news which makes her reflect on where she’s been, on all that’s led up to this moment, to what would turn out to be a seminal moment not only in our shared history but in her own life as well. Soon, Andrea loses her livelihood-no, it’s taken from her, in the act of one wealthy man meeting with another and conspiring to rearrange imaginary lines on a sheet somewhere. It makes no sense to Andrea; she’s always taken to her work with the same careful touch and with the same diligence. Now, cast aside like some old piece of machinery deemed not worth fixing, she pauses to think on what to do next. It’s an impossible torture to be made to feel like an object, a tool manipulated by your betters for their own benefit only to be discarded when no longer needed. For Andrea, through no fault of her own she now must contemplate a near-future littered with dreams broken and fires smouldering still into the night. Not far away, Andrea leaves her home with her daughters, taking refuge in with an aunt she’s not seen in years. With no other means to provide for her daughters, she takes to selling her body on the street at night when no one will see her. At the best of times it’s dangerous work, but during these troubled times to walk the streets at night in search of cash it’s an invitation for every predator to take by force. Some nights Andrea sees no work wander her way; these nights come to be common. But worse are the nights when she’s taken by some thug who then refuses to pay her and strikes her with his fist. She learns quickly not to press them, but still she can’t avoid the men who would beat her black and blue. Pushed to life on the margins, she hides in the darkness of the night’s shadows, able to shroud herself in the shadows only a shade darker than the night. It’s in the shadows the future lies, Andrea among that class of people who count among the most pathetic and hated among us.
For Andrea Newman, though she feels a void in her brought on by years of hard living and utter loneliness still she feels the call of the rebel, that tugging on her heart we all feel whenever instinct rises against education. For Andrea, the walk home at night, one night, sees her looking not at her feet in despair but into the sky behind the apartment blocks flanking the street, at the dull, orange haze created by the fires of liberation burning in the distance. She steps gingerly along the cracked, cratered sidewalk, her body having learned to recite the movements of the walk home each night in the way that only the working man can, and she leans on memories to push her through this current crisis. Her father, her mother, ordinary workers them, each working wherever some small pittance could be meted out to them every other week. They’ve been made to lose their jobs, deprived of their livelihoods in the time it’s taken one of the wealthy man’s many apparatchiks to dash a line across a form on a screen somewhere no one’s ever heard of. But it’s the pain she feels in her heart, radiating out along her nerves to every point in her body that makes her feel alive, like every point in her body has been doused in gas and set alight. She has two young daughters as well, having fled with them only a few years earlier from a man who beat her whenever he took too much to the bottle. There are so many threads needling through our lives, and in these times of disorder and distrust we can only realize our destiny in embracing the horror. Next, we strike.
8. An Icy Heat
A crowd forms around Victory Monument, angry like all the others, chanting slogans and holding signs that accuse the wealthy man of various crimes. A crowd forms, made up of people who are afraid whenever they’re singled out but who become emboldened whenever they combine into a single mass. A crowd forms, giving us a taste of what’s to come, but only a taste, like the first drop of water falling on a thirsty man’s tongue after years of wandering the desert. As the crowd gathers, so gather the storm troopers, a handful of them standing around the edges of the crowd, strategically positioning themselves at the entrances to alleys, on steps in front of apartment blocks, at the intersections of streets feeding into the square, only waiting until the crowd has mostly assembled to move in. The storm troopers rely on experience to steady their nerves when confronted by an overwhelming number of angry people. Still the voices of working men speak in hushed tones, exchanging subversive thoughts, saying things like, “our strike may be broken but our spirit never will be,” “the fire has been kindled and it can’t be put out anymore,” and “may the dead not have died in vain!” As Valeri lives among them, he looks up sometimes and sees flying overhead jets belonging to the air force, in formation, it suddenly occurring to him these are times of intimidation. Still in this early period open sedition is confined to the apartment blocks and the sprawling shantytowns wherein the working class live, in the distance the wealthy man’s gleaming, glass-and-steel towers looming as a stark reminder of the invasion drawing nearer with each day.
Nothing will happen, not this time, nothing besides a few broken bones and a few scraped knees. As the crowd thins out, the storm troopers linger just long enough to see the last of the troublemakers leave, once satisfied the day has passed and the threat has faded returning to their barracks as they’d started out the day. Most of the troopers felt no anxiety, no fear at being confronted with such a crowd, but there’s one young trooper among them who through he’d never make it through the day. There’s always at least one. Befo
re Sean Morrison and the other students from the polytechnic can join in, the police move in. With military precision they arrest the leaders of all the student groups, Sean in the hall when the police break in and push him to the ground. There’s a lot of screaming and shouting but no blood is spilled, Sean soon cuffed in the back of a lorry along with the other student leaders. Speeding for the station, the police put him in a cell and leave him without having said a word to him through this whole affair. But Sean’ll be back out soon enough. Most of the students taken in by the raids will be, too. The police don’t have much evidence against any of the students, and they’ve broken too many laws themselves in bringing the students in. But the damage is done. The police have waited until the students and their consciousness reached its apex, then moved in, throwing the student groups into chaos. Sitting in his cell with the others, Sean thinks himself a fool for having traded in dissent so openly. But when he walks out of jail the next day to the embrace of friends and family, he’s learned a valuable lesson that he’ll soon put to good use.
In a few months, when there comes the moment at which a definitive moment will be reached, all it will take is that one trooper, perhaps not this particular trooper but some other, to give in to a moment of weakness. And when one of them gives in to weakness, so will another, then another, then another, all of them faltering at exactly the moment when they, for their own sake and for the sake of the wealthy man they serve, should be steadying themselves again. This time, Hannah can’t make it in to the hospital, the trains having been shut down and the streets closed to all traffic, leaving her no way to get to work. “Well, now we’ll see what comes next,” she says to herself, “but what is there to talk about?” A young man named Lawrence Jackson accompanies her, having met her only some weeks earlier in the middle of a power outage on one of those long summer nights. “Who’s room is that?” he asks, pointing at Valeri’s. “My roommate’s,” she says, “but he’s out all the time. Working. Taking part in these rallies. He likes to think of himself as a rebel. But so far all he’s rebelled against is good housekeeping.” She turns back towards Lawrence. “But enough of that,” she says, “we’ll leave as soon as the power comes back on or dawn breaks. Whichever comes first.” “Am I interfering?” he asks. But she doesn’t answer. Instead, she leans in for a kiss. In the basement of that disused shop, Darren Wright listens intently to the impassioned sermons delivered by the rogue priest. The police raids and the mass unemployment have driven the faithful in increasing numbers to these underground ministries; once only some dozens, now hundreds visit this particular priest to hear the gospel of revolution. Tonight, the priest declares, “and in the book of Acts, chapter five, verse twenty nine, the apostle Peter declared ‘we ought to obey God rather than men.’ Brothers and sisters, we have seen the police evict the working class from our homes, and we have seen the police arrest they who would deign to take to the streets in outcry.” All are taking in every word, amid the leaky pipes and the damp, mildew-laden air the fire and fury reaching the hearts of every man and woman. The priest continues, “in the Bible we are taught to ‘heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.’ Brothers and sisters, I tell you this: if we are to answer this call to ministry, we must cast out the demons who have lived in our government, who seize the fruits of our labour from us, and who use force against us should we dare oppose them. In service of Christ we must willingly enslave ourselves to the cause!” Again Darren feels the electric sensation running the length of his spine, compelling him to shout out, “amen!” Soon enough this rogue ministry will surge to the forefront and make its own war for the salvation of the working man. As it is written in 2 Corinthians 10:4-5, ‘For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.’ And so Darren knows their ragged, haggard congregation not only will but must inevitably surmount the overwhelming power massed against them; in fact, their time is sooner than any could know.
It’s the second kiss they’ve exchanged throughout their friendship. Laurence, who had been with his share of women since he was a teenager, thinks of this woman as different, the experience of having taken in with her making him feel so much younger than he was. He breathes in the perfume of her hair and seems to see her eyes in the darkness. “I love you, Hannah,” he says. “Don’t say that,” she says. “Why not?” he asks. “It doesn’t lead to good things when men say that to me,” she says. “Then why am I here?” he asks. She doesn’t have an answer. Theirs is a secret romance, secret even to either of them. As if to punctuate the silence, a distant explosion rattles walls and shakes glass like a rolling thunder, the night guaranteed to be dark. It’s only a gas tank at some industrial state bursting into flames, but neither Hannah nor Lawrence know it. Hiding out, they make it through the night, fearing to fall asleep in each other’s arms they sleep in either room. In the streets outside Garrett Walker’s new residence, there’s the noise of sirens wailing and the cracking thunder of gunfire in the distance. Since taking up residence with his mother-in-law, Garrett’s found work, here and there, odd jobs fixing leaky pipes and broken-down cars, never enough to support a family. But when his daughter doesn’t come home one afternoon, he takes to the streets in search of her. Though only sixteen, she’d taken to hanging at a local college in Surrey, and it was at this college when she was caught up in the police raids. It mattered little that she was only a casual observer. The police took in anyone who looked at them cross. After some hours, while he’s in the middle of searching through a back alley his phone rings in his back pocket, inspiring in him a creeping dread. It’s his wife. She says, “they’ve got her.” Immediately he turns back, through the twilight’s shadows a desperation welling up in him, as though some part of him fears by the time he makes it to the station his daughter will already be dead.
But we’re not quite there yet. In the night, a blackout strikes, this not one of sabotage but still enacted deliberately. The signs are already mounting of the impending collapse, not of the way of things but of the current boom, brought about not by the working man’s mounting resistance but by the wealthy man’s repeating cycle of greed. Looking out across the city, already the skeletal towers are reaching higher for the sky than ever before, the wealthy man in a frenzy to wring every last ounce of wealth from the way of things before it all goes up in smoke. After Valeri’s spent the night in the streets, shouting and screaming and hurling abuse at the officers who stand them down, he returns to the mill and finds posted to the front door a notice of closure. Looking back, he sees the short, stocky figure of Murray beside the taller, lankier figure of a man named Arthur Bennington. “What is this?” Valeri asks. “The boss came around twice,” Murray says, “he’s been looking high and low for someone to take his place but couldn’t find anyone. He’s afraid to let the plant run with only his subordinates in charge--he thinks they’ll be too weak and the workers will just do whatever they want.” Valeri laughs. “He’s right! If the managers all quit and we ran this place ourselves it would be in much better shape. Safer, too!” Murray nods, and says, “yes, I know that. And so does Arthur Bennington.”
At the armoury, the Colonel arrives to inspect the troops, looking entirely out of place in his finely-pressed uniform. Standing at a podium before the assembled brigade, he says, “you men are the finest in this army. Though we are at peace now, the time may come when you are called to war. You may even be called to bring peace to the streets of your own country. Whatever the task required, know that in all things we shall all remain steadfastly committed to God, Country, and King.” Private Thompson stifles a chuckle. But others can’t help themselves. The Colonel looks equally mortified and betrayed. The whole brigade, after the inspection ends, is made to stand in formation for eight hours straight, then retires to immediate lights out. Still Craig Thom
pson whispers along with the rest of the troops, already thinking of the day when they’ll serve their own. But this seditious line of thinking must end, Craig’s nagging self-doubt seems to say, before it takes them all to a place where none of them can go. Murray’s companion hasn’t said anything, but looks Valeri in the eye with a steely gaze that seems to pierce through to his soul and bring out his innermost thoughts. “This one’s a good one,” says Arthur Bennington, his eyes never wavering from Valeri’s, “but he’s got much to learn.” It’s a small encounter in the grand scheme of things, and when the plant reopens a few days later Arthur Bennington’s nowhere to be found. No one’s heard of him, either. It’s as though he’s a ghost. But Valeri knows he exists. Imperceptibly, a friendship springs up between them, such a small thing in this day and age, but as the world burns in an icy heat Valeri must carefully consider who he takes among his friends. As men like him struggle to make ends meet, the wealthy continue to encroach on their neighbourhoods, the sleek, glass-and-steel towers seeming to draw nearer every day. It’s only a matter of time, Valeri thinks, until they’ll be forced to stand and fight for the right to stay in their own homes. Valeri, for one, can only look forward to it like the starving man salivating at the thought of a feast.
