by J. T. Marsh
For Valeri, the massacre inspires in him a seething rage, of the kind he’s known only once before: fifteen years ago when the last generation’s failed uprising took them from him. After hurrying into the streets he emerges, exhausted and sore all over, looking for Maria somewhere around where usually she waits. In the streets she’s nowhere to be found. He fears she’s dead; but this is no time to let fear govern one’s actions. In his apartment block’s stairwell, he sees not Maria but Hannah for the first time in days, her scrubs bloodied from the day’s work. They’re both tired. “You’ve come at last,” she tries, “I would’ve thought you’d gotten yourself killed in all this.” She speaks with an almost-dismissive tone which can only just conceal her concern. “You must promise me you’ll stay out of harm’s way,” he says. But he knows it’s not that simple. At the barracks, Private Craig Thompson is made to prepare for war. After they finish accounting for all their guns, ammunition, and the other equipment, they muster on the parade grounds and ready themselves to receive their orders. When Colonel Cooke announces their impending deployment to eastern Estonia, right on the Russian border, a murmur sweeps across the mustered troops, Private Thompson among those muttering under their breaths, Thompson saying, “I can’t believe it.” But a sharp glare from the non-coms silences the men. With people dying on the streets of their own country, the men are to be deployed to defend the territory of another. Already edging towards sedition Private Thompson and the rest of the men haven’t long until it’s their time to rise.
Overnight, a calm emerges. An eerie silence settles over the streets, with those brave few outside putting their heads down as they quickly and quietly scurry along. Even the troopers step out with apprehension, looking into every shadow, glancing quickly into every side street and every alley before moving on, half their minds on their firearms, half on the safety and the security of the station waiting for them at the end of their patrols. If you stand in the right place, at the intersection of once-busy streets, you can hear the wind whistling as it rushes between buildings emptied overnight. Still, the working man finds his attention dominated by concerns closer to home. Valeri passes a few names and a few places to his unknown contact; at times he thinks himself sending information into a void. This time, the names and the places he sends make their way through a network of contacts and find the right hands. In the streets, the unemployed and the unemployable keep on hurling stones, Garrett Walker in with the rest of the rabble voicing their discontent. He returns home after days away, only to learn his daughters have spirited away into the service of the mob rampaging through those very streets, and he determines to take action. Soon the whole family flees, in taking to the streets Garrett’s daughters killed by a police lorry barging into their crowd. As their broken bodies lie on the pavement, he kneels in a pool of crimson blood and says, “I can’t believe it.” It’s a seminal moment in Garret’s life, and under the influence of a blinding rage he turns away from the path of retreat in favour of giving himself over to the dark essence. In this he irrevocably commits himself as a vessel through which the dark essence can grant itself expression, and begins as a working man his final step towards mastery of his own future.
A strike’s risky in this trouble. Though many are underway already, each has been disorganized, erratic, lacking in the discipline needed to make something out of nothing. He takes to the street and makes his way with the others to the mill, out of the chaos this new strike arising like the sudden intensification of an already-burning firestorm. With the other day labourers Valeri marches, at exactly the moment he’s in the midst of a halting, disjointed rhythm between one step and the next an explosion tears through the street, sending Valeri to the pavement. It’s the first attack, the first of many. In the din, Valeri soon picks himself up, his whole body a blurry, pulsating mass of pain. But he musters the strength to make for cover, only stopping in the relative safety of a blown-out storefront to look back on the carnage. Marching with Bibles in hand, Darren Wright and the other parishioners put down in the middle of the street not far from the place where unarmed demonstrators were shot dead. One by one, they take turns preaching the forbidden gospel to one another. Around them, the police are erratic, withdrawing when they can no longer control the situation. When Darren’s turn to preach comes, he stands at the head of the congregation, about to deliver the forbidden gospel in his own way when he sees down the road the last of the police lorries turn and drive away. “I can’t believe it.” Though the deliverance of the revolution from evil is not yet fully formed, a redemption of blood is offered to all who would take it; men like Darren don’t hesitate, in this moment of truth.
As disorder spreads and people die in the streets, he rushes home to be with his loved ones. The only way, he knows, to be sure they’re safe is to keep them safe himself. The urban landscape spreads itself below him, sprawling as far as he can see, a thick smog concealing the horizon, bleeding into the sky. As it draws nearer, the smog seems to fade into a dull haze, obscuring behind every building in a sea of translucent grey. In the working man’s home, among row after drab row of tasteless, prefabricated apartment blocks and narrow, potholed streets, there’s a respite, however fleeting, from the deafening silence of the streets. At the polytechnic, Sean Morrison and the other students have stopped rioting and taken control, their school a shambles but theirs nevertheless. The student council has asserted control, but once the police come for them there’s little any of them will be able to do to hold what they’ve seized. From the rooftop of the polytechnic’s main building Sean and the others fly the flag of the failed rising fifteen years ago, then look out across the city and view the columns of smoke rising in the distance as the fires of liberation burn. When Sean sees the police lorries withdraw, leaving the students in firm control of the polytechnic. “I can’t believe it.” In their quest to assert a revolutionary knowledge, still Sean and the other students are not yet fully awaken, but given to the fight they’re almost there.
But among endless rows of ramshackle buildings stabbing at the sky like the serrated edge of a blade, the working man waits and watches with a mounting anticipation as his world, seemingly frozen in place, in fact spirals out of control so rapidly it’s always been. At the hospital, Hannah, Whitney, and the others are inundated with casualties, the dead and dying lying alongside one another in the halls, the A&E floor painted with streaks and pools of blood both drying and dried. A man dies in front of Hannah; she turns and tends to another’s wounds, only to watch him die, too. There’s screaming and shouting and crying, mixed in with the wailing of sirens and the rattling of distant thunder. Hannah can’t take a breath; she takes a pill to keep herself alert. A woman comes in carrying the limp body of a small child. Hannah turns her away. Hannah’s turned many away. Hannah’s still to turn many away. But others have it as bad.
Still confined to quarters, the crew of the cruiser Borealis come up with their own stories of what’s happening, each slightly different from the next. Some think the crew will be deployed as marines to the streets directly, to assist the army in pacifying the unrest. Others believe the crew will be kept confined to quarters for months, even put in the brig if necessary, the officers fearing desertion. Still others believe the ship will be deployed away, to Canada or the United States on a visit, just to keep His Majesty’s Ship safe and out of the crisis. But Dmitri doesn’t think on what might happen; he plans, in the way he does. “We have to be prepared for the possibility of war,” he says, one night after lights out. He’s in his bunk, the other five in his room listening intently. “We’ve been watching as the country gets poorer and poorer. We can’t watch much longer. We shouldn’t follow the orders of the men who are killing our own people.” Another sailor pipes in, saying, “are you proposing mutiny?” Dmitri says, “no,” then pauses thoughtfully before adding, “not yet.” There’s more, but this exchange is what’s important, the first step in the crew making the transition from serving one banner to serving another.
> After these early attacks, the rebel stops, having administered the slightest touch to introduce a new chaos. Across the city, the rebel plots his next move. It’s only been a short while since his release; like an addict released from treatment, his first act is to link up with the others, the small group of them forming the core of what would come to be an all-powerful force. In a small, dark basement they meet, and quickly consensus emerges from the fusion of divergent opinions. Some want to take to the streets immediately, to join the rabble with whatever arms they can muster and attack, no matter the outcome. Some want to discard armaments and embrace the peaceful struggle, sure as they are that their enemies will give in when confronted with an overwhelming show of popular strength. All are wrong. The rebel knows force must be applied with deliberate intent, methodically, precisely, at the right time and in the right place. If Valeri is to see himself through, he’ll have to wait for his time to rise. Until his time is come, he’ll have to resist the compulsive, overwhelming urge to attack, now.
But so too does the rebel know the importance of applying a constant, steady pressure from all corners, reaching into the night to draw from within its darkness a mass action, mobilizing the students and the clergymen and the trade unionists into a single mass of humanity against they who would seek to preserve the way of things. The rebel’s goal is to make the current order untenable, the current state ungovernable. And so the rebel waits, continuing to gather his strength, adding to his forces, stockpiling his armaments, disseminating his seditious knowledge to those who would seek to conspire with him against the way of things, through a convoluted network of agents and actors, of sympathizers and supporters, eventually finding its way into the receptive mind of the working man. Over time, this receptiveness will turn into sympathy, some time later into wholehearted embrace. Deftly, the rebel dances a delicate dance, astride the markers of history in the making, with only a force powerful enough to lay waste to the streets needed to make way for the future.
As the working man seeks shelter from the chaos in his own quarters, he thatches together the means to survive this crisis spiralling rapidly towards war. Many of his are arrested, but few have yet died, the chaos gripping the city, the country, the entire world seeing the storm troopers here in his hometown stretched too far and too wide to bother much with him. With the stores looted of food, supplies, things like soap and bread have disappeared in the time it’s taken the first bodies to hit the ground. So too are his cupboards bare, and he survives through this early time not by his wits but by the pooling of what little he has with his brothers and sisters among the worker, the student, and the parishioner, their meagre resources enough to provide sustenance in the meanwhile. Still the crowds vacate the streets, looking to the skies for guidance, seeking the patience that can only come from the almost-spiritual release in surrender to the forces moving around him like the fast-moving waters of a river around the rock stuck stubbornly in the middle. But not all is lost. Life, what’s left of it, goes on, and in so going adapts to the changing circumstances all find themselves immersed in, the working man like all the others finding a way to survive through this early period when no one seems concerned for his immediate welfare but him. A sudden explosion erupts from within a school in the wealthy man’s part of town, once the dust settles the death toll standing at almost two hundred adolescents and their teachers. The rebel avoids the limelight, his apparatchiks making a point to avoid taking responsibility for this attack.
Hearing a sudden bang snap across the darkness followed by the sound of concrete crumbling, he knows this is another attack by the rebel, and for a moment he entertains the notion that this time the rebel might’ve deigned to take decisive action. In the midst of a confusing, chaotic time, thunderous explosions go off here and there, randomly interrupting daily life as women and children search for cover, life interrupted as the streets in the time it’s taken those first drops of blood to hit the pavement. At the end of one shift but before the start of another, power cuts in and out randomly, sometimes out for days, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for just long enough to fit the dark in the blink of an eye. Anger spills into the streets even as those very streets remain deserted, like a post-apocalyptic wasteland with scraps of paper fluttering across the pavement in the summer’s light wind. But when the working man stands for only a moment a stream of letters scrolling across his screen, messages overpowering his screen’s settings to display the requisite stories from the talking heads, denouncing lawlessness, preaching devotion to law and order, infusing every breath, every word with a forced anger and a strained intimidation. The working man may not know this in the way you and I do, but on some instinctive level he realizes the wealthy man is improvising things too. All the world’s burning with the fires of liberation still yet in their infant state, with only the slightest wind needed to catch them and send them rising into the highest, the towering inferno. But the old order remains. It’s all a fraud. Every actor has a role to play; each must play their role to its inevitable end. This is why, the working man knows, this early period where there’s disorder in the streets and sporadic battles erupting all over town and across the country the way of things is still strong, still firmly entrenched, these first acts, these protests and these gun battles and these bombings only like the first and lightest of raindrops to build, slowly, into a typhoon-like storm. Little does the working man know that the storm troopers are already plotting their next move, scraping together a force to venture into enemy territory in the hopes of taking to the offensive, after events have so rapidly turned against them. They lash out not because they believe it will work, though they may very well believe it will work, but because they must. It’s their role to play.
But enough, for now, of the rebel; his is a cause long in the making, and long yet still to be made. As the rebel plots and as the working man struggles through these dangerous times, the wealthy man considers his options, deploying his considerable holdings from their safe havens to furnish the storm troopers with new weapons, new shields, believing as he does that such things will save him. But the surge had crested at exactly the moment those angry young men had been shot and killed in the street before, in a crack of thunder and smoke, coming down in a crash. Many projects stall. Many new buildings fall dark and silent, with crews leaving their tools in place after the sudden end of their last shift. Cranes stand over the empty, half-finished concrete shells, cables left to dangle in the wind. It’s all so surreal. After we’ve come this far, I lead you down an empty street and point out the sights here and there, the cracks in the pavement and the weeds sprouting from between them, the faded paint and the still-smoldering fires of liberation having long since burned out. The laughter of children who have never lived here rings out, echoing off the hardened concrete, lending the streets an eerie, ghostly atmosphere made all the more eerie and ghostly by the smog and the dust of a late-summer’s heat wave surging over the city, inflaming tensions, enflaming passions, all at once the wreckage of the old crumbling in an impossible yet familiar falling-apart of all that we’ve come to know. Still, the wealthy man hoards his wealth, casting the working man and all the working man’s friends and allies into the streets. And the rebel does not intervene to defend the working man in this, his time of need.
It’s only been some weeks since dozens of innocents were cut down in a hail of rifle fire right in these very streets, and already we’ve reached the point where the wealthy man has come to feel so pressured, but not yet threatened that his will compels the storm troopers to strike. As the young men and women who form the detritus of society linger in the shadows, in open doorways and behind broken windows, a confused tension sets into the air like the burning of muscles after too long an exercise. Factories shutter, then reopen as if they’d never shuttered at all. A construction crane topples, the next day seeing a brand new crane in exactly the same place. It’s all so confusing and disorienting, how this can be happening, how the wealthy man can preserve his place in t
he way of things even as this wave of violence sweeps over the city and across the country, already extending, in spots here and there, around the world. At night, one night, the working man is called into work, only for the one night, sent home clutching tight in his pocket a pittance smaller than ever before. Still yet the working man looks ahead, watching the fires of liberation burn long into the night, their bright, red-and-gold flames licking into the bluish-black skies, their colour blending to turn the night a sickly, obscene, offensive shade of crimson, as though confused, disoriented as the working man. But it’s a fraud. As the skies have no thought, no will, neither does the working man, his thoughts, his feelings at the whim of they who would deem themselves his masters, whether they be on his side or not. In this, his moment of indecision, the working man is vulnerable, and in his vulnerability he is in exactly the right frame of mind to become receptive to the ideas that would be forbidden to the working man in the wealthy man’s world.
Into the street roll armoured personnel carriers, trundling slowly. The streets are devoid of life, with every shop shuttered and every patch of sidewalk bare. Along the moment’s right flank there passes the black-clad figure, striking out at all who would dare to press him to show his faith. An explosion, then some minutes later another. Shattered bodies scatter across the street. In the darkness of the night, a powerful searchlight sweeps up and down the face of a tower while the chattering of gunfire rips holes in the sky. A column of smoke rises, its blackness barely distinguishable from the night. Days pass, then pass back, looping around in a curvature that seems at once to encompass all that’s happened, compressing events vast and dissimilar into a single point that defies measurement.
