by J. T. Marsh
Young men are led at gunpoint out into the street, then made to kneel with their hands behind their backs. These, the working man’s colleagues, his brothers in spirit are not the first casualties in a war gone wrong, and they will not be the last. Overhead, a black figure sweeps through the darkness, from within his mass loosing bolts of flame on the street, new fires bursting into existence. Despite all that’s happened, the wealthy man still sees himself as fully in control of the crisis playing itself out before him, still confident of the vast wealth he’s hoarded, still self-assured of the righteousness of his own cause. The wealthy man continues to plot his next moves, hurriedly scurrying the last of his ill-gotten wealth in whatever safe haven he can think of, through accounts held under pseudonym upon pseudonym around the world in banks no one’s ever heard of. But he makes a mistake. He always makes a mistake. Little does the wealthy man realize that his vast wealth will mean nothing when, in the future, he finds himself wearing a black hood over his head and a noose around his neck, taking his last breaths before the inevitable justice is visited upon him. In the meanwhile, his mistake isn’t his frantic efforts to store his theft somewhere it can’t be found. In fact, the exact moment he made his critical mistake can never be found, not by you or me, not by the show trials to be set up to press the wealthy man’s guilt and deliver unto him the ultimate justice.
In a flash, fires break out across London, across every city, from the base of towers smoke rising. The sound of glass breaking rings out along the pounding of feet against the pavement and the crying out of anguished voices. The rebel lies in wait, deliberately avoiding the action, watching as the enemy steps over himself to make every possible mistake. Screens across the world flash with images of troopers pointing rifles at angry mothers, unarmed, venting rage at them. Screens across the world flash with images of searchlights sweeping across buildings in the middle of the night, of loose rounds of gunfire ringing in the darkness, of sirens wailing and of passions inflaming as the consequences of a lifetime and a half of passions so suppressed erupt in an orgy of violence. It never ends. It can never end.
After unleashing a pent-up rage onto the streets, there can be no turning back. In the midst of this rapid collapse of the old order, the rebel takes care to consolidate his forces, pausing only to mount the lightest of attacks. His gunmen open fire on the troopers, only to withdraw before these troopers can respond. He takes no life, not yet, succeeding only in his as-yet limited aim. Disappearing into the city, he evades pursuit, blending in with his surroundings, in his plain clothes indistinguishable from the working man, the student, and the parishioner once he discards his weapons. Still the storm troopers fire at anything that moves, at shadows and at flickers of light glinting off scattered shards of glass in the street.
Then, a crashing sound, the ground shaking slightly as a bomb goes off somewhere down the street, hurting no one but rattling nerves. Moments later, another, somewhere across the city. It’s a staggering moment, one of many strewn across the collective consciousness like so much useless confetti. Still there are few injuries and no deaths, the rebel’s plot to strain resources and to fray nerves unfolding slowly over weeks, months. Soon, barricades go up around every public office, every port whether air or sea, across the streets in every city across Britain, around the stock exchange downtown and around the network centres where the wealthy man’s propaganda continues to stream forth with ever increasing intensity. Not protected, not yet, are the targets of value to the rebel, those targets which his enemies would never suspect and those who would never blame him for his own crimes. As the rebel preserves his forces and consolidates his gains, he prepares for a decisive attack.
18. In the Cards
It comes suddenly, in the middle of the night, an unusual time for such men to be up. “Valeri!” shouts Hannah, calling him over to her screen, “Valeri you have to see this!” The powers that be have convened an emergency session for their self-important government, but they cannot sort out the way forward. “It’s happening,” Valeri says. There’s hatred and recrimination, as there is among the workers who surround them every minute of every day, but this hatred and recrimination is different. “At last we will have our revenge,” Valeri says. “I hope you’re right,” says Hannah, “roommate.” She puts her hand over his and gives a firm but slight squeeze. But Valeri has already made in with the rebels of the popular front, in the weeks since the massacre working under the guidance of Murray and others to avenge every last drop of blood his brothers and sisters have been made to shed in the streets. Night falls.
On board the cruiser Borealis, Captain Abramovich addresses the men on a daily basis, through the ship’s loudspeakers urging the same discipline and calm every time. When Dmitri and the others first hear of the collapse in parliament, though, it’s not from the captain but from one enterprising young sailor who’d kept a screen he’d smuggled on board. “The criminals will be brought to justice,” says one sailor. “Maybe the new government will put them on trial,” says another. But Dmitri remains skeptical, saying, “they’re all a pack of jackals. It doesn’t matter who forms the next government, they’ll all keep on killing our own people in the streets.” This exchange is had in the mess hall, and most of the sailors around them agree with Dmitri. This is not a happy crew. For many years the Navy has squandered much money on expensive boondoggles, on new aircraft carriers with no aircraft, on submarines that can’t submerge for all the leaks in their hulls, on missiles guided by software with so many bugs they might as well be great rocks. Meanwhile, their pay has been cut repeatedly, leaving these men to make less than a common street whore. If news of parliament’s collapse is meant to assuage them, it fails.
By the time the sun rises on a new day, this government has fallen, leaving the state’s apparatus in place but adrift, rudderless, in search of a new authority to take the place of the old. An election’s called, thirty days from now, and much will happen in so short a time. I know what you might be thinking, but it’s not yet time for that. Instead, we look to the shadows where the working man withstands the mounting unrest, his anger at those who would seek to govern him balanced by the uncertainty obscuring his personal road through the future. “I will not wait for the time to come,” Valeri insists, speaking with neither Hannah nor Murray but his one-time lover Sydney Harrington. She’s found Valeri after a long absence, and she knows, in the intuitive way she does, that he’s caught up in this somehow. “I don’t ask you to wait,” says Sydney, “but I would ask you to come with my family and take refuge in our home in the country. It’s near a small town in the highlands. We’ll be save there, together.” But by now, Valeri has come to reject private life altogether, going so far as to turn against so natural and so fulfilling an experience as love. And he finds in his self-denial a lofty ideal which gives him something he’s never known before, a vital urge to take part in something that could change everything.
“There’s no place for me here anymore,” says Maria, the last time she and Valeri are to see one another for the current crisis. “There’s never been much of a place for you here,” Valeri says. “So you finally understand me,” says Maria. “I’m beginning to,” Valeri says, “good luck.” As the working man tries in vain to make sense of all that’s happening, still yet he’s distracted from the wealthy man’s mad rush to extract every last bit of wealth he can in the wake of this turmoil that threatens to consume all. As the working man tries, so, too, tries the wealthy man, the working man’s turn to the rebel giving rise to the wealthy man’s reactionary, each provoking the other, neither coming about but in response to one another. It means little now, the whole lot of them still in their confused, primordial state, but as you and I watch this elaborate theatre play itself out, you must know, perhaps on instinct by now, it’s all the same crazy, deranged mess repeating with a slightly different flavour each and every time.
Once you come to realize that all these actors have a role to play and so must play their role no matter w
hat’s transpired, as I’ve long since realized, you may yet gain the ability to sense the flow of history as it reaches for its next phase. Three men gather and make for a church. “They’ll gun us down if they see us,” says one man. “We’ll keep out of sight,” says another. “We can’t miss this sermon,” says a third. Like most working men, they’ve thrown their sympathies in with the guerrillas already staging raids on police stations, government houses, and freight train yards. Like most working men, they’ve not yet brought themselves to terms with what must be done. They haven’t decided whether to vote in the coming elections, and it’s up to the guerrillas of the popular front to dissuade them. The same flag flutters from atop the same government buildings, from spires atop domes and from poles on tall buildings; in the time it takes the caretaker government to arrange for its own replacement, events will transpire here and around the world that’ll make everything we do and everything we say in the meanwhile assume a new meaning few could’ve ever seen coming.
Having come this far, we’ve already cast ourselves off the precipice and can only hope we survive the plummet. But it matters little who’s in power. In the streets, the working man and his allies the student and the parishioner form a single mob, braving the storm troopers’ guns to march on Victory Monument as once they had so often. As the decades of importing slaves from all corners of the Earth have finally caught up to the wealthy man, there’s now that mass of people, pathetic and lacking in dignity as they are, unencumbered by fear of loss and free to hurl themselves once more at the black-clad men who man the barricade up ahead. “We strike against our enemies!” declares one man. “We stand up for the dead!” screams another. “We fight for ourselves!” yells a third. These are the names and the voices of the neglected, maligned working men, and this is their time.
“All power to the people!” shouts one woman. “All power to the people!” shouts another woman. “All power to the people!” shouts a third woman. Even before the massacre these were times when radicalism had long gained an alluring appeal, memories of the failed rising of fifteen years ago inhabiting these streets like ghostly visages, there, yet not there. Confused and leaderless, the storm troopers who only a short time earlier had patrolled the streets with confidence, almost arrogance are now reduced to a dishevelled mess, some firing their arms at anything that moves, at the shadows in the night, others locking themselves in their stations, still others abandoning their uniforms altogether and melting into the crowd as the working man takes to the streets. At the polytechnic, news of the government’s collapse is met with disbelief mixed with despair. Sean Morrison and the other students in occupation emphatically reject the call for elections, agreeing to stand on principle alone. But principles cannot feed the hungry nor heal the sick, and with food supplies running low and medical care needed for some the students have no choice but to end their occupation, for now, and head home to try and make good on their own survival. Sean’s one of the last to leave, taking one last stand on the roof of the main hall. He wants one last moment with the makeshift flag they’ve flown. He says, “we’ll be back,” while looking up at the flag fluttering in the summer’s breeze, “and next time it’ll be for good.” He leaves the flag flying, leaving it as a declaration to the school’s masters of the way things have changed.
But here, now, they point their guns down the road at the steadily advancing mob, their grip quivering, wavering, finally withdrawing, surrendering the moment to that very mob. No longer can they confidently, even arrogantly enter the working man’s home and remove him, as the wealthy man’s profiteering has come to a screeching halt. In the midst of all this disorder, I’d invite you to look on the smoldering fires of liberation, after they’ve burned themselves out the charred husks of men blackened as the shadows of history come to life. “In the name of the dead!” shouts one man. “We rise in anger!” shouts another. “All power to the people!” shouts still another. This is the rallying cry against which the forces at work shall assail themselves, the moment of crisis again reaching for the skies like a tsunami cresting at exactly the moment it strikes the shore. But Valeri is not there. His is thrown in with the rebels of the popular front, in spirit if not yet in fact, and with the rebels biding their time, he waits for the inevitable opportunity to present itself. But he chomps at the bit, hardly fighting the urge to take to the streets and go out in a blaze of glory. Through a complicated and entirely ad hoc network, instructions of sorts have filtered down, changing with each set of ears they pass through until hardly resembling the original order. By the time Valeri hears what’s needed to be done, he hears not instructions issued by authority but the call of the moment resounding through the streets and the alleys here, across the country, and around the world. After their ministry in the streets, parishioners who follow the forbidden gospel yield to the police. They hear news of the government’s collapse and the impending election, and for a time it seems their efforts might’ve finally born fruit. Nevermore assured, they return to their homes, Darren Wright among they who look suspiciously on the coming day. All the wealthy men who live in opulent luxury seem to have absconded with their wealth; but for the screens filled with talking heads delivering their screeds against disorder and banditry, there’s little evidence the wealthy men remain in Britain at all. For the parishioner, the path forward has become more uncertain than ever, obscured as it is behind a rapidly-darkening cloud gathering on the horizon. Still, when he carries on with his life, Darren feels the calling of the revolution, as though it were near to him. He says to his friend Julia, the day after they’ve vacated their occupation of the streets, “I can’t help but feel the worst is yet to come.” She nods, and says, “we’ll be ready when we’re called on to receive the Holy Spirit, and we’ll survive through any troubles.” Amid the burnt-out shopfronts and upturned cars, the broken glass and the shattered dreams, there’s hope.
Lingering in the shadows, the spirit of the old way, too, conserves its strength, looking to the future for the time when the new will rise and present itself as a target. This is the way of things, and has always been. As history forms, so too does anti-history, locked as they are in a mortal struggle for the hearts and minds of the people of our time. Look, please look into the eyes of the people who’ve been killed, their faces and their voices seared into your memory as each cries out, frozen in a moment of terror before their lives are taken from them in an instant, in the time it takes for the bullet to cross that thin barrier between the heart and the soul. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is events confined to the city in which Valeri lives; though we fixate on this city, know these events are occurring, in one way or another, around the world. In time, we shall come to see the greater stage on which we all perform our roles. For now, we are lost in the minutiae even as we ascend to the greatest stage of all. In the days following the deaths of Garrett Walker’s daughters, his life becomes a swirling vortex of pain and anger. Though he wants only to have his vengeance on those who killed his daughters, practical matters intervene. Tending to his wife and her mother, he doesn’t know circumstances will soon thrust him into even greater hardships, death waiting not for him but for nearly everything he loves.
It’s all happened so fast. It seems only yesterday that we were in the midst of a rapid, breakneck growth, in a forest of concrete and glass reaching for the skies as quickly as the working man could be made to work. Quickly, quietly, the sudden resignation of an entire government sets off a chain of events that could but change the world forever. All at once, the workers walk out, joined soon after by their natural allies, the students and the parishioners, the millions of them taking to the streets. Leaderless and paralyzed, the government can’t react fast enough, those few days of chaos prompting an eventual response so heavy handed it promises to inflame passions further and weaken the government’s own hand. Though Colonel Cooke hasn’t said when the brigade will deploy to eastern Europe to poster against the Russians, Private Craig Thompson and the others know it mus
t be near. Despite being confined to their barracks, the whole lot of them quickly form a plan by exchanging notes and whispering under the cover of darkness. “When the order comes down,” Craig says, “we’ll seize control of this barracks and we won’t give in until they promise not to send us abroad.” He’s speaking at night with a pair of other troopers, not the first time someone has suggested it but neither the last. The two troopers nod their agreement. Sitting on the edge of his bunk, it’s almost lights out, and the sergeant will be coming around soon to shut the lights off. It’s precisely because the sergeant is about to arrive that they know this is the time, those precious few minutes a night when they can be assured there’s no one watching. Amid the carnage of the streets, the men of the brigade will be shocked and confused when the order finally comes down not to deploy to a foreign country but to the working class neighbourhoods right here in England, the one place they thought they’d never have to go.
When an unknown person rises to the podium at the capitol and announces the imposition of a new martial law, it seems even he knows the folly of the path laid out for him, just as he knows full well there’s no choice but for him to take that next step. This is the sign of our times. When all have their role to play, all must play their role, all must recite their lines, compelled as they are by the invisible forces that govern their impulses. Still, in the background, the reactionary himself waits for the government to fall. As confident as the rebel is in the certainty of his ultimate victory, so too is the reactionary, their mutual assurance setting them on a collision course. Though it may seem we’re on the cusp of a radical new beginning, it’s not so. We’re only at the start of a long and difficult journey, one which has been in the making since any of us can remember. For us to survive through these harrowing days, we must turn to men like Valeri not for leadership but as avatars for the change we must all undergo. Still in control of the prison when the announcement of martial law is heard, the inmates know what this will mean for them. Some choose this moment to abandon their positions, leaving the makeshift garrison without enough men to hold every part of the grounds. Stanislaw Czerkawski mans the barriers at the front gate with four others, clutching pipes and bottles ready to throw should the police reappear. Food and water are in ample supply, but still the committee formed to govern the prison rations both on the fear they may be surrounded at any time. “If they attack us, we should fight,” Stanislaw says at the night’s meeting in the open space of their cell block, “and if we go down fighting then at least we’ll know that we chose our own fate for once.” Gone is the mild-mannered Polish migrant who’d swept the floors for years, replaced by the roused anger of a man insulted and demeaned one too many times. But neither he nor we are close to the end of our struggles; ready to die, the inmates will be forced to live under not a regime of brutal violence but one of uncertainty and dismay.
