by J. T. Marsh
After having made it this far, we must always be careful to recognize we still have more to accomplish, that we’ve hardly taken our first step and still have a thousand and one left to take. News breaks that another law is set to go into force, signed in secret by the parliamentarian, to be released to the unsuspecting public only later, months later, perhaps even years later, by which time it’ll have become an immutable fact of life in the public discourse, with no legal challenge to stand a chance against the overwhelming political inertia. At Vanessa’s, this fighting and drinking and shouting leads, one night, to the inevitable. In the morning, her body’s taken to the nearest hospital’s morgue, while her husband’s taken in cuffs to the nearest jail. He’ll spend a few years locked up. Her daughters’ll spend the rest of their lives lost and confused. In the years to come, caught up in the disarray to follow they’ll hop from home to home, guardian to guardian, sometimes given off by someone who can no longer care for them, sometimes taken in after whoever’s been caring for them winds up killed, still sometimes picked up by some predator taking advantage of the chaos to prey on children innocent no more.
After the emergency measures fail to placate the working man and his natural allies, the student, parishioner, soldier, and migrant it seems something else might be on the horizon, some new scheme which could succeed in lulling the whole miserable lot of them into a false sense of security and in so lulling make them vulnerable to attack. But we want something more. We’ve always wanted something more. We reject, with full throated enthusiasm, the terms of the debate that’s been foisted upon us. Although we focus on events close to home, know that around the world tensions are on the rise. At any moment some little spark could ignite long-simmering tensions and set the world on fire. Men like Valeri have always been an afterthought in the wealthy man’s designs on hoarding more and more wealth, left to fend for themselves in a world overtly hostile to them. It’ll prove to be that the future must lie in men like him, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Some look out on those streets and see only a cobbled-together assortment of the same ragged and haggard men who must wander along each and every day as though in a trance, but that’s not what I see, not what you should see, only what the wealthy man would have us all see. At some point, there passes a moment when, like a switch, the whole lot of us come to realize we’ve been lied to, not in the basic, sort-of factual way we’ve always known we’ve been lied to but in a primitive, almost instinctive way that lends itself readily to the changing course of our shared future. At some point, there passes a moment when something in all of us changes, drastically and irrevocably, reconfiguring the way we look at the world but reshaping the way each of us thinks so we come to honestly believe this mew way of thinking has been our way all along. In his little bedroom with Sydney, Valeri feels a wave of relief wash over him as he plots his next move, the next move in his quest to become more than he is. It’s a strange sensation, to be so caught up in the passions of a revolutionary fervour that even the love of a woman can’t compare to the burning desire he has in him for justice and freedom. Even as Valeri thinks on this feeling, he knows it to be trite and adolescent to give himself over to self-denial, even as he fully understands it to be enlightening. Now’s the time, or at least as good a time as will come.
Reaching into his pocket, Valeri draws out a small box, handing it unopened to her. “Valeri,” she says, opening the box, a small gasp escaping her lips as she sees what he’s given her. But the only jewellery Valeri owns is a small pin given to him by his union in recognition of his years of service. It’s a small thing, but it means so much to him. It marks him as one of his own. He believes this is something someone like Sydney could never understand, not without having lived his life and felt all the things he’s felt in being made to feel shame for who he is. In the night, it starts to rain, a drop here, a drop there, soon the air crackling with the thousands and thousands of raindrops striking the pavement all at once. But in London’s working class districts men like Valeri have little time for indulgences like love. Even as they stand together, an unspoken understanding invades the moment, the grim knowledge they must not see each other again as lovers for all the need they have to commit themselves to their own respective struggles. Self-denial, Valeri’s come to believe, is the path forward, and he’s about to cast himself irrevocably into a place where she can’t follow. In the grim, grinding poverty that’s gripped London’s working class districts since even before the failed rising fifteen years ago, love is a luxury that must be cast by the wayside, and in the working man’s struggle for justice and freedom Valeri casts love by the wayside in the time it takes him and his lover to bid each other farewell. Soon enough, Valeri returns to his life as a day labourer, the thought lingering in the back of his mind that one day he’ll see Sydney again, a thought subversive, yet tempting.
As a day labourer, Valeri sees new people every day, some days exactly the last sort of people he should come to expect. At a work site, Valeri finds in line to use the portable bathroom none other than his former nemesis, Ruslan Kuznetsov. They exchange bewildered looks. Valeri says, “what are you doing here?” Ruslan says, “they fired me.” A pause. “They got rid of me,” Ruslan says, “after they’d gotten rid of enough of you scoundrels they had no more need for people like me. But they said once things pick up they’ll take me back. That’s what happens when you don’t make yourself into an enemy of the owners. You get a second chance.” Valeri says nothing more, and avoids Ruslan the rest of the day. It’s a pathetic thing, for someone’s mind to be so enslaved to the way of things that they can do nothing but continue to place their faith in those who’ve so enslaved them. But from across the worksite Valeri catches a glimpse of Ruslan working, the look in Ruslan’s eye making clear his steadfast and earnest faith in the way of things. Even after having been deemed surplus and then cast aside like some old piece of disused machinery, Ruslan still can’t summon the strength to turn his back on a lifetime of subservience. In the aftermath of having bid his love farewell, Valeri can’t summon the emotion needed to tell his former nemesis he got what he’d deserved.
Though Valeri and Ruslan will never again cross each other’s paths, it’s a perfect absurdity that Ruslan should live out the rest of his days kept imprisoned so willingly. After night has fallen and the dogs of war are freed from their chains we look to each other for comfort amid these trying times. It’s almost time. Though our war has not yet begun in earnest, there’s hints, here and there, of what’s to come, whether the faint glimmer of hope in the eyes of young men like Valeri or the ashen look of the old men around them who’ve given up.
12. Alter Ego
A burst of gunfire rattles out into the night, erratic, light, from a distance sounding like the popping of bottles. As this revolution-is it too early to call it a revolution?-springs into being, the weakness in the way of things becomes manifest. Teetering on the edge, about to collapse at any moment, leaving little but for the frantic and confused motions of the wealthy man’s efforts to extract every last drop of blood from the working man that he can. It’s a sudden shift, jarring, yet it’s a shift so smooth, so seamless it hardly dawns on the working man there’s anything out of the ordinary going on at all. This is the work of Miguel Figueroa, but if you should ask him he would insist he’s only an agent of change. In the alley between two working class apartment blocks Miguel says, “you must find it before they do,” to an older man named Scott Grey who says nothing but nods in response. Instructions received, Scott turns away and makes into the night, arriving across at a disused warehouse halfway across the city to complete his task. “In the garage,” an unarmed man says, his body half-obscured in the shadows. He points Scott in the right direction, then withdraws back into the shadows. In the garage, Scott finds a crate of rifles, the rifles older than any of them, looking like they haven’t been handled in years. It’s not much of an arsenal, but it’s what they have. There’re others out ther
e who are far better armed, or who will become far better armed, but Miguel can only secure what he can, each of them kept isolated from the other in this early period when yet the rising has not begun in earnest. Scott looks the rifles over for only half a moment, then takes them and conceals them in the cab of his pickup truck under some blankets, crumpled-up papers, and empty beer cans. In time, these rifles will be put to use.
At the polytechnic, classes remain cancelled. Some among the faculty and student body have come to believe the polytechnic will be liquidated by government fiat, but it’s only a rumour, one of many to make the rounds in times like these. Still among the students, though, there’s hope they can return to their studies soon, and that this’ll all quiet down just as every other wave of protests has since anyone can remember. For Sean Morrison, he realizes the truth of the matter when calling his parents who still live in Manchester. They have little time to speak; Sean says, “I hope you won’t worry about me.” His mother says, “of course we worry about you. But we also trust you.” Sean says, “I’ll come up to see you as soon as I can. But it might be awhile.” He doesn’t dare tell her of the pitched street battles, concealing from his own mother his slowly but steadily deepening involvement in a cause even he can’t yet understand. After Scott’s picked up his crate of rifles, he doesn’t distribute them right away. Instead, he returns to work at a construction site, along with his co-workers Randall Reed and Ralph Hughes. “Just give me my cut of the money and I’ll be out of here,” says Randall. “There’s no money,” Scott says. “There’s not?” Ralph asks. “There never was,” Scott says. As they work, hastily assembling the next glass and steel high-rise to be put up, it becomes apparent to the enemy what’s afoot. When Randall calls a friend named Dennis Moore, it never occurs to him that his friend’s calls could be monitored not by the troopers themselves but by a member of the working class turned against his own. Information, names and dates and places soon follow a complex network of intermediaries, too complex to have been deliberately engineered, from Dennis Moore to a clerk named Clarence Lewis who works in an office next to a warehouse, from Clarence Lewis to a dockworker named Eric Roberts, the latter among them electronically filing a false report under a false name with the troopers. It’s a seemingly random sequence of events but it leads the troopers to engage in a series of raids which we’ll get to later. In the meantime, Scott, Dennis, and Randall work, Scott thinking back to that crate of old rifles he’s stowed in a safe place, looking forward to the time when they’d have the chance to put them to good use.
A dramatic turn of events has taken place, but still to come is the most dramatic turn of all. After Darren Wright disclosed, in the way that he did, the existence of the underground church, Father Bennett passed on this disclosure to the diocese. Father Bennett isn’t the first and he won’t be the last to do so. Over time, the totality of these reports will add up to something substantial, but for now it seems only to be a small piece of information amid a torrential outpour of raw fact. But at the next sermon delivered by the rogue priest in the underground church, the gathered faithful are delivered not empowerment but warning. “Do not expect the struggle to be over soon,” says the rogue priest, “for no man can promise you this. Your reward for struggle is not pleasure but pain. Our struggle shall deliver us only unto hardship. Your reward for your faith, your service, your chastity will be in Heaven, and not in Earth.” Still men like Darren Wright aren’t fully committed to the path laid out for them, though soon they will be. Though it might seem men like Valeri are accomplishing little more than eking out their survival, much more is afoot. For Valeri, each day that passes means absorbing still more knowledge, real, useful knowledge of the world around him, some instinctive part of his mind keeping a silent tally of every wrong to be righted when the opportunity arises. “Be safe,” pleads Sydney, as he’s about to leave her apartment for the union hall, as though she knows, as though she’s learned to know he’s up to something. He nods, then turns away, heading to try at nothing but survival, for now. For some people, for most people, life is made up of the public and the private, of the side of ourselves we’re compelled to present to one another and the side we keep to ourselves. A woman named Nicole Foster operates a toll booth on a highway leading into the province’s northern hinterlands. She fears for her livelihood, as there’s always news in the works that she will be replaced by automatic sensors, with no concern given to her future. With all the factories and mills either shuttering or long ago shuttered there’s little hope for women like her. Nicole knows Monica, but only in passing. Monica drives through the booth Nicole operates one day, stopping to pay the toll. But before driving away, Monica takes a small parcel from Nicole, at exactly the right moment so as to make it look like nothing at all. It’s a small moment, but one which’ll amount to much more when the dust settles.
Arduous though unemployment may be for Garrett Walker, frightening is the darkness staring at him when he looks through to the future and sees only despair. His bed is a crumpled mess, lost until the pale moonlight pierces the thick, rolling clouds at night and casts a sickly glow on the flat’s far wall. So early in this struggle and already he thinks himself losing his family and with them all he has left to lose. His wife pledges to stand by him, and she does, faithfully discharging her duties in the home even as she works to earn some small income at a restaurant. Soon, she convinces the manager to hire on her husband as a dishwasher, working a few hours a day for a pathetic wage. It’s hard for men like Garrett to swallow their pride and subject themselves to the indignities of this work, but he takes the job out of the will to provide for his family. Still, as he’s trapped in the noisy, steamy kitchen hosing off plates and glasses, he can’t help but let his mind wander to the tempting and salacious thoughts of revolution. He’s known of the working class parties, but never before this moment has he thought of himself as fit to join. There’s violence and there’s mayhem in the streets, and it’ll only take the gentlest of nudges to send men like Garrett over the edge and compel them to fully commit themselves to the war. For Simon Perez, the moment he steps out of the light and into the shadows marks the moment in his life when he finds his true calling, if only he could realize himself for what he truly is. Tonight he goes to work, crowbar in hand as he looks inside parked cars, glancing into one, then the next, then the next, at each just long enough to look in the seat for something, anything of value. There. In the front seat of a white sedan, a screen left in plain sight. He strikes the window with his crowbar, shattering glass, then reaches in and quickly takes the screen, putting it in his coat’s inside pocket before turning and making back for the alley. A day later he sells the stolen screen for his own pittance, a pittance he spends on his drug of choice. For years this drug has eaten away at the streets, killing, consuming, corroding like a potent acid. No one knows where it came from, no one on these streets knows the complicated, roundabout way each of the countless chemicals blended into each drop finds their way from some obscure corner of the world to here. To men like Simon, all that matters is the pain that goes away whenever he takes this drug into his veins, relief washing over him in a dull warmth. But the relief always fades, and the pain always comes back. Trapped, Simon is like so many others, once a working man discarded like some piece of old, disused machinery, now corrupted beyond repair by an insidious poison.
Not far from where the last man died in the night, Private Craig Thompson and the rest of the artillery brigade bed down for the night, thinking themselves suspicious, but not yet suspect. More than a few copies of banned texts circulate in the barracks, subject to occasional searches which reveal nothing. Private Thompson sometimes hears the rattling of distant gunfire in the night, something unthinkable even a few years earlier yet so common now. Over six weeks their lives seem to normalize, the drudgery of routine offering some small comfort in these trying times. They march, they muster, they travel to the range and fire off the guns in rehearsal for the war always seeming to be in the o
ffing. “No force could ever suppress the human desire for dignity,” says Private Thompson, speaking as much to himself as to the others. “You may count your place in the stockade if you keep talking like that,” says another. “You’re not wrong,” says Thompson, “but there are people in the streets and all they’re fighting for is the right to live in their own homes.” The other soldier says, “I don’t disagree with that, but you must look out for yourself. If the Colonel has you brought up on sedition charges then you’ll be no good to anyone when you’re hanged.” An exchange of gunfire rattles through the night, the working man roused from his restless sleep just long enough to listen for a time. When he’s certain the exchange is taking place at least a few kilometres away, he returns to bed, closing his eyes and falling asleep as the gunfire stops, the exchange never really ending so much as subsiding, like an outbreak of influenza. For Simon Perez, his descent into the madness of addiction and crime marks an impossible tragedy all too common in this day and age. He sits, one morning, in his cell, the first of his cellmates to wake up, and eyes the guard. He’s memorized the guards’ patrols, and once he’s sure this morning’s patrol takes the guard out of sight he reaches under his mattress and draws out his drugs, quickly and quietly shooting up, a wave of relief, warm and soothing, washes over him. Meanwhile, the real criminals, they who grow fat off their theft of wages from the working men of the world not only escape punishment but receive exaltation in the annals of power. The real criminals remain anonymous, but not for long.
For men like Stanislaw Czerkawski, the act of working to fortify the police stations may be considered an act of self-harm, but in fact it’s a demonstration of the irrepressible working class spirit. By day Stanislaw works, but by night he harbours the same subversive thoughts as his brothers and sisters of the working class, each thought sending the same surge of energy through his body like the common thrumming of a universal pulse. Still he works, on this day his crew putting into place the last piece of fencing to complete one particular fortification, with just enough time left in the day to string razor wire along the tops of the fences. Stanislaw is not like the others, just as any one person is not like the rest; Polish by birth, he remains skeptical of the burgeoning working class movement in Britain, remembering as he does the stories his grandfather would tell of life under the old Polish People’s Republic. In time, he will learn to embrace the new character which the working class movement has come to embody. This’ll be time when the tables are turned and men like Simon are empowered to dispense their own justice, handing out the harshest of penalties to those guilty of looting and plundering the wealth of the world. As matches to kindling, all will be called to account for their crimes, for their dispensation of misery and poverty on ordinary men who’ve sought only to sustain themselves. It’s not unlike us all to realize our place in the scheme of things. Men like Simon Perez, the most pathetic and reviled among us will come to be exalted into the annals of power, and in so receiving exaltation will usher in a new era of the people’s rule. Simon Perez, locked in an overcrowded, decrepit prison, may not live to see it. Many young men will rot in this prison, consigned to never realizing their full potential, and many will die here. But theirs will be a vengeance meted out by the hand of another.