But if you look very closely, you can see the beginnings of dissent. True, there’s always been dissent, in one way or another. Whenever the way of things imposes its will on the working man, it necessarily empowers him by implicitly creating its own counter-will, its own anti-will, and in so creating unleashes a sequence of events that will surely bring about its own downfall. This time, though, the dissent might yet bear fruit. All the way down the street, the sound of sirens seems to chase Valeri and the woman (her name’s Maria), even as it’s just the background noise that’s come to fill the nights like a subdued soundtrack. In his apartment, Valeri says to the woman, “you’ll be safe here.” Quickly he adds, “for now.” She looks up and says, “thank you.” He gives her food and water, some rice and beans is all he can manage so close to payday, which she gratefully accepts. Once the adrenaline wears off, though, he’s confronted with the fact that there’s a strange woman in his little box of an apartment, and he hasn’t the slightest idea what to do next. But in death, there’s the promise of rebirth, the imminent war to clear the way through the future.
In his apartment sometime later in the night, Valeri offers to take the woman to the hospital or to the police, but she insists against it. Naturally his first instinct is to suspect she’s a drug addict or a prostitute beaten up by some john, but even this suspicion makes him feel guilty. He supposes she’s an attractive woman, with deep blue eyes, long blonde hair, and a gently sloping face that seems sculpted rather than grown. He suddenly realizes he’s been staring when he notices her staring right back, halfway through a mouthful of rice with a single grain sticking to the edge of her lip. “I’m sorry,” he says, before standing and starting towards his bedroom. “Wait,” she says. He turns back. “You don’t know what you’ve done for me,” she says. “No,” he replies, “I don’t,” and then turns in for the night, half-expecting her to still be there when he wakes up, but half-expecting her still to be gone with what little he has gone with her, she, on the other hand, half-worrying through the night that he might, at any time, have himself at her. In time, both he and she will come to realize the folly of their mutual distrust, even as they’ve already come to rely on one another in ways still yet they can’t begin to fathom. “Oh, well he was frightfully stuck up about it,” Hannah says, later, describing an encounter with her roommate to Whitney, “and he told me not to waste so much time on it. There are more important things to worry about, he said. In times like these we need to help ourselves.” In the hospital moments later, they receive the first of a new batch of casualties from the latest takings to the street, Hannah half-wondering in the back of her mind if her roommate might be among them. Working frantically, she can hardly spare the thought to glance at every bloodied and bruised body brought in to check and see which one could be him. As for the poor and the distraught, well, from the colours of the shirts they’re wearing she can tell they’re agitating for change, and from the broken bones and gunshot wounds she can tell they’ve not yet made much progress.
In this, the working class part of town, sometimes it seems we’re all dying a little bit each day. No, as the buses trundle along the pockmarked streets flanked by shuttered shops and burnt-out apartments, we look to the skies and we see pillars of smoke rising, not from a mob of angry workers but from the burning of a chemical plant’s tanks and the expulsion of toxic gas into the air mixing. In the darkness of the night war does not stop, breaking only for a few hours; the bodies will be left until dawn. In the morning, Valeri rises to find the woman still asleep on his little couch, clutching a pillow tight against her stomach. “What were you doing out there last night?” he asks later, after she’s woken up. “I was…” she starts, but can’t finish.
“Yes?”
“You don’t have to interrogate me, you know.”
“Seeing as you’re in my apartment I think I’ve got the right to know why.”
“You know why.”
“I suppose I do. Should I be regretting it?”
“That’s for you to decide.” It’s a futile exchange, but one which will, in its futility soon prove to make all the difference in the world for them.
One of the other residents in the building Valeri lives in, a black man around his age named Jeremy Washington, came from a background of lies, deceit, and betrayal, all help denied him by the way of things which deems him of no value. But he’s survived this long by way of the instinctive will to live which powers us all through even the darkest times of our lives. But events are afoot. Men like Jeremy Washington, though, learn to carefully navigate through their lives, dodging drug addiction, muggings, but most fearfully of all the troopers who stop them for the most frivolous reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. It’s one night, many years before Jeremy came to work at that plant with Valeri, when he was stopped by troopers outside a convenience store and beaten to within an inch of his life. The troopers take him and dump him on the side of the road a few city blocks away, an old, white lady waiting until the troopers had driven off before she helps Jeremy into her home and tends to his wounds as best she can. In the morning, she offers to take him to the local hospital, but he declines. For Jeremy Washington, the brutal beating at the hands of the troopers had a lasting effect on him. His family, his live-in girlfriend and their two young daughters, watched as he fell deeper and deeper into despair. The beating left him with a limp, making it hard for him to work. He used drugs, partly to cope with the pain, but also because they were cheap and readily available on the streets where he lived. He lost his job. He lost his family. The courts, an adjunct of the troopers who’d beat him, took them from him and made him pay for it all. When he couldn’t pay, they put him back in jail. This time, he emerged toughened by the experience, in the confusion his family scattering while he found his way into the building he now lives in. Still through the first years Jeremy Washington lived in this apartment block he kept on using drugs, eventually resorting to selling them to help make ends meet while still he can’t afford the medication he needs. Strange men came to visit him at all hours of the night, cash in hand, no questions asked, the troopers who patrolled the streets keeping an eye out but never seeming interested. All this had happened before Jeremy had even turned thirty years old. But now, for men like Jeremy, the promise of a new uprising offers him redemption and with it rebirth.
After the failed uprising fifteen years ago, the union is full of mainly ill-tempered but otherwise harmless layabouts. But like everyone else, the war fifteen years ago struck Jeremy at exactly the wrong time in his life, not when he was capable of taking part. It might seem men like Jeremy are the flotsam and jetsam of life, the degenerate criminals living on the margins. But while Jeremy Washington may well be a degenerate criminal, his whole life having come to revolve around drugs, but it’s in exactly his sort of person the future lies. The way men like Valeri will achieve their own liberation is not by the learned wisdom of the academic, nor by the charity of the sympathetic elite, but by the hopeless causes, the most pathetic and degenerate among the vast ranks of the deprived. Although Jeremy had not taken to the streets in the war fifteen years ago, men like him were rounded up and sent back to prison again, randomly selected in the wave of terror that swept across the country once the war had ended. He was taken in not because he’d committed a crime, though he’d done that; the troopers took advantage of an opportunity to purge the streets of men like him. He’s only just been released from prison when the current wave of unrest begins in earnest. He doesn’t think much of it, as the smoke rises from the fires burning in the streets, but while he falls in with his old habits he secretly hopes the troopers who beat him within an inch of his life all those years ago are out there again to be killed in the unrest. But not all is lost.