Whenever Darren Wright looks to the pulpit for guidance, he finds only a vague and empty devotion to tradition and ritual. The priest, after Sunday’s sermon, stays behind as always to counsel the faithful. “We should open the church as a sanctuary to those fleeing arrest,” Darren says, sitting across from Father Bennett in his small office. “We must minister to the needy,” says Father Bennett, “but we must also remember the powers that be were put in place by God. We must never endeavour to upset the law.” The conversation leaves a bitter taste in Darren’s mouth. It’s not the first time Darren has questioned the church’s teachings, but it is the first time his questions have come out. The episode doesn’t shake his faith but reaffirms it, for Darren’s spirit is governed not by tradition but by his smoldering, yet burning belief in righteousness amid a world listless and corrupt. In the meantime, conversations abound. “I can’t afford my child’s medication,” says one woman. “I haven’t bought new clothes for my children in three years,” says another. “I feed my child instead of myself sometimes,” admits a third. Each works, cleaning clothes, washing dishes, waiting tables, sorting through bottles and cans at the recycling depot, and more. But shortages are common, highly localized, sometimes confined to a single household, a single cupboard, a family left to hunger. A family left to hunger multiplied a million times over makes for shortages unlike those the world has ever seen, shortages in a land of limitless plenty, all while the screens are filled with cheerful advertisements for jewellery, luxury apartments, expensive vehicles, vacations to tropical islands, mocking the hungry with the sight of an unlimited feast. And it’s been this way for as long as anyone can remember, long before the war fifteen years ago. Too late will the purveyors of these lies realize their power to deceive is waning in the face of a steadily mounting anger.
Among the students at the polytechnic there’s a broad consensus in opposition to the police raids, but too many diverging ideas on how to proceed. “We learn much theory in the classroom,” says Sean Morrison, “but what good is theory if we choose not to put it to work?” He’s not in class but outside the polytechnic’s main hall, discussing the raids with concerned students. They stand in the thick, humid outdoors and pause only to mop the sweat from their brows. Another student, a young woman from Wales agrees, saying, “we can’t allow ourselves to become another generation who failed in aspiring to their ideals. We must be the generation that finally turns the page.” They hatch a plan, one of many, to march in the streets, with the support of faculty. Although they may be united in spirit, they are a ragged, disjointed mess, acting out not on ideas but on feelings ill-conceived. And they are one small group of many, the totality of them a huge group of people in dire need of coherent form. Already Valeri has come to see through these lies, and he looks on his screen with the kind of hard-fought and scarcely-won sense of disdain. As this current demonstration has its way with the streets, Valeri waits. Maria would offer him food, but her cupboards are bare. Her bedspread is worn, dotted with little holes along its edges, its colour faded, yet neatly and carefully laid. A stuffed bear sits on her pillow, missing an eye and patches of fur. Conspicuously absent are any needles, drugs, or empty liquor bottles. As this current demonstration dies down, its screaming and shouting slowly dulls to a distant murmur, but Valeri doesn’t leave right away. He sits with Maria, and they talk for a while, each in the middle of their own personal experience with the rest of all our lives. Not unlike the world’s impending descent into chaos and open war, each of them lies in their own misery, left dazed and confused, but not without a certain clarity allowing either to see in the other a fraternity that will soon grow into something neither could’ve ever expected.
In the streets, there’s talk. “This is serious business,” says one man, “it seems like yesterday we could expect our children to grow up in a better world than we’d grown up in.” Another man nods, and says, “but now they will grow up to have their wages stolen from them even more than we’ve had ours stolen.” A third says, “and if we steal them back then we become the criminals.” This discourse winds its way through the streets, emanating from the alleys, the pubs, and the train stations, all the places where working men gather to trade subversive thoughts. “This keeps happening to us,” Valeri says to Maria not long after they’d come across one another a third time in the street, surrounded as they are by the impending rise of the next way of life. He doesn’t tell her of his labour, and she doesn’t tell him of her past. “Strange how that happens,” she’d said that third time before walking past him and on down the street. They both see themselves as fighting a hopeless cause, but for different reasons. They both avoid the demonstrations running wild through the streets even as they both secretly long to see those very demonstrations amount to something more. Suddenly, it’s as though Valeri and Maria see each other everywhere they go, imagining in the faces of strangers the look of one another, not unlike the hallucinations of a drug-induced stupor, the quixotic and ill-advised chance encounter on the street late that night proving to have connected them in ways neither could’ve ever hoped for, neither could’ve ever imagined. In time, as she continues to work the streets of the city at night and as he continues to work the floor of the factory in the day, theirs will be a friendship sorely tested but never broken. But when the storm troopers move in, they unwittingly expend what remaining goodwill they have in an attempt at smashing apart the beginnings of something more.
When the timing’s right, we’ll all think ourselves on the right side of history, not merely the winning side but the moral side as well. When the timing’s right, it’ll all come crumbling down, and when we’re left standing in the rubble of the old way of things, it’ll still be unclear, to some, just who among us was truly in the right. Ours is a whole made from the many, a cause that capitulates only to the idea of the great international, and in so capitulating we find unity in strength. Ours is no colour, no creed, and ours is a production that seeks its own love. It’s all a fraud, though. Stuck as we are in the grips of a mindless decay, we are made to be maligned as we put one foot in front of the other and pull ourselves through the day, we are declared lazy, shiftless, lacking in ambition even as we arrive home in the evening tired, sore, dirty all over, and we are, above all, forever consigned within the way of things to the ideological margins, forever, until we learn to take it upon ourselves to fight back. Still yet we’ve not arrived at the precipice of the revolution, despite all the indignities and all the injustices visited upon the working man. Still yet all the acts of resistance blend into a rising action that escalates through our shared history and which must surely lead to something, anything at all. The first acts of resistance, centuries ago, were ill-advised, over before they began. Each successive act, though, was a little bit better planned and executed and lasted a little bit longer.
A young woman, perhaps in her mid-to-late twenties, named Isabella Bennett works as a maid in a luxury hotel not far from the city centre. Every day she changes sheets, cleans floors, and washes linens and clothes for the wealthy guests who come here from around the world. Every day she earns her own pittance, supplemented with what meagre tips the hotel’s wealthy guests give her. And every month, she sends a sum to relatives living in their home country, keeping for herself only the minimum she needs to survive. But the sum she sends has been shrinking for a while, each month the remittance a little less than the last. In the streets, she sees anger, and in the moment of weakness she gives in to her anger, pocketing a watch she finds among one of the rooms. In an age where hardship is made to be experienced alongside abundance, women like Isabella do what they must to make ends meet. Every day Isabella Bennett changes bedsheets and washes floors for wealthy guests who think nothing of spending on a night’s entertainment more than she makes in a month. She comes to work in clothes clean, skin without a blemish, and in hair perfectly bound in a ponytail reaching halfway down her back, chosen to serve the hotel’s wealthy guests because she is pleasing to the eye. One night, near the end of her shift when there are few other staff on this floor in the hotel, she finishes folding towels in the bathroom of the wealthy guest’s suite, the one she’d taken that watch from, turning to find standing in the door that very wealthy guest. “I know you took my watch,” he says. He steps towards her and shuts the door. It’s over quickly, but for Isabella it seems to last an agonizingly long time. When it’s over, she leaves the room and makes her way to fire escape’s stairwell, letting the door shut before sitting on the steps and crying softly into her hands. The night, for her, soon ends. Even as she’s been punished for her act of theft, hers has not been an act of theft but an act of return, this small piece made of the exploitation of labour and now made whole by its return. And so is visited on her punishment for her act of liberation. It’s a small act, one lost in the disorder slowly extending through the streets, but in smallness lies the essence of our times.