In the future, this sort of action will take place on a grander scale, but as it’s already come to be. While these workers have ended their occupation and returned to their homes, fires burn across the country and around the world. The wealthy man continues his campaign to cram the working man into steadily shrinking plots of land, in the urban landscape so many made to live in steadily fewer neighbourhoods, no new homes in these forcing the working man into ghettoes, driving the working man not by force of arms but by force of politics. An explosion, sudden, lights up the night in a burst of orange and golden flame, the imminent arrival of storm troopers met with rifle fire, scattering blood and bone across the city’s street. It lasts only a moment, but in that moment another life’s taken, another young man cut down in the prime of his life. Sirens wail, ambulances speed here and there, the local hospital is overwhelmed with casualties, with broken bones and shattered backs and gunshot wounds piercing right through shoulders and arms and necks, tiled floors and gloved hands soon drenched in blood as nurses work frantically to save lives. Amid the chaos a stale smell rises into the air, from the burnt-out storefronts and from the charred remains of upturned trucks and buses the acrid stench lingering like the memory of a still-fading nightmare in the early hours of a long afternoon. “I don’t know if I can answer that,” Sydney says. Valeri had asked her if she’d stay with him until the end. She’s been here all along; in fact, it’s she who brought Valeri to this church and introduced him personally to the pastor. Valeri’s not been a religious man much in his life, but still he clings in his heart to the hope offered in a spiritual awakening. An essential moment has been reached, if only men like Valeri could know it. Amid the exploding of bombs and the rattling of gunfire in the night, there’s hope, there’s always hope. It’s at this church, which Valeri will never attend again, that he meets Sergei, one of Sydney’s childhood friends. They shake hands firmly, and at once Valeri senses Sergei’s a man to be trusted, a good friend. Later that night, Sydney tells him how she and Sergei had grown up together, attended all the same schools, kept in touch even as adulthood separates so many good childhood friends. He’ll die, later, a tragedy hardly unique in these troubled times.
In the ranks of the striking workers there’s a young woman named Andrea Newman, and she works not because she needs to earn an income but because she needs to sell her labour to feed her family. But as she’s become lost in a hopeless depression, she can only muster the energy to force herself through each day at her thankless job waiting tables at a restaurant attached to a casino. Sometimes, she sees the columns of black smoke rising from fires halfway across the city, juxtaposed against a screen somewhere nearby broadcasting news of the latest factory’s closure, the smiling, perfectly-groomed talking heads briefly mentioning the workers to be put out of work. Sometimes, she sees the news which makes her reflect on where she’s been, on all that’s led up to this moment, to what would turn out to be a seminal moment not only in our shared history but in her own life as well. Soon, Andrea loses her livelihood-no, it’s taken from her, in the act of one wealthy man meeting with another and conspiring to rearrange imaginary lines on a sheet somewhere. It makes no sense to Andrea; she’s always taken to her work with the same careful touch and with the same diligence. Now, cast aside like some old piece of machinery deemed not worth fixing, she pauses to think on what to do next. It’s an impossible torture to be made to feel like an object, a tool manipulated by your betters for their own benefit only to be discarded when no longer needed. For Andrea, through no fault of her own she now must contemplate a near-future littered with dreams broken and fires smouldering still into the night. Not far away, Andrea leaves her home with her daughters, taking refuge in with an aunt she’s not seen in years. With no other means to provide for her daughters, she takes to selling her body on the street at night when no one will see her. At the best of times it’s dangerous work, but during these troubled times to walk the streets at night in search of cash it’s an invitation for every predator to take by force. Some nights Andrea sees no work wander her way; these nights come to be common. But worse are the nights when she’s taken by some thug who then refuses to pay her and strikes her with his fist. She learns quickly not to press them, but still she can’t avoid the men who would beat her black and blue. Pushed to life on the margins, she hides in the darkness of the night’s shadows, able to shroud herself in the shadows only a shade darker than the night. It’s in the shadows the future lies, Andrea among that class of people who count among the most pathetic and hated among us.
For Andrea Newman, though she feels a void in her brought on by years of hard living and utter loneliness still she feels the call of the rebel, that tugging on her heart we all feel whenever instinct rises against education. For Andrea, the walk home at night, one night, sees her looking not at her feet in despair but into the sky behind the apartment blocks flanking the street, at the dull, orange haze created by the fires of liberation burning in the distance. She steps gingerly along the cracked, cratered sidewalk, her body having learned to recite the movements of the walk home each night in the way that only the working man can, and she leans on memories to push her through this current crisis. Her father, her mother, ordinary workers them, each working wherever some small pittance could be meted out to them every other week. They’ve been made to lose their jobs, deprived of their livelihoods in the time it’s taken one of the wealthy man’s many apparatchiks to dash a line across a form on a screen somewhere no one’s ever heard of. But it’s the pain she feels in her heart, radiating out along her nerves to every point in her body that makes her feel alive, like every point in her body has been doused in gas and set alight. She has two young daughters as well, having fled with them only a few years earlier from a man who beat her whenever he took too much to the bottle. There are so many threads needling through our lives, and in these times of disorder and distrust we can only realize our destiny in embracing the horror. Next, we strike.
8. An Icy Heat
A crowd forms around Victory Monument, angry like all the others, chanting slogans and holding signs that accuse the wealthy man of various crimes. A crowd forms, made up of people who are afraid whenever they’re singled out but who become emboldened whenever they combine into a single mass. A crowd forms, giving us a taste of what’s to come, but only a taste, like the first drop of water falling on a thirsty man’s tongue after years of wandering the desert. As the crowd gathers, so gather the storm troopers, a handful of them standing around the edges of the crowd, strategically positioning themselves at the entrances to alleys, on steps in front of apartment blocks, at the intersections of streets feeding into the square, only waiting until the crowd has mostly assembled to move in. The storm troopers rely on experience to steady their nerves when confronted by an overwhelming number of angry people. Still the voices of working men speak in hushed tones, exchanging subversive thoughts, saying things like, “our strike may be broken but our spirit never will be,”