Michael Bunker - WICK

One of the youths, alive with revolutionary fervor, turned to the soldier and told him to go back to wherever he’d come from, and then turned back to the group of his peers in order to revel in their laughter. It was an understandable boast, perhaps, the young man’s reply. There had been an air of lawlessness in the town since it had been overrun by the gang from the prison. However, in the un-codified law of unintended consequences, those consequences likely became inevitable in the face of anarchy, distrust, arrogance and fear.

Until this morning, the Spetznaz soldiers had seemed somehow unreal, merely props in a movie that the people had been rehearsing for all of their lives. When the young man told the soldier to get lost, he was merely feeling the vigor of youthful rebellion and was attempting to clear his throat using rebellion’s howl. Intentions and motivations aside (because who among us can completely judge those?), the facts, as they are wont to do, reasserted themselves. The gun had been pointed into the crowd and had barked its reprimand, and the offending youth from Warwick’s last generation had fallen silent before he had even entered the debate.

The shot rang out across the hamlet, and the sound of it congealed in the air as a confirmation to the various sides that the time had come to fight. And within moments, like the bursting of a dam, the town’s fury was unleashed, and the citizens of Warwick did fight.

In moments, the air was punctuated by the sounds of smallish clashes that grew into the ageless clatter of revolt. There was the sound of footsteps in the street and the sounds of anger in the peoples’ voices that always follow the first sign of battle’s confusion.

Excitement and release of pent-up frustration is always the first cause as well as the first casualty of war. In Warwick it was no different. Anger, like opportunity, came knocking at the door and, after waiting a perfunctory beat, had decided to kick the door in.

We should mention here that in most civil wars, with few exceptions (and most of those are Russian), tangible lines that can be seen and felt are established almost at the outset. The people divide themselves to the north and to the south, or perhaps it is to the east and to the west… or maybe they are bifurcated along racial, religious, or economic lines. This civil war, like most things Russian, was not as simple as that.

Mirroring the growing battle they knew not of, one that was at that very moment just beginning to rage outside the fences of Warwick village and across the whole of America, in this civil war it was much harder to tell the players without a program. Opinions, motives, hostilities, and friendships were more fluid. There was a loose and undefined picture of those who might be considered pro-Russia, and those who could, so long as details were not discussed, be considered anti-Russia. But, even within that false dialectic, there were conflicts and boiling volatility. As Malcolm X said, when you fill your house with barrels of gunpowder, and you play around with things that spark, it is very likely that your house will explode. Warwick was a house filled for generations with gunpowder, and the sparks were now beginning to fly.

Vasily had continued in his slumber as the earliest stages of the battle formed in ever-widening circles, but when it did widen, his dreams became more intense. He saw the oceans filled with lava and smelled air filled with sulfuric explosions.

His sleep, confusing the beginnings of actual sensory intake with the unreality of his dreamlike state, filled in the details of the clatter with a wild and fanciful narrative. Had it been possible to enter his dreams and shake him out of his slumber at that moment, one would have found the mind of Vasily Romanovitch searching for a shelter from a hailstorm of meteors. One would have found him climbing through the rubble of destruction, calling out into the darkness for a friend, any friend to whom he could cling.

In his dream, he happened upon a hill piled high with ashes and cinders, and he scrambled up the hill in order to get a look at the surrounding landscape. As his feet slipped through the ashes, and as he fell into pile upon pile, he came to taste the ashes in his mouth, the grit filling into the spaces between his teeth, and his calling out for help became choked and muffled. Then, in that micro-instant before he awoke, with a crashing of noise emanating from the street and resounding through his wall, he suddenly saw a brightly-plumed Phoenix rise up into the sky like a capsule lifted aloft by a great balloon, and it began to spin like a whirling dervish.

Heart racing, and in the gray middling between wakefulness and sleep, he clawed to the summit of the ash heap. He spit out the ashes and felt his eyes burn. In that particular way that the helplessness of dreams inspires, he tried to wake himself fully, to connect his dream to his body. He tried in vain to raise his arms from his side. He tried to force the sound from his lungs.

It was in that moment that his eyes popped open, and he sucked in his breath in a gasping lunge. His body shot upright and out of bed, and he suddenly became aware of the knock at the door.

Pyotr had risen at the first sounds of conflict and had begun to busy himself around the house, making coffee in the slanting early light that peered from behind and around the curtains. As he did so, he listened to the growing sounds of mayhem, and he wondered at the state of his world.

He heard people come out of their houses, and he made out the rough substance of their shouting and imagined the violence of their movements. He listened to the scuffling from between the houses near his own and sat quietly as neighbors set upon neighbors, and siblings attacked their parents, as the proverb manifested itself in Warwick that a man’s enemies were often those of his own household.

As the coffee reached its boiling point, he quietly slipped into his clothes and looked at the pictures on his mantle. He remembered the day now twenty years past when he’d said goodbye to his family as he secreted them out of the town on a truck that he’d arranged with the help of his uncle. He looked at the stove and listened to the street and wondered whether his family was still alive and whether he would ever see them again.

Pyotr Bolkonsky had always been a quiet man, rarely letting people into his thoughts, but as he sat and listened to the growing chaos from the street, he wondered aloud to the point that he blushed at the immediacy of his thought. “How can these people fall upon their neighbors in this way?” he wondered. “I would give anything for a moment to be with my loved ones.” As he thought this, he heard stirring from down the hall, and he walked over to the stove and poured two cups of coffee.

There is a contradiction in the Russian soul, Gogol and Turgenev identified it, where a man both accepts his plight dutifully as payment for his sins, and rejects all of the individual elements that make up that reality as products of chaos and evil. As Pyotr brought his coffee to his lips and poured the burning liquid down his throat, he thought of this contradiction.

As is the case in peculiarly Russian civil wars, and as has been mentioned previously, in the earliest moments of the conflict, it had been unclear where the battle lines were bound to be drawn. The war that was raging was not two dimensional, but it jutted into the third dimension, and intersecting axes of conflict could probably only be seen and understood from space… or heaven.

There were bubbles of conflict that developed in the street, only to drift until they burst, spilling their contents into the wider community. Men who had no interest in the fight suddenly found themselves engaged in fisticuffs because they had happened to be wearing red, or blue, or yellow when they left their homes that morning.