J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

But on the streets at night there’s an odd peace. Amid the gradual disintegration of the current order, things seem to have a permanence that grows stronger and stouter with each passing day. As one factory shuts down, another opens somewhere else in the world; it’s a pattern that repeats itself a hundred times over with the passing of each and every year. After closing his shift at the plant in the industrial district, Valeri leaves as he always does, walking the same street, he comes across a young woman he’s never seen before, no one’s ever seen before. She’s sitting in the dark, her whole body seeming to crumple in on itself, her hair a mess, her face bruised, blood trailing from cuts on her cheek. He stops, just close enough for her to see him, and after a moment or two she says, “please.” Valeri wants to keep walking, but his instincts overpower his good sense, and he approaches her and offers a hand. Outside, the troopers circle round the block, prowling the city’s streets at night, looking for trouble. There’s the usual riffraff milling about, the odd homeless person sifting through a dumpster, bored youths sitting on the steps of apartments while smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap beer. In the distance, the sound of sporadic gunfire pops like a firecracker, while sirens wail high and low. Already the fighting has started; still the order prevails against the random, disjointed outbursts directed against it, in the middle of the night Valeri suddenly emboldened to take his own personal crusade and make it into something vastly more than what it is. Risking a beating and arrest at the hands of the police, Valeri seizes on the boldness inside him and shelters the woman for the night, the working class slums all around them burning tonight brighter still than ever before. Under the cover not of darkness but of the fire’s light, they leave.

At night, tonight, Hannah tires quickly, but keeps a smile on for the overdoses and the gunshot victims, through the night keeping on her feet thanks not to caffeine but to a well-practiced gumption. As she works, the pipe she’d fixed holds but some of the water leaked pools and drops onto an electrical circuit, shorting the circuit and cutting power to the whole building. She’ll come home that night, tired, and she’ll fall into bed without thinking much of the darkness, across the city trouble brewing in the streets. At night, tonight, the homeless, the prostitutes, the usual flotsam and jetsam of the city take up their usual spots around Victory Monument deep in the working man’s territory. At night, tonight, there’s no crowd of demonstrators, and the only troopers are a pair of junior officers who come around every once in a while to walk the beat. At night, tonight, when no one’s looking and when the passions of the restless have taken respite to lick their wounds, it’s almost time for Valeri to live up to his promise. At war almost continuously since the failed uprising fifteen years ago, the streets in the working class neighbourhoods are dangerous at night, in the darkness lurking the impending dawn.

In the industrial district where the trains often come through so late at night, the three or four or five men have made good their meeting and have gone their separate ways, leaving only a few bootprints and discarded cigarette butts as evidence of their meeting. In the morning as the working man rises to have at the day, the latest acts of dissent lay themselves bare for all the world to see, if only anyone should look. Things are as oppressive and ascetic as they are not because of some new law which declares who may and may not speak but because of the constant threat of deprivation, a threat which insulates us all from each other. In the meantime, Valeri’s fate lies not in the past but in his own personal future, and it’s a chance encounter with the troopers in the streets that’ll soon send him on a journey careening headlong into a collision with the rest of the history binding us all to the same fate. Valeri to pick up the tools of his trade and use them to fight back. He thinks of Sydney, and after leaving for the night he calls her. He speaks in an almost-hushed tone, holding the phone close. “Come to the hall,” he says, and she reluctantly agrees. In these times of radicalism and imminent war, the lives of ordinary workers like Valeri become lost in an ever-escalating storm of death.

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.