J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

“I’ll be careful,” Valeri says.

“Who’s that girl you’ve been bringing home?” Graham asks.

“A friend,” Valeri says.

“This isn’t a whore house,” Graham says, then quickly adds, “anymore.”

Valeri, without skipping a beat, says, “I’ll try to keep that in mind,” then politely closes the door and returns to his reading.

Graham was born abroad and spent his youth in the drug-addled counter-culture movement that’d seized a whole generation. Fleeing a drunken father who beat him whenever on the drink, he came to see his own salvation in the warmed-over haze of his drugs. After getting caught up in a police raid on a drug den and later arrested at some demonstration against the then-current war raging abroad he fell into a deep depression. After losing many years to his fight with the insidious illness, he moved from the States and tried to escape what he’d been through. He might’ve succeeded, if only he could’ve forgotten the things he’d seen growing up in times almost as radical as the times we live in today. Beaten, humiliated, thrown in prison for want of a relief, he scraped together the wherewithal to survive on what little money he could make. Through it all, Graham had filled his life with prostitutes and addicts and common criminals, each in his life just long enough to take what they wanted from him, leaving him bitter. But Graham won’t have long to wait until the war that’s in the offing explodes on these very streets once more.

At the shop, things are different.

“You always were the quiet one,” says a man named Ruslan Kuznetsov, one of Valeri’s fellow workers at the shop.

“It doesn’t concern you what I do,” Valeri replies. Ruslan always was one of those workers who likes to try and play manager’s favourite, tattling on the other workers over the most trivial of offences. Part of Ruslan likes to think he’s earning himself a position as a middle manager by currying favour with them, while another part of him simply revels in reporting on the other workers’ misdeeds, however trivial or harmless. But the better part of Ruslan honestly believes. When a new policy decision comes down, Ruslan not only embraces it but brings himself to honestly believe in it. He’s a complex figure, more complex than he likes to let on, and in troubled times it’s exactly this complexity that’ll ultimately doom him to the same fate as all the others. For now, though, he reduces himself to a managerial sycophant to inoculate himself against the possibility of losing his job and thus the pittance that keeps him barely alive.

Still it bothers Valeri when Graham intrudes like that; as a private person, Valeri doesn’t like questions, even questions neither intrusive nor inappropriate. “You never have any women over,” Graham said once, and it struck Valeri as a pointed question, implying an accusation of homosexuality. But when Valeri had Sydney over, once or twice, he’d thought it, then, something to be concealed should his personal life become exposed, in some small way, to people like Graham or the little old lady across the hall. “In a hurry?” Sydney had asked him once as he led her through the halls and up the stairwell, with Valeri only replying with a half-knowing wink. On this day, as Valeri mulls over his landlord’s latest interjection in the back of his mind, he can’t know but could likely divine the landlord’s role as only an apparatchik of sorts, there to carry out the absentee owner’s will in exchange for his own personal pittance. In his own way, Graham had continued to suffer all those years in silence, tortured not by the beatings or by the transient relationships that’d characterized every period of his life, but by the loneliness in being made to feel as though there was something wrong with him.

At the shop, Valeri and Ruslan are still at it.

“Why aren’t you working harder?” asks Ruslan.

“I’m working as hard as I can,” says Valeri.

“What’s wrong with you today?” asks Ruslan.

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” says Valeri, “it’s just hard for me here.”

A pause. Ruslan shifts his stance slightly. For a moment it seems he might offer sympathy to Valeri. But it’s not to be.

“What’s come over you today?” asks Ruslan.

“Today?” Valeri asks,

“I’ll tell you what’s come over me today. Just look at this place. We work ourselves tired and all we get besides this pathetic wage is heaps of abuse and intimidation. Even you! You run yourself ragged but you never make enough to do anything more than keep yourself alive.”

It’s not the first time he’s let out some pent-up anger, and it won’t be the last. Soon enough Valeri will learn to see him for the frightened man he is, though by the time this personal enlightenment occurs to Valeri it’ll be far too late for any of them to extend much empathy for one another. This particular run-in, though, is but the latest in a string of run-ins between them breeding resentment and mutual distrust.

By the time war broke out in the streets fifteen years ago, Graham was already too old and too enfeebled to take part in the way Valeri’s parents had. Consigned to the sidelines he watched as the younger generation lashed out at the wealthy man’s oppression, every now and then pausing to mutter to himself, “it’s all happening again.” As the crowds of people like Valeri’s parents seized the streets, it seemed to Graham and all the other survivors of a lost generation that, for a moment, this war might see them succeed. Managing to pull himself out of his depression, he found his way into the streets just in time to see it all come crashing down. But all Valeri or anyone else can see in him is a gruff and bitter old man. After sleeping through most of the day, Hannah rises and spots Valeri on his way out the door, thinking to call out to him but choosing against it. Instead, she turns to her own affairs in the few hours until she must return to the A&E. “You don’t understand,” she says to her mother, a thousand kilometres apart and linked only by the screen in each woman’s hand. “If anything happens I’ve got lots of friends here I can take in with. Besides, I’m too overworked at the hospital to get caught up in all the street fighting.” But her mother isn’t so easily reassured. In any case, both know there’s nowhere for her to go, the burden of her wages keeping her stuck in place; with simmering tensions and life stagnant in working class districts of major cities and small towns across the country, anyplace she could go would see her in much the same danger. After the war fifteen years ago, Hannah’s mother, like all mothers, worries on the safety of her daughter living in the city. After seeing ordinary workers cut down in the streets of Britain’s cities and towns, her mother worries Hannah might be caught up in the next war. But she doesn’t know her daughter has come of age in a time of bombs exploding and gunfire rattling in the street; to Hannah, this is simply background noise. Only too late will Hannah realize events about to occur aren’t the new normal, that all our lives will be so radically changed.

After a long and hard day, a punch at the clock releases the working man to tend to his own affairs; his family, scattered across the country with even one or two halfway around the world. In his is a way of solitude, coming home to an empty little box of an apartment sitting amid a hundred other empty little boxes, each hundred little boxes built, once upon a time, to make a way of life for millions. Among his ranks live elderly widowers left to subsist on fixed incomes, single mothers, addicts and prostitutes, yet also families, children, couples who’ve lived here all their lives and others who’ve only just arrived. As fires burn half a world away the working man clenches his fist reflexively and sleeps through the night, tossing and turning all the while, imagining in his dreams a personal vengeance against an impersonal force, a struggle against the forces of nature that’s closer to paying off than you might think. The wealthy man would have the working man believe that this is the envy of the world, that this little cube of air held three stories up off the street, filled with second-hand furniture and cigarette butts and cockroaches hiding in the cracks in the kitchen walls, when the working man comes home in the evening and flips on the lights the whole swarm of them scurrying for cover. Messages bombard the working man through the airwaves and through the data line, messages proclaiming the endless abundance in this day and age, messages declaring skyrocketing prices to be a sure sign of progress even as the working man has cut back on eating meat for the cost of it all. This, as explosions and intermittent gunfire tear holes in the silence of the not-infrequent night-time power outages that plunge London’s working-class districts into total darkness.