J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

It matters little, I suppose, that half of us all can’t afford the essentials of life, that half of us all wear clothes three or four wearers from the factory and with little rips and holes in the seams strategically hidden so as not to give away the our shame. It’s all an elaborate fraud, and it’s always been an elaborate fraud, a fraud perpetuated against the self, eagerly so. But not much longer. When the working man works his way through another day, he stamps across the same, familiar ground, the soles of his boots brought down into the same holes made from the same stamps of boots a thousand and one times before, this time, though, his boots falling a hair’s width aside, in some small act of defiance the working man staking out a spot in his own mind for they who would seek a better way of life to claim. After Hannah arrives to work her next shift at the hospital, there happens the one thing she would’ve never expected: an empty bed in the A&E. It’s empty only for a brief time, perhaps a half-hour or two, then filled with another poor young man dying a quick but painful death. Still, Hannah wonders if this is to be an isolated case, or a regular occurrence, as she takes up her station and looks over the master chart on the wall of all patients, a storm of red and blue streaks and smudges loosely arranged into words on a whiteboard. “Another long night?” asks another nurse, a younger woman named Whitney. “It’s not long if you do it every day,” says Hannah, eying the coffee machine in the corner. Short-staffed and overworked, this is the life they chose, even as young men wearing suits and ties speed along the streets in sports cars outside. In the night, they’ll lose a patient, a young man who’s been dying for some weeks now. He’ll die not of an incurable disease or some traumatic injury but for want of a medicine kept in short supply by the company that holds the rights to it. This, as the hospital’s power fails intermittently, plunging the A&E into darkness for only a moment before diesel generators kick in. But nobody flinches, neither at the death nor the darkness, carrying on.

“Nothing is certain,” said the man standing in front of Victory Monument that day, “even as it is inevitable!” Still Valeri doesn’t quite know what that means, even as he swears to himself that he does. “Don’t love me,” Sydney had said once, in a way that’d seemed, then, to be less melodramatic than it seems, now, as Valeri recalls the look in her eye as she’d said it. As he falls asleep this night with the little red book falling gently onto his chest, the last thing he recalls is the image of his mother and father, standing over him as he kneels at their grave, looking down on him, his father turning and saying to his mother, “it’s almost his time.” Astride a wave of enthusiasm and atop a mountain of riches and power built up beneath him over hundreds of years, the wealthy man looks across the urban sprawl and sees nothing but opportunity laid before him, opportunity reaching for the horizon and beyond. The wealthy man wears his suit and tie which cost more than the working man earns in a year’s wages. The wealthy man cruises the public streets in his armoured cars with blackened windows and with a paid driver who sympathizes not with his master but with the men who live outside his master’s safe and sequestered in a little bubble. Astride a wave of enthusiasm the wealthy man can hardly contain his exuberance, leaping whenever a string of numbers scroll across his screen, the odd red mark drowning in a sea of green. In truth, every green mark signifies the loss of a hundred livelihoods and the thinning out of a hundred more. It’s been this way for a long time, for as long as anyone can remember. But it needn’t be this way much longer. As I lead you through the beginning of the end, we take stock of all sins, so that we may settle accounts when the time is right, not with pounds but with blood. This is a messy business, ugly and vulgar, as it’s always been and should always be. In the night, we seek solace in the certainty that the dawn shall always come.

But then, sometime in the future, there should inevitably come the morning which sees no dawn, where the darkness lingers into the day as if we’ll all be living in a permanent night. In the A&E this night it’s another wave of admissions from the streets, Hannah keeping up but only barely, fourteen hours of tending to overdoses, failed suicides, and breakdowns leaving her with pain behind her eyes and strain in her muscles, worst of all a lump in her stomach. Arriving home to find Valeri already asleep, she walks into their shared bedroom and without taking off her scrubs she collapses into bed, asleep herself before hitting the sheets. “Well, what came of it?” Whitney had asked, two-thirds through their shift. She’d been speaking of the invite Valeri had given her to come to the hall, a thread they’d talked about between drawing blood from one man and injecting a sedative into another. “I have no time to get involved with the rabble,” she’d said. At that moment, for only a moment, the hospital’s power cut out, the lights falling dark and alarms sounding for a brief period before generators kick in. “Well, thank God somebody does,” said Whitney. When Hannah wakes up in the evening, she has the apartment to herself, and at once thinks of her own promise, not to her distant mother but to herself, the promise not to lose herself in the romantic radicalism of youth. Now in her thirties, she feels much older than she is, the temptation towards romance seeming to grow with each year that passes, through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia for youth the radicalism seeming much more romantic than she knows it to be.

In the night, the city comes alive, brimming with a restless energy that seems to emanate from every open window and from every darkened alley. The working class apartment blocks sit spaced close enough for residents to link hands and form a human chain dangling from building to building like power lines. Loose debris litters the sidewalk, swept aside by the overworked crews that run through this place perhaps once a week, at best. Cigarette butts are found scattered everywhere but the ashtrays left out by the city for the working man’s use. Used syringes line the gutters. Blood splotches hide in the trash. This, we would be led to believe, this is the envy of the rest of the world, this is the ideal all aspire to. Left to fester, the looming spectre of so much pent up despair, frustration, resentment can but slowly take shape, its form rising from the formless. We are locked in with our own sort of people, confined into a steadily shrinking space until our space can be shrunk no more; then, still it will be made to shrink. Still in the night you can see the spaces where working people used to work; the ghostly outlines of their figures reaching into the sky, astride a boxed-in feeling more powerful than the highest of drug-induced highs. It’s foolish to wonder what might’ve been, but never is it so foolish to imagine what might yet be. In this spirit, the working man sometimes spares a thought for all that he would’ve been working for all his life had but the force of law not subordinated him to his master. His would’ve counted history’s greatest achievements, the weight of the greatest victories, the tallest towers, the longest spans and the widest roads all made by the hands of the working man. But it’s the littlest achievements, too, the modest house built in the countryside, the carefully-sculpted garden tended in the narrow space on an apartment’s balcony, the small potholes filed in on the highway that make up the working man’s proudest achievements, those mundane acts that make day-to-day life possible.

But not all hope is lost in these quarters, a vitality sharing the same time and space as despair. No matter how much is taken from him, the working man will always have his soul, the essence of his self, that lingering sense of identity lying at the core of his being. But all this is lost in the hurried, frenetic, disjointed day-to-day struggle for sustenance. The working man feels the soreness in his muscles and the tightness in his back, but he’s lucky just to feel, so many of his own dying in the night. Down the hall, a retired lady lives out the last of her days, emerging to let in the nurse who comes to bathe her once a week. Down another hall there’s an apartment where, not all that long ago, an elderly man died in his sleep, only to be left for days, discovered when the stench of rotting flesh became too rancid and overpowering to be ignored any longer.