But with his step through this time, men like Valeri seem preoccupied with their own selves; but there are times when, in the midst of all this struggle, he sees beauty in the arms and in the heart of his former co-worker and current lover, the half-Asian woman named Sydney. “There’s a rumour going around,” she says to him over the phone, “a rumour there’s something big about to go down.” Though Valeri can only imagine what this means, he still looks out his window while half-listening to her. Having stayed away from the mass action, Valeri sees at the end of the day only the same walls that’ve towered over him for so many years. Still he’s in his little apartment, lying wide awake in bed and staring at the darkened ceiling when the arrests begin. A man named Neal Clarke works every day not in the streets but alongside them, putting up the beams and trusses that are to make up the skeletons of the next set of glass and steel towers. Neal’s not caught up in these arrests simply because he’s not at home when the troopers go from door to door. Valeri escapes by virtue of not being targeted. But Samantha’s taken. In truth, this wave of arrests are random, little more than names drawn from a pool. The point isn’t to arrest the troublemakers but to sow fear. At the range, Private Craig Thompson hears of the new trade deal. “How is it parliament signs treaties to put our own people out of work?” he asks. The troops stand at their stations, a moment of calm amid the frenetic, unending drills. “All this will do is close more factories and mills,” says another trooper. “And they’ll send our livelihoods elsewhere leaving us with nothing but more poverty,” says a third. All the men seem to have arrived at an unspoken agreement, the dark essence coursing through them like a drug through their veins. The act of voicing their agreement is a formality, not the means by which consensus is arrived at but the manner in which their consensus is expressed. Theirs is a consensus hundreds of years in the making, still lurking in the shadows but edging closer every day to moving into the light.
But for every one of Valeri’s brothers and sisters who’re disappeared in the night, there’s ten more to take their place on the front lines of the war for work. Every day Neal is acutely aware the fruits of his labour are to be sold off by foreign investors, the wealthy men of the world for profit, each tower erected a monument to the boundless greed and exploitation that’ve come to mark the current order. Every day he arrives at some work site and every evening he returns home, cash in hand, paid under the table by a foreman who doesn’t know where the money comes from. Neal’s been nursing a broken hand for a week, lucky as he thinks himself to have broken it without the foreman seeing it, allowing him to keep working through the pain. When his partner, an older man named Artem notices him wincing slightly as the two pick up a fifty-kilo bag of cement together, the two exchange a half-nervous glance, Neal’s colleague nodding slightly in a silent understanding. They work in the day after the mass arrests, a few of the workers at their site having been disappeared in the night only to be replaced by new faces. Some are old, some are young, all are hungry. “You were meant to be watching him!” says the foreman, a man named Max Kelly. He’s berating a subordinate for inattentiveness when one of the temporary workers made off with some power tools. Across the way, Stanislaw Czerkawski watches the exchange. He’s working at another police station, putting up the same fortifications as at the first. The foreman’s voice can be heard clearly despite the distance. “I’ve warned you before,” says a voice, belonging to the boss, “and I won’t warn you again. Get back to work!” This time, Stanislaw considers, for a moment, standing up to the boss, his jaw instinctively clenching and his fist tightening, only for a moment before the urge passes. The sound of gears whirring and hydraulics smoothly contracting and expanding like muscles overpowers the scene, making it hard for Stanislaw to think. But he manages all the same, years of hard labour having taught him how to practice the art of seditious thought while still working steadfastly at his task. He’ll be among the last of the working men to give in to their seditious fantasies, but when the time comes he’ll make himself counted among the righteous the same as anyone else.
Industry lies decayed, buildings sit as dark, empty concrete shells, caged in by chain-link fences with wires twisting off their poles. Ghosts of families pushed into obscurity still lurk around every corner, in every alley, behind every door. It’s not their fault. It’s never their fault. You can read, sometimes, about some mill somewhere that’s been sold off and closed up, and there’s always a momentary outcry for the working men who’ll be made destitute, perhaps even mention of the vast swathes of our province that’ll be plunged into despair. Even as he’s done what’s been asked of him, still yet it’s not enough, it’s never enough, for no matter how he works the wealthy man still demands of him the elimination of every possible redundancy, the straining of every resource to the breaking point. Men like Valeri are only beginning to see this even as they’ve known it all along, forced as they are by near-starvation to contend with affairs too petty to amount to much. “Go and live with her, then,” says an older worker named Lyle Carson, “see if I care!” He’s on his phone, and it’s not immediately clear to the others who he’s talking with. “It’s always trouble with him,” says Artem, and Neal nods his agreement. “Back to work!” says foreman Kelly. The workers snap to it. In the aftermath of the mass arrests, the day’s work must go on, the workers enslaved by the daily pittance they’re handed. Through the noise of the construction, the hammering of nails into wooden planks and the chattering of a distant jackhammer hardly obscuring the truth.
And then, the outcry will fade, bleeding into silence, the world writ large carrying on as it should without concern for all the lives destroyed and the families torn apart by the need of a few at the top to grow themselves fatter off the sweat of the rest of us. Sydney brings news. “Are you caught up in all this?” she asks. “You must already know the answer to that,” Valeri says. “You still have a job to lose,” she says, “you shouldn’t risk it by joining the gangs.” He winces at hearing her use the word ‘gangs’ to describe the rebels, be they real or imagined. But he can’t dispute her reasoning. Neal is something of an oddity in this day and age, like Valeri unmarried, childless, but unlike Valeri has not yet given up on all hope for his own personal future. At the end of the day, one day, Neal leaves his work behind and makes down the road for an old pub, its owner’s stubborn refusal to sell to the wealthy developers leaving at least one spot for working men to feel at home. He steps inside and muscles his way to the bar, the bartender handing him a pint and shooting him a look that seems to half-ask, half-tell there isn’t to be any trouble tonight. It’s only been a few weeks since the owner of the place had that window near the door fixed, and a few days since Neal paid for it in full. “I want to be there when you get what’s coming to you,” says his neighbour, Hugh Turner, “for all the good it’s going to do me.” But Neal says, “learn your place, old man,” and muscles a scowl onto his face.