It’s summertime, it’s that late-summer time when the heat’s thick and oppressive, when the heat comes in waves and when the air’s filled with a swampy musk. This summer, after so many years of stagnation, the stench of so much lavishness and opulence has become overpowering. Down the streets of yesteryear, we look on the spaces once left open, now filled with empty shells, with monuments built to a way of life that’d never been, that we’d only ever convinced ourselves had been. In the midst of a simmering crisis, we’ve all taken too long to arrive at this proto-revolutionary epoch. For one day, the working men of this city have ceased their work and have taken to the streets, the latest measure enacted by law having been aimed at enslaving them further to their wages but in fact having served only to enrage them further. “What’s in that bag and why are you hiding it here?” asks Graham Russell, the old man who manages the building Valeri lives in. It’s only been a week, maybe two since that latest wave of arrests, and the old man’s suspicion seems to overpower his good sense. “What could I possibly be hiding?” Valeri asks. “Don’t be frightened,” says Graham, “I just need to be sure.”
“Then be sure,” Valeri says, and turns away, walking down the hall and leaving the old man to his business. Though Valeri doesn’t know Neal, and Neal has never heard of Valeri, they will share their fate. You see, Neal is, like the others, emblematic of the general oppression and prostitution meted out upon the working class; with the fires of liberation burning in England and across Europe brighter with each passing day, they will soon have their vengeance.
It’s a mild delirium, a rising insanity that makes the experience seem like a dream. As it’s summertime, we see in the distance a shimmering, shimmering pool of silver hiding behind rising waves of heat. As it’s summertime, we wade through the crowds and make our way to the leading edge of history, once there finding ourselves trapped in a little cone of silence even as we’ve immersed ourselves in a sea of people, each of them there for a different reason yet all of them united behind one cause, for at least one day. “Sergei is dead,” says Sydney. “What?! When?!” Valeri asks. “Today,” she says, “not long ago. He was killed in one of the protests. He was struck in the head by one of the canisters of gas the police fire. He died on the way to the hospital.” Valeri sits in silence for a moment, Sydney, for a second or two, letting the silence hang. “Valeri? Valeri?” she asks. “I’m here,” he says. “Please don’t run out and get yourself hurt,” she says. And he says, “I don’t think that’s up to me…” But this night at the pub, Neal has one drink too many, his tongue loosening just enough. “No!” he says to Max Kelly, “I’m tired of doing what you say.”
Not much comes of it, not right away, but the next day when he shows up at his construction site there’s no work there for him, even as the foreman hasn’t enough workers there to accomplish the day’s work. Distraught, Neal goes to the union hall, the very same union hall where Valeri still calls home, asking for work, any work, to sustain himself for at least some time more. But the clerk on the other side of the desk shakes her head, already their ranks swelling with others in need of work. Some of them have children, wives, elderly parents to provide for; there’s no work for someone like Neal, a man responsible for no one but himself. Even as the talking heads on the screens proclaim a dire labour shortage, still there are thousands left idle, to rot until such time as they are deemed worthy of receiving their own pittance. Neal argues with the clerk, as many others have, but the square-jawed look on her face never wavers, having been practiced many times over the past few years. And Neal is only one man, like the thousands of others, pleading the same case, appealing to the same sense of decency, asking for the same favours from they who’ve learned not to care. “You must be mad, coming here like this,” says Max. “You’re damn right I’m mad,” says Neal. “You stand there and accuse me, but where were you at the time?” Max asks. “I was--”
“You were still in primary school when I was almost killed in the street,” Max says. “I’m not--”
“You’re not what?” Max asks. There’s more, but they can’t have at it all day. Punches are thrown, dust’s kicked up, some scrapes and bruises but nothing worse. At the end of the day, Max gets to keep his job, while Neal’s tossed out with all the other surplus workers. His spot’s filled instantly. He winds up in a church, receiving his rations from the overworked clergy, with no knowledge of when next he’ll be able to have at a pittance to sustain him. Thin soup is his meal, and he forces down this watery soup from a spot at the end of a long table which permits him a look through a window and out across the city. The distant glass-and-steel towers going up on the edge of the working class districts taunt him, their opulence and their garishness contrasting against the sight of him wearing still the boots and vest he had worn when working every day to put those very towers up.
After events have unfolded, the working men of the world return to work as if nothing had happened, as if their lives were to be carried on regardless. We all have rent to pay, and we pay our rent not by agitating in the streets but by selling our labour for less than what it’s worth; our loss is their profit. We go home in the evening with sore backs and dirty hands, returning to our ramshackle apartments filled with second-hand clothes and torn, ragged furniture, with the smell of cigarette smoke hanging in the air even in the rooms of those who haven’t ever smoked a day in their lives. Our enemies, soon to be known by another name, have left us only unemployment and addiction, and in turn they declare us lazy and shiftless, lacking in the virtues of hard work and ingenuity they themselves lack; these stampeding marches, these impassioned riots are but a symptom of the disease that has come to infect the way of things. The revolution has not yet begun, yet still it has begun gathering strength, conserving its power even as opposing forces themselves begin to muster, these opposing forces having not yet coalesced into something real, something capable of striking back except in ways brutish and instinctive. We all pay the price, together, for our foolishness, for our impetuousness, and in so paying we earn our place in the future we’ve yet to build. As a calm settles on these streets, I invite you to hear the screams and the shouts that only hours earlier had filled them, hiding as they are amid the silence. It might take a little imagination, but I can hear it, and if I can hear it then so, too, can you. If you can’t, then I pray for you to be visited upon by the wisdom to see what’s coming. But it’s not here yet. No, wisdom isn’t necessary, and it’ll never be. Just watch. All that’s necessary is for each of us to play our part in the coming days of rage.
In the morning, news breaks of the signing of a new treaty among a group of countries, including this one. It’s left unsaid but widely understood this’ll put many more men out of work, left to fend for themselves. The wealthy men of this country can foresee the impending revolt and are seeking to evacuate their holdings beyond the reach of the working class alliance, this turn of events met still with a muted ambivalence from the country’s workers. Too long betrayed, the whole lot of them are in a state of mind where outrage and ambivalence can occupy the same time and space in their collective consciousness. There’s a sporadic outbreak of protests, of disenchanted youths tossing rocks at troopers mustered. But for Valeri, it’s different. For Valeri, it’s personal. In Valeri’s dreams, memories of his mother and father nourish his own personal flame, soon to blend with the fires of liberation already smoldering around the world. If the wealthy men of this country expect a revolt, then Valeri will count among those who oblige them.