As a day labourer, Valeri sees new people every day, some days exactly the last sort of people he should come to expect. At a work site, Valeri finds in line to use the portable bathroom none other than his former nemesis, Ruslan Kuznetsov. They exchange bewildered looks. Valeri says, “what are you doing here?” Ruslan says, “they fired me.” A pause. “They got rid of me,” Ruslan says, “after they’d gotten rid of enough of you scoundrels they had no more need for people like me. But they said once things pick up they’ll take me back. That’s what happens when you don’t make yourself into an enemy of the owners. You get a second chance.” Valeri says nothing more, and avoids Ruslan the rest of the day. It’s a pathetic thing, for someone’s mind to be so enslaved to the way of things that they can do nothing but continue to place their faith in those who’ve so enslaved them. But from across the worksite Valeri catches a glimpse of Ruslan working, the look in Ruslan’s eye making clear his steadfast and earnest faith in the way of things. Even after having been deemed surplus and then cast aside like some old piece of disused machinery, Ruslan still can’t summon the strength to turn his back on a lifetime of subservience. In the aftermath of having bid his love farewell, Valeri can’t summon the emotion needed to tell his former nemesis he got what he’d deserved.
Though Valeri and Ruslan will never again cross each other’s paths, it’s a perfect absurdity that Ruslan should live out the rest of his days kept imprisoned so willingly. After night has fallen and the dogs of war are freed from their chains we look to each other for comfort amid these trying times. It’s almost time. Though our war has not yet begun in earnest, there’s hints, here and there, of what’s to come, whether the faint glimmer of hope in the eyes of young men like Valeri or the ashen look of the old men around them who’ve given up.
12. Alter Ego
A burst of gunfire rattles out into the night, erratic, light, from a distance sounding like the popping of bottles. As this revolution-is it too early to call it a revolution?-springs into being, the weakness in the way of things becomes manifest. Teetering on the edge, about to collapse at any moment, leaving little but for the frantic and confused motions of the wealthy man’s efforts to extract every last drop of blood from the working man that he can. It’s a sudden shift, jarring, yet it’s a shift so smooth, so seamless it hardly dawns on the working man there’s anything out of the ordinary going on at all. This is the work of Miguel Figueroa, but if you should ask him he would insist he’s only an agent of change. In the alley between two working class apartment blocks Miguel says, “you must find it before they do,” to an older man named Scott Grey who says nothing but nods in response. Instructions received, Scott turns away and makes into the night, arriving across at a disused warehouse halfway across the city to complete his task. “In the garage,” an unarmed man says, his body half-obscured in the shadows. He points Scott in the right direction, then withdraws back into the shadows. In the garage, Scott finds a crate of rifles, the rifles older than any of them, looking like they haven’t been handled in years. It’s not much of an arsenal, but it’s what they have. There’re others out there who are far better armed, or who will become far better armed, but Miguel can only secure what he can, each of them kept isolated from the other in this early period when yet the rising has not begun in earnest. Scott looks the rifles over for only half a moment, then takes them and conceals them in the cab of his pickup truck under some blankets, crumpled-up papers, and empty beer cans. In time, these rifles will be put to use.
At the polytechnic, classes remain cancelled. Some among the faculty and student body have come to believe the polytechnic will be liquidated by government fiat, but it’s only a rumour, one of many to make the rounds in times like these. Still among the students, though, there’s hope they can return to their studies soon, and that this’ll all quiet down just as every other wave of protests has since anyone can remember. For Sean Morrison, he realizes the truth of the matter when calling his parents who still live in Manchester. They have little time to speak; Sean says, “I hope you won’t worry about me.” His mother says, “of course we worry about you. But we also trust you.” Sean says, “I’ll come up to see you as soon as I can. But it might be awhile.” He doesn’t dare tell her of the pitched street battles, concealing from his own mother his slowly but steadily deepening involvement in a cause even he can’t yet understand. After Scott’s picked up his crate of rifles, he doesn’t distribute them right away. Instead, he returns to work at a construction site, along with his co-workers Randall Reed and Ralph Hughes. “Just give me my cut of the money and I’ll be out of here,” says Randall. “There’s no money,” Scott says. “There’s not?” Ralph asks. “There never was,” Scott says. As they work, hastily assembling the next glass and steel high-rise to be put up, it becomes apparent to the enemy what’s afoot. When Randall calls a friend named Dennis Moore, it never occurs to him that his friend’s calls could be monitored not by the troopers themselves but by a member of the working class turned against his own. Information, names and dates and places soon follow a complex network of intermediaries, too complex to have been deliberately engineered, from Dennis Moore to a clerk named Clarence Lewis who works in an office next to a warehouse, from Clarence Lewis to a dockworker named Eric Roberts, the latter among them electronically filing a false report under a false name with the troopers. It’s a seemingly random sequence of events but it leads the troopers to engage in a series of raids which we’ll get to later. In the meantime, Scott, Dennis, and Randall work, Scott thinking back to that crate of old rifles he’s stowed in a safe place, looking forward to the time when they’d have the chance to put them to good use.
A dramatic turn of events has taken place, but still to come is the most dramatic turn of all. After Darren Wright disclosed, in the way that he did, the existence of the underground church, Father Bennett passed on this disclosure to the diocese. Father Bennett isn’t the first and he won’t be the last to do so. Over time, the totality of these reports will add up to something substantial, but for now it seems only to be a small piece of information amid a torrential outpour of raw fact. But at the next sermon delivered by the rogue priest in the underground church, the gathered faithful are delivered not empowerment but warning. “Do not expect the struggle to be over soon,” says the rogue priest, “for no man can promise you this. Your reward for struggle is not pleasure but pain. Our struggle shall deliver us only unto hardship. Your reward for your faith, your service, your chastity will be in Heaven, and not in Earth.” Still men like Darren Wright aren’t fully committed to the path laid out for them, though soon they will be. Though it might seem men like Valeri are accomplishing little more than eking out their survival, much more is afoot. For Valeri, each day that passes means absorbing still more knowledge, real, useful knowledge of the world around him, some instinctive part of his mind keeping a silent tally of every wrong to be righted when the opportunity arises. “Be safe,” pleads Sydney, as he’s about to leave her apartment for the union hall, as though she knows, as though she’s learned to know he’s up to something. He nods, then turns away, heading to try at nothing but survival, for now. For some people, for most people, life is made up of the public and the private, of the side of ourselves we’re compelled to present to one another and the side we keep to ourselves. A woman named Nicole Foster operates a toll booth on a highway leading into the province’s northern hinterlands. She fears for her livelihood, as there’s always news in the works that she will be replaced by automatic sensors, with no concern given to her future. With all the factories and mills either shuttering or long ago shuttered there’s little hope for women like her. Nicole knows Monica, but only in passing. Monica drives through the booth Nicole operates one day, stopping to pay the toll. But before driving away, Monica takes a small parcel from Nicole, at exactly the right moment so as to make it look like nothing at all. It’s a small moment, but one which’ll amount to much more when the dust settles.