If the young man’s sleep was a dream, the town of Warwick found itself waking at that very moment to a yawning, terrible nightmare. After Vasily had slept for only a couple of hours, the sun rose over the hidden valley, and with it, the world opened wide underneath him.
With the dawn, the sleeping animosities that had been whispered in the darkness of the previous night burst out in full-throated alarm into the full light of day, and the townspeople of Warwick began to gather in groups of like minds, wherein they convinced themselves to take up arms and begin a struggle. The spark struck, the long line of woven animosities had ignited, and the resulting conflagration had begun.
Civil war in this wick began as it does in all such conflicts, with physical violence initiated almost as an afterthought. Men, enraged that their rights had been taken, and women, inflamed that their futures were dimmed, lashed out in the only way they knew how. During the night there had been only rumors of war, but, illustrative of the age-old proverb, people had gone to bed with their anger only to find it more wicked and volatile in the light of the morning.
The sudden blinding clarity of long-held ideologies came into sharp (if deluded) focus as the people shook the cobwebs from their heads and wiped the sleep from their groggy eyes, and as they filed into the streets, their usual morning greetings simply retreated behind threats and assaults, as if the nighttime had spread a virus of war, and as if subtle and as yet undefined hatreds had become the currency of the realm.
While no one could have answered, if they had been pressed to do so exactly what those ideologies and threats and hatreds fully entailed, there was a palpable animosity that swept through the population of Warwick, driven by instinct and history and hate. It suddenly seemed as if lives too dangerous to be free had become too unbearable to live any longer. It was as if a political storm had arrived on the heels of the two very real storms the people had just experienced, and the townspeople had no recourse to shelter.
There was the matter of the overthrow of power. There was the reality of the remembrance of promises not kept. Something simply had to be done. It was conviction. It was destiny. No one could go on living this way, the town was heard to say in a collective and contradictory outburst. “To arms!” the townspeople shouted. And they grabbed their pitchforks and burning torches and rifles and hammers and knives, and marched into the street to vent their spleen on the “others.”
The first shot in the battle for Warwick roared forth from the barrel of a Spetznaz rifle on a group of young men near the church. It was not some kind of planned thing. A soldier had ordered the young men to disperse while they were standing around and developing their arguments, and they had simply refused, thinking that his order had been a request.
One of the youths, alive with revolutionary fervor, turned to the soldier and told him to go back to wherever he’d come from, and then turned back to the group of his peers in order to revel in their laughter. It was an understandable boast, perhaps, the young man’s reply. There had been an air of lawlessness in the town since it had been overrun by the gang from the prison. However, in the un-codified law of unintended consequences, those consequences likely became inevitable in the face of anarchy, distrust, arrogance and fear.
Until this morning, the Spetznaz soldiers had seemed somehow unreal, merely props in a movie that the people had been rehearsing for all of their lives. When the young man told the soldier to get lost, he was merely feeling the vigor of youthful rebellion and was attempting to clear his throat using rebellion’s howl. Intentions and motivations aside (because who among us can completely judge those?), the facts, as they are wont to do, reasserted themselves. The gun had been pointed into the crowd and had barked its reprimand, and the offending youth from Warwick’s last generation had fallen silent before he had even entered the debate.
The shot rang out across the hamlet, and the sound of it congealed in the air as a confirmation to the various sides that the time had come to fight. And within moments, like the bursting of a dam, the town’s fury was unleashed, and the citizens of Warwick did fight.
In moments, the air was punctuated by the sounds of smallish clashes that grew into the ageless clatter of revolt. There was the sound of footsteps in the street and the sounds of anger in the peoples’ voices that always follow the first sign of battle’s confusion.
Excitement and release of pent-up frustration is always the first cause as well as the first casualty of war. In Warwick it was no different. Anger, like opportunity, came knocking at the door and, after waiting a perfunctory beat, had decided to kick the door in.
We should mention here that in most civil wars, with few exceptions (and most of those are Russian), tangible lines that can be seen and felt are established almost at the outset. The people divide themselves to the north and to the south, or perhaps it is to the east and to the west… or maybe they are bifurcated along racial, religious, or economic lines. This civil war, like most things Russian, was not as simple as that.
Mirroring the growing battle they knew not of, one that was at that very moment just beginning to rage outside the fences of Warwick village and across the whole of America, in this civil war it was much harder to tell the players without a program. Opinions, motives, hostilities, and friendships were more fluid. There was a loose and undefined picture of those who might be considered pro-Russia, and those who could, so long as details were not discussed, be considered anti-Russia. But, even within that false dialectic, there were conflicts and boiling volatility. As Malcolm X said, when you fill your house with barrels of gunpowder, and you play around with things that spark, it is very likely that your house will explode. Warwick was a house filled for generations with gunpowder, and the sparks were now beginning to fly.
Vasily had continued in his slumber as the earliest stages of the battle formed in ever-widening circles, but when it did widen, his dreams became more intense. He saw the oceans filled with lava and smelled air filled with sulfuric explosions.
His sleep, confusing the beginnings of actual sensory intake with the unreality of his dreamlike state, filled in the details of the clatter with a wild and fanciful narrative. Had it been possible to enter his dreams and shake him out of his slumber at that moment, one would have found the mind of Vasily Romanovitch searching for a shelter from a hailstorm of meteors. One would have found him climbing through the rubble of destruction, calling out into the darkness for a friend, any friend to whom he could cling.
In his dream, he happened upon a hill piled high with ashes and cinders, and he scrambled up the hill in order to get a look at the surrounding landscape. As his feet slipped through the ashes, and as he fell into pile upon pile, he came to taste the ashes in his mouth, the grit filling into the spaces between his teeth, and his calling out for help became choked and muffled. Then, in that micro-instant before he awoke, with a crashing of noise emanating from the street and resounding through his wall, he suddenly saw a brightly-plumed Phoenix rise up into the sky like a capsule lifted aloft by a great balloon, and it began to spin like a whirling dervish.
Heart racing, and in the gray middling between wakefulness and sleep, he clawed to the summit of the ash heap. He spit out the ashes and felt his eyes burn. In that particular way that the helplessness of dreams inspires, he tried to wake himself fully, to connect his dream to his body. He tried in vain to raise his arms from his side. He tried to force the sound from his lungs.