In the mornings we would run outside to the damp grass, barefoot, lie down close to each other to stay warm, and stare at the tall green cliffs overlooking the sea. There were always flocks of birds that flew away when the sun rose above the rock line. There was always a soft breeze, just strong enough, and the silence was perfect. We’d never imagined that sort of silence was possible, and just as our faces got hot and the sun became blinding, we would shut our eyes and nod off, sometimes falling deeply asleep, and the ones who stayed awake would just lie there quietly so as not to disturb the others. No one skipped those mornings, no one stayed asleep in their room. They were moments of happiness, with no worries, when we really believed that something big was evolving between us, and that if everything stayed just the way it was now, we would ask for nothing more. Of course there was one thought in our minds, and we talked about it sometimes: should we abandon the strike before we got caught? Maybe if we stayed in the village, the business with the gallery fire would blow over. Someone else could organize the strike—we didn’t control all the groups anyway. We’d given the world an idea, and now it belonged to everyone—copyright was so twentieth-century, wasn’t it? In other words, why couldn’t we just stay here?
We lived in a tiny village in County Clare, western Ireland, which wasn’t even on most of the maps. To reach it you had to drive off the road and go two miles across boggy, gray land that could swallow up a car’s wheels on a rainy day. They said there used to be a dirt path and a sign marking the turn-off to the village, with a picture of a boy and girl holding hands, but the sign fell off in a storm, or someone removed it; members of the local church claimed the girl’s hand was caressing the boy’s waist.
The entire village consisted of a row of six tiled-roof bungalows, two of which had attics, and in between them were lawns, ash trees, a small barn with a burnt rooftop, and a foul-smelling fenced-off plot of land that had once been a pig pen. Most of the villagers had left. They didn’t sell their houses, they just disappeared. They’d lived off pig-farming, tourism and souvenir sales, and a four-table restaurant in the barn that served bangers and mash and beer at lunch. The few remaining families made a bit of money selling scrap metal. They drove an old tow truck and collected used car and tractor parts, rubbish skips, wheelbarrows, fixtures from abandoned houses, and work tools from long-shut factories. Once a month they’d sell everything to a company in Dublin that crushed metal from all over Ireland into little cubes, melted them down at about 2,000 degrees, cooled them in molds, added various materials, and sold the mixture to the Chinese. No one knew if the Dublin company really needed scrap metal from County Clare or if the whole thing was a public-relations stunt. Two years earlier, the company had lost millions and was sued by shareholders and pension funds, and the police started investigating the transfer of £50 million to tax havens. As part of their pledge to “make amends,” the company decided to employ “ordinary people from disadvantaged communities.” A senior manager explained their change of heart in an interview: “We realized that community contribution is not just a cliché but a genuine mission. We are all part of something larger, aren’t we? And we now ask ourselves how a business can help hard-working Irish people make a living.” The arrangement worked well at first, but the company lost interest, and anyway there wasn’t much scrap metal left, or people, and eventually only two families remained in the village. One lived off a small inheritance; the other trudged on with the tow truck, making enough to feed a couple, two kids, and a dog.
The days passed idly. We lived in two adjacent houses, one of which had a rickety, flea-infested attic that reeked of petrol, so no one wanted to sleep there. But the other was spacious and neat with a proper attic. Between the two houses we had five liveable rooms altogether, which meant we could sleep comfortably: three rooms with two in each and two rooms with three. Most of the time, we didn’t do much at all. We helped arrange the scrap metal a bit, mowed the lawn and pulled weeds, watered beds of dead flowers, and played football in the pig pen. At nights we drank beer and cheap vodka in the barn. Samuel played guitar, Maxwell drummed on an old bathtub, sometimes Conal played too, and Elizabeth sang a million renditions of “Something Is Not Right with Me.” We talked about Cannabis Jazz’s adventures and thought up ideas for how to bring him back to life.
We weren’t allowed to get too far away from the village. We could walk around the area, mostly at night and without torches. It was so dark that people occasionally bumped into trees. One night we heard Justine screaming horribly, and when we found her she was slumped against a tree trunk, half passed out. We carried her back to the village and only in daylight discovered that her whole face was bloody. It was lucky Conal had done a first-aid course.
Where did we get food? Toilet paper? Soap? How did we pay the two village families to keep our secret? Well, the papers don’t always lie. Julian did inherit £50,000 from his dad. He didn’t tell anyone about it—not even Justine, and he’d known her for more than eight years. When we lived at the butcher shop we thought we were getting food in return for our work. Fifteen people doing a job that had been done by one guy, with his teenaged daughter helping out on busy days? It wasn’t our style to ask inconvenient questions when things were going well. But after a week in the village it was a little difficult to believe that these people were hosting twelve refugees from London just so we’d keep their lawns neatly mowed. Obviously Julian realized that if we heard about the inheritance we’d start to lose faith and wonder if he was really one of us, because even if he was donating all his money to the cause, that wouldn’t change the fact that he had enough to do something better with his life, and no one would understand why he’d worked in the kitchen of a Lebanese restaurant or lived with four seamstresses in a moldy room. He knew that. He knew we hated posers, and even more than posers we hated anthropologists who only lived with us so they could get to know the commoners’ way of life and then write about it, and most of all we hated commiserators who hung around with us so they could nod sympathetically with their pale faces and ask us depressing questions. We ran into those people sometimes, and when they stopped being amusing we sent them packing with a good kick in their commiserating faces.
After the inheritance was discovered, people walked around with blank faces and hissed something sarcastic every time Julian was around: “Oh look, the tycoon has come down to rub elbows with the commoners,” that sort of thing. In the end he called a meeting and asked us flat out if we had anything to say to him. In honor of the occasion he’d put on a button-down shirt and combed his long hair, and the way he stood tall and gave us a penetrating look was obviously meant to impress upon us how pivotal he considered the meeting—he was definitely one for dramatic gestures, Julian. White Tyson and Elizabeth, who loathed him, were the only ones who spoke: Julian had lied to us, and he’d lie again. And anyway, look at how decisions are made around here: Julian and Clementine decide everything; Justine, Alberto, and Christopher just nod their heads; and everyone else is supposed to carry out orders, like with the fire at the gallery, which some of the people sitting here today are responsible for, at least as far as the police are concerned, even though no one asked their opinion. When we were at the butcher shop we had votes and discussions, but lately there’s been nothing.
Julian explained that they were still formulating the final proposals for action, and when they were ready, we would discuss them. “Oscar Wilde said that the trouble with socialism is that it wastes too much time on meetings,” Alberto offered, probably to ease the tension. “So we’re socialists?” someone asked. “Aren’t we?” Maxwell answered. “I’m definitely not,” Elizabeth said, “I can’t stand those stuck-up Jewish whiners.” “I am,” Justine said. “So’s Samuel,” David added. “No he isn’t, Samuel’s an anarchist,” Maxwell corrected him. “Are you just saying that because he’s black?” Elizabeth asked. “No, Clementine’s black too, and she’s not an anarchist,” said Maxwell. “I’m not anything,” Samuel proclaimed. “Maxwell is slightly Jewish but not a socialist and not a whiner,” said David, putting his hand on Maxwell’s shoulder. “Not a whiner, that’s true,” Maxwell confirmed—she leaned away and David’s hand was left hanging—“but quite socialist and a bit Jewish.” “I hate rich people,” Tyson declared, “that’s socialist, isn’t it?” “Not necessarily,” Conal opined, “I hate rich people but I haven’t made up my mind if I’m a socialist.” “I’m LSD,” Clementine said with a giggle.* “And about the inheritance,” Julian went on as if he hadn’t heard. He claimed that none of us came clean about everything, did we? Each of us was hiding something. He wasn’t a poser. He hadn’t even used a single fucking penny of that inheritance. He’d put the money aside for exactly this sort of purpose, and when he heard Christopher’s idea he knew right away that the day had come. Besides, he’d never promised to say the truth, or consult with everyone, or be the friendliest guy around—he’d only ever promised to do what he could to make our idea come true. We liked what he said, or at least most of us did, and that was the end of our little rebellion.
From the moment we found out that Julian was financing our lives, things changed. His power no longer stemmed from the fact that we liked his ideas and that sometimes he said exactly what we were thinking, that he verbalized feelings that were flying around our heads, and mostly, that in his presence we did not feel helpless. Now it had another meaning: this life, which we were rather fond of, could only happen if Julian paid the villagers to let us live in the houses, buy us food at the supermarket, and not tell anyone that members of the group who had burned down the London gallery and were planning a worldwide strike were hiding in County Clare.
Talking about liars, David was a big supporter of Julian. So what if he hadn’t told us that he had a lot of money? White Tyson had thrown out twelve different versions of the reason he went to prison, Elizabeth hadn’t really given the hospital psychiatrist a blow job and sent his sperm to his wife in an envelope,* Conal hadn’t slept with twenty-five men, or even with five, and he, David, hadn’t served in Iraq: he hadn’t been in the army at all. We were all liars. We didn’t know then that David had already signed on to be the lead (lead!) writer for a television series about the strike. Legend has it that he was sitting on the Tube reading an interview with the screenwriter of KKN: Resurrection, a series about a gang of zombie kids who help oppressed groups around the world by turning them into zombie-warriors. The interview mentioned her agent, Baxter Sorrentino, and the next day David turned up at Sorrentino’s office and said: “You have ten minutes to sign me.” As Sorrentino said later, “Sometimes you don’t have to read anything a person has written to know that you’re looking at a star!” He sold the show to a New York production company, and David’s advance would depend on the strike’s results: if there was no strike, he would get £10,000, and if a billion people went on strike—he’d get £1 million. The really surprising thing is that David was the only one of us who came up with such a great way to make money. Well, obviously people like Julian, Alberto, Justine, and Clementine wouldn’t have done it, but a few of us would have signed that contract with a grin as big as a pedophile’s after being hired to run a nursery school. We assume he saw no contradiction between a worldwide strike and accepting a million pounds from a production company; if we pulled it off and there really was a strike, loads of people would write about it anyway, and if we failed then it’d be a dumb show about how we failed and he’d get his ten thousand quid. No harm done either way.
Did David’s secret contract with a wealthy production company prove, as people claimed afterwards, that our strike was fundamentally rotten? That we’d never really managed to live outside of the system we wanted to destroy? That maybe you can’t really be outside the system, because maybe there is no such place? We didn’t think so. We weren’t guilt-ridden bourgeois kids whose parents had made money off colonialism, connections, globalization, politics, exploiting workers, playing the stock market, or trading arms, and our lives really were crappy. That wasn’t a lie. David wasn’t interested in how other people saw him. He saw the world only through the lens of how to get through another week. Since the age of five he’d been taking money from other kids, from people on the streets, teachers, horny men in the park, and it would have been stupid to assume that our idea could change twentyyear-old habits. He believed in the strike but he also wanted to make a bit of money. Which is despicable yet at the same time completely understandable.
For the first two weeks in the village we didn’t watch telly, and Julian and Clementine were the only ones who were on the computer when there was an internet connection, so we didn’t know much about the responses to the fire, the special task force set up to catch us, or the American consulting firm that the British government had hired to crush the strike. Mostly, we didn’t realize that some of us had become famous. Two days after the fire, our names and pictures were plastered everywhere. The ones who got the most publicity were Alberto, who was portrayed as a foreign agent importing dangerous ideas from Latin American communists; Julian, who was the reckless cult leader; and Clementine, the “ice queen” who ran things behind the scenes. Justine (traitor, slut), Christopher (the dreamer), White Tyson (went to prison after stabbing his PE teacher), and Elizabeth had some exposure, too. They described us as a combination of criminals, lunatics, nihilists, and communist-anarchists. Julian embodied all the categories. Some of the investigative journalism was quite impressive. They got hold of Julian’s articles in Black Flag and 284 letters of apology to his mother, Alberto’s four poems in The Anthology of Young Poetry in Spanish, White Tyson’s confession to the police (“I wanted to insert the knife into his asshole, but I missed and he ran—he was a fast motherfucker. Well, he was a PE teacher”), Conal’s university papers, the psychiatrist’s reports on Elizabeth, and various other bits and pieces. A team of experts concluded that there were clear signs of “radical utopian messianism.” The world we aspired to create, they explained, was reminiscent of the one described by Thomas More, although it was hard to believe any of us had read him. They said we wanted a world without private property, where manual labor was dignified (what a crock) and everyone always ate supper together, that sort of thing. An analysis of our psychological profiles indicated that, were we to live in such a utopian world, we would be the first to violate the rules and violently trample other people’s rights.
It was obvious that some of the papers were getting their information from at least one of the three we’d kicked out. Quincy was the prime suspect. One article mentioned how Alberto liked to tell us stories, and another said that a source close to the group claimed “Alberto could have been a better leader than Julian, because he wasn’t interested in being a rockstar-Lenin,” something a few of us had heard Quincy say. They also wrote that certain elements in the group wanted to write a list of demands, but Julian had refused. That was a lie—we didn’t want to write anything. Clementine said that the left always wanted to bring redemption to a world full of injustice, but we weren’t talking about redemption, we were rebelling because they’d shoved our faces deep in the shit. (There was a lot written about “the dispute between Clementine and Julian over their vision of the future.”) And there was something else: the foundation of the strike (where everything would freeze, like in Christopher’s dream) was a desire to return to a nil point in which all familiar rules were invalid, or, to put it a bit more modestly, a desire to tilt this world just a little bit in our direction. When they were no longer the feudal lords, with us as guest-workers (even for one day), then we could talk about the future.
Since we weren’t really dealing with the strike, we found ourselves troubled by other questions. Elizabeth and David were fucking, and sometimes they went out at night with a little backpack and disappeared in the dark. Everyone believed Julian and Clementine were screwing but we had no proof, although we weren’t above trying to get it. Several times we surprised them in their room, but they were always hunched over the computer with a stern “Shove off, we’re busy changing the world!” look on their faces. Anyway, they weren’t fucking anyone else. Justine and Alberto didn’t get back together, but they never denied that they were fucking. Elizabeth said she’d slept with Justine a few times, and that Justine liked it when her back was on Elizabeth’s stomach while Elizabeth wrapped her arms and legs around her, octopus-like. Elizabeth also said she never knew when David was coming because nothing came out, his dick was always in the same state, she’d never seen such a stupid dick her whole life. We believed the stuff about David, but we had our doubts about Justine, until Christopher got drunk one night and told Conal that Justine had confessed to him that she’d slept with Elizabeth and had even enjoyed it. Life in the village was good, but sometimes we got really bored, mostly at night, and gossiping always made us feel better. We could be divided up into various groups and sub-groups, and people would do that in the future, but the classification that emerged at the time was: those who were fucking, those who weren’t, and those who might have been.
Obviously not everything was rosy, and perhaps we have a tendency to glorify the era in hindsight. Like everyone else, we need to have some good memories. So it’s certainly possible that there were nights when the silence and the questions about the future troubled us, but we remember very clearly those mornings when we ran out onto the grass together, and they were radiant, joyful, even hopeful. Conal called it “the time when the world was our age.” It had something to do with his theories about childhood. He said there were experiences that you never really had, “but in retrospect you remember them as the moments when a unity arose between you and the world, and nothing can convince you that they did not occur, even though you know they didn’t.” Or something like that. We didn’t delve into it too deeply, but we liked that line: The time when the world was our age.
The recognition that our days in the village were coming to an end, that something big was going to happen, crawled lazily in our direction. Julian and Clementine were worried. They were worried because some of the people who were supposed to strike on 11.11 saw us as a gang of criminals and nihilists, and because of how quiet things were—everyone was talking a lot of shit on social networks but doing very little—and they were afraid the idea was losing its luster, that people weren’t joining us anymore, that the police were arresting anyone who had anything to do with the strike, that there were so many fictitious identities that no one could remember which ones belonged to us and which to our enemies. One billion strikers? The whole thing could end up with half a million.
One day Maxwell and Samuel were in one of the bedrooms, supposedly playing blackjack, when they heard Clementine yell: “It’ll never happen, d’you understand?!” Then Julian said something angrily and they both went silent. The story prompted one intriguing question: what were Maxwell and Samuel doing inside in the middle of the day, when it was so hot that people would rather drink water from the tap by the pig pen than be anywhere near the house? Clearly, they were fucking, but there was something even more exciting going on. According to White Tyson, the story proved that Julian was dying to fuck Clementine but she refused to sleep with that arrogant hook-nosed prick. David said that even if Julian were trying to sleep with Clementine, she wouldn’t have been so worked up. After all, this girl was used to people coming on to her—she’d worked at a strip club!
The next morning when we ran outside, Julian wasn’t there. At first we assumed he was shut up in his room. But in the evening, when we told Clementine we wanted to talk to Julian, she confessed that she’d woken up that morning and he was gone.
We convened in the barn. There was hardly any booze left, and people were getting irritable. Elizabeth called Christopher a spy and threatened to gouge his eye out with her teeth. David informed Samuel that Cannabis Jazz was a spoiled brat: “So his parents died—get over it!” Tyson threw a garden spade at Conal, and Violet screamed that she was going home. After things calmed down, Tyson and Elizabeth said Julian had left because he was crushed by Clementine’s rejection and he wasn’t coming back. Other people said they’d heard Julian had gone to a meeting, that there was someone he listened to. The most extreme version of the rumor was that someone had enchanted Julian and taken control of him. There were those who insisted that Clementine had told at least one person that Julian no longer believed in their ability to lead the strike and had started taking advice, and even instructions, from an unidentified person whom Clementine did not trust. And worse: she suspected this person was working for the enemy. Alberto arrived at the barn late that night and said we should just wait for Julian to get back. “Do you know where he is?” we asked him angrily. “I have no clue,” he answered. At around midnight we went back to Clementine’s room and demanded to know where Julian was. She didn’t seem particularly alarmed and answered impatiently that she had no idea, she wasn’t his fucking nanny.
The rumors sounded so bizarre that we simply repeated them with a skeptical smile. Sort of like you do when you hear a good story about your big brother—say, that on the night Hugh Grant was caught with that prostitute in the car, your brother was in bed with Elizabeth Hurley. I mean, you don’t start asking where they met and how she could have found your fat brother so attractive, right? You repeat the rumor because its unfoundedness is amusing, and there is a minuscule chance that it might be true. Julian, who would never admit that he didn’t know something, who acted as if when he was coming up with the big idea—which was actually Christopher’s—he had predicted a million different scenarios for the strike: yes, that Julian had apparently been bewitched by a mysterious mastermind and was now puppeting this man’s instructions. We didn’t lose any sleep over it. We amused ourselves with a rumor that we didn’t really believe; we amused ourselves with the rumor because we didn’t believe it.
Summer was drawing to an end. We could feel it in the cooler breeze when we lay on the grass in the morning, and then there were a few days of pouring rain, which worried us. We behaved as if summer could stretch out into eternity, beyond those carefree days lay winter and 11.11. Christopher got the flu, and at nights he burned with fever. Soon Alberto and Conal were sniveling too. Julian came back after four days, looking refreshed and content. His complacency reminded us of that day in the car park after we burned the gallery: it was the confidence of a decision already made, of knowing that, although future events may be unclear, your own role has been elucidated. We had to admit that his arrogant demeanor and his fast gait, which signaled that he was thinking and had no time for people like us, were preferable to his gloomy expression and lethargy in the days leading up to his absence.
That night—we only learned the exact details of the meeting much later—Julian, Clementine, Alberto, Christopher, and Justine secretly left the village and sat down by the tree that Justine had slammed her face into. Christopher, who was still unwell, lay on the ground covered in a woolly blanket. Julian started talking. There were two months to go till the strike, only just over a million people had signed on, and it wasn’t clear how many of them really would strike. We had to do something, fast. We had to initiate a big event, something on a scale that hadn’t been seen for a long time, something we could scarcely even imagine.
This was his idea: we would get lots of people out onto the streets all over the world to implement the largest civilian expropriation of property in history. Citizens would take over hundreds of department shops, banks, government ministries, corporate offices, newspapers, everything. He had taken to heart the criticism about our fixation on cultural institutions, and so now he was talking about institutions of every kind. Ordinary citizens taking everything back into their own hands. It was impossible to predict exactly what would happen after the operation: it would be different in different places, depending on the police, the army, the politicians, the demonstrators, but there would be destruction—we weren’t going to hole up in these places like fucking boy scouts waiting for the police to drag us out. We were coming to riot, we were coming to wreak havoc. On the same day we would also release a barrage of viruses and worms against thousands of institutions around the world. He wasn’t proficient in the details of cyber-warfare, and no one here was, but there was a group committed to carrying out one of the biggest cyberattacks in history.
There were other issues to handle, too: in the next few days we would issue our response to the slanderous campaign against us, and the American company hired by the British government would soon become synonymous with everything that was corrupt and perverse on the planet. The main question was whether we were prepared for this. There was no doubt that people would be killed, perhaps in the hundreds. He wasn’t afraid of that. The idea that social protest was not supposed to be violent needed to be undermined. It was naïve to commit to non-violence when the forces you were up against had no compunctions at all.
Christopher and Clementine said that all those lines sounded pretty slick. “You don’t sound like Julian,” Clementine said, “you sound like a product spokesman.” Justine agreed: “ordinary citizens” worked in all those institutions he was talking about, and, anyway, it all sounded like a New Labour campaign. Julian replied that he’d been mulling over this exact problem: you couldn’t really do anything new in protests. At most, you could repackage old ideas and trust that a world yearning for titillation would be only too eager to proclaim your event as something new. Bottom line, it’s all been done before, and if it hasn’t then it’s probably impossible. The only way to innovate was with new combinations of quotations. Everything we did was derivative, but the unique blend of quotations was the new thing.
Clementine claimed she wasn’t bothered by the unoriginality but by the impracticality. She thought Julian’s plan was megalomaniacal. In her opinion, every strike location had to “ride on local events.” There was no point in coordinating one single date and dictating a uniform type of activity. We had to harness the energy locally: there had to be disorder, chaos, lots of uncontainable initiatives. What’s more, the things she was describing were already happening. She’d heard from Angélica Rosares in La Paz—Julian knew her, too—that they were planning huge demonstrations because the government had decided to sell silver mining rights to an international conglomerate, but the demonstrations would be under the banner of the worldwide strike. Clementine suggested we encourage that kind of initiative, instead of imposing a worldwide event from the top down.
Justine said Clementine’s and Julian’s ideas weren’t mutually exclusive: we could encourage local incidents and also organize one big international event.
Alberto said there was no choice, we had to save the strike. The media and the government were steering public opinion, they had the resources to drain us and frighten everyone, to distract people and turn us into a gang of dangerous lunatics. We could sit there all day talking about how we weren’t playing by the same rules as other protest movements—but we could still lose. In fact, we’d always lose as long as we fought with the same old methods. We had to disrupt their game.
Everyone was surprised; Alberto sounded even more enthusiastic than Julian. Clementine demanded to know if the idea was Julian’s or his new adviser’s. Julian snapped that it didn’t matter, the only question was whether Clementine was for or against it! Clementine insisted that Julian expose the identity of the person advising him—what if he was working for our enemies? Had this big idea actually been hatched by the government and the American company? Julian insisted on keeping the man’s identity a secret. He’d gone to meet him because he was suspicious himself, but now he had no doubt that this man was on our side. He didn’t have a secret guru or a mentor or a hypnotist, he was just getting advice from someone who was familiar with the forces we were up against and knew their weak spots, and that’s all he was going to say on the matter.
We didn’t talk much about 12.11. It was beyond our capacity to imagine the world after the strike, and perhaps we understood that if we really delved into it we might lose the necessary zeal. Besides, we didn’t know where we’d be the day after the strike. Would we go back to our old lives? Be in prison? We preferred not to consider those questions, and if someone raised them we mumbled that we were all going to die anyway and the lucky ones would be in solitary confinement somewhere, so drop the subject, okay?
Julian, conversely, took a keen interest in the day after. Not by chance did he constantly pontificate about branches, leaders, representatives, and groups, and not by chance did Clementine mock him for wanting to found a new Socialist International. Julian saw the strike as a stepping stone to establishing a global force. A sort of G8 for the down and out. We knew Julian, but we were still pretty surprised to discover that, while we’d been lazing around in the village, he’d been working on the future leadership composition. The “shadow International” had already debated all sorts of proposals. For example, that a significant portion of every corporation, company, television channel, etc. in the world would always be owned by the public, the workers. We weren’t talking about a comics shop in Camden, of course. Julian claimed that the fact that social networks were privately owned was completely outrageous. Did it make sense for a few individuals to control a network that was essentially created by a billion people? If you could just step outside of the twisted world preached by private ownership, you’d realize it was crazy!
Anyway, in the end Julian suggested we vote on his plan, with the caveat that we should also encourage local events—a sort of compromise that leaned toward him. Everyone, including Clementine, voted in favor, except Christopher, who’d fallen asleep. Some people couldn’t understand why Alberto was supporting Julian. Perhaps because he was so friendly, we assumed he would object to such a violent plan, that he’d be horrified to think of people getting killed. But he didn’t seem bothered at all, and it turned out that our assumption was based on a misunderstanding. Alberto was naturally conflict-averse, but he wanted to be the person who would mediate between everyone and hold the group together. Contrary to some suspicions, Alberto believed Julian deserved the leadership position and had no plans to usurp him. It would be no exaggeration to say that he was Julian’s most loyal ally: at the moment of truth, he offered him all the power he’d amassed in the group. Alberto was charming, generous, sincerely curious about people, and he knew when to talk and when to back off—an extremely valuable quality when you’re living in a group. But there was something about him that we failed to understand, which was his absolute adherence to the strike, his determination to hold it at any cost, and the cruelty he was willing to display in order to make it happen.
After the vote, they announced a meeting at eight and demanded that no one arrive drunk or too high. That sounded ominous. It was raining hard that evening, and spirits were low. The first thing we saw in the living room was a thin, bald figure dressed in black, standing by the window. We usually didn’t turn any lights on at night, making do with the fireplace, and we thought we were finally meeting the secret adviser. Much to our disappointment, the man standing there was Julian, but without any hair. On some people, a shaved head exposes previously unimaginable ugliness; Julian was one of those people. His face was shriveled, his black eyes jumped out with froggish ungainliness, his eagle nose looked even more crooked. A few of us felt the need to lie and tell him it was a flattering look, at least from certain angles, maybe in the dark.
Julian launched into a tempered version of the new plan, with no mention of potential casualties. He implied that he had consulted with representatives from several countries. Even now there’s no telling how truthful that was: there are so many versions going around that it’s difficult to reconstruct how any particular idea came to be. There will always be at least a hundred people who claim they came up with it.
They announced that preparations were already underway in some countries, and that now was the time to decide: each of us could choose whether to participate or not, and those who chose not to should leave the next morning. That provoked irritated grunts, and Clementine explained that it wasn’t a punishment: we were leaving the village in a week anyway, the money had run out, the action would be happening within the next two weeks, and it made no sense for someone who didn’t want to take part to be present. It was a convincing argument, but some of us had the feeling we were being trampled, along with our questions and reservations. Maxwell, who was sitting in an old rocking chair—she was barefoot and wore a blue floral dress, her face looked fresh and tanned and her green eyes glimmered; everyone had noticed how amazing she’d looked these past few days—asked if that was the only plan they were proposing. Alberto replied politely that they couldn’t get input from every single person. The strike had leaders; they’d made a decision. The stagnation caused by endless debates, splinterings, and in-fighting was the greatest enemy of every protest. There was one single objective: a worldwide strike on 11.11. Anyone could write up a manifesto to explain why he was joining—as far as he was concerned there could be a billion different opinions about the reason, as long as there were a billion strikers!
We heard so many new things that evening that at first no one asked where exactly the action would take place. When the question was eventually raised, the answer surprised us: London! They were suggesting that we go back to the city where we were wanted for arson and “planning terrorist activities.” “Shitty idea,” David said. “It really is bollocks,” Maxwell agreed. “It’s a fuckwit idea,” Elizabeth summed up. Alberto insisted there was no reason to panic: most of us didn’t look like our old photos anymore, and we could use disguises. Even we’d had trouble recognizing Julian without his hair, hadn’t we? So how could the police spot him? Or Justine? We weren’t that famous.
People wanted to know how this action was supposed to motivate the masses to join the strike—with all the devastation we’d be causing, chances were that it would have the opposite effect. Couldn’t we just make do with the cyber-warfare idea? Everyone liked that one! Besides, why do it in London, the one place where they were looking for us? David announced that if the plan went ahead, people would be injured and killed. Right now in this room there were people who would be dead by the end of the action! We all shushed him but he kept saying, “There are dead people in this room. Just you wait and see…”
Late at night, we gathered in the barn and argued about one thing: would anyone be gone the next morning? And if so, who? Maxwell? David? Maybe Christopher, who looked pretty down? A few people even bet on Clementine. Obviously if anyone was going to leave they wouldn’t come and give us goodbye hugs—they’d sneak out in the middle of the night and pray they never ran into us again. Alberto announced that he was writing nil—no one was going to leave, we were all committed to the strike, and even if someone left now, the police would be looking for them. So they’d be out on their own, wanted, and forever remembered as the person who dropped out just before the big moment, like that drummer from the Beatles. (Maybe in Chile the story is that he dropped out, someone yelled, but he was actually sort of kicked out.) It didn’t take a genius to realize that Alberto had come to the barn to dissuade the people who might have been planning to leave, but we were too drunk to remember clearly.
At some point Clementine and Julian appeared, and they sat on the floor together, looking very close, and that was really the first time we all had a party in the barn. We emptied all the vodka bottles and the beer cans; Samuel and White Tyson rolled joints for everyone and announced that the weed and the hash were done, there was just a little bit left over for Samuel and Elizabeth, who went crazy if they couldn’t smoke. Conal made some GHB—he claimed he once made a living from selling it, and that some people made GHB while other people were scientists of the stuff, and he was a scientist. We drank the disgusting liquid, all of us except Alberto (“Too old for that shit”) and White Tyson (“I want to die for two weeks after I take it”), and it was fantastic. Good GHB gives you all the sensations you get with E but adds a sort of wildness. You get a heightened understanding of the things you hate, not just the things you love. It’s like you’re happy and furious at the same time. It’s like you want to kill everyone, but only if it makes them happy. Or something. We insulted each other, we kept touching Julian’s bald head, we listened to Elizabeth and Maxwell sing “Something Is Not Right with Me.” Clementine and David danced, like they used to when they worked at clubs. They didn’t strip, but Clementine took off her shirt and danced in her bra, and as to David opinions are divided. He was probably completely naked. Everyone remembered a newspaper article about how Julian used to sing to his girlfriend using his dick as a microphone, and we begged him to show us, even if he kept his underwear on. He refused, but he did an imitation of the Libertines. A few people decided to dive head-first into the pig pen—it was raining, the earth was soggy, it would be amazing!—and they came back reeking and covered with mud, but everyone still hugged them. We were sweaty anyway, and filthy and ugly and drooling and vomiting. It was the best party ever.
We saw all sorts of things that night: we saw Christopher’s mountain of candles after it was completely burnt and looked as black as the village nights. We saw a big auditorium with loads of people lying on the floor, screaming and writhing. We saw a woman standing on a cloud in the sky, flailing her arms, yelling: “I don’t believe in anything! Tell me, do you drown in the sky like you do in the sea?” We saw a plane land in a cemetery in Texas and little children from Newcastle stepping out of it to see how people die in other countries. We saw a boy and a girl running across a field, with green trees around them, and in the distance, above snow-capped mountains, a bamboo hut. We saw Julian, Clementine, David, and Maxwell crawling in a prison cell, their hands tied behind their backs, catching leopard-skin rats with their teeth. We saw a comic-book version of Elizabeth pressing Cannabis Jazz’s face up against her breasts. We saw two kids looking at someone who claimed he was their father and laughing because his dick was on his ass. We saw hands digging in a bottomless empty pot and suddenly touching something greasy that smelled like salami. We saw massive fires and buildings collapsing and huge cities turning into forests, and in between the trees were bridges that said “11.11.” We saw people dancing in the air, but then it wasn’t clear if they were dancing or if their arms and legs were just swaying in the wind. We saw our village in eighty or a hundred years and it was nothing but scorched earth, and the fence around the pig pen was made of a substance that kept changing colors, and the fence said it had caused a huge mess in London so they’d punished it by relocating it here.
In the morning we woke up late. We were still in the barn. The air was cold, we could see the gray sky through the windows, and the partially burnt roof did little to keep the rain out. Some people decided they’d had enough and ran back to the rooms. Only in the late afternoon did we realize Maxwell was gone. That was a serious blow. In the past week she’d been cheerful and lively; Samuel said she’d been reborn in the village. She didn’t leave a note, but on the back of the bill she’d given Christopher, she’d written, “Maxwell. Sorry.” Samuel had been closer to her than any of us. He said he’d noticed she hadn’t had much to drink the night before, but he hadn’t thought anything of it. He remembered that she’d talked about family a bit, she’d said she felt close to us and was afraid she was imagining things; she’d been part of all sorts of groups and the separations always tortured her. She’d once spent months grieving for a group that had existed for only a week. Some people found it easy to say goodbye but she’d never learned how to do it. Samuel remembered playing Alberto’s game with her sometimes, just the two of them: they each had to say one sentence about any topic, and he remembered the last thing she’d said because she’d broken the one-sentence rule: she used to want to die, and now that seemed like a silly idea, and she thought it was thanks to us. It’s funny how stupid we were, not to have seen that Samuel was in love with Maxwell.
The “war of disinformation,” as it was called retrospectively (and hyperbolically), began more or less on the day Julian returned to the village, when various rumors about our plans began spreading on the social networks. Here are a few of them (it would take years of research to list them all): there would be large demonstrations in a hundred parks around the world; speakers would include Lady Gaga, the Dalai Lama, Salman Rushdie, and Diego Maradona. The hundred most expensive private schools in the world would be set on fire. Protesters would take over international airports and ground tens of thousands of flights, hold up trains, expropriate property from the one thousand richest people in the world, rob high-end shops, take control of two hundred corporate offices and one hundred banks. Television stations would be hijacked, and there would be cyber-warfare: we would regenerate the lackluster Y2K bug, for real this time; we’d relocate satellites in space, hack into government and corporate systems and rewrite millions of documents, empty out ten million bank accounts, and cause damage to stock-exchange buildings around the world.
They said that the strike was a smokescreen, that our plan was to plunge the world into mayhem long before 11.11. They insisted big events would take place in South Africa, Mexico, Greece, and Egypt, and that even bigger events would occur in England, Lithuania, Japan, Portugal, and Australia, and then that any sensible person knew there would be four giant events: Indonesia, Mexico, Ukraine, and Spain. They talked about police mobilization, about 150,000 arrests, about special camps set up to contain all the detainees.
Meanwhile, we were busy getting ready to leave. We cleaned the barn, mowed the lawn, washed the floors, and fixed the wooden fence around the pig pen. Admittedly, we did all that in four hours. In the mornings we no longer ran out onto the grass—the ritual suddenly seemed like a Diet Coke ad—and although we spent most of the time lying around in our rooms, the last days in the village flew by. We were tense and spoke very little. It was clear that our time together was over. There were some feeble efforts to tempt us into nostalgia, but most of us couldn’t be bothered. There would be time for reminiscing, but for now the main feeling was that a black cloud awaited us outside the village, that we would be swallowed up inside it, and that the results would be disastrous. Still, no one suggested backing out. In the early, sleepy days, when we’d lain on the grass or listened to Samuel and Maxwell playing music in the barn, we could contemplate that. But now, even though we still lived there, the village had become dreamlike. We recognized that it had never been a real part of our lives, that it was fundamentally deceptive, because at least for a while it had made us believe that our lives could be different. They couldn’t. And when we really understood that, when we shook off the last few weeks and contemplated the lives we were about to step back into, regardless of the strike—even if none of us were arrested and we simply went back to the places we used to hang out in—we remembered all the reasons that had led us to declare the strike in the first place, and we recommitted ourselves to it. Not with the naïveté of the early days, when we’d believed we could galvanize people all over the world whose lives were as lousy as ours, but with a rigid sort of sobriety. It was the only thing we could do. The betrayals, the desertions, the slander, the namecalling, the criticisms of this or the other action, the price we would pay—all those were trivialities that could not put a dent in the idea around which we had gathered: worldwide strike, one billion strikers. We didn’t really have anything else.
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