The Montreal Project [01]
Serial fiction like the olden days. First installment.
-JA
Dougho sat on the edge of the bed he didn’t know the word for and his right thumb hovered over the power icon on his phone like a blimp, he thought, and it even cast a shadow from the dim light from the lamp on the night stand in the room which was otherwise dingy and drab and had the smell and atmosphere of a tomb, not that he’d spent much time in tombs but these were the sorts of references we were allowed to make, he thought, and this led to thinking about the work he’d done in analogy and cognitive processing and of all the research and experimentation he'd handed over to the company for what, he had to wonder, for thirty bucks an hour and the privilege of working fifty hours a week and being ignored by managers who as far as he could tell weren’t qualified to do anything, like he always said, he wouldn’t hire those guys to clean his bathroom, but he stopped saying it not because he was afraid of getting in trouble but because he thought it might be a little classist or at least unfair to people who clean bathrooms, which is hard work and not for everyone, as evidenced by the state of the shower stall in the room where he now sat on the edge of the half-bed he had no word for in English or in French, and he thought about the person who supposedly owned this apartment and he was confused by how cheerful someone could be delivering a whole string of disappointments: the laundry machines no longer work; nothing could be done about the smokers downstairs; the internet would be out for the foreseeable future, thank you for choosing RoomPal for your in-home luxury travel choice smiley face thumbs up and he shut off his cell phone for the last time and he wondered if there was a good body of water nearby to throw it in then he thought he should look it up then realized that he couldn’t and he would need to buy a paper map.
This was an island anyway so there should be water on any side if you walk far enough but then again it was winter and not just fluffy snow and cheery folks on skis winter but hard, cold in your bones winter, the kind of cold where if you’re not careful out there you’re taking a trip to the amputation clinic and then he thought I don’t know if they have amputation clinics but it seems like something they’d have here what with the nationalized health care and all, kinda like dialysis centers, and he thought he should look that up too but he’d shut off his other devices too and locked them in a safe in Chicago the morning he’d bought a ticket with cash and flown to Toronto before getting a train to Montreal and now he was here and he doubted he was clever enough to cover his tracks but he hoped no one was looking for him anyway and he wanted to believe that because paranoia would make him weak and unreceptive to new experiences and he was here to become someone else, goddammit, and why couldn’t the universe leave him alone?
Speaking of the universe he surveyed his corner of it. Stains on the couch. A single thin comforter. Mice under the stove. Crumbs everywhere. Wet towels heaped in the closet on arrival. Mustard curtains that might have been white at some point but were stained by tobacco smoke. Smell of faux-lavender air freshener smeared sweetly over mold. Constant drip of the bathroom sink with a tap that limited the flow and never really seemed to get hot enough to wash one’s hands. Sliding mirror doors on the closet always off track. Smells from other units. Refrigerator always on the brink of shutting off when you open it. One fork with a broken tine. A couple of paper bowls. No towels, no trash bags. Open food containers in the cupboards. It was like someone had been living there and evacuated just minutes before he arrived. Water in the bottom of the only cooking pan. Ants in the bathroom swarming a spot on the sink where a crescent of green residue from a bar of cheap handsoap graced the porcelain divot. The neighbors upstairs and below shouted in French and moved furniture throughout the night. Only one burner worked and that one only halfway. Laundry machines in the foyer when you come in, not connected to anything. Clock on the wall, no batteries, hands stuck at 2:36. Trash strewn over the building's front steps and ground. Area around the refuse bins basically a homeless camp. Airborne tetanus a likely threat.
He pulled the SIM card out of the phone and balanced it between his fingers as he applied pressure to each end until it buckled and cracked then snapped. It was like he’d broken the neck of a small animal. Even with the noise from the units upstairs and below he felt inside himself a dreadful and infinite silence. Cut off from the hive. He would live on his wits. The prospects weren’t good. I will not let this place be evidence of my failures, he said to the dirty room. He would sleep through the winter, hibernate, awaken to become something new. He should be proud. In a way he was a hero, he thought, then he laughed into his knees for a long time.