The Montreal Project [02]

Obligatory disclaimer: this is fiction. Similarity to any persons or corporations living or dead blah blah et cetera.
-JA

*

Before Dougho heard the news about Asstech Solutions and realized what had been happening had been happening for months he marveled at how easy it was to let international events and wars and politics dissolve into abstracts, and in this place where folks had more immediate concerns it was even easier, especially when you only understood every third word or so of most conversations.

Gradually he pulled his head out of the wasps' nest and found he didn't miss the digital universe. Well, okay, maybe at first, maybe it was a little like having a phantom limb. But after his dopamine pathways were rewired he remembered how much he enjoyed reading words on paper.

Blizzards piled on blizzards and he got used to suiting up like he was going on an untethered spacewalk to explore the coffee shops and museums. He attended a festival on a deeply frozen night in a plaza where electronic musicians played to a crowd of fans in puffy coats and he swayed along with them and did not feel silly. He walked the tundra of the botanical gardens and befriended a barn owl who slept in the open during daytime in the barren trees looking like a lead sinker on a fishing line.

Spring was suspended, like someone had forgotten to schedule it, but when it arrived it exploded. He left the basement where he'd slept these last months and the sun shining outside was disorienting. He didn't recognize the place where he'd walked in gloom and where the day didn't bother to differentiate itself from night, but here it was and he shook off the Canadian Flu or whatever had gotten into his sinuses and lungs and he found a cafe where activists hung out and he read free weekly papers that reminded him of what Chicago used to be like and the proletariat pride and the barista who'd helped him with his French when he admitted he wasn't always sure how to respond to her follow up questions when he ordered a coffee. The tower they'd built for the '76 Olympics (winter? he assumed it was winter). The market where he bought quiche because it seemed like a local thing to do even though he didn't see anyone else buying them, and it had broccoli and vegetables in it and the condo where he stayed had an oven that seemed to work alright even though the kitchen always felt under-equipped to cook anything even though the guy he rented it from was a chef, the culinary kind, not just any old boss which is what the word meant in French, he knew, and that guy was in Greece and there were earthquakes happening and general disorder all around the Mediterranean and he wondered if he'd be coming back, he wondered if anyone anywhere would be coming back, and if he himself would be going back home or if the borders would close or if the threat to anyone returning from abroad would be too great and whether that would be enough to request permission to stay in this country which was so much more peaceful, in this city where almost nobody ever got shot.

He attended chess classes designed for children, toddlers, which helped him as much with his French as his skill at the game. He made friends. He dated women, locals who found him exotic for some reason, or took pity on him for being from a broken country. He improved his guitar playing and completed an album's worth of songs he'd started in Chicago but never felt able to finish there. He was a regular at cool taverns and bistros and learned he could stop at two drinks or three if the conversation was good and get himself home. He fell in love with public transportation, smoother and more reliable than he was used to. He read on the bus and wrote on the subway, took notes about his fellow passengers, turned them into stories and translated them himself and racked up publications in the local journals and zines under intriguing pseudonyms. He signed up for standup comedy sessions where he made fun of himself for the stupidity of his people and sometimes he received applause. He started dressing cool. Black boots and jeans and matching jackets. He climbed Mount Royal. He discovered muscles in his chest where there had been none. He learned where the good soups were sold and formed strong opinions about which of the famous bagel places deserved its fame. He found an anarchist queer co-op where activists played board games and planned protests and held nightly karaoke sessions where armies of performers arrived in full theme park regalia while he sat on the couch with a grin and read pamphlets written by Vladimir Lenin.

Whenever he caught it the news from home was consistently disappointing. He managed to avoid it most of the time and when it trickled into his awareness from an odd television screen where he was waiting to pick up a merguez sandwich or an allonge, or if someone at the shared office space he used to make himself appear busy and important but mainly to ensure that he spent time around locals and picked up the way they pronounced their vowels and which idioms they used, if someone there was talking loudly enough that he couldn't avoid it or, worse, asked him what he thought about what was going on down there and how could he, his people, how could they let this happen, he felt ashamed and looked at the floor and said he'd always known it was going to be this way and that's why he'd come here in the first place and then he would return to whatever he was reading, probably a pulp mystery by a local author who set every story on the island and whose characters were all perfect save for one flaw, like a persistent cough, who solved crimes by putting themselves in danger.

He found a library and finagled his way into a temporary membership and for the first time in six months he opened his email account and it was like a bucket of burning coals dumped in his lap and he couldn't look away and when he walked out of there onto the plaza he was certain now that he was being watched and followed so he got as far away from there as he could and found his way back to the co-op where an intense argument over Scrabble was happening.

And then there was this story everyone was talking about and he couldn't ignore it and he had to make a choice about whether to engage or to crawl back into the basement apartment where he was in the habit of sleeping for ten hour stretches on a mix of benadryl and cannabidinol and melatonin and with earbuds in with a white noise loop cranked to drown out the shouts and scrapes and the furniture being shuffled around on all sides of him and he was aware that all of that felt like a metaphor for something more important or bigger, at least, but the truth was he only wanted to sleep so he would be ready if he needed to be ready.

He found his phone at the bottom of the cabinet covered in dust. He plugged it in and went for a walk down the long hill toward the bridge that loomed ahead and at the bottom of the hill, just off center like an optical illusion.

(to be continued)