Remnants of Old Montreal. Part three

(www.bears.co.nz)

Mr. Skirts could only concentrate on his projects in the office. He was desperately out of touch with life in the city. He focused solely, passionately, on the task at hand, and though he understood much about how the city functioned in the abstract, he knew little of its blood. The city was, to him, an equation in time, a set of numbers to pound into a formula. He understood New Montreal as an idea, an ideal; he knew nothing of the physical city, or of the strangers that called it home.

Throughout the world New Montreal was hailed as a beacon of modern progress; sleek and efficient, every bullet train on time. But deep within the inner movements of clockwork happiness lay complex, hidden alleyways. The modern metropolis had an underbelly, parts of it swollen, parts of it starving. The progressive government was crippled by an ancient bureaucracy; the digital economy fluctuated with the whims of analogue desire; the law brutalized those who couldn’t speak; homeless folk failed to keep warm by the light of a bummed smoke. The new city was built upon old foundations, on the backs of men and women with memories.

Mr. Skirts comprehended these discrepancies as the unfortunate remainders of ingenious and inevitable solutions. Some fraction always gets left behind, he would say, That is progress.

Peanut understood differently. He resented the myth of progress. To him the remainder was what mattered. Art and terrorism, things too precious to leave behind or ignore. The remainder was Peanut’s pirate flag. It hung high above pipe dreams in shot glasses, tears for no reason, a broken water-main, snow in July, lovers in the afternoon, an underground poet, and an anarchist French bear who could never let a history of cuddles get in the way of revolutionary ideals. Peanut loved and defended everything that refused to fit nicely. He craved absurdity in meaning; he sought everything that was left-out or left-behind like a withered nun craves the leper. Without these things Peanut had no framework through which to understand his own existence – a disgruntled, talking teddy-bear, addicted to chaos and loose women, married to a rational man.