Excerpt from Anarchy

The bus that was supposed to take Dom and Chana to Chana’s mom’s house was late. The 64 “Grenet,” according to Google Maps, came every twenty minutes on Sundays, but they’d been sitting at the station for almost thirty now and no vehicle of any sort had even pulled into the lot. It reeked of complete incompetence. Dom didn’t understand how a bus could be late to the station it was supposed to start at.

Especially in October, now, when people were going to start getting cold. Dom had on his leather jacket, his Gildan extra-heavy cotton Run the Jewels crewneck, and his fingerless gloves, but still felt at legitimate risk of hypothermia. The testosteronic thinning of his hair that had run its course in the last two years did not help either, and Dom could feel the bite of the wind even through the snap-back he was wearing.

He also didn’t know where he was. The Metro, Dom learned, had that effect. In Ottawa, they only had a bus system, and back in Vancouver the Skytrain ran above ground. As a rider, you had a complete, uninterrupted view of the terrain as you passed between stations. The STM, by contrast, picked you up somewhere, blasted you through the darkness for fifteen minutes, and then spat you out somewhere else. It was like teleporting. And Dom hated it. The human body wasn’t designed to travel like this. In fact, Dom reasoned you could tell the Skytrain was almost two decades newer than the Metro without knowing anything about either system just by the former’s greater attention to psychological well-being.

But none of this would matter once he had the car.

This is where he and Chana were going. The two of them had just been spit-out at Cote Vertu station. It was the end of the Orange line and the farthest Dom had ever been from his apartment. Out here, Montreal did not feel like Montreal. The mid-rise apartments and flaneur-friendly streets that had finally felt worthy of an intellect like his were gone. Instead, Dom found himself surrounded by familiar mediocrity. There was a gas station, two shawarma restaurants, a grocery store, and an RBC. If it weren’t for the obvious French, he may as well have been in Ottawa.

“This is where you grew up?” he asked as Chana led him to the back of the bus. The 64 had been a total of twelve minutes late, but at least it was empty.

“Kind of.” Chana sat in a corner by the window and tapped the seat next to her gently for Dom. “My Mom is from here, and so I lived around St. Laurent until I was in middle-school, when my parents split up and I went to live in Ottawa with my Dad.”

“Oh.” Dom had met Chana during his one year of Alternative High School in Ottawa. Like many of his friends from this era, their relationship was more of a strong acquaintanceship — a bond that only existed when both happened to actually show up for school and kept light by the every-teen-for-themselves environment at Carson. For all he knew, Chana had been born and raised in Merivale. There wasn’t anything particularly exotic about her. He thought she’d moved East just to work with the Montreal Futurist Communist Party until she’d called him about the car last night and explained her real circumstances.

“And then after school I came back here because I needed to get out of Ottawa.”

“Amen,” Dom said.

“Yeah. And because, you know, my Mom said she would buy me the car if I came home and got my license.” Chana sighed loudly. “Which I was trying to do. I was basically kicking it here until the thing with us, and- Yeah. You know.”

“Right,” Dom said, “Sorry, Chana.” Chana leaned weakly against the window and sighed again. She wasn’t a crier like Rudy, but Dom could tell the whole situation caused her great pain. He did his best to hold her in what he felt was a fatherly and protective, but calm, seeming way. With the disarray all of his friends were in, he imagined he was getting pretty good at this.

The more Dom had heard about Chana’s life since she’d answered his mass-text about moving to Montreal, the worse he had felt for not getting in touch with her sooner. Chana was not, he had learned, a seasoned organizer who had made it her mission, upon graduating, to strike out to La Ville Marie and form the most forward-thinking socialist cell in the city. She hadn’t even been living on her own that long.

The truth was that Chana’s mom had ejected her daughter from their bungalow as soon as Chana had approached and explained to her “the whole girl thing.” This was the term Chana used to explain her complex experience with gender identity, which Dom had been aware of essentially as long as he had known her. He assumed it was obvious to most people who interacted with Chana for any amount of time. It was not obvious to Leah, however, and according to Chana, the conversation made her “shit her pants” and tell Chana she had a week to find somewhere else to live.

So, Chairman Matt and the MFCP, it turned out, had basically saved her life. Chana had no money and no job to speak of. Even something like a Cafe was no option, because she’d forgotten all the French she learned as a kid. She was considering moving back to Ottawa and testing the waters with her dad, who sort of knew what was going on but not really, when a friend from a Facebook group had messaged her.

Dom remembered back in high-school, Chana had been into Facebook groups. She was a member of countless little communities with names like “Internationalist Memes for Situationist Teens” that she was always staring at on her phone. He didn’t disagree ideologically with any of these groups, but he’d considered them largely impotent and silly. The medium was the message, and real politics couldn’t be done over memes. You needed longer forms like podcasts, or even Youtube videos, to really make a point.

Nevertheless, Chana’s groups were apparently great places to make friends. She and Lieutenant Sophie had met in one in 2016 and been close ever since. When Chana was kicked out, Lieutenant Sophie had introduced her to the Montreal Futurist Communist Party and explained that they had a headquarters in Cote Des Neiges where Chana could crash as long as she needed, provided she made it to at least one weekly meeting.

Between this and Ottawa, it was a no-brainer.

“I thought she would at least like the name,” Chana said, “‘Chana.’ That sounds more Jewish than ‘Josh.’ God…”

“I know you’ve explained it so many times,” Dom said. He looked around for anyone who could potentially challenge him on the contents of what he was about to say. The bus was empty. “However, I just can’t bring myself to believe that Leah would kick you out of the house on the basis of your gender identity.” He enunciated these last two words strongly, realizing he’d typed them countless times and almost never said them out loud. “Didn’t you tell me once that she has a bachelor’s in gender studies?”

“She does,” Chana said, “But from the eighties or something. I don’t even think they called it that.”

“I see.”

“And my mom is crazy anyways. You have no idea.”

“I guess I don’t. Have we reached your stop yet?” Dom didn’t want to further stress Chana, but he had a rare nervous disorder that prevented him from riding public buses for long periods of time. If they didn’t get off soon, he would start to experience significant amounts of psychosomatic sweating.

“Oh shit.” Chana stood up. “Yeah, sorry. We just passed it.”

The bus was still empty, so the driver let Dom and Chana off between stops, and they emerged into another new biome.

Somehow, this area felt closer to the Montreal Dom loved. It wasn’t any more like downtown than Cote Vertu. In fact, it was even less dense. Dom concluded that the streets Chana was leading him down were basically suburban. But they had a distinctly Montreal quality that the banks and grocery stores had lacked, something about the weird number of front doors on some houses, or the uninspired approach to park planning that Dom had identified throughout the city. It wasn’t Cote Des Neiges, but it was nice.

Maybe with the car, Dom could have a base in this area as well. With the money he imagined he would be making after about a year of his creative work, he could likely rent a place out here as a sort of “summer home,” in which he could meditate and experience a less hectic piece of Montreal’s cultural tapestry. The appeal of this was enormous. Dom couldn’t believe he hadn’t started living on his own sooner.

“So, the car we are stealing is yours, Chana, correct?”

“Of course it is. Don’t say ‘stealing.’”

“But you just implied you did not get your license. Wasn’t that part of the deal?”

“It was at first, but she eventually just gave it to me. I have the texts, and the keys. Look.” Chana pulled a single Nissan key fob from her bag and waved it at Dom. “I can’t drive, but it’s my car. And- Wait.” She put a hand to Dom’s chest. “Don’t go any further. It’s there.” She pointed.

“Where?”

“There,” Chana said, “The smallest place. With the red car.”

Three units down, Dom spotted a red Nissan Sentra in the driveway of a bungalow that looked about the same size as his apartment. The car was shiny. It looked new. Dom figured it must cost more than the house.

“That car? Your mom bought you a brand new car before you even had your license?”

“It’s not new,” Chana said, “It’s the 2015 model. It’s just very clean. Leah doesn’t drive anymore either, so nobody’s touched the thing since they dropped it off here. That’s why you might as well have it.”

“Just as long as I steal it for you?”

The more Anarchist tendencies within Dom’s philosophy approved of stealing, but only under certain circumstances. Stealing food to feed your family, or liquor from large corporations was acceptable. Some larger, more abstract forms of “stealing” such as taking over land to form a commune were even encouraged. Stealing as part of a familial dispute that didn’t really involve oneself, however, was ethical ground he had not yet pondered. It would be very nice to have the free car, though.

“Not steal,” Chana said, “Repossess.”

“Is that what you want me to tell the police?”

“Mom won’t call the cops. I promise. She probably won’t even come outside.” Chana held out the keyfob. “And cops here are a joke anyways. Chairman Matt’s gotten out of like six parking tickets because they’ve written his license plate down wrong.”

Dom didn’t move. He was busy performing moral calculations.

This car would be the first he had owned since high school. In Grade 10, his Dad’s old Mazda had caught on fire after a DIY repair, and the insurance payout had let them buy two new cars. Dom had picked a used Dodge Charger and made it his chariot for years, but his dad was broke again by the time they had to move to Surrey and the car got sold.

Chana continued.

“Look, Domenic, we could debate what counts as personal property for hours, but I think you just really want this car. Come on.”

She was right.

Weighty in his hand, the key seemed to challenge Dom. Did he still have the chops? The Charger used to whip he, Rudy, and Alex around like nobody’s business back in the day. Dom could weave seamlessly through traffic on the Queensway at 120 kilometers an hour without even thinking. That was more than just freedom to travel. That was joyous, liberatory. It was an old-school, classy kind of masculine assertion of oneself upon the world. It recalled the video essay he had watched once on Italian Futurism and the automobile in the early 20th Century. He seemed to remember it ending badly for the Italians, but they had really understood what it felt like to scream “Vaffanculo!” to the world from behind the wheel of 2,500 pounds of steel.

Dom strove to be ethical, but he had needs. He took the key fob and stepped toward the driveway.

“Go,” Chana said, “Quick.”

Dom tried to approximate something like sneaking at first, but gave up quickly. His jacket and cargo pants were too heavy and he had become uncomfortably sweaty since riding the bus. There wasn’t anything on the street to hide behind, either. Instead, he tried to focus on walking as normally as possible. It was unnerving. The liquor he had stolen in high-school had been simple. There was a process to that. Stealing a car felt insane by comparison.

That said, things were going fine so far. Dom hadn’t noticed anybody else on the street yet, and he made it to Leah’s driveway undisturbed. This gave him a great surge of confidence, and as he approached the car, he hit the “Unlock” button on the fob without thinking.

BZZZP. The Nissan honked and all the lights turned on for a second. Dom froze. Thinking quickly, he remembered Chana’s bit about repossession.

“This is an official repossession,” he declared loudly and as authoritatively as possible, “on behalf of Chana Katz. This Nissan Sentra is on this property illegally and will now be returned to its rightful owner.” Dom looked around to see if he was being watched. Chana gave him a ‘What the fuck?’ kind of gesture. “Thank you,” Dom said, finally.

And then he jumped in the car and reversed it into the side of the F-150 across the street.

It wasn’t a bad collision by Dom’s standards, but the Truck’s alarm immediately started going off. The pedals on the Sentra had turned out to be more sensitive than he expected. Chana sprinted over and banged on the passenger-side window. Dom let her in. He thought she would be freaking out, but she was laughing.

“Jesus christ, Dom, you’re insane” she said, “Just drive down there and go right. Let’s get out of here.”

“Is anyone coming?” Dom asked. He was gripping the steering wheel so hard it felt like there was no blood left in his hands. If he looked away from the road even for a second, he was sure he would crash. Chana turned around.

“No,” she said, “Except-”

“What?” Dom said. He turned right off Chana’s street and then left, instinctively, at the next intersection. They had no plan, but he felt drawn to the patch of the river he could see in the distance.

“Leah came out. Right at the end there.”

“Shit.”

“No,” Chana said. “I told you. She won’t call anyone. She’s a shut-in. It was just weird to see her.”

“Right,” Dom said. He was still focused on driving. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Wherever you want. We’re in Nouveau Bordeaux right now.”

“Nouveau Bordeaux.” Dom said. The housing had thinned out even more here, and the places looked nicer. The neighbourhood had a sort of uniquely Montreal waterside vacation-town charm. “I like Nouveau Bordeaux.”

Chana snorted.

“Yeah? There’s a prison here.”

“I do,” Dom said, “It has a kind of waterside vacation-town charm.”

Chana laughed again.

“I envy your optimism, Dom.” She looked at her phone aimlessly for a second and then put it away and started to look forlorn. She kept sighing obviously. Dom turned on the radio to cover this up. They were playing Passionfruit by Drake. “Do you think I was a bad daughter?” Chana said.

“What?”

“To my mom. Do you think I could have been a better daughter? It was the trans thing that got me kicked out for sure, but I can’t help but feel like I was kind of a piece of shit anyways. All I did was smoke weed and go on the computer and jerk off. I could have at least helped buy groceries.”

“I see,” Dom said, “Well, you’ve described your mother as having a few screws loose to begin with, so I don’t think there’s a fair playing field on which I can make any sort of observation about you two’s relationship without knowing more.”

“Thanks Dom.” Chana took her phone back out. He noticed she did this whenever she seemed nervous or unsure of what to say.

“However,” Dom continued, “I believe that parents make the decision to bring their children into the world, and that they bear the responsibility for it indefinitely. They don’t get to dispose of you willy-nilly. I wouldn’t dwell on what you could have done differently, Chana, because it doesn’t matter. Leah should be holding up her side of the parenthood contract.”

“What?” Chana said after a second.

“I’m saying it’s not your fault, so I wouldn’t worry. You have countless opportunities in front of you now, Chana. Focus on that.”

“Hmm,” Chana said, “Well that’s a bit less bad to think about. Do you want to go to McDonald’s?”

“Of course.” Dom smiled. “Tonight, Chana? I can take you anywhere. I can take you to McDonald’s. And I’m buying. It’s the least I can do. And you know why? Cause we have a car now, baby!” Dom leaned on the horn, and swerved the Sentra back and forth across the lane to emphasize this last point. “We have a car!” This was a thoroughly safe move he used to do all the time with the Charger, but it appeared to terrify Chana.

“Christ,” she said. “Calm down. I think you just ran a stop sign.” She put her seatbelt on. “Go left up here. There’s a McDonald’s pretty close to the prison.”