Hannah

Cathy wasn’t exaggerating when she’d said that you couldn’t properly grasp the scale of a city unless you’d seen it with your own eyes. Seeing Huntingdale for the first time had been a jarring experience; seeing Montreal was utterly earth shattering. Just the sight of the city skyline as we approached it on the train caused me to start having palpitations. Our first stop after arriving in the city and renting a car at the train station was St Joseph’s Oratory, the largest church building in Canada, where the refugees we’d come to meet were staying. Frank informed me that the church had been one of the most helpful organizations in dealing with the refugees. This was the opposite of what I had been taught about religion by mother, who’d said that religions offered people nothing but false hope and had driven them to commit some of the most barbaric atrocities in history, hence the non-existence of religion in Prospera. As the largest church in Canada, St Joseph’s Oratory naturally attracted refugees. There were four hundred refugees awaiting resettlement when we got there, fifty of whom would be resettled in Huntingdale. All of their particulars had already been taken of; Frank in his capacity as one of the members of Huntingdale’s refugee resettlement committee just needed to sign off on their transfer. Frank had a brief conversation with the priest when we arrived and the three of us walked off together to meet with the fifty refugees that Huntingdale had agreed to resettle. The pews inside the church had all been removed to make room for cots for the refugees to sleep on. The church was full of people crammed close together with almost no personal space and no privacy. Volunteers, most of whom were church members, were walking about the place helping people with what they needed. There were babies that needed formula, victims of attacks that needed their wounds treated, elderly people that needed assistance with eating or getting to the bathroom, frightened children who’d lost their parents and needed comforting; the war had spared no one. I was getting my first real look at the damage caused by this stupid war that heretofore had only existed to me as images on a TV screen or words in a book. The suffering that it had brought upon these people was terrible but there was hope to be found in the altruism of those that were volunteering to aid them.

The priest, Father Calvin, was a man of kind and benevolent disposition. He said several times to Frank that he couldn’t thank him enough for what he was doing to help, to which Frank responded that it was their moral duty to help the victims of this senseless war. We walked through the middle of the cots to an area in the corner where the refugees we’d come for had been located. Frank gave a brief address to them, sympathising with them for their loss and reassuring them that once they got to Huntingdale they would be far away from any conflict and would have the opportunity to rebuild their lives in peace. The refugees, like Father Calvin, couldn’t stop expressing their appreciation to Frank for what he was doing for them. They were shown outside to a bus that was waiting to take them to Huntingdale. They got aboard, the bus took off, and our work was done.

We’d left Huntingdale at 6 a.m. and the train to Montreal had taken three hours. It was eleven a.m. by the time we were done with the refugees; Frank informed me that we would have seven hours to see the city. The first place he took me was Mount Royal, the best location for views of the city, from where I was able to see the skyscrapers of downtown Montreal, planes ascending out of and descending into Montreal-Trudeau Airport, and landmark buildings like the Olympic Stadium with its tall leaning tower. Seeing that I was fascinated by the architecture of the city Frank offered to take me to see some of the city’s most beautiful and interesting buildings up close. We started with the Olympic Stadium, which looked like a scorpion when you looked at it from the opposite side of the tower, then moved onto the ornate City Hall building, the radical angles of the Casino de Montreal, and the vast Bonsecours Market. The scale of everything that I was seeing, of what we humans were capable of, was amazing, far beyond anything we could’ve imagined in our shuttered lives in Prospera. Whenever I saw a skyscraper, or a plane flying overhead, or a tram trundling down the street, I was constantly reminded that the capability that had created all of it was suppressed by Prospera for a reason. The same ambition and technical ability that had created all of the wonderful architecture and infrastructure in the city was also responsible for the creation of weapons like the nuclear bomb. The fear of those in Prospera was of the natural duality of man and its irrepressible tendencies. The solution they’d decided upon for nullifying the progression of an undesired course of events was to nullify progress in its entirety. In the isolated environment of Prospera their experiment had been a success, but only because the citizens of Prospera weren’t aware of the modernity and freedom that had been sacrificed to create their utopia.

Frank wanted to thank Miranda for accompanying Cathy to the hospital and playing the violin for his wife and the other patients and drove to the Salle Bourgie Concert Hall to pick up a schedule of the upcoming performances of the season.

“When do you think we should come?” He asked me.

“It says here they’re going to be having a night of Bach in a month’s time; Bach is her favourite composer.”

“A night of Bach it is then.”

Frank purchased six tickets for the concert from the woman behind the reception counter from whom who we’d gotten the season schedule and when we returned to the rented car he suggested that we go somewhere for lunch; it was 1 p.m. and we hadn’t eaten since we’d left Huntingdale. He suggested a few places we could go, one of which was Chinatown for some Chinese food, a suggestion to which I instantly said yes. We ate in a restaurant called The Golden Dragon located on Saint-Laurent Boulevard. I asked Frank what I should order since I’d never eaten Chinese food before; he ordered pork stir fry noodles for the both of us and a plate of four spring rolls for us to snack on while we waited for our food to be ready. Looking around at the other diners in the restaurant, I was faced with more uncomfortable questions about whose societal philosophy was right: Prosperans or the people of this world. The diners inside the restaurant were a diverse set: whites, blacks and Asians, all of them co-existing in perfect harmony. Just like when we’d seen the black girl in the library the question of why there were only white people in Prospera entered my mind and I feared that the answer was ugly. Adding to my mental conflict was what I noticed when I looked closer at the diners in the restaurant and the pedestrians outside on the sidewalks. There was a carefree attitude about them that seemed wholly inappropriate given the military actions of the Americans in their country. Why did there seem to be no collective sense of danger and urgency? Why were they more concerned about what was on their cell phones and what they were listening to through their headphones than they were about the suffering of their fellow citizens? As Prosperans we had been brought up with a strong sense of community that wouldn’t have tolerated anything less than a unified response from everybody. That wasn’t the case here; life in this world was characterised by anonymity and dispersion, people were either alone or they belonged to a small group beyond which they had no connections. The idea that they were an important part of something bigger was not how they saw themselves; I could only see that as a fundamental failure of this world.

“Is something bothering you? You look quite deep in thought,” Frank asked me.

“I’m wondering why people aren’t more worried about the Americans and the war.”

“Oh they’re worried, they don’t show it but they’re worried; it’s easier for them not to think about the war and what might happen to them if it were to reach them so they ignore it, but it’s in the back of all their minds, that I can guarantee you.”

“Them ignoring the reality of the war doesn’t help anything, they could be volunteering to help victims like you and Father Calvin are doing or they could be fighting like the members of that online resistance movement; isn’t it wrong for only a few to be fighting and dying while everybody else just goes on with their lives as if nothing has changed?”

“That’s the way things have always been; armies fight wars, they’re not fought by everybody, and fighting takes courage, which most people don’t have.”

“Shouldn’t people be forced to fight then, if there’s the real possibility of losing your country?”

“Having a draft didn’t help America win in Vietnam.”

“Do you think they’ll win eventually, the Americans?”

“I do. Their dictator Mattis underestimated the amount of resistance he’d face here and only sent a small force to try and conquer us; if he gets sick of being trapped in this stalemate and decides to go for a decisive victory then they’ll definitely win. What’ll become of us then, I don’t know.”

“None of this makes any sense to me; I still don’t understand why they don’t just give them the oil.”

“I feel the same way; we don’t need it, we all drive electric cars, but I understand the government not wanting to take the risk of just allowing the Americans in here in case they’re after more than the oil; when you think of it that way, this war was unavoidable.”

“Senseless suffering shouldn’t be unavoidable.”

“I can imagine it’s difficult for you, being one of the people that have experienced loss because of this war. Cathy told me that you four lived in Askan, is that correct?”

“That’s right,” I answered tentatively, not having talked with Cathy about the particulars she’d given her father regarding our situation.

“I remember that attack being covered on the news, it was terrible. How did you four survive?”

“We weren’t in town; we were out, camping.”

“You’re lucky, most people aren’t as lucky as you’ve been. You still have each other, and you have me and Cathy, and as you’ve seen today there’s plenty being done to help victims, so there’s no need for you to be in so much despair about everything that’s happening.”

“I want to help; I want to contribute something to make things better for people.”

“We can discuss that tomorrow when we’re back in Huntingdale.”

We didn’t end up staying in Montreal until 6 p.m. Frank took me to see a few more places after we’d had our lunch and we ended up leaving on a train back to Huntingdale at 3.30 p.m. The trip had been a truly eye opening experience for me. My understanding of this world had greatly increased and I’d developed a greater appreciation for the capacity for compassion that the people in this world had. There were things that you couldn’t learn about just by reading about them in books, that lesson applied more in this world than it did in small, static Prospera. Seeing the people in Montreal interacting with each other and with their surrounding environment it was clear that the problems that they were so obsessed with controlling in Prospera by taking pre-emptive action against them were of very little consequence to these people; they were focused on living their lives and living them happily. Looking back it occurred to me that not everybody in Prospera was as happy as they should have been living in a place of perfect peace. I had been critical of the nonchalance of the people in Montreal in the face of American military aggression; on the way back to Huntingdale I thought of Martha, whom my mother had told would be having an abortion in order to keep the population numbers in Prospera sustainable. She had been shattered by what Prospera demanded of her and by her inability to do anything about it. The difference between the people in Montreal and the people in Prospera, I realized, was that for people in Prospera the danger they faced was constant and in close proximity to them, at any time someone like my mother could demand that they to do something terrible. In one of the books I’d taken out of the library I’d read that the primary tool used by dictators to control people and keep them compliant was fear. We had no dictator in Prospera but there were similar tactics at play. I didn’t believe that it was the goal of my mother and the other committee members to keep their machinations entirely secret; having studied the politics of fear I could only deduce that it was their intention to allow just enough information about their actions to be known by others outside of their tight circle to give just enough credence to the rumours already doing the rounds that kept everyone afraid and in line. This world and Prospera were becoming increasingly similar to me, and why wouldn’t they? We were all human beings after all and Prospera had been founded with humanity’s flaws front and centre in the minds of its creators. The matter of who was right and who was wrong came down to the question of whether in the case of Prospera the ends justified the means; I didn’t know enough to make a definitive judgment on that just yet.