Chameleon (Days)
Page 5
“We’re going to talk. Get in the truck,” I point, and he walks, dejected, on his own. All I can think about is how sorry I feel for him. I try my best to disguise it with my anger. I have to be a father now, and the bad guy, and although I don’t like this role, and I would rather be the teacher, or the Dad who shows him how to be a man, I understand our limitations. It’s hard to father him over the phone. It’s hard when you find yourself three hours away to intercede on a “live” menial ritual like finishing your homework.
He sits in the front seat now.
“Disrespectful?” I raise my voice as I start the truck. It rumbles to back up my voice. He doesn’t say anything.
“That’s what you are? Disrespectful? My son is disrespectful?” I’m borderline losing my temper. My flu stomach gurgles and I worry I may lose something the other way, in my pants. I tighten my gut.
“We’re going to fix this.”
I lay into him for nearly an hour on the drive back. I grill him with questions, why he isn’t paying attention in class, why he is staying up at night, why he isn’t eating properly. (I facetimed him recently to see a 7-11 Slurpee in the frame of the screen.)
As I’m giving it to my son, like The Man was giving it to me prior, I am recording where I see a potential deficiency in my parenting. My former wife tries her best as a single mother, and so do her parents, but the arrow keeps stopping at me and my absence in his life.
My son is trying to force himself to cry now to make me stop. I end my admonishment in style:
“That’s it. Look at the sign. We hit Hamilton. You’re lucky it didn’t last the whole drive.”
In the aftermath, he apologizes to me. He makes his promises to change. He isn’t an addict or an alcoholic, but I worry about his future without my surveillance. I suppose, as an author, I am accustomed to keeping control of a story, but his story is as unpredictable as the one I am working on. And maybe this isn’t so bad. Maybe he needs to find himself in the chaos just like my characters, just like their author.
“I just want you to feel good about yourself, to dream and believe you can be what you imagine yourself to be. You think your Daddy likes to yell at you? It breaks my heart one thousand times more when I see yours breaking.”
He stares at me for an awkward length. I review what I said to him hoping I didn’t cuss as I did so.
“How much time until we get home?”
“Under an hour.”
“Do you mind if I sleep a little.”
When he closes his eyes, I let myself cry in the darkness of the truck. The Man is nowhere to be found and I worry he has seen my greatest weakness.
DAY 8 (LATER THAT NIGHT)
The upcoming chapter I am trying to write is often interrupted by bouts of stomach cramps and trips to the toilet. After returning home and tucking in my son with a traitor’s kiss, my gurgling stomach forces me to isolate myself in the basement again. I can’t sleep. My stomach is upset and I worry I have food poisoning now.
With no hope of a peaceful rest in sight, I relocate The Messenger hitchhiking at night, just past where he abandoned his car.
Although it is dusk, there is a red laser line tracing the white peaks in the distance. To The Messenger, it resembles a Pink Floyd album cover, Dark Side of the Moon. The Messenger is not afraid to be hitchhiking. He is well fed and relaxed. And the walk up a steeper slope is a soft one on gravel. It doesn’t take long for a metallic green four-door sedan to pull up ahead of him. The Messenger chases the red brake lights and hurries to the passenger side door.
“Bsharri?” the younger man in a suit and tie asks. The inside of the car smells like mint trapped in an artificial package.
“Yes.”
“Get in, soldier.”
The Messenger remembers what he is wearing now. The customs official’s uniform. It must have been his lawful uniform which prompted this professionally clad man to stop his vehicle. The Messenger doesn’t respond to the acknowledgment. If the uniform protects him, he achieves his mission faster by reaching Bsharri on schedule.
The younger professional is very careful as he pulls back onto the road. He uses his directional signal, before he merges quickly into the passing traffic.
The vehicle itself is newer, leather seats covered in custom plastic sheaths. Every time The Messenger moves, he hears himself doing so.
“It is a new car. I asked for the covers. I know, covering the dash and where your feet rest is a little much.”
“It is very clean,” The Messenger agrees, forcing a complimentary tone of voice.
“My name is Sifar.”
“I would like to tell you my name, but I am not permitted to do so, under any circumstances.”
The Messenger presents this requirement of his mission as he would a joke, the punchline being no need to worry with a man in uniform. With the armoured support of the uniform, The Messenger does not feel rude in saying this. He feels Sifar will understand.
“I thought of becoming an official myself. Actually, I nearly joined the army.”
“What prevented you?”
“Education, the Civil War, hypocrisy.”
The latter term ruffles his skin as he says it. He squirms in his plastic sheathed seat. It sounds as if he is stretching the car from the inside out so he can fit his legs into it better.
“Are you a fence man, like the rest of them?”
This question is rather aggressive for The Messenger.
“A fence man?”
“Yes. At the border. A secret Sunni in uniform, letting Syrian rebels across.”
The Messenger considers admitting his identity honestly. His military uniform seems to be communicating messages he can’t necessarily control.
“I do not know what you mean.”
The Messenger settles on ignorance instead. It is, he decides, safer to pretend you know nothing about who you are pretending to be.
Sifar is agitated. He loosens his tie with a violent tug. The plastic surrounding him reacts with a warping sound. The Messenger remains as still as he can.
“I suppose killings and kidnappings don’t mean anything to you, or the Cedar Revolution. How soon we forget.”
Although his former life’s position as peacekeeper on the U.N. interim force introduced these ongoing clashes between Sunni opposition forces and Lebanese Armed Forces, his outside peacekeeping role prevented him from realizing the deeper roots of conflict on the border of Syria and Lebanon.
“I work as any man does in uniform,” The Messenger says. He knows diffusing a situation involves humility and concession.
“Yeah, you work all right, for both sides of the fence.”
“I can walk the rest of the way, if you prefer?”
The Messenger decides that Sifar’s tone of voice is far from compromise or casual discussion. He is speeding now and his one hand is trembling on the steering wheel. This turn of events has happened so fast. This violent metamorphosis between man in suit and angry protestor yielded no hint or gun powder line. Just three seconds, like a grenade, and detonation.
As the car ascends the hill, The Messenger sees a straight line of clouds replacing the red line. A very straight, thin sheet of clouds stretching from one end of the earth to the other, like an equator in the sky.
“How about you die the rest of the way.” These words explode from Sifar’s ballooned cheeks like a sudden burst of steam. He yanks the car over to the side and before The Messenger expects it, this man who is dressed for a funeral is stabbing him violently with a knife of no bulging origin. The Messenger feels it plunging into his abdomen, and then into his chest; he feels it missing his neck as he instinctively pushes the door open. The man kicks him out of the car. While The Messenger waits for Sifar to jump out himself and finish the job, he understands the symbolism of the plastic sheathed interior now.
As
expected, Sifar jumps out with no hurry. He shuffles sand into dust clouds as he stands over and spits on The Messenger.
“One less traitor to this country is one more blessing for peace.”
The Messenger struggles to find his bleeding wounds with his hands. He can feel the warmth of his blood leaving his body, in between his fingers. He can also feel the warmth of this man’s spit on his face, cooling quickly.
Just as he imagined every time he tried to kill himself, twenty-three times and counting, his life presents visuals in this flushing of blood transition to the other side. He sees the woman in the scarf and her tiny son, the tiger killer, crouching in the darkness of the bushes. He imagines them watching him die, as he imagines his own son and wife in another lifetime. His wife is breastfeeding his newborn son in the shadow of moonlight seeping in from the half blinded window. Her golden hair is aglow as is a spot on his son’s smooth face. It is one of the scenes which haunts him as a motif, recurring with additional details to colour and reflect its meaning.
Before Sifar leaves his position in the sky to enter his car again, The Messenger chokes.
“Thank you,” he says.
The car speeds off leaving a sheath of gravel that settles on him like tiny hail pellets, or the first shovel of dirt in a grave.
The Messenger has finally achieved his wish despite the incompletion of his mission. He will die with a beautiful view of the night sky and the thin clouds moving rapidly against a backdrop of stars and falling flashing lights. He had always wondered what those floating, flashing lights were. Were they airplanes, or helicopters, or satellites posing as falling stars? Nonetheless, they are as beautiful as the stars themselves, and not trapped in a static constellation.
DAY 9
My middle son finds me passed out in the bathroom, like they did Elvis Presley. Hunched over my knees on the toilet with nothing left to give. My laptop out of battery on the hamper I used as a desk.
“What are you doing, Daddy?”
“Dying?”
“But you’re still alive.”
This is my son, Oscar, my second born, who is ironically blonde with ebony eyes. He is wearing his new glasses. We have finally sold him on them.
“I know. Can you turn around so that Daddy can pull up his pants?”
“Privacy?”
“Yes, privacy, good boy.”
Another remembered lesson apparently learned.
I worry if I saved the last segment before I passed out. Luckily for me, I recall the technology of auto save, which saves me another panic-induced toilet episode. Nothing like losing something you wrote. Instant horror.
When my son leaves to give me privacy, The Man enters to occupy it.
“You killed him before the mission? Now we have to start all over again, find someone new to send my message? I don’t get it. I don’t get you. Kashif was supposed to kill him after he received the message, like passing a simple baton. You did this on purpose to spite me.”
I don’t answer him. I hobble to the sink to wash my hands and to see two sunken eye sockets traced in charcoal. Except, there is no energy in these sun blockers, only fatigue.
“If he dies, he dies,” I recite this famous ’80s movie line under my breath to intimidate The Man. He is not impressed by my allusive humour.
“He was worthy enough to deliver the message and you know it.”
I don’t respond. I can hear footsteps all over the floor above. The heaven of my family awaking too early in the morning to beat the sun with breakfast activity.
I remove the laptop from the bathroom for fear one of my younger children will find a place for it in the toilet (perhaps where it belongs), and store it instead on a bookshelf. I need to spend the day talking to my eldest son. He needs to know how much I care about him. Like a miracle worker, I actually believe I can convert him back to confidence.
My wife is making waffles for my son Tobias, whose diet is very limited due to his aversion to textures—another side effect of being Downs. He loves waffles and dipping them in syrup. His only other preference is ice cream. He can eat ice cream any time of his waking day, and yours, and anyone else’s in the vicinity. He is an ice cream addict, like his mom and dad.
The waffle batter smell doesn’t help my stomach in the least. I resolve to return to my flu water diet, except my right eye is really sore for some reason. Perhaps I threw up one too many times, or maybe it is a sinus thing. Whatever it is, my wife notices me in pieces.
“Boy, you look like you are falling apart.”
“Thanks. Is Aidan up yet?”
“No. Everything all right with him?”
“He’s not getting along with his teacher and he’s been disrespectful. His grades have dropped.”
“Oh my.”
I can tell she is distracted in her tone of voice. She went in for her mammogram and we are awaiting the tests in the torture of real life suspense. Leave it to doctors to have mastered the art of it.
“I want him to come and live with us, full time,” I say, not in the form of a question.
“I think he needs you too,” she says, as if interpreting my real intentions.
Before I can answer her, I have to rush to the bathroom again. However, this is a dud run. When I arrive at the toilet, I realize I have nothing left in my stomach to throw up again. Not even bile. The Man is waiting for me in this bathroom too. My kids are outside the door, knocking wildly to enter. Even Oscar, whom I thought learned the value of privacy.
“I know what you are doing with The Messenger. I figured it out. Like On The Sidewalk Bleeding.”
This scares me. He can read my thoughts.
“You want him to realize there is a reason to live before he actually dies. You wouldn’t have spent so much time and words leading him to Bsharri, just to let him die just outside of it. You’re not that masochistic.”
Once again, I wash my face in this upstairs sink. The dimmer lighting is more flattering to my paler complexion. I haven’t shaved in a week either and there are hairs growing everywhere. Just below my eyes, on my temples, my ears. I need to recover my neglected self.
I ignore The Man but he continues.
“You liked that story as a kid, didn’t you?”
He is alluding to “On The Sidewalk Bleeding,” a story about a young, teenaged gang member who gets ambushed when he leaves a party to buy some smokes. It is raining and he can’t speak, but he tries desperately to die without his gang jacket. He struggles to remove it. In the meantime, three parties of people discover him but are too afraid to help. He manages to get the jacket off, but by the end of the story, when the police officer is writing the report, he notices the discarded jacket first. He says, “just another Royal,” and Andy’s dream of dying as himself, as just Andy, is tragically destroyed.
I received the strap, or actually, the ruler strap, in grade six for reading the story. I had finished my homework and Mr. Hill, our six-foot-five Iroquois Indian English teacher, had ventured to the back of the classroom from his permanent position of writing terms on the blackboard. After finishing early, I opened my desk and found the grade eight book of stories, the last of which was “On the Sidewalk Bleeding.” As I finished reading it, he was staring over me. He called me to the front of the class and sarcastically gave me the ruler on my hand, in front of Christine Persia, a girl I was hopelessly in love with. I kept telling myself, “don’t cry, don’t cry” because I didn’t want her to see me cry. She would never like me if she saw me cry.
I remember going home and telling my mom, and in her Italian immigrant way she said I deserved it.
From that moment on, the story, “On The Sidewalk Bleeding” seemed to follow me. As a teacher, I found it surviving the cuts into new story anthologies. I taught it so many times that I decided to write a gang story myself. My story published under the title “Blood Relatives.” Whe
n I read it at the magazine launch, an elderly woman in the front row approached me afterwards. She said my story reminded her of a story she used to teach. At the same time we said, “On The Sidewalk Bleeding,” and the irony was finally complete.
I received a nomination for The Journey Prize for that story, but it didn’t make the shortlist.
Although I hadn’t purposely tried to put The Messenger in the same predicament, I found myself later in the day, as I watched my children take swimming lessons at the university pool, wondering if my subconscious managed to put The Messenger “On The Hill Bleeding.” The Man must have secured access to my subconscious a step before it dictated the words to my fingers. This worried me. I didn’t want him to interfere with the story. He was just a character. He didn’t have the rights or authorial privileges, and yet, he was clever enough to see influence in my work.
My eldest son stays a safe distance away from me the entire Saturday. He hides in the group of his brothers and sister, or with those who visit to see him. I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about his troubles any more. He doesn’t appreciate my disappointment in him. This time, I made a hurtful impression and I begin to feel guilty again for hurting his feelings. I have to convince myself to stay strong to my words. I am his father, a parent, in a position of authority (as I assume I am with my novel), but instinctively drawn to hug and kiss him. My embattled Italian grandmother on my father’s side, the one who never visited a hospital, and died at 93, the same one who walked ten miles a day in the harsh Canadian winter with grocery bags creasing her veiny hands, used to tell my father that you kiss your kids when they are asleep—so that you don’t make them weak to a cruel world. Although I considered this advice heartless at one point in my life, I reconsidered its rationale in the context of my fatherly responsibilities. It just felt unfair to attack him, when he spent so much time away from me.
So I made him confess to everyone in our extended family so that he wouldn’t develop the habit of hiding things from me.
He hated me for making him expose himself with honesty, all of the stuff that contributed to this lack of confidence, but by the end of this exercise, we were both laughing at it. I think it made him feel like he was big enough to defeat it. We watched the hockey game together at night, and fell asleep together on the couch.