Chameleon (Days)

by Dean Serravalle

  The trail leads them to a city square, surrounded by buildings, cobblestoned around a grand fountain. There is a platform set up before the fountain.

  The Man of Many Wives walks up the platform to introduce Kashif. He describes him very eloquently as a man who has seen God, as a man who will ascend one day as a true prophet of their generation. Kashif is unmoved by these words of praise and acclamation. They don’t penetrate him. If anything, he is bored by the ceremony, by the appreciation. It means nothing to him.

  It is nighttime when The Man of Many Wives escorts them to a room in the compound. It is highly decorated with items speaking the language of excess and wealth. Gold faucets, golden chandeliers, gold speckled marble tiles.

  His face, like Kashif’s, has changed by night. He is no longer the public leader, the humble demonstrator, or even The Man of Many Wives. He has come alone. He invites Kashif and The Messenger to sit at the gold-laced wooden table. His voice has also changed. It is unfeeling now, almost mathematical.

  “We are taking bids and then the negotiation will begin.”

  “Thank you for your hospitality.”

  “I am pleased you are ours for the moment. You have vaulted our value.”

  Kashif doesn’t say anything. It is obvious. The Man of Many Wives is about to leave the room when Kashif stops him.

  “You have many children, true?”

  “Yes, four wives and fourteen children.”

  “You are a lucky man.”

  “Yes, I am blessed. Please refrain from insulting me further.”

  “They will eat you one day,” Kashif predicts.

  The Man of Many Wives leaves the room, obviously upset. It is the first time The Messenger sees Kashif as aggressive on this peculiar journey. He doesn’t understand the insult at all. To The Messenger, Kashif’s questions were small talk, polite and cordial. But The Man of Many Wives received them differently.

  Before asking him, The Messenger thinks about it some more. Why would The Man of Many Wives be insulted about a family question?

  “Because he knows I saw through him from the beginning. He is proud to have captured to me, but I told him I surrendered to him. He is using me to further his group, I am using him to further my search. He is a liar by trade, and so am I, but my truth makes me more real to our destinies. He is aware now that I am aware of his story.”

  Although a language specialist and a premier translator, The Messenger feels inferior to this code language amongst them. They speak terror and fear, and their mode of communication is not to clarify, but to riddle and hide. They become their art, and their art aims to stay on the wall of civilization longer than any other.

  Kashif points to the bags delivered to the room.

  “Take a shower and clean up. It won’t be long now. We will be sold and bought and then delivered to the council.”

  Kashif enters the bathroom and closes the door.

  DAY 36

  My first son, from my first marriage, is down for the weekend. We are celebrating his belated birthday due to the fact it didn’t fall on one of my visiting weekends. It is nice to see he is back on track at school. We talk on the return drive from London and he fills me in on the meeting he and his mother had with his teacher at school.

  Apparently, he needs to stay clear of a very popular friend who is distracting him from his studies. In the same key, he is very creative, according to his teacher, with the potential to be the top student in class. I nearly laugh at the subjective way he sees himself.

  “Daddy, I’m going to be better,” he assures me. “I’m going to start working out more and getting in shape too. I can’t waste my talents, Daddy,” he says seriously, and I am happy he feels better about himself.

  My wife and I have made up since our last argument. She broke down in tears and apologized for the cruel words she said the night she compared my chosen career path with the more successful options my brothers pursued.

  I understand that attending each and every therapy session for Tobias has taken its toll on her. When I fell in love with her, I loved her most for her enthusiasm about family and the adventures we would have growing a big one by today’s urban standards. Neither of us anticipated the challenges lurking in these familial dreams. Nor did we foresee how those challenges would interfere with our own relationship, which we both thought invincible.

  Unfortunately, she lost the innocent belief that everything is going to be all right. I try every day to remind her we have everything to be grateful for and many days she is the one ­convincing me, but it isn’t healthy on either end, I suppose. The assurance begins to sound like lies when compared to the reality of our situation. One son estranged three hours away, another challenged by his inability to walk, eat and go potty, even at the age of five, with the other two innocent of what responsibilities lie before them in the future. When we make up, we both agree that we need to be more positive and to value the little things—our daily and adventurous bath routines, the cartoonish characters of our children, the way they love us in return. We are very blessed and the air is clear before my son’s belated birthday party.

  That same air becomes foggy again when we celebrate it at my parents’ home. It is always loud when we celebrate events at my parents’ house. All of the grandchildren are virtually in the same room and the noise levels are unbearable. Within the chaos of trying to get them fed, refereed after innocuous conflicts, and arranging them together at the table to sing happy birthday, I overhear a conversation my son Aidan has with my father, and once more I am saddened.

  My father comments to my son that he is getting older.

  “Pretty soon you are going to drive to see us,” he remarks.

  “That’s four years away, Nonno,” my son giggles it off. He is happy to have everyone’s attention at the party, even though he said we didn’t have to celebrate it on the drive back from London. I told him he wasn’t old enough yet to complain about celebrating his birthday and he didn’t resist any further.

  In the same conversation, my father asks my son what he wants to be in his life. They assume I am not listening or overhearing the conversation because I am trying to get my one-year-old daughter to sit on my lap and drink from my glass cup.

  “I want to write stories,” my son says.

  This admission stabs me so deep I feel physical pain in my back.

  “Maybe you should be a doctor, or a lawyer,” my father responds in a broken, accented whisper.

  “They make good money, they have their own office, people respect them,” my father says even lower, pulling my son closer to show affection at the same time.

  “But I like writing stories. I read a lot of books, Nonno.”

  I pretend to ignore them and their conversation, even though I can sense both are looking at me. I am not even insulted by my father’s words. I have known these feelings since my mother first told my father I wanted to write stories. My father is a rag to riches success story. He immigrated to Canada when he was sixteen. He worked shitty, automotive, mechanic jobs, only to realize the potential wealth in car recycling. He purchased a building when I was merely one, mortgaging everything he owned, including our house, at 18% (I have heard the story many times), and risked everything only to see it off with great dividends. As a result of his struggles, he forced us to stay in school. He wanted us to have “clean” jobs; he insisted, and he envied the lawyer’s offices he often visited to broker deals, their suited attires, the bills they presented him with, and of course the exorbitant amounts bolded on those invoices.

  My father never understood my passion for writing. He could never relate to it since he was virtually illiterate in this country. My mother, who immigrated at seven years old, went to school in Canada and together they formed a can’t-miss partnership. My mother handled accounts, my father took risks. My father never respected teachers, and yet I became one. He never unde
rstood the economic benefits of writing, because he never read a book. All he ever preached was developing a good name, for business sake, and both of my brothers followed suit, which made their pursuits more relatable to him. I never spite my father for never asking about my writing career. I know he is proud of the man I have become, but I also know he wishes I could have become someone more important in a suit.

  Although I am happy my son defends his interests to my father, I see my mistakes repeated in another time zone. I’ve taken some portal time machine only to see my first dreams in an objective light and they appear saturated in delusion.

  After this secret conversation, my son finds his way to me. He knows I am busy with his one-year-old sister but he gives me a back hug. My father watches to see how affectionate he is with me and I can read envy in his eyes now, or disappointment. I’m not sure. I know my father doesn’t think his first son successful on an economic level. And now, his first grandson is following the rabbit down the same, darkened hole.

  I anticipate another anxiety-ridden night, but I don’t feel sorry for myself anymore or the decisions I have made. I find out a week later that my son also had a conversation with my mother that night, one I didn’t overhear.

  “He thinks you work too hard. He told me. He’s a bright boy. Even though he isn’t here all of the time.”

  “I know. I need to spend more time with him when he is down. Some more one on one time.”

  “You know what else he told me?”

  “What, Mom?”

  “He said, ‘My Daddy does all of these different jobs to make money for us, but he loves writing the most. I can tell, that’s what he wants to do more than anything. He is happy when he is writing.’”

  My mother’s face is tragic when she relates this to me. It wrinkles with a lifetime of concern. Aside from my first novel being published, both of my parents don’t look kindly on awards, or award nominations that garner very little economic return. They have never understood why I spend so much time doing something that doesn’t make me money, or improve the future of my kids. I expect more criticism from my mother. As the first born, I have always received it in bushels. This time around she is impressed by something.

  “He really admires and loves you,” she says, almost breaking into tears.

  I know where I get my sadness from and I worry I will be having the same conversation with my son, many years away, when he reveals his greatest passion and dreams aren’t really working out for him as he first expected.

  “I’m sorry things haven’t worked out, Mom.”

  I am alluding to so many of my mistakes when I say this to my mother. My failed career choices, my failed first marriage, my inability to fulfill the dream I promised I would prove them wrong with. I am old enough not to blame them for their lack of faith in my abilities. And I am wise enough to realize your choices are yours and yours only. They have nothing to do with anyone else. They are a part of your destiny. And yet I continue to believe that even this book I am writing will save everything. Like one book can alter the course of time. Like a word placed in the right spot can shift the axis of the earth. And who knows, maybe it already has since I’ve written it down.

  The Man doesn’t show up to my son’s birthday party. I didn’t invite him and perhaps he knows I need to spend some time away from our conversations. Also, I don’t need to be reminded not to feel sorry for myself. No one likes a pity party but the person who craves pity in the first place. And like most cravings, they can surely turn into addictions, or worse yet, chronic syndromes.

  My son is very grateful for the gifts he receives on his birthday. They are thoughtful gifts and I don’t have to prompt him to say thank you for them. He feels appreciated by the family he may often believe forgets about him when he isn’t around. He feels grateful to have a father he admires. I don’t want him to be a writer and I wish he could be so innocent of faulty dreams ­forever.

  DAY 37

  “So, are you going to finish this story or what?”

  The Man wakes me in the middle of the night. It is four AM and he can’t even wait seventeen minutes more, when he knows I habitually jolt to have my panic attacks. He is impatient, almost edgy. He is in a hurry to be, before he disappears from my memory. Or maybe he is anxious to enter the story, although I haven’t figured out a way yet to get him back into it.

  “You can’t get so distracted now. You have to finish up strong. The Messenger and Kashif are about to be sold to another terrorist group and they will present themselves before the council. By the way, this mysterious council confuses me. I don’t see it in your research notes.”

  “So you admit to reading my research notes?”

  “Of course. It makes me feel like I’m reading those ‘pick your ending’ books. Remember, you used to like them as a kid?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Is this argument necessary again? What does it matter what I know, as long as you know I know it. We are family, no?”

  I never thought of him this way. My creation as family, and yet this domestic metaphor is prevalent in every association with God as a creator. His creations are children, he is a father, or possibly a mother, one and the same.

  “The Council is something I read into when I sifted through the Al-Qaeda research,” I admit. No family secrets here.

  “The ones found in Iraq, after the liberation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  Although I can’t see The Man, I can imagine him shuffling through my papers, although in real time I know they remain still in various piles in my office.

  “The torture explanations are written in presentation format, as if prepared for a specific audience, a selective audience. Each torture depicted in those drawings and the accompanying text is intended to impress someone else. Like it was an experiment or something. And there were discoveries made of an ethereal nature. In those side notes, I caught a misprint, something scratched out. After staring at it and blowing it up, I found an insignia. A council insignia.”

  “So it was documentation intended to impress a specific group?” The Man is thinking aloud.

  “Yes. Although I didn’t write it down anywhere, I found the same insignia elsewhere, in some other writings. And then I discovered the designation of the council in some irrelevant research on The Illuminati.”

  “Oh my, is this what your book is coming to, another version of The Da Vinci Code.”

  “Very funny. This Council exists in absolute secrecy, above levels of government and laws, as an oligarchy of sorts.”

  “Much better, more like Orwell now,” The Man comments.

  “No, not like Orwell. This Council is not consumed with control or power. Just immortality.”

  The Man is silent and I believe I have earned my seventeen minutes of additional sleep. This new information doesn’t satisfy him. He is relentless, almost desperate.

  “You still have to introduce the kid, that’s if you want to make him real, so you have a lot of work to do. You know it is always hard to finish a novel and you have passed your deadline for the first draft. Next semester is about to start. You will have new classes and the worries of the literacy test. Not to mention your big grievance decision. Do you want to do this or not?”

  The Man sounds like a motivational coach. He never sounded so desperate and impassioned about the finish line.

  “What do you mean, making the child real? Of course the child is real.”

  “I don’t see any research about a miracle child anywhere. Is he solely a concoction, a wildcard element to the story?”

  “You don’t believe this child exists? He is the reason for the journey. He is the ultimate justification of cause for the council. This child exists in the same way Sister Carmelina existed.”

  “Sister Carmelina? Who are you talking about now?”

  Th
e Man is confused and I feel empowered that he didn’t know the inspiration for this character. He doesn’t know everything happening in my mind and my imagination. My newfound pride reveals it to him.

  “Sister Carmelina cured my brother.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of a swollen gland. When my brother was a child, his one salivary gland jutted out like a goiter. My mother thought it was a tumor. The specialists at Sick Kids Hospital couldn’t explain it. At one point, he could barely swallow. It was nearly suffocating him. So my religious mother decided to take us all to a hospital in Tripoli. There was a nun bedridden there. She had been bedridden her entire life, since she was a little girl. I remember the visit. Her skin was so white and her hair so dark. We entered her hospital room as a family and she was already speaking to my mother about my brother’s condition. She then raised her hand and placed it on the swollen gland. My family watched as she fell into a deep, trancelike sleep. I was younger, but I remember trying to see if she flinched, or moved, or squinted. Not even her eyelashes twitched. She was frozen while her hand was glued to my brother’s gland. It lasted quite some time. And then she woke up softly.

  “The next morning, my brother woke us all screaming from the bathroom. He felt a little rock under his tongue. It was attached to the bottom of his tongue and plain to the sight. My mother took him to the hospital and with a simple cut, the doctor removed it.