Chameleon (Days)

by Dean Serravalle

  “The doctor couldn’t explain the phenomenon. The specialists at Sick Kids were using words like miraculous.

  “The church is trying to canonize her now and she has many miracles to her name.”

  The Man is quiet after I recount this memory. Even though I can’t see him, I can tell he is rolling his eyes.

  “This is the inspiration for the kidnapped child?” The Man is not converted by my personal story.

  “Yes. I have learned that the least suspected are the most expected.”

  “And if Kashif finds this child, his daughter will be healed? What about him? Will he be healed of all of his past transgressions?”

  “I haven’t thought about it yet,” I admit honestly.

  “Well, shouldn’t you? You are the author of this story. This is your main character. Is it possible to remove your past sins with one, swift, sleight of hand? Reminds me of those born-agains. Yeah, sure, it’s easy to say you have given up your vices after you’ve lived an entire lifetime enjoying them. How convenient it is to be born again, just before you die and are destined for Hell.”

  “I haven’t decided Kashif’s end, just like I haven’t decided how the story will end. If I did so, I would be leading the story to the end instead of creating it honestly.”

  “Does a writer care more about his integrity than his reader? You are both, no? Writer and Reader? As a reader, how long have you idealized stories, believed they were written just for you, for no profit or gain but to make you dream of writing your own someday?”

  “What is your point?”

  “You are doing the same as a writer now! This book is too honest and will be silenced. Lies are easier sold than truths. History has proven this time and time again. You don’t want to get dirty, that’s your problem. To win is to cheat, to cheat is to outsmart, to outsmart is to be ahead, to be ahead is to reach the end before anyone else. Moral victories are just that, moral—weak—soft—invisible and, eventually, silent.”

  “Art has always been an appreciation of silence,” I defend.

  “Tell that to the person who is making money from your art, enough to allow him to make more of it. While you rot in a day job hoping someone will discover how brilliant you are and save you from your excuses. Heck, you started off this novel saying you weren’t going to write what an audience expected. You should do as you promised. Burn this fucking story, right after you rob it.”

  My daughter enters the room and her high pitched voice makes me flinch. I fear she might have heard a profanity before her time but then remember that only I seem to hear The Man. Unless she has some child-like sixth sense.

  “Hi Daddy. Hi Daddy. Hi Daddy. Hi Daddy.”

  She sounds like a skipping record, except she likes the sound of her own voice.

  “Hi, Alaia. How is my sweetie doing?”

  I pick her up and place her on my lap. I love when she leans back onto my chest. I can smell her hair and marvel at the tiny touch of her finger tips resting in the palm of my hand.

  “Don’t write the ending for her to read one day. Write it even though it may hurt her one day to think her Daddy might have sinned beyond her dream of you.”

  She squirms her way off of my lap as if hearing her mother calling her elsewhere. She stops and stares at me before she leaves. Did she hear what The Man said? Or does she see her father in the preliminary stages of schizophrenia.

  “Bye Daddy.”

  DAY 38

  I stall on the scene before my blurry ending. I can feel, by instinct, where the story is going, what end it will reach but I am stumped on this transition scene. This scene will be the catalyst scene, the one propelling the story with speed to its finale.

  It takes me a few days to mull it over. In that span, I spend some time with my children. I return to my routine of bathing them at night. Reading stories with them before bedtime. Shuttling them around to swimming lessons and soccer camps and ice skating. The scene doesn’t come to me right away. This is the first time I have hit a wall as the writer of the story and The Man is nowhere to be found. He doesn’t offer any advice or help. He seldom does when I really need it. I suppose I created him this way. To capitalize upon a weakness but not to contribute to a strength.

  I left the story with Kashif reminding The Messenger they were close to their meeting with the council. The Man of Many Wives doesn’t impress Kashif. Why should he? He is a carbon copy, a cheaper version of himself who takes pride in the fact he has something in common with the legend he kidnaps. Kashif recognizes this pride from a mile away. He doesn’t appreciate it, nor does he consider himself greater than The Man of Many Wives. This journey is a chore into the past for Kashif. He has grown to prefer his visits to the hospital, the routine of seeing his daughter, although he will never admit this flaw in the presence of The Messenger or anyone else. He is also aware that this softness is recognizable to those with instincts as refined as his. If he finds himself in front of the council, they will smell him out and devour him. For this entire journey he has been keeping this secret away from The Messenger. This new fascination with his own weaknesses.

  Kashif had lived an entire life made cold by warm blood on his hands, knowing full well, that with every murder he committed, he was becoming more and more numb to his own humanity. Similar to Macbeth, he had reached a stage where he couldn’t even react to a “night shriek.” “Blood will have blood,” he used to repeat to himself. Now, that same man is only a costume, only a shell he is trying with increased effort to sell to everyone he encounters along the way.

  The idea of this miracle child fascinates him as well. The personification of strength from weakness. The boy doesn’t walk. He is disabled, Kashif believes. And yet, he performs miracles. How is that so? Never, in his previous life, would he believe in such a deliberate contradiction in nature. The bad should cancel out the good, or vice versa.

  Kashif fears he has been inadvertently influenced by the Maronites he has hidden amongst for so many years. Their Saviour on a cross, naked, bleeding, thought to be a criminal. How could the same man be a God of power and strength, able to defeat death and recreate life in another dimension? This contradiction, similar to the child’s, is so obvious but so true in its conception.

  He never saw strength this way before, this softly, the flesh in it. For years, he had only seen the bones of it, the calcium deposits making fractures stronger after being broken.

  In the bathroom, alone, he is expecting someone to break and enter.

  (This is what comes to me in the shower. I woke up feeling my entire body tired and weak, almost brittle. Perhaps I am getting sick again, or maybe I am making myself sick. Either way, I am sweating naked in the mirror when I place Kashif in a similar scene.)

  Kashif knows The Messenger is expecting him, fully dressed in his suit, outside the bathroom. Kashif is in the bathroom alone. He dims the lights. He is naked in front of the mirror. Scars line his skin in random patterns. Some seem to resemble letters, even words, or a canvas of scratched in margin notes better suited for his own story. He can’t help himself from seeing such scars ­differently now. They are no longer battle scars. Symbolic of strength. No, no, no. He feels the one by his rib cage, formed from a twisted knife. It is silky smooth and soft, but strong enough to hold things together.

  His instincts dictate one thing, his heart another. He knows to expect someone to break into the bathroom any minute. Not from the door, but from the window. The sounds of festivities are below. There is celebration in the streets. There is hilarity in the forested areas surrounding the village. And there is condensation on the windows. Someone will appear soon. His instincts are rarely incorrect. Someone will enter, uninvited, to take his blood.

  This is the reason why he dug up the box of needles from his cave closet. He didn’t know it then, but his instincts prompted the retrieval. His box of needles and glass bottles. Blood samples to prove h
e is the same man who defeated enemy armies with the stroke of an ingenious idea. Blood samples with his DNA, the only way to prove his identity. The identity he had expertly kept secret for so long. The identity not even agencies trained to investigate could determine. The identity of a chameleon, whose skin changes and whose blood stays the same.

  There is a knock at the door.

  “Are you all right?” It is the Messenger. He is worried in his voice and expecting the next stage of the journey.

  “I am fine.”

  As he says this in the mirror, Kashif observes how his face moves, how it changes and contorts with every word. This is how others must see him, he determines. This is what makes them afraid.

  In the corner of the mirror, a black figure emerges from the window. As silent as Kashif’s skin in the mirror, he is wearing a mask. His body is athletic in black and he moves slanted, like a shadow against a wall. He is not a threat. He is only a technician. Kashif doesn’t flinch to be found naked, exposed, and vulnerable. After considering the man on the cross, the god on the cross, he is learning a newfound strength in this apparent weakness of exposure.

  The man in the black costume finds the black box with the needles and capsules. How does he know his tools await him on site? Kashif wonders. How is this man aware of the instincts that prompted Kashif to bring the box along in the first place?

  “Lie down.”

  There is a towel on the bathroom floor. It is dampened from the shower. Kashif lies on it as he would an operating table.

  The technician in the black costume expertly removes the needles. He attaches the glass capsules and injects one of the needles into the softest landscape of green veins, on the flipside of Kashif’s elbow.

  He lines up the bottles on the sink. Kashif counts them. One, two, three. Why do they require so much blood from him to determine if he is the real thing, the man they built an industry upon? Is there another purpose for the blood?

  “Blood will have blood,” he thinks again. Are they trying to match the quantity shed on his behalf?

  The Messenger opens the door and he is fearful of the scene or just fearful of the man in black extracting blood out of Kashif’s arm. Or maybe he is fearful of a naked man lying supine on the bathroom floor, too helpless to move with the needle in his arm.

  He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t react. He doesn’t understand, but he is all right with it if Kashif is voluntary. He has learned a lot from this journey, Kashif believes. To be aware of the details surrounding a story. To see them as reflections of character rather than setting and props.

  The Messenger politely leaves the room to secure the ritual privacy.

  The number of bottles on the sink is ten and counting.

  DAY 39

  “I am no master writer or critic, by any means, but you changed the point of view near the end of the story? That’s a no, no. You’re not established enough to assume the license to do this. That last scene was entirely written from Kashif’s perspective. A definite faux pas.”

  “Did you just say ‘faux pas’?”

  I tease The Man because, as I first noted in my preface, I don’t care to please. In order to move a story, sometimes you have to take a risk. I wanted that scene to be emotionally detonating. Kashif submitting blood on the bathroom floor like a person. Counting capsules of his own blood on the counter.

  In my mind’s eye, he was never the beast of his reputation. In my mind’s eye, I realize he is a sinner, as evil as one may be, but he is still human. And humanity is always the salvation point.

  “You’re not going to pull it off, Dean. You can’t make him a hero because you feel sorry for him, or because you have fallen in love with the character. Justice is much bigger than your imagination. The balance of good and evil existed long before your conception of it. He doesn’t deserve to survive this excursion. The Messenger, on the other hand, is redeemable.”

  I don’t appreciate The Man offering his two cents, although at this point his is a much steeper investment. He is right, in some respect. I want to dimensionalize this character some more before the ending. So far, I have developed him as an instinctive warrior who sees terror as a form of art to be valued in its intricate design. I think I’ve also established him as a father, just like me and many others, who is concerned first and foremost with the health of his child. This aspect, I believe, makes him relatable, but also pathetic enough to change. Up until this point, he has manipulated himself physically. He has undergone surgeries and breached extremes to adopt a chameleon role for various, survival reasons. Only now is he changing from within. This metamorphosis is his redemption, I believe. This changing of the guard from the inside out.

  “I don’t believe it,” The Man interposes. He is downright harassing me now as my class is writing their exams. They are quiet. Every once in a while, though, one or two of my students regard me strangely like they are eavesdropping on the ­conversation.

  “If I were a reader, I would find it very hard to believe Kashif is capable of such humanity.”

  “But aren’t the greatest sinners most capable?”

  I almost say this out loud or rather under my breath. Because it is so quiet in the classroom, some of my students hear it. Or maybe they are looking up from the exam because they are stressed to the point of distraction.

  “What is it, Emily?” I ask out loud.

  “Nothing, just thought I saw another grey hair.”

  I get up from my desk and pace between rows pretending I am proctoring the exam properly. My students are working hard and I am thinking hard.

  I nearly skip to my desk to resume my scene. I’m going to stay in Kashif’s perspective if only to annoy The Man further.

  Kashif wakes up after The Messenger places a cold cloth on his face.

  “You passed out. Must have been the bloodletting.”

  Kashif realizes The Messenger is upset with him. His sarcasm indicates a lack of trust in the grander picture.

  “I don’t want to explain. Not yet.”

  “Who was that? He nearly drained you of blood. Look?”

  The Messenger, when helping Kashif to the sitting position, pulls loose skin away from his forearm bone.

  “I don’t know why they needed so much. It is something beyond my identity or purpose.”

  “Do you need help getting dressed?” The Messenger asks.

  “No, just help me get onto my feet.”

  Kashif feels like he has entered another body unlike his own. It doesn’t respond well to stimulus. The limbs, although bloodless, are heavy in movement.

  He returns to the sink, washes his face and notices his skin has paled in tone, dramatically. The bloodletting transformed him into the unexpected likeness of his natural self. It seemed to reverse the many surgeries. He sees the man he used to be in the mirror now. The one with an appetite for destruction. The one intent on destroying meaning and routine and norms and anything worthy of peace.

  “Someone came to the door. He said the pilot has arrived?”

  Kashif realizes the negotiation has finalized. He leaves the bathroom and finds the suit he stitched on the table. He dresses as quickly as he can and returns to the mirror to ensure he appears strong and not weakened by the absence of his own blood.

  “I didn’t see him leave. The man in black. I didn’t hear him come or go?”

  “He isn’t the pilot. He is another man. The negotiation has ended.”

  When they leave the room it is early morning. The festivities are dead and the world is asleep. Kashif walks ahead of The Messenger. He gains strength with every step down a corridor. Although he is weakened, he believes his instincts have strengthened as a result of his body’s attempt at recovering itself.

  He knows the pilot is employed by the most powerful terror organization, the one directly linked to and on the right hand of the governing counci
l.

  The pilot is dressed in naval military uniform. He is young and angular.

  Kashif understands that the final terrorist group is waiting on the plane for him. The Messenger stands close by. He appears to be looking for The Man of Many Wives but that man has already been taken care of. He has no reason to be polite anymore. No one dies at this level. These are merely transactions, investments with returns. Numbers trounce pleasantries at this level and Kashif doesn’t feel the need to educate The Messenger. He believes The Messenger will figure this out for himself.

  “Let me lead you to the plane.”

  The pilot marches down the stairwell and to a shiny limousine. The chauffeur is waiting by the door. The Messenger, Kashif and the pilot are escorted to a private plane gleaming on its own runway.

  Another accordion stairway leads to an open door up above.

  Kashif and The Messenger follow the pilot up the steps. When they enter the plane another group is expecting them.

  “To the ruins,” a young man speaks up in the direction of the pilot.

  The pilot nods and Kashif moves to the seat prepared for him.

  DAY 40

  “You have the child,” are Kashif’s first words as he takes a seat in the plane. There are three young men sitting in the cabin with him. The Messenger is seated across from him, curious. The three young men don’t resemble each other. They are not brothers, or part of a brotherhood, like the other groups. These men are educated from various corners of the world. The screens of laptop computers flicker against the screens of their lighter faces. The man who speaks first is fair-skinned, almost freckled by the eyes. His accent is educated, private school British. He doesn’t act like he is caught in a lie. He is transparent, through and through.