DAY 10
Blasted out of bed by a bright, blinding, early morning sun storm, I sneak downstairs again to the kitchen before the kids wake. On the page, I find my dying Messenger, stranded on a hill, bleeding into the sand, physically absorbing into the night. Except, when I try to locate my notes for the next chapter (I usually type them in before erasing them when I start writing again), his perilous future disappears.
I never leave a day’s work without reviewing my notes for the next instalment, and yet, these notes disappear, and with them, so does the fate of my Messenger. Notes cannot find the delete button on their own. Or did someone not like what he saw.
The Man’s attempt at a subtle hint only serves to annoy me. The Man must have infiltrated my laptop and erased the direction I was heading in, although little does he know I often deviate from it anyway.
I have no intention of killing The Messenger. I never did. And contrary to what The Man assumed or predicted, I don’t want him to end up like Andy in the short story, “On The Sidewalk Bleeding.” I don’t want him to die this death, despite The Messenger’s insatiable and ironic desire to die by another’s hand.
So I begin the next chapter by placing him in the brightness of sunlight breaking into a hospital room. When his eyes open, The Messenger believes himself in Heaven or at least a bright purgatory before it. It makes him feel good again to feel new, resurrected life, to realize the afterlife is not a deep, historic sleep. All he can see is light when he opens his eyes. No shapes or shadows yet. Just light. The warmth of it heating his skin embalms his lips. In his heart, he feels overjoyed to have escaped the torture of his previous, natural life. All of the tragedy, the string of misfortune cut and re-stitched with stronger knots to make it more difficult with pulling to untie and loosen. The loss of his wife. The loss of his son. Each and every attempt at suicide. The strange, coincidental salvations.
This is the immortality he craved. A lighted one.
He could sense water sliding down his cheek from his eyes, sticking and pooling in the spaces between his neck and shoulders. A cleansing of flesh water to be replaced and dried by the bright light.
And then the voice.
“You are waking.”
He had heard this voice before. In his previous life. It continues.
“Do you see me, yet?”
The Messenger squints and more water flushes from his eyes. Sparkles appear in the light to replace the blurriness and deaden the brightness. A shadow behind the translucent shower curtain of light grows larger and develops an outline of edges. The Messenger can now smell the man’s skin, an alcohol-based pungent scent creeping in from the left side, where this man’s hand checks the pulse on his neck.
“What is your name?”
The Messenger doesn’t feel like he can talk. Does he have a name, anymore? Is it relevant in this other world?
“Can you see me, sir?”
The Messenger keeps squinting. The voice is insistent. As blurry as the light preventing him from sharpening the focus of his eyes.
He squints one last time. When his eyelids open, he sees a nose very close to his. The face reverses.
“We almost lost you. I mean, what am I saying, I tried to lose you.”
An evil giggle accompanies a familiar accent.
The Messenger squints again, repeatedly, like something is caught in his eye. And the more he tries to see, the more blind the water in his eyes makes him. His hands are restrained to steel bars. What Heaven is this? He panics. “I can’t move my legs, either.”
He struggles to see until he gives up and refuses the exercise.
He falls asleep.
When he awakens, a man whom he recognizes is sitting at the edge of his bed. This man is wearing a white lab coat. It is no longer bright in the room, but dark up above, with subtle fluorescent under lighting creating a glow from below.
“Am I above the clouds?” The Messenger asks.
“No, you are below them.”
“Why are you here?”
“I saved you from your wounds.”
“I am not alive.”
“Yes, you are.”
“You didn’t save me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You were the one who tried to kill me.”
“Also correct.”
“This cannot be.”
“But it is.”
“What are you doing to me?”
“Nothing I haven’t done to anyone else.”
“Which is?”
“Kill and save them at the same time.”
“Why?”
“I have my reasons.”
“I want to die. Kill me again.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“How does it work?”
“You live now, that’s all, until you die again.”
The words make The Messenger feel sleepy so he drifts away with the hope of never waking to the same nightmare—Sifar, his murderer, is dressed as a doctor.
It is Sunday, and after I finish my chapter for the day, my kids wake up on cue—for the first time in our family history. They charge downstairs with hungry eyes. It is still sunny and the glare is making Aidan squint.
“What would you like for breakfast, buddy?”
“I’m not hungry yet. Oh, nothing now please.”
Once again, I feel sorry after realizing his effort to sound more polite. He is trying hard to get on my better side.
“You are coming with me today.”
“I know, you drive me back today, Daddy.”
“No, we are going to church and then I am taking you for a haircut. We are going to stop into the bookstore and I am going to buy you a book. But first you are going to write a letter.”
“A letter? Why?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do?”
“Like a real letter?”
“Yes.”
“To whom?”
“Your teacher.”
He hates this idea. He blows air from his mouth and leans back.
“Are you pouting now?”
“No. Why am I writing him a letter?”
“To apologize, and to show him you are better than what he believes you to be.”
“What is the letter going to do?”
“Show him you are serious about changing your behaviour in his class. It’s like a contract and he can hold it to you because it’s on paper. Like a written promise.”
I can tell my wife, who is currently making waffle batter for Tobias, is impressed by the idea. She nods her head.
It’s the best idea I could think of before I drive almost four hours away to talk to this teacher in person. At the very least, my son doesn’t expect it, and I can exploit a teachable moment, shrinking away with the fact I have to drive him back to London in a couple of hours.
“He won’t like it.”
“Yes, he will.”
“What do you want me to write?”
“What you know you need to do, that’s all. Put it on paper and make it real.”
I hear the echo in my voice the more I talk. It seems like I am talking about my own writing, and furthermore, what I believe about the written word.
Aidan reluctantly grabs a piece of paper from the computer printer and I hand him my nice pen.
“Address it properly, like a professional. It will make him believe you are serious.”
He does as I ask and before long he has a list of errors he promises to repudiate.
“Now, you are going to type it out. You are going to give him the rough draft and a good draft. And you are going to sign it at the bottom.”
He follows the instructions and produces the final copy to me. I add a note, mys
elf, to ensure the teacher gets it. I don’t want my son to throw away the letter or pretend to lose it.
“I want this in your knapsack tonight. I’m going to tell your mother at the drop off.”
He pouts before finding a distraction to save him.
“Can I have some cereal now?”
“Sure, Cheerios?”
“Without the milk,” he asks.
Already, I can see him transforming into his eccentric, creative self again.
The drive back to London is a bonding moment. His haircut is a good one that he’s happy about and we stop into Chapters on the way to get him a Percy Jackson novel. He reads sixty pages in the car. We talk about confidence, and we talk about not giving up on yourself and before long, I am standing before my former wife at the truck stop.
I explain the letter and what he promised to reform in his behaviour. When he enters the car, I take it a step further.
“I would like him to live with me.”
My former wife’s reaction is pretended shock. She must have sensed I would go there.
“Why?”
“Because I think he needs me in his life. He needs his father now, if at the very least, for discipline’s sake.”
“He has two strong, male role models.”
She is referring to her father and her brother. I know they love my son, but together they can’t make up the bond we have. So I say it.
“He needs his father. The both of them can’t take my place.”
I don’t mean for it to sound that aggressive, but she uses it against me anyway.
“So, your new wife becomes his mother. I still haven’t forgiven you.”
She blames me for making the final decision on the end of our marriage. Ten years ago now, I try my best to address the current issue.
“It’s not about us. It’s about him, now. I promise, I’m not trying to steal him away. I just think he can benefit from having a father every day, not to mention his brothers and sister.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t borne him any siblings,” she says.
Now it’s getting ugly and I can sense The Man in the truck nodding his head. I can almost hear what he is saying. She is not going to change her mind. You can’t change her mind. She will never forgive you. People never change. She isn’t a character in your book. She is a human being, born with the inability to change.
“It’s not about you! It’s about him. What kind of kid says he has no confidence? He needs me. We can keep the legal agreement intact, just change the residency. I’ll pay for it if I have to.”
This stuns her, the fact I will continue to pay her child support despite him living with me. He is in the backseat of the car and her parents are in the front seat, behind the windshield, witnessing our argument. I worry they will use the scene to turn him against me. I worry I wasted breath and my passion to save my son on the wrong battleground.
“Please, think about it.”
She enters the car and I wave to my son as they speed off in the opposite direction. I listen to sad songs all the way home.
DAY 11
I arrange my notes on the Governmental hospital in Bsharri, but they lack an authenticity of experience. I know the measurements of rooms, the views from others, the entire design of the ICU, where The Messenger rests, afraid to wake up to the nightmare he experienced in the bright light.
To fill in the gaps, I remember my own time in the ICU in Hamilton. Or actually, the time I spent watching the beeping monitor measure the growing blood clot in my father’s brain. He fell in the garage at my uncle’s house after leaving the party to go for a smoke. To this day, no one understands how it happened. My mother found him on his back, blood leaking out of his ear. I remember the scene tragically. Mid-January, minus 19 degree weather, my feet in his borrowed silk, see-through socks, freezing on the pavement as I watched my uncle pull my incoherent father up to the sitting position, his eyes rolled back before he vomited onto his lap.
The injury segregated him in a coma on the third floor of the hospital, in the ICU, for close to six months. We were told he may never wake up. What we didn’t expect was the harm a feeding tube in his stomach would cause. It damaged his spinal cord and left him paralyzed from the waist down.
He did wake up, actually, the day after a nurse very rudely convinced us otherwise. It happened during my graduating year in university and it changed all of our lives. My father, the workhorse, a bull in the guise of a human being, who never once took a Tylenol, now takes a cocktail of pills every day as he tries to exist sitting down in a chair that prevents him from charging through a red flag.
I sit back on my chair in the office. It is late at night, or early morning. I can’t tell. I’m struck by what I remember from those days. Countless shifts in the ICU, sleeping on hospital floors. Patrolling doctors. Visiting priests. Lost hope. Desperate prayers. Nosy relatives and friends curious to see if he had lost his mind, the one that intimidated so many with its business savvy.
I recall every detail, ingrained in my skin, tattooed to my DNA now, flowing through my veins. I recall all of the metallic scents mixed in with passing carts marked with hurried penmanship as “soiled diapers.” I remember the gloomy but soft lighting in the ICU late at night, the soft green nurses’ uniforms, and their white sneakers. How we fed him water with a sponge because he couldn’t move to drink it from a straw, his neck inhibited by a plastic brace. How the flat-lining noise of other machines in the nearby vicinity attracted knots of green nurses and white-robed doctors. The numbers on our monitor. 84. 87. 91. Red light. Not supposed to go over 91. 91 meant more brain damage. 91 meant his brain expanding within an escapeless skull, before it caused damage the other way.
I put myself in that ICU again and combined with my research on the Bsharri hospital, I imagine The Messenger waking up, this time in the middle of the night. The softer light is wired to create a peaceful, candlelit effect. No murderous doctor is hunched over him. No complex thought process is trying to deduce the motivation of this same doctor who picked him up on the side of the road as a hitchhiker. No, The Messenger wakes in the middle of the night with a burst of delusional energy. For, when his eyes focus, his wounds stretch against their staples to shoot darts of pain across the landscape of his skin. They shoot first to his head, like a bulldozer pushing stone against the rocky ground beneath. And then they shoot to the tips of his toes, which become itchy for pain medication, or a warmer blanket.
The Messenger realizes very quickly that he is alive on the same planet, in the same human, albeit damaged form, without any benefit of escape this time. The doors are locked in the ICU. Nurses are conversing mute behind a glass window. Monitors beep, not in unison. He is thirsty. His lips are splitting apart and bleeding on the inside, onto his tongue. He coughs out loud and he imagines smoke puffing from his nose and lungs. Dusty smoke. He doesn’t know he has reached his destination, Bsharri. He forgets his mission, temporarily. He recognizes other beds in the vicinity, like his own, with curtains pulled back for easier access and less privacy.
A young girl in a hospital gown walks like a death raven in between the rows. Her skin is pale and her hair blacker than the dark pockets with no light. She approaches his bed, dips a stick with a tiny sponge on its end, into a yellow cup of ice water. She squeezes it between his lips and the connection is ecstasy. He is paralyzed by her sunken white eyes. Is she a ghost? Or another hallucination? She disappears and he is too weak to swivel his head. He closes his eyes and feels his tongue burning for more, although his lips relieve themselves with the silkiness of saliva. It has returned to his mouth.
The girl with long black hair disappears like an apparition. A younger Madonna serving those in the rows between life and death.
The doctor returns to take her place a short time later. It is Sifar again, still in disguise.
“Do you believe me, now?” he says.
> Sifar is intelligent with his glasses and smooth to the eye. He is wearing a beautifully white lab coat. His green, olive skin is exquisitely shaved as if by a sharper razor. His hands are hairless, his fingernails tailored and manicured by a soaking in milk, it appears.
“You did not save me?”
He whispers under the tone of the beeping monitors.
“I did save you, after I nearly killed you.”
“Why would you do such a thing?”
The Messenger is uncomfortable. These few words spoken have already dried the coolness from the sponge. His lips are burning again.
“I create my own patients. It may be my ego.”
Sifar crosses his hands delicately. They mesh together as one. His scent is not strong or antiseptic. Just clean skin, or tree oil natural.
“Why did you create me?”
“To play God. To play doctor. To play human. Take your pick.”
“Why didn’t you destroy your creation then?”
“Because I realize who you are, or rather, who you are not. Else, I might have left you to die on a cliff.”
“Who am I?”
“A man dressed in borrowed clothes. Not an official. I drove away and realized something halfway to the hospital.”
“What was that?”
“Humility.”
“What about it?”
“It doesn’t exist in that uniform. It never has. I called an ambulance right away and insisted on operating on you myself. Consider your salvation my apology.”
“Who are you?”
“A man who appreciates the powerless.”
“But you enjoy the power of a God.”
“Which makes me appreciate the powerless that much more. Opposites attract.”
“What will you do to me?”
“Set you on your way.”
“What if I say anything?”
“You won’t.”
Chameleon (Days) Page 6