“How do you know that?”
“Because you are powerless, as I said. It will do no good to you and you realize this. No matter what your mind begs you to do, your body knows who it belongs to now, its debtor. It will not betray you or me.”
Sifar rises from his seat on the edge of the bed, straightens his lab coat and walks away. The Messenger is appalled by the audacity of this doctor. He is also amazed by the way his body reacts when he considers exposing his crime to another. The doctor is right. His body is not his own anymore. It is indebted to its saviour.
DAY 12
The Messenger convalesces to the stage of earning a private room in the step down unit. Ironic to its designation, the room is situated on a higher floor in the Bsharri hospital.
In my own, familial past, I consider the same irony when I think about my father’s transfer to the step down brain injury floor in Hamilton General. Three floors above ICU, the step down floor resembled a haunted house of deranged mutant beings. Mysterious patients, securely locked in their rooms (and for good reason, mainly fear of the unknown) screamed random words in random languages, shouted out obscenities, smashed themselves into anything concrete. One man believed himself to be a sheep and he bahhhd all day and all night. Another chewed on his arm tasting it to be a chicken leg. The step down unit scared my brothers and me when we visited our father, who, like his new roommates, wasn’t the same either. He didn’t recognize us. He ordered my mother to make food for the invisible visitors who abided in the room with him. I never respected the power of the brain more than when I saw it broken and talking with my father’s tongue. We watched it heal while he spoke words without connection, sentiments without love, while he looked at us strangely, while they tied him down because he became violent to his own body. Nothing scared us more, even when we believed he would never wake up from his coma, than the step down floor. To this day, I count my blessings he escaped the horrors within his own skull.
Unlike my father’s floor of brain malfunctions, this new convalescent floor feels floating distant to The Messenger, set apart from civilization. A floor of isolation and quiet perhaps reserved for the terminally ill or those in greater need of privacy. An oasis level set above the chaos of emergency action below it. Or another level above Hell, as Dante would deem it, but one still connected to others dragging it all down into one abyss. If anything, the room resembles a tiny apartment to The Messenger instead of a medical container. The green chair in the corner appears comfortable and there is blushing colour on the walls.
The Messenger sees the same nurse periodically, or different versions of the same one, and unlike the ICU, one doesn’t walk by every few minutes. He is left alone now for stretches of time. He is isolated on the island of his own bed. His only consolation is a single window with a view. He can see the milk mountains through the glass. They appear above the hospital in the upper half of the window frame. However, he hasn’t gained enough strength to move on his own yet, nor developed enough neck-stretching flexibility to see what is revealed in the bottom half of the window frame. He is sure ambulances, paramedics and patients on gurneys stage the common tableau below him, at the emergency entrance—exit. At night, the red lights rise from the sign like artificial fire to make the darkening sky appear pink.
He loses track of time often, in and out of sleep, and his skin feels stretched against his ribcage, like a lace-tied corset. In the long minutes of his supine rehabilitation, he fights hard not to think of his wife, in the state of her decease (disease?), or the passing of his son; his last memory of them both on a similar bed. Another reason why he chose, multiple times, to end his life on his own terms. He considers this connection for the first time. So many failed attempts. Maybe a record somewhere in there.
He can’t die like them. And he can’t wait for a similar, dragged out death sentence. So he hopes.
To reassure himself everything will be all right in his end, he visualizes Kashif, his future murderer, to whom he will deliver his message. He hopes to find Kashif soon. Kashif will eliminate him expertly, as a real killer would, sparing him the guilt of trying and failing over and over again.
Having waited for his family to die in traumatic slow motion sequence inspires a craving for a specific death in The Messenger, one preferably executed in the midst of a violent act. It is a better alternative to waking up one morning only to find a new bump on your neck, or worse yet, the realization you are losing your breath in spurts of hyperventilation. The very thought of dying in his sleep disgusts The Messenger even further. After seeing his wife deteriorate on a bed into someone he couldn’t recognize or fall in love with again, unlike the vibrant version he couldn’t help himself from marrying, he became cynical about the value of happy endings, or peaceful endings for that matter. He believed it better to die in the midst of battle, or as a result of sacrifice, or as a victim of circumstance or accident, all of which happened suddenly and without expectation, or worse yet, waiting.
Above all else, he despises the act of waiting. To The Messenger, waiting is the real enemy. A slow torture in whatever context, waiting implies letting someone else live before you. Waiting suggests stopping when every instinct and fibre desires movement. Waiting means not living at all, really, just suspending hopes in time; a preserved death personified in the embalming of a bloodless corpse.
The Messenger seeks any distraction in his room, but the white peaks in the top frame of the window form an avalanche of snow in his imagination, rolling down the mountain, crashing through his sealed hospital window, and pummelling the heavy weight of packed snow onto his chest. What melts seeps through the recently stitched stab wounds, those in the process of healing into scars.
A collection of his wife’s identities bury him in waves of white. The soft, simple way she wore her wedding dress. Her hair down, no jewelry, her great grandmother’s veil with no intricate design, just pinned on flowers losing petals with every step towards the altar, with every photograph taken, some curling and browning from the popping of camera flashes or champagne bottles. And then her white hospital gown, again so simple. White cotton, one lace behind her neck like the necklace he used to help her clasp, open backed, just like her wedding gown, except this time, he could see the bulbous bones of her spinal cord protruding through a thin veneer of peeling skin.
His son’s baptism gown, white again, which made him look effeminate, his long eye lashes the envy of every woman in church, his face smudged in their lipstick, holy oil blessing his forehead. White napkins, white cake, white favours, white candles, white baby shoes, white blankets, white hospital tubes, white walls, white sunlight, white Styrofoam cups, white clown faces with bloody lipstick, white moons, white stars he made to dangle from the ceiling fan in his son’s room. All white, all destructive enough to kill the life he gains by waking up. So he falls asleep before it becomes dark, buried under oceans of snow. At least it is warm underneath his white sheets.
DAY 13
Paris is attacked by terrorists. And bombs of unwarranted opinions explode all over Twitter and Facebook and television news channels. Previous to this shocking event, my wife reveals the results she receives from her mammogram test. There is “something there,” she says. Her doctor schedules an appointment with a surgeon a week later. We have to wait. We watch the news. And talk.
“I can’t believe this is happening again.”
I don’t know what she refers to. Does she mean the terrorist attack? Or is she alluding to another obstacle to overcome in our relationship. We’ve been through so many already. My painful divorce. Two virtual miscarriages. A son born with Down syndrome. All of the odds ranging in the one in a billion range.
“There is violence everywhere, even in a place like Paris.”
“I suppose that is the point,” she says. “Shed blood in a place of love.”
“What will the surgeon do?” I ask.
“Review my tests, maybe a
needle biopsy.”
I don’t tell her I’ve been researching all of the possibilities. Maybe I am testing her honesty to see if she is trying to spare me the uncertainty of her worry.
“How do you feel?”
“Scared, what else?”
I am too, but I don’t know what to say, who to be. A rock, or a split branch for her to grab onto?
“We will see what he says,” she assures me. She understands how sensitive I am to my own imagination. She knows me well. She knows I will think of it until every detail destroys me. I try to numb myself to the stories of those you hear almost every day. A worker’s sister, the guy who used to work for my brother, the child of a girl I went to kindergarten with, only twelve years old. The Terry Fox Run scene. How my five-year-old son locked a stare on a prosthetic limb there, thinking it a trick or a funny bone pulled expertly out of an electrified hole in The Operation Game. Like me, he doesn’t sleep well when he becomes sensitive to a fear.
Since that walk, he asks questions unbecoming of a five-year-old boy, or rather, becoming his ignorance.
“You won’t die,” he asks his mother before she tucks him into bed after a requested cuddle. He doesn’t know a thing, but the fear speaks for itself. It also speaks for me. We love her the same, I think to myself, or fear the loss of her in our lives, the same way. I feel like one of her children and maybe this is the excuse for our similar panic. Losing the mother in her we so desperately need as men afraid of every threatening domestic detail we are not designed to accomplish with the same grace.
The Man from my walk-in closet sits between my wife and me on the couch as we watch the stories from the terrorist attack. Two gunmen enter a Parisian café and start shooting. As random as a video game, as horrifying as one of his off-the-wall ideas. Another bomb-clad individual tries to enter the soccer stadium only to be refused by a security guard, who pushes him far enough not to hurt anyone else but himself. The invasion by random gunman of a heavy metal concert in a theatre. Again, what seems like an unfamiliar event in the city of love. Open fire on an audience facing the stage. Suspension of disbelief destroyed by an unsuspecting bullet in the back.
The reported, contextual details are eerily similar. Smoke. Shattered glass. Red lights and wandering bystanders left bleeding as they sit on the curb in the embrace of a stranger in uniform.
My wife is frozen. I try to feel sorry for those who passed away so suddenly, but like The Messenger, I am comparing deaths. I can’t help myself. It is morbid thinking, or so The Man tries to mediate the space between us. My wife disappears for a moment to start the air popper in the kitchen.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing?”
“She needs to hear reassurance and all you can think about is that stupid messenger of yours. Who do you feel more sorry for? He is alive, for God’s sake. You spared him. But you can’t spare her, only a doctor can do that. You are powerless, like your doctor/murderer said when he gloated to The Messenger.”
“Whatever I say will explode between us, perhaps killing you too,” I say.
“You are selfish,” he says.
He is right, to so many degrees. It is hard to admit how much you depend upon someone to fulfill your life. How she fills in the spaces while life happens, so that life can happen.
“I don’t know what to say, right now. Everything is suspended. We are waiting.”
“She is suffering, while you wait.”
I never assumed The Man carried any sensitivity. I stereotyped him, I suppose, not realizing that, as his creator, I could do such a thing.
“Killers have hearts too, you know,” he says.
“You care about my wife?”
I am still skeptical as I have always seen him as someone who is beyond the weakness of care. The Man, or in my design of him, is immune to the circumstances that make us human. Like an insane man, or my father in the step down unit, or Kashif, whom my reader is about to meet for the first time in this book. The Man is a self-emptying shell that is always looking for a temporary fill, not realizing he leaks from the inside out.
“That is harsh. Is that what you really think of me?”
Once again, I am annoyed by his skill of reading my mind.
“Are you ready to re-enter the story?” I ask him. I am trying to change the subject. I can hear my wife shuffling popcorn into a separate bowl.
“I never liked Lebanon. I will find my way back into the story, in due time.”
“No, you won’t. I will write you in when I see fit,” I promise him, disguising a threat.
“As you say, master, writer.”
He laughs to himself a little when my wife returns. The news is almost all red now. Reports appear with the Eiffel Tower in the background. They are geographically situating terrorism, promoting their stories against the appropriate backdrop. It is theatre and the stage is reset by the world’s association with Paris again, except this time there are no lights. Only red, emergency lights and blankets sprawled over dead bodies on the street.
“How can you stop this from happening?” I ask my wife. She is folding laundry now. She removed her contacts and is wearing her glasses.
“Some things happen for no apparent reason but to be,” she stops herself.
Another news reporter interrupts our fragmented conversation. The Man has disappeared. I think I see him on the television screen, walking by a crime scene. I blink my eyes and when I do so, I don’t see him anymore. I am hallucinating. Invisible stress is occupying me, I consider. I need to see a doctor but I don’t want to suggest it to my wife. I believe this could be a trigger for the argument we haven’t had. That even in her potential life threatening sickness, I need the help of an outside source to straighten my mind out.
“Do you remember Cape Cod?” I ask her.
The thought of it brings an automatic smile to her face.
“I miss Cape Cod. Remember the day we arrived. We were early and they wouldn’t let us into the room, so we stripped down and jumped into the ocean because the waves were high.”
“Yeah, it was so much fun.”
“I have never had so much fun, in all of my life.”
“You wore that white bikini.”
“You liked that white bikini.”
“I loved it. I loved that time. I love you,” I say to her.
She stares at me and then stops folding the laundry.
I can feel her tears seeping through my shirt and to my shoulder when I have her in my arms.
DAY 14
The pressure of my wife’s test results and the possibility of cancer make us more intimate. Our kisses are softer. Our lovemaking is more sensory and frequent. We reserve our nights to fall asleep together, combining our body heat to thaw the coldness of the next day’s reality. We fight against this reality in the morning by exploring the intimacy of our warm skin and softer touches. I am a lucky man, I often think in those early mornings. I sleep next to a woman who is as beautiful to the touch as she is to the imagination. In the darkness of the early morning we find the opportunity to whisper our attraction to one another. We rush sex and sneak around so the kids don’t hear or wake. We do so understanding we have not outgrown each other, that our first passion remains, despite what we’ve been through, or are about to go through.
I adore the way she falls on me in these moments, how our bodies understand the timing of our desires with no language, only movement and sensory appreciation. I find her easily in the dark and it assures me I can do the same during the day, or in the light of tragic news.
Our kids infiltrate the scene with the worst sense of timing and we often regret our hiding and sneaking around under the covers, where we pretend to sleep, where it becomes a game to keep us covered until we are decent enough not to traumatize our children with the naked bodies of their parents.
“We are horrible parents,” she giggles under the sheets while they beg to join us on the bed, while I try to find my underwear near the foot of the bed, rolled up in between sheets.
“We always find a way,” I joke.
She reads into it a little more than I expected and jumps on me to kiss me violently.
Our kids are not impressed and one of them starts crying.
“Are we ready to eat?” I announce.
This pacifies their disapproval of our physical intimacy.
When I make it to school that morning, I am energized and happy. I feel confident my wife will defeat this scare and we will find a way to keep making love around it.
And then I throw a book at a student and my world is turned upside down again.
I don’t know what came over me. I walk into school in the early morning like a sexually redeemed husband in a Cialis commercial. My first class, with my locally developed kids, goes well. They understand the novel I am teaching them and are surprising me with their insights. And then second period comes around. My senior Writer’s Craft class. As I await them filing in, I can hear some giggling about not having their assignment in for the class. Others complain about a printer not working in the library downstairs. When I have them settled, I can see that only a few have their assignment ready on their desks. It is a creative writing class and this term, I have an eclectic bunch, to say the least. I am disappointed in their failed effort. It is nearing Christmas and I detect their attention declining. Even as I am trying to get them to settle down, they are speaking under my voice. So my introduction to the day’s lesson transforms into a state of the union address. I offer these on occasion to my students. One usually comes before Christmas break, the other during Spring Fever. It simply reminds them of important deadlines and evaluations left over. It almost always follows the theme of picking up the intensity instead of sitting on your current mark.
I am in the midst of this state of the union and I can hear my voice rising. I rarely, if ever, raise my voice. I feel I am lucky my students respect me as a teacher and writer, and in this class, this respect is only magnified by inspired moments of creative ideas and mentoring. However, on this day, there is a new sharpness to my voice. I can feel it cutting the air. Everyone in the class is attentive to the alacrity of every word.
Chameleon (Days) Page 7