Worse yet, I can hear the echo of my voice, so it must be loud. As I reach a climax in my lecture, about how sacred an act it is to create something on paper, and how reflective it is of everything they find important in their young lives, one of the students in the second row takes out her cellphone. She is texting and doing absolutely nothing to disguise it.
“Are you serious!” I lower my voice an octave but raise it a few decibels higher. She pretends not to hear me. She thinks it is directed to the rest of the class in general.
I grab an edition of Macbeth (we are studying it in my grade 11 class) and aim for the exposed phone. The pages feather up, change the direction of the toss, and swipe her on the arm. She is scared. I can tell from her reaction she is scared, as are those around her. They didn’t expect me to throw something. I didn’t expect me to throw something. I think about it for a split second before realizing that I actually threw something. My voice is functioning without me.
“Are you serious!” I repeat. “You are texting someone right now!”
With no other option but to follow through, I grab my water bottle next and throw it into the recycling bin. A few of the students flinch. They have never seen me angry and I can tell they simply want it to end. Not to overdo the drama, I assign them a shitload of seatwork and the class is quiet and studious. However, the girl is shaky. She is still scared.
After about five minutes she leaves the room without asking.
I wait. I walk out of the room to see if she is crying in the hallway at the same time suspecting where she has gone.
I get a call from the vice principal ten minutes later.
“I have a girl from your class here, she is crying.”
“Do you want me to come down?”
“Yes. I’ll send another teacher up.”
I find her in the office with the other vice principal.
Amelia is crying and shaking in the chair and I can’t help myself from feeling sorry for her. She is a student who understands my sense of humour, but is completely shocked by my sense of anger. She doesn’t throw me under the bus, though. All she wants is to go home.
Our other vice principal is a lady I worked with at another school. She is bluntly honest with an erected tough exterior, but softhearted. She encourages Amelia to stay in school.
“Going home will only draw more attention to it the next day. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional,” she says, and then she looks at me to continue her train of thought.
“It wasn’t, and I’m sorry.”
Just as I apologize, I feel The Man entering the room uninvited. He is speaking to me in between the awkward spaces of trying to convince this girl to stay at school.
“What has happened to you? She will throw you under the bus in a flash. Don’t feel sorry for her. She is dramatizing the whole event. Can’t you see she is desiring your attention?”
I try to ignore him. I am worried I have seriously scarred this girl.
“Your pathetic inclination to pity is making your story boring. It’s your tragic flaw as a writer and the reason you haven’t published more. You feel sorry for yourself. You feel sorry for your characters. It’s not your job to pity your characters. It’s the reader’s job to do that. You have to create them as empathetic. You love them too much, you like your students too much, or else The Messenger would have already met Kashif. Instead, you have him toiling in a hospital room thinking about his wife, feeling sorry for himself. It’s tragically contagious, if you ask me.”
The girl keeps using the same tissue to dry her tears, so I offer her another one.
“Listen, we can get over this. Let me walk you back to class. I promise, it won’t ever happen again.”
“What is she, your wife now?” The Man laughs out loud. “You can’t show weakness to a student, just like you can’t show weakness to the characters you create. They will take advantage of you.”
I must be listening to The Man too much because the vice principal is repeating a question in my direction.
“Are you all right? Can you walk her back to class now?”
Apparently, my student has agreed to the idea of sticking around. It is an awkward walk back to class. I remind her how much I appreciate our previous rapport. How I would rather make her laugh than cry. We stop at the foot of the stairway and I tell her I get too passionate about writing while explaining how I want her to be serious about her own talents. How disturbing it was to see she cared more about the person she was texting.
“Are we all right?” I ask.
She nods.
The rest of my students watch as she takes her seat. I try to joke it off to let them know all is resolved, but I am worried I have hurt her in some way.
When I return home from work, my wife is waiting with our daughter at the bus stop. I tell her what happened from the car window, while my daughter tries to hitch a ride in the truck.
“It’s okay,” my wife says. I expect her to say we don’t need this right now, but she doesn’t.
“She should have known not to bring her cell phone to class.”
“I know. I still feel bad about it.”
“I bet she is over it. You have to get over it,” she recommends.
Perhaps, like The Man, she knows me too well. I harp on things, especially when it is me making the mistake. I recall it a million times, with all of the details, and every time I think about it, I do more damage to the regret. The Man is right, I feel sorry myself. Perhaps, like my Messenger, I ask for bad luck, or invite it subconsciously.
After the chaos of feeding the clan, getting them bathed and in bed, I return to the computer. I creep on Twitter and Facebook to see if my tirade made the gossip news. I don’t see any evidence of it. Perhaps, as my wife suggested, it was nothing. Or perhaps it is only something to me.
At night, I decide it is time to empower The Messenger. He is healing nicely and as humans are prone to do, he feels more alive mentally, even sexually.
So I revisit him in his hospital room. And I introduce something unfamiliar to him since his wife passed—a sexual fantasy. When he pulled off the road and carried the tiger to the hidden habitation in the woods, I did have him leave at night because he was worried of an attraction he felt towards the boy’s mother.
It scared him to think he could be attracted to anyone but his wife, despite thoughts of it when he was married to her, when he was away at his job halfway across the world. From a distance, the loneliness inspired thoughts of adultery and this is one of the reasons why he wants to die in the present. He thinks he deserves it. He thinks having those thoughts actually created the punishment of his family’s death. That they are one in the same. Cause and effect.
The nurse who now bathes him in his room with a sponge resurrects the sexual instinct in him. He worked with many attractive women at the U.N. Strong, intellectual, sexualized women with high levels of testosterone. Aggressive women who could keep secrets, who wanted to live adventurous lives, who considered time zones justification for sexual experimentation.
There was one media officer in particular. Her name was Cheryl. Straight blonde hair cut sharply at the ends to reveal a portion of her long neck. A properly posed smile. Her eyes smiled at him as well, as did her body language in his presence. She leaned on him, shoulder to shoulder, placed her hand on his forearm to get his attention. She was never overly flirtatious or bubbly, but he felt an inner pull around her. He considered acting on it at times. He imagined the moment their mutual physical interests would cross. He didn’t know a single thing about her, other than her job title and name. She made him feel good about himself, perhaps even younger, or more nostalgic for those younger, simpler days.
One night, on a peace conference in Cambodia, she wished him good night in a darkened hallway. He could hear the ice machine around the corner sending water through an osmosis system, and then stop. It becam
e quiet. She wore her glasses that evening and his search for her face behind them invigorated that pull. She spoke in a sonnet’s sequence. Each line designed to rhyme with another down the road.
“Do you ever wonder what we are searching for?” she asked with one foot holding the door of her hotel room open.
“Violence and peace,” he answered. In retrospect, he felt stupid for trying so hard to impress her.
“We go from place to place and stick our noses in someone else’s history. Always in places where we don’t belong. We are like the worst kinds of tourists.”
“I know. It is condescending, isn’t it?”
“That’s it exactly. That we should investigate their cultures, or assume we have the right to judge them on a scale that balances the benefits of war and peace.”
She removed her glasses and he interpreted the gesture as an invitation. He wanted to move closer to her. He wanted to breach the crest of the wave about to smash into a sandy shoreline and dissolve into it, but he stopped himself. He remembered every detail of that moment. The musty fog of air and mosquitos in the hallway. The hum of the ice machine, the falling crash of water congealing into ice in the darkness of a cooling bin. The length of her body leaning into the door frame. Half of it inside her room already, the other keeping the conversation going. They had never spoken about their opinions. He had often thought about his career path, his service to peacemaking. But he had never discussed the hypocrisy of it with someone else. She rested her face on the door frame now, like it could help her close her eyes and fall asleep.
“I suppose we are middle people,” he said. “We stand in the middle and try to see both sides of the conflict. And then we invite others to join us in no man’s land only to realize it is more dangerous than taking sides.”
She nodded and sighed a little. Her agreement lit up the sensory mechanisms on his chest. He could feel air exhaling from all of his pores now, his nervous stomach pumping the circulation of the flow.
“Good night.”
She paused to stare at him one last, awkward time. Her wedding ring sparkled on the door frame. She tapped it against the door when he didn’t respond. She was waiting for him to make the next step, to take sides, to leave the middle of his doubt to venture onto her side, which didn’t appear so dark in real life as it did in the context of his seedling guilt.
“Good night,” he returned under his breath. He wondered if she had heard him because she paused again, frozen.
He turned his back and that Christmas, when he returned home, the diagnosis of his wife’s illness confirmed the sin in his heart.
This time around, in the Bsharri hospital, the very thought of sin or guilt never crosses The Messenger’s mind.
The nurse with long black hair carefully removes the hospital gown covering the scarring stab wounds. When she does so, his skin tingles. Her fingerprints are soft and gentle, her skin silky on the drying areas of his. He stares at her while she pulls the gown down and away from his body. When she leans over the bed to pull the part of the sheet stuck in the hospital bed bars, her breasts press into his belly. She works away oblivious to how he sees her. Frustrated with a resistant sheet, she walks over to the other side and he can see her panty line beneath the green scrub pants. These details make him nervously hungry, as he felt that night in Cambodia. He tries hard to dismiss the way his body is reacting to her presence. She doesn’t speak to him. She simply moves to prepare. To prepare her work assignment in the most efficient manner possible. She doesn’t recognize how these movements inspire a fleet of cold pimples down his body. Even his feet feel funny now, tingly as well, heated.
She rolls up her sleeves and prepares the sponge. She doesn’t rush, as he expects her to. And she is not ruthless with the work. She begins with his hair. She presses it back with the wet sponge, in even strokes, so that it doesn’t get too wet, so that it doesn’t drip onto his pillow. To ensure this, she tucks one towel under his neck by pulling him into her chest. He smells her skin and sees constellations of tiny little moles and freckles darkened by sun.
When she returns him gently to the towel covering his pillow, he smiles at her. She smiles back and nods. She then proceeds to place towels under his entire body. She lines up rolls on one side but not before helping him to lay in the fetal position. She unravels the towels and returns him to his back. She does the same on the other side but this time leaves him in the fetal position.
She bathes him with a cloth and sponge, like a mother would gently to a newborn. With his back turned to her, he tries hard to settle the shiver of his body. He isn’t cold. If anything, he is overheating, the wetness of his hair posing as a perspiring forehead.
Her touch arouses him and for every ounce of shame and decency, he can’t stop his body from reacting. When she turns him over, flat on his back, he has grown noticeably to her. She doesn’t react. Perhaps she has seen this overreaction to the sponge bath before. She continues without skipping a beat, as if not to notice. She blesses his feet with the warmth of a wet towel, while he closes his eyes to pretend sleep. This may spare him some shame, he believes.
Until she touches it.
He opens his eyes and she is stroking it softly with her finger pressed on the inside of the sponge. She catches him watching her but shows no reaction to his embarrassment. His face feels like it is reddened with rash while she continues to stroke it gently with the sponge. In her eyes, he imagines what she is thinking. That he is perverted, or starved for a woman’s touch. Or maybe she believes him to be a man with no self-control.
She stops suddenly to place the dried out sponge on his belly. He feels completely exposed to her now, his body, his thoughts, his imagination, his desires—all vulnerable to her simple touch. He expects her to dry his pulsating skin with a towel but she doesn’t yet.
Instead, she places her hand around it and strokes it further until he releases himself into her hand with a repressed moan.
She wipes his belly with the sponge again and lets his skin air dry as she collects her cleaning supplies.
He says thank you under his breath. She leaves the room not hearing it as an invitation to stay.
DAY 15
The Messenger finds a surrogate home in the Bsharri hospital. His discharge is delayed, according to the nurse he is sexually attracted to. Her nametag reads Sabal and she is surprised to find he also speaks her language, which is sign. She doesn’t voice words. He is unsure if it is a physical disability or a mental one. Whether she is not able to speak, or whether she chooses to be mute. On his end, he enjoys the silence between them. How she communicates to him with the touch of her hand. He never once considered his body this landscape of mysteries until she touched it. In the mirror, it had always appeared as one embedded with land mines and irreparable failure marks. But there are other meanings she unearths in her explorations of it, buried truths.
He discovered her inability to speak after another intimate bathing session. Once again, her very presence in the room inspired a physical compulsion in him. And for a second time, she appeased it with a skin-to-skin touch, after which he desired to talk to her. He wanted to express his sexual attraction to her outright and apologize for it. He worried if her interpretation of his arousal demeaned her in any way. He also craved reassurance from her. Despite his automatic attraction to her presence in the room, he didn’t expect her to relieve him of this internal torture every time she entered to care for him. She didn’t respond to his questions or apologies. She nodded and smiled. Smiled and nodded. After the first time, he understood the embarrassment of not having anything to say. Now that she had crossed the line twice, he needed to know how she felt about it. For some reason, he required a guarantee she did this to him only. Like an awkward commitment or promise ring of sorts.
After he spoke to her, she didn’t respond by voice. He tried to get her attention while she collected her bathing materials, but to n
o avail. She didn’t flinch at the sound of his voice.
So he waited for her to catch his eyes before he tried sign language.
His message made her blush red.
“Thank you for reminding me I am alive,” he had said with his hands.
She responded in kind.
“You have many scars.”
“I have fought many battles,” he answered, “more with myself.”
She nodded. She understood.
She then walked over to the head of his bed. He observed the roundness of her breasts, the soft skin between her chin and neck. She extended her arm before his eyes and he saw scarred lines there at the wrists.
He expected her to cry. The very coincidence of their mutual attempts to die almost persuaded him to do so himself.
“I want you to stay. When you leave, I wait for you to come back,” he gestured before rambling with his hands.
“When you come back, I never want you to go. When you go, I think about you until you return.”
She placed a hand over her mouth to prevent an obscene burst of laughter, or a grunt.
The quiet in their exchanges combined with the effort to communicate with her in sign created a poem between them. Sign language. His interpretation of her sign language and the secrets beneath the surface of her own skin. How they motivated those same fingers which squeezed him ever so gently and firmly to make him release himself into her hands.
Abruptly, she turned as if to hear something in the dead quiet of the floor. She walked over to the door and locked it again as if to imply she needed privacy to bathe her patient. Except this time, she removed her white nurse’s shoes, climbed over the steel railing at the foot of the bed and sat crosslegged there.
Chameleon (Days) Page 8