How could I possibly empathize with him, I often doubt. My protagonist is a terrorist, through and through. The terror he has created from killing innocent victims in the course of their daily lives is atrocious in nature. Children, unsuspecting bystanders, tourists, and even loyal animals have perished due to his interpretation of a greater cause. He is despicable from the perspective of his history, or rather, his fingerprints upon it. And yet, I feel for him. And it’s not because his daughter is dying slowly for his sins in the same hospital from which The Messenger has recently discharged himself. No, no, no. If anything, there may be some critics who will consider this motivation slightly cliché in nature, although I do have some twists in store.
So why is Kashif, my numb, unfeeling protagonist, worthy of my sympathy? Perhaps The Man was right. Maybe I feel sorry for my characters because their creator feels sorry for himself. Is it possible to inherit this trait, albeit genetically, from creator to creation? Adam didn’t inherit his ability to create from God, although he was created in his likeness? Instead, he was assigned the responsibility of naming his creator’s creations? Is this employment god-like? Was this construct doomed to fail from the start with a little taste of the forbidden fruit?
I think deeply about my protagonist. By this point, I consider him something more than a friend, someone less real than family due to our inseparable differences. I could never imagine killing to prove a point or obliterating innocence to make it memorable. And yet, I kill off my characters solely to speed up the pace of a plot. Or worse yet, I kill them with the hidden agenda of making them memorable after the story is over. To make them immortal, I suppose.
So how am I any different than Kashif. He kills real people and I kill fictional people for a living. That’s one major difference. He kills for a belief, I kill for entertainment, which makes me sound much worse. He is willing to sacrifice anything to create story and I am on the fence. Does it mean that much to me, creating story? Am I prepared to go to the ultimate end to see it through, for blood to have more blood, as Macbeth put it?
The Man finds me in the midst of this deliberation as I tidy up the English storage room at school. I am alone, after school, and it is quiet. Due to the size and waste of space in the English storage room, I previously asked our principal if it would be okay to create a quiet, lounge-like marking area. Of course she completely disagreed and rejected the idea. So instead, I clear a spot in the room because I have decided to sacrifice my lunch on a daily basis in order to write some more. Usually, I write late at night but the story is calling me strong during the day so I need to at least use my lunch time to read over the previous day’s work. In doing so, I get a head start at night, not to mention the use of my brain in the course of the day and not at its suffocating end.
“You should be home and you know it. Your wife is receiving her test results today.”
I laugh to myself. Although The Man doesn’t know it, I purposely stalled the story with some philosophical renderings in order to smoke him out of his hole. The Man thinks he is the only one who can infiltrate. He has been avoiding me since he ambushed the story and one of my characters, Sabal, in between the lines, or in between page breaks. I am also aware how such an argument becomes too much temptation for him. I created The Man with his own tragic flaw—curiosity. This is what keeps him alive and healthy. This insatiable curiosity to learn more than what he should know drives him. It motivates him. It inspires him. It also makes him an addict and vulnerable. Sometimes knowing too much is more dangerous than knowing too little. Sometimes, you aren’t meant to know anything at all.
I don’t answer him. My wife is indeed receiving the call from her doctor today. And we will find out if she will require surgery, a biopsy, or treatment. I try my best to keep busy in the room, so as to feign anger with The Man. Although he accuses me of being too sensitive with my characters, he too is sensitive to my impression of him.
“If it makes you feel any better, I won’t do it again.”
Wow, a haphazard apology. My characters must be able to evolve and grow. When I created him, or when he first introduced himself to me as an idea, I never meant to equip him with sensitivity. He was supposed to be the opposite of everything I believed to be good and true. Unlike Kashif, who has more potential to show character from the hole he has dug himself into.
The Man harps upon his sin. The more he talks, the more it sounds like he is confessing to a rape.
“I fell in love with your creation of her. There, I said it. Well, that’s not completely true. I fell in lust with your creation of Sabal. I like her sexual aggression and her ability to keep quiet amidst it all. To trust in her ability to show over tell. Very ingenious of you.”
Now I sense he is trying to suck up to me. He lays it on.
“I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t ruin the story, literally. I mean, I made it happen in between the lines, or the way Shakespeare would not stage certain murder scenes, like King Duncan’s assassination. It happens off stage. That’s it, I made sure to make love to her off stage.”
I can see him smirking, or at least craving a manly affirmation of his ability to bed women, albeit fictional in nature. I refuse the spoken word. Like Sabal, I take my vow of silence and rearrange the books on the shelves in order to create a Literacy Section—the new catch word from the Ministry of Education. Improve literacy scores. Standardized testing. No one graduates until they are deemed literate. Educational bureaucrats or Educrats. They don’t see how they are destroying the style that must accompany teaching English. It’s their subtle attempt to kill it by accident or with the sweep of a broom.
“What? Are you going to hold a grudge because I had sex with one of your characters behind the story’s back? Oh, I see. That’s it. You’re treating her like a daughter of sorts and you wanted me to ask your permission first, didn’t you?”
I remain silent. I see why monks resorted to it. It gives me power in this dusty room. It allows me to breathe beyond the block walls.
“She was incredible and I won’t apologize for that,” he says under his breath.
I pity The Messenger. I shouldn’t, I suppose. He doesn’t even realize how he got cheated on again. In an attempt to save him the humiliation, I did my best as the author to have Sabal lie to him. The fact these lies make him stronger and allow him the impetus to leave, which I assume, was The Man’s first intention before he got his hands on her, is a nice improvisation to move him forward in the story.
“As I said to you before, when you create there is an element of free will to every detail. I acted in free will, that’s all. Your God doesn’t control you and you certainly don’t control me, despite your traditional notions of authorship. Get over it. This is the future. Characters that come alive in between the lines, off the page. Why should that privilege be reserved solely for readers alone and their pathetic interpretations. I bet you don’t hold it against them when they interpret your work for another meaning outside of your intent.”
He is making much more sense now. I am enjoying the squirming session. It distracts me from thinking about the results of my wife’s mammogram, inconclusive as they first were.
I make it look like I am about to tackle another shelf and then I take two quick steps, slap the lights off and close the door behind me. Amidst this most recent enlightenment, The Man deserves some time in the dark.
When I arrive home, my wife is waiting for me in the beautiful scent of tomato sauce percolating on the stove. She is energized and organized preparing dinner with extra special side dishes to compliment the main course, like garlic bread waiting to broil on a baking pan and an antipasto spread already centering the made up table.
“It’s only a cyst, formed from a blocked duct and probably caused from Alaia breastfeeding so much.”
I run at her and her cheek softens my neck as we embrace.
“I’m going to stick around a little bit more.
I hope you don’t mind,” she whispers in my ear.
I am relieved and there are really no words to express anything original in this moment. I suppose some life experiences, of such importance, require redundant clichés to close them officially. So I use a common one that makes her sigh again in my ear.
“I couldn’t do anything without you.”
That night we are intimate and excitedly wild after a few glasses of wine. I find myself breathing heavily under a sheath of sweat.
She falls asleep within seconds while I continue to catch my breath. I expect to collapse into a coma, just like her, but the worry hasn’t released itself yet.
And it keeps me up half the night, despite the good news.
DAY 18
The Messenger follows the black priest down the hill leading to the hospital from the highway, and up another gravel road. About ten steps behind. To The Messenger it appears as if this priest is not interested in getting to know him. He prefers to walk alone within a certain radius of gravel and bordering cedar forest. The more he walks, the narrower the road gets, the more shaded. It is early in the morning, nearly dawn but it is still night in this valley of historic trees. No signs of life. No stirring. A very tranquil quiet before a rustic stone abode emerges camouflaged just below a rolling hill that flattens at the edge of a cliff.
The possibility of the cliff in his dreams, when he was first assigned his mission, makes his stomach tingle. The Messenger tries hard not to think of Sabal although he wonders about the way she left him. After betraying his trust. In the admission of a lie.
The black priest turns toward the stone shelter. Like Sabal, he leads with his body and not his words. His footsteps are soft, stratospheric, almost above ground. He is not anxious, only patient in his pace. There is no hurry to find warmth or any congenial small talk to make his follower feel at ease. He reaches the wooden door and leaves it open once he enters. Never once glancing back.
In this setting The Messenger is never out of breath. The scent of cedar mixed with a view of the ice caps in the distance, through the trees, on the other side of the cliff, creates a fresh, oxygenated atmosphere. He is invigorated with the air, with the way its sharpness scrapes the edges of his throat. He hesitates before entering not because he is afraid of this strange man, this priest from the hospital. Like the nature surrounding him, he is awakening to the dawn in the most natural way. And his eyes are not strained. They are open and the water within them is loose enough to cry but thin enough to cleanse an infection.
From this valleyed vantage point, the place in the woods resembles the scene he imagined after hearing instructions from The Man in the grotto. It is isolated from the world but close enough to the church in the village, where he was supposed to ask such a priest about Kashif, the person to whom he would deliver his message. Perhaps this is the priest referenced in the initial message, come to lead him to Kashif.
Upon entering, he is surprised to find that the interior of the abode is not as rustic as its exterior. No religious paraphernalia anywhere. Just the black priest sitting in a lazy boy chair by the window overlooking the cliff and its invisible drop. It is a brilliant view of the chasm. There is a white goat outside with his nose in the dirt.
“I assume you have been instructed to find me.”
“But you found me.”
“Yes. I could tell you were looking for me.”
“Can you lead me to him?”
He stops. He closes his eyes and his face disappears in the darkened corner.
The living room in which he sits is monastic in presentation. A single chair. No sofa. Nowhere else to sit. No eating table. There is one outside under a fig tree. The white goat poses against this backdrop, looking up every once in a while. The inside area is vacated but for the chair. No television. No portraits or pictures on the walls. The walls themselves are stone, thickened and roughened by mortar. It is cool in this room. The stone hearth is filled with smaller stones as if blockading the chute to prevent the entrance of water.
The priest stands upright. He moves the chair and there is a trap door beneath it.
“Follow me.”
The Messenger follows the priest down a ladder which descends loosely in the hollowing depth of an old well. He can hear the echo of water rolling over itself below and like Alice in Wonderland worries of another more colourful world beneath the surface. The priest below him disappears once he reaches the bottom. It is a long descent and surprisingly it is warmer with every step. The inviting scent of something burning climbs up his body as he climbs down the ladder. A web of tangled roots brush up against his face the more he descends and there is no light at his feet. The darkness from below, the sound of water and the rising heat contribute to the disappearance of half of his body. From the waist down he is blind. From the waist up he is disappearing as quickly as the priest.
He trips on the last prong. He sits on clay in the deep hole, in a deeper darkness.
“Stand up and walk.”
The instruction echoes.
The Messenger gets up and slams nose first into a clay wall. It is gravelly and dirt enters his mouth. The darkness is suffocating now, as thick as oil.
“Take two steps to the left . . .”
“Ten more steps . . .”
“Five steps to the left again . . .”
“Eight more steps . . .”
“Five more . . .”
“Three more to the left, now five more to the right . . .”
“Take three steps.”
Although he has followed every direction, he finds himself in a similar darkened area, more lost in his mind than he was when he first descended the ladder. At least then, there existed the possibility of climbing back up.
“Fall now.”
“Fall?”
“Yes, fall.”
“How?”
“Fall!”
The Messenger feigns a fall.
“Fall to the ground. No knees.”
How does the priest see him in the darkness?
“Get up and fall again.”
He does as he is told.
“Place your cheek on the ground.”
The Messenger does so.
“Now slide to your left.”
The Messenger slides under what appears to be an enormous rock. It is so tight, he begins to hyperventilate. The psychological effect of being buried alive. He breathes in dirt and every time he raises his head it strikes a harder, sharpened surface, until his lips find leather. The foot raises his face from the ground. When he stands, he is nose to nose with the black priest.
And then a door opens. The sound of water echoes loudly as it falls and pools below him somewhere. He follows the footsteps until sensory lights brighten the area slowly, like an artificial sunset.
It is a circular cavern, centered by a pool of water. There is a fishing pole idle by the edge and a stool there.
As the light opens this scene he is focussed on what is before him, the pool of water, how it invigorates his thirst, the sound of it refreshing the air, providing it mist. The priest has disappeared again. The lights soon reveal him in a corner.
“Will you take me to him now?”
The priest walks into a spot lit area. He has a cloth in his hand. He digs his fingernails into his forehead. It is a violent gesture until The Messenger realizes he is removing a wig. When he does so, the shaved scalp is lighter skinned and in contrast to the priest’s face. He removes his shirt next to reveal black arms and a black neck but a white chest, completely bare. He becomes naked, two tone in colour, walks over to the inlet of water, dips in the rag and washes himself clean. Before long, he is a naked, hairless man and The Messenger is unsure whether an olive tinge graces the tone of his skin. The priest, or the man no longer purporting the costume of one, walks over to a wall and pushes in a trap door. He returns shortly
thereafter in a robe.
“Follow me.”
The Messenger ascends the steps to another area, elevated above the water. When he enters the room there are painted portraits on easels, and one with simple, pencil drawings.
On the easels, The Messenger sees depictions of a woman in a full niqab, the blonde-haired man, and the tall brunette from his neighbouring room at the hospital, amongst others. All of them created for the purpose of public disguise. There are new depictions he hasn’t seen yet and a rack of costumes. There is also a makeup table with a mirror. A prop area with canes and shoes and accessories. An entire backstage area promoting the assumption of other trap doors and tricks.
“I am the man you are looking for. I am Kashif.”
The Messenger is overcome with emotion. His deliverer stands before him and not as a myth or the subject of folklore. He has found the man who will terminate him, the one who will free him from the life that robs him of his dignity. Very naturally, The Messenger approaches him, embraces him, and then kisses him on the cheek once.
“How did you know it was me?” The Messenger asks.
“I have been waiting for this day. I felt you in my dreams. I am sensitive to the silent voices that speak to me. They spoke to me in the hospital.”
“But how?”
“How do they speak to me, or how do I hear them?”
“Both.”
“They enable me to survive alone. I survive on instinct alone and it has never betrayed me. I don’t think. I don’t worry. I don’t rely on anything but the instincts ingrained in me. I could smell your message. I could sense you were looking for me. I follow my instincts and I never distrust them.”
“I almost died before I could tell you.”
“But you didn’t. This is true. Your survival makes you more invincible.”
“Until you kill me yourself.”
The Messenger intends this as a hint. Encountering Kashif as a man of pure instinct makes him distrust The Man’s promise.
Chameleon (Days) Page 10