Chameleon (Days)

by Dean Serravalle

  It is work to hide these thoughts from him now. I have taught myself to think about two things at once to disguise them. As I drive into school and wait in the traffic line again, I think about the Facebook messages my deceased cousin’s wife posts on occasion. She really misses him. She suffers thinking about him. I know he wouldn’t want her to, but she does so anyway. She laments about friends trying to comfort her from the comfort of their own tragic free lives. No one could possibly understand what she is going through and words are never good enough to change a person’s tragic state of mind. I’ve learned that on my own. And despite what I want to hear as I attend this meeting intended to reprimand me, that the accusation of fetching a coffee on my lunch break is ridiculous, it will do very little to free me from my self-imposed pressure. I am heavy again. Weighted in my shoes. Sore in my arms. Every once in a while, I feel random pains in my neck and shoulders. And I don’t feel like teaching anymore.

  I feared this day would come when I first started out. I expend so much energy in each class. I often transform into a cartoon for my lower level readers so they can stay attentive. I become a stand-up comedian in other classes to entertain them into learning or grasping otherwise boring curriculum demands. All the while, I worried that the energy would run out one day. How could I have guessed, I would learn to hate the sound of my own voice.

  “You are a great teacher. Your students admire you. Your colleagues emulate you. Without conflict, air doesn’t clear. Good things come from these types of tests.”

  The Man’s voice is self-help now. He must recognize me drowning before I realize I am in deeper waters than I thought.

  “Like you?” I tease.

  “Please give me better credit than that. You created me for God’s sake.”

  I pull into the parking lot and I find it difficult to pull my bags out of the truck. Even such a menial chore in its daily repetition feels like work to my body. I spite the routine of every day, although it will find disruption with my meeting during last period.

  By the time I reach my classroom, I have avoided all social contact. I pride myself on not bringing baggage into my classroom. I advise my students to do the same. I treat it as hallowed ground. They still don’t see it, but humour me nonetheless. And yet here I am, lugging a truckload full of it today. My students smell hypocrisy like blood hounds so I try my best to escape this source-less depression.

  As if timed to lend me extra-terrestrial help from the universe, a coincidental email comes my way. The timing is too uncanny. It is too intended, almost overly contrived.

  I read this random email from the Loran Scholarship Foundation. Our first Loran Scholar graduate from our school nominated me for a teaching award and the email outlines that my principal has been advised of the future presentation. It makes me laugh. It is all too obvious.

  I search for The Man in the room. This has his fingerprints carbonized all over it. He is nowhere to be found, which makes him the prime suspect. My students are filing in.

  “What is it, sir?” Nico asks me.

  “Nothing, why?”

  “Your tie doesn’t match your shirt. Did you change in the dark again?”

  “You got it, Nico.”

  I walk out into the hallway, not caring if the vice principal is lurking in the stairwell corridor expecting to arrest me for not being in my classroom before the anthem and prayer announcement. The Man is nowhere to be found.

  I return to my desk and re-read the email. It is a national award and I am honoured by the quote taken from Aaron’s nomination essay. I want to cry, but not because I am honoured. I feel so undeserving, so tricked.

  The Man sits in the desk next to Emily, my human grey hair detector.

  “I have nothing to do with it. It’s not just a coincidence. And I didn’t know about it either. I meant everything I said and the email is proof for my words.”

  I continue to ignore him to imagine the principal’s reaction.

  I have three good classes in a row after receiving my award email. I find myself laughing again amongst my students and it doesn’t feel forced or unnatural. I deliver my lessons very smoothly with comedic grace and focus. By the time my preparatory period arrives, the Union leader is waiting for me outside the main office door.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there something else I should know before we go in? Does she have something more than you grabbing a coffee?”

  “Not that I know of,” I smile.

  “I hear you are the recipient of a national teaching award, congratulations.” He offers me his thick hand and I shake it. His smile is fatherly. He is a retired teacher himself with white hair but much thicker bodied than The Man I imagined for my story. His blue eyes crease like they are pitying me at the same time.

  “Okay, let’s go in then.”

  I follow Terry in through the office and the secretaries who often tease and flirt with me whenever I am waiting for a fax or to see an administrator, are quiet in their concern. When we arrive to the office, the principal, Mrs. Smith, and Mr. Lye, are waiting. Absent is the vice principal with whom I get along.

  Mrs. Smith shakes hands with Terry. Mr. Lye is seated at the round table with a notebook already scribbled upon.

  “Hi, Dean. Just received the email from the Loran Foundation. Congrats on the award. I hear that maybe the Governor General will present it.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Terry is surprised by my principal’s open recognition of me. He has ferreted every foul intention from this principal and is temporarily stunned to find her the bigger person from the start.

  We take a seat and the vice principal has his head down. He is writing. I look in his direction as if to wait for him to stop.

  The principal raises her glasses to the perch of her nose before handing me a printed paper under the school’s letterhead. Terry quickly asks for a copy and is provided one as well.

  “I am filing this letter with Human Resources. It details how you went for a coffee on your preparatory period. It also points to how you said to Mr. Lye, “you handle things your way.”

  The Man is sitting at the principal’s desk, in her leatherback lounge chair. He snuck himself in somehow, without my ­detection.

  “Call her on it,” he advises me.

  “Hold on,” I say. “I said no such thing and it has been taken entirely out of context. I was asked by Mr. Lye how I handle late assignments. I explained to him that my way is to follow the Growing Success document and to allow opportunities to submit to a certain point in time, whereby I determine if the assignment is deserving of a no mark, or a zero. I did not say it that way.”

  The vice principal does not answer or raise his head. He is writing everything down.

  “Good for you,” The Man says. His voice is condescending from the principal’s chair. I don’t appreciate being in an inferior position with one of my created characters. Ironically, I don’t feel this way before my principal and vice principal, or my union leader. I feel justified by my innocence.

  “Hold on,” Terry settles me down with a hand.

  “You are writing him up because he went to get a coffee on his break, down the street, on a Friday afternoon. May I ask who saw him getting the coffee?”

  “I did,” my principal answers. She removes her glasses and assumes a more erect sitting posture. The spaces in between her fingers are red, her ring on the marriage finger unpolished gold with a sharp rocky summit.

  “What were you doing in the Starbucks, if I may ask?”

  “Getting coffees for the office.”

  “So you are writing him up and filing this in Human Resources?”

  “He is not supposed to leave the school on his prep period.”

  “Do other teachers go down the street to grab a coffee on their prep period?”

 
“Yes, I’m sure they do,” my principal answers.

  “Then why are they not in this room with us today.”

  “Because he was caught.”

  Terry chuckles a little to himself. The Man sitting in the principal’s seat is not laughing.

  “This is your day job?” The Man asks me. His sarcasm is annoying.

  Mr. Lye, the vice principal, continues to write, as if inspired.

  “Isn’t that a double standard?”

  “No it isn’t. He knows the rules.”

  “But you just said other teachers do it.”

  “That’s not the issue here.”

  I listen to the tennis exchange in this conversation and I zone out. I think about The Messenger and Kashif, stranded in the last chapter of my story. They wait for me patiently, as if preferring to exist in the fictional world I have created for them. Despite its violence, its heartbreaking juxtapositions, and the steep challenges presented before them, the world I have created is ironically far more real and far less absurd than the one I currently exist in. How would you justify a scene like illegally retrieving a coffee on a break, in a novel, I ask myself. I’m not sure it would sustain any suspension of disbelief. A principal arguing with a teacher’s union leader about a teacher who went out on his break, like so many others in the course of a week of work do, to grab a coffee? And the best part about it is I went with someone else, who is not being written up. Better yet, I’m not a coffee addict like this friend of mine from Special Ed. I was driving to London later in that day to pick up my son and I usually have a coffee to keep me awake on the three-hour drive, which is the only reason I agreed to go.

  “Fiction is far more real than reality,” The Man follows my train of thought. “With fiction, you crave making sense of a situation. In reality, no situation makes sense enough to crave.”

  “I think you are enjoying this moment too much,” I finally speak directly to him with my mind’s voice.

  “Of course I am. You shouldn’t be here. Yes, you are a good teacher and your students adore you. You found your calling. You found your means by which you give back to your community. If they gave out medals for such service, you would be highly decorated. But this routine is killing you. Can’t you see that? You work harder every year and you don’t get a raise. You’ve topped off on the pay grid. The guy who teaches next to you, strike that, the guy who never teaches in the room next to you, makes the same and he isn’t in this office wasting his time. He flies under the radar. Hell, he even gets to have coffee or breakfast on his prep period, like everyone else. It may be time for you to think about your life. You are having a mid-career crisis, and we need you more.”

  I never thought of my characters as needing me as much as my students do on a daily basis. It isn’t too farfetched, is it? My characters are as broken as many of my students. They need their creator to animate them in the same way I animate Shakespeare for a student who will never appreciate it enough to see it performed live with a future love interest. Yes, it is nice to receive cards that note how I inspired this student, or opened new doors of understanding for another. But don’t my characters need to be inspired as well? Or do they only get leftover inspiration energy at the end of a day, or in the eye-crusted hours of the early, darkened morning?

  The argument has provoked raised voices.

  Terry finally stops it before it twists out of control.

  “All of Dean’s evaluations are sparkling and just today he was informed he will receive a national teaching award. We will take this letter with us.”

  Terry rises from his seat and pulls me by the arm to do the same. We are not very synchronized in making body language statements.

  “Good day.”

  He lets me walk out of the office first and we reconvene in the foyer before the main entrance to the school.

  “We will file this with our previous paperwork as an attempt at a retaliation for your first grievance and present it before the trustees.”

  I’m not really listening to him. Instead, I wonder if The Man remained in the office to listen in on the principal’s private, aftermath meeting with the vice principal.

  “Dean, is everything all right?”

  “Yes, sorry Terry. Thanks for everything.”

  “I think you are the first one in history to be written up for getting a coffee on his break. Congratulations.”

  I smile.

  “I’ll get back to you soon. Keep your head up, kid. That’s a nice award.”

  I watch him leave the school and consider quitting my job for the first time.

  DAY 21

  “Okay, we need a believable story for the past fifteen years.”

  Kashif has led The Messenger out onto the cliff again. The sun has brightened the sky. Kashif is picking vegetables from his garden as he thinks aloud. As he uproots them, they dangle colourful in his grasp.

  “How about we begin with the real one,” The Messenger interrupts, drawing an ireful look from Kashif.

  “I mean. Knowing the true story will allow us to create a fictional one, no?”

  “I knew it was wrong to kill you. Okay, let us eat first.”

  Kashif takes the vegetables to a well, disguised by an area in the bush on a cliff. He ropes up a basin and cleanses them thoroughly. He then delivers them to the picnic table.

  “I haven’t eaten meat since I found her,” he begins.

  He pushes a pink beet in The Messenger’s direction. It is sour but his hungry mouth adapts to its freshness.

  “I created terror, if you need to know. I mean, terror has always existed. Fear has always existed, and leaders have always exploited it to govern and rule. But I organized terror. I made it a commodity and this commodity made many a man rich. I found ways to sell it to the highest bidder, and in doing so, I owned a share in it. Terror is a product now.”

  Kashif bites on a narrow carrot. Without swallowing it, he bites on a celery stalk and a deep green herb.

  “The secret,” he says, “is to mix the raw vegetables in your mouth. The unison improves the palate and vitaminizes your blood.”

  He takes a flask from a pocket.

  “Here, have some.”

  The Messenger drinks, all the while thinking it is poison until he remembers how cursed he is to live forever with a sarcastic desire to die.

  He nearly chokes. It is thick oil.

  “It’s a mixture of fresh pressed olive oil and seed oil. It needs to be cold crushed for the right fats to escape.”

  The Messenger quickly pulls another leafy stem his way to eliminate the sticky taste in his mouth.

  “When I was a young boy, I lived a death wish like you. My father died as a soldier fighting for the wrong cause. For justice, he always told my mother. For our people, he always told me. I saw him as a hero until he died. And then, I kept forgetting him. Over and over again. I tried hard to remember him. I kept his sepia picture by my bedside. But time made him disappear for me. Because he died, my mother starved to death to keep me and my brother alive. Right here, in Lebanon. She picked olives for me. She stole figs. She sold herself for anything she could put in my mouth. And I fed from her, selfishly. My brother and I, both. He was younger than me but I couldn’t help myself some days. I often thought I could eat him if things got worse. It was then, we were stolen away.”

  “You were kidnapped?”

  “Yes, but my mother knew. She didn’t object. She accepted we might eat some more from another hand. We left her sick and dying on her own. At the very least, we could climb trees for her. Hunt little animals. Build a fire. But this man in a uniform took us away. She didn’t resist him. She waved and that was the last I saw of her.

  “The military man in green took us to a camp with other boys. There, he fed us beyond our imagination. Everything from figs to meat to cedar berries. Even imported delicacies, like Baklava
. We grew fat stomachs, my brother and I, at this camp, and we had fun learning how to shoot a gun and a bow and arrow. I never once thought about my mother. Or my father. The Military Man was our hero, our father and our mother. We waited to see him every day. He held candies in his pockets for us. We were not even seven years old yet. He liked us above all of the others, we believed. He pretended to hold special treats for us that he didn’t give to the others. And then he disappeared. I mean, the body remained, but that generous man disappeared. Overnight.”

  “Overnight?”

  “Yes. He came to us the next day. When we put out our hands he burned them with his cigarette. When we moved to embrace him with a grateful gesture, he kicked us in the face. My brother lost teeth. I broke my nose. He spat on us. He peed on us. He shit on us one day while others held our faces down in the bedrock.

  “And then he reappeared like a magic trick. The same man. The same body, but a different face, a different personality, a different character, a different voice. I didn’t know how to see him without fearing the bad version would return. I never trusted him again. I couldn’t. He had burned me. He had raped me. He had hurt my brother and I and now he was helping us again, feeding us again, kissing us again. It was Jekyll and Hyde but in the same place and in the same clothes. We feared which man would approach us the next morning.

  “After he had fattened us up again, he began speaking to us alone. My brother was younger and he followed me everywhere until this Military Man divided us. My brother cried. He was hardened by our lives but still sensitive to pain. For some unknown reason, I taught myself how to freeze over, how to become numb to it all. This Military Man spoke to us in a dark room with no light. I could only hear his voice in the darkness. I couldn’t tell if it was Jekyll or Hyde, but every time, he pushed me to be honest with him.