Chameleon (Days)

by Dean Serravalle

  And now I am sick enough in my stomach to have bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, strained vision, sore ankles and muscles and dry lips.

  I punch these symptoms into the internet at an obsessive rate. They are linked to so many terminal endings, but also to many menial, seasonal cold and flu ailments.

  “If writing cures you of these ills, quit your job and do what you want to do. It’s not that hard. Let those babies starve a little. Your kids are too spoiled anyway.”

  The Man is alluding to my two sons. The one who lives apart from me and my six-year-old. Both of them are underachieving in school. Both of them seem to have attitude issues or inabilities to focus and apply themselves.

  I nearly struck my six-year-old the other day. My wife signed him up for an indoor soccer camp on Sundays. With other kids his age and younger, they run through drills and fitness games. He has fun in the drills and he is happy and playful. But when the scrimmage starts he is screwing around with a few of his friends. He is trying to entertain them with “poop” jokes and “fart” sounds. He does this often with our son Tobias during bath time. Although Tobias is nearly five, his mind is equitable to a two-year-old’s, so he laughs hysterically. But no one is laughing on the soccer pitch. The coach is upset. He is constantly reminding Oscar to seek out the ball. He doesn’t move in any predestined direction. Younger kids run right by him with the ball without his acknowledgment of their existence. And then he cheers when the other team scores on his net.

  I understood this behaviour when he was four, and tolerated it when he was five, but now that he is six, it raises heartburn in me. Sitting uncomfortably on this smelly, turf field, and watching other kids run by my son who is showing no interest or focus again disturbs me beyond the limits of my own temper. I ignore everything my wife is saying to me.

  “Can you be more social with the parents? You look miserable,” she whispers.

  She is right. I am miserable. I have never been one to project my own aspirations onto my son, but he isn’t even trying. I am watching him in a wide open view misbehave, goof off, and not even break a sweat. So I snap at my wife.

  “He is too spoiled,” I growl under my breath.

  “We don’t buy him anything.”

  “Everyone else does. But that’s not what I mean. He is spoiled with attention. And when he doesn’t get it in spades, he starts searching for it, and it only.”

  “He’s just a kid,” my wife reasons. I can tell she is fearing my words.

  “Then why is he the only one not going after the ball. He is playing soccer today, not entertaining kids on recess. He has no focus.”

  “I knew you shouldn’t have come. Don’t talk to me.”

  She says this with a strained, disguising smile for the other parents. They aren’t even listening to our conversation. If they were, they would think I was one of those fathers who thinks his son will play professional sports one day. I’m not. I don’t care about sports and I never aspired to those lofty goals. And God knows, I am not one to live vicariously through another, unless it is one of the characters I create in a story. But I do want my kids to try. I want them to work hard at everything they do. I don’t want them to act entitled. And I don’t want them to be spoiled. I want them to transcend and be original unto themselves, which is why my wife is angry with me. We had an argument the week before about my son attending too many birthday parties. According to my wife, if you invite a friend from his class, you have to invite everyone not to leave anyone out, or ostracize. So my son will attend twenty-two parties this year! I thought the idea was ludicrous since some of these parties happen on the same day.

  “Don’t you dare say you didn’t grow up this way again!” was how the argument ended on her note of disgust. But I couldn’t disagree with her more. I don’t want my kids following the flow of this insanity. If a kid in his class doesn’t want to invite him to a party, he shouldn’t go—period.

  So I take it out on my six-year-old son on the way home. My tone of voice scares my wife and I know, while I am lecturing him, that the boomerang effect will return to strike me in the back of the head with less sleep and more guilt.

  “You don’t want to play, then you’re not playing anything anymore!” I scream from the front seat. In the rearview mirror, he is frozen in his booster seat. He has to wear glasses now, since one of his eyes is weaker than the other, which makes me feel a whole lot guiltier for some reason. But he isn’t blind, and I’m not finished.

  “You are nothing but a goof! That’s all. You goof off and no one is laughing! Can’t you see that! They were playing soccer and you were goofing off all by yourself. Because that’s all you are, a goof! My son is a goof!”

  He isn’t crying. He isn’t moving. He doesn’t like this tone of voice.

  “No more stories before bed. If you want a story, you are going to read it yourself. You are six years old and you don’t read on your own yet! No more cuddles, and so help me God if you cry for one more stupid reason, I will give you more to cry about.”

  My wife is shocked by my tone of voice and the sharp edge to my words. She knows not to interrupt me or maybe I have frightened her as well.

  “And no more treats for nothing!”

  These are my last words. Even the radio volume has lowered due to my voice. During the remainder of the ride, I think how ridiculous I sounded. No treats? Really? This is how I father? My wife doesn’t say anything and when we finally park in the driveway, I have more to say.

  “You are going to hang up your coat! You are going to work every day now if you can’t play right. You will clean dishes, you will scrub floors, you will clean up your brother’s mess, you will do everything you never want to do!”

  My son leaves the car sullen. When he enters the house he nearly skips with speed to hang up his coat. He can’t even reach the pole to hang his jacket but he rushes to the bathroom to get the toilet stool. He then rushes downstairs to the toy room to clean up the mess.

  My wife is about to defend him but I put my hand up.

  She is more shocked to see this method of Gestapo control.

  I whisper, “He is soft and he acts like a little baby. He tattletales, he sucks out, and he doesn’t listen. It’s my turn to fix him.”

  “Fix him?”

  “Let me be his father,” I say, as if to blame her for something otherwise.

  She walks away.

  That night, when he goes to bed, I stand at the doorway making sure she doesn’t take his side. I know she agrees with the need to change his behaviour, but she completely abhors the manner in which it was introduced.

  I can hear him whisper to her, “I’ll try harder to be good, Mommy.”

  It breaks my heart instantly, and now my heart seems to break over and over again as if by default. Every time I think of my deceased cousin. Every time I consider how ungrateful I am for not appreciating my wife’s good health news. Every time I teach my lower level readers and hear their broken family stories. Every time I see Tobias struggling to walk in his cast ankle shoes. Every time I see him eating baby food from a pouch. Every time I think about what my estranged son is doing. His misbehaviours. My inability to help him from a distance.

  “I told you feeling sorry for yourself would only lead to your ruin,” The Man pipes up. He quickly retracts and returns to his positive tone. He has been much more positive as of late.

  “All of this is good for you as a writer. The struggle. Your father’s near death accident when you were in your early twenties. Your mother’s perpetual health issues, her cancer, your cousin’s death, your son’s Down syndrome, the horrible divorce you lived through, your ex-wife’s vendetta against you and your current wife, your own phobias, your bullying boss at work, how it’s been difficult to publish your second book after your first. They fuel your growth.”

  “My growth? Then why do I feel like I am always sinking. And e
very time I see a little light, I sink deeper into something else? I think it’s about time I see someone.”

  “Do you think that someone will tell you anything different? You are a creator, an artist, you foolish man. That never changes, no matter what drugs they prescribe you, or how much time you spend on a couch. You are obviously depressed, and anxious—all of the trendy words these days. So I won’t tell you the obvious, like every other.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. But I will tell you what will happen as a result of all of these shortcomings?”

  “Shortcomings?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “You will experience post-traumatic growth.”

  “Post-traumatic growth?”

  “I assume you don’t believe me?”

  I know he is trying to be nice. I don’t know why, or if he truly feels sorry for me himself, but he has his intentions disguised expertly. I feel he is fooling me now while I am vulnerable.

  “Did you make up that term?”

  “Of course not. Look it up yourself. It was coined by Richard Tedeschi to describe people who experienced profound changes, major transformations, as they coped with various types of trauma and challenging circumstances, like yourself.”

  It sounds believable, but I never believe him, so it is hard to taste, swallow and digest.

  “When does the growth happen?”

  “You poor soul.”

  “Don’t pity me.”

  “Why not, you’re asking for it.”

  “I’m not asking for it. I don’t know how it’s happening to me, what is causing it. I may need an objective eye to see me from the outside in. Unlike you, apparently, who has taught himself to see me from the inside out.”

  “You are eating your lunch alone and enjoying it that way. You used to work a room. Students and teachers would gravitate to you, to your energy, to your passion and intensity and now you prefer to eat alone. You are hiding in the open.”

  “From what?”

  “The truth of who you really are. You are no prince, you are no Hamlet avenging his father. You’re just a small town boy from Thorold trying to make himself more important. You starve for importance, don’t you? You crave it. You live for it in the same way the janitor at your school pretends to know something more about the stock market. He is always trying to prove he is more important than a janitor. You are always trying to prove you are more important than a teacher. But you are a dime a dozen. I’m sorry to tell you.”

  His words are true to form and it silences the room more than the absence of people. Even the hum of the fridge from the kitchenette has disappeared.

  “What is the post-traumatic growth again?”

  “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Sometimes you have to hit the water below rock bottom first.

  “Like I said, all of these circumstances, unfortunate though they may be, will only create a greater appreciation for life, open up new possibilities, improve your relationships, make you more spiritual. Trauma doesn’t crush you, according to this theory, it sets the stage for your self-improvement.”

  “You sound like an extended horoscope. Why do you assume you are my friend?”

  “Do you see any others in the room offering you these pearls?”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “People naturally develop and rely on a set of beliefs and assumptions that they’ve formed about the world, and in order for growth to occur after a trauma, the traumatic event must deeply challenge those beliefs. Trauma shatters worldviews, beliefs and identities like an earthquake—look it up. Even our foundational structures, like the extended family you lean on. Everything crumbles and you will shake, but after everything clears, you will find a desire to rebuild it all over again.”

  A teacher walks in to interrupt our conversation. He is sniffing around for leftover food or scraps left from the previous lunch. He is hungry. He smiles and moves out of the room.

  “Rebuild, Dean. That’s what you have already started to do with this new novel. The others have failed, your life has failed you in so many ways, but you are rebuilding, despite your physical inability to walk straight some days, or sleep through a night.”

  I leave the lunch room and find myself keywording the ­theory, “post-traumatic growth.” It is everything The Man previously explained and more.

  “Loss and gain are interrelated,” the article explains. “Out of loss, there can be creative gain.”

  “Adverse events can be so powerful that they force us to think about questions we never would have thought of otherwise.”

  I return to the empty lunch room but it is empty no longer. The Man is nowhere to be found. In the past, he might have stuck around to remind me that “he told me so.” He took great pleasure in proving me wrong, his creator, the writer of his story. But ever since he traumatized the story by taking advantage of Sabal, another character in the story, he seems different, almost mature. Is he growing more, as a character, outside the story? Is that possible without putting him in scenes, testing his greatest weaknesses with conflicts foreign to him? Involving him in relationships with others? Maybe I should write him in some way? But where? Kashif is now driving the story forward. He has taken over first billing and as a result, the landscape of the world I have created is becoming more colourful and suspenseful. The plot is also coming together. Introducing The Man at this juncture might threaten the new fabric of this direction.

  Or is his behaviour a ploy to get me to involve him some more? Perhaps his sexual encounter with Sabal, in between the lines, inspired his appetite to exist more. I created him not to have any human qualities like pity, regret, or guilt. I created him as a man who was as close to achieving immortality as a suffering saint or mystic. So why have I kept him on the outside, all of this time? Perhaps I have devalued him and he is insulted as a result of my ignorance.

  He isn’t in my classroom when I enter my last period of the day. With newfound adrenaline, I deviate from my planned ­lesson and nearly float on air with an inspired Shakespearean improvisation.

  DAY 24

  The Messenger can barely see Kashif ahead of him. He has separated himself again, even from Gibran, the goat. The Messenger appreciates the goat’s pace. Its brittle limbs barely maintain balance on the side of the road. Every once and a while, The Messenger leads it away from the steep cliff’s edge.

  A few hours into the walk, Kashif is sitting at the cliff’s edge himself, staring out into the mountainous distance.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “This is where we are going.”

  He points over the valley of green.

  “We will climb that mountain?”

  “Will Gibran be able to handle it? The walk down is steep.”

  “You distrust his abilities.”

  Kashif slides down a little before leaning back to walk down the cliff from the road and not fall over. The Messenger focuses on Gibran. He tries to get the goat to go first, but the animal refuses him. Kashif has already disappeared into the bush.

  “Okay, if you don’t want to come, stay here.”

  The Messenger begins his descent and uses his hands on the rocks to support himself. When he reaches the flatter valley below, Kashif is far ahead of him while Gibran is lost behind him. Until he hears steps.

  The goat is tiptoeing its way down. The baggage it is carrying is pressing forward on its head, but the goat is resilient. It extends its neck backward. It is obedient. It knows its job. To lose the bag is more perilous than tumbling down the cliff. Not worried anymore, The Messenger looks ahead. He hears the crunching of branches and follows the echo of the sound.

  The goat reaches level ground unscathed, fully balanced. It yelps a little as if to cheer before following the trail by sound himself. It appears like a long time before The Messenger finds Kashif in a
slight clearing before the incline of the mountain. He is sharpening a branch. His strokes are long and straight. The branch bends into the knife with appreciative slivers flailing onto the ground.

  “Have a seat. Rest a little before we take the mountain.”

  The Messenger prefers to lean against a tree. The falling pine needles of the cedar make a sparkling sound up above.

  “Have you thought of a story to sell me with yet?”

  Kashif continues to shave the branch and The Messenger wonders if he will shave it entirely into nothing. It is almost nothing, its width the size of a finger.

  “You have been away for fifteen years. You were captured, and then escaped?”

  “Who captured me?”

  “Another group?”

  “Impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “No group can claim responsibility for such an act. Terror is all about responsibility. That is the selling point.”

  “You disappeared to another country?”

  “Also impossible. They have been looking for me. Even those who believed me dead. Your story must be good enough to eliminate my martyr status. The story must be very ­believable.”

  “What really happened? How did you martyr yourself?”

  “I created a death scene.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I couldn’t live the same anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I found out about her.”

  “Your daughter? That’s understandable.”

  “I didn’t know she existed. For five years, I didn’t know she existed. And then I woke up one day knowing a part of me was dying somewhere. It was something I never felt before. Something within me separated itself from the whole. I don’t know how to describe it, really.”

  “So you knew she existed even before you really knew she existed.”