Chameleon (Days)

by Dean Serravalle

  “Yes.” He stops talking and shaving the stick now that Gibran is made visible in the bush. Gibran’s whiteness is almost unicorn-like in the brush.

  “Her mother never told me. She never wanted to tell me. She never wanted her to know. So I went in search of her, one day. To do so, I created my death scene. I staged a death scene and then left blood in my place. My blood. On a mountain like this. I took pictures and sent them to the television network. They created the rest of the story. They had my blood to prove it was me, but not a body. That’s how you create a martyr. You remove the body from the scene. It always leaves a tiny space of doubt to fuel the legend.”

  “What did they determine the cause of death to be?”

  “The explanations varied. From foreign enemies, to suicide, to Mohammed taking me as a prophet from the mountain as a sacrifice. This one usurped the rest.”

  “How did you find her?”

  “I ventured into every hospital on the planet, and I followed my instincts.”

  “How long did it take you to find her?”

  “Five years. I found her in a nunnery. Abandoned by her mother.”

  “Do you know her mother?”

  “I know she is mine.”

  “How?”

  “I took her blood. Blood will have blood, isn’t that what they say.”

  Gibran is proud to have reached the cleared out space in the forest. The goat is breathing heavy, but Kashif, in a swift move, inserts the threadlike sharpened branch into the goat’s chest and the goat instantly keels over. The Messenger is shocked by how quickly it happens. Gibran’s eyes are wide open, as if never seeing it coming.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I felt you were as hungry as I am.”

  Kashif removes the baggage from the goat’s back and delicately lifts the goat onto his shoulder.

  “Take the bag, will you?”

  They leave the spot without a story. The Messenger follows Kashif and is able to keep up with him as he climbs up the mountain. The goat’s mouth is dripping blood and creating a trail for other predators to sniff out.

  DAY 25

  When they reach an area before the zenith of the mountain, Kashif walks into a cave reserved from a primitive history. This is a hiding shelter he has used before, The Messenger believes. Kashif leaves a limp Gibran on the sand in front of the cave before he enters. When he returns, and like he has seen a God, he is bearded again, as he was for the picture.

  “It is time to get back into character.”

  “Why did you kill Gibran?”

  “We have to eat, before we are kidnapped. It will be like a last supper.”

  Kashif removes a long, sheathing blade from his tunic. He begins skinning the goat.

  “Can you prepare a fire?”

  The Messenger does as he is told. He collects branches and twigs and kindle. He then finds a split tree, deadened on the slope. He procures a thicker piece of wood to weight the rest of it down. It takes him a while to light the fire, but he does so expertly. It doesn’t impress Kashif in the least. He is busy skinning the goat. When he breaks its limbs, The Messenger shivers. As if synchronized, the fire bursts into a taller flame when Kashif, hands bloodied and steaming with the goat’s warmth, carries the blanket of goat parts to the fire. He washes his hands cleanly and then he sharpens some more twigs with his knife. The Messenger wonders if he is sharpening the branches for him, this time around, but he is making skewers. He offers a few to The Messenger.

  “So what will be believable as my story,” Kashif asks, as if teasing The Messenger. He seems to already have the story stored in his mind. This is a test, The Messenger considers. If he passes it, Kashif will regard him as someone worthy to represent his public interests.

  “I need to know one thing more.”

  “What is that?”

  The meat on the stick is bubbling away its water in the translucence of the flame.

  “Who was her mother?”

  “There were many women. I told you, I don’t know.”

  “As you said, I need to know the truth before I can create a believable fiction.”

  Kashif smirks.

  “She was a daughter herself. Of one of our funders. You will meet him when we are captured, I am sure. It’s the reason I didn’t want to tell you the entire truth. I didn’t want it to show on your face.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “I met her here, in Lebanon first, and then she hunted me in the African desert. She was a privileged girl, but too curious. Her father had sent her away to learn languages and other cultures. She had disguised herself.”

  “She found you?”

  “Yes, she is the only one to find me. Aside from you.”

  “How did she know who you were?”

  “Well, first she came to understand her father’s secrets. He is a powerful man, but she was a resourceful girl. And then, after the discovery of her father’s power, she chased its most dangerous weapon.”

  “Before you had changed?”

  “I am always changing.”

  “Before your surgeries, I mean.”

  “Yes. My reputation as a chameleon is believed to be ingenious, and many concur I am completely devoted to the craft of terror. The real reason for these changes was to hide myself from her, not from those who placed bounties on my head.”

  “Why would you want to hide yourself from her—her father?”

  “Her father knows nothing of anything. These are secrets I will keep beyond the afterlife.”

  The Messenger waits without asking. He understands this is the best way to achieve the truth from someone in a mountainside confessional. Silence is the most appropriate lure and the campfire provides the perfect warmth for trust.

  “She made me human. It is that simple. I was created immortal in my instincts, but she made me human.”

  Kashif offers the first cooked piece to The Messenger and he is appreciative. Even without spice or salt, it is pleasing to the taste. There is blood in the aftertaste.

  “You cannot survive as long as I have with weakness. In this world, weakness is only employed as a trap. She weakened me and I worried it would endanger her. My own weakness. One day, she sent me a picture of herself in a hospital bed. She knew where I was hiding all along. She died, and our daughter was dying of the same disease, but she wouldn’t tell me. So I disappeared to find her and I have never reappeared since.”

  “How did she know where to find you?”

  “She had her ways. I never questioned her as the mother of my daughter. My daughter is not like her mother—my daughter refuses to die. She refutes peace, like her father. I never make myself recognizable to her. I dress as random visitors but I believe she knows it is me, just like her mother knew how to find me.”

  “By instinct?”

  “Very funny. So what is the story?”

  “I thought about it the whole walk here. There are private stories and there are stories meant for public consumption.”

  Kashif leans in and his chin seems to rest on the tip of a fluttering flame.

  “If you say you have come out of hiding, your audience will question your cowardice. They will consider you broken, mentally, or by nerves.”

  “I agree. I agree.”

  The Messenger is somewhat surprised Kashif is listening to him so intently. Why does he want him to make up the story?

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Sorry. A thought crossed my mind.”

  “You are wondering why I am entrusting you with my story.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Guess so accurately.”

  “I have been living my life by the same feeling, the same hunches, and the same instincts. It’s a language all to its own. But to answer your que
stion, I need your objectivity. It is the reason you are alive right now. A story coming directly from me will carry a dangerous bias, like I am making it up. Like it is contrived for an ulterior motive. However, if you tell my story, you will gain the credit of having found me and that credibility will serve the story better. Your story will be from a distance, getting closer and closer the more you tell it. This will inspire those who have been searching for me for fifteen years, to find us.”

  “Which is why, I believe, we should take the religious route with your story. If you claim mystical status, like a saint or a prophet called, or even an angel, for that matter, your audience will fear your absence, they will grow curious to the unknown, and they will listen to everything you have to say without question.”

  Kashif smirks and the fire lends it more width with a lined shadow on his face, from ear to ear.

  “We will present you as a monk called to a religious rite of passage. You were called to Mecca; you were called by the prophet Mohammed. You have returned to pave a new wave of terror. One that will revolutionize the term.”

  “This will explain my absence.”

  “This will also introduce you to the child who can save your daughter. Your resurrection will explain why he exists. A prophet paving the road for a second coming.”

  “You stole that from another religion.”

  “Is that what a story is in the first place? Something stolen from another’s perspective?”

  Kashif slaps his lap before taking a big bite of meat from a stick charred by the fire. The Messenger wonders if it is burning his tongue.

  “This is why you are alive. I knew not to kill you, even though I should have. I could feel I needed you. We must dramatize and record this story. It must be brief in its first installment, in the firelight. We will build this story and they will come to find us on the mountain.”

  Kashif disappears into the cave to retrieve his bag. He removes a brand new, traceable phone and it lights up his face once he turns the power on.

  “It’s time for us to move now.”

  DAY 26

  Kashif positions himself at a defined angle to the fire. Half of him is behind the fire, the other half revealed by it. One side of his bearded face is in the orange fire light and the other erased by the black in the dark.

  “When you are ready, ask the questions. Be sure to cut off the answer of the second, the way we rehearsed it.”

  The fire pops a sparkle into the night. It floats away until it extinguishes and disappears. The Messenger presses the red record button on the phone.

  “Why have you returned?”

  “I was sent back by The Prophet. I was dead, now I am alive again.”

  “What is your mission?”

  “To create a new jihad. To renew the old with the new. To pave the way for—”

  The Messenger presses the button. Kashif asks him to replay it. The take is a good one. Kashif is convinced by it.

  “Perfect, you can see the old cedars in the corner of the screen. They will know how to find us now.”

  “Do you want to try it again?”

  “No, send it.”

  The Messenger sends it to the email Kashif spells out to him. They listen to the sound of the message sending before the air is silenced again by the glow of the phone, by the glow of the fire, by the smoggy scent of burning flesh.

  “Now we wait, and watch.”

  “What are we watching for?” asks The Messenger.

  “The battle before the victory. After the victory, we will be delivered to the council. The victor will lead us to the child. You can sleep, if you wish. You must be very tired. I will stand watch.”

  The Messenger is tired and his head is spinning for some ­reason. The orientation of the mountain against a darkening sky creates a vibrating effect. Or perhaps it was something he ate, or the guilt from having eaten an animal he had grown close to in so short a time.

  He passes out before he can fall asleep thinking. He dreams of Gibran, the goat, numerous times. In each series of dreams the goat is mutated. In one of them, the goat’s head replaces Kashif’s on his body. Kashif is the goat, eating himself in another.

  An explosion awakens him instantly. It is the crack of dawn and Kashif is statue-like in the same place. His hands on his knees, his eyes are focussed on a trail of smoke rising from the valley.

  I stop writing because I am forcing words out of my fingers. Each sentence feels like I am stretching it off the page. I find myself reverting back to rewrite paragraphs that require essential plot details or descriptions. I fear I am questioning the validity of the entire story too much at this point, now that I see its end approaching. The story wants to funnel quickly to its resolution point and I am resisting the swirling vortex of the flush. It is begging to be finished but I am trying to slow it down. I want to apply the same intensity and attention to detail in the last pages as I had in the first. I don’t want it to end, as well. For personal reasons. This is my metaphorical getaway for life’s more serious issues. This is my total escape. Mind, Body, Spirit. This story has become the only work that energizes me in this trinity.

  I would like to blame my day job teaching as continuing to disappoint me but I can’t scapegoat my career. It has been good to me over the years. It has helped me come out of my shell. It has given me purpose, acclaim, appreciation, and inspiration, with further room for future fulfilment. And yet I feel myself failing it with my insatiable dreams.

  By this point in my life I assumed I would be writing full time. Transitioning from my public career into a private one. Living off of my books, and not by the protocol of a rigid routine. Establishing a name for myself in the industry. I have fallen short of my aspirations, fallen shorter and older by all accounts and expectations. I haven’t been able to put together another novel worthy of publication and the possibility of writing for a living has become a pipe dream someone else is smoking the life out of.

  I want to talk to my wife about it. I hear the roll of the treadmill downstairs and I know she is exercising. The kids are asleep. The rest of the house is dark.

  I find her with her headphones on. She is running at an impressive speed. When she sees me, she removes them and slows the pace down.

  “Hey.”

  “I was thinking, I would like to build that cottage up north. Maybe we should go modular home instead.”

  “Why did we spend money on architectural plans then?”

  She seems disgusted by my suggestion. Her voice is nearly hateful and everything in it is rejection.

  In a predictable act of desperately grasping for one last hope, I purchased a waterfront lot on a small lake in Muskoka a year back. It was supposed to be a place my family could retreat to since there are six of us, and one with an inability to walk on and off a plane for a normal vacation destination. Deep down it was also to be my writing retreat, and we were supposed to build a dream cottage, rent it out and pay off the mortgage that way, while enjoying the offseason weekends. I purchased it on a line of credit. My wife agreed because she believed it would be a ­family investment, one that our Down syndrome child would familiarize good times in. The idea seemed golden until both of my brothers invested in local commercial properties that yielded better monetary returns. Both of them are more successful than me and I am very proud of them. I don’t spite their success or good decisions. I can tell my wife sees our investment in a different, comparative light now.

  I try my best to explain. To salvage the initial dream, when it appeared like such a good idea.

  “It may be too expensive to build the architectural way.”

  “You know what, this is irrelevant right now. Why are you bringing it up to me?”

  “Because I’ve been getting some quotes and I wanted to start slowly.”

  “We can’t start! We will never be able to start! We have no money to start it!
”

  I can see lost faith in her eyes, in my presumed talent, in what she thought I was when she married me.

  “I just thought.”

  “You don’t think like a businessman because you are a shitty businessman.”

  I know where this is coming from. I don’t know it all just yet. My mind is critically thinking ahead of itself, analyzing every implicit meaning.

  We are arguing about a dream. Or I am arguing about a dream because she is not refuting the dream. Instead she is attacking my lack of attention in her life since we received the news of her escape from cancer. When I am writing long hours before and after work, I become quiet and aloof in between. I don’t ask questions. I don’t take interest in or remember important family events I should share in as a husband and father. I am consumed by the words I write to the point where they consume the ­goodness in my life. They bring light to my eyes, but darkness everywhere else. So I can see why the cottage is a bad idea at this point in time. It represents another distraction from them.

  I don’t see this angle right away. It hurts me right away when she insults me, so much so that I begin to leave before turning around for more.

  “Like you’re a good businessman? What have you done to push us forward?”

  Neither of us is arguing about business anymore. Our tones are violent, our words sharper still. Although we breach topics like the cottage, my inability to make the same money as my brothers or our bad luck with investments, there is only one reason why we fight.

  “I don’t want to be in the same room with you anymore. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to be here. I’m leaving.”

  “Then go,” I answer. “I don’t care anymore.”

  We both seek escape. We both want to run, a new race, on a new track, with a real victory at the end. Not a consolation victory. Not a moral victory. A victory that doesn’t come with the constant acceptance of loss, one set apart from changing a five-year-old’s diapers, or trying to force Tobias to eat something more than cookies and bread with peanut butter. We are frustrated with the daily toil of parents dealing with the slow progress of a disability. And what kills us more is that we would never trade him for anyone else. It’s the love we have for him that is the killer. It is the love that we bear him that carves new entry points of pessimism and comparison with everyone outside of our own struggles. Even our families don’t understand, and why should they want to understand how difficult it is to confront the same reality day in and day out, knowing full well it could only get a little better if it’s a good day.