Chameleon (Days) Read online

  chameleon

  (days)

  chameleon

  (days)

  A Novel

  Dean Serravalle

  Copyright © 2018 by Dean Serravalle

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior ­written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations ­embodied in reviews.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s ­imagination or are used ­fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Serravalle, Dean, 1973–, author

  Chameleon (days) / Dean Serravalle.

  ISBN 9781988098616 (EPUB)

  ISBN 9781988098623 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS8587.E7748C43 2018 C813’.6 C2018–900450–9

  Printed and bound in Canada on 100% recycled paper.

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Now Or Never Publishing

  901, 163 Street

  Surrey, British Columbia

  Canada V4A 9T8

  nonpublishing.com

  Fighting Words.

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing program.

  For Tommy (Roselli)

  DAY 1

  AUTHOR’S (IN YOUR) PREFACE

  I’ve killed the man in me who pleases. The one who cares about doing the right thing the right way. The man who works for an invisible audience. Whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you are—I don’t suffer for you anymore. What you may expect from the way I tell this story. Especially since I am trespassing inside of it already.

  I had a writing instructor once who called this particular sin “authorial intrusion.” She said an author shouldn’t interfere with the story he is creating. Arrest me, then. For this is exactly what I am about to do. Intrude. Break into the story. Rob it. Leave some shit behind, maybe a trademark or two. It’s going to feel like you lost something at the end. This poetic mess you won’t want to clean up.

  And I may rob the story more than once, to be honest. Come back and find new items in it to steal. I may be so mean as to take your photo albums on the way out. This is my wife’s greatest fear if the house should ever burn down. Hey, there’s an idea. Set the story on fire at one point. Maybe after I rob it, but before it resolves itself? Why not? No one is paying me to write you a fancy story. If anything, I may have to kill myself first for someone to publish it.

  Or, you can just put the book back on the shelf. Again, why not? Why should you listen to this wash-up, or read the story he stole from a naked girl who fell asleep on his soft pillow and let it drool from her mouth. She doesn’t even know I stole it, by the way. Too bad. The characters are mine now, the fiction is mine, her truth is mine, the untruth is mine, and its virginity is mine, except, I am not going to parade this story down an isle with a white dress. . . .

  No, no, no, this story is broken, into, officially, and it starts with a guy I met in my walk-in closet. Actually, he wasn’t really there but I hear him speaking to me whenever I change in the dark. You see, I don’t want to wake my wife. She knows I have to go to work and the kids need to sleep in the quiet morning night. Ever try finding a shirt to match your pants in the dark? How about a tie to bring out the dominant colour of your patterned socks? It is always cold in the closet too. Whoever built the house must have thought clothes don’t need warmth. The hardwood floor is a sheet of ice. The room is dark and my wife’s silky dresses lick my back as I smell what’s fresh on my side, what’s dry-cleaner chemical on my skin, the dull scent of a brown, neck-stained collar.

  In this same closet, a fictional character introduces himself to me whenever he believes no one else is listening. He is the fictional character who appears first in this story. A skinny vegan type of man with skull bones pocking the skin on his face. White hair traces a receding “M” on his forehead. To be frank, I met him in the shower first. He’s kind of obsessed with me when I have privacy. In the shower. On the toilet. In the car on my way to London. In the dark, cold, walk-in closet, or when I grab some hung sausage from the cellar downstairs. He follows me around like a kid believing you have candy in your pocket, even though you ate it right in front of him.

  Like I said, he’s the guy who appears first in my stolen story. This man who wears a three piece suit wherever he goes because he needs an inside pocket to hang a watch on. He likes the feel of it ticking against his belly. It reminds him of fleeting time. It reminds him of the value of life because he has taken so many.

  He waits in a grotto for a hired messenger. The grotto is one I visited myself on Mount Gargano. As a teenager, I took great interest in this underground cavern. Water drips down its carved out walls and a mysterious stream flows behind them. A local saint is buried in a glass coffin so that tourists could see she never decomposed, while a statue of Saint Michael the Archangel is tucked into a little cove. He overlooks a drift of candles below him. In his famous pose, his sword is about to attack their ­evaporating light. I was told by a pilgrimage priest if I wished for anything in the grotto; it would be granted to me. A local, folklore secret, so it didn’t surprise me to see crutches decorating the cavern wall. Pictures taped to it. Scratched in thank you messages. I made a wish myself, but not for this character, who never deals with uncertainty.

  His name has changed so many times it is a question mark to his own memory. So I will call him “The Man”. Simple enough. The Man waits in the grotto for The Messenger. The Messenger he will see alive for the last time. The Messenger he has learned about through every investigative means necessary. His knowledge of The Messenger is godlike privy from the inside out. His knowledge of The Messenger overflows enough to make him believe he has every right to pronounce his death. Ownership of another man does have its privileges. It justifies murder. It justifies mercy. The Man waits in the flickering dark pockets pooled by the candles, then by the glass coffin, before settling at the top of the stairway. The first step down is steep and almost invisible to the feet.

  The Man will wait for The Messenger to enter the grotto. No cellular reception here. No pictures allowed. And then The Man will sneak up on The Messenger and speak to him from behind. If The Messenger manages to look back at The Man’s Sodom and Gomorrah face, The Man will be forced to paralyze him permanently with a needle. He will then seek someone else to perform his mission. The Messenger knows the instruction and this consequence worse than death. He knows nothing of The Man, however, who came to life for me first, years after I stole the story—the one who talks to me from the closet, and in the shower, and sometimes in the silence after I’ve made love to my wife, this man with a message.

  For the message is more important than The Messenger. The Man knows it. So does The Messenger. This Man from my closet does not exist to anyone but his own understanding of how the world works. He has graduated from spy conspiracies. He has graduated from the command of others. He has graduated from a fake obituary with a fake name. He exists solely in the ­purgatory he has devised for himself. A place built on getting away with murder. Or worse transgressions. His pocket watch ticks to remind him he is real. He is never identified. Not even as a stranger. He procures no rewards for his plotting. He serves no master or higher order. He is already presumed dead. The Messenger is only familiar with what The Man knows of him.

  To The Messenger, The Man must be a ghost or a man in the likeness of evil. How else could The Man kn
ow him so intimately? This Man with a message.

  The damp grotto is nearly empty these late evenings for those praying with half open arms. They supplicate on blistered knees by the orchestra of candles. The Man from my walk-in closet waits by the entrance until The Messenger arrives. He does so on time. He was told to arrive on the exact minute. No sooner or later. The Messenger descends to a pew where the corner candles are too damp to reignite. The Man in the three piece suit follows him there. The Messenger knows he is being followed.

  The Messenger is a man in his early forties weathered elderly by the tragedies of his own life. The death of a soul mate. The death of an only child shortly thereafter. The acknowledgment of perfect health despite his own attempts at killing himself. My Man from the closet knows it all. Such criteria limited his search, refining it to a point of certainty. The Messenger wants to die more than anyone The Man has ever researched. The Messenger simply has the bad luck of being saved. Twenty-three suicide attempts and some very creative ones. Only to be saved every time. A passerby at the bottom of the cliff. A scuba diver in the canal. Helicopters before the brink of The Falls. A surgeon who expertly removed the misfired bullet from his skull.

  This is no ordinary Messenger, according to my Man. This Messenger is immortal. So who better to deliver a dangerous message than one who requests death as payment?

  By the way, do you see why The Man’s voice scares me in the walk-in closet? My Man is a haunting figure. He leans over the rotting wood of the pew and speaks over the shoulder of The Messenger in the same, reassuring voice.

  “It’s okay now. You will reach your end.”

  The Messenger is overjoyed although he doesn’t want to show it. He listens and forces himself not to look behind him.

  “You will deliver a mission in a message for me.”

  The Messenger nods. He can feel breath on his neck and surprisingly, it is dry and warm, with no scent.

  “You will travel to a village in Northern Lebanon. It is called Bsharri. The birthplace of the poet. You will access it via the Syrian border. You will find a black priest in a church there. He will lead you to a Muslim man who lives amongst his enemies. He enters Maronite churches. He makes the sign of the cross when he wishes to avoid the suspicion of his paranoid villagers. His face is clean of hair, like a newborn baby’s. Twenty-three facial surgeries to absolve his true identity. All voluntary. He has one name. Kashif. It means revealing spirit. Ironically, he doesn’t have one, a spirit. He has more blood on his hands than many wars. He believes himself retired from the dangerous game. His only weakness is thirteen years old. She lives in the same village without knowledge of him, in a hospital. We have a rifle pointed at her neck. Make sure you remind him of this reality.”

  “What is the mission?”

  The Messenger regrets speaking out loud. It indicates impatience. He lowers his head.

  “The mission is to rescue a child not like his own . . .”

  “You will explain these details to him. This child in need of rescue is a miracle stolen and detained by the wrong faith. He is five years old and is just learning how to walk. And yet, he can cure the devil of an illness.”

  The Messenger tries to imagine the child.

  “The child is the next coming captured. Only Kashif can deliver him. Only Kashif can infiltrate the walls he has built himself in another lifetime.”

  “How will he find this child?” The Messenger asks, once again hesitating to sound rude.

  “With his specialty—terror. He will know how to find him. Before he decides on the mission, he will know better to shoot you in the head on the edge of a mountain cliff. You will see the width of a blue sky and white mountain peaks before everything turns to black. He will not miss. He will not let you live after you deliver this message. He will never trust the messenger or the mission, but one, you, will be available to kill, the other will pursue his greatest fear.”

  The Messenger understands the message. He questions one detail further.

  “His daughter is already dying?”

  “Yes. We will kill him before she says goodbye.”

  The Man delivering the message adjusts the lower button on his suit jacket. The Man rises from the pew and disappears into the crowd as he ascends the stairs to a lighter darkness. The Messenger lights a candle and offers thanks for The Man’s promise.

  DAY 2

  The Man sits in the front seat of my truck. He tries to convince me I need to research that little village in Lebanon some more. He says I must breathe in the cedar-wooded air before I set the next scene. With my mind’s voice, I tell him I don’t feel like doing anything. My wife found a lump in her breast the night before. She woke me from my sleep to have me find it myself. I felt it below the softness of her skin—­lurking.

  The Man from the preface will not appear anywhere in the next chapter of this story. However, his temporary exit from the story doesn’t mean he doesn’t care for it. I can hear him in my inner ear as I drive to work. It is early in the morning and I follow the leftover moon in the sky alongside the highway.

  “You need to do me justice,” The Man repeats.

  I assume justice means I have to write a story worthy of his participation in it. I’m sure he’s read The Preface already, since he inspired it. And it wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t approve, although he hasn’t mentioned anything specific about it yet. I’m sure he likes that I’ve rewritten it a few times already. For an outcast, private character, he seems to seek public attention or at least all of mine.

  I wait in a traffic line to enter the school parking lot. Parents who refuse their children the horror of riding a yellow bus to school clog the entranceway. They try to swing in ahead of the busses. And then they try to pass them on the left when all of the cars are stationary. I want to listen to music but I can’t. I don’t want to appear rude to The Man. I feel a duty to our telepathic conversation now that I have written him on a page. And I am distracted. I have four children. I don’t want them to grow up without a mother.

  When I finally reach my class, Mr. Lye, one of the vice ­principals, is waiting at my door. He is a stout man with a grey spotted goatee moustache. He is upset with me.

  “You need to be in class,” he points to my door’s entrance. The bell hasn’t rung yet.

  I don’t say anything, although the few students sitting at their desks send him daggers with their eyes. They protect me by spiting him more. He picks at their uniforms, confronts them when they are flirting with each other in the hallways and stops music at dances to reprimand their sexual gyrations. In return, they make him the enemy for his job description.

  My first period kids are locally developed, which means they are reading at levels much lower than their ages. I feel for The Man from my Preface when I reach the classroom, knowing they take higher priority. Luckily for the both of us, he has disappeared for a while.

  “You have another grey hair, sir,” Emily points out. I have many on my head now, which leads me to believe she solely wants to start a conversation that will transition into one of her weekend trailer stories. She lives in a foster trailer home, but she sells the experience frequently as an amusement park.

  The Man finally takes a seat in the class and I can see him nodding his head at me. Although he harasses me more in private, he realizes my creative spirit needs a room to be alone in. He suggests calling the other vice principal. He wants me to fictionalize a story of illness, so I can go home and continue research on this tiny village in Lebanon, where The Messenger is headed. To kill two birds with one enormous shotgun, I do him one better. I venture into the hallway to find one of our Lebanese exchange students. His name is Mohammed and he is Muslim. He loves soccer and he knows I played, so he is always trash talking me on lunch duty. I find him at his locker.

  “Hey Mohammed, I need some information on a tiny village in Lebanon.”

  “You pla
n on visiting Lebanon, sir?”

  “No, just writing about it.”

  “Can I be in the story?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Listen. It’s called Bsharri. It’s a Catholic village in the north.”

  “I’m from Beirut, sir.”

  “I know that, Mohammed.”

  “Okay, let me text my father and I will get back to you.”

  “Thanks,” I say, while Mr. Lye roams the hallways to clear them before morning prayer announcements. The bell still hasn’t rung. I worry if seeking research about a tiny village in Lebanon is appropriate behaviour for a husband who felt a lump in his wife’s breast this morning.

  The Man, my character from the Preface, is happy I took the initiative. As the author of the story, I feel like I shouldn’t have to answer to a character, never mind one who isn’t my protagonist. Yet, he is insistent like the coach who was never the best player. It’s a priority that the story he is a part of comes alive with my fiction, despite its root of truth.

  I’m not his slave, I say under my breath. Emily stares at me. She is always staring at me in the front row, with her magnifying eyes, trying to find one more grey hair or a longer one sliding out of a nostril, or a fluff of some on my ears. Maybe she is my ticking clock, personified. Maybe she is the pocket watch that reminds me I have to get this story down on paper, when in actuality, life needs to happen first.

  My kids need to eat. I need to sleep. My kids need light. I need to pay electricity bills. My wife needs to see a doctor only my benefits can pay for. Where does writing a story fit into these more pressing realities?

  “It fills in the spaces worth dreaming about in between them, stupid,” I hear my Man saying. I can imagine him smirking somewhere, although I know he hates my digressions.

  On my lunch duty, Mohammed finds me. He is eating a pita wrap and I can see creamy hummus on his tongue as he talks at the same time.