DAY 8 (LATER THAT NIGHT)

The upcoming chapter I am trying to write is often interrupted by bouts of stomach cramps and trips to the toilet. After returning home and tucking in my son with a traitor’s kiss, my gurgling stomach forces me to isolate myself in the basement again. I can’t sleep. My stomach is upset and I worry I have food poisoning now.

With no hope of a peaceful rest in sight, I relocate The Messenger hitchhiking at night, just past where he abandoned his car.

Although it is dusk, there is a red laser line tracing the white peaks in the distance. To The Messenger, it resembles a Pink Floyd album cover, Dark Side of the Moon. The Messenger is not afraid to be hitchhiking. He is well fed and relaxed. And the walk up a steeper slope is a soft one on gravel. It doesn’t take long for a metallic green four-door sedan to pull up ahead of him. The Messenger chases the red brake lights and hurries to the passenger side door.

“Bsharri?” the younger man in a suit and tie asks. The inside of the car smells like mint trapped in an artificial package.

“Yes.”

“Get in, soldier.”

The Messenger remembers what he is wearing now. The customs official’s uniform. It must have been his lawful uniform which prompted this professionally clad man to stop his vehicle. The Messenger doesn’t respond to the acknowledgment. If the uniform protects him, he achieves his mission faster by reaching Bsharri on schedule.

The younger professional is very careful as he pulls back onto the road. He uses his directional signal, before he merges quickly into the passing traffic.

The vehicle itself is newer, leather seats covered in custom plastic sheaths. Every time The Messenger moves, he hears himself doing so.

“It is a new car. I asked for the covers. I know, covering the dash and where your feet rest is a little much.”

“It is very clean,” The Messenger agrees, forcing a complimentary tone of voice.

“My name is Sifar.”

“I would like to tell you my name, but I am not permitted to do so, under any circumstances.”

The Messenger presents this requirement of his mission as he would a joke, the punchline being no need to worry with a man in uniform. With the armoured support of the uniform, The Messenger does not feel rude in saying this. He feels Sifar will understand.

“I thought of becoming an official myself. Actually, I nearly joined the army.”

“What prevented you?”

“Education, the Civil War, hypocrisy.”

The latter term ruffles his skin as he says it. He squirms in his plastic sheathed seat. It sounds as if he is stretching the car from the inside out so he can fit his legs into it better.

“Are you a fence man, like the rest of them?”

This question is rather aggressive for The Messenger.

“A fence man?”

“Yes. At the border. A secret Sunni in uniform, letting Syrian rebels across.”

The Messenger considers admitting his identity honestly. His military uniform seems to be communicating messages he can’t necessarily control.

“I do not know what you mean.”

The Messenger settles on ignorance instead. It is, he decides, safer to pretend you know nothing about who you are pretending to be.

Sifar is agitated. He loosens his tie with a violent tug. The plastic surrounding him reacts with a warping sound. The Messenger remains as still as he can.

“I suppose killings and kidnappings don’t mean anything to you, or the Cedar Revolution. How soon we forget.”

Although his former life’s position as peacekeeper on the U.N. interim force introduced these ongoing clashes between Sunni opposition forces and Lebanese Armed Forces, his outside peacekeeping role prevented him from realizing the deeper roots of conflict on the border of Syria and Lebanon.

“I work as any man does in uniform,” The Messenger says. He knows diffusing a situation involves humility and concession.

“Yeah, you work all right, for both sides of the fence.”

“I can walk the rest of the way, if you prefer?”

The Messenger decides that Sifar’s tone of voice is far from compromise or casual discussion. He is speeding now and his one hand is trembling on the steering wheel. This turn of events has happened so fast. This violent metamorphosis between man in suit and angry protestor yielded no hint or gun powder line. Just three seconds, like a grenade, and detonation.

As the car ascends the hill, The Messenger sees a straight line of clouds replacing the red line. A very straight, thin sheet of clouds stretching from one end of the earth to the other, like an equator in the sky.

“How about you die the rest of the way.” These words explode from Sifar’s ballooned cheeks like a sudden burst of steam. He yanks the car over to the side and before The Messenger expects it, this man who is dressed for a funeral is stabbing him violently with a knife of no bulging origin. The Messenger feels it plunging into his abdomen, and then into his chest; he feels it missing his neck as he instinctively pushes the door open. The man kicks him out of the car. While The Messenger waits for Sifar to jump out himself and finish the job, he understands the symbolism of the plastic sheathed interior now.

As expected, Sifar jumps out with no hurry. He shuffles sand into dust clouds as he stands over and spits on The Messenger.

“One less traitor to this country is one more blessing for peace.”

The Messenger struggles to find his bleeding wounds with his hands. He can feel the warmth of his blood leaving his body, in between his fingers. He can also feel the warmth of this man’s spit on his face, cooling quickly.

Just as he imagined every time he tried to kill himself, twenty-three times and counting, his life presents visuals in this flushing of blood transition to the other side. He sees the woman in the scarf and her tiny son, the tiger killer, crouching in the darkness of the bushes. He imagines them watching him die, as he imagines his own son and wife in another lifetime. His wife is breastfeeding his newborn son in the shadow of moonlight seeping in from the half blinded window. Her golden hair is aglow as is a spot on his son’s smooth face. It is one of the scenes which haunts him as a motif, recurring with additional details to colour and reflect its meaning.

Before Sifar leaves his position in the sky to enter his car again, The Messenger chokes.

“Thank you,” he says.

The car speeds off leaving a sheath of gravel that settles on him like tiny hail pellets, or the first shovel of dirt in a grave.

The Messenger has finally achieved his wish despite the incompletion of his mission. He will die with a beautiful view of the night sky and the thin clouds moving rapidly against a backdrop of stars and falling flashing lights. He had always wondered what those floating, flashing lights were. Were they airplanes, or helicopters, or satellites posing as falling stars? Nonetheless, they are as beautiful as the stars themselves, and not trapped in a static constellation.