DAY 38

I stall on the scene before my blurry ending. I can feel, by instinct, where the story is going, what end it will reach but I am stumped on this transition scene. This scene will be the catalyst scene, the one propelling the story with speed to its finale.

It takes me a few days to mull it over. In that span, I spend some time with my children. I return to my routine of bathing them at night. Reading stories with them before bedtime. Shuttling them around to swimming lessons and soccer camps and ice skating. The scene doesn’t come to me right away. This is the first time I have hit a wall as the writer of the story and The Man is nowhere to be found. He doesn’t offer any advice or help. He seldom does when I really need it. I suppose I created him this way. To capitalize upon a weakness but not to contribute to a strength.

I left the story with Kashif reminding The Messenger they were close to their meeting with the council. The Man of Many Wives doesn’t impress Kashif. Why should he? He is a carbon copy, a cheaper version of himself who takes pride in the fact he has something in common with the legend he kidnaps. Kashif recognizes this pride from a mile away. He doesn’t appreciate it, nor does he consider himself greater than The Man of Many Wives. This journey is a chore into the past for Kashif. He has grown to prefer his visits to the hospital, the routine of seeing his daughter, although he will never admit this flaw in the presence of The Messenger or anyone else. He is also aware that this softness is recognizable to those with instincts as refined as his. If he finds himself in front of the council, they will smell him out and devour him. For this entire journey he has been keeping this secret away from The Messenger. This new fascination with his own weaknesses.

Kashif had lived an entire life made cold by warm blood on his hands, knowing full well, that with every murder he committed, he was becoming more and more numb to his own humanity. Similar to Macbeth, he had reached a stage where he couldn’t even react to a “night shriek.” “Blood will have blood,” he used to repeat to himself. Now, that same man is only a costume, only a shell he is trying with increased effort to sell to everyone he encounters along the way.

The idea of this miracle child fascinates him as well. The personification of strength from weakness. The boy doesn’t walk. He is disabled, Kashif believes. And yet, he performs miracles. How is that so? Never, in his previous life, would he believe in such a deliberate contradiction in nature. The bad should cancel out the good, or vice versa.

Kashif fears he has been inadvertently influenced by the Maronites he has hidden amongst for so many years. Their Saviour on a cross, naked, bleeding, thought to be a criminal. How could the same man be a God of power and strength, able to defeat death and recreate life in another dimension? This contradiction, similar to the child’s, is so obvious but so true in its conception.

He never saw strength this way before, this softly, the flesh in it. For years, he had only seen the bones of it, the calcium deposits making fractures stronger after being broken.

In the bathroom, alone, he is expecting someone to break and enter.

(This is what comes to me in the shower. I woke up feeling my entire body tired and weak, almost brittle. Perhaps I am getting sick again, or maybe I am making myself sick. Either way, I am sweating naked in the mirror when I place Kashif in a similar scene.)

Kashif knows The Messenger is expecting him, fully dressed in his suit, outside the bathroom. Kashif is in the bathroom alone. He dims the lights. He is naked in front of the mirror. Scars line his skin in random patterns. Some seem to resemble letters, even words, or a canvas of scratched in margin notes better suited for his own story. He can’t help himself from seeing such scars ­differently now. They are no longer battle scars. Symbolic of strength. No, no, no. He feels the one by his rib cage, formed from a twisted knife. It is silky smooth and soft, but strong enough to hold things together.

His instincts dictate one thing, his heart another. He knows to expect someone to break into the bathroom any minute. Not from the door, but from the window. The sounds of festivities are below. There is celebration in the streets. There is hilarity in the forested areas surrounding the village. And there is condensation on the windows. Someone will appear soon. His instincts are rarely incorrect. Someone will enter, uninvited, to take his blood.

This is the reason why he dug up the box of needles from his cave closet. He didn’t know it then, but his instincts prompted the retrieval. His box of needles and glass bottles. Blood samples to prove he is the same man who defeated enemy armies with the stroke of an ingenious idea. Blood samples with his DNA, the only way to prove his identity. The identity he had expertly kept secret for so long. The identity not even agencies trained to investigate could determine. The identity of a chameleon, whose skin changes and whose blood stays the same.

There is a knock at the door.

“Are you all right?” It is the Messenger. He is worried in his voice and expecting the next stage of the journey.

“I am fine.”

As he says this in the mirror, Kashif observes how his face moves, how it changes and contorts with every word. This is how others must see him, he determines. This is what makes them afraid.

In the corner of the mirror, a black figure emerges from the window. As silent as Kashif’s skin in the mirror, he is wearing a mask. His body is athletic in black and he moves slanted, like a shadow against a wall. He is not a threat. He is only a technician. Kashif doesn’t flinch to be found naked, exposed, and vulnerable. After considering the man on the cross, the god on the cross, he is learning a newfound strength in this apparent weakness of exposure.

The man in the black costume finds the black box with the needles and capsules. How does he know his tools await him on site? Kashif wonders. How is this man aware of the instincts that prompted Kashif to bring the box along in the first place?

“Lie down.”

There is a towel on the bathroom floor. It is dampened from the shower. Kashif lies on it as he would an operating table.

The technician in the black costume expertly removes the needles. He attaches the glass capsules and injects one of the needles into the softest landscape of green veins, on the flipside of Kashif’s elbow.

He lines up the bottles on the sink. Kashif counts them. One, two, three. Why do they require so much blood from him to determine if he is the real thing, the man they built an industry upon? Is there another purpose for the blood?

“Blood will have blood,” he thinks again. Are they trying to match the quantity shed on his behalf?

The Messenger opens the door and he is fearful of the scene or just fearful of the man in black extracting blood out of Kashif’s arm. Or maybe he is fearful of a naked man lying supine on the bathroom floor, too helpless to move with the needle in his arm.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t react. He doesn’t understand, but he is all right with it if Kashif is voluntary. He has learned a lot from this journey, Kashif believes. To be aware of the details surrounding a story. To see them as reflections of character rather than setting and props.

The Messenger politely leaves the room to secure the ritual privacy.

The number of bottles on the sink is ten and counting.