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 plan 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.

“This village you asked me about. It surrounds a church. Actually, the homes are so close to the church you can hear the confessions from within it,” he laughs more at the Catholic ritual of confessing your sins. I can tell his father finds the practice weak in this young boy’s Muslim voice. Although, not weak enough to send his son to a Catholic school.

“Why are they so close?” I ask.

“The church protects them from the inside. The cedar trees and the mountains protect the village from the outside.”

“From what?”

“From storms, earthquakes, us.”

Mohammed laughs again. His skin is dark, oily and pimple ridden, like the rest of the kids. Unlike them, his attitude is very condescending. Even to his fourth period English teacher from last year.

“The village protects itself against conversion?” I ask.

He nods.

“Are you planning on moving there, sir?”

His jokes are as garlicy as his breath.

“No, I’m deporting you there, Mohammed.”

“You won’t find me dead there, sir.”

His roots show.

“Isn’t that the point?” I joke and he finds it funny until another bite.

I call my wife after lunch duty but she doesn’t respond. She is supposed to contact her doctor and arrange a mammogram. I shirk at the horrible possibilities of what such a test may find. And I think of my cousin who passed the year before. My age, and much more brilliant with his hands. But also, four kids.

After school, I get on my phone and research this tiny village. Bsharri. The pictures preach escapism. Apparently it roots the only remaining Original Cedars of Lebanon. Tall, multi-trunked cedar trees whose exposed roots cling to mountain cliffs like arms climbing them. The peak of the church attempts to rise from the valley and is gratefully shielded by the green. Historically, Bsharri in Phoenician translation means ‘The House of Ishtar,’ which alludes to the worship of a pagan goddess. And yet, Maronite Christians sought refuge in the mountainous terrain when they were persecuted in the 7TH Century. Characterized by its courageous and tribal resistance, the people of Bsharri are very hospitable but violently patriotic, which may explain why Kashif, the man who will receive the message, hides there. He hides in a land renowned for its resistance against Palestinian and Syrian invasions. A beautiful northern landscape of mountains and valleys, with a church nestled expertly in the valley.

The Messenger has these pictures on his phone as well. He glances at them periodically to imagine Kashif, the man unaware of the message he is about to receive. The Messenger is more invested in his dying scene, or, rather, where he imagines himself to be murdered. It excites him. The thought of finally dying and not by his own failed hand. He considers it justified now. His intentions have always dictated this fate with mind body spirit communication breakdowns preventing the proper execution of this desire. The Messenger trusts my Man. He trusts the voice that reassured him he would die on the mountain, his last vision of the sky in the pictures.

The Messenger reverts to these pictures the hotter it gets on the bus he is travelling on. He is in Syria and the roads are pothole ridden and sink hole cavernous at times. The bus rocks to the point of keeling over. Instinctively, passengers leap from their seats to the other side to balance it. It is plain and evident that assembled families are fleeing with the hope of gaining access to the border, although The Messenger can read other designs in their dust dried eyes. Making a run for it in the opposite direction, for instance.

The Messenger must find a way to cross the border. He has no passport. If he did, it would only serve to stall his entrance. Or prevent him entirely with a detention. He must smuggle his way across the border and he carries enough bribe money in his pocket to do so. He is also not afraid to kill anyone in his way since he is not afraid to die by retaliation. But he is also a man of promise. One who values a vow. He never sought another woman after his wife died. He never considered moving on to another life. And when his own child died, he felt no inclination to start anew. Instead, every second thought about them ­hollowed him further, like a butcher carving meat from his bones without the need to skin him first. His bones rattle when their images race through his hollow, cavernous tunnels, leaving only empty echoes in the darkness of forgetting.

He walks up to the bus driver and asks him to open the door. It is practically parked in a line of beeping lorries. The Messenger would prefer to walk across the border on foot. Once on the other side, he could always hitchhike his way to the village of Bsharri or find another bus. Crossing the line is the challenge. Green Beret-clad men with shouldered machine artillery pace lines and point the tips of guns into windows to incite facial recognition. A few of them catch him walking towards them with his hands up. As he does so, he finds interested eyes in the eldest of the group, the leader. The Messenger adjusts the direction of his path to meet with this general.

“What do you think you are doing?” the official asks. His accent is silky Persian.

“Crossing the border.”

The Messenger is fluent in sixty-four languages. He once worked as a translator for the United Nations before his promotion to diplomatic peace missions. He learned negotiation skills and the art of reading a lying face in this capacity. He found the right man to bribe at the border. He communicates this mutual understanding by lowering his hands and becoming a close talker. Not necessarily a pleasurable tactic, it communicates trust and secrecy to the official with body language. The official with a beret seemingly stapled to his head by metal pins and symbols is equally as tall. His stomach protrudes to the brink of his shirt buttons, while his gun holster disappears below the rounded belly. He is a man of appetite, The Messenger deduces.

He points his gun into The Messenger’s chest to protect his space. It indents The Messenger’s chest like the point of a knife.

“Turn around.”

The Messenger does as he is told. The point of the gun finds the imaginary passage of the bullet on The Messenger’s back, if he would have pulled the trigger.

“Walk.”

All of the subservient officials glance over to the scene briefly. They are too afraid to stare. The Messenger finds himself in a closet inside the customs building. In the dark again. He hates the dark for making his memories come to life like a projector film. The Messenger squints his eyes hard in an attempt to create white stars and flashes, maybe even a headache. These are physical distractions he has devised, psychological horse shutters.

He can’t prevent the smell of cleanliness, bleach from the mop bucket, to spur on a back door entrance to a memory.

His baby son is floating in the kitchen sink. Tiny, small enough to fit in, like a dish or a fragile glass. His wife is pulling her hair back and he sees her freckled neck in this memory. It is youthful and the skin is taut on her throat. She is laughing and his son is splashing. There is water on the ceramic tile of the floor. He had just returned from a trip in Egypt to make the birth a few days prior. Although his baby is blind and his eyes haven’t come into focus, his first born is gripping his arm instinctively as if holding onto a safety bar. He is insecure in his own bath water, in the warmth of his mother’s singing, so he has reached out for a lifeline. The Messenger never wants to leave his home again. There is too much to lose now.

The official arrives having changed out of his uniform. He looks like a father himself in civilian khaki slacks and a Hawaiian patterned shirt.

“Come with me.”

The Messenger follows the official who appears to have finished his shift. The official leads him to a dressing room. He walks in to make sure the institutional shower area is vacated. He then proceeds to pull a uniform from a locker.

“Change.”

The Messenger does as he is told, removing the envelope of money from his pocket to remind the official of his payment.

The thickness of the envelope indicates more danger, which makes the official too honest to steal it outright. He seems to understand there are other powers at work greater than his sphere of influence. He waits until The Messenger has fully dressed.

“You, my soldier, will drive me home.”

The official throws The Messenger the keys.

“I always have a soldier drive me home.”

The Messenger is curious to know why, yet he doesn’t ask. The official explains anyway.

“To protect the money I take.”

This confession confuses The Messenger.

“To each his share.”

The Messenger feels like he has met a man whose name should be The Collector. A man with an understanding of a role. A man devoted to one destiny, like his own.

“I will leave you on the side of the road somewhere.”

Of course, thinks The Messenger. He didn’t expect a ride anywhere to begin with. This needs to be a pilgrimage, at the end of which exists the story of a tragedy or a visitation. When he starts the car his heart beats at the possibility of a car bomb about to detonate. And for some reason, he is disappointed when he sees the fuel gauge at full and ready to roll.

I decide not to conclude this chapter because I hear my wife entering upstairs. The kids are asleep and the baby monitor downstairs sounds like one long raspy breath. When I hear the heaviness of the steel door seal the fumes of the minivan inside the garage, I join her at the island in the kitchen. She is already drinking a glass of water. I don’t ask her how the appointment went because I can see the signed requisition for a test sticking to the countertop. She stares at me through the clear glass as she drinks. I can tell she is worried. I can hear it in her hard swallows, how thirsty she is.

“Are you ready to go to bed?” I ask.

She nods and I follow her up the stairs.