If Only
So
by N.
E. Toren
3 P.M. Full Moon
“Name
Sir?”
“- Pierce Never”
“Here on business?”
“- Nah just vacation, came to see some relatives in Santa Barbara, try the Seafood.”
“- Pierce Never”
“Here on business?”
“- Nah just vacation, came to see some relatives in Santa Barbara, try the Seafood.”
He was allergic to shellfish, he didn’t care much for fish at all in fact. He certainly had no relatives in Santa Barbara. And all the Chameleon really wanted was a plug to recharge his laptop. He needed it so he could connect to a subsistent Internet connection. Internet is essential to his job you see, and the Chameleon takes his job, which at the same time is kinda his life, very seriously. His eyes are already running through the surroundings, scanning for a Starbucks, for people in long black trench coats, for familiar faces he isn't looking forward to see. He is after all a Chameleon, and a great one at that. He is the type of nothing, unfit and too obscure to stereotype, a person who can simultaneously be multiple persons with stunning ease, two, three maybe four people at the same time, some folks might even foolishly mistake it for madness, ignorant of the natural cunning and wit.
“Seafood’s
good here, try Almond’s, best place in town”.
The customs officer
hands him back Pierce's papers. These papers did in no natural way
belong to him, but this did not seem to arouse any suspicion on the
officer's part.
“Thanks” he
manages to reply before another surge of Pierce takes over control.
He asks for the
nearest toilet, the custom officer bids him a good day, has God bless
him, and points him in to the direction of the lavatory.
He has little
knowledge about Pierce, this particular person he is currently being;
who he loves, where he’s been and if he even exists or existed. He
really can't say he hasn’t, it has happened to him once before, at
some lousy security congress down South. There had been coffee and
bagels, a modest assortment of generic spreads, it spoke of
mediocrity and boredom farts and yawns. It was there that he had made
the honest mistake of introducing himself as someone that the person
he talked to knew. He managed to rather swiftly get himself out of
this explosive situation by showing him a flock of papers, these of
course, turned out to be perfectly legit. As they should, they were
issued by his government and printed by some techy he knows.
The
Chameleon doesn’t
know why, but one day carrying
Pierce's ID,
He felt the
insatiable urge to jack off
in the lavatory,
Pierce has been doing so ever since.
So now, at an obscure toilet booth at
LAX, Pierce is
all set in five.
He could do these sorts of things
in less than five
minutes. Would
he have been himself, the self he did not
create, he couldn't
phantom being
able to pull it
off that quickly.
I guess he just felt
kinda kinky
being Pierce. I guess he
knows
somewhere deep down Pierce is
a horny son of a bitch, jacking it at airports all over the goddamn
globe. I imagine him sitting at JFK or
Charles de Gaulles before heading down to
the taxi stand to go downtown, just epically jacking it in a toilet
booth just after customs. Maybe he
should buy Pierce a criminal record that can testify to his
relentless fapping,
it would only take a couple hundred bucks, and
the internet connection he hadn't found yet.
He
makes his
way through the airport. Doing so, as only
he could, desperately scouting for
uncovered ass cheeks or another
great pair of tits. There
was enough of that down these
miles of hollow corridors just
howling of life. The rhythmic humming of
countless
footsteps, tapping down vast stretches of escalator
walk ways made him
feel as if it was the soundtrack to his moment.
There are unruly
kids and accompanying them are stressing
parents. Weirdly synonymously
there are flocks
of seniors being
led down the hall by a young blonde
bimbo parenting their travels.
If you pay close attention, you might even
spot that stoned teenager going paranoid,
wild-eyed, as
he just cured himself of a forgotten stash. He
always pays attention, and thus notices and listens in on those
intriguing conversations just dieing
off in the distance and the past.
“Where
did you park the car honey?”.
-
“Goddamnit Greg I told you to take a picture!”.
He's
especially amused by the airport speakers, for
his head is teeming
of new roles
and characters
waiting to emerge, needy for a name.
You see, he gets
the names for his
new persona from the airport speakers. He
rehearses the
annotation while Pierce is busy masturbating in
a toilet booth somewhere, stuck in a depraved position.
When
he finally
reaches the exit,
he puts
on his aviator
shades before stepping out into the world.
He gets
into a cab, with
a need to go in and out of town. A
strangely distant relative had some stuff
he needed to get a hold of before he would set off for a yearly
meeting with an old friend and competitor. The clock was ticking as
this event was due to take to place in close to thirty seven hours,
and although it usually did not
consist of much more than a few glasses of strong liquor, preferably
a Macalan, and a predetermined
amount of Chess games, it
is a returning highlight of his life.
Perhaps even
more so for him than for his opponent, as
curiously enough
this was the
only event he would go to as himself, the
lonely self he did not make.
Because aside of Pierce, an
extraordinarily handy character for
some situations - and one that he
seemed to have
developed naturally somewhere along this
frantic obsession of his – his own
identity was perhaps worth more intrigue and attention than the
degenerate asshole he had created for
himself, or the other persona just aching to meet you.
But he was frightened and like a fucking
Turtle he pulled back his neck and decided to switch
roles. He
needed one particular character in order to
meet his relative as smoothly as possible.
He needed a
person more qualified for this
particular task.
All his persona
have been created from his imagination, his
deepest wants and fears, propagated or circumvented by these people
he is, as he imagines them to be.
Aside
of Pierce being a
front for his own
perverse fantasies, he also
came in quite
handy whilst
traveling. Obnoxious Pierce attracts attention to himself by being a
hallmark bastard, a
good goddamn part of the time. His
conduct seems to be
primarily driven by his primal urges, of
which most dominantly stood out his unwavering need to pro-create.
He thus,
quite expectedly, always reasoned from his
reptilian brain. Which
could also be
the reason he had a fair share of reptilian
traits. Why would
such negative attention
be preferable
to any kind of other attention?
Criminals, terrorist and other specie of degenerates are mainly
either a naive
open book, confident of their carelessness,
people who have not managed to step outside
of the social context and reflect upon their particular position
therein. And
those on the contrary exist as well, people
who take great care
of attracting as little attention as
possible to themselves.
These two widely
practiced approaches,
to him at least,
seemed very
susceptible to errors, errors which may be very infrequent but can
proof to be
fatal. Therefor
his preferred
way of handling airport security, customs, policemen, the law in
general, is to
shock and awe by letting Pierce have a go
at it. He
strolls around the airport for puss in dire need, he makes a savage
out of himself and drinks
in airport bars. He
over-tips the
waitresses, the cleaning staff and frequent
visitors of airport lavatories, can
hear Pierce's
relentless fapping in the toilet and those
weird impulsive grunts he lets go now and then
freak the fuck out
of almost all of them.
He
gets
out of the taxi at a busy place in town and
although these days it can take
quite some time,
he happens upon a
telephone booth.
He dials
a memorized set of numbers and calls a
relative. There
is a crackling sound resonating through the connection before it is
finally answered,
the Chameleon
says
something like: “It's
me, you know, just checking in, was hoping
you had a moment”.
The
telephone went:“Don’t
bother, I’m at the Seychelles with Lora, funny actually; you know
who I ran into?”.
He said he was in an
extraordinary hurry as he just finished his last coin, and hastily
asked him if he could stay in his guest house for a night. He could
hear him grinning as he said "sure". He insisted I stayed
out of his house and elaborated before he could advice him not to,
although he did wonder why he couldn't enter his home.
"Lenny is down
there, you remember Lenny?"
The Chameleon remained
silent, it was his lawyer.
"Yeah he's
been holding up down there for a few days now, his wife left him and
now he's down there running naked on something Peruvian (coke) with a
couple of Mexican gals, great fun! Wahahahaha!"
He roars when he
laughs. It's quite a characteristic laugh.
He also happens to
live in Beverly Hills, its billionaires side.
“Yes well, run
along now, uh, don't bother Lenny, don't go into the house, and don't
get yourself into any trouble with those Mexican girls, Lenny is
grieving son, he needs it.”
However
curious his demands had
made him, he agreed whole-heartedly
to the terms. His guest house is
a four bedroom standalone house, with a front porch for smoking Cuban
cigars and a back porch leading up to a
33,000
gallon ‘modest swimming pool’. Although
his relative
seemed unaware of
it, this extravagant swimming pool
is often used by
his wife/girlfriend Lora to fuck the pool
cleaner. This might seem too cliché to be true, but it is actually
quite a common
practice in these societal spheres.
The
old man himself
obviously hadn’t made his billions as a pool cleaner. He had
instead made it off of the hard work of others, as is generally the
case with rich people. In his twenties after graduating from a
private institution in Switzerland he intelligently redistributed his
inheritance until it came flowing back to him in bulk. He eventually
started his own company that had something to do with raw
materials, although some mystery involved
the exact nature. The
Chameleon didn't bother much for these
particular details, knowing too much about
a person can be a potential danger, especially if they're intolerably
wealthy, so he chose to
forget. He
couldn't even
remember what he
knew about
myself, but he did
know he was
fairly well-off and had been so since
birth.
Before he sets off for
the guest house he gets into yet another cab which stops at a motel
he had send a priority postal package to a few days earlier, Pierce
checked in at the reception, the clerk said a package had arrived for
him a day earlier. Pierce was surprised; “A
package?”. The clerk seemed irritated and explained that he
didn't like strangers sending packages to his place.
"I don't like
it! For all I know you could be a drugfiend! or some goddamn
ter'r'rist."
Although he had
certainly experienced both those phases at some point in his
life, he assured the weird little man he was neither and showed him
several credentials and presented him of a whole myriad of fitting
excuses that would most likely get him off the hook. He then calmly
tried to gesture him to hand over the package, taking extra care of
his motions, as not to confuse and look like he was on any kind of
illegal substances the short fellow had personally been acquainted
with.
"I've checked
the package and you're fine, just don't be doing it again."
He said while handing
over the package to Pierce. Although the fact that he had the
audacity to check a postal package angered him, he couldn't possibly
rely on him to know of the long established concept of human decency,
for the peculiarly piffling man had obviously been brought up in a
trailer park and even without the Chameleon's notorious rage, he was
doomed.
Before
he could make his
way up to his
room, the clerk
mentioned there
were allot of perverted people sending perverted shit to his motel,
and he would have none of it any longer, as
if he naturally recognized Pierce to be
one of his own. He
made his way up the stairs and wondered if
the clerk would
send himself perverted stuff
when he was in a random motel somewhere.
While he walked down the corridor, he
wondered why the clerk
thought motels existed. As soon as he had
entered his motel room, he became paranoid about the clerk who
had checked
the goddamn package. His internal dialogue
flared up in utter dismay and confusion
until Pierce interfered: It
takes a sick son of a bitch to know a sick son of a bitch, he
won't give you away, he has too many skeletons in his own closet.
As Pierce's voice
resonated inside his head it revolted him and he felt like throwing
up.
Pierce
then continues
to fantasize
about the room's toilet. However the Chameleon acts swiftly to
retake control, it is now he firmly
decides
Pierce is
too much of a horny fucker to be messing around with for much
longer. He
couldn’t be masturbating everywhere, it was shameful and the room
might give him a
horrible rash or some exotic STD that
would make a doctor want to stick a cotton stick up his penis.
Pierce would be okay, that’s probably why he wouldn’t mind, and
why he had to go.
The motel room is a
damp room, it smells of wilding fungi. It has Tampa Bay written all
over it, partly reclaimed by the wetlands. Except this is Cali, so
this was probably just casual crack smoke from an adjourning room, it
came seeping through a window that wouldn't close and laid a
swamp-like fog across the room. He tried getting rid of the strange
smoke and looked for the AC. The clerk had boasted the air
conditioning system when he called him to make a reservation a few
days earlier. The AC cost you 5 bucks extra, but the damn thing
wouldn’t work, the remote had evidently been tampered with and
Pierce just stood there for a while, inhaling and exhaling the easing
fog. Paying 10 instead of 5 probably wouldn’t make it work either
but he played with the idea for a brief moment. Pierce turned on the
TV to check the adult material so evidently characteristic to motels.
He thought about dialing nine for reception to ask the clerk to come
up and fix the AC, but he was too afraid the clerk wouldn’t leave
and sniff his underwear.
He walks into the
bathroom, and goes standing in front of its mirror. He witnesses
himself, and notices, Pierce had developed neat sweat spots under the
armpits of his T-shirt. Partly due to the intensive masturbation
session earlier at the airport men's room, partly because the AC
wasn’t working and he had just flown 8 hours from a country that
doesn't make it past 90 F and most importantly; he felt comfortable
with that. He is like a mushroom, to be kept in the dark, in a humid
and cold climate, the likes of London or Wales, to be fed fast-food,
warm beer and perverted imagery. As Pierce went for a piss the
Chameleon notices the particular pattern of poo stains in the toilet
bole. Pierce doesn't notice it, and just stands there after-pulling
his dick for an unconventional and provocatively long time. It's
always hard for him letting go of Pierce, he's just so comfortably
easygoing, so tremendously unlike himself. But he knows it has to be
done and when he gets out of the bathroom, he puts Pierce's papers in
an envelope. Fearless people are not to be fucked with, they are
extraordinarily impredictable.
“See you in Heathrow
Pierce” he mumbles and walks back to the mirror.
It's
these moments that he
is self aware. As
he strips
himself of his
camouflage and gets
ready for the next
act. He
often cries or
pukes or stares
into those two oblivious blue
eyes staring back until he feels utterly
uncomfortable and wants to curl up in a ball and sob ceaselessly.
Yes, he gets emotional,
his line of work
will do that to a man. While he
plucks his
nose hair he
imagines the pain
as chastising himself
for his many
sins. He stands
ground while he
redoes his
hair and remodels
himself into yet
another familiar
front.
He talks to himself.
"Hi Steve, how
are you?"
While
he's talking his voice shifts
in to another
gear. He
finalizes his
change, He's
pleased with the result and grants
that pristine
image of someone else, a genuine smile
and a blink of the eye.
Hi Steve, with your
tenement apartment in Connecticut, your hands-on approach to life and
your stable emotional condition. Steve is a proud lifelong member of
the Red Socks fan club, he has a bumper sticker that can testify to
that. He likes to think of himself as an average sports player, he
had after all, enjoyed that one sparkling season of High-school
volleyball. Until he consequently stopped to pursue sports that
better suited his sportive qualifications and ambitions, sports like
and perhaps especially; Chess. To the common eye he is nerdy and
conservative, boring in bed and a drag to spend time with.
The Chameleon is just
glad Steve isn't a dirty bastard like dear Pierce before him, no,
certainly not, Steve has manners. The only primal urge Steve seems to
exert is that of the universal force of self-organization, as if the
nature of the universe and Steve collided on it. Steve does not curse
or loose control or drink. Steve knows his computer, he feels at bay
between the ebb and flow of data. Tidal waves of data, which he
encodes and decodes with frightening ease. He could hack into your
computer like... that, and he probably has, if you could be
significant enough for him to prey at you. The man is all business no
pleasure, his perfection is touching. Not dirty old, stinking Pierce.
Steve did not have time to masturbate to motel pay-tv channels. To be
perfectly frank, I'm not even sure if Steve even masturbated.
The principle aim of
someone like the Chameleon is not to simply fraud, to cheat or lie.
It is rather to let someone else inside of him take control, someone
he has created. Now what is it that he does you might wonder? If
you'd ask me to lie, I would've said he's a spy, a fucking great spy.
But honestly? for what he does there are no words, it's that secret.
If there even had been words to describe his work, they have been
stripped of your vocabulary long before it was yours. If anything
it's the perfect evidence of the crucial role he plays in the passing
of time and this story. But how? And what in god's name does he do
from day to day?
Well the untrained eye
would probably see a random assassin with a particular liking for
targets in the economic stratosphere. And while I can see how this
analyses is easy to make, there are definite political motives that
drive the Chameleon and his behavior is in no way random. Rather, it
is planned, coordinated. There is no god-given purpose, no eventual
utopia waiting to arise, there is no hero or villain, no good nor
bad, no ideologies for these are mundane concepts belonging to
the mundane reality of a mundane world. A reality he chose to ignore
and a world he has no part in. There is no time or energy wasted on
religious superstition and this is certainly not just a family
vendetta either. There is just what is, a Chameleon, a disturbed 30
year old man, living in a world of systems and systems and
systematized stereotyped thought and all of them proved irresistibly
hostile to him at some point during his life, but aside of the system
bullshit, he is part of a very special family. It's the base line of
his life, the operating system of his actions. His father had been
very stipulate to program him that way, as he was programmed before
him, and those before him, and perhaps they were all right. His
family had left him a legacy. His father was determined to keep him
away from it until he was finished with it, but although his dad
might be plundering their heritage, he was rebuilding it in the
shadow, without anybody actually noticing.
He suddenly realizes
something. His shifting persona, this professional affliction with
which he troubles and thrives, serves as a buffer between him and the
impending realization, that he bathes in loneliness and is unable to
reconnect. Down to brass tax it's his dad's fault, when he was young
his dad had shattered his soul in a few dozen pieces, he had been
trying to glue parts of his soul together ever since.
He
quickly dismisses
that thought and
makes
his way to the
shabby cabinet in this heathen motel room
in Florida, California.
The dormant package lays in front of him,
and an uneasy feeling creeps
up his spine. He becomes overwhelmed by
these electric jolts of fear and anguish, which seem to be a
byproduct from his diagnosed
insanity, his head full of hims. He sits down on the bed and drinks a
coke from the minibar, which apart from everything else in the room
seems to be attended to daily by the motel staff.
He gets
a hold of himself,
as he so often does,
and even makes
sure to shut the curtains.
When
he finally opens the package he is not surprised to find
it full
to the brim with papers he
had illegally
acquired. He
had baby photos, he
had a divorce declaration from a woman that
died in an 2004 airplane crash in Ohio. There was nothing he
didn’t take care off. Highschool diploma, State College Degree, he
had even taken a few jobs at some point
to help with the background. He routinely
changed the pictures in his
wallet, changed
his wallets
completely in fact.
He used different
gum, different toothpaste, different clothes, different hairstyles.
He would read different books, watch
different TV and
ordered different
drinks at the bar. He would fake allegies,
medical conditions, intonation and speech.
Depending on who
he was his walk
could spontaneously
suffer from a spastic limp or his
right hand would suddenly begin to tremble
as if it was the
onset of a
serious illness.
Steve
was in charge of his short
term organization. He lacked knowledge of the bigger picture,
knowledge the Chameleon preferred to keep
himself. He
dazes upon the
bigger picture when Steve is busy micromanaging his
life. He
has a few reasons
not to inform Steve of too much of his
grandiose plan. First, Steve has this weird
sense of morality, where he himself
lacked it
completely. He
blamed this on the fact that he and not
Steve could elevate himself
above the ephemeral, ordinarily human
things a consciousness may dwell on for an entire lifetime.
The chameleon has
this strong suspicion Steve would call him
a narcissist, and
Steve would just laugh at him and his schemes. He could not bare
the humility that would follow from such a vile justification and
even the thought of that happening made him tremble of terror.
He valued his
longstanding relationship
with Steve, as his own creation, as a
useful soul
inhabiting the same body. And
obviously because Steve
did take pretty good care of his own
personal interests. Even
though sometimes he is a bit of a cocky
bastard, overstepping his authority, as is
happening in this
damp and hostile
motel room somewhere between the airport and Beverly hills. As it
appears that
Pierce had smuggled
some blow into his
package, Steve is such
a paranoid fucker
and decided he might as well just use it,
unaware of its effects, such is the limbo
mind. He is
hoping perhaps
it might give him that extra stim to get everything prepared in time.
Steve snorts
long stretches of poisonous powder, until
the Chameleon
can't feel his
nose, his
face feels like
rubber and his
hands are all clammy
and sweaty.
Before
the Chameleon, or Steve for that matter, have any clue to what is
going on, someone else takes control and the Chameleon finds himself
in a black-out. And so it
is, that on the dawn of the next act, Steve
and undeniably himself,
squanders their
plans in
a savage black-out that no-doubt in its
depravity will
remain unremembered forever, if
only destiny was so kind. Oblivious to what
targets he is missing, he
wakes up in the hills above the city with
little time to prepare for meeting
his old friend. Who
is just aching to see him.
