The first Character the reader is introduced to is Chameleon and his many personalities. But there are 5 or 6 more characters that all play a different role within this story.
The next post is what I got so far. It changed considerably from the first post and I hope you will resupply me with some of your wonderful and much needed feedback on the changes and the direction of the story.
Please note:
- the title Chameleon is just a temporary title, I already have a better title in mind, but in fear of losing it to the internet I'm going to keep it to myself.
- The second chapter of the first Chameleon post I made is still featured in the story but there will be one chapter before that will hopefully catch the reader off guard.
3 P.M.
“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, didn’t care much for fish at all. He certainly had no relatives in Santa Barbara. And all Pierce really wanted was a plug to recharge his laptop so he could connect to a subsistent Internet connection. His eyes were already running through the surroundings, scanning for a Starbucks, for people in long black trench coats, for familiar faces he wasn't looking forward to see again. He was after all a Chameleon, and a great one at that.
“Seafood’s
good here, try Almond’s, best place in town”.
The customs officer
hands him Pierce's papers, and although they were really not his
papers, they did not seem to arouse any suspicion.
“Thanks” he
replies while feeling Pierce take control again.
Pierce asks for the
nearest toilet, the custom officer bids him a good day, has God bless
him, and points him into 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 yawns and farts. 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 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 papers,
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 things like these in five minutes.
Would he have been himself, 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
obsession, it would only take a couple hundred bucks.
He
makes his
way through the airport. Doing so, as only
he could, desperately scouting for
uncovered ass cheeks or a great pair of tits.
There was enough of that down
these miles of
hollow corridors howling of life. The rhythmic humming of countless
footsteps, tapping down vast stretches of escalator
walk ways made the atmosphere feel dense.
There are screeching
kids and stressing parents, flocks of seniors led down the hall by a
young blond bimbo screeching for control,
the occasional
stoned teenager going paranoid as he just
cured himself of a forgotten stash, and
always those intriguing conversations dieing off in the distance and
the past. “Where
did you park the car honey?”.
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
thinks about the
annotation while Pierce is busy masturbating.
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 doesn't consist of much more than a few
glasses of strong liquor and a predetermined
amount of Chess games. It
was a returning highlight of his life, perhaps
even more so for him than for his
opponent, it was very curiously the only event he would go to as
himself, being his lonely self.
Because aside of Pierce, although 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.
Realizing this himself as well, he had 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, quite expectedly, always reasoned from
the reptilian brain. This could be
what possibly
reinforced his widely recognized 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,
or people who take great care
of attracting as little attention as
possible to themselves.
Their approach, to him at least,
seemed very
susceptible to errors, errors which may be very infrequent but can
proof to be
fatal. His
own 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, 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 his fellow toilet
user.
He
gets
out of the taxi at a busy place in town and
although these days it can take
quite some time,
he finds
a phone booth. He
rings his
relative. He
finally answers,
when he 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, it 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. He 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 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. 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 substance.
"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. 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 checking
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 continued
to fantasize
about the room's toilet. However the Chameleon is swift to
retake control and catches
him in the act and firmly decides
Pierce is
too much of a horny fucker to be messing around with for any
longer. He
couldn’t be masturbating everywhere, it was shameful and the room
might give him a
horrible rash or some exotic STD. 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 swamp. 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
would 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 on his
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 was 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 and perverted imagery.
As Pierce went for a piss the Chameleon noticed the particular
pattern of poo stains in the toilet bole. Pierce didn't and he
decided once more that he had got to go. 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 puts
Pierce's papers in an envelope.
“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 wake up next to.
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 ever 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, for these are
mundane concepts belonging to the mundane world. A world he has no
part in, a world that cast him out long before he could remember.
There is no time for religious superstition and this is certainly not
a vendetta. 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. It drove him into exile, but he
has been plotting his revenge carefully. What means to what end? All
means necessary, to an end that is very near.
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.
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 undeniable 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. 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. 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 bear 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 damp
and hostile motel room somewhere between
the airport and Beverly hills. As it appeared that Pierce had
smuggled some
blow into his
package, Steve was a paranoid
fellow and
decided he might as well just use it,
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 their
nose, their
face feels like
rubber and their
hands are all clammy
and sweaty.
Before
the Chameleon, or Steve for that matter, have any clue to what was
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
squandered their
plans in
a savage black-out that no-doubt of its depravity would never be
remembered. Oblivious to what targets
he is missing, the Chameleon wakes up in the hills above the city
with little time to prepare for his old
friend.
Chapter II
She's still angry as she
wakes up. “How could he?” She thought. Aside of her angry
condition she was also suffering from an alcohol induced headache and
a bruise on her right arm from when she fell the night before. Such a
fucked up night it had been. Such a fucked up condition she is in
now.
The night before began
very normal, she bought a sandwich from the seven eleven convenient
store downstairs of her small 'studio', for which she paid top
dollars but got susprisingly little for in return. It wasn't until
11 pm that she got a phone call from a friend of hers. It rang and
rang for about 15 minutes until she finally picked up.
The phone shouted:
“Dawn?! It's Georgia”
“Hi babe” Dawn
replied casually.
- “What you doin'?”
“Not much”.
Dawn
really wasn't doing much, she had just finished shaving her legs the
previous hour, and had consequently felt the need to just sit on her
bed and stare into the mirror across from it for a while. She felt
fat and worried her agency wouldn't keep her on contract for much
longer, they would send her back home, probably even breaking the
news to her in a text message or email. She didn't want to go back
home. She hadn't been eating properly for a while now, and had
banished herself from anything remotely fattening. Her dietary
tactics weren't helping her much, she realized this
as well, and the fact that she
had been drinking for fourteen consecutive days. And
then there was
all the other stuff she took to quell
the confusion. All the shady substances that were handed to her by
old men in fine suits, and she felt ashamed by the excitement and
curiosity with which she
accepted those.
She
was particularly ashamed
of what would happen after she took them, between her, her
legs and her friends or those
old men equipped with fine words for delicate ears to blush by.
-”O...kay. Well, you
wanna go out tonight?”
“What do you wanna
do? Is there something special tonight?”
She pleaded they would go
out together as there was this guy she really wanted to meet but
needed an opinion on.
