Chameleon
Indyana Horobin (Griffith University)
I sit watching, afraid to ruin the moment with formalities. Morning sunlight warms the back of my head. Sam’s smile from cheek to cheek, a fragment of simple joy. He’s outlived the champagne and beer and vodka. All of it for only a couple bucks. Bali is cheap. His green eyes match palm trees, polo shirt brown like the soil. Glasses – thick, black, rectangular frames around his eyes, squinting in the glare. Sam fits this place, fits with the Yucca trees and Canna Lillies. I watch him take in the mountains of dried yellowing overgrowth, villa lazing onto the hillside, land sloping down into oceanside rice paddies. His eyes on the small huts and shops, temples and restaurants that interweave through streets below. The traffic is chaos. No lights, no green, yellow, red, just chaos and consideration. He sees drivers give way to other drivers at intersections and police standing on corners, M16’s slung over their shoulders. Green trees separate the streets and the beach, black volcanic sand stretches down into blue water. Sam looks at it all, taking his time, smiling. I watch until it feels wrong. I’m an intruder, a distant noise, a child roleplaying a tree in theatre. He is happy, who am I to cut it short with “hello”.
‘What colour is Indy?’ Sally asked. She sat, feet on the wicker seats, in a black caftan, surrounding herself in darkness. We all rested in the villa: Balinese architecture, decorative dark coconut wood. A kitchen off to the side, the pool acted as the living room, front and centre.
‘I don’t know, he block off. I try before to, to throw energy into him and he jus’ block it, take some my energy.’ Bob Bali was one of those guys who could rock a mullet. He wasn’t like the Adidas lads of Surfers Paradise: nasal accent, Lynx Africa, over the shoulder bum-bag. Bob’s mullet fit him like salt on steak, just plain perfectly. He read people too. Auras, colours, vibes, spiritual healing. ‘Most people are one way or other, you confuse, you don’t know.’
‘But how, darling, how can he fix it?’
Bob whispered, bowed his head, flicked his thumb on phantom string, ‘You need to trust yourself, Brudda.’ He patted my shoulder, ‘Jus’ trust.’
Everyone else’s smooth, whiskeyed talking suited the quiet, they made the mood. I hated my voice. I had the voice of a guy behind a camera, too loud, too off-tone, too clear. I was glad Sally spoke for me. I gave up verbal cues for body language. I had a constant slight nod when I didn’t know what to say or do, a product of childhood trauma and silent adolescence. A life ago my tormentors would squeeze my throat, now they suffocated my colour, turned it translucent, see-through. They didn’t know, but they would’ve taken pride in seeing their fingers dig out my throat in dreams, choked breath sneaking before the cough. Sahib told me there’s a phrase for this, Siahi zer kada – gripped by the dark.
Sam is on the balcony, above my hut. Walking inside and out, taking off his glasses and putting them back on again, praying to the hills, to the morning sun, for fragments of last night. The mountains answer him, casting a smile on his face again. He has memories now that hold the same weight as a good marriage, or better sex. It all comes from a few hours of drunkenness and inside jokes. We met at the airport two days ago, both on this writer’s trip. He was the first to sign up for karaoke last night, the only one to fall asleep in the bar. He said things while drunk, like ‘wet my whistle’ and ‘hard yakka’ and ‘yeah, nah, right, right’. He’s still on the balcony, grinning. It’s that smile, a smile that says today will be good. A smile that says last night was fucking amazing.
Dark wicker seats confined me like the smothering black of night beyond those thick molasses roller-blinds. They were drooped tongues, hanging down, promising to lick clean all the hangovers that found their way to this villa. The day we arrived in Denpasar we had a four-hour car ride to familiarise the landscape. Four hours on top of six in the plane to get to know each other. Jedda wrote about dramas in the Kimberleys, Sahib about early life in Afghanistan. We were to stay in the same villa with Sally, our mentor, our leader.
Bali was different to home, rubble and loose bricks instead of puke and grime. Huts, shacks, bungalows instead of high-rises. Broken glass pasted on wall-tops, a replacement for barbed wire. The pool was vital that night, to wash off the stench of airplanes and air-conditioning. It was cloudy at first, bombed with chlorine. We swam and it turned clear, I turned it clear, infected the water with my blockage of colour.
My energy was bad, but not injured like Jedda’s. Minutes after landing in Bali, her ankle fucked the floor of an airport bathroom. Lumps and bumps and limps, a tennis ball under her skin – broken. Bob took Jedda to a medicine man. Not a doctor, a man. When she came back, she told us he lived in the hills, had scary masks on his practice, had a scarier silent nature but could crack bones better by twisting his hands. They paid him with a bag of sugar.
‘Sally, you pink, it means love, lots of love but strong, too strong sometimes.’ He hugged Sally and she kissed Bob’s cheek. ‘Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I’m feeling.’ He was practiced at lapsing into Marley lyrics.
‘What about me, Bob Bali, what colour am I?’ Sahib had been carefully curious of Bob and his aura reading, his powers of healing. His want to know got the better of him, he abandoned caution.
Bob answered, ‘You red Brudda. Control, you have control over emotion but when you get negativity you separate, you go by yourself.’ He gave a slow breath, ‘Everybody have positivity and negativity energy, mos’ people at thirty percent positivity.’
‘Can you tell what I’m at?’
‘Sorry, bro, you at thirty-five percent, you make it better by staying away from city, you fix from nature.’ His voice dropped, it had been darting through Sahib’s red forests but now sank in a bog, muck water and murky, real fucking murky. His eyes were narrow darts finding their bullseye by nodding their way to the board, nodding to our faces, ‘I used to live in city, I live in Kuta for seven years, it, it bad for me. I become user, I, I use heroin. It, it very bad for me. When I leave I feel better.’ That was the end of it. The ‘shits’ and ‘woahs’ enough to punctuate the conversation, quick, impressed and smelling of Marlboro Golds.
My eyes are ocean-blue some days. The same days that I spend out on the water, floating between the breaking points, the endless sky and ocean crashing into each other’s horizon. I don’t think I am, though, ocean-blue. I surf now, but it scared me as a kid, I’d hyperventilate at waves, like breathing at them would clear the swell. Maybe I’m like water. Translucent, glassy, see-through, taking on all colours it’s around, always a different tone, always. Consistently different.
My room at the villa, followed a simple shape, a cube. Four white walls, king-size black bed, outdoor shower. Bags dumped in the corner, I laid on the bed, stomach cramping and spasming. Illness crept up on me that night, it dug at me, clamoured on me. Fever dreams, night sweats. I could picture myself, possessed, climbing the walls, clinging to the ceiling, head spinning around and around, limbs bent wrong, mangled, mutilated. Bob Bali rushed in to exorcise me, ‘I cass’ you out Dee-man’ chakras and invisible instruments. I felt taken, the food, the land, the water burnt my insides, scorched my throat. Maybe I was the possessive one, an Iblis, a demon, come to scourge the hills with light coloured shorts and white t-shirts. Then again, maybe I was just another white man in a place white men shouldn’t be. A place of holding your mouth closed under shower water, of buying bottled water and alcohol sanitizing hands after washing them. Bali. A place where rain was sweat falling from the sky, the sun green-housing any water exposed to it, endless, endless cycling of moisture. Where homelessness hung on every corner, hand out for cash, hand out for help. Where trash and crashed buildings sat on streets but you had to recycle toilet paper because water is, above all, sacred, that and the toilets clogged if you did try to flush it. Somewhere fucking raw – or at least rawer than home.
Pink and panicked, red and furious, no breathing, no breathing, no –
I was fucking green, I was blue, yellow, brown, purple, I was suffocating, in flux, in change, inability to cope, and I couldn’t fucking breathe.
Just get a breath in, just one.
One.
The panic attack woke me at midnight, tears, breathless, siahi zer kada.
Bile, acid in my gut, crept up my throat. Swallowing and swallowing, I tried to shove the vomit back down. Mouth opened, hands on toilet seat, I leaked my colour, rejected my chakra into the bowl. I cried, my pupils had pissed themselves, but there was something more. Red, violent visceral red, my colour had stolen Sahibs. Subconjunctival haemorrhage – regurgitation, demonic retching; capillaries melted into my eyes. My clearness reached the chameleon phase. Colours soaked from everyone. Red-eyed, green faced, white knuckled. It was a miracle the Wiggles didn’t show up and kick the shit out of me like some rainbow-based, children’s-show-running mob men. I went back to sleep with the expectation of being told “Wake up, Jeff” any moment.
The ocean view comforts me, water that goes from here to home. I stare at it, between glances at Sam. I feel like I’m back in Surfers Paradise, between the waved peaks, floating on blue water. I pretend the sun rises over it, that maybe I’m also at Coolie or Byron, not a foreign land, still sick, still fucked.
Fresh winds bring the smell of fish attending day jobs, crabs smoking pot in crab-pots, dolphins skirting to boats. The hut is a getaway, a church to cleanse bad spirits, a leech to suck blood from eyes and bring thoughts from wounds. I ride the high, not from last night’s booze and karaoke, but the brain cells I’ve exploded from vomiting. I watch Sam. Satellite dish smile. Framed eyes on the mountains and sea, laughter in the palms. I want to greet him, stand in front of him, blend colours, copy rays. I want his laugh, happiness at the taste of last night.
I don’t know how to cleanse auras or tell people their colour. Right now though, I know Sam is yellow like the sun.
Indyana is a PhD candidate currently studying at Griffith, with major focusses in modern history and creative writing. He has had multiple publications within Griffith’s Talent Implied works, a publication in Drunken Boat’s 2020 anthology Meridian, and a short-story published in APWT’s Pratik: Fire and Rain, which launched at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2023. He also has a publications in SWAMP Writing Issue 29 and 32 and Family History ACT’s The Ancestral Searcher. His current PhD project focusses on familial oral histories told in memoir.
