Doing surveillance was once how I made my living. I’ve always enjoyed watching people as they go about their everyday lives. Of course you must learn to carefully look for the unusual details, to look at faces, walking gate, and peculiar habits. The sense of accomplishment from observing things most people would miss is something hard to describe. Unfortunately, as city traffic turned homicidal, doing a surveillance became a survival ordeal. The old habit of constantly looking around and watching for unusual behaviour has remained and sometimes adds amusement to my dull life.
While having a coffee at one of those ubiquitous coffee kiosks in a shopping mall, I started watching a fellow who seemed a little anxious. His movements were stiff but slow in an attempt to look normal.
He carried a plastic shopping bag from a grocery store, but no grocery store was located in this mall. He seated himself at a food court table between a garbage bin, pedestrian divider, and the coffee kiosk. I didn’t know the table was there until he sat down, disappearing from view. Curious, I moved to where I could see his reflection in the coffee kiosk’s drink cooler door. There he sat, looking out from his concealed cubbyhole for some time. He was watching, and I was watching him watching.
Slowly, he extracted a collapsible cane from the shopping bag and adjusted it to suit his stature. He then deftly took off his shoes and put on a much more worn pair. Next, he combed his hair so that the part was on the other side and put on a cheap felt fedora that he pushed back on his head. Glasses followed after he licked his finger and put something on his eyebrows that made them much more pronounced. The transformation was completed by putting on a vest that seemed to include padding that made him twenty pounds heavier and reversing his jacket to change its colour.
When a much older, fatter, man slowly shuffled off through the mall using a cane for support, I knew that I had just witnessed a chameleon going about his daily routine, whatever that was.
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