Page 2 of Nights Without Night
“I’ve got one of those too,” Ezra mutters testily. A blush rises on Joaquin’s darker skin.
“Oh, my.Dotell,” Iva purrs. Ezra opens his mouth, which is immediately covered by Joaquin’s hand.
“Nope. Nope, nope, nope,” Joaquin says, shaking his head. Iva grins, pointing her finger at his face and saying nothing. This must obviously mean something to him because he tilts his head back, groaning.
“No!”
“Drama queen,” I laugh, “we’ve all got one of those.” I share a look with Iva.
“I don’t,” Isadoro says. We turn to look at him and he shrugs.
“Well,” Iva drawls, “I don’t suppose those are standard military provisions.”
People are usually a little weird about Isadoro’s service, either over-asking or stepping around it awkwardly. Iva, despite having met him a few hours ago, isn’t one to pussy-foot around, taking everything in stride like there’s nothing that can fell her. I suspect the confidence is partly an act, but whose isn’t?
“I must have missed that particular care package,” Isadoro replies.
“Wait. Are you telling me that the giant dildo I sent you didn’t get to Iraq?” I ask, faking surprise.
“I made do,” he says, and the surprise turns a little less fake.
“Oh, my.Dotell,” Iva says again. I snort, rolling my eyes.
“Yes.Dotell,” Ezra says. Joaquin looks at him. “For purely scientific reasons, of course. Knowledge is power,” Ezra adds hastily. Now it's Joaquin’s turn to roll his eyes, but the edges of his lips tilt up in a smile.
“I don’t kiss and tell,” Isadoro says.
“You kiss your dildo? Kinky,” Iva says, cackling. Isadoro shakes his head, smiling as we all laugh. The slope of his wide shoulders has relaxed somewhat, and I lean against him slightly.
Thank God for good friends.
I’d first met Iva more than a year previously when I had started the condensed Digital and Traditional Arts program I’m currently on at Fox Lake University. Both of us being Hispanic, we’d bonded in the studio. The friendship had been a little bit of a relief. Being twenty-six years old, most of my classmates aren’tthatmuch younger than me, but I can’t help but feel that the gap between us is widened by the disparity in experiences. It makes it harder to connect, but Iva made is easy.
Without having the money or the scholarship to go to college without including a massive amount of debt with the experience, I had chosen to go straight to work after high school. I started in miserable customer service jobs, freelancing as a digital artist on the side. Somehow, the freelancing took off, until I managed to land a position in a company that could give me a steady source of income, meagre but enough to live on when added to my job as a bartender on the weekends.
Despite the talent my manager saw in me, everybody around me was so overqualified that the educational differences between them and me started to show. If I had had the time and energy, I would have been able to teach myself the programs that kept coming out and updating, but I didn’t. When I started lagging despite my best efforts, the boss had called me into her office, and I had been sure I was done for. I prayed for the firing to be a shot to the head, quick and painless.
Instead of a killing blow, I was given an opportunity. The company would pay for a two-year course at Fox Lake for the promise of coming back and working with them for at least three years. I had sat in the boss’s office, stunned, before snatching the opportunity up with both hands.
The workload, I had to admit at the beginning, was tough. It was a long time since I had been in the role of student, and it showed. However, I come from a family of immigrants, meaning that hard work is in my very blood, the only example I’ve had since I was young. Not even the most tedious of classes have been able to even chip at my resolve to succeed.
Currently in the second semester of my last year, I’m nearing the home stretch. Come summer, I’ll hand in my final projects and return to work in the fall, hopefully with a bump in salary that will allow me to drop the bartending job.
Frankly, I can’t wait to stop feeling like I’m just treading water. These past years, ever since high school ended and Isadoro left, I’ve been trying to ignore the hand-to-mouth feeling so many people are familiar with; the sensation that I’m just one bad step away from failure.
I turn back to look at Isadoro. Now that the conversation has calmed, I can see the tension return to his shoulders, as if he can only be distracted from it for so long.
Isadoro’s last tour ended a mere month ago, at the tail end of Christmas. As I watch him, I can’t help but catalogue the changes between this Isadoro and the one that left at eighteen years of age. It’s not that I’m surprised—not only because only a fool would expect eight years of training and war not to have an impact—but because I had seen the change in increments every time he stayed with me during his leave. The experience had been reminiscent of playing a game ofStatues. Every time my back was turned, he would shift. Every time I turned back, he would solidify into stillness, changed into a different form. I used to dread the moment the game would be over—when the changes would be too great, and I’d lose the chance to see anything of him anymore.
Despite how accustomed I became to him being gone, being at war and in danger, I had still followed his career closely, watching the news obsessively as I tried to fill in the gaps between what little Isadoro shared with me. My awareness of him never waned, even though his absence became normal.
After joining the military in 2010, following the surge in troops 2009 brought, he went to boot camp and then was deployed quickly to Afghanistan. I watched as the tides changed in the following years, how troops were called back as Obama made promises in a lilting voice. I hoped the waters would pull Isadoro back to me, but almost the opposite happened. After two year-long tours, he called to tell me he had applied to join the Special Forces—the Green Berets.
The news had been numbing and infuriating at once. I couldn’t help but feel betrayed. Despite its presence in both the news and my life, war was a foreign concept to me. At times, I thought I understood Isadoro’s motivations for joining. Others, they were incomprehensible to me. I had been so unable to process the news of his desire to not only stay in combat, but go in deeper, that I had hung up on him, and refused to pick up when he called me again.
The week that followed, before he was able to get in touch again, was filled with sleepless nights. I oscillated wildly between one extreme of the emotional spectrum to another, from one argument to the next. In the end, I could only conclude one thing: it wasn’t about me.
Whether I understood it or not, whether I agreed with it or not, it wasn’t my decision to make. Even if it killed him.
