Page 3 of Nights Without Night
When he called again seven days later, I had picked up with a stone in the pit of my stomach. There had been a moment of staticky silence before I simply said,Okay.
It wasn’t permission. It was acquiescence.
The training took two years. After the Killings of Yazidis in Sinjar, Isadoro was posted to Iraq in 2014. There, I had no idea what he did. If there is one thing loving someone doesn’t give you, it’s the knowledge of what is happening to them at war.
The callous my love for Isadoro rubbed against expanded. In a place inside me without conscious thought, I believed Isadoro would never come back, either because he would be killed or because he would continue into a full military career. When T***p was elected, all hope evaporated. Hope I didn’t even know I had, buried in hidden land inside me, was unearthed and pressed into an oil-slick substance that coated everything. I couldn’t stop watching the news, as if doing so was keeping the thread between Isadoro and me tight, but the necessity was exhausting.
And, then—maybe I should have seen it coming. Should have let myself believe, for a moment, when during Isadoro's last leave we sprawled on the couch, limbs tangled like we were teenagers again, like contact didn’t matter. When I turned to look at him, just to make an asinine comment about the show we were watching drunkenly, and I saw the look on his face.Lost.Fractured. The kind of exhaustion that goes so deep into the cellular composition of your soul that you begin to think curing it would necessitate a transplant of spirit, of personality, of being.
Fear like nothing I’d ever felt struck me then. It didn’t compare with the news of his first deployment, or every jolt of terror when the TV announced a fallen soldier, or the terrified anger of his decision to join Special Ops. For the first time, it hit me in more than a vague, abstract way that maybe his living body would come back to me, but his soul wouldn’t.
He’d seen me watching him, and for a moment that terrible look was focused on me.
“I can’t…I…” he’d said, voice small and barely reaching me.
“Don’t, then. Don’t. Come back,” I’d blurted tipsily, desperately.
He’d looked at me from where I was laid across his body, on his chest, and the expression had shuttered. But something lingered in his eyes.
“Isa…please.”
It was the most selfish thing I had ever done, but nothing else was possible in that moment.
He’d run his hand through my hair, and I’d pressed my forehead against his chest. He’d said nothing. Promised nothing.
I don’t know if that moment influenced his decision to leave at the end of his next tour. Mosul had just been re-taken when he called to tell me. I’d been in the studio and had to sit down hard, letting the chatter around me and the familiar smell of paint and thinner fill my head. It hadn’t seemed real.
I’d had this dream a million times before.
For some reason, the intervening time between him telling me and him coming home had been branded by a terror I hadn’t felt since he first deployed. I was afraid his decision would curse him, increasing his chances of injury. Of death.
“Iván?” Isadoro had prompted as I sat there in the studio, trying to comprehend.
“Yeah,” I’d replied through a clogged throat. The silence stretched until our time was up. “Please, be careful. Come home,” I’d said as a goodbye. There had been a beat of silence.
“I will.”
A burst of laughter from Iva and Ezra drags me to the present. Instinctively, my eyes go to Isadoro. The tick in his jaw is back.
“I’m beat,” I say, a half-truth. “Can we go?” Isadoro looks at me, eyebrows twitching down for a moment before he nods.
The cold, street air away from the heated courtyard is a relief. The noise of the bar dampens and is replaced by the night. As we walk, I can see his posture relax by increments and then soften the moment we enter our apartment. The all-day heating I can now afford thanks to Isadoro greets us, and I feel myself relax too. The glow of the living room lights pop to life, revealing the clustered seating and coffee table pointed at the TV, the easel by the window, the attached kitchen. Our two bedrooms are separated by the bathroom and the boiler cabinet. It’s close enough to hear him, sometimes, moving around deep into the night, a restless series of sounds that happen more often than not.
I hadn’t much questioned the decision of finding an apartment together. I know my mental health will be severely tested when he brings people home, but his takes precedence.
It had been so long since we spent so much time together for such an extended period that I hadn’t known what to expect. The Isadoro that has come back from war is a mixture of new and old. I recognize his big smiles, his old jokes, the teasing about food and sex. On the surface, he seems fine. Underneath, I can feel something stirring. In the quiet of the night, his vigilant stillness almost seems chilling, simply because it is so different from the façade he tries to keep up during the day. But I know him well enough to recognize truth from fiction. Know the core of him, beyond the smiles and the charm and the stillness.
We can’t go back to being eighteen and trying would only hurt. But I have no idea what things will look like going forward.
I’d gotten him a job as a bouncer at the bar I still worked weekends at when Isadoro first arrived home. During the week, I take him to the dog shelter with me, which he now frequents. Part of me was scared I was pushing him too hard, but he never reacts like I feared he would. He doesn’t duck to the ground at the loud barking of the dogs. He doesn’t crumble at the potential violence of being a bouncer or the screaming of drunk patrons. I had this media-fed idea of what trauma looked like—an outward, violent thing—but I’m beginning to think whatever effect combat has had on Isadoro, it is quiet and deep.
Despite the softening of edges arriving home from the bar has brought, I can see he’s wired and know that even if something is going on in his head, he won’t talk to me about it. All I know is at night, this Isadoro comes out. The silent one who doesn’t sleep.
We shed our layers and I sit on the couch, grabbing a sketchpad and some charcoal. I know he likes the gentle, scratchy noise of it.
“Weren’t you tired?” Isadoro asks.
“Tired of being there.” I shrug. He throws me a look. There are no illusions about what I’m up to, but if it’s not said aloud, he lets me take care of him.
