Page 38 of Nights Without Night
“Treat him like a person. Like your friend. If you have a project he can help you with, ask him to be involved. Ask him to do chores. Small things that can be escalated into more demanding things. Don’t treat him like he’s a ticking time bomb. Simply, show him he’s not defective. You can’t force him to believe it, but you can show him,” Mansur says. I nod slowly, trying to process the onslaught of information.
“Okay. I think…that makes sense.”
“Good. And lean on your own support system. Do not isolate yourself. Do not cast yourself as your friend’s saviour. Be smart about the sacrifices you make for him. You mentioned you’re in college — make sure you keep at it. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, laughing a little.
We talk for a few minutes more, but I can’t take much more. The session was useful but oddly exhausting. I leave with his direct office line in my pocket, feeling tired but also the one thing I’d been looking for.
Hope.
**********
I let a few days pass, feeling Mansur’s words percolate through the grooves of my brain. They drip down the windowpane of my worries, mixing with all the dust and the grime already collected there until I can see an idea peek through the glass.
After a knock and a warning, I step into Isadoro’s room.
“Isa, I really need your help,” I say. Surprisingly, he stirs straight away, turning to look at me. He blinks at the light streaming from the hallway.
“What?” he croaks.
“I need your help. Please,” I say, and walk back towards the living room, leaving his bedroom door open.
I wait. I strain my ears for the click of his door shutting, but it doesn’t come. Instead, Isadoro appears, rumpled and bruise-eyed, but there.
“Sit down, okay? I need help with a project,” I say, pointing at one of the kitchen stools I’ve placed in front of the easel, behind which I’m standing.
“You want to draw me?” Isadoro asks, frowning.
“Not quite,” I say, and busy myself with the paints and pencils, moving them around restlessly so he doesn’t feel watched.
Amazingly, he sits down. I take a deep breath.
“I want you to describe a memory of when you were deployed. Or, like, not the full memory, but describe one scene. It doesn’t have to be, you know, anything…big or…you know. It can be anything. A street. A landscape. A person. A moment. Whatever,” I say. Isadoro still has a frown on his face.
“Why?”
“Because I want to draw it.”
We look at each other. The silence stretches. Then, he sighs.
“Fine,” he says, like he’s only sitting there because it would take more effort to say no than to say yes, but I don’t care. I’ll take what I can get.
It takes him a while to think of a memory, but I don’t prompt him. I watch him from the corner of my eye. He’s lost his military posture. His back is a broken curve, hands loose between his knees as he rests his feet on the bar between the stool’s legs. His skin is sallow and it’s obvious he’s lost weight.
He doesn’t look like any Isadoro I’ve ever met before, but I’ll take this one too.
I startle a little when he starts talking but listen intently. The image is simple but precisely described. My hand moves on its own, following Isadoro’s words easily. The scene takes shape in front of me almost as if I were there, as if Isadoro were lending me his eyes for a moment.
It’s a hot day. The hottest day you’ve ever felt, that you could ever dream of. The air is a weight pressing you down. Your uniform is familiar, now, but no less suffocating as you stand in the sun. You can feel sweat collect, dry, collect. Unreachable patches of your skin itch. You’ve learnt to ignore them.
You are watching. Waiting. Three-quarters of this game, you’ve learnt, is watching and waiting.
You look at a building. It’s beige like everything else is beige. Except for the sky, which is always so blue that if you look straight up and squint your eyes it’s like you’re falling right through. Like most of the buildings in this town, in this land your people have failed, this building is chipped and worn. There’s a section on the side that’s missing, like a bite taken from an apple. There’s trash all around it, leaves its shed in preparation for a spring that never comes. There’s a metal fence between you and the building but that too is half falling apart.
The façade of the building is a series of precarious balconies, rows of black, blind eyes.
Except for one. From one single balcony, a red cloth hangs. Too big to be a hijab, but you think it’s a similar material. Weightless. It’s moving, the corners rippling. The whole of it lifts every once in a while, like the ghosts of children running under their mother’s skirt. You can’t feel a breeze, and it’s like you’re looking at another world. A little rectangle of colour, poking through.
