Ali Al Saeed, Yellow (short story)

A picture. A memory. Something beautiful. A lost love. A touch. Anything but this. Clear my head. Brush the pain aside. It’s working. I’m in a lovely place where the sun is warm and the breeze is cool. No. The pain. It’s here. It never leaves. It’s become part of me. Of my being. It’s inside me. Inside my blood. My head. My bones. My soul… 1 Sadiq lies on his hospital bed, in a room full of other patients, their wails and cries piercing his ears. Their screams of pain – his as well – are echoing in the empty hallways. He lays still, his eyes shut. His body is stiff yet limp. Tears run down the side of his face, onto the soft, feathery pillow. He wishes there is a hand he can hold. But there is nothing but the crumbled sheet under him. The loneliness hurts just as much as the unremitting pain. Even though he has spent many days and nights – once even up to an entire month – all by himself in this same hospital, it never really made it any easier. You would think that you could get used to it in time. But you don’t, Sadiq learnt. If anything, it remains the same. Perhaps it even gets worse, but your mind refuses to accept that it does. He vaguely remembers the first night his father rushed him to the E.R. when he was as little as four years old. The pain makes him remember. He remembers the needles, the stench of old medicine and the indifferent look on the nurse’s face. Twenty-three years later, it’s the same old story. Nothing has changed. Where did all the time go? What in Allah’s name went wrong? Sadiq looks to the desk on his right for the watch. It’s time for his shot. “Nurse!” he shouts out. His voice is hoarse and weak. “Nurse!” he hits the call button, knowing that it’s useless. He used to time them. To see how long it would take them to respond. No quicker than 15 minutes. They would sit there in their nurses’ room and chit-chat about the latest Nancy Ajram “video clip” or how to cook a proper beryani for their husbands. Once done, one of them drags her feet as if heading to the mortuary. “What?” asks Nurse Jamila. There is nothing pretty about her. Her fat bits hang from her sides like punching bags. “I need my shot.” “Tsk tsk tsk, you’re timing it aren’t you?!” she says, shaking her head and letting out a deep, miserable sigh. “You know, you look fine to me.” “Please,” he begs. Patients like himself are allowed one injection every four to six hours, depending on their state at the time. Sometimes, if the nurse sees fit, they skip them. They use all kinds of drugs, the strongest permitted for medical use. Sadiq has tried them all. They have become part of his system as well. Every vain of his body is filled with weak blood and drug substance. Nurse Jamila comes back with a shot of Morphine. Sadiq wants to object, but he knows better not to. Morphine doesn’t help much. It lasts only for a few minutes, and then the pain is back with a vengeance. It’ll do for now though. It’ll buy him a moment of peace and tranquility, one short painless moment. He feels the sharp needle break his thinning skin and into his vein. Instantly, he is relieved. The Morphine shoots into his entire body and subdues his senses. The pain is gone. Sadiq shuts his eyes and swims into another world. They called him Zardo, they called him Asfar, they called him Mr Yellow. At first, he was taunted by these names. He would go home and cry silently alone in the bathtub. But then these names became who he truly was, became his thing, his identity. He grew to embrace them, grew to accept that his skin and eyes will always seem pale and yellow. But what he never really adjusted to was the fact that he was never going to have a normal life. The hardest blow came when he knew that he will never be able to do the things he dreamed of doing. Those hopes and fantasies have been dashed and crushed under the weigh of his medical condition. It knocked his sprit down, down onto the gutter. Nothing left to him but the remains of the daydreams he used to have; of climbing hills and trekking through the Tibet, of traveling across the globe on foot, of playing football every Tuesday with the guys; of running, just for the joy of feeling the breeze brushing against his face. He will do none of these. The pain is back. Every joint in his body feels as if it is being crushed. Another 227 minutes of it, until his next shot. Sadiq watches the Casio digits change, second by second. 2 Just like so many times before, Sadiq drove himself to the hospital late that night. In time, it became almost a sort of ritual. His senses atoned to the route from his house in Isa Town to the Sulmaniya Medical Complex.