When toothpaste dries in the sun, it gets brittle. It congeals, begins to crack, shrivels. And it loses its color. It turns from light green—the color it emerges from the tube marked Government Issue Mint Toothpaste—to talc white. Finally the surface turns to powder and can be blown away. A boot, gallows, a circle, waves, letters, numbers—everything disappears as white dust in days or weeks.

He kneels at the back wall of the cage and rubs the crumbled lines off the floor with the palms of his hands. In the stalls around him, they’re doing their routine again on their towels. Rashid has been laying on his mattress since dinner, thinking about whether he should stand up. He’s overcome with sadness. He has an invisible hole inside him, and only food can for short periods fill it. As soon as he tells himself that, he feels the ever-expanding hollowness between his pelvis and neck. But everything is functioning normally; only his knee hurts against the hard concrete. He works slowly and precisely, and deliberates over each motion. He wipes the mix of dirt and chalk off on his pants and unscrews the top from the tube. He’s careful not to waste any of the paste. A small, viscous drop on his pointer finger is enough for a letter, or half that for the letter “i.” He lays each line with the edge of his finger, then goes back over it with his fingertip creating all the shapes he needs in finger-width strips of color on the concrete, long, angled, across and one rounded: K-I-R-A-T. Up to now the MPs haven’t discovered his designs. They’re suspicious of letters. They find meanings in them. There are “I”s and “A”s everywhere: Rashid, Tarik, Kirat, Islam. Letters shaken up in a dice cup, secret combinations. Tarik and Islam—the chaplain, Muhammad Halabi-Islam—are gone. Left are Rashid and Kirat the lizard.

When he first saw the lizard, it was on the base of the plywood wall behind his cage, hanging there like a neon-green letter, head down, glimmering, rigid. For a second he was startled. It was pretty, as if from another world. It didn’t belong in a prison. He stared at it, as if he could hold it in place with his eyes, and stayed in the same position he’d been in when he first spotted it there, squatting on his mattress—since his first interrogation he’d been unable to sit on concrete anymore—his head turned halfway around over his shoulder. He thought he saw one of its eyes move like a rotating mechanical ball sticking out of an otherwise dead surface. There was nothing to suggest a heart was beating or lungs breathing inside the contours of its form, and yet it was a complete living thing, self-sufficient and distinct. The shape of its body—with no neck, coming to a point at the end of its head, its tapered tail beyond the splayed legs longer than its head and body put together—made it look like an arrow pointing to the ground. Its long tail was an odd piece of decoration, seemingly superfluous and fragile, but it made the reptile a stubbornly unmistakable creature. A lizard. As long as a measuring stick. The same cool, shimmering color he imagined the nearby ocean to be, near the shore, where the golden sand lightened the shade of the water; bright flecks glittering amidst the turquoise depths, and golden stripes running from the lizard’s shoulders to its jaws with that same shimmering light.

After a while, he could see that its body did move. Tiny waves of shadows would wash the glittering light from its skin and then they would reappear. A light show with its source inside the animal itself. He stared at it, and forgot about himself. The changes on its skin seemed to be trying to communicate something. He wanted to understand. The motions of this motionless creature must hold some meaning, some promise. The wandering changes of color seemed to increase. Then they started to synchronize. And then suddenly one big wave pulsed across its whole body, washing away the green color. It became paler, warmer, the entire animal seemed to disappear and then reappear. As Rashid watched, the ocean green turned to light brown. The lizard melted into the plywood. It still hadn’t moved. It was magic. The light flecks were still there, and still shimmering. Rashid bent forward until he could see through the chain links without seeing the wire, and just as his face was about to touch the fence, the tail whipped silently to the side and the arrow shot off. Just above the ground the lizard stopped and looked around, then it was off into the grass. Its light brown body dashed through the blades of grass and disappeared. Rashid’s heart pounded, flitting in his chest like a bird held in a fist.