Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  He hadn’t thought he could cry again. He’d thought he’d used a lifetime of tears. He thought his heart was gone, incinerated, nothing but ash. He thought he’d be alone forever, however long the rest of his life was. Hours, perhaps. Maybe days. Until it was all over, finally.

  But Dan was there, holding him up. His tears soaked Kris’s shirt, his skin, and his hands squeezed Kris’s arms. Dan was there. For the moment, at least, he wasn’t alone.

  “Let me take you home,” Dan finally said. His voice shook. “You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

  Numb, he let Dan load his duffel into the SUV. He kept an ironclad grip on David’s. It was all he had left of his husband. Dirty clothes, a paperback he’d tried to read, a notebook of doodles. His wedding ring, clasped tightly in Kris’s hand, that he always took off and left with Kris whenever he went outside the wire or over the border.

  This duffel was the only coffin he’d ever have.

  “Take me to his grave,” he whispered. “I need to see.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I have to see it.”

  Dan drove him to Arlington National Cemetery, not saying a word. The middle of the day, and traffic was light. Pedestrians smiled and laughed as they walked along the streets of DC.

  It felt like two different worlds, inside and outside the car. Everyone else lived in some alternate reality where there were still good things in the world, while Kris was left in the darkness.

  They parked near the new burials, and Kris spotted the fresh mound of earth, the uneven patches of new sod laid over a recent burial. Saw the crescent moon carved into the marble headstone above the words Staff Sergeant David Haddad.

  A dark-skinned woman in a headscarf kneeled at the grave. Her shoes were to one side and she faced east, crossing David’s grave. Her cheeks were wet, but she held her hands open in front of her chest, her lips moving silently.

  “It’s his mom.” Kris stared. “She didn’t believe him when he told her we were together.”

  “What do you want me to do? Want me to leave?”

  “She’s my mother-in-law. I should…” He shook his head. “We both loved him. We should mourn together.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  Kris palmed David’s ring and slid from the car. He’d carried David’s ring all the way from Kabul, holding it between his hands like a prayer on the long flight.

  His legs shook as he made his way up the gently sloping hill to David’s grave. The headstones blurred into a spinning carousel while David’s flew into perfect focus. He wanted to puke. He wanted to run. He wanted to rip up the fresh grass and throw away the dirt, claw his way down to David, pry open his coffin and lie beside him. Lie in his ashes, let David into his body at an atomic level. Would David stay with him, if he held David inside him?

  “As-salaam-alaikum,” he choked out.

  David’s mother blinked at him. Fresh tear tracks carved mascara down her cheeks. “Wa alaikum as-salaam,” she whispered. “Did you know my son?”

  He couldn’t speak. He nodded, collapsing to his knees. One hand traced David’s name on his headstone as he covered his mouth with the other. David’s ring touched his lips. He kissed the gold, the promise they’d made each other.

  He held the ring out in the palm of his hand to David’s mother. “We were married.”

  She frowned.

  “Do you remember when he called you and told you he had found someone he wanted to be with forever?” Kris watched her face morph from confusion to shock, terrible shock. “And he told you his name was Kris?” His lips trembled, his chin. “That’s me. We were married in Canada a few weeks before. He didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “No…” She shook her head. “No, no, no. My son was not—”

  “We were in love. So deeply in love.” Damn it, he was crying again. “Here, look.” Fumbling, he reached for his phone and pulled up a few pictures they’d taken. They weren’t the best, but it was them. In Hawaii, cuddling. Kissing. On the beach, holding hands. In Toronto, in matching suits. Kissing after their wedding. In front of their new home. Lying in bed together, shirtless. David kissing his cheek.

  She pushed his phone away and squeezed her eyes closed. “Allah, forgive my son,” she whispered. “Forgive him, in your mercy. Forgive him from his sins. Make his grave wide and peaceful. Allah, please do not punish him in his grave!”

  “It’s not a sin! We were in love!”

  “It is a sin!” Fresh tears burst from her eyes. “You come to me and tell me my son sinned, that he turned against Allah. You bring me this here, at his grave? What are you trying to do? Hurt me?”

  “No! We both loved him, I thought—”

  “He will be punished for this! And now I must know it! Now I have to think of him, facing an eternity of agony in his grave!”

  “We were in love!” Kris screamed. “I loved him! And he loved me! Why does that need punishing? What the fuck kind of God does that?”

  She stood, grabbing her purse and her shoes. “If you loved my son, you would have cared for his soul. His relationship with Allah. Now—” She covered her mouth and shook her head. Then turned and strode toward a parked sedan, her head in one hand. Her sobs floated back toward Kris, echoes that seemed to grow, surround everything.

  He fell to his face on David’s grave, tears flowing into the fresh grass. He didn’t, couldn’t understand. Of all the things he was ashamed of, in all the ways he’d failed so spectacularly in his life, loving David was never something he regretted. Never, ever.

  Why? Why did the world fight against them? Why was their love so suspect?

  Why had David been taken from him?

  Why had he lived? Why was he still enduring, when the love of his life was not?

  He didn’t deserve to live. He’d failed on September 11, he’d failed to stop the vice president and his quest for Iraq, and he’d failed on the Hamid operation. There was blood on his hands, no, he was swimming in blood, an ocean of it, waves that drowned him when he closed his eyes. And in the center of it all, the very center of his failures, was the taste of ashes on the back of his throat.

  Everything he’d tried to protect turned to ash. Towers to bones, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. His love, in the back of a trunk.

  His torment, his torture, was to keep on living.

  Only God could be so cruel.

  Dan eventually picked him off the grass and helped him back to the car. Kris mumbled his address, and Dan made the long drive in silence as Kris pitched sideways and lay on the bench seat, clinging to the leather like if he let go he’d be launched into space, or the tether that kept him leashed to the last remnants of his sanity would break.

  Would it be so bad to be insane, though? If he hallucinated David, but spent the rest of his life in a padded room, would the trade-off be worth it? Could he ever imagine David the way he truly was, though? Could he ever conjure up the totality of his existence, his soul? All his perfections, all his imperfections, every one of his deepest thoughts and secrets, things Kris had known and hadn’t known. He could never recreate David, not if he spent his entire life trying.

  The sun had set by the time Dan pulled into his driveway. The shape of their house made his spine shiver, called up every memory of David’s smile inside their walls.

  How many dreams had David packed into their house, staring at each room like he was watching a future movie play out. What had he imagined for them there? What was he hoping for when they both came home for good?

  He walked the entire house, his hands trailing over walls and cabinets, kitchen counters and the back of the couch. They’d made love there and there, fast and frenzied, happy pouncing after unpacking. Slow and sweet, kissing until they ran out of air and they just kept going, never separating. The garage, where David’s old truck still sat. He’d moved into Kris’s life in that truck, taking them from weekend sleepovers to full time partners.

  The porch, David’s favorite spot in their home. They’d drunk b
eers and held hands, watching the sun set. Ate cinnamon rolls and laughed over breakfast, listening to birds chirp. Walked the property, the tangled bushes and leaning trees, the rough scrabble of northern Virginia. If David was going to find peace, he’d said to Kris, he’d find it right there, holding Kris’s hand.

  Where was he? Where was David? He’d sworn, one night after they’d had too much to drink and war was everywhere, and the fear of dying was a real, heavy thing, that he would come back if the worst happened. He would haunt Kris, find some way to break the barrier between life and death. If there was a way, he swore he would find it. He wouldn’t leave Kris alone. Kris had sworn the same, promises drenched in alcohol and tears and kisses that turned to endless lovemaking.

  He’d carried David’s ring like a totem, like an idol, praying to it as if it were a signpost for David’s soul. Come back to me. I’m here, I’m waiting for you.

  Damn it, he’d promised. He’d promised he would.

  If there was any place on the planet that Kris would find David’s ghost, it would be on their back porch. He’d been waiting, he knew, until the last moment. He wanted to walk out there and see him, see David in his chair. Holding out his hand for Kris to join him.

  He’d promised he would come back.

  But the porch, his chair, was empty, and David’s ring was cold in the palm of his hand.

  David wasn’t coming back.

  There wasn’t anything to come back from.

  Whirling, he puked, heaving a stomach full of bile over the railing. He hadn’t eaten in days, and his stomach had started to turn on itself. He swayed, fell. Landed in a heap, a bag of brittle bones and rancid blood, powered by a broken heart and a soul full of shame.

  Kris was alone.

  He stormed out of the house hours later, Dan trailing behind him. Dan had crashed on the couch, slept for what looked like the first time in days. Dark bags under his eyes seemed etched into his skin, and new frown lines arched across his forehead like furrows and canyons.

  Kris kept pacing, trying to bottle up every memory, every moment he and David had spent together. It was too much, the house full of hope, of dreams. Too, too much. He was being smothered by all the broken hope, the ghosts of their love. He had to get out.

  Dan took him to a hotel, checked him in. Crashed in the second bed while Kris barricaded himself in the bathroom. He turned on the shower and crawled in, sinking down the tiled wall until he was a heap on the floor, soaking wet, shivering down to the bone. But he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything anymore.

  He called his mamá, only his second call ever outside of their annual Christmas and Easter calls. The first time, he’d called to tell her he was married. When she answered, she was excited, her voice full of joy, of wonder. “Am I going to be a grandmother?”

  “He’s dead. David’s dead.”

  He heard his mamá drop the phone, heard her scream, curse, and then pray. Fast Spanish, breathless prayers rushed together in a long, unending string. He sat on the floor of his hotel room like a rock. His mamá’s grief washed over him and around him, but he was an unmovable boulder. Nothing could touch him anymore.

  She came back on the line with her voice choked full of tears. She wanted to know how, when, why. He gave her the barest details. “It’s been on the news. Haven’t you seen?”

  “You never tell me details, mi chico. I didn’t think it was you.” She moaned, prayed again. “What will you do?”

  He swallowed.

  “Come to Puerto Rico. Come here. I will take care of you. Leave all that behind, all of that. Just come here. It can be like it was, yes?”

  For a moment, he thought about it. Mamá had run after he left for college. She’d escaped a life she hated, a man who resented her, and a city that had brought her nothing but grief. She’d returned to the island she loved, lived away from the world and all of its hurts. She’d hidden herself away, carving a new world for herself where nothing could ever reach her again. It was tempting to fall into that, to disappear into Puerto Rico as well. Run, and never stop running. Run until he outran himself.

  But his life sentence had been issued. He was made to live. He was made to suffer, to endure.

  So suffer he would.

  His mamá’s prayers, her sobs, over the crackling phone line brought him back to Sunday mornings he’d spent at her side, incense and candle smoke in the air as he shifted in his too-tight shiny shoes. The low rumble of the priest’s chanting. Jesus’s nude body on the cross, his muscles glowing, gleaming by the light of the sun carved through stained glass. Verses read aloud in Father Felipe’s deep baritone sank through his mind, the remnants of his soul. Hubris and punishment, God’s wrath.

  Because you have done this, you are cursed upon all else. Because you have done this, dust shall you eat for all the rest of your days.

  Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

  Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

  For all the rest of your days.

  He wouldn’t take any shortcuts, no easy way out. Death would be too easy. Living on without David was a punishment worse than any Hell envisioned by any religion. His sentence was harsh, but just. To live, and to suffer. For the rest of his days, until he too returned to ash, after a million torturous days.

  He had an ocean of blood to clean up, thousands of lives to avenge.

  He didn’t have to find David’s killer, though.

  His killer stared back at him from the mirror every day.

  He sat in silence for twenty-four hours, building a wall around his heart, around himself. David was supposed to come back to him, but he hadn’t. This wasn’t a movie, and there wouldn’t be any reunions, any dances at midnight.

  There was a truth in the fact that he was alone, that David wasn’t a whisper away, his soul vibrating just out of reach of Kris’s perceptions: there was nothing, and no one, for him, in this life or the next.

  His walls built higher, deeper. The void in his heart yawned wide, and he threw his hopes and dreams into its bottomless abyss. I will never love again.

  He went back to the house once, yanking clothes out of their closet and stuffing things in garbage bags. He called a realtor and told them to sell it, as fast as they could, and get rid of everything inside it. He couldn’t spend a single second longer in the house, a mausoleum to David’s dreams. He couldn’t breathe the air that David had imbued with all his hope, all of his love. He couldn’t create a future for one in a house that was made for so much more.

  Three weeks later, he put a down payment on a studio condo in Crystal City. He spent the first night lying on garbage bags full of clothes and staring out of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, until the sun rose over DC.

  Dan checked on him twice a day, calling, texting, and dropping first by the hotel, then his unit. Kris could set his watch by Dan’s visits, his quiet concern. He brought Kris food, tried to distract him.

  One night, he brought a file over and slid it across the carpet to Kris.

  “What’s this?”

  “Open it.”

  Pictures, from a drone strike. Black and white photos with a targeting grid overlaid on the grisly center scene. Close ups of a mangled car, and a body hanging out of the driver’s door. A face he’d burned into the backs of his eyelids. “Al Jabal.”

  “There’s been a huge increase in drone strikes over there. Revenge and payback. Kabul station tracked down Al Jabal. He was the one who put all the pieces together. Convinced Hamid, and then convinced Zawahiri of what they could do with Hamid. He’s also the one on the videotape, with…” Dan swallowed. “The agency believes that he was David’s killer.”

  Ryan had done it. Kris stared at Al Jabal’s body, half blown apart, fallen like a broken rag doll out of the car. He should feel satisfaction, wrath, fury. He should cry. He should wail and feel it all again, relive the moment he saw David’s burned and blackened body. He should be angry at Ryan for taking away his vengeance. Or grateful, even though it was Ryan.
He should feel something.

  He felt nothing.

  His soul had stretched and stretched until it snapped. All of his edges were frayed, flapping in the breeze. Everything good within him was gone. All that was left were brittle bones, baptized in a thousand lives of shame, and a prisoner’s sentence to endure. For all of your days.

  “I thought you’d want to know.” Dan said softly. He seemed thinner, the arches of his cheekbones more pronounced, the square angle of his heart-shaped jaw sharper. His face was gaunt, shadows living under his eyes. “Are you really going to do this? Join SAD?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “You don’t have to stay in the CIA. You’ve given them everything. You don’t have to do this. Especially when you know they just want you to fail. Why give them that satisfaction?”

  “I’m going through with it. I am joining SAD. I am going to make it through the training, and not just by the skin of my teeth. I am going to fucking excel,” Kris hissed. “I’m going to be the faggot in their ranks, someone they can’t ignore. Someone they can’t get rid of. They think they can make me quit? Ryan thinks this is how to get rid of me? He’ll never be rid of me.”

  Dan’s lips thinned as he stared at Kris.

  “I can’t leave. What would I do? Who would hire me? The man who got his entire team killed. The man who ruined the Hamid op.”

  “None of that is true. There were so many things against you, things you couldn’t know.”

  “I’ve seen the Congressional hearings. George has always loved to throw me to the wolves.”

  CNN had broadcast George’s unclassified public hearing on the failure of the Hamid op a few days before, and George had taken great pains to isolate the failures to one individual: the base commander of Camp Carson. According to George, speaking for the CIA, Kris had “failed to imagine the lengths al-Qaeda was prepared to go to”, and had “failed to properly conduct a thorough counterintelligence operation”.

  Never mind that George, Director Edwards, Ryan, and even the White House had been pressuring Kris to move fast, get Hamid operational as quickly as possible, get movement on the Bin Laden and Zawahiri case.