Page 113 of Whisper

“I really hate ‘I told you so’,” Kris had said. “It’s used against me too many times. ‘I told you he was gay. I told you he couldn’t do whatever, because he’s gay’.” He’d shaken his head, staring down over Saddam’s fountains, lips pursed, eyes narrowed. “ButI fucking told you so,” he’d hissed. “And I fucking told the vice president, too!”

Kris went back on the hunt.

Saqqaf was his prey.

Being in Iraq was like being in a Salvador Dali painting, with reality melting on all sides, slipping and sliding away. Iraq, with its dusty air and faded light, the stench of rot and death and diesel, the concrete barriers that rose and rose and rose, dividing the city into siege zones, into sectarian crises and splinter cells. Life was cut off, constrained, checkpointed. Life was suspicious. Seething hatred filled the streets, as thick as Baghdad dust, heavier than the diesel fumes and the sweat. Hatred was a stench that couldn’t be washed away.

David existed within and outside the hatred. Driving in Humvees, in bulletproof SUVs, the glares on the streets turned hard and cold toward him. He was an occupier. He was one of them.

Walking on the street, undercover, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, leaving behind the bulletproof armor and the polo emblazoned with the Blackcreek logo, and leaving behind the weapons strapped to his thigh and under his arms, he became human again.

It was his Libyan blood, his burnished skin, his dark hair. It was Arabic that came effortlessly to his lips, with an accent that couldn’t be faked. It was the way he moved and flowed with the Arab culture, slipping back into the tides of his youth, living in his memories in the present all over again. It was the thousand and one judgments that came at him, from a thousand and one stares. To be American, and to be Arab. To be a collaborator, and, later, to be one of the dirty Arabs on the street, sweating under the gaze of the American soldiers, hidden behind their sunglasses and their tanks. To be viewed, by everyone, as something other than what he was. A thousand and one stares. A thousand and one ways to be perceived. The kaleidoscope of his soul shifted, twisted. Who he was changed again.

He was a puzzle that the world constantly played with. His soul twisted and turned a hundred times throughout the day.

Every night, he returned to Kris’s arms. Kris was the one person in the world who didn’t demand something from him, didn’t judge him for the way he listened to theazanwith his eyes closed. Who never asked him to choose, American or Arab, gay or Muslim, him or them. Kris let him exist, in all his mismatched parts, even if his existence felt like an ink blot stain or a bug splat against a windshield.

Kris seemed to want nothing from him except his blemished life, and his whole heart. He could give those to Kris.

Iraqdemandedhis anguish, his rage. The CIA and Blackcreekdemandedhis wrath, his fury, his vengeance.

Whispers from the desert scratched at his soul.

But his heart quieted when he returned to Kris, when they rejoined at the end of the day. Kris, exhausted after his hunting, his managing an intelligence operation that rivaled the size and scope of what they’d built in Pakistan, had time to smile at him, hold his hand. They drank Baghdad Martinis—boiled water—on their balcony and watched the sun set, listened to the call to prayer as they held hands.

Words from the Quran came whispering back to him, out of nowhere, in the quiet moments he shared with Kris.And of everything, We created pairs. Heaven and Earth. Night and day. Sun and moon. Sea and Shore. Light and darkness.David gazed at Kris.You, for me.

Subhanallah, he loved Kris so much. Loved him for loving him, and never demanding. Loved him for knowing parts and pieces were broken or missing, tarnished or destroyed.

Kris had those parts within him, too. They’d never spoken about it, but it was just something they knew. He loved Kris for that, for the shared ways they’d moved through the world and had each gotten kicked a dozen times or more. Coming from nothing and fighting for more, being brown in a world full of white, being gay in a world full of straight. Kris had the same bruises on his soul that David had, all the sighs and side-eyes that came with growing up poor, brown, and gay. They’d both been outsiders, both been relegated to the margins. They’d both fought for everything they’d had, every single scrap. Like recognized like, it seemed. They’d never had to fight each other. They were survivors together, them against the world. The whole world seemed to be dividing into lines, into demarcations, intousversusthemversusthe other.

But not between him and Kris. They were the same, as if half of David had been split off and put into Kris, like the Quran said about the souls of lovers. That soulmates had known each other before life, before time, and once on the earth, they were searching for each other again. Kris was that, to him.

And Kris, like David, seemed to want nothing more than to be loved for who he was. And, by Allah, he loved Kris for all of who he was, and more.

He tried to care for Kris the best he way could, repay Kris for the peace his presence brought to David’s existence. He made love to Kris until Kris screamed his name, until he was limp and spent and grinning ear to ear. He rubbed his shoulders every day, tried to relieve the strain of carrying the weight of the CIA’s hopes and the White House’s fears on his shoulders. He held him every night, whisperedI love youinto Kris’s hair before he fell asleep.

If he could have, he would have bottled those days and nights, kept them hidden away, able to be lived in and remembered, like slipping into a dream as easily as one could slip into a lake.

But autumn turned to winter, and then to spring.

Ramadan came, and with it, the bloodiest surge of the insurgents. Fury boiled over. Hatred turned against everyone and everything.

Kris took command of a fusion cell, working in tandem with General Ramos and a joint task force of Special Forces operators responsible for finding and striking at the cells of fighters aligned with Saqqaf. David saw some of his old friendly teammates, and some who hated his guts. Every night, Kris and General Ramos sent teams into the cities, raiding houses, searching for fighters. Searching for Saqqaf.

David spent the mornings with Kris, working through the raw intelligence gained, assessing the men arrested during the night before they were sent to Abu Ghraib.

“We need more intelligence!” General Ramos constantly bitched. “We need more actionable intelligence. People to arrest and get off the streets. Terrorists to interrogate.”

“We needbetterintelligence,” Kris snapped back. “Not more garbage. Betterqualityintel. We need more people on the streets, more people building bridges. More people willing to talk to us.”

General Ramos snorted at him, and then called Abu Ghraib, demanding more information be extracted from the prisoners. “There’s eight thousand terrorists in that prison,” he barked. “Get them to talk!”

Interrogators flew in from Guantanamo Bay, from the CIA’s detention center and interrogation unit. Trainers arrived, sent to help at Abu Ghraib. Information began flowing.

Most of it was useless.

In the afternoons, David hit the streets of Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, sliding into the rhythms of the occupied city and the tides of fury, rage, and impotent helplessness. On the streets, he was Dawood, a displaced Libyan who used to work in the oil fields and in the refineries, but had been ousted, like so many others, thanks to de-Baathification. He listened to the rage, the street corner wailers, the coffee shop arguments with other out-of-work Iraqis and bitter denunciations of the occupiers and the Americans.