Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  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 the azan with 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.

  Iraq demanded his anguish, his rage. The CIA and Blackcreek demanded his 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, into us versus them versus the 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, whispered I love you into 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 need better intelligence,” Kris snapped back. “Not more garbage. Better quality intel. 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.

  “The Americans, they’re rounding everyone up. Everyone. Not just the Islamists and the insurgents.”

  “Dawood, you should be careful.” An old man, a former teacher, who smoked and sat in the same café everyday drinking coffee and chatting with the neighborhood men, called out to him. “The Americans, they’re arresting all unwed men! Anyone from this high up!” He held his hand just above his waist. A boy’s height.

  He played soccer in streets overflowing with sewage alongside high school dropouts and smoked cigarettes on street corners, beneath gas hawkers bellowing their prices for fuel, a hundred times any affordable rate.

  “I heard we’re not supposed to play on Karraba Street on Thursday.” One of the players passed him the ball. He juggled it between his feet, kicked it down the block. It bounced off a burned-out car, bounced in a pile of sewage.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  The player shrugged. “Around. Things get said, you know?” He chuckled. “I don’t want to get—” He made an explosion sound, and his hands burst open. “You should stay away too.”

  David hid from American convoys and felt the burning gaze of a Humvee’s turret gunner zeroing his sights on the center of David’s forehead.

  “Do you ever wish things would go back to the way they were?” Samir, another out-of-work young Iraqi, smoked with him on a street corner, hidden away from the American convoy blazing d
own the Baghdad street. Car horns blared, and the Americans fired warning shots into the street, forcing the Iraqis to drive over each other to get out of the convoy’s way. Cars crunched. Glass broke. Curses and shouts filled the air.

  “There’s no going back.”

  “There’s no going forward.” Samir shrugged. “What do we do? We have nothing. No country. No jobs. No pride.” He grabbed David’s shoulder. “At least we have today, and each other, my friend.”

  Hatred, a palpable, pure thing, grew like cancer, like a tumor David could hold. Could taste, choking him and everyone in Baghdad.

  He felt, with a surety of rage, what Saqqaf was tapping into on the streets of Iraq. There was a blood haze rising, a fury cresting, that was going to swallow the world.

  Baghdad, Iraq

  March 31, 2004

  Where are you?

  The text came in midmorning. David had slipped out of the Green Zone early, heading to one of his meeting points. He ducked into an alley, skipping over a puddle of sewage and discarded shell casings.

  Kris kept texting. Where are you? Answer me. I need you to text back, right now. Right now.

  [I’m here. I’m on Karada Road.]

  Thank fucking God. Get back here. Now. Please. PLEASE.

  [What happened?]

  Get back here.

  He pocketed his phone and turned around, heading for the Green Zone. He twisted and turned, ducked into a café for a coffee and smoked two cigarettes on two different street corners, making sure he wasn’t followed, before entering the Green Zone cordon. Half a mile of concrete barriers topped with razor wire funneled all pedestrians into a single file line. Barely anyone wanted to enter the Green Zone that morning. David, dressed in his Iraqi street clothes, moved quickly past the overwatch posts, the tanks and giant machine guns glaring down onto the pedestrians in the concrete tube.

  At the first of three checkpoints, a soldier ordered him to his knees fifty feet from the sandbag barrier. “Get the fuck down! Hands on your fucking head! Now! Now!”

  Twelve rifles centered on his head.

  David slowly dropped to his knees. Placed his hands behind his head.

  Four soldiers tackled him, pushing his face into the ground. One stepped on his cheek, the sole of his boot digging into his skin.

  Old pain, the remembrance of his childhood, flared. You are worth less than the filth I step in every day. He winced and closed his eyes.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” One of the soldiers, a squad sergeant, bellowed. Hands rifled over him, roughly searching his body. They lifted his clothes, grabbed his chest, his stomach. Grabbed his crotch and fisted around his cock. “What the fuck are you doing here, huh? Come to blow yourself up? Come to kill more Americans? Huh?”

  “Sergeant!” One of the soldiers searching him found the badge he kept sewn inside his jeans, his contractor badge and his CIA ID. The soldier passed them to his sergeant.

  “Are these fucking faked?” The sergeant bellowed. “Did you fake these credentials?”

  His cell phone, lying next to his head, buzzed. Every soldier whirled, pointing weapons at him and at the phone.

  “It’s a CIA officer calling,” he said slowly. “Please answer it.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” The sergeant gave him a love tap with the butt of his rifle, slamming the stock against his cheek. His face ricocheted off the ground, gritty sand coating his mouth, his nose, his eyes. He tasted blood. “You want us to pick up the phone and blow ourselves up?”

  Another soldier had disappeared back to the Humvee with his credentials. David saw him on the radio, frantically gesturing to David and then to the creds, lying on the passenger seat. After a moment, he jogged back to the sergeant and whispered in his ear.

  “You fucking wait right there,” the sergeant spat at David. “Fall back,” he grunted to his men. “Keep eyes on him.”

  Nine minutes passed as David tasted his blood and smelled the fetid fumes of Baghdad’s streets. Felt the dirt and the filth seep into his body. Felt the hatred of the American soldiers burn into him, and felt the weight of their half-squeezed rifles pointed at his head. Never, in his whole life, from Afghanistan to Somalia to escaping Libya, had he felt closer to death.

  He breathed in and out, keeping his eyes closed. Kris. You will come. You’ll always come. I didn’t answer your call. You won’t ignore that. You’ll come for me.

  Another voice rose inside him, a voice he recognized, and yet did not. It sounded like his father, but not. Like the voices of a thousand old men and old women combined, like wisdom and experience and age. Like humanity, but more than humanity.

  Call on me, and I will answer you.

  His breath faltered. His gasp blew a puff of dust from the street. Sand collected on his bloody lips.

  If Allah should aid you, no one can overcome you.

  Years. It had been years and years since he’d prayed. The last time he had was before flying out of Egypt, before heading to America. He could barely mumble through the tears, then. He’d never had to pray without his father beside him.

  In America, his mother turned deeper into her faith while David spun out into the waters of MTV and football and his first fumblings with another boy.

  Allah, he whispered. How did he even begin? What did he even say? What did you say to someone you had ignored for decades? Had turned your back on? What did you say to your God who had let your father be taken and killed?

  Tears burned through him following a burst of rage, white-hot agony at the memory. The afternoon when the men had come, had dragged his father out of their house. His mother, sobbing, trying to plead with them. The Mukhabarat had backhanded her, pushed her down. His father had tried to break free, tried to run back. He was like an animal, desperate to get to his wife, to get back to his home.

  “Dawood!” He’d screamed. “Dawood! La hawla wala quwwata illa billah!” There is no power nor strength save in Allah.

  The Mukhabarat had punched him, knocked him down again.

  A week before, his family had celebrated David’s tenth birthday. His father had given him prayer beads and a djellaba, a mini replica of his father’s, to wear to the mosque. He’d loved it, had worn it night and day, trying to look like his father. All he wanted, when he was nine years old, was to be the perfect replica of his father when he grew up.

  “Dawood…” His father had locked his gaze on him, lying on the sandy ground, blood splattering his white djellaba. “Habibi…”

  Those were his father’s last words to him. The men, the Mukhabarat, had grabbed him and shoved him in their car, driven away.

  He had become his father, beaten and bloody in the street, put on the ground by another man.

  “What the fuck!” Kris’s shrill screech, his outrage, shredded the memory. David’s eyes flew open. He was still on the street, still cheek-down in the blood and the sand.

  But not in Libya. In Iraq.

  And Kris had come for him.

  “Put your fucking rifles down,” Kris shrieked. “Put them fucking down, now!” He held his ID in front of him like an indictment, like a warrant for the soldiers’ souls. A proclamation, declaring they had done fucked up. “He’s fucking CIA, you assholes!”

  One of the soldiers, a young private, helped David stand. The kid was maybe eighteen. Maybe younger. He had baby fat in his cheeks and pimples on his nose. When David looked like that, he’d been at football practice, watching the track team in their running shorts. He’d gone to high school dances. He hadn’t held a rifle.

  “Sorry,” the kid mumbled. He wouldn’t look at David.

  Kris appeared at his side, his hands everywhere, putting David’s clothes back to rights, running over his skin, holding his face.

  “You fucking assholes hit him,” Kris snarled. “What the fuck!”

  “We’re on high alert,” the sergeant growled. “You know that. You put it out.”

  “He’s fucking one of us.” Kris smoothed back David’s hair.


  David held his wrists. “What happened?” Sand and blood smeared on his lips as he spoke.

  Tears simmered at the edges of Kris’s eyes. His lips moved, but nothing came out. He cupped David’s cheek, his thumb stroking over David’s growing bruise, the knot from the sergeant’s love tap. “Fallujah,” he whispered. “Everything has changed.”

  The command center was deathly quiet.

  Sixteen video cameras played different angles of the same scene. Two dilapidated SUVs, burning to a husk. Their metal frames were ashy skeletons, engulfed in an inferno.

  Charred bodies, Blackcreek contractors, pulled from the flames. Beaten. Dragged through the streets.

  “Oh God, they were Blackcreek contractors,” Kris whispered. “They were Blackcreek! Do you have any idea what I thought, when the first reports came in? Do you have any idea—”

  He grabbed Kris and pulled him into his arms, held him as Kris sobbed, his muffled cries against David’s chest the only sound in the command center. Kris clung to him, his fingers digging in to his skin, as if David would disappear, as if he wasn’t really there, was only a figment of Kris’s imagination.

  “I’m okay,” he breathed into Kris’s hair. “I’m okay, Kris.”

  The screens kept playing, revealing the barbarity of the morning. Blackened bodies dragged across the road. A riot had formed around the bodies. Chanting, cheering, faces bursting with excitement. The madness of a mob. Insurgents, jihadis, masked men in black, in the center. Taking the burned bodies, the corpses. Dragging them to a steel lattice bridge, notated on the military’s maps as landmark “Brooklyn”.

  Sometimes, it looked just like America, like looking at the steel girders of the Big Apple, and it was easy to imagine the Hudson or the East River was just beyond, instead of the endless wash of desert.

  Ropes were thrown over the girders.

  Kris squeezed his eyes shut. He wouldn’t watch. His lips thinned, pressed together until they went white.