by Tal Bauer
His hands trembled.
He couldn’t look at Dan.
Not yet.
Dan’s confession had haunted him the whole way home, the words circling his mind as he drove, as he parked, as he rode the elevator to his unit.
They didn’t mean anything. It was just Dan. Dan being in love with him. That was nothing new.
Home, and his empty studio seemed to swallow him whole. The hum of the laundry machine was as loud as a train.
A bowl of condoms and a bottle of lube on his nightstand had stared him down. Across the bed, on the opposite nightstand, David’s photo sat, alone. Other than the photo, was there anything real in the entire condo? Anything that showed the world a human existed inside the four walls?
Kris’s gaze had traced David’s image, his stern glower, his brawny stance. Why had he chosen that photo? Why not a picture of their wedding? Why not something happier, something that showed them, their love?
If he’d had to look at that every day, could he have ever moved on?
Had he ever moved on? Was fucking his way through every older man in DC moving on?
It was something. But something wasn’t everything.
He’d held David’s photo, staring into his dead husband’s gaze. Was there anything left of their love? Was there anything left between him and this photo?
Finally, he’d set the photo facedown on the nightstand and headed for the shower.
It was in the shower that he collapsed, clinging to the tiles as he slid down the wall, sobbing, shrieking, falling to his knees as it hit him, again, the truth blindsiding him as powerfully as it had nine years before. David was dead. Gone. He was all alone.
Kris cried until the water ran cold, face buried in his hands. He’d taken his ring off after six years. Even the tan line had faded. His ring lay next to David’s, tucked into the bottom of David’s duffel from Afghanistan, in the darkest corner of his closet.
David was dead, and gone, and there was nothing Kris could do to change that. To make that hurt less. Freezing his life hadn’t worked. Freezing his heart hadn’t worked, either. The hurt still ached, still was an anguish he couldn’t possibly bear.
Dan’s words kept circling and circling, trying to reach his heart.
I wish you would let me love you. I wish we could really do this.
I want to be the man who makes you happy again.
Could he be happy again?
There were moments he was. Mike, as infuriating as he was at times, made him smile. How had a masc meathead marshal like Mike and he become friends?
Because Mike reminds you of David. Parts of him, at least. Would Mike and David have been friends, if David were alive?
Why hadn’t Kris said yes when Mike pursued him? Why had he pushed him away, kept it friends-only between them? Would Mike have ended up being a hollow echo of David, sentenced to always be compared in Kris’s mind? Would he have lined up Mike versus David for the rest of their lives, had he pursued Mike?
There were other moments when he was happy, though. Moments with Dan. Dancing with him that night. The way their kiss had raced through every nerve in his body, lighting him up from the inside in a way no one else had, no one but David. Moments since, when he tumbled into bed with Dan. When they met for dinner, and he saw the curve of Dan’s grin over candlelight, or they shared a bottle of wine and laughed on Dan’s patio, watching the stars. Dan’s touch ghosting over his skin, over his lips, as he stared down at Kris in his bed. How their fingers laced together, held, as Dan made love to him. He’d always held back, but...
Maybe… maybe he could be happy again.
He panicked in the shower, then tore through his closet for the perfect outfit, putting on his makeup and eyeliner like he was going on the hunt. He was going out, forget the rest of his squad, Mike and Billy and Jon and Carlos and Aaron. He was going to find a man to bring home, fuck this panic, this heartache away.
But he didn’t make it past the bathtub. A hollow emptiness in the center of his chest had opened and opened, a zipper inside him ripping apart until he thought he was going to trip and fall backward into himself.
He was tired of it all. He was tired of being alone.
When he knew exactly what not being alone felt like.
When he knew how wonderful, how beautiful, how fantastical it was to be loved. To be in love.
Two hours later, and there he was, in Dan’s office with Dan’s favorite Chinese food. He finally looked up, into Dan’s gaze.
Dan’s face was hard, his expression locked down. Eyes tight. “Kris, you don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“You don’t have to try and make everything fine. Pretend nothing happened. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t—”
“I’m not— That’s not what I’m doing.”
“No? What’s this?” Dan nodded to the food. “Look, you know how I feel now. I figured if I ever told you, you’d run away, and…” He sighed. “I just don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to pretend.”
“I’m not pretending. And I obviously didn’t run away.”
“Kris…” Dan looked away.
“I’m trying, Dan. I’m trying. This.” He waved between them. His hand landed on a container of fried rice. “I’m trying, I am.” His eyes flicked up. Met Dan’s. “Us.”
Dan’s entire existence formed a question. He didn’t move, not a muscle, not a hair. But everything changed.
“I’m trying,” Kris repeated, softer. “So just sit your ass down and eat your damn food. Before it gets cold.”
Finally, Dan sat, pulling out his chair and collapsing like his bones had turned to jelly. Kris saw it hit him, that Kris had picked up his favorite food, from his favorite place. Kris looked down, picking through his lemon chicken as Dan tried to reset back to neutral. Dan had always been a case study in measured calm, an oasis of it, even. He’d been the center of Kris’s hurricane, ever since Kris had stepped off the Learjet without David.
Maybe even before.
“Ryan giving you shit?” Kris steered the conversation back to safer waters. Shitting on Ryan was practically an Olympic sport for him.
Dan, diplomatically, demurred. “He’s ripping his hair out over this new threat.”
“You’re not?”
“I am. I just don’t berate my subordinates about it. I keep my freak-outs all in here.” Dan tapped his forehead.
“See, that’s why you got the big office. Why you became one of the big boys at the CIA.”
“My poker face?”
“You can take Ryan’s shit and not want to strangle him. Not vault over your desk and beat him to death with your keyboard. I’d be in jail for murder, I know I would.”
Dan snorted. “We all learned from your example. ‘CIA Officer versus Vice President’ is a teaching module at The Farm now, you know.”
Kris laughed, his head tipping back. His laugh echoed, bouncing around Dan’s glass office for a long moment. God, it felt good to laugh again, for fun and not at someone or like he wanted it to hurt.
He caught Dan’s gaze as he sat back. Warm joy, liquid gold, poured from Dan, seemed to slither through the air and into his skin, down to his bones. Kris’s stomach clenched. His heart pounded. Heat built in his blood. He let it. Let himself react to Dan, to Dan’s outpouring of love.
Dan cleared his throat. “Actually, I was going to call you.”
“Missed me already?”
“Always.” Dan smiled. “But, no, this time, officially.”
Kris frowned. Froze, with lemon chicken halfway to his mouth. “’Bout what? The intel dump? This new threat? I don’t work in CT anymore. You know that.”
“There’s something in it that I need to show you.”
“You know Ryan is going to shit if you bring me in on this.”
“I have to.” Dan winced, set down his carton of crispy beef and grabbed a red-bordered Top Secret folder from the stack on his desk. “This is the transcript of an audio fi
le uploaded to al-Qaeda’s media office and sent out online.” He held out the folder.
Kris reached for it. Dan didn’t let go, not right away. He held Kris’s gaze, worry in his eyes. Kris sat back slowly as flipped the folder open.
Inside lay a statement, first in Arabic, then translated into English:
To be a Muslim is to live with a pain that sits in your soul. A pain the rest of the world cannot know. It is Muslim pain. To have everything of our greatness ripped away. Everything of our history, destroyed. The world once saw us as people to admire. To love. But now, the world sees only ruin. I know what it’s like to be hated for who you are. To have your life dictated by others, and your choices, your path, made for you. There is a rage that lives inside us, brothers. There is a rage that screams, ‘we will prove everyone wrong’. We are more than this. Yallah, this is Muslim pain. And we will not feel this pain any longer.
“I’ve watched videos of your interrogations,” Dan said carefully. “I know you built rapport with your detainees by addressing their pain. You’ve called it ‘Muslim pain’, verbatim, before.”
“I’ve said several things in here verbatim before.” Kris flipped the folder shut. Set it back on Dan’s desk. Memories clamored from behind the locked door in his mind. He swallowed. “Whoever said this, you think he’s a former detainee? Someone I worked over once? Someone we let go who went back to the great jihad?”
“Can you remember who all you said this to? I’ve pulled the old detainee records, but I was hoping to spare some of my people from having to watch thousands of hours of footage of your interrogations to build a list of suspects. If you can help narrow it down…”
“The records aren’t complete, anyway.” Kris pressed his lips together. “The first detainee I used this approach with was Abu Zahawi.”
When the detainee program came to light, CIA leadership at the time had ordered Zahawi’s interrogation tapes destroyed. Everything, from Kris’s questioning to Paul’s torture, the beatings, the waterboarding. The only remnants of Zahawi’s interrogation lay in Kris’s notes and in Zahawi’s statements to the military tribunal, his public condemnation of his treatment by the CIA.
Dan blinked. His eyes pinched.
“Let me see the list you’ve got. I’ll run through it, see what names jump out.”
“Thank you.” Dan sighed. “I know this is hard. I know you want to put everything from back then behind you. I appreciate this.”
“You can show me how thankful you are later.” Kris winked.
Laughing, Dan passed over a printout, a list of detainees Kris had interrogated. It was three pages long, two columns on each page. Jesus. He folded it in half, slid it into his trench.
“So who is this asshole, hmm?” Kris went back to poking at his food. “What’s the word on the al-Qaeda street?”
Dan leaned back, his hands laced behind his head. He exhaled slowly, shrugging. “They call him Al Dakhil Al-Khorasani.”
“‘The stranger from Khorasan’? Interesting kunya.”
“What’s really interesting is the way all the al-Qaeda branches are throwing their support behind him. Sending blessings to Al-Khorasani, wishing him well on his hegira.”
“His hegira?” Kris’s eyebrows shot sky-high.
“Yes. One of the reasons why Ryan is going apeshit is… we have no flipping idea what that means.”
“Divine direction to go someplace? Or leave a place? The hegira refers to Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina. Traditionally, it’s been used as a call for Muslims to migrate to places where they can live in peace.”
“Buuut,” Dan said carefully, “Jihadists have been militarizing it. Turning a call to peaceful migration into a military injunction to reshape the Middle East, and then the world, into their version of a militant Islamic state. A renewed Caliphate.”
“As part of their apocalypse. Yes, I’m familiar with the eschatology. And so is Al-Khorasani. He’s using the Khorasan hadith as part of his jihadi name.”
“Hegira for the jihadists has become inextricably tied to jihad. The Prophet moved for war. They move for war. It’s become the call to move to a place to conduct jihad against their enemy.”
“So Al-Khorasani is going someplace to wage war. Hardly new behavior for jihadists.”
“But where? We’ve got no intel. We’ve got no idea who this guy is. ‘The stranger from Khorasan’?” Dan threw his arms out wide. “We’re days out from September eleventh, and you know jihadists all love to try something on the anniversary. But all we have to go on is the hope that you might narrow down this list and we can focus on finding former detainees you identify, then try and track them down around the entire globe. So far, we’re running into graves and dead ends. It’s like Al-Khorasani is a ghost.”
“Ghosts don’t exist. He’s a man. Which means we’ll find him.” Kris smirked. “We’re the CIA. We find all men.”
“Thank you for helping. It might give us an actual lead. We’ve bumped everyone into high alert. Sent out threat warnings across US Embassies and to all FBI offices.”
“I’ll look over it tonight.”
“If you want…” Dan inhaled, a sharp, quick breath. “If you want, you can look it over at my place. I won’t be getting out of here until at least the next cable dump comes in from Islamabad, but…” He shrugged. “I can cook you breakfast when I get home.”
Kris looked down. His empty studio, and the ghosts of his pain? Or Dan’s home, his modest Maryland ranch house, comfortably lived-in, always open to Kris?
“I think,” he said carefully, “that I should be the one making you breakfast.”
Slowly, Dan smiled, like dawn breaking over the ocean, over a snow-topped mountain, a thousand glittering rainbows falling from the sky. He pulled out his keys and twisted one off, held it out for Kris. “You can keep this.”
Kris took it. Palmed it, taking a deep breath. “I will see you at home.”
“I’ll see you at home,” Dan whispered. He tried, he really tried, to hold back his joy, his galloping exuberance. “Thank you. For… everything.”
“Thank you. For not giving up.”
“If I knew I just needed to throw a tantrum, I would have years ago.” Dan chuckled.
Kris threw his fortune cookie at him. “All right, I’m gone. You have a ghost to hunt and I have bad guys to remember. I’m going to need a drink to jog my memory.”
“Have one for me.” Dan blew him a quick kiss as Kris grabbed his trench.
He turned at the doorway and blew a gentle kiss back to Dan.
He could do this.
He drove through DC toward Maryland instead of taking the outer loop. He pulled out at Dupont Circle and drove two blocks, then parked. Walked past the Tap Room, Mike’s go-to joint, and went another two blocks to a small jazz bar tucked into the walk-ups and the streetlamps. It was quieter, someplace he went when he just needed to get out of his head.
Before he went to Dan’s, this time for something other than a fuck-and-go, he needed to say goodbye.
No one knew him there, not like at the Tap Room or his other go-to hookup bars. He could fade into the background, be nobody. Anonymity was a precious, beautiful thing.
He ordered a Cosmo and sat at the corner of the bar, far from the door. It was too early for the live music, too late for dinner, and he was one of the few crowding the place. Couples lingered over drinks at scattered tables here and there. Candlelight threw shadows and whispers of light on the walls.
David. Kris twirled the stem of his Martini glass. Ruby swirls spun, and he stared into the ripples. Is it okay to say goodbye to you? To your memory? Is it okay to move on?
His cocktail was silent. He downed a swallow and set the drink down, watching the ripples form again, crash into each other. Is it okay to look for a piece of happiness again?
A barstool squeaked next to him. He closed his eyes. Damn it, he didn’t want to deal with anyone, not tonight. Ironic, though; the first time he wanted to be left alone, som
eone made their move. One day before, and he’d have spun with a smile, investigated the man until he determined yes or no. To fuck or not to fuck.
“I’m not interested,” he said, not looking up. Take a hint.
A man settled beside him, propping his forearms on the bar top. In the entire length of the bar, not a single other seat was taken. He’d sat right next to Kris. On purpose.
And he wasn’t leaving. Kris felt the hot stare of the stranger’s gaze against the side of his face.
“Look—” Kris grabbed his drink and twisted. God help this man, interrupting his soul searching, his goodbye to David, on this night. He glared, his eyes sharpened to daggers. “I’m not—”
David gazed back serenely.
David blinked. Once. Twice.
The Martini glass hit the floor. Shattered, splintering into a billion fractional pieces, as many pieces as Kris’s heart had broken into, his soul.
Kris’s mouth moved, but nothing came out. His mind wouldn’t work. Memories erupted from behind the locked doors of his brain: an explosion, the ground shaking. A strike team moving through black smoke in a cramped mosque. Finding an open trunk, a car on fire. A body, burned black, turned to ash. David’s smile as he drove Hamid onto the base. David’s headstone in Arlington.
David, dead.
Except, David was sitting six inches from him, close enough Kris could feel the heat of his body. Could smell him, smell the soap and his skin, like moonlight and sundrenched sand and jasmine, something that had been purely David.
David had changed. A decade did that to a person, especially if they were alive. Lines creased his face, around his eyes, deeper than before. He sported a short beard, dark strands streaked with gray and trimmed close to his skin. His hair was longer, curled on the ends. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, and a simple green canvas jacket.
His eyes, which had always been event horizons for Kris, the edges of David’s soul, rough borders where they merged and became one, glittered. His light was marred, though. Where once galaxies had shone, sorrow tinged his gaze.
Kris’s chest heaved, his breaths coming hard and fast, speeding up until he was gasping, struggling to breathe. Was he imagining this? Had he just lost it, his final grip on reality? His gaze darted left and right, landed on the bartender, heading his way with a frown.
