Chapter 24
Andrews Air Force Base
Maryland
January 2009
It should be raining. It should be thundering, lightning rending the sky, the world splitting in two. The world should end, like Kris’s world had ended.
But the sun was shining and the sky was a perfect blue, a crystal blue. Not a cloud marred its flawlessness. He resented the sun on his skin. The crisp freshness to the air. Why did the earth continue to spin now that David was gone?
Shouldn’t his death make an impact in the world? Shouldn’t the planet mourn? Where was the rain, the snow, the frozen tears from the sky?
He’d been the only living passenger on the CIA’s Learjet back from Islamabad to DC. There’d been no fanfare, no send-off. He had two duffels with him, the totality of his and David’s belongings in Afghanistan.
There were four flag-draped coffins in the belly of the jet.
Darren, his deputy, and three of the SAD officers from Carl’s security team.
He flew with their ghosts for twenty-six hours. The cabin was as silent as death, and for a time, Kris wished the plane would just plunge into the ocean, disappear, take him down to the depths. He should be dead, he should be, and there was no logic, no reason to his continued heartbeat. His lungs continuing to inhale and exhale. He didn’t want to be alive.
The plane had landed smoothly at Andrews Air Force Base and taxied to the private corner of the airfield reserved for the CIA. Hearses were waiting, and a smattering of dark SUVs.
Kris spotted George and Director Edwards waiting by the hearses.
When the plane finally parked, no one came and opened the jet door. He was left locked inside the jet as the coffins were unloaded one by one by an honor guard and carried to the hearses.
Director Edwards and George bowed their heads as the coffins passed, closed their eyes. When the last was loaded, they climbed into their SUV and the convoy drove off.
Only then did the pilot open the door for him. Lower the stairs.
He got the message, loud and clear. He was to blame, and everyone—everyone—knew it. He was going to suffer for this. He was going to be made to wear his stripes of shame for the whole world to see. He was the pariah, forced away, kept back from everyone else in case his tainted fall from grace infected them, too.
He dragged his duffels down the stairs. David’s felt like a thousand pounds, like the weight would break his spine. He kept his head down, blood red eyes fixed on the metal stairs, the dark asphalt.
“Kris…”
At the bottom, waiting by the very last SUV, was Dan.
He was pale, his eyes almost as red as Kris’s, and tears ran down his face, dripped from his jawline. His lips quivered, pressed together. “Kris, I am so sorry…”
Kris couldn’t speak. He dropped everything and ran to Dan, threw his arms around his friend. Dan grabbed him, squeezed him until he thought his chest would pop, and buried his face in Kris’s neck. “I’m so sorry,” he kept saying. “So sorry, Kris.”
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 beers 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.
“Kris—”
“I can’t go anywhere else,” he snapped. “I can’t. My entire life is here. Everything I’ve done. Everything I am. If I lose this…” He waved his hand in the air, let it fall, slapping on his carpet. “It’s the only thing I have left.”
“I’m here,” Dan said softly. “You will always have me.”
“You are too good a friend to me.”
Dan smiled, sadly. “You’re not alone.”
Yes I am. For all of my days.
He said nothing.
Pakistan Northwestern Frontier
Bajaur Province
Federally Administered Tribal Areas
He was dying, albeit very, very slowly.
Al Jabal’s father, Abu Adnan, had brought David into his one-room home and laid him on his straw-stuffed mattress. Two goats lived inside, sharing the warmth of the fire. The place smelled of wood smoke and straw, musty fur and oats.
Abu Adnan did his best to care for him. He set David’s broken leg, pulling until the bone slipped back into alignment. Without an X-ray, it was impossible to know if it was set correctly, but at least it was back inside his thigh. “Alhamdulillah,” Abu Adnan said. “We have set goats and cows in these mountains, and occasionally a mule. But this is the first man I have ever helped with his bone so broken.”
David stumbled through his pain, explaining how to wrap his broken ribs. Abu Adnan finally managed to cut up David’s shirt and tie it into strips, wrap it around his chest until he felt like a mummy.
Infection loomed. He felt himself grow hot, burn from the inside. Consciousness slipped away, replaced by a hazy twilight, a flickering montage of images that appeared out of order.
Abu Adnan washing him with water boiled over the fire. Cleaning him, even when he soiled himself. Changing bloody bandages along his leg, his chest, his arms. Praying beside him, the slow movements and soft whispers an almost constant hum in the back of David’s mind.
He saw Kris, first standing in Abu Adnan’s doorway. He tried to chase him, but Kris disappeared, reappeared across the peak in the farmland of another mountain dweller. No matter how he tried to chase Kris, leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop in his delirium, Kris always seemed to stretch farther and farther away.
“Kris…” he moaned in his sleep. “Come back to me.”
Was Kris dead? Was he seeing Kris from the other side? Was Kris telling him to join him? Soon. Soon I’ll be dead, too. We’ll be together again, my love. Ya rouhi.
And then he thought of his father. What had his father thought before being killed? What had gone through his mind? He’d prayed, of course. David could remember the shape of his father’s lips, blurry over the television screen, mouthing the words to prayers he’d watched his father make a thousand times before. He replayed the memory again, felt the hands of the Mukhabarat officers holding him still, forcing him to watch his father’s execution.
Murmured prayers. Were they the last pleas to a God who had abandoned them? He watched the shape of his father’s lips in his memory again, suddenly clear, as if he’d stepped into the past, into the memory, into the basketball court.
His father was whispering his name. Dawood, Dawood. Grow up with the love of Allah in your heart. Never let anyone take His love from you. Dawood, you are the best of the world, the best of your mama and me. Dawood, I love you, my ibni.
Father… How can you love Allah so much when this is the way of the world?
Abu Adnan’s prayers continued, as did his tender ministrations. Never, not in a million years, would David have imagined he’d be cared for by the father of the man who tried to murder him, who had murdered so many of his colleagues, his friends. What did he do with that? How did he respond to Abu Adnan? Hatred was too simple. Father, Baba, you would know what to do.
His fever spiked. Not long now. Consciousness slipped further and further, and the last thing he remembered was Abu Adnan holding his hand as he prayed throughout the night, asking Allah for mercy for his brother.
Camp Peary, Virginia
CIA Training Compound
The Farm
June 2009
Not only did Kris graduate SAD training, he graduated fifth in his class. His classmates were Rangers and Delta Force, SEALs and Air Force pararescue men. Physical specimens honed to the peak of their limits, used to pushing every boundary. They breezed through training as it if was a cake walk, comfortable in their position in the class, overly confident in their abilities. Overly confident that Kris wouldn’t last, either.
But Kris wanted it, needed it, more.
Isolated, left alone by the others, pushed aside like a leper, he turned his rage inward, channeling it into pure drive. Every fury-filled thought he had, every sidelong glare he caught, stoked the furnace of his shattered soul. He spent days and nights in the base gym, repeating his and David’s workouts until he puked. And then he did it again.
During combat training, every punch that landed was a punch David had felt. Every kick was a blow that had hit David’s body. Every breath he took, every step he walked, every beat of his heart, was for David. He couldn’t let up, not for a moment. He had so much to do. So many lives to avenge, deaths to answer for.
Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-eight souls hung his tattered soul in the gallows. All the dead of September 11, plus one: David.
Graduation day, four months after training began, was a simple affair… for everyone else. Director Edwards shook every graduate’s hand, congratulated them on joining the CIA family.
Kris was told not to participate and was given his graduation certificate and new orders the night before. He was instructed to report to the SAD office at Langley directly and bypass the graduation. Like a leper, the director wouldn’t touch him, wouldn’t be seen with him.
Dan, of course, was there. He smiled for Kris and pulled him in for a hug, then took him to dinner at one of DC’s best steakhouses. For two hours, over Martinis with Dan as he recounted the foibles of his training, Kris almost felt normal.
Except for the hole in his heart and the void in his soul, and the ring he still wore on his left hand.
They shared a bottle of champagne after dinner. “To new beginnings,” Dan toasted.
“To the dead.”
“To never letting anyone else tell you what to do.
“To vengeance.”
“To those poor bastards at SAD. They don’t know what they’re getting.” Dan clinked his glass with Kris’s for the fifth time. And, for the fifth time, Kris downed his champagne like it was a shot. “They have no fucking idea what I’m capable of. Not now. Not yet.”
Pakistan Northwestern Frontier
Bajaur Province
Federally Administered Tribal Areas
June 2009
Somehow, he survived.
He rode his fever in waves and crashes, burning up until Abu Adnan packed snow around his head and under his arms, and then trembled, shivering while every blanket Abu Adnan owned was piled on top of him. The goats slept by his side, trying to warm him up.
Eventually, his fever broke. His eyes opened.
“Allahu Akbar,” Abu Adnan prayed. He smiled down at David. “You will live, in shaa Allah. Allahu Akbar.”
“Where am I?” he croaked. His voice, weary from disuse, cracked, split in two.
Abu Adnan named a town David had never heard of, on a mountain David didn’t know. “What tribal area?”
“Bajaur.”
He swallowed hard. He was a million miles from nowhere, inside the mountainous, unreachable Bajaur Province. The Pakistanis didn’t venture into Bajaur, and neither did the US. It was a land untouched by time, locked away from the world thanks to the sky-piercing mountains, a former ocean’s canyon floor now scraping the stars. “Do you have a cell phone?”
Abu Adnan shook his head. “No one here has cellulars. There is no way to use those devices here.”
“How far is the nearest town?”
“Yallah, very far. Very far.”
“I know your son told you to keep me here as a hostage.” David’s voice trembled. He sniffed. “But please. I have to go. I have to get back to my people.”
“Astaghfirullah, I am sorry, brother—”
“Your son wants to kill me. Please, please.”
“My son, my Adnan, is dead,” Abu Adnan said softly. “He was killed months ago.”
David froze. “Months?”
“You have been unconscious for some time, brother. But Allah is merciful. He has brought you back to health. Allahu Akbar!”
“I have to go. I have to get back. I have people—” His voice choked off as tears built in his eyes. “I have to go back,” he whispered.
“How? There is one road out of these mountains. A goat path. It takes four days to walk it. It takes another four days to get to the nearest village. Al-Qaeda is there. That is where Al-Qaeda found my son. He too wanted to leave these mountains. But he only found death.”
“Am I your prisoner now?”
“Brother, you are not a prisoner, except of your own body. You haven’t stood for months. How do you expect to walk down the mountain? Bismillah, Allah can do a great many things, but that would be a miracle.”
“Please… help me. I have to get back. I have to go home.”
“I cannot make it down the mountain. I would not survive the trip. In shaa Allah, the rest of my days will be spent here, in my home.”
“Who will come for me? Al-Qaeda? The Taliban?” Had his life been spared just to die again?
“No one will come for you, in shaa Allah. My son never told a soul where he was from. He kept these mountains, our home, his deepest secret. He brought you here to be a part of that secret.”
Tears slipped free of David’s eyes, sliding in sideways tracks down his temples. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“As long as you are here, brother, you have a home. You are safe under my roof, and you are welcome to my food. I will treat you like family. Like the son I’ve lost. Alhamdulillah.”
Was this the way of the world? Was this Allah’s path? A son without a father and a father without a son? Had Allah planned this? His tears seared his eyes, his skin, and he curled against himself as they poured forth.
He’d lived, he’d survived, but he was without Kris, the other half of his soul. But suddenly, back in the arms of a father. What twisted paths, what curving melodies, his life had taken. Was there anything other than the touch of the divine in his destiny?
He was supposed to die. He’d given his life for Kris’s, had pleaded with Allah for the trade. But instead of taking his life, Allah had seen fit to deliver him here, to this mountaintop in the most desolate region on earth, a place lost in time, in space. Abu Adnan had probably been born inside these four walls, had probably never traveled more than twenty-five miles in his entire life. His whole existence could fit on the face of this one mountain, raising his family, glorifying Allah.
Was there a purer form of submission to Allah than this? Living outside of time and living with the prayers of Allah in the center of his soul? If his father were still alive, would he not live like Abu Adnan? Is this the faith you adored, Baba? Is this the God you loved with all your heart?
What did it mean? What did all of this mean? To lose his father, to find Kris. To lose Kris, but to find a father. Years and years of carnage and despair, evil and death. Did Allah allow this evil, this anguish, to take place? Had he created life, created everything in their pairs, split David and Kris’s souls, and then walked away? Was evil of His creation, or of humanity’s, the end result of their wickedness run amok? Wasn’t faith supposed to bring everyone closer to Allah? How had the world, and His people, fallen so far?
Was this a test? The faithful, the righteous, were always tested. But how cruel a test! To destroy cultures, families, lives. The deaths of millions. To invade with evil into the corners of every life, rip out their hearts, take away fathers and sons. What kind of God would do such a thing?
Or, was this a second chance? Or perhaps, he’d lost count of how many second chances he’d been given by Allah. Allah is ever merciful, the Quran said. Whisper my name, and I will always be there. My mercy to you is eternal, everlasting.
Indeed, we belong to Allah, and to Allah we will return.
His tears turned to sobs, giant, hiccupping gasps that raked through his still-healing ribs, made his lungs ache, his throat go raw as he screamed. Abu Adnan reached for him, pulled him close. Held him, like he was a child. He felt like a child. He felt small and alone and afraid.
Abu Adnan spoke in his ear, softly, “Every heart that aches, Allah soothes. Every tear that falls, Allah catches. Every sin that is regretted, Allah forgives. Alhamdulillah, ibni. Alhamdulillah. Allahu Akbar.”
His whole life, his entire life, he’d wanted his father back. He’d wanted to cling to him and hear the rumble of his voice, feel his chest beneath his cheek. Ask him questions and listen to his father explain the world to him again. He wanted his father, and his childhood, and their home in Benghazi back. He wanted prayers and the mosque back. He wanted the fire in his heart, the lightning in his soul, the electric connection to Allah, back. He’d never been able to fill that void, that yearning for his past. He was an Arab, a Muslim, and he missed everything about his past.
“Allahu Akbar,” David whispered. His hands clung to Abu Adnan, to his arms, his back. He was so weak. How many months had he lain there, wasting away, save for the broth and bread Abu Adnan had been able to feed him. He felt like a shadow of his former self.
Truly, he couldn’t make it down the mountain, either.
Not like this.
He felt a decision settle around him, made of choices both within and without his control.
Kris, my love. My soul. We were united before time, made for each other. We will never part, not in this life or the next. Wherever I am, I will always be yours. I swear it.
He couldn’t go back. Not now. Physically, he couldn’t make the journey. But beyond the physical, there was something else, something deeper. A yank in his soul, a pull to remain. To return to his faith, a life he could have lived. The allure of a father’s love, days spent in prayer, drenched in the faith and love of Allah. He could have had this life. If only for one afternoon, this would have been his life.
Perhaps this was history shaking off the dust. Did all things happen in their own time? Were all things ordained, and brought to pass? Nothing will happen to us except what Allah has decreed for us, the Quran said. Endure patiently, with beautiful patience.
But what of Kris? How long had he been lying here, wasting away on the mountain? Had he been written off? If the CIA thought he was alive, wouldn’t the military overturn the entire country, every province, looking for him? Why was he being allowed to rest in peace, cared for tenderly by this lonely father?
Was Kris even alive? He’d offered to trade his life for Kris’s. What did it mean that he was still breathing? If he came out of these mountains and found Kris’s grave, he would shatter. He would shatter and fall to dust, and there would be nothing left of him. He couldn’t take losing both his father and Kris.
He knew the limits of his sanity.
Was this his last chance? A way to return to Allah, live a life he could have had with his father before joining Kris in the next life? Their souls were destined to be together.
He would always return to Kris. All the days of the rest of my life are merely hours to pass until we meet again. Our souls will always find each other. I will see you again. Alhamdullilah.
“La ilaha illah Allah,” Abu Adnan chanted softly. He repeated his words, the shahada, the cry of the faithful, the statement of faith. “La ilaha illa Allah.”
Choking, gasping, with tears staining his lips, snot running in rivulets down his upper lip, he whispered along with Abu Adnan. “La ilaha illah Allah.”
There is no God but God.
Oh Baba, Oh Allah. Find me, please. I seek you, I seek you now more than ever. Help me, O Allah, help me. I am lost. I can’t breathe, I can’t think. I can’t go on. Help me. I have lived in the darkness, consumed with anguish. Help me. Help me, Baba, please.
Lines from the Quran, words on his father’s lips, rose like bubbles in his memories. Even if you but whisper, Allah will hear you, always.
“I submit to you,” he breathed. “O Allah, I submit to you. Bring me closer to you.” He gasped, pressing his face against Abu Adnan’s weathered neck. “Take care of my love. Take care of my love while I cannot.”
Kris… You are my moon in the darkness, always.
We will see each other again.
Someday.