Page 125 of Whisper
Kris’s jaw dropped. He reached for David, stumbling, falling himself, as if they were now together in freefall, in the vortex of evil destroying the world. His lips moved soundlessly as he tried to find words, find something to say. “David…”
“I want—” Tears choked him. David grabbed Kris, tried to hold on. Tried to stop falling. “I want my father’s faith—”
I want myfather.
There was a permanent hole in his soul, in his life, and nothing could fill it. His father had been ripped away from him.
He clung to Kris, burying his face in Kris’s chest, as his bones collapsed, no longer able to carry the weight of a man who hadn’t mourned his loss. His baba, the man he wanted to become, the man he looked up to more than anyone else in the world. His faith in Allah had shattered that day, and the pieces, the refuse of the first ten years of his life, had blown like litter through his existence, debris that kept piling up against his heart.
Had Allah been murdered that day as well? In David’s soul, and also the world? Were they just continuing to murder Allah every day since, every incarnation of evil in the world another blow against Allah and His love? Could even the Father of All stand against so much hate and so much evil? Something was broken, fundamentally broken, in the universe. What if it was Allah that they’d broken?
Had their hatred finally killed God? Was that why He was gone?
What would his father say about this world, if he’d lived? Heneededto know. He needed that guidance, his father’s presence in his life.
What would his father make of the man he’d become? The choices he’d made? The man he loved?
Would his father have ever looked at him with hatred? Would he ever have called him a sinner, akufir, a disbeliever? Set against the horrors of the world, all the ways big and small that people could inflict horror and anguish on each other, was David’s heart beating for Kris so evil? Had Allah made him this way? Or was it just emptiness and chaos, his genetics aligning in one of a million different possibilities?
David had always put his faith in biology, in genetics, in his high school science teacher who had belabored the point, over and over, that being gay wasnota choice. It was who you were, how you were made. David’s friends on the soccer team used to joke that Mr. Whitley talked about gay stuff so much because he was gay, obviously gay, with his skinny body and his pastel button-downs and his lilting voice.
But what if he’d seen the truth about David, and maybe others, and he’d spent the nine months he’d been given as their teacher trying to give them a gift that they’d cling to for the rest of their lives?
How did anyone feel loved for who they were, in the face of so much agony? How did anyone reconcile the world with a dead and absent God?
He struggled to breathe, dragging in ragged breath after breath. He was shaking, quaking, as if his soul was about to burst apart. Kris stroked his hair, pressed his lips to David’s temple. He hauled David to him, pulled him into their cot. Wrapped his arms and legs around David, holding him as close as he physically could.
David wanted to crawl inside Kris, press their souls together. Reunite with Kris in the way they were meant to be, before time, when Allah had made them as one. He believed that, to the marrow of his bones, the center of the atoms that made his being.
But if he believed that, if he believed he and Kris were the same soul made by Allah, then what else was true?
Could Allah give him Kris and take his father?
Could both be true?
What did that mean?
Damn it all. Damn Mousa, and Saqqaf. Damn the president for invading Iraq. Damn Bin Laden, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and the nineteen men who hijacked four planes on September 11. Damn Qaddafi. Damn all of the hatred, all of the anguish, that had set the world on this path, had twisted lives and history and faith, had killed Allah and scattered all hope until no one could find the truth anywhere, no matter how hard their heart beat or their soul bled.
The one, the only man, who could have ever found the answers, who could have ever put the world back together, had lost his life in a basketball stadium, swinging from a rope as a crowd cheered. He’d loved too much, too strongly, for the world, especially a world that had killed God. His death had created a void, a black hole, and David imagined all the love, all the light in the world disappearing into the void his father’s life had left behind, like water disappearing down a drain, spiraling away into nothingness and infinity.
David had watched it through his tears on TV, the day the world killed the one man who held Allah in the center of his heart.
Joint Strike Force
Sunni Triangle, Iraq
June 2006
“Hey. We’ve got something on the drone feed.”
The sun was still up. Kris blinked, bleary eyed. He and David were tangled in his cot beneath his plywood desk. The Iraqi sunlight burned through the blinds, through the sheet Kris had tacked up to block out the spears of light.
Groaning, David face-planted in the cot as Kris struggled to his feet. Carter’s deputy, a Special Forces captain, kept his gaze purposely up, not looking at the two of them entwined, half naked. It was too hot to sleep in anything but the bare essentials. David wore his tiny running shorts, black nylon that hugged his upper thighs. Kris slept in his briefs, outrageously colored neon and brilliant patterns that cupped his ass and crotch. The captain turned in the doorway, giving him privacy.
For a military that had beaten out modesty in basic training and that treated nudity as commonplace as being fully clothed, the privacy granted to David and him felt like a shun. Carter had insisted that he be given a private office and private space to sleep and had quietly put out a gag order on discussing him and David. It was the biggest open secret in the strike force. The man leading the hunt for Saqqaf was as gay as the day was long.
“Imagine Saqqaf’s face when he finds out it was a gay guy who tracked him down,” Kris heard once in the mess, two Special Forces soldiers with their heads together, eyes flicking toward him.
