He didn’t stop drawing blood. “But there was only so long I could hold onto that. I was already questioning my worth when they took me. I’d already done things that changed me. That took me further away from the man I wanted to be for you,” he said. “But with everything they were doing to me, I still was determined to come home to you. That’s what got me out. Because no way in fuck was it strength on my part. I was half starved, fully beaten, nearer to death than I had the right to be without actually dying. But I got out, some way.”
His eyes touched the smoking barrel that contained my wedding dress, contained our other life.
“The Devil takes care of his disciples, I guess,” he muttered. “Was wandering around the desert when patrols found me. That there was the one bit of good luck I encountered in war.” He laughed. “If we can call it that. By the time they got me back to base, airlifted me to a hospital in Germany and woke me out of the coma I was in, I didn’t know my own name. The fuckers had taken my dog tags, my face was a mess and I wasn’t awake to tell anyone who the fuck I was. I didn’t want to know who I was. Because I knew whoever I was, I’d done something bad. I’d become something bad. I could just fuckin’ feel it. And I couldn’t face it. Sure as shit couldn’t face myself in a mirror. So I forced myself not to remember. Until I forced myself to.”
He paused to reach into his pocket, put a smoke in his mouth and light it. Like he needed the comforting inhale of death to get him through the story.
“By the time I could tell them, uniformed officers had already come to my parents’ door tellin’ them their son was dead,” he said. “And it wasn’t a lie. But my superiors were willing to rectify that fuckup. But they gave me another choice, not because of concern for me, but for their image. I was the soldier that had been on a mission that wasn’t meant to exist, and woke up someone who didn’t.”
He inhaled and exhaled twice before he kept going.
“I was a liability. It was only in that split second that I made the decision to stay dead. It was not calculated, planned. It came from the core of me, the core that had turned rotten, ugly. And I made that decision, because of who I was to Uncle Sam, who I wasn’t meant to be, they let me. They preferred it that way. They turned a blind eye to me doin’ that, like the way they turned blind eyes to a lot of shit.”
I knew that too. Because I worked for media that was meant to be all about the truth, but they were owned by people who wanted the truth to be relative. So the media turned blind eyes to a lot of shit too.
“It was easier for them for me to be dead,” he rasped, inhaling. “Easier for me too. I wandered around as a dead man for a long time.”
I looked down at my hands as he stopped speaking. They were stained black with ash.
“Your face,” I whispered. “They did that?”
He nodded once. “They got frustrated when I didn’t talk. I suppose they considered themselves masters of such things. They hated me. I don’t know why they didn’t just kill me. But they wanted to destroy me first, I guessed.”
His hand went up to his face.
“They made me watch.”
I flinched.
I wanted to offer him comfort.
I wanted to show him what my family showed me today. Hope. But I couldn’t. Not yet.
“I don’t know what broke me more, burying you, or having to come to the realization that I didn’t lose you to death, but to abandonment,” I admitted, still trying to hurt him, prod at those open wounds he’d just uncovered.
“I didn’t abandon you,” he hissed, face hardening. “I fucking saved you.”
“Yeah,” I scoffed. “You’re the hero of this story.”
He didn’t look at me.
“Met a guy in Iraq,” he said instead of arguing. “He’d been over there much longer than me. He was a badass. Best at what he did. Everyone looked up to him. Not just ‘cause of how brutal he was in battle, but how rational he was. Fair. He was generally a good guy to be around. Had a wife and baby. Talked about them every day. Wasn’t a day where I didn’t see him lookin’ in wonder at the photos he carried around in his pocket. He wasn’t ashamed of it. He was proud as fuck of those two girls.” He ran his gaze over me slowly.
My stomach dipped, even in the midst of this, I wanted him.