Page 33 of Salt Kiss
I shake off my dad’s words, forget them. They’re just rumors—rumors that seem very far away from the man who just charmed every old lady withinpeace be with youhand-shaking range.
Mark eases out of his suit jacket and drapes it over his arm. I don’t do the same, although I’d dearly like to. The humidity here is a living, breathing thing.
“I find it anchoring,” Mark finally replies. “Don’t you?”
“Because it’s familiar? Yeah, I guess.”
“You’re not religious?” he asks. It’s his turn to sound curious.
“Not really,” I say. “I never minded going to Mass before I went to West Point. I liked it even. I liked the singing and the comfort of it and seeing everyone.” And then I pause, having surprised myself.
When I look over, I see that Mark has lifted a brow. An invitation to elaborate.
“Well, I—I’d just forgotten that part,” I say, feeling a little silly. He doesn’t care about this. “I’d forgotten that I liked seeing people. Being part of a group.”
“Being part of a group—you didn’t feel that way in the army? With your platoon?”
“Withthem, yes. But when I came home after my first deployment, it was...”
I can’t describe what it was. Like being a pod person. Like being an extraterrestrial. I felt like a stranger among people who’d known me my entire life.
“They didn’t understand,” Mark finishes for me.
“Even my father—all his deployments were during peacetime, you know? He didn’t seem to understand that it was different, and whenever I tried to explain it, it kept coming out wrong.”
And it was never that I consciously gave up trying to explain it, but I kept telling myself that if I could just think of the right words first, the right metaphors, it would be like a spell. A spell that would unlock the truth, and I could make my father see how terrifying it had been, how lonely and yet also how cramped and teeming. And I’d be able to explain how we’d see something sodeeply fucked upand then we’d all wake up the next day and go back to business as usual, and how that turned life into something so flimsy that nothing meant anything anymore.
And if I could make General Ricker Thomas understand, then maybe I could eventually make everyone understand. Or at least understand enough that they would stop seeing me as some sort of symbol. As a stock photo of a courageous soldier, clear-eyed and valiant.
Mark nods a slow nod. He gets it. I feel like a jackass right then for forgetting that.
He gets it.
“You know what I’m talking about,” I say. “That feeling of when you come back.”
“I thought it would be worse after the CIA,” says Mark. “But it wasn’t. It was about the same. You want to tell everyone what it was like, what you saw, what you had to do, and at the same time, you can’t even find a single word to start describing it that doesn’t shrink the entire thing down into something smaller and easier than it was.”
“Yeah.” We cross a narrow street, Mark’s shoulder brushing once against mine. “That’s it exactly.”
I see our hotel peeking above the other buildings, but Mark veers left, down another narrow street. I’m getting used to Mark’s excursions when we travel, but I do wish, professionally, he’d tell me where we were going so I could get my bearings first.
“Anyway, to answer your question, sir, I’m not religious now because I don’t think I ever was in the first place. I likedit, church, the building and the people in it, but God felt like part of the package and not the reason for it. He’s never felt as viscerallythereas something like the army. Like America.”
“Have you made a graven image of our country, Tristan?” Mark asks.
Have I? Maybe I had at one point. At any rate, I’m afraid I’m onto a new graven image now, a new idol.
He’s walking right next to me.
“Not anymore, sir.”
“Hmm.”
We stop in front of a small storefront with a display of dusty clocks in the window. Without pausing to read the sign listing the shop’s hours, Mark walks through the open door. The rooms above the store have their shutters flung wide to cajole a stray breeze, but the shop below is stifling and dim, filled with shadows and ticking clocks.
Mark approaches the counter in back, already unfastening his wristwatch with practiced movements. “I think this is running fast,” he says to the man behind the counter, whose expression doesn’t change. “Could you quote a repair for me?”
The man blinks behind his glasses, once, and then takes the watch and goes into the back. Mark leans against the counter, looking utterly relaxed and dashing with his jacket over his arm, and his white shirt hugging his wide shoulders and tightly muscled chest. A gentleman out for an afternoon stroll, with all the time in the world.
