Neither Verdict
For two years his smile reached his eyes. Then he went to East Timor, and a man came home, and it was not him. I am the only person alive who saw both.
Versión en español: Sin veredicto
I met him in 1997. Two years before East Timor — though neither of us knew that then, and it was simply a year with nothing in front of it.
What I remember first is the smile. He smiled constantly, and it was real, and that is the part I need to set down accurately because it is the whole of what I am trying to say. It was warm. It was sincere. When he looked at me — when he actually looked into my eyes — he smiled, and the smile began somewhere behind them and arrived on his face afterwards. He was tender. He was kind. He was, in an uncomplicated way I have never seen in him since, happy.
Two years of that. Then he went, and a man came home, and it was not him.
I married him anyway. We married after that first deployment, which means the man I married was already the one who came back. I had seen the change by then. I married him inside it, still believing it was temporary.
It was not. And there was more of it coming. He went again in 2001, and came back further down — so that it was not one change but two, a drop, and then another drop from a lower place. I had no language for that at the time. I only knew that each return took something else with it.
I have spent a long time trying to describe what replaced him and the closest I can get is this. It was as though the person I married had been buried alive somewhere inside his own head. For years I believed I could still hear him in there — that he was screaming, that he was trying to get out, that if I stayed close enough and waited long enough he would find his way back up. So I waited. I stayed beside him and I waited, and every year he went further down, deeper into wherever he had been put, until the distance was too great and I understood there was nowhere left to dig.
He still smiled. That was almost the worst of it. But the smile had become a piece of equipment — a cold, correct, obligatory arrangement of the face that meant I am fine, can't you see that I am fine. It never reached his eyes again. Not once, in nineteen years. I know precisely what his real smile looked like, and I watched a man wear a replica of it for the rest of our marriage.
It took me years to stop waiting. Longer still to understand that what had arrived in his place was not a phase he was passing through. It was permanent, and it was who he now was.
I was twenty-three. He was twenty-seven.
I want to be careful here, because I am looking back across twenty-five years, and memory is not a reliable witness to its own happiness. So let me keep the claim narrow. The only period I remember him being happy is 1997 to 1999. Everything I know about the man he was, I learned in two years, as a woman of twenty-three. Everything I know about the man he became, I learned across nineteen more. Those are not the same kind of knowing, and I have never been able to weigh one against the other.
I think he loved me. I believed he loved me.
A doctor asked me once. Not my doctor — his, working through a form he had no particular interest in. Do you think the medication had anything to do with it? He asked it the way you would ask about diabetes in the family, and then he waited with his pen up.
I said I didn't know. He wrote something down and moved to the next question.
I have thought about it nearly every day since. I still cannot answer it, and I have come to understand that I am not going to be allowed to.
Here is what it is actually asking, though nobody puts it this way.
If the drug did it, then the man I married was injured by his own government, in a place he was sent to, with a compound he was handed and could not sensibly refuse. He is a casualty. Everything that came afterward happened to him as well as to me. And my anger — nineteen years of marriage and eight years since, a quarter of a century of it — has been sitting on top of a wound.
If the drug did not do it, then he was a man who did those things. He chose each one. He was capable of stopping, and did not. And I stayed.
Those are the two doors. I have never been permitted to walk through either.
Most losses come with a document. Grief gets a certificate with a date printed on it, and people know what to say to you. Divorce gets a decree, a file number, an end. Even a diagnosis is a kind of permission — a word you can hand to people so they understand what they are looking at.
I have no document. Nobody has ever told me what happened to my husband. The institutions that might have found out were never required to, and so they did not, and so there is nothing. Not a finding against him. Not a finding for him. Nothing at all.
In the early years I wanted it to be the drug, and wanting it was almost comfortable. If the damage was chemical then the man underneath was still in there, held down by something external, and things that are external can in principle be removed. I read everything I could find. I learned words I had no business needing. I was looking — though I would not have said so then — for the door he was being kept behind.
I don't want that any more, and the reason is not one I like.
Somewhere in the last decade the wanting reversed. There are days now when I need it not to have been the drug, because a casualty cannot be held responsible, and I am carrying something that has to go somewhere. Not only mine. Four children's worth. And so I catch myself hoping he chose it, because a man who chose it can be blamed, and blame at least has an address.
I am not proud of that. I am leaving it here because it is true, and because I suspect I am not the only wife who has arrived at it and never said so out loud.
The question does not stay still. It changes shape depending on what has happened that week. When I hear about the men who did not survive their own aftermath, it is a wound and he is one of the wounded. When I think about the two false statements, and how easily they were believed, and how quickly, it is not a wound at all — it is strategy, and strategy requires a strategist. Both readings are available to me on the same day. Sometimes within the same hour.
That is the part I would tell another woman in this position, if she asked. Not that it gets better. That it does not resolve, and that the failure to resolve is not a failure of yours. You are not being slow. There is genuinely nothing there to land on.
My children have their own version of the question, and theirs is worse in one specific way. They have no before. They were too young. They never met the man who smiled properly, and so they cannot miss him, and they cannot mourn him, because as far as they have ever known he did not exist.
I am the only person alive who saw both men.
That makes me the sole witness to the only evidence there has ever been — and it is evidence of a kind no institution will accept. A woman's memory of how her husband used to look at her is not a finding. It cannot be tested, or filed, or entered anywhere. It is, nonetheless, the thing I am most certain of in this entire account.
What I have instead of an answer is a habit.
Twenty-five years of holding two irreconcilable men in my head at the same time. One of them was harmed and one of them did harm, and I cannot put either down, because putting one down would mean deciding, and deciding is exactly what I have never been given the standing to do.
The holding costs something. That is what I did not understand for a long time, and it is as close as I can get to describing how this feels now, all these years later. It is not grief, quite — grief has an object. It is not anger either, because anger needs a target that stays still long enough to be aimed at. It is the particular exhaustion of keeping a person suspended between two verdicts for a quarter of a century, because no institution on earth would take the case.
I have stopped expecting it to end. Not because I have made peace with the question — I have not, and I do not think I will — but because at some point I understood that no answer was coming. Nobody is looking. The trials he was given cannot say with certainty what he was given, or when. There is no test that settles it, no file that holds it, no person alive whose job it is to find out. The question will outlive both of us.
So I write it down instead.
That is all this is. Not a verdict, because there isn't one and there was never going to be. Only a record that the question was asked, by someone who had to live inside it, and was never answered.
And underneath it, the one thing I have never once been uncertain about: that for two years, before any of it, a man looked at me and smiled, and the smile reached his eyes.
