The Current Between Us

Trent extended his arm as pain again shot through his heart at the thought of never again kissing Gage. The dull ache remained constant, but the painful sharp stabs kept coming, over and over, since Gage entered his house. He checked the urge to rub his heart.

Trent stepped back as Gage walked forward. He averted his eyes as Gage finally walked past him. Trent was done with the meaningful looks and the almost touches. As Gage placed his things on the kitchen table, Trent bypassed the table and went to the cabinet for a glass to get a drink of water. He didn’t offer Gage anything. He watched the water from the faucet fill the glass, and drank it down like the shot of whiskey he wanted it to be. He stood at the sink until he heard the chair scrap across the floor.

Gage didn’t say another word until he opened his laptop and placed a folder down in Trent’s normal seat. Trent came to the table, but stayed standing until Gage finally spoke. “I understand I’ve hurt you, Trent, but please take a seat and let me explain. You’ve followed my career. You understand the reports I do. They aren’t pretty and they aren’t kind. I’ve been working this one, in this folder, for almost six years. It’s the one I’m retiring on. You and I have talked about it. It’s my last report, but what I haven’t said to you… it’s designed to be a going-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory kind of report.”

Trent listened to him, let the words sink in, but he didn’t sit. His focus stayed on Gage’s nose or on the red file folder sitting in front of him, never back on Gage’s face. For some reason, Gage felt the need to talk about his last project, when he’d guarded its secrecy to this point… Maybe Gage changed his mind about giving up his career, wanting to stay in the industry, but that didn’t explain the intense anger or the lack of communication over the last few days. It didn’t explain anything at all, because none of it had to do with Trent.

Trent let his eyes lift to the laptop sitting open, but the screen showed the desktop, nothing for him to see. Trent resisted the urge to run his hands over his face. With every passing second Gage stayed in his house, Trent’s resolve weakened. He fought the desire to drop to his knees and beg Gage to give him one more chance. But Trent couldn’t fix an undefined problem. Finally, Gage did something more than just look at him and reached forward to open the file in front of Trent.

“I need to warn you, some of these images are graphic, but they’re necessary. And, Trent, I have never shared any of my cases with another outside of my employment since I started doing this. I’m asking for your confidence. I know it’s not deserved, but please,” Gage said, laying a hand on top of the open file.

“Is all this really necessary, right now? I get your career is important. I was a big fan, but it’s not really a good time for me to go through all this,” Trent said, hoping to get Gage out of his house sooner rather than later. Because the need to pick up Gage’s hand and bring it to his lips nearly overwhelmed him.

“Baby, please just let me start from the beginning. You’ll see soon enough.” Gage scooted in closer to the table and began by turning over the first sheet of paper in the folder. A photo lay underneath. Trent saw several dead men lying around an exploded tank of some sort. Gage took the picture off the top and began to explain.

“This was the start of the Afghan war. I was there documenting everything, it’s where I got my start. I took photos of everything I saw back then. I took this shot.” He pointed to one photograph, and then moved it aside to point to another. “And then took this shot, all within a matter of an hour or so. You can see the time stamp documentation at the bottom of the photo. We were the first ones to come up on this scene. It was me and my crew. We didn’t stay with field operations the way we were supposed to. Now look here, Trent. In this photo, you see six pair of downed boots. In this one, you see five. Not too abnormal, really, apparently someone didn’t die, and escaped the scene. The problem, look at the wider view, there is no evidence that anyone with this degree of injury left the site.”

Gage flipped photos as he spoke, every once in a while pulling a photo out, laying it above the red folder on the table. No explanation he gave was more than a bullet-pointed version and thankfully Gage kept this fast moving. Trent’s mind was a little fried, but he followed, finally sitting down at the table, watching the things Gage pointed out for him to see.

“Now look at this one. Here I’m in Pakistan and it’s the same type thing. Seventeen pairs of downed boots, and here in this photo, there are sixteen. Now look at this one, here I’m in Bosnia; it’s the same thing. Now look back at these. Specifically at the soles of the boots gone missing in each shot they are different than the soles of the standard issue boots these soldiers were required to wear. This got me interested, so I began to dig. I looked at thousands of military photographer’s photos taken all over the world. I found this same situation in twenty-three different photos and in every single case the boots that went missing were different than all the other boots in the photo… Make sense so far?” Gage asked.

“The one boot sole in all these pictures had the same tread design, but different than anyone else in the photo,” Trent said, not looking away from the pictures, pretty amazed Gage found the pattern to begin with. Who would even think to scrutinize the photos that closely?