In Lifa, Texas, it turns out, Jilly has been having some trouble. Zeiger found out about this when he spoke on the phone with the Mackey women last night; he’d called for Arlo’s birthday. “A respect call,” he says, as if this is a generally understood term. She’ll have to ask one of the other veterans if it’s a military thing.
“Her mother’s upset because I guess Jilly’s been ‘acting out,’ whatever the fuck that means, and the teachers seem to think that somehow the tattoo is to blame—that she should have it removed. Laser removal, you know, they can do that now.”
“I see. And what does Jilly say?”
“Of course she’s not going to. That’s her brother on the tattoo. She’s starting at some new school in the fall. But the whole thing makes me sad, really sad, Beverly. I’m not even sure exactly why. I mean, I can see to where it would be hard for her—emotionally, or whatever—to have him back there …”
Beverly squeezes his shoulders. A minor-key melody has been looping through her head since he began talking, and she realizes that it’s a song from one of her father’s records that she’d loved as a child, a mysterious and slightly frightening one with wild trumpets and horns that sounded like they’d been recorded in a forest miles away, accidentally caught in the song’s net: “The Frozen Chameleon.”
“It’s probably a weird thing to explain in the girls’ locker room, you know? But on the other hand I almost can’t believe the teachers would suggest that. It doesn’t feel right, Bev. You want a tattoo to be, ah, ah …”
“Permanent?”
“Exactly. Like I said, it’s a memorial for Arlo.”
Grief freezing the picture onto him. Grief turning the sergeant into a frozen chameleon. Once a month Beverly leaves flowers in front of her parents’ stones at St. Stephen’s. Her sister got out twenty-five years ago, but she’s still weeding for them, sprucing daffodils.
“You don’t think the day might come when you want to erase it?”
“No! No way. Jesus, Beverly, weren’t you listening? Just the thought makes me sick.”
She smooths the sky between his shoulder blades. The picture book of Fedaliyah, stuck on that page he can’t turn. After an instant, his shoulders flatten.
“I was listening. Relax.” She shifts the pressure a few vertebrae lower. “There. That’s better, isn’t it?”
By March 10, she estimates she’s survived hundreds of explosions. Alone in her apartment, she’s watched Pfc. Mackey die and reincarnate with her eyes shut, massaging her own jaw.
From dusk until three or four a.m., in lieu of sleeping, she’s started sitting through hundreds of hours of cable news, waiting for coverage of the wars. Of course Zeiger and Mackey won’t be mentioned, they are ancient history, but she still catches herself listening nightly for their names. One night, spinning through the news roulette, she happens to stop on a photo still of a face that she recognizes: Representative Eule Wolly, the blue-eyed advocate of massage therapy for the new veterans.
Who, she learns, never served abroad during the Vietnam War. First Lieutenant Eule Wolly was honorably discharged from the navy while still stationed in San Francisco Bay. He lied about receiving a purple heart. The freckled news anchor reading these allegations sounds positively gleeful, as if he’s barely suppressing a smile. Next comes footage of Representative Wolly himself, apologizing on a windy podium for misleading his constituents through his poor choice of wording and the “perhaps confusing” presentation of certain facts. Such as, to give one for instance, his alleged presence in the nation of Vietnam from 1969 to 1971. Currently he is being prosecuted under the Stolen Valor Act.
Beverly switches off the TV uneasily. Just that name, the “Stolen Valor Act,” gets under her skin. She pushes down the thought that she’s no better than the congressman, or the rest of the pack of liars and manipulators who parade across the television. In a way his crime is not so dissimilar to what she’s been doing, is it? Encouraging Derek to twist his facts around as she loosens his muscles; trying to rub out his memories of the berm. Thinking she can live the boy’s worst day for him.
“He’s doing amazingly well,” Beverly hears herself telling her sister, Janet, during their weekly telephone call. Bragging, really, but she can’t help herself—Zeiger is making huge strides. His life is settling into an extraordinarily ordinary routine, she tells Jan, who by now has heard all about him.
“He’s got a full-time job now, isn’t that exciting? He signed the lease on a new apartment, too, much nicer than the cockroach convention where he’s been living. I’m really so proud of him. Janet?”
She pauses, embarrassed—it’s been whole minutes since her sister’s said a word. “Are you still there?”
“Oh, I’m still here.” Janet laughs angrily. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? You want to throw it in my face?”
“What?”
“Nice to hear you’re still taking such excellent care of everyone.”
Fury causes her sister’s voice to crackle in the receiver. For a second, Beverly is too stunned to speak.
“Janet. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t pretend like I didn’t do my part. I was there as often as I could be, Beverly. Once a month without fail—more, when I could get away. And not everybody thought it was a good idea to skip college, you know.”
Beverly stares across her kitchen, half expecting to see the dishes rattling. Once a month? Is Janet joking?
“Do you want me to get the calendar out?” Beverly’s voice is trembling so hard it’s almost unintelligible. “From September to May one year,” she says, “I was alone with her. Don’t you dare deny it.”
“It’s been twenty goddamn years. Every other weekend, practically, I was there.”
“You did not—”
“Dad thought you were crazy to stay, Mom practically begged you to go, so if you stayed, you did it for your own reasons. Okay? And I came to help plenty of times. I’m sorry if it wasn’t every fucking weekday like you. I’m sorry we can’t all be saints like you, Beverly. Healers—”
Now she sounds like the older sister that Beverly remembers, her voice high and wild, stung, making fun.
“And I had my own family.”
“You had Stuart. The girls weren’t even born yet.” Beverly sputters. You got the girls, she manages not to say, although now her outrage is actually blinding.
“You’re not remembering right,” Janet insists. We were out there a bunch of times …”
“Janet! You can’t be serious!”
“We were and you know it.”
Beverly swallows. “But that’s simply not true.”
“I know I’ll regret saying this, okay, I’ve held my tongue for twenty years, I should get a damn medal like your little buddy out there. But who else is going to tell you? You are like a dog, Beverly.” Beverly can almost feel her sister’s fingers clawing into the telephone, as if they are wrapped around Beverly’s neck. “You’re like a sad dog. Your masters aren’t coming back. Sor-ry. Mom’s been dead for over a decade, do you realize that? You need some new tricks.”
Beverly takes a breath; it’s as if she’s been punched.
“You have no idea what I sacrificed—”
“Oh, give me a break. Die a martyr then. Jesus Christ.”
For many years, Beverly will remember every word of this conversation while failing to recall, no matter how hard she tries, who hung up first.
Quaking alone in her apartment, Beverly’s first impulse is to dial their old home phone number. If you were alive, Mom, she thinks, you would set the record straight. For years she’s assumed that she and Janet agreed on this point, at least: the basic chronology of their mother’s fight with cancer. What happened when. Who was present in which rooms. Beverly doesn’t know how to make sense of who she is today without those facts in place. With a chill she realizes there are no witnesses left besides herself and Janet. She has a sense memory of steering her mother down a long c
orridor, her wheelchair spokes glinting. Janet missed knowing that version of their mother. If Beverly stops pushing her now, or loses her grip, she will roll out of sight.
With her hand still tangled in the telephone cord, Beverly decides that she doesn’t want to be yet another of the cover-up artists. Can’t. She won’t go on encouraging the sergeant to lie to himself, just so he can sleep at night. She’s warped the truth, she pushed the truth under his skin, but she won’t allow it to go on changing. Suddenly it is vitally important to Beverly that Zeiger remember the original story, the one she has stolen from him. Whatever she’s wiped from his memory, she wants to restore. Immediately, if that’s possible.
“Derek? It’s Beverly. Can you come in tomorrow? I have a slot at nine …”
She gets a melting flash of an obscenely blue sky, blooming fire. A large bull is standing in a river, in chest-high green water, chains of mosquitoes twisting off its bony shoulders like tassels. Its eyes are vacuums. Placid and hugely empty. The animal continues lapping at its reddish shadow on the water, oblivious of the bomb behind it, while a thick smoke rolls over the desert.
When she sees Zeiger in person the following morning, with his big grin and his smooth, unlined face, she can feel her resolve fading. She knows she’s got to help him to recover his original memory, to straighten out the timeline of April 14 now, before she loses her nerve completely. He lies down on the massage table, and she’s glad his face is turned away from her.
“I was thinking about you a lot this weekend, Derek,” she says. “I saw a news show where they interviewed an army general about IEDs … I thought of your friend Arlo, of course. That story you told me once, about April 14—”
Derek doesn’t react, so she babbles on.
“This general said it was almost impossible to spot trip wires. He called them these ‘tiny wires in the dirt.’ And I thought, I’ll have to ask Derek if that was, ah, his same experience …”
There is no warning contraction of his shoulder blades.
“Of course it’s hard to spot the wires!” Derek explodes at her. He shakes off her hands, sits up. “You need TV to tell you that? You need to hear it from some general? Jesus Christ, it’s nine a.m., and you’re interrogating me?”
“Derek, please, there’s no need to get so upset—”
“No? Then why the hell did you bring up Arlo?”
“I’m sorry if I—I was only curious, Derek—”
“That’s right, that’s everyone. You’re ‘only curious,’ ” he snarls. “None of you has any idea what it was like. Nobody gives a shit.”
Derek rolls his legs away from her and stands, struggles into his shirt and pants, knocking into the massage table. Then he goes stumbling out of the room like a revenant, half dressed, trailing one sleeve of his jacket. Walking away from her so quickly that it’s impossible to tell what, if anything, changed on the tattoo.
Six thirty a.m. on Monday: Beverly is brushing her teeth when the phone rings. It’s Ed Morales, of course, who else would it be this early on a workday but Ed, his voice spuming through the receiver. Lance Corporal Oscar Ilana is dead, Ed tells her. Has been dead for two days. In the mirror, Beverly watches this information float on the surface of her gray eyes without penetrating them.
“Oh my God, Ed, I’m so sorry, how terrible …”
Not Derek is her only thought as she hangs up.
It remains that, beating in her head like a bat, a tiny monster of upside-down joy: not-Derek, not-Derek. Then the bat flies off and she’s alone in a cave. Oscar. She remembers who he is—was, she corrects herself. Another of their VA referrals. One of Ed’s patients. He’d survived three IED blasts in Rustamiyah. She’d chatted with him once in the waiting room, a lean man with glasses, complaining about how pale he’d gotten since coming home to Wisconsin although his skin was a beautiful maroon. He’d passed around a photograph of his two-year-old daughter. For a new veteran, he’d seemed remarkably relaxed. Cracking himself up.
The news of Lance Corporal Ilana’s death turns out to be hidden in plain sight in her apartment, spread out on her countertop, gathering leaky drips from her ceiling. After Ed calls her, she finds the Saturday newspaper where his suicide was reported—
The soldier died in his car of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at 11:15 p.m. At 11:02 p.m., he reportedly sent a text message to his wife informing her of his plans to harm himself.
Beverly cancels every appointment in her book except for Derek Zeiger. Then Zeiger fails to show. For the first time in three years, Beverly skips work. Beds down straight through noon with the blinds half drawn, the sunbeams rattling onto her coverlet. Through the mesh of light she can still see Arlo Mackey’s ruined face. Go away, she whispers. But the ghost is in her body, not her room, and scenes from his last day continue to invade her.
“It all came at you like you didn’t have a brain,” Derek told her once, describing the routine chaos of their patrols.
Beverly has never been a drinker. But after learning of Oscar Ilana’s death she returns from the liquor store with six bottles of wine. Between Monday and Friday four bottles disappear. Into her, it seems, as unlikely as she finds these new hydraulics of her apartment. It turns out the dark cherry stuff doesn’t help her to sleep, but it blurs the world she stays awake in. What a bargain for ten bucks, she thinks, on her tiptoes in the liquor store. Maybe she can fix the problem by moving the sun again. How far back would she have to rewind it, to instill a permanent serenity in Derek? Hours? Eons? She imagines blue glaciers sliding over Fedaliyah, the soldiers blanketed in ice. It seems incredible to her that she ever thought she might do this for him—wring the whole war from his tissue and bone. In Esau, night lightens into dawn. Cars begin to jump and whine across the intersection at six a.m. When an engine backfires, she flinches and grinds down on her molars and watches the Humvee erupt in flames.
Enough, she tells herself, snap out of it, this is ridiculous, insane—but it turns out these commands don’t clear the smoke from her brain. Beverly uncorks a second bottle of wine. She cracks open her window, lights a cigarette pinched from Ed. Smoke exits her lips in a loose curl, joining the snow. She wonders if this will become a new habit, too.
Nobody blames massage therapy for the young soldier’s suicide, exactly, but Representative Wolly’s H.R. 1722 program gets scuttled, and plenty of the commentators add a rueful line about how the young lance corporal had been receiving state-funded deep tissue massages at a place called Dedos Mágicos.
At Dedos, it’s surprising to see how deeply everyone is affected, even those on staff who only briefly met Ilana. There are lines of mourning on Ed’s face. He spends the week following Oscar’s death walking softly around the halls of the clinic in black socks, hugging his arms around his ice cream scoop of a belly. He doesn’t curse or scream at anybody, not even the clock face. A gentle hum seems to be coming from deep in his throat.
And where is Derek? His phone is still disconnected. He’s AWOL from his regular groups at the VA hospital. The counselor there reports that she hasn’t heard a peep from him in five or six days. Beverly replays her last words to him until she feels sick. She keeps waiting for him to show up, staring down at the Dedos parking lot. It occurs to her that this vigil might merely be the foretaste of an interminable limbo, if Derek never comes back.
Outside the window, a dozen geese are flying west, sunlight pooling like wet paint on their wings. Beverly has been noticing many such flocks moving at fast speeds over Esau, and whenever she sees them they are as gracefully spaced as writing. She can’t read any sense behind their dissolving bodies. Then the red parchment of the Wisconsin sunset melts, black space erases the geese, it’s night.
Beverly learns that one prejudice that has been ordering her existence is that there is an order: that time exists, and that its movements are regular and ineluctable, migrating like any animal from sunup to sunset—red dawns molting their way into violet dusks, days flocking into weeks and months. N
ot: April 14. April 14. April 14, like raindrops plunking onto her head from a ceiling she can’t see. Her “flashbacks,” such as they are, do not conform to the timeline of Derek’s first story anymore. They feel closer to dreams—in one of them, the red wire rises out of his back like a viper to strike at her hands. Sometimes Zeiger stops the truck and kneels in dirt, digging with his fingers, and Mackey survives, and sometimes Zeiger fails to see the wire and the bomb explodes. Sometimes every character in the story has been dead for half a century, and a gleaming herd of water buffalo is grazing on the empty land, which looks like a science-fiction moonscape in this epoch, and a team of archaeologists finds the bomb, spading into the dust of the old New Baghdad.
The wire is always present, though—that’s the one constant. Curled loosely on top of the dirt, or almost completely buried. It’s a surprise that keeps giving itself away, exposed in the ruby light of her jarred skull.
Sometimes her worries worm southward, and she finds herself thinking about Jilly Mackey. This tenth-grader with her brother’s death day pinioned to her back like some large and trembling butterfly. She pictures the kid leaning over her homework in Lifa, Texas, pulling the red star taut under her shirt. What exactly were these “troubles” that Derek mentioned? Is the tattoo changing on her, too? What if something worse than a wire is lunging out of her canvas? Beverly has to fight down a crazy desire to telephone the Mackey women, offer her services. In another mood this would have struck Beverly as hilarious, the vision of herself boarding a plane to Texas with a duffel of massage oils. My thumbs to the rescue! How would she conduct that conversation with Mrs. Mackey? “Hello, I’m a massage therapist in Wisconsin, you don’t know me from Adam but I’ve been mourning the death of your son? I’d like to help your daughter, Jilly, with her back pain?”
But that’s a lunatic wish, of course; Beverly’s concern for the Mackeys would fly through the telephone wires and mutate into something that stabbed at their ears. There’s no etiquette for a call like that. No set of techniques or magical oils.
Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Page 18