Granta 122: Betrayal (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

by Неизвестный

  How old was Sergeant Derek Zeiger when he enlisted? Seventeen? Twenty? As she heats the oils for his massage, Beverly becomes very interested in this question. Legally, nowadays, at what age can you do business with your life’s time – barter your years on the free market for goods and services? A new truck, a Hawaii honeymoon, a foot surgery for your mother, a college degree in history? In Esau, Wisconsin, you have to be eighteen to vote, purchase cigarettes, legally accept a marriage proposal or a stranger’s invitation to undress; at twenty-one, you can order a Cherry-Popper wine cooler and pull a slot lever; at twenty-five, you can rent a family sedan from Hertz. At any age, it seems, you can obtain a room by the hour at the Jamaica Me Crazy! theme motel next to the airport, which boasts the world’s dirtiest indoor waterfall in the lobby.

  At eighteen, Beverly had no plans for her future. All that year her mother had been dying, and then in April, two months before her high-school graduation, her haunted-eyed father had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, a double hex on the McFadden household. Six months to a year, the doctors said. Mr Blaise McFadden was a first-generation Irishman with hair like a lion and prizefighter fists, whose pugilist exterior concealed a country of calm of which Beverly secretly believed herself to be a fellow citizen, although she had never found a way to talk to her dad about their green interior worlds or compare passports. His death was not the one for which she’d been preparing. She’d spent her senior year cramming for the wrong test.

  ‘Go to school,’ said Janet, Beverly’s older sister. ‘Daddy doesn’t need you underfoot. They can take care of themselves. Nobody wants you to stay.’

  But Beverly didn’t see how she could leave them alone with the Thing in the house. Beverly’s parents were coy, demurring people. If they heard Death mounting the stairs at night, footsteps that the teenaged Beverly swore she could feel vibrating through the floorboards at 3 a.m., nobody mentioned this intrusion at breakfast.

  Beverly enrolled in the ‘Techniques of Massage’ certificate programme at the Esau Annex because it required the fewest credit hours to complete. She’d surprised herself and her instructors by excelling in her night classes. Beverly felt that she was learning a second language. As a child she’d been excruciatingly shy, stiffening even in her parents’ embraces, but suddenly she had a whole choreography of movements and touched people with a purpose. ‘I can’t believe I’m telling you this,’ a body might confide to her. Spasming and relaxing. Pain unwound itself under her palms, and this put wonderful pictures in her head: a charmed snake sinking back into its basket, a noose shaking out its knots. In less than six months, Beverly had passed her tests, gotten her state certification and found a job in downtown Esau, and she was working at Dedos Magicos before her twentieth birthday. She’d felt smugly certain that she’d made the right choice.

  Six months after his diagnosis of stomach cancer, right on schedule, Beverly’s father died; her mother hung on for over another decade. She’d flummoxed her oncologists with her fickle acrobatics, swinging over the void and back into her body on the hospital bed while the life-recording machines telegraphed their silent, electronic applause. Beverly arranged for the sale of the farmhouse and used the proceeds to pay down her mother’s staggering medical bills. For three years she lived in Beverly’s apartment. In remission, then under attack again; in and out of the Esau County Hospital. Beverly tracked the rise and fall of her blood-cell counts, her pendulous vitals. She was thirty-four when her mother entered her final coma, accustomed by that time to a Twilight Zone split between work and the ward.

  In her mother’s final days, massage was the last message to reach down to her – when her sickness had pushed her to a frontier where she could no longer recognize Beverly, when she didn’t know her own face in a mirror, she could still respond with a childlike pleasure to a strong massage. Beverly visited the mute woman in the hospital gown every day. She gave this suffering person a scalp-and-neck massage, and swore she could feel her real mother in the shell of the stranger smiling up at her. Marcy McFadden was gone. But Beverly could read the Braille of her mother’s curved spine – it was composed in the unspeakable, skeletal language that she had learned at school.

  Beverly smiles down at her new patient, rubbing the oil between her hands. She pulls at his trapezium muscles, which are dyed sky blue. Beverly is amazed that this level of detail is possible on a canvas of skin. Practically every pore on his back is covered: in the east, under his bony shoulder, there’s an entire village of squat huts, their walls crackled white and black with the granular precision of cigarette ash. South of the village there is a grove of palm trees, short and fat. A telephone pole. A river dips and rises through the valley of his lower back. Tiny cattle with dolorous anatomies are grazing and bathing in it, bent under black humps and scimitar horns. The sky is gas-flame blue, and right in the centre of his back a little ‘V’ of birds tapers to a point, creating the illusion of a retreating horizon. Several soldiers occupy the skin below Zeiger’s spine. What kind of ink did this tattoo artist use? What special needles? He dotted a desert camouflage onto the men – their uniforms are so infinitesimally petalled in duns and olives that they are, indeed, nearly invisible against Sergeant Zeiger’s skin. Now that she’s spotted them, though, she can’t stop seeing them: their brown faces are the size of sunflower hulls. Somewhere a microscope must exist under which a tattoo like this would reveal ever-finer details – freckles, sweat beads, bootlaces. Windows that open onto sleeping infants. The cows’ tails swatting mosquitoes. Something about the rice-grain scale of this world catches at Beverly’s throat.

  ‘What’s the name of this river back here?’ She traces the blue ink.

  ‘That’s the Diyala, ma’am.’

  ‘And this village, does it have a name?’

  ‘Fedaliyah.’

  ‘That’s in Iraq, I’m assuming?’

  ‘Yup. New Baghdad. Fourteen miles from the FOB. We were sent there to emplace a Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Unit at JSS Al-Khansa. And to help the Iraqi farmers to feed their jammous.’

  ‘Jammous?’

  ‘Their word. Arabic for water buffalo. We’re probably mispronouncing it.’ He wiggles his hips to make the bulls dance. ‘That was a big part of my war contribution – helping Iraqi farmers get feed for their buffalo. No hamburgers and fries in Fedaliyah, Bev, in case you’re curious. Just jammous.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got some museum-quality . . . jammous back here, Sergeant.’ She smiles, tracing a buffalo’s ear. She can see red veins along the pink interior. Sunlight licks at their dark fur.

  ‘Yeah. Thanks. My artist is legendary. Tat shop just outside of Fort Hood.’

  The brightest, largest object in the tattoo is a red star in the palm grove – a fire, Derek Zeiger tells her, feeling her tracing its edges. He doesn’t offer any further explanation, and she doesn’t ask.

  She begins effleurage, drawing circles with her palms, stroking the oil onto his skin. The goal is to produce a tingling, preparatory warmth – a gentle prelude to the sometimes uncomfortably strong pressure required for deep-tissue work. Most everyone enjoys this fluttery feeling, but not Sergeant Zeiger.

  ‘Christ, lady,’ he grumbles, ‘you want to hurt me that bad, just reach around and twist my nuts.’

  Effleurage is a skimming technique, invented by Swedes.

  ‘Sergeant, please. I am barely applying any pressure. Forgive me for saying this but you are behaving like my nieces.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he snarls. ‘Do you twist their nuts, too?’

  Healing is a magical art, said the pamphlet that first attracted the nineteen-year-old Beverly to this career. Healing hands change lives.

  ‘Healing hurts sometimes,’ Beverly tells the soldier briskly. ‘And if you cannot hold still, we can’t continue. So, please –’

  People can do bad damage to themselves while trying to Houdini out of pain. Beverly has seen it happen. Recently, on a volunteer visit at the county hospital, Beverly watched an elderly woman on
a gurney dislocate a bone while trying to butterfly away from the pins of her doctor’s hands.

  But ten minutes into their session, Beverly can feel the good change happening – Zeiger’s breathing slows, and she feels her thoughts slowing, too, shrinking into the drumbeat of his pulse. Her mind grows quieter and quieter within the swelling bubble of her body, until all of her attention is siphoned into her two hands. The oil becomes warm and fragrant. A sticky, glue-yellow sheet stretches between her palms and the sergeant’s tattoo.

  ‘How does that feel now? Too much pressure?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Are you comfortable?’

  ‘No,’ he grunts. ‘But keep going. This is free, right? So I’m getting my money’s worth.’

  Bulls stare up at her from the river. Under her lamp, the river actually twinkles. It’s amazing that a tattoo needle this fine exists. Beverly, feeling a bit ridiculous, is genuinely afraid to touch it. She has to force herself to roll and knead the skin. For all of its crystalline precision, the soldier’s tattoo has a fragile quality – like an ice cube floating in a glass. She supposes it’s got something to do with the very vibrancy of the ink. Decay being foreshadowed by everything bright. Zeiger is young, but he’ll age, he’ll fade – and he’s the canvas. Zeiger is now breathing deeply and regularly, the village rising and falling.

  At a quarter to four, Beverly begins to wind down. She makes a few last long strokes along his spine’s meridian. ‘Time’s up,’ she’s about to say, but then she notices something stuck beneath her pinky. When she moves her hand she slides the thing across the sky on Zeiger’s shoulder, still tethered to her finger like a refrigerator magnet. Only it’s flat – it’s inside the tattoo. No, she thinks, impossible, as she continues floating it around his shoulders. An orange circle no larger than a grocery sale sticker. It’s the sun. Beverly swallows hard and blinks, as if that might correct the problem. She draws her pinky halfway down his spine, and the sun moves with it. When she lifts her little finger, the sun stays put. She can’t stop touching it, like a stubbornly curious child at a stove top – well, this is trouble, this is a real madhouse puzzle. The sun slides around, but the rest of the tattoo stays frozen. The buffalo stare at the grass, unalarmed, as it zings comet-like over their horns. The soldiers’ faces remain stiffly turned to the west, war-blasé, as the sun grazes their helmets . . .

  She gasps, just once, and Sergeant Zeiger says in a polite voice, ‘Thank you, ma’am. That feels nice.’

  ‘Time is up!’ Ed raps at the door. ‘Bev, you got a four o’clock!’

  The door begins to open.

  ‘Ed!’ she calls desperately, pushing the door back into its jamb. ‘He’s changing!’

  And when she turns around, Derek Zeiger is changing, standing behind the hamper and hopping into his pants. His arms lift and pull the world of Fedaliyah taut; Beverly gets a last glimpse of the sun, burning in its new location on the Diyala River.

  Beverly swipes at her eyes. When she opens them, the tattoo is gone from view. Now Sergeant Derek Zeiger is standing in front of her, just as advertised on his intake form: 6’2”, a foot taller than Beverly, and he is muddy-eyed indeed, squinting down at her through irises that are brown, almost black. He draws a hand from his pocket.

  ‘Well, thank you, ma’am.’ Inexplicably, he laughs, scratching behind one ear. ‘I guess I don’t feel any worse.’

  ‘Sergeant Zeiger –’

  He waves her away.

  ‘Derek,’ he says. ‘Derek’s good.’

  She notices that he winces a little, just walking around. He pushes a hand to the small of his back like a brace.

  ‘Oh, it’s been like this for months,’ he says, waving her concern away. ‘You didn’t do this. You helped. It’s a little better, I think.’

  And then she watches him straighten for her benefit, his face still taut and bloated with pain.

  She can feel her face smiling and smiling at him, her hand shaking in his.

  ‘Then you have to call me “Beverly”. None of this ma’am stuff.’

  ‘Can I call you Bev?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What about Beav?’ He grins into the distance, as if he’s making a joke to people she can’t see. ‘Beaver? Can I call you the Beav?’

  ‘Beverly,’ she says. ‘Can you do me one favour, Derek? The next time you’re in the shower –’

  ‘Beverly!’ He swivels to give her a big, real grin. ‘I’m shocked! It’s only our first date here . . .’

  ‘Haha. Well.’ Beverly can feel the blood tinting her cheeks. ‘Just be sure to get all of the oil off. And should you notice – if you feel any pain? Or – anything? You can call me.’

  She’s never given her home number out to a patient before. As the sergeant turns his back to leave, shouldering his jacket, she mumbles something about muscle adaptation to deep-tissue massage, the acids that her hands have released from his trigger points. How ‘disruptions’ can occasionally occur. The body unaccustomed.

  At Hoho’s Family Restaurant, Beverly treats herself to peanut-butter pancakes and world news. She grabs a menu and seats herself. She’s a long-time patron, and waiting for service always gives her a crawling, uncomfortable feeling. Beverly often finds herself struggling to stay visible to waitstaff, taxi drivers, cashiers. She tries hard to spite the magazines and persist in her childhood belief that ageing is honourable, to wear her face proudly, like a scratched medallion, the widening circles of purple under her eyes and the trenches on her brow. To be that kind of veteran. A woman ageing ‘gracefully’, like the church ladies she sees outside of Berea Tenth Presbyterian, whose yellowed faces are shadowed by wigs like cloudbursts. In truth, Beverly can never quite adjust to her age on the calendar; most days, she still feels like an old child. She spends quite a lot of time trying to communicate to strangers and friends alike that her life situation is something she chose: ‘I never wanted anything like that, you know, serious, long-term. No kids, thank God. My patients keep me plenty busy.’

  But it’s been years, Beverly thinks. And whatever need starts knuckling at her then is so frightening that she can’t complete the sentence. It’s been decades, maybe, since she’s been really necessary to anybody.

  That night, emerging from the fog of her own shower, Beverly wonders what the soldier is seeing in his mirror. Nothing out of the ordinary, probably. Or almost nothing.

  She places her hand against the green tiles and cranes around to peer at her back. She can’t remember the last time she’s done this. Her skin is a ghostly white, with a little penguin huddle of moles just above her hip, looking lost on that Arctic shelf. She can imagine her sister rolling her eyes at her, telling Beverly to get some colour. Dmitri, whose skin is an even shade of ginger root all year round, tsk-ing at her: ‘Beeeverly, quit acting like the loneliest whale! Go to a tanning salon!’

  Her hand glides along the curve of her spine, bumps along her tail bone. These are the ‘rudimentary vertebrae’: the fishy, ancient coccygeal bones. The same spine that has been inside of her since babyhood is hers today, the exact same bones from the womb, a thought that always fills her with a kind of thrilling claustrophobia. So much surface wrapped around that old stem. She watches her hands smear the water droplets on her stomach. It’s strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.

  That night, under the coverlet, Beverly slides her hands under her T-shirt and lets them travel up and up, over her ribcage, over her small breasts and along the hard ridge of her collarbone, until she is gently wringing her own stiff neck.

  Monday morning, Ed greets her with a can of diet soda. Eduardo Morales is the owner of Dedos Magicos, and he’s been Beverly’s boss for nearly thirty years. He is a passionate masseur whose English is so-so.

  ‘Beverly. Here. On accident, I receive the diet soda,’ Ed murmurs. ‘The machine made a mistake.’

  Beverly sighs and accepts the can.

  ‘I hate it, y
ou drink it.’ He says this with a holy formality, as if this transaction were underwritten by the teachings of Christ or Karl Marx.

  ‘OK. It’s 8 a.m. Thank you, Ed.’

  Ed beams at her. ‘I really, really hate that one. Hey, your first appointment is here! Zeiiiiger.’ He gives her a plainly lewd look. ‘Rhymes with tiiiger.’

  ‘Very funny.’ She rolls her eyes.

  But Beverly’s hands are lifting to fix her hair, like a teenager. She hasn’t felt this kind of nervousness in years.

  Sergeant Derek Zeiger is waiting for her, lying shirtless on the table, and once again the tattoo burns like a flare against the snowy window. The first thing Beverly does is lock the door. The second thing is to check his tattoo: all normal. The sun is back at its original o’clock. When she breathes in and rubs at it the skin wrinkles but the sun does not move again.

  Today, she tells Zeiger, she’s trying ‘cross-grain strokes’ – bearing down with her forearms, going against the grain of the trapezium muscles. He says he’s game. Then he shouts a curse that would shock even Ed, apologizes, curses again. She tries to lift his left hip and he nearly jumps off the table.

  ‘It’s not my fingers that are causing you the pain,’ she says a little sternly. ‘These muscles have been spasming, Sergeant. Working continuously. I’m just trying to release the tension. OK? It’s going to hurt a little, but it shouldn’t kill you. On a scale of one to ten, it should never hurt worse than a six.’

  ‘Ding, ding, ding!’ he yells. ‘Eleven!’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ She can feel herself smiling, although her voice stays stern. ‘I’m not even touching you. Tell me if you’re really hurting.’

  ‘Isn’t that your job? To know that kind of stuff?’

  She exhales through her nostrils. Knots, she tells the sergeant, are ‘myofascial trigger points’. Bony silos of pain. Deep-tissue massage is a ‘seek-and-destroy’ mission, according to one of her more macho instructors at the Annex, a big ex-cop named Federico – a guy who used to break up race riots in Chicago but then became a massage therapist, applied his muscle power to chasing pain out of tendons and ligaments. Her fingers feel for the knots in Zeiger’s large muscle groups. Her thumbs skate over the oil, entering caves between his vertebrae and flushing the old stores of tension. She pushes down into the fascia, the atlas bone that supports the skull, the top and centre of each shoulder blade, the triangular bone of his sacrum, his gluteal muscles, his hamstrings. She massages the trigger points underneath the tattooed river, which seems to pour from his lowest lumbar vertebrae, as if the Diyala has been wired into him. Beverly imagines the whoosh of blue ink exploding into real blood . . .