by Неизвестный
When, fifteen minutes into his third massage, Sergeant Derek Zeiger begins to tell Beverly the same story about Pfc Arlo Mackey and April 14, she pauses, unsure if she ought to interject – is the sergeant testing her? Does he want to see if she’s been paying attention? Yet his voice sounds completely innocent of her knowledge. She supposes this could be a symptom of the trauma, memory loss; or maybe Derek is simply an old-fashioned blowhard. As her hands travel up and down his spine, he tells the same jokes about the jammous. His voice tightens when he introduces Arlo. His story careens onto Route Roses . . .
‘Why did you call it that? Route Roses?’
‘Because it smelled like shit.’
‘Oh.’ The flowers in her imagination shrink back into the road.
‘Because Humvees were always getting blown to bits on it. I saw it happen right in front of me, fireballs swaying on these big fucking stems of smoke.’
‘Mmh.’ She squirts oil into one palm, greases the world of April 14. Just his voice makes her crave buckets and buckets of water.
‘I killed him,’ comes the voice of Sergeant Derek Zeiger, almost shyly.
‘What?’ Beverly surprises both of them with her vehemence. ‘No. No, you didn’t, Derek.’
‘I did. I killed him –’
Beverly’s mouth is dry.
‘The bomb killed him. The, ah, the insurgents . . .’
‘How would you know, Beverly, what I did and didn’t do?’ His voice shakes with something that sounds like the precursor to a fit of laughter, or fury; it occurs to her that she really doesn’t know this person well enough to say which is coming.
‘You can’t blame yourself.’
‘Listen: there are two colours on the road, green and brown. Two colours on the berm of Route Roses. There was a red wire. I didn’t miss it, Bev – I saw it. I saw it, I practically heard that colour, and I thought I probably ought to stop and check it out, only I figured it was some dumb thing, a candy wrapper, a piece of trash, and I didn’t want to stop again, it was a thousand degrees in the shade, I just wanted to get the fucking generators delivered and get back to base, and we kept right on driving, and I didn’t say anything, and guess who’s dead?’
‘Derek . . . You tried to save him. The blood loss killed him. The IED killed him.’
‘It was enough time,’ he says miserably. ‘We had fifteen, twenty seconds. I could have saved him.’
‘No –’
‘Later, I remembered seeing it.’
Beverly swallows. ‘Maybe you just imagined seeing it.’
When Beverly’s mother first started coughing, those fits were indistinguishable from a regular flu. Everybody in the family said so. Her doctors had long ago absolved them. At the wake, Janet and Beverly agreed that there was nothing to tip them off to her cancer. And their father’s symptoms had been even less alarming: discomfort on one side of his body. Just an infrequent tingling. Death had waited outside their door for a long time, ringing the McFaddens’ bell.
‘You think it’s hindsight, Derek, but it’s not that. It’s regret. It’s false, you know, what you see when you look back – it’s the illusion that you could have stopped it . . .’
Beverly falls silent, embarrassed. After a moment, Derek lets out a hoarse laugh. He lets enough time elapse so that she hears the laugh as a choice, as if many furious, rejected phrases are swirling around his head on the pillow.
‘You trying to pick a fight with me, Bev? I saw it. Believe me. I looked out there and I saw something flash on the berm, and it was hot as hell that day, and I didn’t want to stop.’ He laughs again. ‘Now I can’t stop seeing it.’
He lets his face slump into the headrest. On the tattoo, Fedaliyah is becoming weirdly distorted by the energy of his shuddering. His shoulders clench – he’s crying, she realizes. And right there in the middle of his back, a scar is swelling. Visibly lifting off the skin.
‘Shhh,’ says Beverly, ‘shhh –’
At first, it’s just a shiny ridge of skin, as skinny as a lizard’s tail. Then it begins to darken and swell, as if plumping with liquid. Has it been there all along, this scar, disguised by the tattoo ink? Did the oils aggravate it? She watches with horror as the scar continues to lengthen, rise.
‘I saw it, I saw it there,’ he is saying. ‘I can see it now, just how that wire would have looked . . . Why the fuck didn’t I say anything, Beverly?’
Quickly, without thought, Beverly pushes down on it. An old, bad taste floods her mouth. When she lifts her hand, the dark scar is still there, needling through the palm grove on the tattoo like something stitched onto Derek by a maniacal doctor. She runs her thumbs over it, all reflex now, smoothing it with the compulsive speed with which she would tidy wrinkles on the white sheet covering the table. For a second, she succeeds in thumbing it under his skin. Has she burst it? Will a fluid seep out of it? She lifts her hands and the scar springs right back into place like a stubborn cowlick. Then she pushes harder, wincing herself as she does so, anticipating Zeiger’s scream – but the sergeant doesn’t react at all. She pushes down on the ridge of skin as urgently as any army medic doing chest compressions, and from a great distance a part of her is aware that this must look hilarious from the outside, like a Charlie Chaplin comedy, because the scale is all wrong here, she’s using every ounce of her strength, and the red threat to Sergeant Zeiger is the width of a coffee stirrer.
And then the scar or blister, whatever it was, is gone. Really gone; she removes her hands to reveal smooth flesh. Zeiger’s tattoo is a flat world again, ironed solidly onto him. This whole ordeal has taken maybe twelve seconds.
‘Boy, that was a new move,’ says the soldier. ‘That felt deep, all right.’ His voice is back to normal.
Beverly feels woozy. Her mouth is cracker-dry. She keeps sweeping over his back to confirm that the swelling has stopped.
‘Thank you!’ he says at the end of their session. ‘I feel great. Better than I have since – since forever!’
She gives him a weak smile and pats his shoulder. Outside the window, the snow is really falling.
‘See you next week,’ they say at the same time, although only Beverly’s cheeks blaze up.
Beverly stands in the door frame and watches Zeiger scratching under his raggedy black shirt, swaying almost drunkenly down the hallway. Erasing it – she hadn’t intended to do that! Medically, did she just make a terrible mistake? Should she have called a doctor? Adrenalin pumps through her and pools in her stiff fingers, which ache from the effort of the massage.
Call him back. Tell Derek what just happened.
Tell him what, though? Not what she did to the scar, which seems loony. And surely not what she secretly believes: I saw the wire and I acted. I saved you.
The next time Sergeant Zeiger comes to see her he is almost unrecognizable.
‘You look wonderful!’ she says. ‘Rested.’
‘Aw, thanks, Bev,’ he laughs. ‘You too!’ His voice lowers with a childlike pride. ‘I’m sleeping through the night, you know,’ he whispers. ‘Haven’t had any pain in my lower back for over a week. Don’t let it go to your head, Bev, but I’m telling all the doctors at the VA that you’re some kind of miracle worker.’
He walks into the room with an actual swagger, that sort of boastful indifference to gravity that Beverly associates with cats and Italian women. One week ago, he was hobbling.
‘Are you done changing?’ she calls from behind the door.
She knocks, enters, light-headed with happiness. Her body feels so fiercely tugged in the boy’s direction that she takes a step behind the counter, as if to correct for some magnetic imbalance. Derek rubs his hands together, makes as if to dive onto the table. ‘God, I’ve been looking forward to seeing you all week. Counting down. How many more of these do I get?’
Seven sessions, she tells him. But Beverly has already privately decided that she will keep seeing Zeiger, for as long as he wants.
She grabs a new bottle of lotion, really high-en
d stuff, just in case it was only the oil she used last time that provoked his reaction. Ever so lightly, she pushes into his skin. The little fronds of Fedaliyah seem to curl away from her probing fingers. Ten minutes into the massage, without prompting, he starts to talk about the day Mackey died. As the story barrels onto Route Roses and approaches the intersection where the red wire is due to appear, Beverly’s stomach muscles tighten. She drapes her hands over the spot on Zeiger’s back where the scar appeared last time. She has to resist the urge to lift her hands to cover her eyes.
‘Derek, you don’t have to keep talking about this if you . . . if it makes you . . .’
But she has nothing to worry about, it turns out. In the new version of the story, on his first pass through the fields of Uday al-Jaimali, Zeiger never sees a wire. She listens as his Humvee makes its way down the road, past the courtyard and the goat and the spot where the red wire used to appear. Only much later, over fifty minutes after Mackey’s body has been medevacked out on a stretcher, does Daniel Vaczy locate the filthy grain sack that contains a black mask, a video camera and detonation equipment for the ten-inch copper plate that kills Mackey, fragments of whom they later recover.
‘We almost missed it. All hidden in the mud like that. No trigger man in sight. Really, it’s a miracle Vaczy uncovered it at all.’
Beverly’s hands keep up their regular clockwork. Her voice sounds remarkably steady to her ears:
‘You didn’t see any sign of the bomb from your truck?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘If I had, maybe Mackey would be alive.’
He’s free of it.
Elation sizzles through her before she’s fully processed what she’s hearing. She’s done it. Exactly what she’s done she isn’t sure, and how it happened, she doesn’t know, but it’s a victory, isn’t it? When the sergeant speaks, his voice is mournful, but there is not a hint of self-recrimination in it. Just a week ago last Tuesday, his sorrow had been shot through with a tremulous loathing – his guilt outlined by his grief. Beverly once read a science-magazine article about bioluminescence, the natural glow emitted by organisms like fireflies and jellyfish, but she knows the dead also give off a strange illumination, a phosphor that can permanently damage the eyes of the living. Necroluminescence – the light of the vanished. A hindsight produced by the departed’s body. Your failings backlit by the death of your loved ones. But now it seems the soldier’s grief has become a matt block. Solid, opaque. And purified (she hopes) of his guilt. His own wavy shadow.
Is it possible he’s lying to her? Does the kid really not remember a red wire?
She plucks tentatively at a tendon in his arm.
‘You can’t blame yourself, Derek.’
‘I don’t blame myself,’ he says coolly. ‘Did I plant the fucking bomb? It’s a war, Bev. There was nothing anybody could have done.’
Then Zeiger’s neck tightens under her fingers, and she has to manually relax it. She massages the points where his jawbone meets his ears, imagines her thumbs dislodging the words she just spoke. Where did the wire go? Is it gone for good now? She leans onto her forearms, applying deeper pressure to his spinal meridian. The lotion gives the pale sky on Zeiger’s back a dangerous translucence, as if an extra second of heat might send the sunset-pink inks streaming. She has a terrible, irrational fear of her hand sinking through his skin and spine. All along his sacrum, her fingers are digging in sand.
‘That feels incredible, Beverly,’ he murmurs. ‘Whatever you are doing back there, my God, don’t stop.’
And why should he feel guilty, anyway? Beverly wonders that night. Why should she?
Did it happen when I moved the sun? Beverly wonders sleepily. It’s 11.12 p.m., claims the cool digital voice of time on her nightstand, 11.17 by the wind-up voice of her wristwatch. Did she alter some internal clock for him? Knock the truth off its orbit?
Memories are inoperable. They are fixed inside a person, they can’t be smoothed or soothed with fingers. Don’t be nutty, Beverly, she berates herself in her mother’s even voice. But if it turns out that she really can adjust them from without? Reshuffle the deck of his past, leave a few cards out, sub in several from a sunnier suit, where was the harm in that? Harm had to be the opposite, didn’t it? Letting the earliest truth metastasize into something that might kill you? The gangrenous spread of one day throughout the lifespan of a body – wasn’t that something worth stopping?
3.02 a.m. 3.07 a.m. Beverly rolls onto her belly and pushes her head between the pillows. She pictures the story migrating great distances, like a snake curling and unwinding under its skin. Shedding endlessly the husks of earlier versions of itself.
One thing she knows for certain: Derek Zeiger is a changed man. She can feel the results of her deep-tissue work on his lower back, which Zeiger happily reports continues to be pain-free. And the changes aren’t merely physical – over the next few weeks, his entire life appears to be straightening out. An army friend hooks him up with a part-time job doing IT for a law firm. He’s sleeping and eating on a normal schedule; he’s made plans to go on an ice-fishing trip with a few men he’s met at work. He has a date with a female marine from one of his VA groups. The first pinch of jealousy she feels dissolves when she sees his excitement, gets a whiff of cologne. He rarely mentions Pfc Arlo Mackey any more, and he never talks about a wire.
All of a sudden Derek Zeiger wants to tell her about other parts of his past. Other days and nights and seasons. Battles with the school vice-principal. Domestic dramas. She listens as all the former selves that have hovered, invisibly, around the epicentre of April 14 start coming to life again, becoming his life: Zeiger in school, Zeiger before the war. Funny, ruddy stories fill in his blanks.
Beverly feels a tiny sting as Derek ambles off. He looks like any ordinary twenty-five-year-old now, with his rehabilitated grin and his five o’clock shadow. It’s the first time she’s ever felt anything less than purely glad to see his progress. They have four more sessions together as part of his H.R. 1722 allotment. Soon he won’t need her at all.
On Friday, Sergeant Zeiger interrupts a long and mostly silent massage to recount his recent dream:
‘I had such a strange one, Beverly. It felt so real. You know how you can unspool the ribbon from a cassette tape? I found this wire, I had bunches and bunches of it in my arms, I walked for miles, right through the centre of the village, it was Fedaliyah and it wasn’t, you know how that goes, in dreams, the houses kept multiplying and then withdrawing, like a wave, I guess you would call it. A tidal wave, but going backwards, sort of pulling the whole village away from me like a slingshot. That’s how I knew I was dreaming. Because those houses we saw outside of Fedaliyah were shanties, they had shit for houses, no electricity, but in my dream all of the windows were glowing . . .’
These walls receded from him, sparklingly white and quick as comets, and then he was alone. There was no village any more, no convoy, no radios, no brothers. There was only a featureless desert, and the wire.
‘I kept tugging at it, spooling it around my hand. I wasn’t wearing my gloves for some reason. I followed the wire to where it sprung off the ground and ran through the palms, and I knew I shouldn’t leave the kill zone alone but I kept following it. I thought I was going to drop dead from exhaustion – when I woke up I ran to the bathroom and drank from the faucet.’
‘Did you ever get to the end of it?’
‘No.’
‘You woke up?’
‘I woke up. I remember the feeling, in the dream, of knowing that I wouldn’t find him. I kept thinking: I’m a fool. The trigger man has got to be long gone by now.’
‘What a strange dream,’ she murmurs.
‘What do you think it means?’
His tone is one of sincere mystification. He doesn’t seem to connect this wire in his dream to the guilt he once felt about Arlo. Does this mean he’s getting better – healing, recovering? Beverly’s initial thrill gives way to a queasy feeling. If they continue these treatmen
ts, she worries that all of his memories of the real sands of Iraq might get pushed into the hourglass of dreams, symbols.
Derek is still lying on his stomach with his face turned away from her. She rubs a drop of clear gel into the middle of his spine.
‘You were looking for the trigger man, Derek. Isn’t that obvious? But it was a nightmare. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘I guess you’re right. But this dream, Bev – it was terrible.’ His voice cracks. ‘I was alone for miles and miles, and I had to keep walking.’
She pictures a dream-small Zeiger retreating after the wire, growing more and more remote from the Derek Zeiger who’s awake. And a part of her thinks, Good. Let him forget that there ever was an April 14. Let that day disappear even from his nightmares. If the wire ever comes up again, Beverly decides, she’ll push it right back under his skin. As many times as it takes for Sergeant Derek Zeiger to heal, she will do this. With sincere apologies to Pfc Arlo Mackey – whom she suspects she must also be erasing.
Working the dead boy out of Route Roses like a thorn.
She has a feeling like whiskey moving to the top of her brain. Beverly pushes down and down and down into the tendons under his tattoo to release the knots. Muscle memory, her teacher used to say, that’s what we’re working against.
Off duty, at home, Beverly’s own flashbacks are getting worse. She shuts her eyes on the highway home, sees the mist of blood and matter on the Humvee windshield, Mackey’s head falling forward with an abominable serenity on the cut stem of his neck. At the diner, her pancake meals are interrupted by strange flashes, snatches of scenery. Fists are pounding on glass; someone’s voice is screaming codes through a radio. Freckles sprinkle across a thin nose. A widow’s peak goes pink with sunburn. Here comes the whole face again, rising up in her mind like a prodigal moon, miraculously restored to life inside the Humvee truck: the last, lost grin of Pfc Arlo Mackey. Outside her window, the blue street light causes the sidewalk to shine like an empty microscope slide. Her bedroom is a black hole. Wherever she looks now, she sees Arlo’s absence. At night, she sits up in bed and hears Derek’s voice: