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

by Неизвестный

  ‘So Belok gets on the radio. Blood is coming out of Mackey like a fucking hydrant . . .’

  Now Beverly is afraid to go to sleep. A moot fear, it turns out: she can’t sleep any longer.

  Of course there is always the possibility that she is completely off her rocker. If Zeiger were to bring her a photograph of Mackey in his desert fatigues, would she recognize him as the soldier from her visions? Would he have a receding hairline, brown hair with a cranberry tint, a dimple in his chin? Or would he turn out to be a stranger to Beverly – a boy she doesn’t recognize?

  Derek she likes to picture in his new apartment across town, snoring loudly. There is something terribly attractive to Beverly about the idea that she is remembering this day for him, keeping it locked away in the vault of her head, while the sergeant goes on sleeping.

  Despite her insomnia, and her growing suspicion that she might be losing her mind, Beverly spends the next month in the best mood of her life. Really, she can’t account for this. She looks terrible – Ed never even yells at her any more. Her regular patients have started making tentative enquiries about her health. She’s lost twelve pounds; her eyes are still bloodshot at dusk. But so long as she can work with Derek, she feels invulnerable to the headaches and the sleep deprivation, to the bobbing head of Pfc Mackey and the wire loose in the dirt. So long as only she can see it, and Derek’s amnesia holds, and Derek continues to improve, she knows she can endure infinite explosions, she can stand inside her mind and trip the red wire of April 14 forever. When Derek comes in for his eighth session, he brings her flowers. She thanks him, embarrassed by her extraordinary happiness, and then immediately presses several of the purse-lipped roses when she gets back to her apartment.

  She stops wasting her time debating whether she’s harming or helping him. Each time a session ends without any reappearance of the wire, she feels elated. That killing story, she excised it from him. Now it’s floating in her, like a tumour in a jar. Like happiness, her souvenir of their time together, laid up for the long winter after the boy heals completely and leaves her.

  Derek misses his appointment three weeks in a row. Doesn’t turn up outside of Beverly’s door again until the last day of February. He’s wearing his unseasonably thin black T-shirt, sitting in a hard orange chair right outside her office. With his skullcap tugged down and his guilty grin he looks like a supersized version of the jugeared kid waiting for the principal.

  ‘Sorry I’m a little late, Bev,’ he says, like it’s a joke.

  ‘You missed three appointments.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I forgot. Honestly, it just kept slipping my mind.’

  ‘I’ll see you now,’ says Beverly through gritted teeth. ‘Right now. Don’t move a muscle. I have to make some calls.’

  Through the crack in the door she watches Zeiger changing out of his shirt. Colours go pouring down his bunched bones. At this distance his tattoo is out of focus and only glorious.

  ‘So, American Hero. Long time no see.’ She pauses, struggling to keep her voice controlled. She was so worried. ‘We called you.’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry. I was feeling too good to come in.’

  ‘The number was disconnected.’

  ‘I’m behind on my bills. Nah, it’s not like that,’ he says hurriedly, studying her face. ‘Nothing serious.’ His lips keep puckering and flattening alarmingly. She realizes that he’s trying to smile for her.

  ‘You don’t look too good,’ she says bluntly.

  ‘Well, I’m still sleeping,’ he says, scratching his neck. ‘But some of the pain is back.’

  He climbs onto the table, smoothing his new cap of hair. It’s grown and grown. Beverly is surprised the former soldier can tolerate it at this length. The black tuft of hair at his nape is clearly scheming to become a mullet.

  ‘Is the pressure too much?’

  ‘Yes. But no, it’s fine. I mean, do what you gotta do to fix it, Bev.’ He takes a sharp breath. ‘Did I tell you what’s happening to Jilly?’

  Beverly swallows, immediately alarmed. Jilly Mackey, she remembers. Arlo’s sister. Her first thought is that the girl must be seeing the pictures of April 14 herself now. ‘I don’t think so . . .’

  In Lifa, Texas, it turns out that Jilly has been having some trouble. Zeiger found out about this when he spoke on the phone with the Mackey women last Thursday; he’d called for Arlo’s birthday. ‘A respect call’, he calls it, as if this is a generally understood term.

  ‘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 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 smoothes 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 3 or 4 a.m., in lieu of sleeping, she’s started watching 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 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 honourably 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 h
is crime is not so dissimilar from 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, 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.’

  ‘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. OK? 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.’

  ‘The girls only met their grandmother once –’ Beverly sputters. You got the girls, she manages not to say, although now her outrage is actually blinding.

  ‘You’re not remembering right. 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, OK, 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?’

  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. She’s always 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 corridor, 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 obscenely blue sky, fire. A large bull is standing in the 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 tripwires. He called them these “tiny wires in the dirt”. And I thought, I’ll have to ask Derek if that was, ah, his experience . . .’

  ‘Of course it’s hard to spot the wires!’ Derek explodes at her. There is no warning contraction of his shoulder blades. 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 9 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 –’

  ‘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 on Monday morning: 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 Eric 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 grey 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. Eric. She remembers who he is – was, she corrects herself. Another of their H.R. 1722 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. 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 on the evening of Eric 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 a bottle, 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 instil a permanent serenity in Derek? Hours? Aeons? 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. When an engine backfires, she flinches and grinds down on her molars and watches the Humvee erupt in flames.