Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  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 takes maybe twelve seconds.

  “Boy, that was a new move,” says the soldier. “That felt deep, all right. Do the Swedes do that one?” His voice is back to normal. “What did you do just now?”

  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 doorway 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 real doctor? Adrenaline 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 looks almost unrecognizable.

  “You look wonderful!” she says, unable to keep a note of pleasure out of her voice. “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, lightheaded 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 gravitational 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 indefinitely, for as long as he wants to continue.

  She grabs a new bottle of lotion, really high-end 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 that 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. An animal premonition causes her to drape 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 and 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-Jumaili, Zeiger never sees a wire. She listens as his Humvee rolls 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 medevaced 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 which they later recover.

  “We almost missed it. All hidden in the mud like that. No triggerman 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 matte block. Solid, opaque. And purified (she hopes) of his guilt. His own wary 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 oil 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, under an early moon. And 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 windup 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 lectures 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 life span 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 his 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, get
s a whiff of cologne. He rarely mentions Pfc. Arlo Mackey anymore, and he never talks about a wire.

  All of a sudden Derek Zeiger, who is thawing faster than the rainbow ice he used to slurp at the state fair, 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 epicenter 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 VA 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 center 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 this shimmering, like a wave, I guess you would call it. A tidal wave, but going backward, sort of pulling the whole village away from me like a slingshot?—now, okay, that’s how I knew I was dreaming? Because those houses we saw outside Fedaliyah were shanties, they had shit for houses, no electricity, but in my dream all the windows were glowing …”

  These walls receded from him, sparklingly white and quick as comets, and then he was alone. There was no village anymore, 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 my 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 triggerman has got to be long gone by now.”

  “What a strange dream,” she murmurs.

  “What do you think it means, Beverly?”

  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. There are child savants, she knows, who can recite answers to the thousandth decimal point without ever understanding the equations that produced them. If they continue these treatments, she worries that all 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 triggerman, 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 in that moment, 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 sensation like whiskey moving to the top of her brain. It leaves her feeling similarly impaired. Beverly pushes down and down and down into the muscles 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. Beverly shuts her eyes on the highway home, sees the mist of blood and matter on the Humvee windscreen, 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: the last, lost grin of Pfc. Arlo Mackey. Outside her window, the blue streetlight 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:

  “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 anymore. Her regular patients have started making tentative inquiries 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 withstand 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 presses them immediately 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 from him. Now it’s floating in her, like a tumor in a jar. Like happiness, laid up for the long winter after the boy heals completely and leaves her.

  Derek misses three appointments in a row. Doesn’t turn up outside 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 supersize version of the jug-eared kid waiting for the vice principal.

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

  “Your appointment was three weeks ago.”

  “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. Colors go pouring down his bunched bones. At this distance his tattoo is out o
f 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 mouth keeps twitching like an accordion. 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 back there 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 …”