Vampires in the Lemon Grove

The New Veterans

When Beverly enters the room, the first thing she notices is her new patient’s tattoo. A cape of ink stretches from the nape of the man’s neck to his hip bones. His entire back is covered with blues and greens, patches of pale brown. But — what the hell is it a tattoo of, anyways? Light hops the fence of its design. So many colors go waterfalling down the man’s spine that, at first glance, she can’t make any sense of the picture.

Compared to this tattoo, the rest of the man’s skin — the backs of his legs and his arms, his neck — looks almost too blank. He’s so tall that his large feet dangle off the massage table, his bony heels pointing up at her. Everything else is lean and rippling, sculpted by pressures she can only guess at. Beverly scans the patient’s intake form: male, a smoker, 622″, 195 lbs., eye color: brown, hair color: black, age: 25. Sgt. Derek Zeiger, U.S. Army, Company B, 1st Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In the billing section, he’s scribbled: This is free for me, I hope and pray …? I’m one of the veterans.

And it is free — once she fills out and faxes in an intimidating stack of new forms. Ten sessions, 100 percent covered by military insurance. Sergeant Zeiger is her first referral under the program created by Representative Eule Wolly’s H.R. 1722 bill, his latest triumph for his constituency: Direct Access for U.S. Veterans to Massage Therapist Services.

At the Dedos Mágicos massage clinic, they’d all been excited by the new law; they’d watched a TV interview with the blue-eyed congressman in the office break room. Representative Wolly enumerated the many benefits of massage therapy for soldiers returning home from “the most stressful environments imaginable.” Massage will ease their transition back to civilian life. “Well, he’s sure preaching to our choir!” joked Dmitri, one of the oldest therapists on staff. But Beverly had been surprised to discover her own cellular, flower-to-sun hunger for exactly this sort of preaching — in the course of a day, it was easy to lose faith in the idea that your two hands could change anything.

On the table, her first referral from the VA hospital has yet to budge. She wonders how long this soldier has been home for — a month? Less? Dark curls are filling in his crew cut. Only the back of his skull is visible, because he is lying facedown on the table with his head fitted in a U-shaped pillow. She can’t tell if he’s really asleep or just pretending to be completely calm for her; often new patients try to relax, a ruse that never works — they just disperse their nervousness, springload their bones with guile. Rocky outcroppings of “relaxation” shelve and heave under their backs, while their minds become a tangle of will.

With the man’s bright tattoo for contrast, the rest of the room looks suddenly miserably generic. The walls are bare except for a clock lipped in red plastic, which feels like a glowing proxy for Ed’s mouth, silently screaming at her not to go a penny over the hour. The young sergeant’s clothes are wadded on the floor, and she shakes out and folds them as she imagines a mother might do.

“Sir? Ah — Sergeant Zeiger …?”

“Unh,” moans the soldier, shivering inside a good or a bad dream, and the whole universe of the tattoo writhes with him.

“Hullo!” She walks around to the front of the table. “Did you fall asleep, sir?”

“Oh, God. Sorry, ma’am,” says the soldier. He lifts his face stiffly out of the headrest and rolls onto his side, sits up. “Guess I zoinked.”

“Zoinked?”

“Passed out. You know, I haven’t been sleeping at night. A lot of pain in my lower back, ma’am.”

“Sorry to hear it.” She pats his shoulder, notes that he immediately tenses. “Well, let’s get you some help with that.”

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 for goods and services? A new truck, a Hawaii honeymoon, a foot surgery for your mother, a college degree in history? When can you sell your future on the free market? In Esau, Wisconsin, you have to be eighteen to vote, to smoke cigarettes, to 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. The gift store sells padded bras and thongs and a “Caribbean wand” that looks like a stick of cotton candy with tiny helicopter rotors, for some erotic purpose that Beverly, at forty-four, still feels too young to guess at.

At eighteen, Beverly had no plans for her future. She had zero plans to make a plan. To even think that word, the “future,” caused a bile that tasted like black licorice to rise in the back of Beverly’s throat. 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’s and prizefighter fists, whose pugilist exterior concealed a vast calm, 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. What a joke! Pop quiz, everybody! She’d spent her senior year cramming for the wrong test: Mrs. Marcy McFadden’s passing.

“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 teenage Beverly swore she could feel vibrating through the floorboards at three a.m., nobody mentioned this intrusion at breakfast.

Beverly enrolled in the “Techniques of Massage” certificate program 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 in even 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; she was working at Dedos Mágicos before her twentieth birthday. At twenty, 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 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 her mother 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. Twenty-nine when her mother entered her final coma, she was 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 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 him, rubbing the oil between her hands. She pulls at his trapezius muscles, which are dyed sky-blue. His tattoo is the stuff of Dutch masters. 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! Beverly grins, as proudly happy as a child to identify nouns. 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 center of his back a little V of birds tapers to a point, creating the illusion of a retreating horizon. Several soldiers occupy the base of Zeiger’s spine. What kind of ink did this tattoo artist use? What special needles? The artist dotted desert camouflage onto the men — their uniforms are so infinitesimally petaled in duns and olives that they are, indeed, nearly invisible against Sergeant Zeiger’s skin. Now that she’s spotted them once, 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. To help the Iraqi farmers 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 some feed for their buffaloes. 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 one’s ear. She can see red veins along the pink interior. Sunlight licks at each sudsy curl.

“Yeah. Thanks. My artist is legendary. Tat shop just outside 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 so Sergeant Zeiger. Sergeant Zeiger is thrashing around under her hands like Linda Blair’s understudy.

“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 doctors’ 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 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. Each body, Beverly believes, has a secret language candled inside it, something inexpressibly bright that can be transmitted truly only via touch.

“How does that feel now? Too much pressure?”

“It’s fine. It’s all good.”

“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. Their silver horns curl like eyelashes. Under her lamp, the river actually twinkles. It’s amazing that a tattoo needle this fine exists. Beverly, feeling a bit ridiculous, is nonetheless genuinely afraid to touch it. She has to force herself to roll and knead the skin. For all 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, when 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 upper back. 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 an idiot child at a stovetop — well, this is trouble, this is a real madhouse puzzle. The sun slides around, but the rest of the tattoo stays frozen. The cows stare at the grass, unalarmed, as it zings cometlike 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 at 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—”

“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 got 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 favor, 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 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 the Hoho’s Family Restaurant, Beverly treats herself to peanut butter pancakes and world news. She grabs a menu and seats herself. She’s a longtime 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 aging is honorable, 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 aging “gracefully,” like the church ladies she sees outside 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 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 color. Dmitri, whose skin is an even shade of gingerroot all year round, tsking 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 tailbone. These are the “rudimentary vertebrae”: the fishy, ancient coccygeal bones. The same spine that has been inside 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 rib cage, 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 Mágicos, and he’s been Beverly’s boss for nearly twenty-five 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, you drink it.” He says this with a holy formality, as if this transaction were underwritten by the teachings of Christ or Karl Marx.

“Okay. It’s eight 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. “You all love to give me a hard time.”

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

Sergeant Derek Zeiger is waiting for her, lying shirtless on the table, facing the far wall, 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 “crossgrain techniques”—bearing down with her forearms, going against the grain of the trapezius 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. Okay? 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? I mean, you’re the expert.”

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 from them. She pushes down into the fascia, the Atlas bone that supports the skull, the top and center 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 …

Her fingers find a knot underneath this river and begin to pull outward. Out of the blue — so to speak — Sergeant Zeiger begins talking.

“The tattoo artist’s name was Applejack. But everybody called him ‘Cuz.’ You ask him why, he’d tell you: ‘Just Cuz.’ Get it?”

Well, that was a mistake, Applejack! Beverly silently rolls her knuckles over Zeiger’s shoulders. With a birth name like Applejack, shouldn’t your nickname be something like Roger or Dennis? Something that makes you sound like a taxpayer?

“Cuz is the best. He charges a literal fortune. I blew two disability checks on this tattoo. What I couldn’t pay, I borrowed from my friend’s mom.”

“I see.” Her knuckles sink into a cloud over Fedaliyah. “Which friend?”

“Arlo Mackey. He died. That’s what you’re looking at, on the tattoo — it’s a picture of his death day. April 14, 2009.”

“His mother … paid for this?”

Under the oil the red star looks smeary and dark, like an infected cut.

“She lent each of us five hundred bucks. Four guys from Mackey’s platoon — Vaczy, Grady, Belok, me, we all got the same tattoo. Grady draws real good, and he was there that day, so he made the source sketch for Applejack. After we got the tattoo, we paid a visit to Mrs. Mackey. We lined up side by side on her yard in Lifa, Texas. To make a wall, like. Mackey’s memorial. And Mrs. Mackey took a photograph.”

“I see. A memorial of Arlo. A sort of skin mural.”

“Correct.” He sounds pleased, perhaps mistaking her echo for an endorsement of the project. Beverly doesn’t know how to feel about it.

“That must be some picture.”

“Oh, it is. Mackey’s mom decided she’d rather invest in our tattoos than some fancy stone for him — she knew we were his brothers.”

The sergeant’s head is still at ease in the U-shaped pillow. Facing the floor. Which makes it feel, eerily, as if the tattoo itself is telling her this story, the voice floating up in a floury cloud from underneath the sands of Fedaliyah. As he continues talking, she pushes into his muscles, and the tattoo seems to dilate and blur under the oil.

“She circled our names in his letters home — Mackey wrote real letters, not emails, he was good like that — to show us what he thought of us. He loved us,” he says, in the apologetic tone of someone who feels that they are bragging. “Every one of us shows up in those letters. It was like we got to peel back his mind. She said, ‘You were his family and so you’re my family, too.’ Grady told her all the details of the attack, she wanted them, and then she said, ‘We will join together as a family to honor Arlo.’ She said, ‘Now, I want you boys to put the past behind you’—that was her joke.”

“My God. That’s a pretty dark joke.”

Sick, she was about to say.

His shoulders draw together sharply.

“I guess it is.”

Thanks to the tattoo, every shrug causes a fleeting apocalypse. The V of birds gets swallowed between two rolls of blue flesh, springs loose again.

“And — stop me if I’ve told you this? Mackey’s ma had another kid. A girl. Jilly. She’s a minor, so Mrs. Mackey had to sign a piece of paper to let Applejack cut into her with his big powerdrill crayons.”

“His sister got the tattoo? Her mother let her?”

“Hell yes! It was her mother’s idea! Crazy, crazy. Fifteen years old, skinny as a cricket’s leg, a sophomore in high school, and this little girl gets the same tattoo as us. April 14. Arlo in the red star. Except, you know, scaled down to her.”

His scalp shakes slightly in the headrest, and Beverly wonders what exactly he’s marveling at, Jilly Mackey’s age or the size of the tragedy or the artist’s ingenuity in shrinking the scenery of her brother’s death day down to make a perfect fit.

He waits a beat, but Beverly cannot think of one word to say. She knows she’s failed because she feels his muscles tense, the world of Fedaliyah stiffening all at once, like a lake freezing itself.

“Plenty of guys in my unit got tattoos like this, you know. It’s how the dead live, and the dead walk, see? We have to honor his sacrifice.”

Pride electrifies the sergeant’s voice. Unexpectedly, he gets up on his elbows on the massage table, cranes around to meet her eye; when he says “the dead,” she notes, his long face lights up. It’s like some bitter burlesque of a boy in love.

“What does your own mother say about all this, if you don’t mind me asking?”

He laughs. “I don’t talk to those people.”

“Which people? Your family?”

“My family, you’re looking at them.”

Beverly swallows. “Which one is Mackey? Is this him, in the palm grove?”

“No. That’s Vaczy. Mackey’s burning up.”

Zeiger pudges out a hip bone.

“He’s — this red star?”

“It’s a fire.” The sergeant’s voice trembles with an almost childish indignation. “Mack’s inside it. Only you can’t see him.”

The truck has just run over a remotely detonated bomb and exploded. Still burning inside the truck, he explains, is Specialist Arlo Mackey.

“Boom,” he adds flatly.

Why on earth would you boys choose this moment to incarnate? Beverly wonders. Why remember him — your good friend — dying — engulfed?

“You were with him on the day he died, Derek? You were all together?”

“We were.”

And then he fills in the stencil of April 14 for her.

At 6:05 a.m., on April 14, Sgt. Derek Zeiger and a convoy of four Humvees exited the wire of the FOB, traveling in the northbound lane of Route Roses, tasked with bringing a generator and medical supplies to the farm of Uday al-Jumaili. The previous week, they had driven out to Fedaliyah to do a school assessment and clean up graffiti. As a goodwill gesture, they had helped Uday al-Jumaili’s son, a twelve-year-old herder, to escort a dozen sweaty buffalo and one million black flies to the river.

Pfc. Vaczy and Sgt. Zeiger were in the lead truck.

Pfc. Mackey and Cpl. Al Grady were in the second vehicle.

From the right rear window of the Humvee, Sgt. Zeiger watched telephone poles and crude walls sucked backward into the dust. Sleeping cats had slotted themselves between the stones, so that the walls themselves appeared to be breathing. An orangeish-gray goat watched the convoy pass from a ruined courtyard, heaving its ribs and crusty horns at the soldiers, its pink mouth bleating after them in the rearview like a cartoon without sound. At 6:22 a.m., a click away from the farm in Fedaliyah, the lead Humvee passed a palm grove within view of the Diyala River and the wise-stupid stares of the bathing jammous. Zeiger remembered watching one bull’s tremendous head disappear beneath the dirty water. At 6:22, perhaps fifteen seconds later, an IED tore through the second Humvee, in which Pfc. Mackey was the gunner. Sgt. Zeiger watched in the mirrors as the engine compartment erupted in flames. Smoke flew into the gash of his mouth. Smoke blindfolded him. On his knees in the truck he gagged on smoke, its oily taste. Incinerated metal blew inside the vehicle, bright chunks raining through the window. His head slammed against the windscreen; immediately, his vision darkened; blood poured from his nostrils; a tooth, his own, went skidding across the truck floor.

“This front one is a fake,” he tells Beverly, tapping his enamel. “Can’t you tell? It’s too perfect.”

He remembered picking up the tooth, which was a shocking, foreign white, etched in space. He remembered grabbing the aid bag and the fire extinguisher and tumbling from the truck and screaming, directing these screams nowhere in particular, down at his own laced boots, then skyward — and then, when he got his head together, he remembered to scream for the intervention of a specific person, the medic, Spec. Belok. He saw the gunner from the third truck running over to the prone figure of Cpl. Al Grady and followed him.

“Well, okay: the bomb was a ten-inch copper plate, concave shape, remote-detonated, so when it blows there’s about fifty pounds of explosives behind it. I heard over the radio ‘There is blood everywhere,’ and I could hear moaning in the background. The blast shot Corporal Grady completely into the air, out of the vehicle — and Grady is six foot five, Beverly …”

Beverly pulls at the wispiest clouds along the cords of his neck.

“Where’s the triggerman? Are we about to get ambushed on the road? Nobody knows. There’s no one around us, there’s no one around us, and do you think maybe Uday al-Jumaili came running to help us? Guess again. His house is dead quiet, it’s just our guys and the palm grove. Behind the truck, the jammous are staring at us. Three or four of them, looking as pissy as women, you know, like the attack interrupted their bathing plans. Grady is responsive, thank God. The door is hanging. Mackey is screaming and screaming, I’m kneeling right under him. Some of his blood gets in my mouth. Somehow even in my state I figured that one out: I’m coughing up Mack’s blood. And whatever he’s screaming, I don’t understand it, it’s not words, so I go, ‘Mack, what’re you saying, man? What are you saying?’ I cut his pants to see if the femoral artery was severed. I remove his IBA looking for the chest wound. I wrap the wound to his head and his neck with a Kerlix …”

Zeiger’s head is buried in the cushion — all this time, he hasn’t looked up from the floor. Jigsaw cracks spread through the tattoo where his muscles keep tensing.

“Hours later, I’m still hearing the screaming. That night at the DFAC — the chow hall — we’re all just staring at our food, and I’m telling people, ‘I didn’t catch his last words. I lost them, I didn’t catch them.’

“And Lieutenant Norden, I didn’t see him standing there, he goes: ‘Hey, Zeiger, I’ll translate: good-bye. He was saying: bye-bye.’ Norden’s like a robot, no feeling. And I almost get court-martialed for breaking Norden’s jaw, Bev.”

Bev, he says, like a strand of hair tucked behind her ear. Incredibly, in the midst of all this horror, she can still blush like a fool at the sound of her own name. She’s terrified of setting him off again, knuckling down on the wrong spot, but at no point during his story does she halt the exploratory movements of her hands over the broad terrain of Zeiger’s back.

“So now we all hump Mackey around like turtles. That day, April 14, it’s frozen for all time back there.”

“Well, for your lifetimes,” Beverly hears herself blurt out.

“Right.”

Zeiger scratches at a raw spot on his neck.

“Nobody has to live forever, thank God.”

“Gotcha. My mistake.”

Moisture clouds her eyes out of nowhere. Forever, just that word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that’s got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math. God, she does not want the kid to have to carry this forever.

“You know,” she says, adjusting the pressure, “I think it’s a beautiful thing you’ve done for your friend—” She traces the inky V below the tight cords of his neck. Silent birds migrating into the deeper blues. “You’re giving him your, ah, your portion of eternity.”

Portion of eternity, Christ, where did she get that one? A Hallmark mug? The Bible? Possibly she’s plagiarizing the chalkboard Hoho’s menu, some unbelievable deal: the bottomless soup bowl. Until doomsday, free refills on your coffee.

“No, you’re right.” He laughs sourly. “I guess I’m only good for a short ride.”

A long silence follows. Fedaliyah heaves and falls.

“How long do you think, Bev?” he asks abruptly. “Fifty, sixty years?”

Beverly doesn’t answer. After a while she says, “Are you still being treated at the VA down the road?”

“Yes, yes, yes—” His voice grows peevish, seems to scuff at the floor under the head support. “For PTSD, the same as everybody. Do I seem traumatized to you, Beverly? What’s the story back there?”

Instead of answering his question, Beverly lets her hands slide down his back. “Breathe right here for me, Derek,” she murmurs. She eagles her palms outward, pushes in opposite directions until she gets a tense spot above his sacrum to relax completely. Beneath the sheet of oil, the tattoo’s colors seem to deepen. To glow, grow permeable. As if she could reach a finger into the landscape and swirl the jammous into black holes, whirlpools in the tattoo …

Soon Zeiger is snoring.

She works her fingertips into the skin around the fire, and she can smell the flowery scent of the oil becoming more powerful; just briefly, she lets her eyes close. Suddenly the jasmine smells of her room are replaced by burning rubber, diesel. Behind her closed eyelids, she sees a flash of beige light. Spidery black palms, a roadside stand. A pair of heat-blurred men waving at her as if from the other end of a telescope. Sand ticking at a windscreen.

Beverly hears herself gasp like someone emerging from a pool. When her eyes fly open, the first thing she sees are two hands, her own, rolling in circles through the oil on the sergeant’s shoulders. She watches, astonished, as her two hands continue to massage on autopilot, rotating slickly all the way down the man’s spine — has she been massaging him this whole time? She feels a disorientation that is very close to her childhood amazement during the ghostly performances of her uncle’s player piano: the black keys and the white keys depressing in sequence, producing music. Sergeant Zeiger groans happily.

What just happened? Nothing happened, Beverly, she hears in the no-nonsense voice of her dead mother, the one her mind deploys to police its own sanity. But her nostrils are stinging from the burning petroleum. Her eyes are leaking. Tentatively, Beverly strokes the red star again.

This time when she shuts her eyes, the flashes she gets are up close: she sees the clear image of a face. Behind the long windscreen of a Humvee, a sunburned, helmeted soldier smiles vacantly at her. “Hey, Mackey—” someone yells, and the man turns. He is bobbing his chin to some distant music, drumming his knuckles against the stiff Kevlar vest, uneclipsed.

Beverly has to stop the massage to towel her eyes. Where are these pictures coming from? It feels like she’s remembering a place she’s never been before, reminiscing about a face she’s never seen in her life. Somehow a loop of foreign experience seems to have slotted itself inside her brain, like her uncle’s piano rolls. Zeiger’s song, spinning wildly through her. She wonders if such a thing is possible. Music she hears on the radio lodges in Beverly for weeks at a stretch. All sorts of strange contagions sweep over this earth. Germs travel inside coughs and sewer rats, spores are cloaked in the bare wind.

A “flashback”—that was the word from the VA literature.

Beverly tries to concentrate on her two hands, their shape and weight in space, their real activity. If she closes her eyes for even a second, she’s afraid that Humvee will roll into her mind and erupt in flames. She forces herself to massage Zeiger’s shoulders, his buttocks, the tendons of his neck. Areas far afield of the “Arlo Mackey” trigger, the red star — the fatal fire, rendered down. The star seems to be the matchstick that strikes against her skin, combusts into the vision. And yet, in spite of herself, she watches her hands drawn down the tattoo. Now she feels she has some insight into the kind of trouble that April 14 must be giving Sergeant Derek Zeiger — there’s a gravity she can’t resist at work here. Her hands sweep around the red star like the long fingers of a clock, narrowing their orbit. Magnetized to that boy’s last minute.

At the end of the massage, she pauses with the oily towel in her hand.

Her eyes feel as if there are little heated pins inside them.

A truck goes rolling slowly down Route Roses.

“Wake up!” she nearly screams.

“Goddamn it, Bev,” Zeiger grumbles with his eyes shut. Beverly stands near his face on the pillow, and watches him open one reluctantly. Under her palms, his pulse jumps. “I was just resting my eyes for a sec. You scared me.”

“You fell asleep again, Derek.” It’s an effort to ungrit her teeth. She can feel an explosion coming in their tingling roots. “And it seemed to me like you were stuck in a bad dream.”

At home, Beverly licks at her chalky lips. Her heartbeat is back to normal but her ears are still roaring. Is she lying to herself? Possibly the flashback is really nothing but her own projection, a dark and greedy way to feel connected to him, to dig into his trauma. Perhaps all she is seeing is her own hunger for drama spooling around the sergeant’s service, herself in hysterics, a devotee of that new genre, “the bleeding heart horror story.” So named by Representative Eule Wolly in his latest rant on TV. He’d railed against the media coverage on the left and right alike: prurience, pawned off as compassion! The bloodlust of civilians. War-as-freak-show, war-as-snuff-film. “All the smoky footage on the seven a.m. news to titillate you viewers who are just waking up. Give you a jolt, right? Better than your Folger’s.”

Was it that? Was that all?

That week, Beverly sees her ordinary retinue of patients: a retired mailman with a herniated disk; a pregnant woman who lies curled on her side, cradling her unborn daughter, while Beverly works on her shoulders; sweet Jonas Black, her oldest patient, who softens like a cookie in milk before the massage has even begun. By Friday the intensity of her contact with Sergeant Derek Zeiger feels dreamily distant, and the memory of the tattoo itself has gone fuzzy on her, that picture no more and no less real to her than the war accounts she’s seen on television or read. Next time she won’t allow herself to get quite so worked up. Dmitri, who is working with several referrals from the VA hospital, tells her that he can’t stop bawling after his sessions with them, and Beverly feels a twist of self-loathing every time she sees his puffy face. No doubt his compassion for the returning men and women is genuine, but there’s something else afoot at Dedos Mágicos, too, isn’t there? Some common need has been unlidded in all of them.

What a sorrowful category, Beverly thinks: the “new veteran.” All those soldiers returning from Fallujah and Kandahar and Ramadi and Yahya Khel to a Wisconsin winter. Flash-frozen into citizens again. The phrase calls to mind a picture from her childhood Bible: “The Raising of Lazarus.” The spine of the book was warped, so that it always fell open to this particular page. Lazarus, looking a little hungover, was blinking into a hard light. Sunbeams were fretted together around his forehead in jagged green and yellow blades. His sandaled pals had all gathered outside his tomb to greet him, like a birthday surprise party, but it seemed to be a tough social moment; Lazarus wasn’t looking at anyone. He was staring into the cave mouth from which he had just been resurrected with an expression of sublime confusion.

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 to him? 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 blow-hard. 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 feels dry and papery.

“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 sounded 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 colors on the road, green and brown. Two colors 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 color, 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 in the dark for a long time, ringing the McFaddens’ doorbell.

“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 raucous laugh. He allows enough time to 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. It’s like a punishment.”

He lets his face slump into the headrest. On the tattoo, Fedaliyah is becoming weirdly distorted, pulled to Daliesque proportions 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 slender 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 irritate it? She watches with ticklish 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 thin, dark scar is still there, needling through the palm grove on the tattoo like something stitched onto Derek by a blotto doctor. She runs her thumbs over it, all reflex now, smoothing it with the compulsive speed that she tidies wrinkles on the white sheet. For a second, she succeeds in thumbing it under his skin. Has she burst it, will 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 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 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, gets 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 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 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 …”

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 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 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. Not: 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.

“You know, I wanted to save him,” Ed confides to her. And Beverly thinks that she would have liked to save all of them — Arlo Mackey and Oscar Ilana and Derek Zeiger, Jilly Mackey and her mother, the Iraqi children of the jammous farmers getting poisoned by their swims in the polluted Diyala, her own mother and father.

“Me, too, Ed.”

“But a man like that is beyond help,” says Ed, patting Beverly’s shoulders as he has never done before in their decades together, and it’s a construction of such grammatical perfection that she knows he must have memorized it from the TV anchors.

Early Sunday morning, the phone startles Beverly awake.

This time, thank God, it’s not Ed Morales. It’s not Janet calling with the weather report from Sulko, Nevada, or the joyful percolations of her twin nieces, wearing their matching jammies under Gemini stars in the American desert. Nobody else calls her at home. No stranger has ever rung her at this hour.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Bev. Sorry to call so early.”

“Derek.”

Beverly sinks under her coverlet. The relief she feels is indescribable.

“Were you up? You sound wide-awake.”

“You scared me. The last time I saw you—”

“I know. I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to explode on you like that. I honestly don’t know why that happened. It’s weird because I’ve been feeling so much better lately. And for that I wanted to say, you know: thank you. To be honest, I was never expecting much from you. My real doctor at the VA made me enroll in the program. Massage therapy, no offense, I was thinking: hookers. Happy endings, la-la beads.”

“I see.”

“But whatever you do back there works. I’ve been sleeping like a baby ever since. I sleep through the night.” The wall clock says 3:00 a.m.

“I sleep good,” he maintains, as if wanting to forestall an argument. “Tonight is an exception to the rule, I guess.” He laughs quietly, and Beverly feels like a spider clinging to one bouncing line — their connection seems that frail.

“Well, we’re both awake now.” She swallows. “Why are you calling me here, Derek?”

“I’m not cured, though.”

“Well, Derek, of course you’re not,” she says, fighting to get control of a lunging pressure in her chest. “Massage doesn’t ‘cure’ people, it’s a process …”

“Beverly …” His voice breaks into a whimper. “Something’s wrong—”

There are a few beats of silence. In the mysterious, unreal distances of her inner ear, Pfc. Arlo Mackey continues screaming and screaming inside the burning truck.

“I’m in pain, a lot of pain. I need to see you again. As soon as I can.”

“I’ll see you on Monday, Derek. Ten o’clock.”

“No, Beverly. Now.” And then there is shuffling on his end of the receiver, and an awful sound like half a laugh. “Please?”

Ed Morales has never fired anybody in his thirty-year tenure as the owner of Dedos Mágicos, and he always mentions this a little wistfully, as if it’s a macho experience he’s dreamed of having, the way some men want to summit Everest or bag a lion on safari. She doesn’t doubt that he will fire her if he finds them out.

Still, where else are they supposed to go? Beverly is a professional. She is not going to confuse everything even further at this late hour by beginning to see patients in her home.

Beverly has keys to the building. She drives beneath a full, icy moon, following the chowdery line of the Esau River. All the highways are empty. When she pulls into her staff slot, the sergeant’s blue jalopy is already there.

“Thank you,” he mumbles as they climb out of their cars. His eyes are red hollows. “Don’t be scared, promise? I don’t know what went wrong the other day.”

Beverly, who has some idea, says nothing.

“Are you afraid of me, Beverly?”

“Afraid! Why would I be? Are you angry at me?”

Kind nos are exchanged.

There is a fat moon behind him, one white ear eavesdropping brazenly in the midwestern sky.

Beverly fumbles with the car lock, gets them both inside the building. Something is moving under his shirt, on his back, she can see it, a dark shape. In the onlyness of moonlight, his snowy boots look almost silver. Nothing stirs in the long hallway; when they pass the crescent of the reception desk, she half expects Ed to leap up in a fountain of expletives. Their shoes mewl on the tiles, sucked along by slush. They speak at the same time—

“Lie down?”

“I’ll go lie down—”

“Thank you for meeting me, Beverly,” he says again, sounding so much like a boy about to cry. “Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong.” He groans. “Ah, Bev! Something feels twisted around …”

He pulls off his shirt, lies down. Beverly sucks in her breath — his back is in terrible shape. The skin over his spine looks raw and abraded; deep blue and yellowish bruises darken the sky of Fedaliyah. And a long, bright welt, much thicker and nastier than the thin scar she erased, stretches diagonally from his hip bone to his shoulder.

“Jesus, Derek! Did someone do this to you? Did you do this to yourself?”

“No.”

“Did you have some kind of accident?”

“I don’t know,” he says flatly. “I don’t remember. It looked this way when I woke up two days ago. It’s gotten worse.”

Beverly touches his shoulder and they both wince. Maybe the welt did erupt from inside the tattoo. Maybe Derek vandalized the tattoo himself, and he’s too ashamed or too frightened to tell her. She’s surprised to discover how little the explanation matters to her. In the end, every possibility she can imagine arises from the same place — a spark drifting out of his past and catching, turning into this somatic conflagration. No matter how it happened, she is terrified for him.

She dips a Q-tip into a bottle of peroxide, stirs.

This time she abandons any pretension of getting the true story out of him. She doesn’t try to grab hold of April 14 and reset it like a broken bone. She doesn’t mention IEDs or Mackey. Her concerns about whether or not it would be better for the sergeant to forget the wire, wipe his slate clean, are gone; she thinks those debates must belong to a room without this boy hurting in it. All she wants to do right now is reduce his pain. If she can help him with that, she thinks, it will be miracle enough.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’re going to fix you up. Hold still for me, Derek.”

She begins at the base of his spine, rolling up, avoiding the most irritated areas. He whimpers only once. Through his neck, she can feel the strain of his gritted teeth.

“That fucking kills, Beverly — what are you doing?”

“Shh — you focus on relaxing. This is helping.”

She defaults to what she knows. Eventually, as in the first sessions, she can feel something shifting under her hands. Her voice needles in and out of Zeiger’s ears as she tells him where to move and bend and breathe. It’s dark in the room, and she’s barely looking at his back, letting his fascia and muscles guide her fingers. Gradually, and then with the speed of windblown sands, the story of the tattoo begins to change.

A little after five a.m., Beverly stops the massage to button her sweater up to her neck. It’s the same baggy cerulean skin that she always puts on, her old-lady costume. Tonight her sleeves bunch at her elbows, so that she feels like a strange molting bird — eating keeps slipping her mind. The moon is out; their two cars, viewed through the clinic window, have acquired a sort of doomed mastodon glamour, shaggy with snow. A green light blinks ceaselessly above her, some after-hours alarm she’s never here to see. She checks to make sure the windows are closed — the room feels ice-cold. Beverly moves to get Zeiger’s shirt, towels. She’s washed and dressed the damaged skin; the tattoo is almost completely hidden under gauze. Now she doesn’t have to look at the red star. Beverly cotton-daubs more peroxide onto his neck, which feels wonderfully relaxed. Zeiger begins to talk. With his eyes still shut, he tours her through the landscape on his back; it’s a version of April 14 that is completely different from any that’s come before. She listens to this and she doesn’t breathe a word. She has no desire to lift the gauze, check the tattoo against this new account.

When he’s finished, Beverly asks him in a shaky voice, “Nobody died that day, Derek?”

“Nobody.”

He sits up. Perched on the table’s edge, with the blanket floating in a loose bunting around his shoulders, the sergeant flexes and relaxes his long bare toes.

“Nobody died, Bev. That’s why I got the tattoo — it was a miracle day. Amazing fucking grace, you know? Fifty pounds of explosives detonate, and we all make it back to the FOB alive.”

Beverly smooths a wrinkle in a square of gauze, tracing the path of what was, the last time she looked, the Diyala River.

“Nobody died. I lost a chunk of my hearing, but I just listen harder now.”

His face is beaming. “I love telling that story. You’re looking at the proof of a miracle. My tattoo, it should hang in a church.”

Then he slides toward her and cups one big hand behind her head. He sinks his fingers through the gray roots of her hair and holds her face there. It’s a strange gesture, more gruff than romantic, his little unconscious parody of how she feels toward him, maybe — it makes her think, of all things, of a mother bear cuffing its cub. He digs his fingers into her left cheek.

“Thank you, Beverly.” Zeiger talks in a telephone whisper, as if their connection is about to be cut off at any moment by some maniacal, monitoring operator. “You can’t even imagine what you’ve done for me here—”

For what is certainly too long an interval Beverly lets her head rest against his neck.

“Oh, you’re very welcome,” she says into a muzzle of skin.

What happens next is nothing anyone could properly call a kiss; she turns in to him, and his lips go slack against her mouth; when this happens, whatever tension remains in him seems to flood into her. She fights down a choking sensation and turns her head, reaches for his hand.

“Beverly—”

“Don’t worry. Look at that snow coming down. Time’s up.”

“Beverly, listen—”

“You’ll be fine, Derek. I don’t think those bruises will come back. But if they do, you come back, too. I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’ll be waiting right here.”

Several months after her last encounter with Derek, the phone rings. It’s Janet, and just like that they are on speaking terms again. Janet invites her out to Sulko, and one morning Beverly finds herself standing in front of her nieces’ class as a special guest for Careers Day. Little girls in violet vests sit patiently on the carpet. Their drawings shimmer on a corkboard wall near the window, bright shingles fluttering under pins. Beverly demonstrates a massage on a child volunteer, and the other students gather in a circle and dutifully grasp one another’s shoulders. She’s amazed to see how fearlessly they touch each other, pure pleasure flowing from tiny hands to shoulders without any of the circuit breakers that are bound to come later. The class runs into the lunch hour, but during the Q&A even her nieces are too shy to ask a question. At last, at the teacher’s violent, whispered encouragement, one loopy-looking kid with pigtails the bright orange of cooked carrots raises her hand.

“What do you like the most about your job?”

“Oh, that’s an easy one!” Beverly summons a smile for the girl. “Helping.”

Most days, she doubts she helped the sergeant at all. She thinks it’s far more likely that she aggravated his condition, or postponed a breakdown. But a picture comes to her of Zeiger walking down the street into vivid light, the tattoo moving with his muscles. She wants to believe that this is possible — that he lifted the gauze to find the welts healed and the tattoo settling into a new shape. Not even in her fantasy can she guess what it might look like. In her wildest imaginings, Zeiger finds both things — a story he can carry, and a true one.