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.