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!”