“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 deaclass="underline" 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.