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.”