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.