“That feels incredible, Beverly,” he murmurs. “Whatever you are doing back there, my God, don’t stop.”
And why should he feel guilty, anyway? Beverly wonders that night, under an early moon. And why should she?
Did it happen when I moved the sun? Beverly wonders sleepily. It’s 11:12 p.m., claims the cool digital voice of time on her nightstand, 11:17 by the windup voice of her wristwatch. Did she alter some internal clock for him? Knock the truth off its orbit?
Memories are inoperable. They are fixed inside a person, they can’t be smoothed or soothed with fingers. Don’t be nutty, Beverly, she lectures herself in her mother’s even voice. But if it turns out that she really can adjust them from without? Reshuffle the deck of his past, leave a few cards out, sub in several from a sunnier suit, where was the harm in that? Harm had to be the opposite, didn’t it? Letting the earliest truth metastasize into something that might kill you? The gangrenous spread of one day throughout the life span of a body — wasn’t that something worth stopping?
3:02 a.m. 3:07 a.m. Beverly rolls onto her belly and pushes her head between the pillows. She pictures the story migrating great distances, like a snake curling and unwinding under his skin. Shedding endlessly the husks of earlier versions of itself.
One thing she knows for certain: Derek Zeiger is a changed man. She can feel the results of her deep tissue work on his lower back, which Zeiger happily reports continues to be pain-free. And the changes aren’t merely physical — over the next few weeks, his entire life appears to be straightening out. An army friend hooks him up with a part-time job doing IT for a law firm. He’s sleeping and eating on a normal schedule; he’s made plans to go on an ice fishing trip with a few men he’s met at work. He has a date with a female Marine from one of his VA groups. The first pinch of jealousy she feels dissolves when she sees his excitement, gets a whiff of cologne. He rarely mentions Pfc. Arlo Mackey anymore, and he never talks about a wire.
All of a sudden Derek Zeiger, who is thawing faster than the rainbow ice he used to slurp at the state fair, wants to tell her about other parts of his past. Other days and nights and seasons. Battles with the school vice principal. Domestic dramas. She listens as all the former selves that have hovered, invisibly, around the epicenter of April 14 start coming to life again, becoming his life: Zeiger in school, Zeiger before the war. Funny, ruddy stories fill in his blanks.
Beverly feels a tiny sting as Derek ambles off. He looks like any ordinary twenty-five-year-old now, with his rehabilitated grin and his five o’clock shadow. It’s the first time she’s ever felt anything less than purely glad to see his progress. They have four more sessions together as part of his VA allotment. Soon he won’t need her at all.
On Friday, Sergeant Zeiger interrupts a long and mostly silent massage to recount his recent dream:
“I had such a strange one, Beverly. It felt so real. You know how you can unspool the ribbon from a cassette tape? I found this wire, I had bunches and bunches of it in my arms, I walked for miles, right through the center of the village, it was Fedaliyah and it wasn’t, you know how that goes in dreams, the houses kept multiplying and then withdrawing, like this shimmering, like a wave, I guess you would call it. A tidal wave, but going backward, sort of pulling the whole village away from me like a slingshot? — now, okay, that’s how I knew I was dreaming? Because those houses we saw outside Fedaliyah were shanties, they had shit for houses, no electricity, but in my dream all the windows were glowing …”
These walls receded from him, sparklingly white and quick as comets, and then he was alone. There was no village anymore, no convoy, no radios, no brothers. There was only a featureless desert, and the wire.
“I kept tugging at it, spooling it around my hand. I wasn’t wearing my gloves for some reason. I followed the wire to where it sprung off the ground and ran through the palms, and I knew I shouldn’t leave the kill zone alone but I kept following it. I thought I was going to drop dead from exhaustion — when I woke up I ran to my bathroom and drank from the faucet.”
“Did you ever get to the end of it?”
“No.”
“You woke up?”
“I woke up. I remember the feeling, in the dream, of knowing that I wouldn’t find him. I kept thinking, I’m a fool. The triggerman has got to be long gone by now.”
“What a strange dream,” she murmurs.
“What do you think it means, Beverly?”
His tone is one of sincere mystification. He doesn’t seem to connect this wire in his dream to the guilt he once felt about Arlo. Does this mean he’s getting better — healing, recovering? Beverly’s initial thrill gives way to a queasy feeling. There are child savants, she knows, who can recite answers to the thousandth decimal point without ever understanding the equations that produced them. If they continue these treatments, she worries that all his memories of the real sands of Iraq might get pushed into the hourglass of dreams, symbols.
Derek is still lying on his stomach with his face turned away from her. She rubs a drop of clear gel into the middle of his spine.
“You were looking for the triggerman, Derek. Isn’t that obvious? But it was a nightmare. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I guess you’re right. But this dream, Bev — it was terrible.” His voice cracks. “I was alone for miles and miles, and I had to keep walking.”
She pictures a dream-small Zeiger retreating after the wire, growing more and more remote from the Derek Zeiger who’s awake. And a part of her thinks, Good. Let him forget that there ever was an April 14. Let that day disappear even from his nightmares. If the wire ever comes up again, Beverly decides in that moment, she’ll push it right back under his skin. As many times as it takes for Sergeant Derek Zeiger to heal, she will do this. With sincere apologies to Pfc. Arlo Mackey — whom she suspects she must also be erasing.
Working the dead boy out of Route Roses like a thorn.
She has a sensation like whiskey moving to the top of her brain. It leaves her feeling similarly impaired. Beverly pushes down and down and down into the muscles under his tattoo to release the knots. Muscle memory, her teacher used to say, that’s what we’re working against.
Off duty, at home, Beverly’s own flashbacks are getting worse. Beverly shuts her eyes on the highway home, sees the mist of blood and matter on the Humvee windscreen, Mackey’s head falling forward with an abominable serenity on the cut stem of his neck. At the diner, her pancake meals are interrupted by strange flashes, snatches of scenery. Fists are pounding on glass; someone’s voice is screaming codes through a radio. Freckles sprinkle across a thin nose. A widow’s peak goes pink with sunburn. Here comes the whole face again, rising up in her mind like a prodigal moon, miraculously restored to life inside the Humvee: the last, lost grin of Pfc. Arlo Mackey. Outside her window, the blue streetlight causes the sidewalk to shine like an empty microscope slide. Her bedroom is a black hole. Wherever she looks now, she sees Arlo’s absence. At night, she sits up in bed and hears Derek’s voice: