Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Rule Eight: Be a good sport — but watch your back!

You want to have a sportsmanlike attitude while tailgating in the Antarctic, even when it is difficult (e.g., snow-blind/mourning a loss/drunk on Crown Royal). Show those Team Whale fans that even though their players weigh ten tons to our players’.038 grams, we krill supporters are the bigger people. Some of the tailgaters for the minke whales are homicidally devoted to their team. Rich psychopaths. You’re likely to find the rowdiest bands of them near the Grytviken whaling station, drinking cabernet and hissing across the calved icebergs at us.

Pull your rubberized Krill earflaps down — that’s what I do. Be civil. Tragedies happen in the lower latitudes, particularly when some of the younger guys get their blood up. Fights seem to spike about a month or two before the Big Game, when you hit that traffic in the Bismarck Strait.

One sad example, from a coupla seasons ago: This teenager called the minke whale fans “dickriders.” A poor freckled kid from Decatur City, Iowa. God, we all liked him. He wasn’t the brightest bulb but somehow he’d memorized every Krill statistic going back to the Cretaceous Food Chain Games — he just loved the franchise. It was his first tailgate, he told us — his first time below the equator. Sweet kid. We all liked him but we kept forgetting his name.

Anyway, the dawn after the whole “dickriders” altercation? Our Krill boats were all still at anchor but the Team Whale tailgaters were long gone. We found the kid’s body floating amid blocks of ice, already meat, three blue skua jawing on it. An orca sailed by him like a sunken moon, its wake engulfing the kid in black ripples. His feet were bare, I remember that. Those monsters took his Krill feet and his Krill Scamper-socks. Can you imagine that level of evil — sock robbers? We could see the boats of his murderers like a line of ants in the distance, entering the hole of the midnight sun.

You can lose at tailgating, too, just as devastatingly as Team Krill keeps losing to Team Whale.

Rule Nine: Should you have to bury your dead, do so in the proper receptacles

Nobody likes a litterbug. You can’t get much lower class than a boat of tailgaters who just leave their dead around.

Rule Ten: Don’t fall overboard

The game lasts twenty seconds, tops. You don’t want to come all that way and miss the game.

Rule Eleven: Don’t stop believin’

Some (like my ex) will tell you that it’s a special sort of masochist who supports Team Krill, since all evidence suggests that they have been consistently losing the Food Chain Games for eons. Paleobiologists’ molecular-dating methods reveal that the krill have never won a game. Team Krill loses to Team Blue Whale, Team Humpback Whale, Team Fin Whale, Team Sei Whale, Team Skua, and Team Albatross.

To this, I say: sure, it takes a special kind of fan to love the league underdog. Something Maureen would know very little about. Listen. The krill are in a rebuilding year. The krill are always in a rebuilding year. Every year the whole franchise of 60,000,000,000 krill gets eaten. Team Whale sucks Team Krill into the primordial combs of its baleen plates at twenty-eight knots. We’ve got a decent offense but we’ve got a pretty dismal record on defense.

But this is going to be our season. With all your might, try to believe that.

The greatest feeling in the world is getting there. Rowing over to the ice caves on game night, after all that travel. Krill will surge along either side of your boat in a rosy pregame warm-up. Lots of excitement in the frozen air. Inside the ice caves, you can glimpse the minke whales grouping into pods.

“Surge, krill!” Denny Fitzpatrick always screams at this juncture; you can bet that he’s been drunk since April. “Surge, you godless bastards!”

Antarctic tailgating is such a nice way of socializing on a balmy evening, when the sun goes down in flames behind the caves, while you share the end of your two-year supply of liquor and chips (how did it last only eight months?) with the Russians. We wear our costumes on the stern of the boat, our Krill eyestalks ogling the polar stars, huddled, shivering, convulsing with victory dreams. We munch and munch in the most extraordinary silence.

When Beverly enters the room, the first thing she notices is her new patient’s tattoo. A cape of ink stretches from the nape of the man’s neck to his hip bones. His entire back is covered with blues and greens, patches of pale brown. But — what the hell is it a tattoo of , anyways? Light hops the fence of its design. So many colors go waterfalling down the man’s spine that, at first glance, she can’t make any sense of the picture.

Compared to this tattoo, the rest of the man’s skin — the backs of his legs and his arms, his neck — looks almost too blank. He’s so tall that his large feet dangle off the massage table, his bony heels pointing up at her. Everything else is lean and rippling, sculpted by pressures she can only guess at. Beverly scans the patient’s intake form: male, a smoker, 622″, 195 lbs., eye color: brown, hair color: black, age: 25. Sgt. Derek Zeiger, U.S. Army, Company B, 1st Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In the billing section, he’s scribbled: This is free for me, I hope and pray …? I’m one of the veterans .

And it is free — once she fills out and faxes in an intimidating stack of new forms. Ten sessions, 100 percent covered by military insurance. Sergeant Zeiger is her first referral under the program created by Representative Eule Wolly’s H.R. 1722 bill, his latest triumph for his constituency: Direct Access for U.S. Veterans to Massage Therapist Services.

At the Dedos Mágicos massage clinic, they’d all been excited by the new law; they’d watched a TV interview with the blue-eyed congressman in the office break room. Representative Wolly enumerated the many benefits of massage therapy for soldiers returning home from “the most stressful environments imaginable.” Massage will ease their transition back to civilian life. “Well, he’s sure preaching to our choir!” joked Dmitri, one of the oldest therapists on staff. But Beverly had been surprised to discover her own cellular, flower-to-sun hunger for exactly this sort of preaching — in the course of a day, it was easy to lose faith in the idea that your two hands could change anything.

On the table, her first referral from the VA hospital has yet to budge. She wonders how long this soldier has been home for — a month? Less? Dark curls are filling in his crew cut. Only the back of his skull is visible, because he is lying facedown on the table with his head fitted in a U-shaped pillow. She can’t tell if he’s really asleep or just pretending to be completely calm for her; often new patients try to relax, a ruse that never works — they just disperse their nervousness, springload their bones with guile. Rocky outcroppings of “relaxation” shelve and heave under their backs, while their minds become a tangle of will.

With the man’s bright tattoo for contrast, the rest of the room looks suddenly miserably generic. The walls are bare except for a clock lipped in red plastic, which feels like a glowing proxy for Ed’s mouth, silently screaming at her not to go a penny over the hour. The young sergeant’s clothes are wadded on the floor, and she shakes out and folds them as she imagines a mother might do.

“Sir? Ah — Sergeant Zeiger …?”

“Unh,” moans the soldier, shivering inside a good or a bad dream, and the whole universe of the tattoo writhes with him.