Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

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.

“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.