Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

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:

“So Belok gets on the radio. Blood is coming out of Mackey like a fucking hydrant …”

Now Beverly is afraid to go to sleep. A moot fear, it turns out: she can’t sleep any longer.

Of course there is always the possibility that she is completely off her rocker. If Zeiger were to bring her a photograph of Mackey in his desert fatigues, would she recognize him as the soldier from her visions? Would he have a receding hairline, brown hair with a cranberry tint, a dimple in his chin? Or would he turn out to be a stranger to Beverly — a boy she doesn’t recognize?

Derek she likes to picture in his new apartment across town, snoring loudly. There is something terribly attractive to Beverly about the idea that she is remembering this day for him, keeping it locked away in the vault of her head, while the sergeant goes on sleeping.

Despite her insomnia, and her growing suspicion that she might be losing her mind, Beverly spends the next month in the best mood of her life. Really, she can’t account for this. She looks terrible — Ed never even yells at her anymore. Her regular patients have started making tentative inquiries about her health. She’s lost twelve pounds; her eyes are still bloodshot at dusk. But so long as she can work with Derek, she feels invulnerable to the headaches and the sleep deprivation, to the bobbing head of Pfc. Mackey and the wire loose in the dirt. So long as only she can see it, and Derek’s amnesia holds, and Derek continues to improve, she knows she can withstand infinite explosions, she can stand inside her mind and trip the red wire of April 14 forever. When Derek comes in for his eighth session, he brings her flowers. She thanks him, embarrassed by her extraordinary happiness, and then presses them immediately when she gets back to her apartment.

She stops wasting her time debating whether she’s harming or helping him. Each time a session ends without any reappearance of the wire, she feels elated. That killing story, she excised from him. Now it’s floating in her, like a tumor in a jar. Like happiness, laid up for the long winter after the boy heals completely and leaves her.

Derek misses three appointments in a row. Doesn’t turn up outside Beverly’s door again until the last day of February. He’s wearing his unseasonably thin black T-shirt, sitting in a hard orange chair right outside her office. With his skullcap tugged down and his guilty grin he looks like a supersize version of the jug-eared kid waiting for the vice principal.