Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Enough , she tells herself, snap out of it, this is ridiculous, insane —but it turns out these commands don’t clear the smoke from her brain. Beverly uncorks a second bottle of wine. She cracks open her window, lights a cigarette pinched from Ed. Smoke exits her lips in a loose curl, joining the snow. She wonders if this will become a new habit, too.

Nobody blames massage therapy for the young soldier’s suicide, exactly, but Representative Wolly’s H.R. 1722 program gets scuttled, and plenty of the commentators add a rueful line about how the young lance corporal had been receiving state-funded deep tissue massages at a place called Dedos Mágicos.

At Dedos, it’s surprising to see how deeply everyone is affected, even those on staff who only briefly met Ilana. There are lines of mourning on Ed’s face. He spends the week following Oscar’s death walking softly around the halls of the clinic in black socks, hugging his arms around his ice cream scoop of a belly. He doesn’t curse or scream at anybody, not even the clock face. A gentle hum seems to be coming from deep in his throat.

And where is Derek? His phone is still disconnected. He’s AWOL from his regular groups at the VA hospital. The counselor there reports that she hasn’t heard a peep from him in five or six days. Beverly replays her last words to him until she feels sick. She keeps waiting for him to show up, staring down at the Dedos parking lot. It occurs to her that this vigil might merely be the foretaste of an interminable limbo, if Derek never comes back.

Outside the window, a dozen geese are flying west, sunlight pooling like wet paint on their wings. Beverly has been noticing many such flocks moving at fast speeds over Esau, and whenever she sees them they are as gracefully spaced as writing. She can’t read any sense behind their dissolving bodies. Then the red parchment of the Wisconsin sunset melts, black space erases the geese, it’s night.

Beverly learns that one prejudice that has been ordering her existence is that there is an order: that time exists, and that its movements are regular and ineluctable, migrating like any animal from sunup to sunset — red dawns molting their way into violet dusks, days flocking into weeks and months. Not: April 14. April 14. April 14 , like raindrops plunking onto her head from a ceiling she can’t see. Her “flashbacks,” such as they are, do not conform to the timeline of Derek’s first story anymore. They feel closer to dreams — in one of them, the red wire rises out of his back like a viper to strike at her hands. Sometimes Zeiger stops the truck and kneels in dirt, digging with his fingers, and Mackey survives, and sometimes Zeiger fails to see the wire and the bomb explodes. Sometimes every character in the story has been dead for half a century, and a gleaming herd of water buffalo is grazing on the empty land, which looks like a science-fiction moonscape in this epoch, and a team of archaeologists finds the bomb, spading into the dust of the old New Baghdad.

The wire is always present, though — that’s the one constant. Curled loosely on top of the dirt, or almost completely buried. It’s a surprise that keeps giving itself away, exposed in the ruby light of her jarred skull.

Sometimes her worries worm southward, and she finds herself thinking about Jilly Mackey. This tenth-grader with her brother’s death day pinioned to her back like some large and trembling butterfly. She pictures the kid leaning over her homework in Lifa, Texas, pulling the red star taut under her shirt. What exactly were these “troubles” that Derek mentioned? Is the tattoo changing on her, too? What if something worse than a wire is lunging out of her canvas? Beverly has to fight down a crazy desire to telephone the Mackey women, offer her services. In another mood this would have struck Beverly as hilarious, the vision of herself boarding a plane to Texas with a duffel of massage oils. My thumbs to the rescue! How would she conduct that conversation with Mrs. Mackey? “Hello, I’m a massage therapist in Wisconsin, you don’t know me from Adam but I’ve been mourning the death of your son? I’d like to help your daughter, Jilly, with her back pain?”

But that’s a lunatic wish, of course; Beverly’s concern for the Mackeys would fly through the telephone wires and mutate into something that stabbed at their ears. There’s no etiquette for a call like that. No set of techniques or magical oils.

“You know, I wanted to save him,” Ed confides to her. And Beverly thinks that she would have liked to save all of them — Arlo Mackey and Oscar Ilana and Derek Zeiger, Jilly Mackey and her mother, the Iraqi children of the jammous farmers getting poisoned by their swims in the polluted Diyala, her own mother and father.

“Me, too, Ed.”

“But a man like that is beyond help,” says Ed, patting Beverly’s shoulders as he has never done before in their decades together, and it’s a construction of such grammatical perfection that she knows he must have memorized it from the TV anchors.

Early Sunday morning, the phone startles Beverly awake.

This time, thank God, it’s not Ed Morales. It’s not Janet calling with the weather report from Sulko, Nevada, or the joyful percolations of her twin nieces, wearing their matching jammies under Gemini stars in the American desert. Nobody else calls her at home. No stranger has ever rung her at this hour.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Bev. Sorry to call so early.”

“Derek.”

Beverly sinks under her coverlet. The relief she feels is indescribable.

“Were you up? You sound wide-awake.”

“You scared me. The last time I saw you—”

“I know. I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to explode on you like that. I honestly don’t know why that happened. It’s weird because I’ve been feeling so much better lately. And for that I wanted to say, you know: thank you . To be honest, I was never expecting much from you. My real doctor at the VA made me enroll in the program. Massage therapy, no offense, I was thinking: hookers. Happy endings, la-la beads.”

“I see.”

“But whatever you do back there works . I’ve been sleeping like a baby ever since. I sleep through the night.” The wall clock says 3:00 a.m.

“I sleep good,” he maintains, as if wanting to forestall an argument. “Tonight is an exception to the rule, I guess.” He laughs quietly, and Beverly feels like a spider clinging to one bouncing line — their connection seems that frail.

“Well, we’re both awake now.” She swallows. “Why are you calling me here, Derek?”

“I’m not cured, though.”

“Well, Derek, of course you’re not,” she says, fighting to get control of a lunging pressure in her chest. “Massage doesn’t ‘cure’ people, it’s a process …”

“Beverly …” His voice breaks into a whimper. “Something’s wrong—”

There are a few beats of silence. In the mysterious, unreal distances of her inner ear, Pfc. Arlo Mackey continues screaming and screaming inside the burning truck.

“I’m in pain, a lot of pain. I need to see you again. As soon as I can.”

“I’ll see you on Monday, Derek. Ten o’clock.”

“No, Beverly. Now.” And then there is shuffling on his end of the receiver, and an awful sound like half a laugh. “Please?”

Ed Morales has never fired anybody in his thirty-year tenure as the owner of Dedos Mágicos, and he always mentions this a little wistfully, as if it’s a macho experience he’s dreamed of having, the way some men want to summit Everest or bag a lion on safari. She doesn’t doubt that he will fire her if he finds them out.