Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

Why on earth would you boys choose this moment to incarnate? Beverly wonders. Why remember him—your good friend—dying—engulfed?

  “You were with him on the day he died, Derek? You were all together?”

  “We were.”

  And then he fills in the stencil of April 14 for her.

  At 6:05 a.m., on April 14, Sgt. Derek Zeiger and a convoy of four Humvees exited the wire of the FOB, traveling in the northbound lane of Route Roses, tasked with bringing a generator and medical supplies to the farm of Uday al-Jumaili. The previous week, they had driven out to Fedaliyah to do a school assessment and clean up graffiti. As a goodwill gesture, they had helped Uday al-Jumaili’s son, a twelve-year-old herder, to escort a dozen sweaty buffalo and one million black flies to the river.

  Pfc. Vaczy and Sgt. Zeiger were in the lead truck.

  Pfc. Mackey and Cpl. Al Grady were in the second vehicle.

  From the right rear window of the Humvee, Sgt. Zeiger watched telephone poles and crude walls sucked backward into the dust. Sleeping cats had slotted themselves between the stones, so that the walls themselves appeared to be breathing. An orangeish-gray goat watched the convoy pass from a ruined courtyard, heaving its ribs and crusty horns at the soldiers, its pink mouth bleating after them in the rearview like a cartoon without sound. At 6:22 a.m., a click away from the farm in Fedaliyah, the lead Humvee passed a palm grove within view of the Diyala River and the wise-stupid stares of the bathing jammous. Zeiger remembered watching one bull’s tremendous head disappear beneath the dirty water. At 6:22, perhaps fifteen seconds later, an IED tore through the second Humvee, in which Pfc. Mackey was the gunner. Sgt. Zeiger watched in the mirrors as the engine compartment erupted in flames. Smoke flew into the gash of his mouth. Smoke blindfolded him. On his knees in the truck he gagged on smoke, its oily taste. Incinerated metal blew inside the vehicle, bright chunks raining through the window. His head slammed against the windscreen; immediately, his vision darkened; blood poured from his nostrils; a tooth, his own, went skidding across the truck floor.

  “This front one is a fake,” he tells Beverly, tapping his enamel. “Can’t you tell? It’s too perfect.”

  He remembered picking up the tooth, which was a shocking, foreign white, etched in space. He remembered grabbing the aid bag and the fire extinguisher and tumbling from the truck and screaming, directing these screams nowhere in particular, down at his own laced boots, then skyward—and then, when he got his head together, he remembered to scream for the intervention of a specific person, the medic, Spec. Belok. He saw the gunner from the third truck running over to the prone figure of Cpl. Al Grady and followed him.

  “Well, okay: the bomb was a ten-inch copper plate, concave shape, remote-detonated, so when it blows there’s about fifty pounds of explosives behind it. I heard over the radio ‘There is blood everywhere,’ and I could hear moaning in the background. The blast shot Corporal Grady completely into the air, out of the vehicle—and Grady is six foot five, Beverly …”

  Beverly pulls at the wispiest clouds along the cords of his neck.

  “Where’s the triggerman? Are we about to get ambushed on the road? Nobody knows. There’s no one around us, there’s no one around us, and do you think maybe Uday al-Jumaili came running to help us? Guess again. His house is dead quiet, it’s just our guys and the palm grove. Behind the truck, the jammous are staring at us. Three or four of them, looking as pissy as women, you know, like the attack interrupted their bathing plans. Grady is responsive, thank God. The door is hanging. Mackey is screaming and screaming, I’m kneeling right under him. Some of his blood gets in my mouth. Somehow even in my state I figured that one out: I’m coughing up Mack’s blood. And whatever he’s screaming, I don’t understand it, it’s not words, so I go, ‘Mack, what’re you saying, man? What are you saying?’ I cut his pants to see if the femoral artery was severed. I remove his IBA looking for the chest wound. I wrap the wound to his head and his neck with a Kerlix …”

  Zeiger’s head is buried in the cushion—all this time, he hasn’t looked up from the floor. Jigsaw cracks spread through the tattoo where his muscles keep tensing.

  “Hours later, I’m still hearing the screaming. That night at the DFAC—the chow hall—we’re all just staring at our food, and I’m telling people, ‘I didn’t catch his last words. I lost them, I didn’t catch them.’

  “And Lieutenant Norden, I didn’t see him standing there, he goes: ‘Hey, Zeiger, I’ll translate: good-bye. He was saying: bye-bye.’ Norden’s like a robot, no feeling. And I almost get court-martialed for breaking Norden’s jaw, Bev.”

  Bev, he says, like a strand of hair tucked behind her ear. Incredibly, in the midst of all this horror, she can still blush like a fool at the sound of her own name. She’s terrified of setting him off again, knuckling down on the wrong spot, but at no point during his story does she halt the exploratory movements of her hands over the broad terrain of Zeiger’s back.

  “So now we all hump Mackey around like turtles. That day, April 14, it’s frozen for all time back there.”

  “Well, for your lifetimes,” Beverly hears herself blurt out.

  “Right.”

  Zeiger scratches at a raw spot on his neck.

  “Nobody has to live forever, thank God.”

  “Gotcha. My mistake.”

  Moisture clouds her eyes out of nowhere. Forever, just that word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that’s got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math. God, she does not want the kid to have to carry this forever.

  “You know,” she says, adjusting the pressure, “I think it’s a beautiful thing you’ve done for your friend—” She traces the inky V below the tight cords of his neck. Silent birds migrating into the deeper blues. “You’re giving him your, ah, your portion of eternity.”

  Portion of eternity, Christ, where did she get that one? A Hallmark mug? The Bible? Possibly she’s plagiarizing the chalkboard Hoho’s menu, some unbelievable deal: the bottomless soup bowl. Until doomsday, free refills on your coffee.

  “No, you’re right.” He laughs sourly. “I guess I’m only good for a short ride.”

  A long silence follows. Fedaliyah heaves and falls.

  “How long do you think, Bev?” he asks abruptly. “Fifty, sixty years?”

  Beverly doesn’t answer. After a while she says, “Are you still being treated at the VA down the road?”

  “Yes, yes, yes—” His voice grows peevish, seems to scuff at the floor under the head support. “For PTSD, the same as everybody. Do I seem traumatized to you, Beverly? What’s the story back there?”

  Instead of answering his question, Beverly lets her hands slide down his back. “Breathe right here for me, Derek,” she murmurs. She eagles her palms outward, pushes in opposite directions until she gets a tense spot above his sacrum to relax completely. Beneath the sheet of oil, the tattoo’s colors seem to deepen. To glow, grow permeable. As if she could reach a finger into the landscape and swirl the jammous into black holes, whirlpools in the tattoo …

  Soon Zeiger is snoring.

  She works her fingertips into the skin around the fire, and she can smell the flowery scent of the oil becoming more powerful; just briefly, she lets her eyes close. Suddenly the jasmine smells of her room are replaced by burning rubber, diesel. Behind her closed eyelids, she sees a flash of beige light. Spidery black palms, a roadside stand. A pair of heat-blurred men waving at her as if from the other end of a telescope. Sand ticking at a windscreen.

  Beverly hears herself gasp like someone emerging from a pool. When her eyes fly open, the first thing she sees are two hands, her own, rolling in circles through the oil on the sergeant’s shoulders. She watches, astonished, as her two hands continue to massage on autopilot, rotating slickly all the way down the man’s spine—has she been massaging him this whole time? She feels a disorientation that is very close to her childhood amazement during the ghostly performances of her uncle’s player piano: the black ke
ys and the white keys depressing in sequence, producing music. Sergeant Zeiger groans happily.

  What just happened? Nothing happened, Beverly, she hears in the no-nonsense voice of her dead mother, the one her mind deploys to police its own sanity. But her nostrils are stinging from the burning petroleum. Her eyes are leaking. Tentatively, Beverly strokes the red star again.

  This time when she shuts her eyes, the flashes she gets are up close: she sees the clear image of a face. Behind the long windscreen of a Humvee, a sunburned, helmeted soldier smiles vacantly at her. “Hey, Mackey—” someone yells, and the man turns. He is bobbing his chin to some distant music, drumming his knuckles against the stiff Kevlar vest, uneclipsed.

  Beverly has to stop the massage to towel her eyes. Where are these pictures coming from? It feels like she’s remembering a place she’s never been before, reminiscing about a face she’s never seen in her life. Somehow a loop of foreign experience seems to have slotted itself inside her brain, like her uncle’s piano rolls. Zeiger’s song, spinning wildly through her. She wonders if such a thing is possible. Music she hears on the radio lodges in Beverly for weeks at a stretch. All sorts of strange contagions sweep over this earth. Germs travel inside coughs and sewer rats, spores are cloaked in the bare wind.

  A “flashback”—that was the word from the VA literature.

  Beverly tries to concentrate on her two hands, their shape and weight in space, their real activity. If she closes her eyes for even a second, she’s afraid that Humvee will roll into her mind and erupt in flames. She forces herself to massage Zeiger’s shoulders, his buttocks, the tendons of his neck. Areas far afield of the “Arlo Mackey” trigger, the red star—the fatal fire, rendered down. The star seems to be the matchstick that strikes against her skin, combusts into the vision. And yet, in spite of herself, she watches her hands drawn down the tattoo. Now she feels she has some insight into the kind of trouble that April 14 must be giving Sergeant Derek Zeiger—there’s a gravity she can’t resist at work here. Her hands sweep around the red star like the long fingers of a clock, narrowing their orbit. Magnetized to that boy’s last minute.

  At the end of the massage, she pauses with the oily towel in her hand.

  Her eyes feel as if there are little heated pins inside them.

  A truck goes rolling slowly down Route Roses.

  “Wake up!” she nearly screams.

  “Goddamn it, Bev,” Zeiger grumbles with his eyes shut. Beverly stands near his face on the pillow, and watches him open one reluctantly. Under her palms, his pulse jumps. “I was just resting my eyes for a sec. You scared me.”

  “You fell asleep again, Derek.” It’s an effort to ungrit her teeth. She can feel an explosion coming in their tingling roots. “And it seemed to me like you were stuck in a bad dream.”

  At home, Beverly licks at her chalky lips. Her heartbeat is back to normal but her ears are still roaring. Is she lying to herself? Possibly the flashback is really nothing but her own projection, a dark and greedy way to feel connected to him, to dig into his trauma. Perhaps all she is seeing is her own hunger for drama spooling around the sergeant’s service, herself in hysterics, a devotee of that new genre, “the bleeding heart horror story.” So named by Representative Eule Wolly in his latest rant on TV. He’d railed against the media coverage on the left and right alike: prurience, pawned off as compassion! The bloodlust of civilians. War-as-freak-show, war-as-snuff-film. “All the smoky footage on the seven a.m. news to titillate you viewers who are just waking up. Give you a jolt, right? Better than your Folger’s.”

  Was it that? Was that all?

  That week, Beverly sees her ordinary retinue of patients: a retired mailman with a herniated disk; a pregnant woman who lies curled on her side, cradling her unborn daughter, while Beverly works on her shoulders; sweet Jonas Black, her oldest patient, who softens like a cookie in milk before the massage has even begun. By Friday the intensity of her contact with Sergeant Derek Zeiger feels dreamily distant, and the memory of the tattoo itself has gone fuzzy on her, that picture no more and no less real to her than the war accounts she’s seen on television or read. Next time she won’t allow herself to get quite so worked up. Dmitri, who is working with several referrals from the VA hospital, tells her that he can’t stop bawling after his sessions with them, and Beverly feels a twist of self-loathing every time she sees his puffy face. No doubt his compassion for the returning men and women is genuine, but there’s something else afoot at Dedos Mágicos, too, isn’t there? Some common need has been unlidded in all of them.

  What a sorrowful category, Beverly thinks: the “new veteran.” All those soldiers returning from Fallujah and Kandahar and Ramadi and Yahya Khel to a Wisconsin winter. Flash-frozen into citizens again. The phrase calls to mind a picture from her childhood Bible: “The Raising of Lazarus.” The spine of the book was warped, so that it always fell open to this particular page. Lazarus, looking a little hungover, was blinking into a hard light. Sunbeams were fretted together around his forehead in jagged green and yellow blades. His sandaled pals had all gathered outside his tomb to greet him, like a birthday surprise party, but it seemed to be a tough social moment; Lazarus wasn’t looking at anyone. He was staring into the cave mouth from which he had just been resurrected with an expression of sublime confusion.

  When, fifteen minutes into his third massage, Sergeant Derek Zeiger begins to tell Beverly the same story about Pfc. Arlo Mackey and April 14, she pauses, unsure if she ought to interject—is the sergeant testing her? Does he want to see if she’s been paying attention to him? Yet his voice sounds completely innocent of her knowledge. She supposes this could be a symptom of the trauma, memory loss; or maybe Derek is simply an old-fashioned blow-hard. As her hands travel up and down his spine, he tells the same jokes about the jammous. His voice tightens when he introduces Arlo. His story careens onto Route Roses …

  “Why did you call it that? Route Roses?”

  “Because it smelled like shit.”

  “Oh.” The flowers in her imagination shrink back into the road.

  “Because Humvees were always getting blown to bits on it. I saw it happen right in front of me, fireballs swaying on these big fucking stems of smoke.”

  “Mmh.” She squirts oil into one palm, greases the world of April 14. Just his voice makes her crave buckets and buckets of water.

  “I killed him,” comes the voice of Sergeant Derek Zeiger, almost shyly.

  “What?” Beverly surprises both of them with her vehemence. “No. No, you didn’t, Derek.”

  “I did. I killed him—”

  Beverly’s mouth feels dry and papery.

  “The bomb killed him. The, ah, the insurgents …”

  “How would you know, Beverly, what I did and didn’t do?” His voice shakes with something that sounded like the precursor to a fit of laughter, or fury; it occurs to her that she really doesn’t know this person well enough to say which is coming.

  “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Listen: there are two colors on the road, green and brown. Two colors on the berm of Route Roses. There was a red wire. I didn’t miss it, Bev—I saw it. I saw it, I practically heard that color, and I thought I probably ought to stop and check it out, only I figured it was some dumb thing, a candy wrapper, a piece of trash, and I didn’t want to stop again, it was a thousand degrees in the shade, I just wanted to get the fucking generators delivered and get back to base, and we kept right on driving, and I didn’t say anything, and guess who’s dead?”

  “Derek … You tried to save him. The blood loss killed him. The IED killed him.”

  “It was enough time,” he says miserably. “We had fifteen, twenty seconds. I could have saved him.”

  “No—”

  “Later, I remembered seeing it.”

  Beverly swallows. “Maybe you just imagined seeing it.”

  When Beverly’s mother first started coughing, those fits were indistinguishable from a regular flu. Everybody in the family
said so. Her doctors had long ago absolved them. At the wake, Janet and Beverly agreed that there was nothing to tip them off to her cancer. And their father’s symptoms had been even less alarming: discomfort on one side of his body. Just an infrequent tingling. Death had waited in the dark for a long time, ringing the McFaddens’ doorbell.

  “You think it’s hindsight, Derek, but it’s not that. It’s regret. It’s false, you know, what you see when you look back—it’s the illusion that you could have stopped it …”

  Beverly falls silent, embarrassed. After a moment, Derek lets out a raucous laugh. He allows enough time to elapse so that she hears the laugh as a choice, as if many furious, rejected phrases are swirling around his head on the pillow.

  “You trying to pick a fight with me, Bev? I saw it. Believe me. I looked out there and I saw something flash on the berm, and it was hot as hell that day, and I didn’t want to stop.” He laughs again. “Now I can’t stop seeing it. It’s like a punishment.”

  He lets his face slump into the headrest. On the tattoo, Fedaliyah is becoming weirdly distorted, pulled to Daliesque proportions by the energy of his shuddering. His shoulders clench—he’s crying, she realizes. And right there in the middle of his back, a scar is swelling. Visibly lifting off the skin.

  “Shhh,” says Beverly, “shhh—”

  At first, it’s just a shiny ridge of skin, as slender as a lizard’s tail. Then it begins to darken and swell, as if plumping with liquid. Has it been there all along, this scar, disguised by the tattoo ink? Did the oils irritate it? She watches with ticklish horror as the scar continues to lengthen, rise.

  “I saw it, I saw it there,” he is saying. “I can see it now, just how that wire would have looked … why the fuck didn’t I say anything, Beverly …?”

  Quickly, without thought, Beverly pushes down on it. An old, bad taste floods her mouth. When she lifts her hand, the thin, dark scar is still there, needling through the palm grove on the tattoo like something stitched onto Derek by a blotto doctor. She runs her thumbs over it, all reflex now, smoothing it with the compulsive speed that she tidies wrinkles on the white sheet. For a second, she succeeds in thumbing it under his skin. Has she burst it, will fluid seep out of it? She lifts her hands and the scar springs right back into place like a stubborn cowlick. Then she pushes harder, wincing as she does so, anticipating Zeiger’s scream—but the sergeant doesn’t react at all. She pushes down on the ridge of skin as urgently as any army medic doing chest compressions, and from a great distance a part of her is aware that this must look hilarious from the outside, like a Charlie Chaplin comedy, because the scale is all wrong here, she’s using every ounce of her strength, and the red threat to Sergeant Zeiger is the width of a coffee stirrer.