Vampires in the Lemon Grove

This story is about Beverly, a 44-year-old massage therapist who has been working at Dedos Magicos for over twenty years. The story begins with:

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 (147).

The man is Sgt. Derek Zeiger, “male, a smoker, 6’2”, 195 lbs., eyes color: brown, hair color: black, age: 25” (147). He’s an Iraq veteran, and is seeking Beverly’s services because of the 1722 bill: “Direct Access for U.S. Veterans to Massage Therapist Services” (148).

During Zeiger’s first massage, Beverly wonders about his past. She thinks about her own past, and how she nursed her dying mother and father when she was 18. She deliberately didn’t go to a traditional college because she didn’t want to leave her parents alone with “[d]eath mounting the stairs at night” (150). While her father died quickly, her mother lived, albeit sick, for many more years, and Beverly tended to her. During that time, she got her degree in massage therapy:

In her mother’s final days, massage was the last message to reach down to her—when her sickness had pushed her to a frontier where she could no longer recognize Beverly, when she didn’t know her own face in a mirror, she could still respond with child-like pleasure to a strong massage (151).

While Beverly is massaging Zeiger, she realizes his tattoo is an elaborate landscape. He says it’s Fealiyah, or “New Baghdad. Fourteen miles from the FOB. We were sent there to emplace a reverse osmosis water purification unit at JSS Al Khansa. To help Iraqi farmers feed their jammous […] Arabic for ‘water buffalo’” (153). Tiny, detailed people are inked within the landscape, and in the center is a bright red fire. Even though she’s applying light pressure, Zeiger winces as if he’s in horrible pain. She tells him that “[h]ealing hurts sometimes,” and she thinks about how “[p]eople can do bad damage to themselves” while trying to recover from pain (154). However, after a few moments, she feels his muscles relax.

Just as she’s about to end the massage, she “notices something stuck beneath her pinky. When she moves her hand she slides the thing across the sky on Zeiger’s shoulder, though the thing is still tethered to her finger like a refrigerator magnet. Beverly realizes this is the sun. She moves the sun around in the tattoo, but the rest of the tattoo remains the same. She is in disbelief and doesn’t know what to think.

Beverly sits at Hoho’s Family Restaurant, one of her favorites, and contemplates her age and what it means to age gracefully:

In truth, Beverly can never quite adjust to her age on the calendar; most days, she still feels like an old child. She spends quite a lot of time trying to communicate to strangers and friends alike that her life situation is something she chose: ‘I never wanted anything like that, you know, serious, long-term. No kids, thank God. My patients keep me plenty busy’ (157).

That night, she thinks about Derek.

During their next massage, Derek tells her why he got the tattoo: his best friend and fellow soldier, Arlo Mackey, died while on duty. He was in the car behind Zeiger when his car exploded. Mackey’s mother paid for Derek’s tattoo:

She lent each of us five hundred bucks. Four guys from Mackey’s platoon—Vaczy, Grady, Belok, me, we all got the same tattoo. Grady draws real good, and he was there that day, so he made the source sketch […] After we got the tattoo, we paid a visit to Mrs. Mackey. We lined up side by side on her yard in Lifa, Texas. To make a wall, like. Mackey’s memorial. Mrs. Mackey took a photograph (161).

The tattoo depicts the exact moment of Mackey’s death; the flame is Mackey, forever burning in the exploded car. Even Mackey’s 15-year-old sister got the same tattoo. Beverly is shocked that they would choose to forever remember him in this way, and thinks that she doesn’t “want the kid to have to carry this forever” (166).

Derek admits that he’s being treated for PTSD. He falls asleep, and when Beverly closes her eyes she can smell something burning and she sees flashbacks, like memories that aren’t her own; the tattoo seems to come to life and pull her into the moment. She wonders if it’s like how music gets stuck in her head for days at a time; maybe she’s somehow catching Derek’s memories.

The next time she sees Derek, he tells her the same story about how he got the tattoo. Beverly thinks that he’s messing with her, but she realizes he’s not. He tells her the same details, but this time he says that he killed Mackey because he saw a red wire on the road while they were driving, but he was too hot and lazy to stop and check it out. Instead, he drove over the wire, which detonated the bomb just in time for Mackey to drive over it. As he tells her this story, he starts crying on the massage table. While he’s crying, Beverly sees that “there in the middle of his back, a scar is swelling. Visibly lifting off the skin. […] Then it begins to darken and swell, as if plumping with liquid” (172).

She’s never seen it before, but she instinctually pushes down on it. It keeps moving, and every time she pushes on it “the scar springs right back into place like a stubborn cowlick” (173). Finally, she notices it’s gone. Derek has stopped crying and says that he feels amazing. After he leaves, she’s certain that the scar was the red wire and that she has erased it from his memory, thus erasing his guilt over his friend’s death.

The next time she sees Derek, he looks happier than she’s ever seen him. He’s like a new person, and he has no memory of ever seeing a red wire. That night, she wonders if she altered “some internal clock for him? Knock[ed] the truth off its orbit?” (177). But then she tries to think rationally: “Memories are inoperable. They are fixed inside a person, they can’t be smoothed or soothed with fingers” (177). She wonders if what she’s done is dangerous; she wonders if it’s bad for Derek to forget pieces of his past. Derek is better, but he tells Beverly that he had a dream about a red wire, demonstrating that the memory is at least still in his subconscious. She’s happy he’s doing better, but she “worries that all his memories of the real sands of Iraq might get pushed into the hourglass of dreams, symbols” (180).

It’s as if Derek and Beverly have switched memories. Derek is sleeping well, but Beverly is now up all night haunted by the flashbacks of Mackey’s death:“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” (182). She decides she’s happy because she knows she’s helping Derek.

Beverly talks on the phone to her sister, Janet. They get into a fight because Janet insists that she helped Beverly take care of their sick mom, but Beverly is adamant that Janet hardly helped at all. The fact that she and Janet are the only witnesses left to those moments with their sick mom scare her because “Beverly doesn’t know how to make sense of who she is without those facts in place” (188). She suddenly decides that she can’t distort Derek’s perception of his past any longer. She calls him and schedules an immediate massage. During the massage, she brings up Mackey, and Derek gets angry and defensive. He leaves in the middle of the massage. Beverly wonders if anything changed in his tattoo.

One of the veterans that’s been receiving massages at Dedos Magicos kills himself, and everyone is broken-hearted. Beverly hasn’t seen Derek in a long time, and the veteran’s bill that allowed veterans access to free massages gets shut down. After nearly three months, Derek calls Beverly late at night. He says that he’s in a lot of pain and needs to see her immediately. She agrees to meet him at Dedos Magicos as soon as they get off the phone.

Once they’re in their usual room, Derek takes his shirt off and “Beverly sucks in her breath—his back is in terrible shape”; it’s covered in bruises, with a huge protruding welt that “stretches diagonally from his hip bone to his shoulder” (197). He says that he just woke up this way. She massages him and bandages him up and “[g]radually, and then with the speed of windblown sands, the story of his tattoo begins to change” (198). He then begins to tell the story behind his tattoo, only it’s “completely different from any that’s come before. She listens to this and she doesn’t breathe a word. She has no desire to lift the gauze, check the tattoo against this new account” (199). He says that nobody died that day and that his tattoo “should hang in a church” because it’s “proof of a miracle” (199).

He tells Beverly thank you and kisses her. Beverly ends up making up with her sister, and goes to visit Janet and her children in Sulko. She can’t imagine what Derek’s tattoo looks like now, but she hopes he has “a story he can carry, and a true one” (201).