The
General's
Masseur
A Short Story
By Jeffrey Benson
*****
"For the love of God,
of your children, and of the civilization to which
you belong, cease this madness. You have a duty not just
to the
generation of the present—you have a duty to
civilization's past,
which you threaten to render meaningless, and to its
future, which you
threaten to render nonexistent. You are mortal men. You
are capable of
error. You have no right to hold in your hands—there is
no one wise or
strong enough to hold in his hands—destructive powers
sufficient to put an
end to civilized life on a great portion of our planet.
No one should wish to
hold such powers. Thrust them from you. The risks you
might thereby assume
are not greater—could not be greater—than those which you
are now
incurring for all of us."
— George F. Kennan
(Garmisch, Germany, October 1,1980),
in Sketches from a Life, Pantheon,
1989.
I wake
up at nights, thinking about the General. I light a candle by my bed and watch
the shadows grow thick and fuzzy. The wind rattles my window. I pull myself
into a fetal position. My thoughts run like squirrels around a tree. Somehow I
might have been able to do more with the General, as much as anyone citizen. I
remember to breathe deeply, and to let my thoughts stream through the night.
I gave the General his
first back massage at my studio. His secretary made the appointment. He arrived
on time, wearing his uniform. He was a large-boned man of perhaps 50, maybe a
young-looking 55. With a small smile his eyes searched my studio, the candles
and rugs, soft piano music, burning incense. He didn't say much. I watched him
unbutton his collar and his cuffs as he walked into the dressing room. I told
him to put on a clean robe, and to untie it when he lay down on the massage
table.
He
seemed comfortable with the silence. I told him to talk only as much as he felt
during the massage, to tell me if there was pain, tenderness, or pleasure, to
use it as a time and place to relax, to let his muscles and his mind uncoil, to
float like a rowboat on a lake.
His
back was thickly muscled and tight, as most men's are. A woman's back often
feels like long pulls of taffy, a man's often like concrete just before it
hardens, barely flexible. I worked for a long time on the muscles of his
midback, which were wound like tight shoelaces. The muscular tension was
inhibiting his breathing. I ran my hands in long strokes up the ridges on
either side of his spine, pulled my hands across his shoulders, and then pulled
them down along his sides. His lungs expanded more fully. He made no sounds. I
thought he was concentrating completely on the movements of my hands.
When
I was finished, I told him to get dressed again at his own pace and that I
would be in the reception room, drinking tea. He could join me there. He
arrived quickly, again working on the buttons of his collar and cuffs. The
General declined a drink, paid me in cash from a money clip in his pants
pocket. He told me that he enjoyed the massage greatly.
"I
could swing some more business your way with the other officers," he said,
but turned away and added, ''I'd like to keep you to myself for now."
I
didn't get up when he left, just waved from my chair. He wasn't going to keep
me for himself—I had plenty of other clients. Don't worry, General, I won't ask
you to hand out my business cards at the Pentagon.
The
General came for a massage once a week. He seemed comfortable and coolly
controlled, and he never said anything beyond simple hellos and good-byes. I
like to know more about my clients, their jobs, their families, their hobbies.
It helps my work. A receptionist, working under a continual barrage on
interruptions, was fond of long, seemingly endless massage strokes that began
at her coccyx and many luxurious moments later finished at the base of her
skull with my thumbs rotating in small circles. I have a bus driver who uses
his hands to grip all day, and I gently pull on his fingers and knead his
palms.
The
General offered no inspirational morsels on which to nourish the massage. I began
to slyly question his secretary when she called to confirm his appointments:
Was the General squeezing me in between meetings? Was he at the parade grounds?
Did he seem particularly anxious about the movement of troops in Central
America? She didn't know, I should ask him, and she wasn't really sure.
Left
to my own intuition, I imagined his back to be a battlefield. Barbed wire
circled his shoulder blades. Deep trenches were dug on the borders of his
spine, an airstrip was being built in the small of his back. I sought to bring
harmony to the conflicts among his nerves, muscles, and bones. My hands were a
peacekeeping battalion, they were a USO show with Bob Hope featuring Miss
America, my hands were a cease-fire. Over time I never succeeded in
establishing a lasting peace, only in reducing the casualties. He was breathing
from deeper in his abdomen, and the range of motion with his right arm had
increased.
Then
one day he was pictured in the newspaper, standing next to the president,
discussing military strategy. The situation in Central America was unstable,
the president said. The General was in charge of many soldiers. The president
would not stand by idly while another small country flexed its muscles. Troops
were being armed. Everyone was holding their breath.
I
worked aggressively on the General's back. I rolled muscles like tanks over the
edge of his waist, sabotaged the fortresses in his shoulders. I would level all
resistance. If it were possible to delay the war by making the General too
relaxed to command, it would be done here. For the first time the General
moaned during the massage, and then he asked me to please be more gentle.
I
felt stupid. My work was massage, and I was doing it poorly, ignoring the
sensitivity my hands had developed. My hands could liberate his energy, but
that was all. If I wanted to stop him from going back to work, I should stab
him in the back. I considered stopping the massage. My hands were resting on
his midback. They rose and fell with his tight breaths. His eyes were closed.
The beating of his heart gently rumbled. He was nearly as inflexible and rigid
as he had been on his first visit. I finished the massage with firm strokes
that would loosen his diaphragm.
He
came more often the next weeks. He was busy with war preparations. The best I
could do for his back now was to maintain whatever flexibility I could. He made
no significant improvements. He stored the pressure of his decisions in his
back the way dogs bury bones and then forget where they are. On television his
movements were rapid and disjointed. The president looked as if he had on a
corset as he explained the circumstances surrounding the bombing of a school.
We were a reflex action away from war. The entire population of the Western
Hemisphere was in need of a massage.
A
good massage was supposed to open the heart. I was up during the night. I had
my hands on one of the most crucial backs during a world crisis, and the more I
worked the closer we stepped toward war. The General was only breathing
shallowly from his upper chest, and he had sharp pains in his shoulders. I felt
incompetent.
In
the morning I found out that the United States had launched an invasion. The
General canceled his appointment. His secretary did not want to schedule
another time.
"Not
until there's more stability," she said.
I
spent the afternoon with friends and family. We watched the news and drank
wine. Phone calls were made to join a group of people gathering by the White
House, quietly protesting the invasion. I stayed home alone, hoping for a phone
call from the General that didn't come.
He
had his next massage three days later. By then, more than 8,000 people had been
killed, 50,000 driven from their homes, the number of wounded unknown. It was
not going to be a quick war. The little country had secretly mined its harbor,
and at the height of the invasion, four United States ships blew up. The
backbone of our military presence was snapped. The president asked for more
troops.
As
always, the General was punctual. His back was as tight as any back I had ever
seen, as if his muscles were the cables to a bridge, and life was a column of
tanks rolling up the roadway. His shoulders heaved with every breath—I worked
on opening the bottom of his torso, but it was heavily barricaded and my hands
tired. I concentrated on being gentler. There was a spot at the base of his
neck that was flexible, and I rotated his head slowly in my hands, stretching
the muscles down into his shoulders. The General was momentarily more relaxed.
I couldn't infiltrate the tension in any area below his collarbone, so I worked
on his neck, his jaw, and forehead. I could see the muscles at the junction of
his two lips yield, and his mouth lightly opened.
I
looked at the clock—we were 30 minutes beyond the end of the appointment. I
roused the General and apologized. He would be late for a meeting; perhaps I
had delayed the war effort for a half hour. He thanked me for the massage, and
I continued to apologize for delaying him. He shook his head, told me that he
appreciated my work. His body was so stiff that when he shook his head I
thought it might snap off. He was working hard to breathe as he put on his coat
and scarf.
The
United States launched a second invasion the next day. Planes, parachutes, PT
boats, missiles. I sat at my kitchen table, listening to the radio. Reporters
were not allowed to accompany the invading forces. The announcer filled the
time with background information on the decision-makers in the military. Then
he interrupted with a bulletin that the General had collapsed at the Pentagon
late yesterday—word was just in that he had died. His lungs had become too weak
to breathe, as if they had been strangled by the neighboring muscles. The
announcer said he was 63 years old.
I
felt numb, sad and empty. I would never massage that back again. He must have
left my studio, had his meeting to launch the invasion, and then stopped
breathing. I called his secretary and found out the time of the funeral. I
wanted to be there.
Except for the women dressed in black, the
preacher and the gravediggers, I was the only person not in military uniform.
The
General's wife cried as she was given the United States flag from the coffin.
The vice president was supposed to arrive, but I never saw him. I wondered if
the other generals knew about his weak lungs.
One
of the women approached me.
"You
must be the massage therapist. I'm the General's secretary."
We
stood silently together as the coffin was lowered and prayers said. The prayers
were caught in the wind and shredded on the trees above.
"He
depended on your massages," the secretary told me as we walked toward our
cars. "He said they made him feel peaceful. Pretty funny, huh?" she
smiled but did not laugh.
"I
think I gave him a massage just before he died," I said.
"He
probably would have died sooner if not for you. He wasn't healthy enough to be
in charge of this war. He was trying to convince the others to hold off on the
invasion, but the plans were inflexible, set in concrete. You know, he tried to
get some of them to go to you for massages."
"No,"
I said. "He said he didn't want to do that."
"Well,
some of them sure could use one. That's what the General used to say. Look at
them." She nodded her head at the other generals. "So stiff."
I watched them climb down into their
limousines as if the cars were bomb shelters and the road paved with
terrorists. They roared off to the war room.
"Do
me a favor, please" I said, pulling some dog-eared business cards from my
coat pocket. "Could you hand these out to them?"
She
took the cards from my hand. The war was escalating.
