Night Soul and Other Stories (10 page)

Just in time watched by early headlights of a car unparking, he locks the bike’s wheel and the diagonal down-tube of its frame to a stanchion, unclips the Cateye odometer, pockets it. The helmet under his arm eyed by the Cuban doorman who has seen it all bears a whole convex potential of races and demolitions, roller blades and training wheels and once a good lay in the countryside without ever taking it off: a future curving up over the mind, smuggling into the China trip, you hope, a look at both (rather than just the better known of) the two giant dams inland after the Beijing stop where Xides, professionally summoned, would shortly meet his friend the correspondent to inspect the 768-foot-high A tower, in essence less upward than a colossal frame through whose limbs, jogged and trapezoidal, circulate TV production studios, broadcasting, media, God knows what all allegedly non-hierarchical around the multi-D window cavity through which is to be seen depending where you are the more and the less, city, nation, a blank, the frame’s glazed skin of international sign language like the bracing wrapping in the façade plane holding the building up—

—yet waiting for him back over the polar cap a return flight he looked forward to already—a homecoming next month felt this evening against his arm and ribs, the helmet’s hard arc, cupped rim, and the hand of the acupuncturist whom he wanted, sometimes in friction, discord, mystery, to please, who yet had picked up from him cheap surely beyond what any healer, restored in some corner of her own seeking, might learn. Though why had she imagined him bicycling to her?

“Late today,” said Nuevo.

At Xides’ greeting—his stupid question “She there?”—did Nuevo roll his eyes letting you in on something that had happened? This building.
People.
An abyss above.

A knife missing from the magnetic strip in the dark kitchenette. A small black-and-white TV he didn’t recall on the living room floor next to the tall plants that had shed two white blooms waiting to be swept up. A
Time Out
magazine on his chair by the table near the foyer. A current in the apartment asking, asking—enfolding the voice that as he came in through a front door propped open with the Yellow Pages in the way yet letting him in, had directed him to go into the treatment room, a dresser drawer not perfectly closed, a ladder folded against her closet door, two couch pillows belonging to the day bed adrift against a book case. Though where was she as he took off his clothes and his glasses, as he tried to get his back to flatten down on the table pad and its sheet.

And the Yellow Pages?

After a time, a sound from the other room, of trust. His and Hers, a reverie while he awaited her steps.

The correspondent, interrupting him last week, had asked particularly about the acupuncturist, the little terrorist—Xides’ curiously lowered voice, once described in print by his friend as
physically inside
his thought, at that moment brainstorming disaster housing. These blue tarps the Commission pitched by the thousand “that looked like swimming pools from a chopper—refugees on the move inside their own
borders
nowadays—”

One outa three hundred homeless globally, the listener puts in for Xides (worked up) to add: “We can do better.” You’re sounding like a politician, the listener put in against his friend’s thoughts: “Afghan, Iraqi—” (Indonesia Colombia Bosnia, the listener put in, hearing some new trouble looking for words from years ago almost, this architect originally)—“superadobe would work better for godsake, Sam, local-earth with barbed wire for mortar.” These grain-storage bags of hemp they recycled as tents, the Jap firm—if conditions changed you could add on a little four-foot wing—post-explosion, post-quake, post-flood, post-contamination, post-epidemic, post-
words
, post—The correspondent would remember after “X” was gone—but who’s this “
we
” that could “do better”? the correspondent wanted to know—only kidding—leaving the next morning for China a few days ahead of Xides. Only to get thrown back at him by his old friend strangely exercised, “Where’s this
X
stuff coming from, Sam?”

“Un
known
,” was the reply—Xides an intriguing unknown in the equation of our future together, the correspondent had written before and would again, moved by his old friend who, when asked about “the little terrorist” that acupuncturist “of yours”—had said the
scale
was getting to him. The scale? From inside. Ah. “My own.” Large?

And
small.

X would mesh the fingers of one hand through those of the other, edgy, maybe just that everything you do eventually gets torn down, hearing lately coming back from the tactical jungle civil dreams of his own on urban circulation picked up only to be implemented by military listeners, that is to draw blood yet in terms of economy and political stability maybe improving in fact his original thoughts on horizontal stretch. How motion might, decentralized, shift the “syntax” of a city, this new breed had it, improvise access flows to open insurgents to penetration where even state-of-the-art defenses against nuclear ends are “architecture” nowadays, perhaps even the contemplation of de-spare-parted sewage plants, depowered to leave sewage pools in the streets and river levels low.

Neighborhood renewal where it’s the neighbors that get replaced. And who
were
the insurgents? Imam followers such as
mutah
believers in temporary marriage? Other Muslims who condemn festival dramas and art depicting humans? Suicide strategists or self-anointed Gospel free-enterprisers who knew the drill? He explained magnetic water as a material to the correspondent who confessed that “acu”puncture always suggested “aqua” to him though this was incorrect; but it told Xides that man to man the correspondent was thinking about what went on at those sessions.

His eyes shut to hear her steps. Did he almost place that old Sam-sung TV? A thing on the move in the other room as if it were near the ladder in
this
room, he thought, seeing double, keener then than an instrument an unholy scent of cut orange came with her hand and a faint rinse of detergent. She asked how he’d been. As if it were longer than this past Tuesday.

Did he want to take off his watch, was an order, not a question. How was the pain in the small of the back and did he feel it ever in his belly? They needed to talk. It was her breath he smelt orange on too.

Taking his watch, Any fever? Why did she ask, needling his ear now? She thought she’d seen a slight swelling in his right ankle last time.

Her nostrils, her tongue tip concentrating upon her upper lip, her color looking back at him so close, he put his fingers up to her cheek for a second (unprofessional of him): What were The Yellow Pages doing propping open the door? he wondered. “And a piece of newspaper keeping the place,” was all she said, seeming to agree. The magazine, the ladder, her dresser drawer out, the daybed pillows not put back he didn’t mention.

He reminded her he would be going away in a week. “Voyager,” she said.

And he would have to temporarily stop treatment but would take the moxa with him.

Back where it came from, she said.

He might need some more.

He could buy the sticks there, she said.

His blood metered a certain risk now where he lay, putting things together.

For a time, she tended her needles like a planner. She took her time with kidney points, splitting him down the middle. An ice fisherman. Who the hell knew what she did? Track him? A bulletin-boarder with push-pins. Today he never got the small of his back flat. “Who the hell knows what you’re doing?” Xides said, for she was speaking and barely paused to think and smile with him, there was something coming, a lie lay somewhere between them today, a good lie maybe.

The needles in him, body, face, and he didn’t know how to hear the compliment he knew was coming, and shut his eyes. A law bending his way unsummoned, and now she said, quite out of character, for he would always remember, “You had an impact on me.”

He’d been meaning to make up for that, he said.

“Why don’t you just unload that funny stuff,” she said, like that was what she wanted to say.

“Whether I trusted you or not, I said, which was mean. In fact, I needed to tell someone. Well, I did tell one person—about the African kid but—”

“No, no,
I’d
been meaning,” she began—

“I really wanted
you
to hear.”

“Someone who knows you—” she interrupted and he thanked her, thinking it was
she
disguised as “someone” when presently he would see what she’d said was someone whom he might not recall; while Xides didn’t catch between his own words what she’d tried to tell him at first. “I really meant to tell you. The flight from Mozambique? A boy on the plane.”

It didn’t matter, she said, at work now.

“On the plane a talk we had, this is four or five years ago, he was all worked up, God he was smart, what I’d said in Maputo that morning, all of fourteen, I could have adopted him, just challenging me on public nested structures in folded grids and a house I designed under a river (?), one flow making new flows interrelating rooms…but city planning, I thought.”

“…?”

When Xides described this Friday appointment to the correspondent a week later thousands of miles from New York, was it Valerie giving him like a massage while he talked, or his hair-cutter…? He didn’t think so. A presence he detected here not hers alone like small things slowing down—acceleration nearing a new state. Or just all she kept to herself, discretion of course.

And how the phone rang not in the middle but at the end.

A city fluxed of spaces renewable and dispensable, he had said in his speech, like a continuous outward-and-inward-breathing being—between flesh and liquid, both. “So if your house as you said, Mr. x-ay
deez
, is just somewhere on the way to somewhere else,” the boy later on the plane couldn’t contain himself, “the city you plan fluid from district to district, for those who live there to move and mingle—that is what you said, inventing a city for us that should be porous in its multiple perimeters, social, dynamic, made from our drought-sickened soil, sir, should I thank you?”

“It was hypothetical, not just for here,” the man protested—

“—and to be eem-
pro
-veesed each day, if memory serves,” said the boy, fourteen, who had swallowed an idea or two and taken them to points past what the visiting thinker himself might have foreseen—yet the boy himself unwary how he sounded in the presence of others, “—but multiple really means
mult
iplying with you, sir, and you have done the math and maybe you would show me please.”

In his recollection she plucked a needle from his instep like a mistake he was sure or an experiment (oh he knew her), and in his ear cartilage he felt a fact that had always been there, like a pair of ears, counterpart hearings. Like why do you tell someone something?

To hear how it comes out.

He waited for the correspondent as their train wound through a steep and foggy valley to say something, but there was nothing to say at that moment, though Sam often knew what Xides thought.

That kid, singled out to travel with the distinguished visitor down to Durban not four but
five
years ago after a talk he had given—what a talker himself, that boy, with a couple of languages plus his own and Portuguese, though from a remote township—angular, disputatious, thin as a runner—over six feet tall in the aisle before he bent himself into his seat by the window in which though this was his first flight he had little interest, for it was Xides or what Xides had had to say that so exercised him. Valerie had seemed to pay little attention except to ask how the boy had been chosen.

“But your house it is your
home
you cannot treat it—” interrupted the Army officer, voice rising like no white person’s voice personally and richly who hung over the back of the seat ahead drawn by the talk as well as her job, which appeared to be escorting to Durban and back this boy with the mind and fierce charm and infrastructural impatience—“it is not just the
city
—” the Major smiled with her cheeks, her teeth—

—interrupted now in
her
turn by the round-headed interpreter in the aisle (whose services were not required) who leaned over to point out the famous gorge as the plane, banking to show the “1000 Hills,” began its approach pattern. The land coming up if it could only be left alive.

“If he had been my kid,” Xides added in his account of all this past and present to the correspondent…The distinguished visitor with this one last stop before he turned homeward, listened especially to the boy, and peered across him out the window at the tilt of the land as the boy completed his analysis, “So with all these thoughts you could plan your city, reinvent its corridors—
d’accord
—in a dynamic field locked into feedback operating a web without a weaver. But Mister “x-ay
deez,
” the long fingers tapping the man’s shirt sleeve, “with your city theory one could also move in and take
over
a city.” All the mileage spent for what—was it the look in the lovely eyes of the Major exclaiming, “
Could
they
do
” that produced in Xides an unprecedented spasm or was it a moment later? “Maybe you misunderstand me,” Xides had protested. “Structure is
motion
.” “What is that, to misunderstand?” said the boy.

“I would not forget this whatever he meant,” he told the acupuncturist engrossed in her work, who said, “He meant was he just to give you back what you wanted.”

“War
is
architecture, sir,” the boy had offered proudly, “it’s not only
everything
.”