Night Soul and Other Stories (8 page)

But the phone rang—like clockwork. He didn’t feel flushed but she handed him the mirror and left him there, his face looked normal. An unusual second ring joined them, the machine wasn’t behaving.

Needles heel to arm, trajectories into the Qi marking targets all over his front, he listened to footsteps he knew quite well stop. She would be arrested before the shoji screen, its spiritual grid, the rosewood frame dyed black—and she was looking at the still water in the miniature pool, he could hear her thinking a divided thought under the eye of the caller, and his perspiring face in the mirror made him dizzy. It was a rival. She would be back. She was in the doorway.

“It was on,” said the man lying there in his underwear, feeling definitely something. “I’m back,” she said, unlike herself, “excuse the interruption.” “There are none.” “That’s a relief,” she said, attending to her needles (pelvis points not quite right for Kidney Meridian, he thought).

She’d forgotten and gone to answer the phone and something had changed. She was angry and this irritated her patient. No, it had never occurred to him, he said, fumbling over to her the mirror, closing his eyes—“but there
are
no pure interruptions.” “Your work,” she tried to say something, “your passion.” He could tell with his eyes closed as he felt a needle in his foot turn that she was trying (but why now?) to speak of him: “Aren’t you all about…?”

“Why does he call when I’m here?”

“At least it’s not one of those three-in-the morning jobs,” she said. Coarse for her.

Unlike her. Even a breach of something, but what? Keeping things separate. She hadn’t denied that it was him. But could the person know who was here? She had heard her caller in the phone ring. That was it.

The one who had fired her was what Xides suspected.

“No interruption,” he murmured, surprised. “Well, that’s one thing I’ve gotten out of this…what’s going on inside,” he said. “Cities that can access each of us?” she said, persisting.

“If we used what we had. Our materials.”

“Materials?” she said, fine-tuning a needle. “Cities,” she said. What was she doing? What was between them? “Yes, cities that can access—” (she had heard it somewhere)—

“I don’t love hearing myself.”

“People know who you are,” she said.

“But not
what
, God help me.” He was talking. What cities did she like?

She had a friend in Boston.

Xides had an idea, he told her, he needed to go back to where he’d had it first—something that needed a new material to build though it had been around a long time. An idea? she said. He despaired of it. What was the idea? she said. Yes, exactly, he said. “And someone takes what you thought up,” he said—changing the subject, seeing maybe vertigo was what the mirror had given him upside down—

“And turns it into something,” she said.

A schoolboy on a plane from Mozambique to Durban he would tell her about sometime, he said, whether he trusted her or not, he added meanly.

Me
?

He’d said too much. A spasm in his being, he’d betrayed his own confidence. Her intelligence and courage were all he trusted. They seemed to talk fast. We had Kidney Meridian, what was the other one? Triple Burner?

Several, she was saying: Triple Burner a name only, more a relation, not a shape, between lungs, kidney…spleen, small intestine…organs that regulate water—old ideas, she said offhandedly like someone else, a person he could almost hear. (A mentor? The person in Boston?) They talked about China, Qi, the effect on it of organs it passed through. Passed near? Or through the neighborhood of? He needed somehow to see what we were talking about. He kept after her though because he had been mean about the African boy incident.

“Have you seen your internist?” she said.

He opened his eyes as she freed a needle, then another. His silence like gravity. What were his vertebrae to her? He knew some anatomy. (Did she really?) His disks, the tilt of his pelvic bone, his tail bone, his overly forward aiming neck bone. Yet his mind. He had seen forty operations, he thought.

“What materials?” she said, and he was off like a fool. A material he told her about strong as steel, yet warmer feeling, adapted at great expense for a war museum for ultra-light roofing and siding that might move in the wind like aspens up the slope of a valley he knew in New Mexico—

New Mexico—?

This metal, it was even an element—titanium.

“Ti
tan
ium,” she said, recalling something. Why had he thought she would drop him? It was the phone. His mind she did take an interest in. Skin-deep, deeper still. She’d probably heard of titanium for implants? “That too,” she said. His own dentist, she used it he happened to know, who joined him in a half triathlon two years ago in Rhode Island that he finished in six and a half hours. Was he bragging? Valerie didn’t know—about what? She didn’t think so. She was holistic, he said. Cutting the swim time through keeping the body parallel—their coach called it vessel-shaping, he added. Parallel to what? Valerie asked, for she was a swimmer. To the water. Swimming at night, seeing less, knowing more, he said. Whose coach? she asked, his and the dentist’s?

Valerie sat him down at the desk one Tuesday. Why? He was ready with his tongue. She had her little book out, her thought marshalled. “No,” she changed her mind, “let’s go in there.” Later the phone rang and she came back from not answering it and spoke of his work as if the aborted call brought her these thoughts. What he’d spoken about abroad she seemed almost to know—a porous perimeter, structures at the edge of an outer neighborhood that you could pass through like a democracy field with unmarked lines of approach. Or wait, changing the subject for he didn’t trust himself—or her (though who would she tell—and how had she known?)—a rich family in Peking ages ago built a series of linked mansions, city within a city. He described it all—it stopped her—but the
idea
(for he hadn’t changed the subject after all) we could use and turn into its opposite, right here. For people. For city space might have no borders. It was all worked out, two sides of it, killer analysis. And would’ncha know, the military got hold of it. “So I’ve heard,” she said. (What had got him started? Her? Her call? A dim scrape of moving on the floor above, like furniture dragged?) “Think of all those floors in skyscrapers interrupting circulation or here in your own building even for privacy’s sake.”

“Privacy,” she said, doing something (but what had she meant,
So I’ve heard
—“Sky’s the limit on
rent
, I’m afraid—well, there was Leonardo,” she said. (Wasn’t she stabilized? Not this building.)

“Leonardo?” like a phone ringing a remark half recalled in his crowded life then gone. “His ideas got used,” she began.

“If you’re any good they do,” he said.

She would remember that, she said. “Pass it on,” he said, “if your ideas
aren’t
any good they get used just the same.” He mentioned a group down in—he was just talking—he stopped. Well, no, he would be talking to a bunch of—far from here—(“You have your fans,” she said almost like a bitch) and like a…like a…he would spot among the two hundred a clutch of military in the middle of the auditorium, a territory within, out of uniform but you
knew
. Had they come because of what they would do when they went back to civilian life (if ever)? “But no.”

“Like a
what
?” said the acupuncturist.

“A stain.” He was not just talking.

“You think war is life’s indispensable risk,” she said. (How did she know that?) His correspondent friend called it naïve of him—“what are you doing night-walking in a war zone?” his friend complained. Naïve? Xides at least
knew
he didn’t know what was going on.
Naïve
? It got him going. When he had heard an on-site American colonel swear that better bombing in Bosnia would have dropped the bridges into the river, dissolved the infra (coupled with serious offensive hacking)—war over.

Then you get into real self-defense structure, Xides told the surprised colonel.

Naïve? He was smarter than others who were embedded
in
the events, these operations against insurgents, and if he didn’t make himself clear…“You do,” said the woman between him and the light. Was it some dreary healing he heard in her listening voice?—“We must talk,” he remembered later she’d said. It disappointed him. But one thing he was not was naïve. So she could forget
Naïve
Meridian, if there was one. She made a sound, like the softest vanishing laughter.

Because here it was Tuesday again. In the dumb progress of his treatment, Could Qi flood you? he asked. It was not really like that—a river, she said. His eyes closed, he dismantled the adjacent daybed opening the damn thing stretching the material. (Was Qi a two-way street? And why “
day
bed”? Why Leonardo? And e-mail—was she too good for e-mail?)

“You said you were technically (?)—in what you wrote me—”

He knew what it was, her trick not in the needles only.

“—a
widower
(?)” she said. What he’d written for her had been all things he
did
, not was. He traveled, he spoke, went to the theater, because he thought performers had something (he’d written her). They were quick, crazy to be up there, foolish, quite true, gutsy. He kayaked in the North River, good upper-body technique he’d been told until his back acted up. Drank socially, and too much doubtless, but held it. He ate anything. Could manage no more than four and a half hours of sleep at best, made night rounds with a police lieutenant. He still grew miniature Asian trees in a small lighted space of his house—or they grew. His girlfriend had served as a naval officer and now painted large paintings of animals that sold. All this he had written down quite truthfully. He had killed a person once and did not recommend that mode of self-defense. He had his pride, didn’t let people do things for him for nothing, he’d written, and he reckoned all this didn’t tell his holistic healer much she could use. A lesson to him. He liked her, he’d added at the end.

“So you were technically still…?” Yes. “Married.” Yes, he had a daughter nineteen, away at college. “
She
makes you a widower?” “We were divorcing.” The logic popped his ears coming in for a landing, was it the acupuncture? Inside of right knee local-calling the heel or long-distancing collarbone? Limbs mixing from inside surprised at what got said.

“Getting unmarried,” said the young woman. “Oh boy,” he said. “Was it convenient this way?” “Not for my daughter.” His foot he realized later hurt. “Who exactly left who?” “Exactly.” “Were you lucky to be left?” One of them had the upper hand for a moment, was it because Valerie had gone too far?

“Was that it?” he said.

“
You
left but then she did it better?”

“It saved some money.”

The acupuncturist contemplated his belly like a thing. “You were lucky to be left I mean. But no going back.”

“That’s divorce. Like getting out of bed in the morning.”

“We know about that.”

That she would speak like an authority on this made you wary. “She was not interested,” he said.

“In?” “What I do.”

“Why should she be?”

“It’s your goddamn
wife
.” Xides reached for a needle in his belly to take it with his thumb and finger, Valerie intercepted, and he gripped her fingers like an animal biting. He expelled what was in him, all the needles and Qi and blood but here’s to the needles they were still in there helping him. He raised his knee to reach another needle but listened to her: “My partner’s knee, sinuses, headaches I could care about, aching back, his habits. Him.” “Him.” “Pain in the leg I can help, stomach, foot, head. I don’t have to imagine a city he is planning for Africa or down the street.”

“She was mending things at the last moment,” he said wondering who was the “he” planning the city. “Your wife mending things?” “My daughter more.”

“Between you and her mother.” “No, between
them
.” “That’s different.” Valerie had spoken.

“A floppy hat she wanted her to have. She was…”

Valerie reached out a book from the bookcase, female and professional in her single motion, so collected and expecting credit for it. “Your wife (?).” “Yes, she was graceful.” “And long after,” said the young woman, whatever that meant.

“I might sit us down and ask what was going on,” he said.

“You?”

“I felt cursed.”

“You believe in such things?”

“Saying them.”

Dismissing a city for Africa, was it Xides she meant? Would she know such a thing?

But “down the street”—who was that? Some small-scale chore he’d also undertaken once. What had he told her? She had said he had good teeth.

She put the book aside.

“Your own partner ignores your work, your acupuncture, and it wouldn’t matter to you? Your goddamn life.”

“Any more than you have to like the patient,” she said.

“You’re trying to impress me. Have you ever fired—?”

“It’d be me I fired.”

“—one here in your little home.”

“I like the windows. I look out into the street when I’m on the phone (?).”

It was always a lesson, he said.

“Like the rent,” said the young woman, at his side again. “You people want too much,” she said.

Well that was something, he said.

“No.” She laid her hand upon his forehead. Did she smooth his hair back? He couldn’t believe her. “Do you breathe?” she said, and as if she weren’t mad at him: “The gods have laid on him a restless heart that will not sleep,” was what she said.

It chilled him, it was pretty silly. Or was she, an unprotected tenant he happened to know (and maybe high-rent), meditating some parting of the ways? It was a mistake to think of her belonging to him for this hour twice a week, and he actually had not made that mistake. He was adjustable, even if his daughter knew his schedule and when he went to acupuncture. He breathed a droll breath out. He was real anyhow. Had Valerie changed the subject?