Night Soul and Other Stories

  It was another day and he phoned his internist and topped his bike tires up and got himself across the Bridge to Brooklyn to visit the compressed straw paneling in a new auditorium of his and the exposed recycled steel Smartbeams for one suspended mezzanine floor. His daughter at her college in Ohio did not take an interest in this old school she had commuted to as a child, cabbed and subwayed by him at seven-thirty in the beginning. A year later put on the bus, and as they pulled away at the window talking to her friend, her father standing out on the curb almost but not quite ignored. And now he had been consulted again about the sustainable “green” building at her college—which she kept her distance from—his part in it.

  A sketch reformulating the position of a hundred and fifty sensors which were not even his job, constantly monitoring flows of energy, cyclings of matter. To reweave the human presence was how they put it that he had been asked to advise on, but later an equation had come to him like Nervi’s parabola and bare, sincere roofs, prefab beams, salt warehouse and Naval Academy swimming pool to beget another equation. Xides despaired of his own thoughts. When would she stop changing her major? It had been music; would it be again? He was tied up in double deadlines with cash value people were phoning about. The fish farming reservoir shapes networked for sluiced storm-water the filters didn’t yet quite track. Proud, though, of a high-end commune in eastern Washington, where his single-wall structures convey recycled light with this new water so far an industrial secret.

  Warmed by the great skylight, she might have been clocking him, lap after lap, the Asian in the deck chair with next to nothing on, a passing plane aglint far away, when he stood up at the shallow end and felt her dark glasses at once beamed away from him. She was knitting—and young, her very thighs thinking at this moment; and not a resident, he felt. He placed her. Designer? Chemist? What was it coming to him, a movie theater lobby two nights ago he was certain; yet, now he thought of it, also lab offices at Einstein in the Bronx where, on his way to the caf in the next building over—a prolific little cactus, its pads and joints overflowing the pot and pausing to rest on a formica desk top to make their way along and rising like uncanny structure in motion, suppliant, stubborn, succulent—she’d been behind him as he left the Mag Res building with half the equation.

  He pushed off for four more lengths of the pool, Sam not showing maybe, something happening here to Xides, Xides letting it, his back supple deep inside. Three schoolboys, two skinny, one fat, arrived from school here at a serene, serious mid-Manhattan rooftop club, were getting horsey at the edge as he made his turn at the far end. Until, halfway down, he was not moving but, face down, arms stretched like a diver’s, he might have been thought knocked dead by this explosion of plunging boys coming himself to rest eyes open into five feet of water luminous with particles, absorbing under the surface the violent ring of cries from the kids shoving and killing each other as he had felt their plunge shift the volumes about him, and his hearing; felt approach his eyes through refracted glimmer a saving lure but he saw it was also in his eyes too, atoms there stunned to note the water mobilizing certain thousands of those (sun-saving) bacteria (at his bidding even?) that make chains of crystals inside them into magnets to point themselves toward the pole, light’s very shadow.

  A second explosion acoustical and dreamed by the water that filled his ears signaled in both of them not just the boys bombing the adjacent lane and the woman up on her feet (for in a corner of his eye he saw below her belly button her tiny bikini bottom’s waist and crotch practically converging—as his body the morning of Hutong could be subject to surveillance but not his half-lost vague thought of architect assembling solitary before Grace found him) before he himself brought his feet down now onto pool bottom like a tuck starting a back flip and reared, water pouring off his shoulders, startling the boys, surging over to hoist himself out, find his towel and flip open his cell five days home from China, though he had biked past Valerie’s early in the morning, run a red light hearing the doorman’s call behind him, and hoping the acupuncturist hadn’t been expecting his phone call, heard that thought given the lie now at poolside by, to his amazed dripping ear, the 617 number you were invited to leave messages at by a woman’s voice whose every word sounded like a beginning, as exact as an idea might be good and also vague, like low wood structures in the old courtyards of the Hutong, the settled strength of peanut oil frying, the half-baked idea he returned there for.

  617 was Boston.

  She had moved. He had been in China. His gaze reached that far but the Asian woman across the pool believed it was her he saw, and he said, above his cell, “Mag Res building” meaningless words above his cell for her to read or some bugger listening in to hear, water riding off his skin, his towel around his neck male and executive, several places at once, probing the woman in the glasses. And suspecting surveillance and hoping to see his friend at any moment, he recalled our own projection of the insides of the dam and almost regretted missing acupuncture the day before his flight to China because his daughter had needed him just at that hour.

  To meet her at the bank (she was so busy). It wasn’t money. Was it just him she wanted? Though he brought money up. Which made her mad all over again. Really because the “older” boyfriend (whom she knew her father didn’t like—Hey, check it out) had decided that at twenty-seven he needed some space. It had started the night her dad had come to dinner, she told him. Then later they took a walk and bickered about the dinner and heard that explosion and had an argument about it, lights on in the windows of an apartment house they passed (“And it started to rain?” he said, and his daughter so fine in her wretchedness, which would pass, looked at him sharply—Yes, she had looked up into the rain, she liked rain, and people at their windows she took them in at that instant and for some reason wished she could have phoned her dad but by then he was somewhere on the bike path racing downtown and she had Mom’s hat that old floppy job in her hand and put it on, and her companion said, Your shoes (meaning, Why do you wear those heels?), and she stopped and had a look.

  And giving her father a nice afternoon peck on the lips, a few words like all her little habits stayed with him as they parted after exactly (he could not bring himself to say it to her) forty-four minutes, “Not going back there,” was what Viv said with all that sweeping subtlety yet to be lived into, for he had heard himself saying those words once to someone.

  So it was for his daughter that he had let the Friday acupuncture appointment go with a phone message. He would see Valerie when he came back from China but was on his way, she should know, to finding himself a Recycled Man. In which, as he recognized it at once as a lie, or an attempted one, there spread from chest to scalp, brain to instep its material truth as well.

  Xides on the far side of the pool went to greet Sam in his street clothes with the palm of his free hand raised but the Asian woman had gathered up her magazines and vanished into the ladies’ locker room, leaving Xides with suddenly the full equation of how architecture out of your very body puts together times.

  “You see that?” A shadowy band like a line drawn with a broad chisel-tip pencil enlarged with a cartoonist’s water brush was what the doctor pointed to on the luminous screen. “That’s a second lesion on top of the first which would have scared us with your back you now tell me about, if this second hadn’t appeared, but it looks like—(can you beat that?) no telling when, but…”

  “Like what?” There’d been no reason to do the test, take these pictures, except the patient’s faith in some fly-by-night acupuncturist’s opinion, but…

  “We’re seeing a second lesion which sets off this, this growth. That’s new organ we’re looking at. Kidney. Come back in four weeks. Damn.”

  “Damn?”

  “’Zif you’d had liver surgery.”

  The correspondent knew the Asian woman but not from the pool. She was attached to the Chinese consulate.

  Xides’ back seemed better. His daughter had long ago inherited his earl
y rising. Now he had inherited her early-to-bed.

  A couple passed. The woman on her cell.

  Xides called the 617: “You were on the phone that night of the explosion, it was out on the North River, I could tell, and you were at the window looking down into the street, and a girl—a young woman—walking by looked up. It was raining and you were on the phone and she put on her hat. You said something to the guy on the other end of the phone, and he hung up on you. True?”

  The correspondent did his homework. He remembered what you said. And he knew his man. The chemistry of materials and the melancholy wonder that they are us.

  The metropolitan form in Africa (Xides would quote someone whose name he’d forgotten), reveals itself through its fugitive discontinuities. Look at Joburg. The unconscious of a city. Strata, residues, layers become provisional, precarious, in times of…what was the word?

  “That boy who was arrested when you landed in Durban?”

  “He was behind me, with the woman, the major who’d intervened to forestall something potentially incorrect the boy was on the way to saying.”

  And on the tarmac you were welcomed.

  “They took him in by another door while I was shaking hands with a couple of…I called to the major, who…the boy stopped and looked over his shoulder, people taking him by the arm, I hailed him, I don’t know what I said, I don’t know.”

  And he?

  “Words of mine. To the effect that—”

  To the what?

  “—‘urban design becomes repression,’ he cried out, I think, and was hustled away—‘architecture,’ I heard, ‘fantasy,’ I think, ‘the city becomes’—”

  The acupuncturist had said a month ago she could imagine what came next.

  Xides had made a fuss, been stunned, had inquired, and it was explained to him, and he wanted to cancel his appearance but didn’t.

  In the evening Valerie’s return message was waiting for him, her voice more for him at first than the words: “It was a floppy hat…and she took it off right after she put it on and kicked one leg out as if to show her foot, and she looked up into the rain. At my building, I think. And she stopped and the guy she was with kept walking. And she stood there and turned and walked in the other direction.”

  The metropolis becomes the place where, across warped space, the superfluity of objects is converted into a value in itself, the correspondent had put down. X he had called a “mystery man…interrogating self-doublingly”—a phrase cut by the editor at The Economist in favor of direct quoting.

  Xides stopped to say Hi to Nuevo. What had Nuevo called out to him when he was on his bike day before yesterday?

  “They left this.” A taped-closed shopping bag, double-bagged with XIDES in white gel ink on a black Post-it. “They did?” It was sort of heavy and you felt a subtle balance. He saw the green light of Valerie’s machine in the waiting eye of the doorman. The infinitely small appointment book with handwriting to match. Smaller and smaller, seeing then but a corner of it. This between them an angle an algorithm could turn back into the whole thing, like a sliver of kidney his whole body and more. Valerie would not have left the package.

  Clea was there when he opened it. It was the binnacle compass, gimbal-mounted and of some value. You trip over it, you win it. He would not go back there. He could not think of another message to leave. He had told Valerie nobody had fired her. He had said, You don’t go back there, and she had said, You don’t. She had taken his advice in a form he now saw had always been there.

  So was it he who had sent her back to Bob Whey?

  Clea set the compass on a counter on newspaper and wiped it. It was greasy, it was filthy, she said. And then, “Do you need this?” she said, meaning want. A scrap of paper half-taped with a frayed strip of duct-tape to the bottom of the housing. “An honor,” it read, and Xides unpeeled it, and laughed at what he found on the other side, a piece torn from a photo he remembered, a broken nose of stone, the sphinx he knew Napoleon and his horse were looking at one day for the camera.

  His companion for this moment, his cleaning woman, must have known him, his face. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  CHARACTER

  In the year 1990 I tell this to a woman who is on a job with me, and we share an issue of justice, I believe, but at that moment of first meeting, little more. A recollection of hers inspires mine, and she hears me out. She happens to be an expert on sound.

  One summertime I dreamt of varnishes. I was a boy. “Dream” in the sense of eat, sleep, think varnish, thin, mix, and apply again. And varnish remover.

  I carved a model whaleboat. Chiseled it, I hear the split and scrape, gouged it out of a slab of stained hardwood that had been lying on the toolshed floor for weeks—for years. A base, a stand for a trophy, I can’t imagine what. The wood had this deep and independent gravity to it, and the finish brought up a richer, plum band or stripe across the top side like the dark gap between the good creamy rings of Saturn in my book. And I—who knew where the rakes were, three trowels, the pink skull of (I think) a cat at the foot of the neighbor’s termite-ridden fence post, a rusted little handsaw, the tuning fork my mother had left beside the kitchen sink, the wintergreen-tasting twigs and dirty red bark of the woodpecker’s preferred tree on the far side of the house, my sister’s bike covered by me with a plastic tarp when she went to camp, and here behind a blue coffee can (kerosene-smelling) of nails (to be used as a target when my town friend brought his air rifle out) my sister’s zippered kit of bike tools and an unused train ticket on the shelf above the workbench in this shed where I had learned for myself the carpenter’s rule Measure twice, cut once—I who (as my father put it) kept track as much as anyone around this joint had left where I’d seen it the middle of June this eighteen-inch block of maple inherited like the tool shed itself from the previous owner. Part of something else. Noticing it now I took it up off the floor and felt it and was drawn to it by a force of ownership.

  For the first time I thought vaguely, What is going on around here? In fact, I loathed myself as a boy, despised the balsa wood of my old-fashioned model kits—can you imagine? These had been procured for me by my great-uncle, a Warrant Officer in the Coast Guard, and they were specialty items even in those days. I don’t know where he found them. A heavy cruiser, an aircraft carrier, slim destroyers side by side, a buoy tender, an old scale-model 83-foot harbor patrol boat. Today it’s all pre-cut plastic, and was even then. Whereas my great-uncle thought plastic an abomination. Granted it repels “ship worms” on a real boat, but then you get chronic barnacles and you need to apply anti-fouling paint. Plastic come to think of it may have been just about all he felt himself in extreme opposition to—such a quaint objection it seems now. I could cut a hull from a length of balsa when I was nine. A double-ended Macao junk had my blood on it. Airy as cork, completely dispensable meringue-light balsa wood for kids to carve like cheese.

  I’d had other kits that required no cutting to speak of. Old friend bass wood, for a Union Pacific locomotive, a Patton tank with treads that moved. But not to be compared to what I found on the floor of the toolshed, our toolshed now (for we had bought this place cheap after renting it the previous summer. Now what was that like?). I was almost twelve. In that instant, balsa seemed soft as styrofoam, the crust of a loaf, as flesh, I didn’t know what, an avocado, but I would try my hand upon this ill-advised hardwood maple—my knife and the dented chisel that I had come upon by chance striking it with my rake in a pile of rotten leaves. It said—this chisel, but more this curious dent or uncannily retooled minute trough in it, no more than a wicked little groove in the middle of the blade—Get started, get going.

  You see my mood, humming all the time in fact.

  Instead of breathing.

  Remembering little things the way you can’t not remember some larger ones—now that’s confusing, the way I put it. Animal smell of the sun on the earth at the exposed root of an outstanding sweet white oak that now belonged to us; or on the
other hand my mother and father’s parallel love of life, I suppose.

  The woman I’m telling this to more clearly than it could have been told or thought twenty-five years before narrows her eyes, she has a look of attention and polite impatience, she wants to hear what’s coming, understanding that this isn’t a story maybe. How could there be passion in her interest, impertinence?

  Kneeling among shingles, splintered shims, and hard rice grains and kernels of horse corn and preferring the bottom of a yellow milk crate to rest the block of maple on, I took the handsaw to its corners, and soon had a crude oval, kerosene-smelling because of the saw.

  But not an oval. God! a many-sided mess on my hands to take me until I had to go back to school—the rest of the damn summer to finish the boat, the wood implacable—or until my sister got home from camp.

  But not a mess, when I blinked and saw my crude cuts now as one sweep of gunwale either side and found my pencil in the clanking can of nails. This thing I made would be a model of an old double-ender whaleboat, not quite the flared, sea-steep prow and stern of a Portuguese fisherman’s “half-moon” but steadier and stronger. But maple?

  Next morning I began to shape the gunwales and hollow out the hull on the ground outside. Holding my breath, and with awful slips and stops, holding the mad tool down one-handed with the whole half of me bearing down on the damnably minerally resistant block.

  My gouge-marks looked like fingertips working another matter trying to get somewhere and there was a war on and I’m right here ensconced in a summertime state with no coastline. Jazz in my throat, my unconscious humming a frequency set to a secret future that was my own, and hoping to take up the saxophone. But ruining my fingers on the wood. Cutting myself on the blade. Muttering “Deeyum!” bringing to life this piece of a petrified forest which maybe remembered in my gougings the leafy tree it came from. By this time they were casting hulls out of cement, so here was hope for me, hollowing out my hull, holding (my great-uncle said) the line (for the Coast Guard had turned to steel and fiberglass).