“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.
“Titanium,” 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 “daybed”? 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.
“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?
She asked his view of the Twin Towers. His view? He had been unable to think about them: that they were two was probably the thing, he said. Neither one worked by itself. Did they together? He’d never set foot inside. Had been invited to Windows on the World once, the restaurant, but couldn’t make it. Knew the part-time theater guy Jim Moore, who helped the French high-wire guy with the famous walk. He and the acupuncturist thought about this. “Travel light,” she said.
“Friday could you come at seven?” she asked presently, it was what she’d had in mind all along, a wavy needle going back into the white cardboard box unused, P.M. of course. Why the change? he asked. It was like her not to answer for a moment. The desk, the table in the other room, black maple structure, why had she sat him down there and then skipped this change and brought him into the treatment room. OK, seven. “Thank you,” she said, a frankness covering more than their next appointment. He had done something for her. What?
He would do his Friday errand in her neighborhood this time before seeing her. “Maybe I’ll come a different way,” he said. “Let’s see,” she said, “the bike path exits right over here, doesn’t it?” He could always stop seeing her.
“How is the back?” The actor pulled up a chair from the next table arriving after the show Wednesday night, needing a drink and the menu, which he knew by heart.
“Hearing’s improved,” said Xides. Everyone laughed. “That’s a beginning,” said the web designer, who was smart, had been in rehab, knew more about the war sometimes than the correspondent (who was out of the country), more about everything than anyone but was likable and somehow dark. The actor reached across for her hand. “He’s got a habit but you can’t see the needle marks,” Eva said. A painter of realistic animals, she had drawn on the tablecloth a picture of the notorious lower back. “Guy who recommended her called her a great little terrorist, according to Sam,” said Xides. The philosopher liked it. “He knows something.” “Whoever he is,” said Xides. “Didn’t have his name tag on.”
“Well he knows her.”
“She doesn’t know it but she’s getting me ready for my trip,” said Xides taking the whole thing lightly for his own reasons. “You should bring her here,” said the philosopher. “Why do you go?” said Eva, meaning China. The web girl made a sound. She knew a great acupuncturist in Chinatown, she could get his number. This was received in silence. “But he lost his odometer on the way up to see her,” said Eva. “How do you do that?” said the philosopher. “How do you know you lost it?” the detective raised his untrimmed Irish eyebrows, “maybe it was stolen.”
“On the bike path?” The actor bit into the last of someone’s baguette as the waiter brought his drink, and, his mouth full, had a good laugh with the philosopher, who said it was not the mileage.
“She only knows what she’s doing,” said the website girl then. Xides thought she was improving. He wondered why she came here. She felt at home. “Well, she’s holistic,” he said, dripping wine on Eva’s picture as he gave himself some more. “She’s professional,” said the girl offering her glass against his in a curious one-on-one.
Valerie had come back into the treatment room from the call she didn’t take. “Your regular’s after you,” he said, but she had spoken of Xides’ work. It was acute. It struck him. It was Leonardo she cited whose ideas got picked up. Xides had said that himself. He’d said these things more than once. Where? Like the matter with energy. Like Corbu at nineteen beginning with the rib-cage and maybe modular heart and see what cities became. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. Was it something she had said? Maybe not.
What is pain? the philosopher was asking, but now said he’d heard Xides would be getting back to pure math. Xides joked that he still had that two-hole doughnut in mind he once cared to know could stretch into a sphere with two handles. The philosopher was nodding seriously. But Xides wondered what he carried around with him these days. Missing his friend the correspondent here at Caesar’s who knew his thinking but they would soon meet. Something else he couldn’t put his finger on. Night streets came to mind, like a cloud of gas swarms of citizenry spread between high-rises. Yesterday pausing halfway down the catwalk of a suspension bridge cable he saw not the city he was thinking about but, dizzyingly, his daughter in her stroller, her mere life. And bicycling the river path, he could see through the surviving trees, the neighborhoods all the way up to the sweatshirted picnickers in long basketball shorts one night on the riverside, aiming the red barrel of a telescope at, he could have sworn, the Palisades.
The odometer he let go, a clip-on, and replaced it erasing with it the proof—the credit in city miles for exercise and all that he’d glimpsed—all his regret about time, which you need not seek but will stretch at the expense of others.
It came to him later with Eva burning moxa close to his skin, close as he could stand, acrid, truthful, a pungency to get used to, that the calls thirty minutes—he said it out loud: “These calls she gets at thirty minutes into the appointment—”
“What about them?”
“I don’t hear them, the machine takes them, but I feel they’re—”
“From the same person?” Eva withdrew the moxa.
“That’s right.”
“Is this stuff doing you any earthly good?” She stretched to drop it in the ash tray (in the shape of a life preserver that had hardly been used in twenty years), and her dressing gown fell open. In her face fine shadows, in her eyes the acupuncturist perhaps, in her habits always prepared, semper paratus from her Navy days, Marines, Coast Guard, he didn’t have it quite right, semper was right. She was gone. Was that true, “Valerie” was just trying to fix him up for his next trip? he heard her ask, No, not true; long-te
rm care. A laugh from the bedroom. “She better take care, a caller like that.”
A drawer pulled out, he got up to follow, content that they were going to the theater Thursday, a place he felt at home, the warehouse down under the Manhattan Bridge near the docks.
How did he know it was the guy who had left Valerie?
Eva flung her robe over his head and tumbled him onto the bed.
Her pale hair unpinned, he was telling her now, somehow a little falsely, that in some Asian tongue one syllable of the word for “moxa” meant “acupuncture.”
A pattern of disharmony was what the acupuncturist was after.
Had her kidney meridian patient shown up ever with a helmet in his hand, that Valerie should mention the bike exit? The once he’d biked to her she’d had no way of knowing. He’d gone without his helmet. (And lost his odometer.)
Was she taken with him? They must talk, she’d said the last time, he recalled, when she’d said he did make himself clear, he did. And he told her the scale of what she was working on inside him was scary. They might get to be friends, he had told the correspondent.
To Clea, his cleaning woman from Grenada whom he loved because she fixed the window shade in the bedroom and could cope with the breaker box in the basement (“down in the mines,” they called it) and found an empty pill bottle beside the kitchen phone and knew what they were for, he spoke of all this news coming in on Outlook Express piggybacked, sometimes attached, with ads for prescription meds, as if she would understand him. Plavix against heart attack and stroke (?). Canadian cut-rate meds, but why the bombing of a shrine in Samarra got sort of smuggled in with Levitra or Retin A and sort of tacked onto a family violence case and someone’s stepson a victim of bad fathering, the item said, and fed a diet of Trix cereal and Chicken McNuggets, you couldn’t figure the connection with cut-rate prescription meds, and personal messages cut short in the middle, with a plot in Basra to ship explosives into the Holland Tunnel and blow a hole into the river. Clea said people took too much medicine but maybe they have problems like we do. She didn’t know. She e-mailed her family with her friend’s laptop, that was it, except for her sister in Toronto. It saved on the phone. Items on a list, microwave timer off, how Mr. Xides was sleeping with his back—an intimacy between them, and at last, like some small action detected in a landscape, the man who’d returned the bike with the tire fixed having told him one night what was good for his back, materialized in conversation like a wake-up call with Clea just as Eva phoned about a bite to eat before the play, she was on her way, so he only later recalled Clea saying, Looking out for you, as she straightened the books on the night table.