Night Soul and Other Stories, Page 8

  Old Ibsen warehoused practically under the giant arch of a so-so bridge, they reviewed what they had just witnessed on stage: the mob hooting, yelling, Dr. Stockman thundering that the majority was always wrong—when someone among his hostile fellow citizens quite piercingly whistled. And now not a cab to be found at ten-twenty, a current of wind off the East River, a garbage can lid rattling down the sidewalk at them out of nowhere, they’d have to walk it to the Madison Street bus or the East Broadway F train. A taxi appeared, night yellow before they knew it, and he and Eva settled back behind a rangy old Haitian woman at the wheel. He turned to Eva and she felt the twinge in his mouth touching hers and knew the bike was good for his back only some of the time but she wasn’t challenging the pain-killer acupuncturist, while to him, his place vacuumed, bathroom scrubbed down but the basin faucet gasket leaking, it was the piercing working whistle that came back of the guy summoning a cab he must have known was around the corner that night near the other river as prompt as his appearance out on the cobblestones almost before X’s tire had blown.

  A challenged rider these days, mostly giving the bike a rest, he felt the jarring cobbles like vertebrae, like abandoned code, at 6:15 Friday pedaling into that once-forgotten block. Its time has come. The street wet from a hydrant now shut, the bicyclist hardly sees a Fire Captain in his hat getting back in a car pointed the wrong way toward the highway. A gray construction veil drapes a six-story building, two buildings, screening the street from mortar and brick dust sprayed by grinding and repointing these warehouse façades, asbestos back in the seams. Heavily supported on the old sidewalk paving stones by giant steel legs, the second-floor-level pedestrian bridge is flagged on its spiraling razor fence against perimeter intruders by a sign vowing landmark condos next year. An area subtly exploding from old, disused commercial to residential, and on a steel door through which X had passed, two work permits, identical from here. And advice about your back sounding a night of routine New York emergency (was it three months gone by?) its signature the rhythm on these cobblestones of a Samaritan accosting him and leading the way indoors. Where work in progress could look less building than dismantling there in Bob Whey’s clutter of—his name came back in one piece and was gone—tools, materials, floorboards darkened by a century of use, fugitive photos like overlapping bulletins, vehement palaver, veiled compliment, that night, that hour.

  But now the bicyclist rode up onto the sidewalk strewn with rubble, and his palms upon his handlebars sensed only space in there now where not even a phone waited on the gritty floor, you felt sure, or the two calls one knew of. The heavy-duty door shadowed by the scaffolding overhead did not know him when he pulled on the handle, hearing the car idling behind him and then a shot from its horn. “You got business here?” said the voice of the Fire Captain standing on the far side of his car, who recognized him when he turned. “As you were, Mr. Xides—you remember me from the Mayor’s—?” “Yes of course.” Was he in on this? Neighborhood renewal? No, just remembering. Well, onward and upward, Mister Xides. Captain? Captain? An explosion that night. What night? Bayonne or someplace out on the river weeks ago. Got me. Could be anything. A touch on the horn pulling out.

  “Yer late,” said the young Parks person, when he came off the bike path at six-forty. “You too,” he said. In the bed of her utility vehicle parked like a toy lay two rakes. On a bench a couple of street kids who’d love to get their hands on the wheel. The one he recognized said, “Been to Africa lately?” This amused the boys. “Gotcha bike,” said the young woman, who lifted the fan-shaped leaf rake by its plastic handle and let it fall, she had a call on her cell, a piece of song. Slow-moving in her ample brown trousers, she liked him, or recognized him, he read her metal name-tag over her uniform shirt pocket. Late for what? For this. He would let the stone paths and old apartment houses, high also because of the River below, and people come to him. There passed an expensive dog, lanky, fragile, learning sort of flowingly to heel. He propped the bike behind a bench, and eased himself down. “You got back misery,” the girl said, starting up. “Well, I come here,” he said.

  “You do. I see you.” She had a thought. “Sitting there like a…”

  “An architect, sort of.”

  “Never woulda guessed.”

  “How many miles did you ride?” said the wise-guy boy.

  “So long, Mahali.”

  Two men in ties and jackets pedaled up the last stretch of exit ramp. The bald one in the lead spinning low gear at a great rate, trousers clipped, the elder, gaining on him, leaned into his un-shifted high and, stroke on stroke, rose up on the pedals like a kid to make it to the top. Scarred and patinaed old briefcases rat-trapped behind, Friday emotions of each man aimed homeward, inward, maybe berserk, if you knew these faces. A quiet sound coming, the electric moan of the Parks Department “off-road” easing by again. A back-fire down the street to the east. “I thought you lived around here…” “I did.” “Before my time?” “Before your time.” She liked him, she was observant. “Gotcha helmet.” Accommodating, this black girl, hospitable, precise. She could almost touch him.

  The boys on their bench had something on their mind, Mahali gone. Seeing him muttering at a little mike was part of her day, or what had become an errand for him slipped into her job, him just sitting for a few minutes here. A tablecloth of wine spills, crumbs, equations, came before him, his late-night friends, actor, academic, artist; detective who never forgot a walk, like a dog a smell, and could identify a person in the corner of his eye; but most, the correspondent, who had asked how was it going with the little terrorist?

  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 o
n 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?”

  “Unknown,” 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-aydeez, 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 multiplying 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 mi
stake 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.