Night Soul and Other Stories (6 page)

He was in Tel Aviv next day, and a team of people among the audience the day after come to hear him speak of space improvised for strategic flow, unlocked and its urban perimeter multiplied—and speak he can. That done, Basra, added last minute by a shadow agency like one hand not letting the other hand know whatever, and a night walk through a zone, a rattle of shots and a dull explosion in the near distance, a detour of small streets absorbed in the sketchy warren of back pain that brought with him the dead their ears ringing like memory inverting memory so space became more space. Two more stops. Turkey. And it was more like three weeks before he came home and even then seeing his bike where Clea, for it had been her day, had parked it in the basement hallway, helmet secured, putting in a call to his daughter a week before Christmas (who told of the explosion out on the river they’d heard taking a walk after he had left them), he had all but forgotten another New York night, its feeling and map, and to have the bike picked up (but there it was, unmentioned by Clea), and near forgotten the thing or two said to him about his back, that night, though there would come a time when he would summon them and they would come.

He would sketch it for us on the restaurant tablecloth. A disk bulging between vertebrae—another disk, another vertebra, stairway to nowhere, that lower back. Late-night entertainment for his friends at Caesar’s. The correspondent, when he was in town. The philosopher, who wanted to talk about the war, and laughed a deep belly laugh. Eva, who had her close-up view of his back agonies—that it was all about his daughter he was on the outs with. The detective lieutenant if they were in luck. The portly actor who had landed a part. Recently, a computer chick with a nostril ring, one-time notorious hacker now a hot website designer, who said What about surgery for that back? And sometimes, sitting down with them, the owner, Bob Austrian, who’d been known to call for one last bottle from the devoted but rather remote waiter who by now was leaning on the shadowy little bar, head tilted into his cell phone that had just snugly rung—champagne on the house once in candlelight for someone’s birthday—the correspondent’s, his eye for history on the tablecloth. Spills, crumbs, a word or two scrawled in ballpoint, a phone number, a name, upon request a math equation for the two plane curves for units of disaster housing approaching each other on an axis like whales nose to nose—and, closing down the place, our revered regular’s spinal cartoon like a section of ladder. Words fail you, he’d take a drawing every time. The doctor had shown it to him with some new software. What next?

“What would you do for a lower back cure?” said the philosopher. Oh it wasn’t that bad, the sufferer broke in—“Would you—?” “Hey, whoa,” said correspondent, knowing what was coming. “—kill for it?” The actor had a fit of coughing. “
Would
you?” No problem, the offending disk was now said to be happily disintegrating, soon there wouldn’t
be
a problem any more. “Said by…?” asked the web girl, when others laughed. “Seriously though,” said the philosopher.

“It’s his back,” said the correspondent, who had tried to forestall that insinuating philosopher-question. Because he knew his friend, what he was capable of beyond a drawing on a tablecloth headed for the laundry, and had followed his career with curious eloquence. Originally an architect of office blocks light in look transferring a transparency and lift to a lower hovering balance as if to clear an added space below. A man known for unimagined problems and their solutions—an engineering and forestry college in Ontario that unleashed upon the architect six months later a physical attack by the benefactor with typical Canadian temper when the several buildings were said to be like parts of a disassembled ship. An original, known now for his thinking about cities, their perimeters porous with self-improvising and opportunity, “multiple” in the old sense of multiplying. A risk-taker known for the future, for humane blueprints, yet, in destroyed urban places abroad, seeing scars to be not structurally just erased but worked
with.
In advanced circles recognized for materials, green steel, uncanny glass and canny polymers layered for holding light in an expansible or contractible wall unit serving linked labs, auditorium, conservatory, municipal hearings. Known for materials that thought for themselves, it was somewhat inaccurately said, and he was sniped at, consulted, respected, known and subtly unknown, his résumé like a dam arched against some river force. Revolutionary would perhaps not be putting it too strongly, the correspondent believed (the correspondent would soon report on him again though rarely spoke of him to others)—a man alone but open to the right helper if he got lucky; also a mystery, amid lasting issues of design and engineering, also respectful of others, even philosophers busy with homework on war appropriations who knew his background in math; always alive to the potential of streets, light, water, the limbs of a structure, a sudden tensile stroke of invention. This the correspondent knew, who was his friend and sometimes envied him.

For he could work anywhere. Dictated while bike-riding, that best of all angles sitting the saddle of his wise hybrid. Here’s to the North River bike path, here’s to genes, women, good manners, work, massage. Here’s to cortisone (which gave you a headache); ibuprofen, death on the kidneys you heard (so one morning he stopped taking it). Stamina notorious. Anything was better than standing on his feet, walking a few blocks and stopping. Or flying. (He kept it to himself.) Worst was getting his legs out of bed to the stab in the back like a sickening alarm or the phone that actually had woken him ringing inside his head with some message—for he wasn’t in pain, the pain was in him, he would say. It didn’t quit thinking, he said. Kayaking on hold, the run at dawn too, which had absorbed him, for the River could make him forget. His lower back always behind him not that
it
knew to haunt him. There was a pretty good upright piano at Caesar’s. He sat at it more easily than his own. Which was not an upright but a baby grand. Never knew what he would play, until his fingers touched down, he’d had a wild man for a teacher, an uncle, a non-teacher really.

The new acupuncturist he kept to himself. But here’s to her as well. Sometimes the cool ones come closest. She hadn’t recognized his name when he’d phoned her one long afternoon. Yet then she did, he sensed. He spelled it for her, X-i-d-e-s (
why
did he?), Xides (as in
my
), and said it again,
Zai-deez
. Who had referred him? Well, a journalist friend who didn’t know her but…had been given her name by…someone he’d sat next to at a briefing (?). Another writer? No idea.

She was thinking, and you could hear the faintest pause. She was on the move. Doing things, he felt. He heard the little clack of the blinds being raised. They both knew there was more. But she would see him.

In fact his friend the correspondent had said leave him out of it, he’d run into this guy at a structural materials show, metal glomming onto bone came up in the conversation and orthopedists, and in this way a certain friend, no name dropped, of the correspondent’s with back trouble came up whom he’d expected to see here but remembered was out of town. Whereupon the guy recommended an acupuncturist. Extremely good, uncanny, though a gal bent on remaking you from the ground down, and a great little terrorist.

It was an interruption, Tuesday Friday appointments, though he doubled up an errand that needed doing in her neighborhood.

She dressed in black and stood very straight, a person, pale, compact, and, when he thought about it, smooth or learned in her body. What’re you gonna do? Maybe she knew something and could help. Swami healers could diagnose over the phone sight unseen. What was the truth? He left it to her. Her hair, so darkly un-reflecting, was caught up behind in a clasp at her neck yet in front combed tight back into her scalp like a Hispanic girl’s on the subway first thing in the morning. She saw the two dark tucks where stabs had found his rib cage years ago. She had him prone at first, hard for him so mostly she put him on his back which he eased down flat on the table.

Belly, ankle, nostril, groin, you let her go where she would, she’s licensed. It was the needles, wasn’t it? Longer than he had thought, flexible, thread-thin, sensitive to where they went. Earlobe or right inside the ear the cartilage (the heel of her palm brushing his beard), placing her needles. Fine steel planted like markers, not at all an inoculation, she might string two or three together, he told Eva.

Needles placed to free the flow along the channels. Methodical, yet more. He resented coming, didn’t he? He would surprise her. She told him what she was doing. What did she know? It multiplied. She came and held a small mirror to his face. “Look at our color.”

The flush prickled his forehead and cheeks, you’d think he’d taken too much of something, niacin high potency or a couple of real drinks on top of his pills. “See the difference?” The phone went once in the other room almost answering her—was it the third time he’d seen her?—and seemed to tell her she would pick up. He made a sound back in his throat, “Mmhmm,” lying there wondering if the darkening pink in his face was good for the lower back or would last when he left. The mirror lingered.

Peering into the glass held above his face like a photo in a cell-phone camera—like swollen material—Look what we’ve accomplished, he heard her say. More than pink; stupid-looking, he thought. Cooked, and the timer went off. The phone had answered her question before she asked it. It was the needles, where she stuck them in. Her intricate treatment took effect crudely.

She saw her patients where she lived. He would stretch out on the table in the treatment room. There was a long couch, too—an open-out daybed, he figured, from the clear front line of the frame just visible beneath the three seat cushions. At either end of it stood glass-front bookcases displaying selected volumes, leather-bound Materia Medica, racks of stoppered phials, small blue-and-white plastic dispensers containing white remedy pellets. He was actually tired of his back acting up. He wanted her to do something for him, and he told her this.

It was when she first had sat him down to tell her what had been going on. You came in through the front door and just beyond the foyer a desk came into view against the near wall, a small, neat, dark-lacquered table, no more than that; a chair for her, a chair for you. They reviewed what he was taking. Illnesses? Never. Work? He let it be vague—urban space, an idea person—(he did not say
architect
or
planner
). He traveled some (didn’t tell her that he was in demand). Exercise? Violent. Eating, alcohol, sex? Sure. Allergies, none. She was at home here with him. She was a thinker. She had a look at his tongue. He smiled, his cheekbone itched. He would write an account of himself, please, for next time, a page would do. He didn’t know what she knew. He had noticed a traveling clock somewhere. She didn’t wear a watch. He wanted to know nothing about her, he was fifty-two. He couldn’t help what he knew. His appointment times inscribed in her little book so little it made, like her minute handwriting, a statement that what mattered was elsewhere. And, among other things, it was him. Or some feminine economy. The chairs were of black maple, he thought, but spare and light to lift, a clarity to sit in, a sweet, unpainted smell or their making itself gave less weight, you could certainly stand on them. She led him away into the other room.

Her quick way of talking made you forget the silences. Or remember them, because when you started to say something, it reminded her, and she was off, almost. Yet quiet. A dominant person. You must listen. He could time her pauses. She belonged to him not quite for an hour. Prick the outside, change the in-. Leaving, he had a sensation of warmth circulating laterally across his back and belly.

A current they knew was there, she had said, but didn’t wholly grasp. How come? he said. She looked at him.

Young, she called him Mr. X the third time he saw her. Mr. X? It didn’t seem like her. A nickname was new for him yet was this one? It went unmentioned to his friends. Like her address, which surprised him yet with one of those familiar New York coincidences no more odd than meeting his daughter by chance on the subway one night. Now, who would say “Mr. X”? Some wife.

His Qi was pretty good, she thought. He had heard of it. A flow, a something, but that’s not quite it. He went to China but he’d heard about Qi here. Here it all seemed to make more sense, where chance was choice or freedom. He knew what it was, Qi, so long’s he didn’t have to say what it was. Qi was…“like us, the flow of it,” he said. “Let’s surprise old Qi.” He was taking a hand, maybe a little obnoxious, he said passing his eye over her. Like a stream, he went on. To be undammed…or electricity? Like magnetic water, a new highly classified material.

“Qi is what it
does
,” she lowered the elastic of his boxers. Qi, he said. Good, she said softly, at work. What if she were wounding him? She wouldn’t. She could. And where would such an unthinkable suspicion come
from
? Qi. He felt not even a jab but a response from inside him to the point. (If she would only scratch him there, he itched.) Did he breathe? she asked. God yes, he was a runner.

She had studied in China, his friend the correspondent happened to recall. Here’s to Chinese medicine, let’s not make too much of it. Acupuncture was pain-management was what you heard, migraine, arthritic knee, carpal tunnel, sciatica, pitcher’s elbow—and he had hired her. Snoring as well, he’d heard, someone else’s problem. Inoperable malignancy.

China, you do what the doctor says, if he doesn’t help you you fire him, she said. Was that true? he asked. She didn’t say. But she had a mentor somewhere she could run things by, he said. She had. She had a fine and prominent and private nose and he thought she was quite intelligent and was an early riser. He didn’t need to know her secrets. Valerie Skeen was her name. Her power given to her by you. In a
way
. The paths inside you that might cross with motion even when you were still. Chinese medicine, but he had been in China on other business. When he closed his eyes, she would sometimes say things. “So I gather you don’t exactly build buildings now but…” He let it go, it was their third or fourth time together. “…you make cities better?—that kind of thing?” she said. She waited a moment. “You think up cities, I believe,” she said, imagining it perhaps. She’d heard it somewhere obviously.