Night Soul and Other Stories (11 page)

The major had gotten up into the aisle, and when she was gone into the lav (to phone ahead, it turned out), the boy gripped his companion by the wrist and asked if Xides did not foresee America in ruins. And, yes,
then
came the back spasm, more like a radial artery jabbed to make the heart wince—or, further down, a quick kick to the kidney sustained even as you spun away chilled in the face, and the hand not on his wrist now but gripping his hand. “What is it?” the boy said.

“As if he had taken something from me and wanted to help,” said Xides to the acupuncturist, who drew the last needle. “A suspect, was the boy a suspect?” she said.

“Well-informed we now think.”

“We?” The word said as she had asked earlier how the boy was picked for this trip.

“You don’t think I set him up?”

“I know you, Mr. Xides. But what did he take from you?” That note of intimacy in her use of his name yet distance, and her words recalled what Xides had half-heard minutes before,
someone who knew you
—i.e.,
whom you might not recall
—and a distinctly heard woman’s code, “We need to talk.”

The impact he’d had on her? “Mean of me, I’m not surprised it had an impact to say I might not trust you with the story.”

She made a sound. “You thought
that
was it?” A light of doubt in the voice, of faint contempt.

He looked her in the eye, those dark but he now saw gray and harboring eyes that saw he had spoken as another man setting a rule for her.

But the impact she had mentioned, he felt it now like a sound or a politeness. In his body, as in hers. Was it something that had been recognized by her through him? Or it had nothing to do with him at all. Like her saying she could just imagine and didn’t want to imagine what had happened in Durban when they landed.

The correspondent (hearing all about it the following week in China) would be surprisingly subdued at the account of the appointment with the acupuncturist and how it had bizarrely concluded. The story of the flight, this scene in a downward banking plane he knew from years ago, but, as Xides explained it in the train along the route to the dam, arched gravity mass like a bridge on its side convexed upriver in the notorious neighborhood of which half a million farmer families had lived, now, just before Valerie’s phone was to ring at around seven-fifty-five, Xides had found in the lost, now recollected, hand of the unlucky young fellow traveler to Durban (and back) or found in himself or—who knows?—the purr of Mahali’s electric vehicle, the answer to the missing first odometer. Why did the correspondent take it so seriously?—having heard of the loss from their friend the detective lieutenant after the night in the restaurant when the correspondent was out of the country—or was it the odometer that made him think? Now it came to Xides that the thief who had slipped the Cat Eye weeks ago out of its little two-track base fixed to the handlebar was almost certainly the boy in the park, only eleven or twelve but more at large than the African boy that day whose abrupt round-trip and subsequent detainment would prove less mysterious than whether he’d been set up and how.

“I’m moving my practice away from New York, we need to talk…”

“But not right away,” he said quickly.

She’d been meaning to tell him. He would get a referral of course.

The phone rang in the other room twice, and a voice, tentative, irritable, and, yes, familiar, of a strength vectored by years of opinionated speech, confirmed what Xides had guessed somehow. “He fixed my
tire,
” he said. Tonight at almost eight the call had found them, and as if to make sense of the Yellow Pages, the dresser drawer, daybed pillows not restored, ladder—was the guy staying here?—the voice had already, a moment before, though this was not really the important thing, been identified by the man lying in his undershorts, the small of his back now that he was about to get up at last comfortably flat like, more or less, his upper spine upon the sheet covering the table though how that obscure, mixed force, the voice on a machine not turned down unmistakable from weeks ago in camo jacket and sneakers, Bob
Whey
, had actually come to be out there that rainy night on the cobbles where he would recognize Xides, might alter what had happened here.

“He fixed my tire.” “He what?” Whey would hear only himself. Yet, softly
to
him, “
Bob,”
Valerie said, “Bob,” wanting to interrupt the message going on contagiously confusingly clear—the hybrid bike identified as Xides’ downstairs with Nuevo’s witness. It was eight o’clock, said the voice, “we have to talk, good stuff today—work to do.” “
Bob,
” she said, and, to Xides sitting up on the table, “I named you once, only a name, weeks ago, and he knew you, you had met” (though he can exaggerate), “and I had to go and mention your appointment times, that’s all”—softly not to interrupt the message, “He’s what he is.” The voice going on domestically—“…I can get a decent price for the compass…got a share on a storage downtown”—concluded, “You’re so…”

“You can do better than that,” Xides said when the message was done. He was into his trousers, then his shirt unbuttoned that needed to be tucked in after he unbuttoned the top button of his trousers, new black sneakers, his cell ringing, his checkbook, jacket, wallet.

“We can all do better maybe,” she said, taking his check—“I have some moxa somewhere, I’ll find it next time.”

Xides came back to her. He took her hand her left hand in his right (so much between them), he took her shoulder, he’d had it, angry the two of them, forgetting something her hand nearly reminded him of, and he said trivially he’d again forgotten to ask her about Qi being one-way or two-way he’d meant to ask her. She made a sound. It could wait, he said, and
Does
he
know you’re moving?
said in his chest silently for he had the answer.

Nuevo was down at the end of the block. As Xides coasted by and Nuevo called out, “Hey, hey—” Xides, seeing ahead half-stunned and careful, running a light, bound for the Hudson River bike path, feeling two drops of rain hit like ball bearings a magnet, did not look but was aware of Nuevo doing something with his lifted hand, speed, distance, future, loss, danger.

“You want to take a swim?” said one engineer; “it is five hundred feet deep,” said the other. “He was an Olympic swimmer,” said Xides elbowing the correspondent, who had asked what fraction of the 18G megawatts from the dam would serve the 2008 Olympics. No no, all for Yangtze cities.

What do you think about up here?

Despite crippling silt, this great upstream reservoir was green. Chemical green we are used to supposing. The two Chinese could not take the Americans to see the shafts and galleries networking the interior of the dam, this wall greatest since The Great Wall, but a diagram of a contraction joint was faithfully drawn on a pink pad showing how it and many others with a special grouting concrete would allow for routine cracks in future. “You are a writer,” the younger engineer said to the correspondent, who had a hundred catwalks in his memory.

When they handed in their helmets, Xides told of a plastic bag at his New York door containing the helmet he had left at the acupuncturist’s. Returned by?

Xides could only guess. Whey, said Sam, I would bet on it, what about you? he turned to the engineers, who nodded, smiling. A third Chinese had appeared.

The doorman had been tapping the top of his head of course, as if X were crazy. “You could have collected it Tuesday.” The engineers and the indelibly gray-haired security liaison in a button-down shirt listened to the Americans. “She had to cancel.”

“She doesn’t do that,” said the correspondent.

“You’re telling me?”

“I had it on good authority she doesn’t.”

“Well, I canceled the Friday.”

“You’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I could have used a session.”

The correspondent knew something was wrong. When something is wrong, a friend will sometimes know.

Also a rival. The Chinese had asked about “magnetic water,” said to be under test as a field insulator and lighting conveyer. “Invention or discovery, we understand it is yours Doktah Ex,” the elder engineer grinned. “But for which structure of this material we have yet to learn.”

“There is no telling. But it belongs to all of us,” said Xides, “and I would hope it might help the farmer. Also, I am not a doctor.” He asked about the other dam, the less well-known—was there a chance they could see it? Bows, not nods.

The structure of the water material itself was what the Chinese were angling for, the correspondent agreed with Xides. Xides thought of Bob Whey, the bare extent of him, ground plotted point by point, and speaking of a criminal war—of Xides’ contribution possibly. The other dam would wait.

Back in Beijing Xides purchased moxa on a rainy day with a state guide whose alternative occidental name was Grace. Meanwhile, the correspondent was getting as much as he could out of an interrogation of himself (on this seventh trip to the mainland) evidently inspired by documents he’d laid out neatly on his hotel bed when he left for breakfast regarding the diet pill Meridia the Chinese were allegedly competing with the Canadians to peddle a generic of.

What is wrong? Is it thinking? Or the back? Or is Xides back home already in his mind? Architect reflecting on the St. Louis-Arch-size (but taller) Central Chinese Television Tower window cavity: what’s it looking out
on
? “Media Park” for the people? Or cornered between adjacent “News” and “Production” limbs, the area named “Green Land” he didn’t need to revisit, you could see it from miles away like soaring Shanghai next to which New York is old, where buildings want to fall down. “What has architecture to do with anything?” he asked his friend. “No theory of bigness.” The correspondent said it sounded like Xides twenty years ago, “vacuum in front pushing from behind”: “Remember what you said about materials telling us what to do?”

Xides deposited a check for slightly more than eight thousand dollars American, a fee installment, in a Beijing branch of his bank. He was alone. Xides found the narrow enclosed lanes of the Hutong district. A statement, an idea like an act, was eluding him in a smell of peanut oil, of frying, a duck standing in a cage. Looking for a courtyard and house set back where he had once had an idea he couldn’t recall. Low warrens of wood structures, the privacy, an attraction for visitors to glimpse in Beijing and see as China. An observer. A nursery school with children at their nap—cells of a hive of hives, some new material that came to him. Grace of all people apprehended him here to the surprise of neither.

No problem, a university-trained guide. And in a nearby temple, with a great gong way upstairs, the correspondent joined them somehow. Xides made it easily up the stairs and later down the street. “I should have my head examined,” he said.

“That what the doorman meant?”

“She said you don’t have to like the patient, and I asked if she’d ever fired one. ‘It’d be me,’ she said.” “Valerie said that?” “Yes, she meant herself.” “Of course. You’re attached to her.” “Tougher things than that,” Xides said, turning to Grace, a tall girl with a fine sense of distance yet in touch with what was under discussion, what withheld. Though not going to be thought interested in what the men were going home to. “The moxa, it seems to have helped,” said the correspondent. Grace smiled her white, extraordinarily crooked teeth, two front ones grown in right in front of two others.

“I haven’t had a chance to use it.”

Their van was waiting. A bus and thickets of bikes on the move. Much to see out the window besides people in another bus. A bike mechanic plying his trade right out on a street corner, parts and tools strewn on the sidewalk. “You told her this same man had fixed your flat? The one who phoned her? A bike mechanic?” No, it was the middle of the night, he was just there in the street. “How strange,” said the correspondent.

On the plane coming back, the thought, his kidneys, that Valerie had left him to do what he would came to him instead of sleep and he thought he would go see his internist. He was alarmed to remember it, embedded in a dark capsule slipping past its own sound crossing the pole, stationary the cabin in time until he got up and went back to the galley to look out and see if he could see the Aleutians, the land bridge, some long-ago action down there. Looking to be surprised.

A door shut, a tight hatch seal in the ongoing plane’s invisible sound. “Something’s wrong,” the correspondent said, joining him. Aware of the radiant flight attendant, Xides was thinking, The guy that recommended Valerie, he didn’t
know
Sam.

Of course not, the correspondent had one of those badges on. They both laughed at this. Was it nonsensical? Well, at the materials show a badge came in handy, Xides mused. “You can tell from how they’ll glance at it,” the correspondent granted.

“And the guy
wasn’t
wearing one of course,” said Xides.

“Something else,” said the correspondent, but Xides said, “He spoke with authority?”

“He was more into titanium. He may have had…he may have…”

“May have had…?”

The flight attendant like a waitress interrupting a conversation asked Xides if he needed anything and he said he would like a bike to ride up and down the aisle. “What are you thinking?” she said.

“Why, taking someone up to the Acropolis.”

“You like Greece?”

“Which I myself once put off visiting though I was in Athens, I was scared of it.”

She had never been. Who was he taking? she asked surprisingly. She offered a bottle of water and he asked his friend again, “
May
have had…?”

“A chip on his shoulder, who knows.” The correspondent took the water himself. “A chip on his game leg, that’s right,” he said. “Looked at his watch, didn’t know why he was here, he said. I told him he
did
.” “Good for you.” “You say these things. Sometimes they’re true. Next thing he was talking about pins in joints, structural stuff, and I brought up a pretty well-known orthopedist whose name you know and then a friend with a bad back.”