Joseph McElroy: Night Soul and Other Stories

Now the cab paused as if to back into this odd street of unrenovated commercial buildings, begrimed and fine — old cobbles a bike tire’s mine field he had known. The host shook his head at the twenty-dollar bill, a corner torn. They looked at each other. Something: what was it? Luck that Whey had looked out when he did? “Yeah I heard it,” Whey said.

“Yeah, I was looking out at the River and I missed my turn,” said the other. “Well, I was on the phone, I got it in both ears, I thought it was my head splitting again,” said Whey.

“And then?” said the other, for now the phone was ringing.

“Person on the phone’s saying, ‘Not long for this place’—her place she meant, hearing the explosion, I think. Sometimes you want your life back. Sometimes you don’t.” He laughed and pulled a remote out of his jacket pocket. “You never lost it,” said the other. “Well, I need a break.” “Don’t get locked out…” (what was the guy’s name? — propping the door ajar).

“A pleasure I’m sure.” The cab came up the wrong way, U’d and pulled over. “An honor in fact.” The visitor had said so little. Why an honor? — his coming and going sandwiched between two phone calls. The steel door swung shut upon the light, upon the host, his body, its progress, the body you did violence to yet in adapting took bizarre instruction from point by point in building the building, locating this dark street that knew him and he had bumped along late at night yet never quite noticed. And now the cabdriver with baseball cap and ponytail gathered with a shiny clasp, Russian, was known to him.

Not a huge surprise for this city traveler, her hand on the wheel, her nearness, her shoulders. She seemed to remember him, waiting for him to notice. Russian, a moonlighter from some Union Square spa. They had compared notes one night, two hold-up stories; then (may I?) their own handguns (the range he went to in a downtown basement, hers across the river in Long Island City, keeping up to snuff, permits up to date). They had even compared hands. A bond. She reaching up, he forward just past the divider, their own hands extending with a quite separate and ancient intent off the stem of the arm knowingly, yes—“what does it know?” she’d said. Yet rider and driver — tonight they matched discretion, no questions, the smell of her coffee, a lifted sandwich, the mayo and meat aroma of her late lunch lessening and another sweeter smell bearing him along — no regret realizing after all that his bike with its tire would have gone in the trunk, and oddly that some current was live in him from that chance encounter.

So now he was inspired to tell her about tonight. Though he wondered out loud why the man wouldn’t let him pay for fixing the blow-out, it was a job to be paid for; while she replying, “He had something else from you, I think,” made him think again of what they could do with this block. His thinking ten, fifteen years ago, proportions came to him, two types of structure neither enough by itself, not just for a block, a neighborhood, a wider scheme, it came to him, some wholeness always unfolding — and that parting word “honor” from his host, a fugitive city voice and somebody calling him back, stretching. All forgotten, except his nameless back, which on the ride home in a veritable couch of a back seat moved him to speak of his daughter in her “older” boyfriend’s place tonight, their bland, unforgiving food. The driver’s laugh at this inspired him to ask her in for a rub by the fireplace he had rebuilt, rethought, but he must pack and perhaps sleep. Yet dream then of the dark person who’d rung Whey at that hour. To dream is to know you’ve slept.

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.