Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

“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.

“Every architect I know has something that won’t get built up his sleeve,” he said. He opened his eyes. “A lie lies like a path through that commonplace,” he said. He was proud. “I’m a fool,” he said, and was proud of having said it to a woman. “But also something that will get built,” she said.

She didn’t yet say what it was, what was happening with him. She spoke of how we didn’t know why it worked. It was him in a way, so it touched him. Was it up to him, then, to do what would decide her? Was acupuncture like nothing else? Meridians came up. A map inside you but moving. Channels keeping the organs going. One way streets? he said. Maybe she thought he was stating not asking.

There were no words for it connecting inside with outside, if you believed it (or had to). It was Qi. He dreamt early in the morning. His lower back was on hold, dozing. What day was it? Her mouth was expressive in silence, it was alert. What was there for him to do at her place? He went there to lie down and have her treat him. Courtesy between them like fine lust. Appointments came and went.

He asked if these prescription drug bargains came in on her e-mail too with messages weirdly added on about Iraq, abuse, bizarre events (she didn’t exactly find it funny), he was about to give examples, the occasional genocide, often the war — cut-rate Lotrel, pain-killer Celebrex, many of them Canada cut-rate, Levitra, Xanax—

“For anxiety,” she said. He laughed, remembering an early morning dream.

She didn’t have e-mail. “So that’s one thing you won’t lose if they switch us off,” he said. “Us?” They could switch off a whole society. “Would we do it to ourselves?” Well, we wouldn’t do it to our own grid, we were hostages to electricity we had too much to lose — he’d been in Auckland in ’98. “Well, Auckland,” she said, and “If the phone fails you you can always…”—she removed a needle from his instep—

“Go knock on their door,” he said, he didn’t know why. He had dreamt early in the morning just at dawn of forgetting how to ride his bike, losing your own infrastructure. This woman probably didn’t even have TV.

He paid cash for these brown herb sticks of powerhouse moxa she gave him to take home like small incense cigars to light and hold as close as you could stand to the abdomen and hip points she identified. Was she making things worse? Homework, she called it. You want me, you get moxa, part of the package. It was her little joke. A little bit goes a long way, she said. The pain found itself diverted for now.

He could think, or maybe couldn’t not. One meridian had points independent of other meridians. But so close to Kidney Meridian you couldn’t tell unless you asked her. Conception Meridian it was called. Yes, from pregnancy but also Responsibility Meridian it was called, she said. It went down along middle pelvis very near Kidney Meridian then external genitals and anus. She hadn’t any plans to…? No.

What does she do? his friends had wanted to know. He was a good describer, more even than one would want to know. A pain-killer’s not a cure, we’ll have to see, he said. Frankly sometimes you drift off. This stuff was ancient. Adjust the balance was what she’d said. “Of limited value use with you,” said the correspondent. Actor had heard it was good for snoring. To Eva there wasn’t much to tell — who’d already traced the back pains to his daughter, a diagnosis a little sad coming from her.

How Valerie spun a needle, he would describe. But not the mirror. Not the phone ringing.

She brought him the mirror to see himself. Held between thumb and middle finger.

“Here, look at your face.” Showing off what she’d done. The phone rang uncomprehendingly in the other room and stopped, denied its path. It had rung at the same time Tuesday. Like eyes that can hear. But what?

She had the machine turned down but not the first ring and a half. He had closed his eyes and saw the ceiling. “They fire you, then they won’t leave you alone,” she said. To herself she said it. And for him. “Scared of you but,” he said. The needle in his heel ached, he’d resisted the needle. A reflex, she told him, how had he learned to do that? “Scared not of me,” she said. It was the fourth time he’d come to see her.

There was a red Buddha carved of wood quite massive-seeming on a polished wooden pedestal in the living room. The pedestal shaped like a cushion. Beside a stone pool grew two white flowering plants. How did they stand so tall in their pots without bending and how did she keep the water so still? In a corner stood all by itself a two-part shoji screen near the answering machine with the green light, no chair near the phone — and elsewhere, the distances finely maintained, a towering glass vase on the floor held stalks of grain, which struck him as beautiful or successful. A tiny alcove kitchen, a dark and silver shadow waiting that you could almost miss — where two knives hung magnetized.

She took time and she made it pass. He saw her. Where did the steep pain go? A weight, yet there poised with her. A delusion and real. They were getting somewhere. She was doing something. A route the needles plotted. He never saw the marks when he went home.

Back pain? she asked. Got worse. So the treatment…? It was kind of working Tuesday and Wednesday — (“What was that like?” she asked—“Like less gravity, a shot of ozone”) but then yesterday not. She studied the man extended before her in his shorts. It was Friday. She spun her point between finger and thumb. She wouldn’t say certain things. That she hadn’t liked him but had found him to be quite an OK patient. That she’d heard of him before he ever phoned her but he was nothing like that when you got to know him. Why had he found her? he wondered.

Had he used the moxa? Damn right, singed himself.

“Nobody fired you,” he said, hearing in his own words that she meant that person, a former patient, had also dumped her.

The needle jabbed his foot this time. Nothing she had done. Messaging soft tissue up to his hand, open for a needle between thumb and index. “Once burned, twice shy, my dad said.” Her authority was close. She was a healer. Or it was what she had always done. “You don’t go back there,” he said. “You don’t,” she said.