Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

Later he remembered his back. It came to him that, yes, the caller who had fired Valerie had left her. She had been his girlfriend, it came to him. Unprofessional. The main thing seemed elsewhere. Shielded by perspective. Closeness. A secret that would come out and be less big a deal than what we knew already.

“Strong spleen,” she had said, it was a Tuesday, a March sleet storm snare-drumming down the window. Terrific, he had said. Yes, it helps. It’s better, he said. She nearly smiled. He’d almost ruptured it once. Lucky, she said. Yes, it was. Senior high, a car crash, he wasn’t driving.

“So who was?”

X’s uncle who was only three years older.

“ Why was it lucky?” the acupuncturist asked.

“It got me into what I do.”

Was that true? she said.

Well, fear of spaces.

The phone rang and stopped. He explained that he had come out of anesthesia and seen the ceiling sliding open on the floor above which, listen, was a sky full of buildings turning and in motion mapped by someone he was sure, and then he couldn’t breathe gagging on mucus, or thought he couldn’t. Had she any idea what that was like ? It was like a bleb he had ruptured once letting in air around the outside of one lung collapsing it. She asked how that had happened. He had stretched and wrenched himself at the end of a dive off a springboard to make the entry straight up. The lung healed itself. Scars in there. “We’ll never know,” she said.

Spleen? he said after a moment.

It got rid of impurities.

Was that a good thing? She ignored this. “They show up in the tongue moss. As smoke, what we call smoke.” “Sounds like a rough night, smoky tongue moss,” he said. She looked at him. Where was her secret? The guy kicking her out by leaving himself.

When Xides undressed he would take off his watch. Was he developing needle memory? When Valerie showed him his face it would be about thirty minutes and he lay there. This was when the phone decided to ring. You could do without it.

“Is it right there at the needle that you get into the Qi?” “Down here too.” She pointed to the groin area where he knew there was a needle but didn’t look below her hand, her face. It was like water in a bark canoe, he told her, the leak you see in the floor isn’t right over the break in the outer skin. Asked how his back was, he didn’t know today. Her hand was close and out of sight, she spun the needle, twiddled it, three or four seconds in his belly, he thought — could you work two meridians, he thought, did two cross? He would find out himself. “We don’t know how it works,” she said softly. “If it works,” he said. “It works.” “Unless it doesn’t.” “That’s right.”

“ Your Qi…,” he persisted. “Yours,” she said. “Works on mine?” he said. (They didn’t yet think as one.) “Your tech nique I mean. You’re remote but you still do your work.” “I’m not remote,” she said.

He muscled himself down off the table when they were done, pulled on his pants, buttoned his shirt, tied his shoelaces, wrote a check. Felt like a warehouse. She wrote a remedy for him to do something about his sleep, handed him a slip of paper thin as onion-skin. He said he’d gone back to swimming, it was good for his back, the friend who’d recommended her was a great swimmer or had been—

It could chill your kidneys, she said.

— and good for his mind, he wanted her to know (as if he were fond of her), he had an idea for nested pools like the public place in Hong Kong but more stacked than tiered, did she know Hong Kong? On the way to someplace else, he thought she said quickly. — You need to regulate your bodily functions like drinking, eating, standing up straight. That’s indispensable. Otherwise — she was saying, looking at the paper in his hand… — he felt her like a hand inside his heated face, and wanted to speak of winter fishing in Wisconsin but he needed to pee yet still more to get out of here, it was the treatment.

Did he eat a lot of meat? she asked. He summoned up for her like an invitation a monster weekend night-hiking down into the Grand Canyon with a retired IRS supervisor now supermarket checkout buddy at the tourist center, thirteen hours South Rim to North watched by big white-tailed squirrels, next night (and day) sixteen hours back through Bright Angel and flashlighting rocks and a wild burro and, up above along the switchbacks to the car, cliff chipmunks you hardly knew were there, a tassel-eared squirrel, another shadow in the dark moving around behind him or nothing but a function of his own climb. IRS buddy cooked a fat king snake in its skin on a Coleman stove, what he’d been getting to, dead but it started wriggling again, like tossing a fish back or an eel with its head chopped off.

She said, “Your e-mails about prescription drugs? You don’t know what’s in them.” It was what came with them, he told her, news messages. “About?” He recalled it verbatim: an improvised explosive device not clear if 13-year-old boy knew he was carrying a bomb. Among the dead were 3 Iraqi civilians and a Kurdish soldier guarding an Iraqi police station, al-Herki said, decision came Monday after talks comprehensive and productive between Rice and Olmert went from casual conversation one hundred eighty degrees from that. Cut-rate Lotrel, Xanax, Celebrex, Retin A…Then he remembered a suicide bombing, a shrine in Samarra, and Iran’s nuclear plant — and a violent accident underscores the danger of working with wild animals , said a solitary message. It was only information, he said. Her smile faded. He was leaving.

“Those things you wrote me.”

“Showing off.”

She laughed, such a hard laugh, brief. “I thought the phone was going to ring,” she said. He was embarrassed. “The accident, you were what, eighteen?” “Sixteen.” “I guess it wasn’t your signature city you got drawn into in those days. But bridge houses on an old El, all that that…” Where did she get her information? he asked. “You knew at sixteen, looking at the ceiling.” He’d known nothing. He’d had an aunt who designed for Bucky Fuller, did the architect work actually but no one would ever know. She got no credit.

For her ideas? Valerie said.

The front door swung shut behind him. He had left her. The elevator in this well-appointed apartment house on its way up, a phone went, if it was hers. Her laugh a moment ago had been like someone else. The Chinese. He belonged to the city. What had she meant by bodily functions? He tried to straighten up. No one stepped out of the elevator. He never saw patients coming or going.

He thought about her when he was with his friends. And when he was thinking. Acupuncture as anesthesia. Patterns of disharmony. Sometimes she began with his tongue. Mossy. That mean green? — he was joking. No, it was the coating, the fur. After-a-rough-night fur? he interjected. Did he have rough nights? she said. He stared at her. No, she said, it was how the coating — he had it out again down over his lower lip — was implanted on the tongue material. His coating was thin, but OK.

Thank God for that.

She said it was his back but it was more his kidneys. “Oh is that all?” “A weakness there.” He asked if they were getting anywhere. Beyond pain management did he mean? she came back at him. She questioned him. Any unexplained fevers? Did he work regular hours? He was always working.

Call that regular hours?

People called him.

Who?

College president, consult on a “green” building. Do you get yourself into things? The college came to mind, he shut his eyes, students, self-defense. Sometimes he worked all night, he said.

When she got him on the table she stuck his right palm, which he didn’t like. “What is it?” Skin, he said. Yes, she murmured. Lucky he wasn’t on a serious blood-thinner, he said, he touched her. Not at your age, she said, and acupuncture did not cause bleeding, it could be used to stop it.