Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

“If you’re any good they do,” he said.

She would remember that, she said. “Pass it on,” he said, “if your ideas aren’t any good they get used just the same.” He mentioned a group down in — he was just talking — he stopped. Well, no, he would be talking to a bunch of — far from here — (“You have your fans,” she said almost like a bitch) and like a…like a…he would spot among the two hundred a clutch of military in the middle of the auditorium, a territory within, out of uniform but you knew . Had they come because of what they would do when they went back to civilian life (if ever)? “But no.”

“Like a what ?” said the acupuncturist.

“A stain.” He was not just talking.

“You think war is life’s indispensable risk,” she said. (How did she know that?) His correspondent friend called it naïve of him—“what are you doing night-walking in a war zone?” his friend complained. Naïve? Xides at least knew he didn’t know what was going on. Naïve ? It got him going. When he had heard an on-site American colonel swear that better bombing in Bosnia would have dropped the bridges into the river, dissolved the infra (coupled with serious offensive hacking) — war over.

Then you get into real self-defense structure, Xides told the surprised colonel.

Naïve? He was smarter than others who were embedded in the events, these operations against insurgents, and if he didn’t make himself clear…“You do,” said the woman between him and the light. Was it some dreary healing he heard in her listening voice? — “We must talk,” he remembered later she’d said. It disappointed him. But one thing he was not was naïve. So she could forget Naïve Meridian, if there was one. She made a sound, like the softest vanishing laughter.

Because here it was Tuesday again. In the dumb progress of his treatment, Could Qi flood you? he asked. It was not really like that — a river, she said. His eyes closed, he dismantled the adjacent daybed opening the damn thing stretching the material. (Was Qi a two-way street? And why “ day bed”? Why Leonardo? And e-mail — was she too good for e-mail?)

“You said you were technically (?) — in what you wrote me—”

He knew what it was, her trick not in the needles only.

“—a widower (?)” she said. What he’d written for her had been all things he did , not was. He traveled, he spoke, went to the theater, because he thought performers had something (he’d written her). They were quick, crazy to be up there, foolish, quite true, gutsy. He kayaked in the North River, good upper-body technique he’d been told until his back acted up. Drank socially, and too much doubtless, but held it. He ate anything. Could manage no more than four and a half hours of sleep at best, made night rounds with a police lieutenant. He still grew miniature Asian trees in a small lighted space of his house — or they grew. His girlfriend had served as a naval officer and now painted large paintings of animals that sold. All this he had written down quite truthfully. He had killed a person once and did not recommend that mode of self-defense. He had his pride, didn’t let people do things for him for nothing, he’d written, and he reckoned all this didn’t tell his holistic healer much she could use. A lesson to him. He liked her, he’d added at the end.

“So you were technically still…?” Yes. “Married.” Yes, he had a daughter nineteen, away at college. “ She makes you a widower?” “We were divorcing.” The logic popped his ears coming in for a landing, was it the acupuncture? Inside of right knee local-calling the heel or long-distancing collarbone? Limbs mixing from inside surprised at what got said.

“Getting unmarried,” said the young woman. “Oh boy,” he said. “Was it convenient this way?” “Not for my daughter.” His foot he realized later hurt. “Who exactly left who?” “Exactly.” “Were you lucky to be left?” One of them had the upper hand for a moment, was it because Valerie had gone too far?

“Was that it?” he said.

“ You left but then she did it better?”

“It saved some money.”

The acupuncturist contemplated his belly like a thing. “You were lucky to be left I mean. But no going back.”

“That’s divorce. Like getting out of bed in the morning.”

“We know about that.”

That she would speak like an authority on this made you wary. “She was not interested,” he said.

“In?” “What I do.”

“Why should she be?”

“It’s your goddamn wife .” Xides reached for a needle in his belly to take it with his thumb and finger, Valerie intercepted, and he gripped her fingers like an animal biting. He expelled what was in him, all the needles and Qi and blood but here’s to the needles they were still in there helping him. He raised his knee to reach another needle but listened to her: “My partner’s knee, sinuses, headaches I could care about, aching back, his habits. Him.” “Him.” “Pain in the leg I can help, stomach, foot, head. I don’t have to imagine a city he is planning for Africa or down the street.”

“She was mending things at the last moment,” he said wondering who was the “he” planning the city. “Your wife mending things?” “My daughter more.”

“Between you and her mother.” “No, between them .” “That’s different.” Valerie had spoken.

“A floppy hat she wanted her to have. She was…”

Valerie reached out a book from the bookcase, female and professional in her single motion, so collected and expecting credit for it. “Your wife (?).” “Yes, she was graceful.” “And long after,” said the young woman, whatever that meant.

“I might sit us down and ask what was going on,” he said.

“You?”

“I felt cursed.”

“You believe in such things?”

“Saying them.”

Dismissing a city for Africa, was it Xides she meant? Would she know such a thing?

But “down the street”—who was that? Some small-scale chore he’d also undertaken once. What had he told her? She had said he had good teeth.

She put the book aside.

“Your own partner ignores your work, your acupuncture, and it wouldn’t matter to you? Your goddamn life.”

“Any more than you have to like the patient,” she said.

“You’re trying to impress me. Have you ever fired—?”

“It’d be me I fired.”

“—one here in your little home.”

“I like the windows. I look out into the street when I’m on the phone (?).”

It was always a lesson, he said.

“Like the rent,” said the young woman, at his side again. “You people want too much,” she said.

Well that was something, he said.

“No.” She laid her hand upon his forehead. Did she smooth his hair back? He couldn’t believe her. “Do you breathe?” she said, and as if she weren’t mad at him: “The gods have laid on him a restless heart that will not sleep,” was what she said.

It chilled him, it was pretty silly. Or was she, an unprotected tenant he happened to know (and maybe high-rent), meditating some parting of the ways? It was a mistake to think of her belonging to him for this hour twice a week, and he actually had not made that mistake. He was adjustable, even if his daughter knew his schedule and when he went to acupuncture. He breathed a droll breath out. He was real anyhow. Had Valerie changed the subject?

She asked his view of the Twin Towers. His view? He had been unable to think about them: that they were two was probably the thing, he said. Neither one worked by itself. Did they together? He’d never set foot inside. Had been invited to Windows on the World once, the restaurant, but couldn’t make it. Knew the part-time theater guy Jim Moore, who helped the French high-wire guy with the famous walk. He and the acupuncturist thought about this. “Travel light,” she said.