Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

“Friday could you come at seven?” she asked presently, it was what she’d had in mind all along, a wavy needle going back into the white cardboard box unused, P.M. of course. Why the change? he asked. It was like her not to answer for a moment. The desk, the table in the other room, black maple structure, why had she sat him down there and then skipped this change and brought him into the treatment room. OK, seven. “Thank you,” she said, a frankness covering more than their next appointment. He had done something for her. What?

He would do his Friday errand in her neighborhood this time before seeing her. “Maybe I’ll come a different way,” he said. “Let’s see,” she said, “the bike path exits right over here, doesn’t it?” He could always stop seeing her.

“How is the back?” The actor pulled up a chair from the next table arriving after the show Wednesday night, needing a drink and the menu, which he knew by heart.

“Hearing’s improved,” said Xides. Everyone laughed. “That’s a beginning,” said the web designer, who was smart, had been in rehab, knew more about the war sometimes than the correspondent (who was out of the country), more about everything than anyone but was likable and somehow dark. The actor reached across for her hand. “He’s got a habit but you can’t see the needle marks,” Eva said. A painter of realistic animals, she had drawn on the tablecloth a picture of the notorious lower back. “Guy who recommended her called her a great little terrorist, according to Sam,” said Xides. The philosopher liked it. “He knows something.” “Whoever he is,” said Xides. “Didn’t have his name tag on.”

“Well he knows her .”

“She doesn’t know it but she’s getting me ready for my trip,” said Xides taking the whole thing lightly for his own reasons. “You should bring her here,” said the philosopher. “Why do you go?” said Eva, meaning China. The web girl made a sound. She knew a great acupuncturist in Chinatown, she could get his number. This was received in silence. “But he lost his odometer on the way up to see her,” said Eva. “How do you do that?” said the philosopher. “How do you know you lost it?” the detective raised his untrimmed Irish eyebrows, “maybe it was stolen.”

“On the bike path?” The actor bit into the last of someone’s baguette as the waiter brought his drink, and, his mouth full, had a good laugh with the philosopher, who said it was not the mileage.

“She only knows what she’s doing,” said the website girl then. Xides thought she was improving. He wondered why she came here. She felt at home. “Well, she’s holistic,” he said, dripping wine on Eva’s picture as he gave himself some more. “She’s professional,” said the girl offering her glass against his in a curious one-on-one.

Valerie had come back into the treatment room from the call she didn’t take. “Your regular’s after you,” he said, but she had spoken of Xides’ work. It was acute. It struck him. It was Leonardo she cited whose ideas got picked up. Xides had said that himself. He’d said these things more than once. Where? Like the matter with energy. Like Corbu at nineteen beginning with the rib-cage and maybe modular heart and see what cities became. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. Was it something she had said? Maybe not.

What is pain? the philosopher was asking, but now said he’d heard Xides would be getting back to pure math. Xides joked that he still had that two-hole doughnut in mind he once cared to know could stretch into a sphere with two handles. The philosopher was nodding seriously. But Xides wondered what he carried around with him these days. Missing his friend the correspondent here at Caesar’s who knew his thinking but they would soon meet. Something else he couldn’t put his finger on. Night streets came to mind, like a cloud of gas swarms of citizenry spread between high-rises. Yesterday pausing halfway down the catwalk of a suspension bridge cable he saw not the city he was thinking about but, dizzyingly, his daughter in her stroller, her mere life. And bicycling the river path, he could see through the surviving trees, the neighborhoods all the way up to the sweatshirted picnickers in long basketball shorts one night on the riverside, aiming the red barrel of a telescope at, he could have sworn, the Palisades.

The odometer he let go, a clip-on, and replaced it erasing with it the proof — the credit in city miles for exercise and all that he’d glimpsed — all his regret about time, which you need not seek but will stretch at the expense of others.

It came to him later with Eva burning moxa close to his skin, close as he could stand, acrid, truthful, a pungency to get used to, that the calls thirty minutes — he said it out loud: “These calls she gets at thirty minutes into the appointment—”

“What about them?”

“I don’t hear them, the machine takes them, but I feel they’re—”

“From the same person?” Eva withdrew the moxa.

“That’s right.”

“Is this stuff doing you any earthly good?” She stretched to drop it in the ash tray (in the shape of a life preserver that had hardly been used in twenty years), and her dressing gown fell open. In her face fine shadows, in her eyes the acupuncturist perhaps, in her habits always prepared, semper paratus from her Navy days, Marines, Coast Guard, he didn’t have it quite right, semper was right. She was gone. Was that true, “Valerie” was just trying to fix him up for his next trip? he heard her ask, No, not true; long-term care. A laugh from the bedroom. “She better take care, a caller like that.”

A drawer pulled out, he got up to follow, content that they were going to the theater Thursday, a place he felt at home, the warehouse down under the Manhattan Bridge near the docks.

How did he know it was the guy who had left Valerie?

Eva flung her robe over his head and tumbled him onto the bed.

Her pale hair unpinned, he was telling her now, somehow a little falsely, that in some Asian tongue one syllable of the word for “moxa” meant “acupuncture.”

A pattern of disharmony was what the acupuncturist was after.

Had her kidney meridian patient shown up ever with a helmet in his hand, that Valerie should mention the bike exit? The once he’d biked to her she’d had no way of knowing. He’d gone without his helmet. (And lost his odometer.)

Was she taken with him? They must talk, she’d said the last time, he recalled, when she’d said he did make himself clear, he did. And he told her the scale of what she was working on inside him was scary. They might get to be friends, he had told the correspondent.

To Clea, his cleaning woman from Grenada whom he loved because she fixed the window shade in the bedroom and could cope with the breaker box in the basement (“down in the mines,” they called it) and found an empty pill bottle beside the kitchen phone and knew what they were for, he spoke of all this news coming in on Outlook Express piggybacked, sometimes attached, with ads for prescription meds, as if she would understand him. Plavix against heart attack and stroke (?). Canadian cut-rate meds, but why the bombing of a shrine in Samarra got sort of smuggled in with Levitra or Retin A and sort of tacked onto a family violence case and someone’s stepson a victim of bad fathering, the item said, and fed a diet of Trix cereal and Chicken McNuggets, you couldn’t figure the connection with cut-rate prescription meds, and personal messages cut short in the middle, with a plot in Basra to ship explosives into the Holland Tunnel and blow a hole into the river. Clea said people took too much medicine but maybe they have problems like we do. She didn’t know. She e-mailed her family with her friend’s laptop, that was it, except for her sister in Toronto. It saved on the phone. Items on a list, microwave timer off, how Mr. Xides was sleeping with his back — an intimacy between them, and at last, like some small action detected in a landscape, the man who’d returned the bike with the tire fixed having told him one night what was good for his back, materialized in conversation like a wake-up call with Clea just as Eva phoned about a bite to eat before the play, she was on her way, so he only later recalled Clea saying, Looking out for you , as she straightened the books on the night table.