Joseph McElroy: Night Soul and Other Stories

Materials, he was explaining — that was what he was doing for the visitor as if the flat tire had been a means to bring you in and tell you about this multi-use neighborhood project like the latest thing. Though then, “Smart materials,” he said, like a joke between the two of them but the visitor looked upward, to where the second floor had vanished or become a twenty-foot ceiling. Resist impulse to pull out cell and take a picture.

This person in the night who’d fix your flat — but when? — was he kidding? “Whey. Bob Whey, w-h-e-y?” he said. “No tools? No tube?”

“Just me and the bike.” The visitor’s back half out again. His host eyeing him, “It’s been a tough evening,” said the man. “Tough day,” was the reply.

A day getting ready to go away. Plus two weeks of talk ahead, mainly his but coming at him like night terrain to a paratrooper. And then tonight, dinner on his best behavior, and afterward his first flat in years by accident taking this route of three or four routes sometimes at night when the city belongs to him, redoing it in his head, his chest, arms, and butt. The end of a difficult evening — and now this guy, one more city sell with some point probably of value offered in the end. Fix your flat but step in here, see what we got goin’ on. Parking his visitor’s bike up against a table-saw this not uninteresting guy who, whoever he was with, didn’t like to be alone. Self-taught veteran you felt, wounded person (?), with one jagged half-broken tooth — partners (he said — but you wondered) in this and the building backing onto it — semi-raw space from two city decades ago, how had it escaped? — who would talk himself out of a job you would bet.

“Do it from the ground up human scale, human materials.” “The ground?” the visitor weary now, “the ground—?” thinking, Who’s we —? “Groundscraper not skyscraper,” the other broke in, who’d been so mysteriously prompt out in the street, almost before the tire had blown. Perhaps a little unbalanced, like his limp, but no. “Decentralized community unit if we could only buy — you know what I’m saying, you do, I feel you do — designed fer — shoot, use what you have. Aren’t we glad the Towers went down?” (the voice rising, the bridges on the bulletin board coming back in focus)—“get outta this damn strait-jacket everywhere you look architects asked to come in but no chance to preciate the situation, study it, honor it, put the neighbor back in the hood. When’s it going to be our turn? All they can talk about is uncured violations.” The voice asking you for approval, how familiar these thoughts at a stretch they could have been the older man’s own once that he cut his teeth on, imagining these connected insides, the bare spaces of this building and the next, and a third building backing on the next block south (?). Yet this came to you now more a room you could live in, that leads to another also with a window, a ceiling, some circulation. These words in the middle of the night told a story, the speaker’s own — what was he saying, this almost structure taking instruction from…the body, that old architect’s dead end? — not seriously lame, this guy stranded though in a wee-hours expanding burrow — but he was halfway interesting: “Try another city,” he said as if to himself. “Boston for godsake.”

The visitor looked about him needing to get home, but the man counted on him.

For what?

To speak? Wasn’t there a materials show coming up in ten days? said the stranded bicyclist offhandedly, picking up a magazine off a chair, wincing. Whey seemed not to hear. “See a whole goddamn city planned for where was it Borneo, and one for Lake Victoria (?) — Jesus Christ.”

Welcomed off the street, he felt competed with, disturbed by this man Whey, his overlarge glasses. Half wanting you here, half what? Some violence just setting foot in a building — had Whey said that? Well, when was any empty building complete? said the visitor. “Most buildings are a lie,” was the reply, bitter, private.

“It’s how your work gets used.”

“Oh,” said the host with feelings one could deeply grasp, “you know it. My stuff’s been — you smile? — appropriated, God knows.” Whey draped his jacket over the bike seat. “Yup, it hurts, your own materials, flesh and bone,” said visitor.

“Quit before they fired me. Blow them off, the lot of them. Travel light,” the gesture took in the space.

“Bonaparte will find his Leonardo,” said the visitor, and when his host challenged the dates but Thanks for the company, you could ride that two-wheeler back there, Whey pointed — clear through into the next space, prob’ly easier on your back that angle, million years of insane evolution — he was irritated at Whey as if with his limp, his weights, something of a loser, his work underfoot, clippings tacked over one another, dancers, bridges, he knew in advance what was communicating itself to the visitor about his lower back, this successful traveler who couldn’t spend another minute here and, on two tracks somehow, his gray-and-black helmet hung from the handlebar stem, thought only of how to hobble home yet for a split second also of architecture as clothes, or the body.

Violence, the man had said — to even set foot in a building, let alone this in-progress — his hand describing a shape — multi-cellular experiment, this nest that takes its instruction from the body, its cue and summons—“said I was kidding myself.”

“Who did?”

“Just now.” Whey pointed at the phone on the floor.

“Kidding yourself about…?”

“All this.”

“It’s only the phone.”

“Depends who it is for godsake—‘Go into another line of work, asshole,’ was what it meant . That’s the phone for you,” said Whey, “then they tell you go get a breath of fresh air. I hung up but I took the advice.”

So that was how he had come to be out in the street.

“So. Missed your turn?”

“Yeah’d you hear the—” the visitor cupped his ear.

“The boom? You heard it? Explosion, whatever.” Whey pinched the flat, ran a finger up the rim. “How long since these wheels were trued?” Want to siddown? How far ya got to go? an odd ring to it. Hey that’s ten, twelve blocks from us.

Who was us? Someone who could live with this strewn floor. Here’s to the late-night advice about lower back but—

“Home is home,” Whey swept his jacket off the bike seat, “a fix — a fix — if you can just come off it. You see what’s here. All out in the open.”

What did Whey want? The visitor, ready to wheel his devoted bike into the night — is he just someone off the street? Summoned into some building that might never get done. God, an installation virtually. Two citizens in theory in the middle of the night. And someone coming to join them here? Or phoning? One didn’t ask. What was the emergency? “Don’t know where your thoughts turn up these days,” the man exacting some price. “Far from home,” said the other, thinking of the morning’s flight. “Zactly,” said the host, “criminal—” he tripped, lunged, got his footing—

“The war you mean.”

“Criminal as war. As war criminals if you want to know. And all this, this architecture, city planning theory (?), the military’re using it now, operational you hear. Glad you missed your turn anyhow.”

“You heard that bang out in the River whatever it was?” Why did the visitor ask, when his host had already said.

Surly now, some story in his eyes, preoccupied, not answering. Was he ready for his guest to go? Yet in their Army jackets, host and visitor together shared then the oddest thing of all stepping out onto the old irregular slabs of sidewalk, where Whey like a workman in broad daylight let out a whistle ear-piercingly through his teeth, and the roof-light of a taxi slid into view at the corner. Like some secret but one that hardly matters, next to this meeting.