Night Soul and Other Stories (7 page)

“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.

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.

He was being touched but along a line that crossed another this time he was sure. “What is it?” he said. “You came in armored,” she said, “you should see yourself.” “I come here to see you.” It was less a needled point he felt now. She had been working two meridians, and we would see. Skin was elastic, he said, containing most of him openly. They thought about it. He found a growing warmth, an erection not only in his face, and welcomed not what was happening to him at this moment but in his shorts its embarrassment. She had paused to appreciate his look. His flush? Skin, he said out loud, remembering work and all this strange travel, always a stretch, and that the Chinese, who had thought up pasta, hadn’t they (?), though not all its shapes—had asked him to consult and they would have to talk about that. He and she.