“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.
But the phone rang — like clockwork. He didn’t feel flushed but she handed him the mirror and left him there, his face looked normal. An unusual second ring joined them, the machine wasn’t behaving.
Needles heel to arm, trajectories into the Qi marking targets all over his front, he listened to footsteps he knew quite well stop. She would be arrested before the shoji screen, its spiritual grid, the rosewood frame dyed black — and she was looking at the still water in the miniature pool, he could hear her thinking a divided thought under the eye of the caller, and his perspiring face in the mirror made him dizzy. It was a rival. She would be back. She was in the doorway.
“It was on,” said the man lying there in his underwear, feeling definitely something. “I’m back,” she said, unlike herself, “excuse the interruption.” “There are none.” “That’s a relief,” she said, attending to her needles (pelvis points not quite right for Kidney Meridian, he thought).
She’d forgotten and gone to answer the phone and something had changed. She was angry and this irritated her patient. No, it had never occurred to him, he said, fumbling over to her the mirror, closing his eyes—“but there are no pure interruptions.” “Your work,” she tried to say something, “your passion.” He could tell with his eyes closed as he felt a needle in his foot turn that she was trying (but why now?) to speak of him: “Aren’t you all about…?”
“Why does he call when I’m here?”
“At least it’s not one of those three-in-the morning jobs,” she said. Coarse for her.
Unlike her. Even a breach of something, but what? Keeping things separate. She hadn’t denied that it was him. But could the person know who was here? She had heard her caller in the phone ring. That was it.
The one who had fired her was what Xides suspected.
“No interruption,” he murmured, surprised. “Well, that’s one thing I’ve gotten out of this…what’s going on inside,” he said. “Cities that can access each of us?” she said, persisting.
“If we used what we had. Our materials.”
“Materials?” she said, fine-tuning a needle. “Cities,” she said. What was she doing? What was between them? “Yes, cities that can access—” (she had heard it somewhere)—
“I don’t love hearing myself.”
“People know who you are,” she said.
“But not what, God help me.” He was talking. What cities did she like?
She had a friend in Boston.
Xides had an idea, he told her, he needed to go back to where he’d had it first — something that needed a new material to build though it had been around a long time. An idea? she said. He despaired of it. What was the idea? she said. Yes, exactly, he said. “And someone takes what you thought up,” he said — changing the subject, seeing maybe vertigo was what the mirror had given him upside down—
“And turns it into something,” she said.
A schoolboy on a plane from Mozambique to Durban he would tell her about sometime, he said, whether he trusted her or not, he added meanly.
Me?
He’d said too much. A spasm in his being, he’d betrayed his own confidence. Her intelligence and courage were all he trusted. They seemed to talk fast. We had Kidney Meridian, what was the other one? Triple Burner?
Several, she was saying: Triple Burner a name only, more a relation, not a shape, between lungs, kidney…spleen, small intestine…organs that regulate water — old ideas, she said offhandedly like someone else, a person he could almost hear. (A mentor? The person in Boston?) They talked about China, Qi, the effect on it of organs it passed through. Passed near? Or through the neighborhood of? He needed somehow to see what we were talking about. He kept after her though because he had been mean about the African boy incident.
“Have you seen your internist?” she said.
He opened his eyes as she freed a needle, then another. His silence like gravity. What were his vertebrae to her? He knew some anatomy. (Did she really?) His disks, the tilt of his pelvic bone, his tail bone, his overly forward aiming neck bone. Yet his mind. He had seen forty operations, he thought.
“What materials?” she said, and he was off like a fool. A material he told her about strong as steel, yet warmer feeling, adapted at great expense for a war museum for ultra-light roofing and siding that might move in the wind like aspens up the slope of a valley he knew in New Mexico—
New Mexico—?
This metal, it was even an element — titanium.
“Titanium,” she said, recalling something. Why had he thought she would drop him? It was the phone. His mind she did take an interest in. Skin-deep, deeper still. She’d probably heard of titanium for implants? “That too,” she said. His own dentist, she used it he happened to know, who joined him in a half triathlon two years ago in Rhode Island that he finished in six and a half hours. Was he bragging? Valerie didn’t know — about what? She didn’t think so. She was holistic, he said. Cutting the swim time through keeping the body parallel — their coach called it vessel-shaping, he added. Parallel to what? Valerie asked, for she was a swimmer. To the water. Swimming at night, seeing less, knowing more, he said. Whose coach? she asked, his and the dentist’s?