Valerie sat him down at the desk one Tuesday. Why? He was ready with his tongue. She had her little book out, her thought marshalled. “No,” she changed her mind, “let’s go in there.” Later the phone rang and she came back from not answering it and spoke of his work as if the aborted call brought her these thoughts. What he’d spoken about abroad she seemed almost to know — a porous perimeter, structures at the edge of an outer neighborhood that you could pass through like a democracy field with unmarked lines of approach. Or wait, changing the subject for he didn’t trust himself — or her (though who would she tell — and how had she known?) — a rich family in Peking ages ago built a series of linked mansions, city within a city. He described it all — it stopped her — but the idea (for he hadn’t changed the subject after all) we could use and turn into its opposite, right here. For people. For city space might have no borders. It was all worked out, two sides of it, killer analysis. And would’ncha know, the military got hold of it. “So I’ve heard,” she said. (What had got him started? Her? Her call? A dim scrape of moving on the floor above, like furniture dragged?) “Think of all those floors in skyscrapers interrupting circulation or here in your own building even for privacy’s sake.”
“Privacy,” she said, doing something (but what had she meant, So I’ve heard—“Sky’s the limit on rent, I’m afraid — well, there was Leonardo,” she said. (Wasn’t she stabilized? Not this building.)
“Leonardo?” like a phone ringing a remark half recalled in his crowded life then gone. “His ideas got used,” she began.
“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 “daybed”? 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.”