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.
Old Ibsen warehoused practically under the giant arch of a so-so bridge, they reviewed what they had just witnessed on stage: the mob hooting, yelling, Dr. Stockman thundering that the majority was always wrong — when someone among his hostile fellow citizens quite piercingly whistled. And now not a cab to be found at ten-twenty, a current of wind off the East River, a garbage can lid rattling down the sidewalk at them out of nowhere, they’d have to walk it to the Madison Street bus or the East Broadway F train. A taxi appeared, night yellow before they knew it, and he and Eva settled back behind a rangy old Haitian woman at the wheel. He turned to Eva and she felt the twinge in his mouth touching hers and knew the bike was good for his back only some of the time but she wasn’t challenging the pain-killer acupuncturist, while to him, his place vacuumed, bathroom scrubbed down but the basin faucet gasket leaking, it was the piercing working whistle that came back of the guy summoning a cab he must have known was around the corner that night near the other river as prompt as his appearance out on the cobblestones almost before X’s tire had blown.
A challenged rider these days, mostly giving the bike a rest, he felt the jarring cobbles like vertebrae, like abandoned code, at 6:15 Friday pedaling into that once-forgotten block. Its time has come. The street wet from a hydrant now shut, the bicyclist hardly sees a Fire Captain in his hat getting back in a car pointed the wrong way toward the highway. A gray construction veil drapes a six-story building, two buildings, screening the street from mortar and brick dust sprayed by grinding and repointing these warehouse façades, asbestos back in the seams. Heavily supported on the old sidewalk paving stones by giant steel legs, the second-floor-level pedestrian bridge is flagged on its spiraling razor fence against perimeter intruders by a sign vowing landmark condos next year. An area subtly exploding from old, disused commercial to residential, and on a steel door through which X had passed, two work permits, identical from here. And advice about your back sounding a night of routine New York emergency (was it three months gone by?) its signature the rhythm on these cobblestones of a Samaritan accosting him and leading the way indoors. Where work in progress could look less building than dismantling there in Bob Whey’s clutter of — his name came back in one piece and was gone — tools, materials, floorboards darkened by a century of use, fugitive photos like overlapping bulletins, vehement palaver, veiled compliment, that night, that hour.
But now the bicyclist rode up onto the sidewalk strewn with rubble, and his palms upon his handlebars sensed only space in there now where not even a phone waited on the gritty floor, you felt sure, or the two calls one knew of. The heavy-duty door shadowed by the scaffolding overhead did not know him when he pulled on the handle, hearing the car idling behind him and then a shot from its horn. “You got business here?” said the voice of the Fire Captain standing on the far side of his car, who recognized him when he turned. “As you were, Mr. Xides — you remember me from the Mayor’s—?” “Yes of course.” Was he in on this? Neighborhood renewal? No, just remembering. Well, onward and upward, Mister Xides. Captain? Captain? An explosion that night. What night? Bayonne or someplace out on the river weeks ago. Got me. Could be anything. A touch on the horn pulling out.
“Yer late,” said the young Parks person, when he came off the bike path at six-forty. “You too,” he said. In the bed of her utility vehicle parked like a toy lay two rakes. On a bench a couple of street kids who’d love to get their hands on the wheel. The one he recognized said, “Been to Africa lately?” This amused the boys. “Gotcha bike,” said the young woman, who lifted the fan-shaped leaf rake by its plastic handle and let it fall, she had a call on her cell, a piece of song. Slow-moving in her ample brown trousers, she liked him, or recognized him, he read her metal name-tag over her uniform shirt pocket. Late for what? For this. He would let the stone paths and old apartment houses, high also because of the River below, and people come to him. There passed an expensive dog, lanky, fragile, learning sort of flowingly to heel. He propped the bike behind a bench, and eased himself down. “You got back misery,” the girl said, starting up. “Well, I come here,” he said.
“You do. I see you.” She had a thought. “Sitting there like a…”
“An architect, sort of.”
“Never woulda guessed.”
“How many miles did you ride?” said the wise-guy boy.
“So long, Mahali.”
Two men in ties and jackets pedaled up the last stretch of exit ramp. The bald one in the lead spinning low gear at a great rate, trousers clipped, the elder, gaining on him, leaned into his un-shifted high and, stroke on stroke, rose up on the pedals like a kid to make it to the top. Scarred and patinaed old briefcases rat-trapped behind, Friday emotions of each man aimed homeward, inward, maybe berserk, if you knew these faces. A quiet sound coming, the electric moan of the Parks Department “off-road” easing by again. A back-fire down the street to the east. “I thought you lived around here…” “I did.” “Before my time?” “Before your time.” She liked him, she was observant. “Gotcha helmet.” Accommodating, this black girl, hospitable, precise. She could almost touch him.