The boys on their bench had something on their mind, Mahali gone. Seeing him muttering at a little mike was part of her day, or what had become an errand for him slipped into her job, him just sitting for a few minutes here. A tablecloth of wine spills, crumbs, equations, came before him, his late-night friends, actor, academic, artist; detective who never forgot a walk, like a dog a smell, and could identify a person in the corner of his eye; but most, the correspondent, who had asked how was it going with the little terrorist?
Just in time watched by early headlights of a car unparking, he locks the bike’s wheel and the diagonal down-tube of its frame to a stanchion, unclips the Cateye odometer, pockets it. The helmet under his arm eyed by the Cuban doorman who has seen it all bears a whole convex potential of races and demolitions, roller blades and training wheels and once a good lay in the countryside without ever taking it off: a future curving up over the mind, smuggling into the China trip, you hope, a look at both (rather than just the better known of) the two giant dams inland after the Beijing stop where Xides, professionally summoned, would shortly meet his friend the correspondent to inspect the 768-foot-high A tower, in essence less upward than a colossal frame through whose limbs, jogged and trapezoidal, circulate TV production studios, broadcasting, media, God knows what all allegedly non-hierarchical around the multi-D window cavity through which is to be seen depending where you are the more and the less, city, nation, a blank, the frame’s glazed skin of international sign language like the bracing wrapping in the façade plane holding the building up—
— yet waiting for him back over the polar cap a return flight he looked forward to already — a homecoming next month felt this evening against his arm and ribs, the helmet’s hard arc, cupped rim, and the hand of the acupuncturist whom he wanted, sometimes in friction, discord, mystery, to please, who yet had picked up from him cheap surely beyond what any healer, restored in some corner of her own seeking, might learn. Though why had she imagined him bicycling to her?
“Late today,” said Nuevo.
At Xides’ greeting — his stupid question “She there?”—did Nuevo roll his eyes letting you in on something that had happened? This building. People. An abyss above.
A knife missing from the magnetic strip in the dark kitchenette. A small black-and-white TV he didn’t recall on the living room floor next to the tall plants that had shed two white blooms waiting to be swept up. A Time Out magazine on his chair by the table near the foyer. A current in the apartment asking, asking — enfolding the voice that as he came in through a front door propped open with the Yellow Pages in the way yet letting him in, had directed him to go into the treatment room, a dresser drawer not perfectly closed, a ladder folded against her closet door, two couch pillows belonging to the day bed adrift against a book case. Though where was she as he took off his clothes and his glasses, as he tried to get his back to flatten down on the table pad and its sheet.
And the Yellow Pages?
After a time, a sound from the other room, of trust. His and Hers, a reverie while he awaited her steps.
The correspondent, interrupting him last week, had asked particularly about the acupuncturist, the little terrorist — Xides’ curiously lowered voice, once described in print by his friend as physically inside his thought, at that moment brainstorming disaster housing. These blue tarps the Commission pitched by the thousand “that looked like swimming pools from a chopper — refugees on the move inside their own borders nowadays—”
One outa three hundred homeless globally, the listener puts in for Xides (worked up) to add: “We can do better.” You’re sounding like a politician, the listener put in against his friend’s thoughts: “Afghan, Iraqi—” (Indonesia Colombia Bosnia, the listener put in, hearing some new trouble looking for words from years ago almost, this architect originally)—“superadobe would work better for godsake, Sam, local-earth with barbed wire for mortar.” These grain-storage bags of hemp they recycled as tents, the Jap firm — if conditions changed you could add on a little four-foot wing — post-explosion, post-quake, post-flood, post-contamination, post-epidemic, post-words, post — The correspondent would remember after “X” was gone — but who’s this “we” that could “do better”? the correspondent wanted to know — only kidding — leaving the next morning for China a few days ahead of Xides. Only to get thrown back at him by his old friend strangely exercised, “Where’s this X stuff coming from, Sam?”
“Unknown,” was the reply — Xides an intriguing unknown in the equation of our future together, the correspondent had written before and would again, moved by his old friend who, when asked about “the little terrorist” that acupuncturist “of yours”—had said the scale was getting to him. The scale? From inside. Ah. “My own.” Large?
And small.
X would mesh the fingers of one hand through those of the other, edgy, maybe just that everything you do eventually gets torn down, hearing lately coming back from the tactical jungle civil dreams of his own on urban circulation picked up only to be implemented by military listeners, that is to draw blood yet in terms of economy and political stability maybe improving in fact his original thoughts on horizontal stretch. How motion might, decentralized, shift the “syntax” of a city, this new breed had it, improvise access flows to open insurgents to penetration where even state-of-the-art defenses against nuclear ends are “architecture” nowadays, perhaps even the contemplation of de-spare-parted sewage plants, depowered to leave sewage pools in the streets and river levels low.
Neighborhood renewal where it’s the neighbors that get replaced. And who were the insurgents? Imam followers such as mutah believers in temporary marriage? Other Muslims who condemn festival dramas and art depicting humans? Suicide strategists or self-anointed Gospel free-enterprisers who knew the drill? He explained magnetic water as a material to the correspondent who confessed that “acu”puncture always suggested “aqua” to him though this was incorrect; but it told Xides that man to man the correspondent was thinking about what went on at those sessions.
His eyes shut to hear her steps. Did he almost place that old Sam-sung TV? A thing on the move in the other room as if it were near the ladder in this room, he thought, seeing double, keener then than an instrument an unholy scent of cut orange came with her hand and a faint rinse of detergent. She asked how he’d been. As if it were longer than this past Tuesday.
Did he want to take off his watch, was an order, not a question. How was the pain in the small of the back and did he feel it ever in his belly? They needed to talk. It was her breath he smelt orange on too.
Taking his watch, Any fever? Why did she ask, needling his ear now? She thought she’d seen a slight swelling in his right ankle last time.