Her nostrils, her tongue tip concentrating upon her upper lip, her color looking back at him so close, he put his fingers up to her cheek for a second (unprofessional of him): What were The Yellow Pages doing propping open the door? he wondered. “And a piece of newspaper keeping the place,” was all she said, seeming to agree. The magazine, the ladder, her dresser drawer out, the daybed pillows not put back he didn’t mention.
He reminded her he would be going away in a week. “Voyager,” she said.
And he would have to temporarily stop treatment but would take the moxa with him.
Back where it came from, she said.
He might need some more.
He could buy the sticks there, she said.
His blood metered a certain risk now where he lay, putting things together.
For a time, she tended her needles like a planner. She took her time with kidney points, splitting him down the middle. An ice fisherman. Who the hell knew what she did? Track him? A bulletin-boarder with push-pins. Today he never got the small of his back flat. “Who the hell knows what you’re doing?” Xides said, for she was speaking and barely paused to think and smile with him, there was something coming, a lie lay somewhere between them today, a good lie maybe.
The needles in him, body, face, and he didn’t know how to hear the compliment he knew was coming, and shut his eyes. A law bending his way unsummoned, and now she said, quite out of character, for he would always remember, “You had an impact on me.”
He’d been meaning to make up for that, he said.
“Why don’t you just unload that funny stuff,” she said, like that was what she wanted to say.
“Whether I trusted you or not, I said, which was mean. In fact, I needed to tell someone. Well, I did tell one person — about the African kid but—”
“No, no, I’d been meaning,” she began—
“I really wanted you to hear.”
“Someone who knows you—” she interrupted and he thanked her, thinking it was she disguised as “someone” when presently he would see what she’d said was someone whom he might not recall; while Xides didn’t catch between his own words what she’d tried to tell him at first. “I really meant to tell you. The flight from Mozambique? A boy on the plane.”
It didn’t matter, she said, at work now.
“On the plane a talk we had, this is four or five years ago, he was all worked up, God he was smart, what I’d said in Maputo that morning, all of fourteen, I could have adopted him, just challenging me on public nested structures in folded grids and a house I designed under a river (?), one flow making new flows interrelating rooms…but city planning, I thought.”
“…?”
When Xides described this Friday appointment to the correspondent a week later thousands of miles from New York, was it Valerie giving him like a massage while he talked, or his hair-cutter…? He didn’t think so. A presence he detected here not hers alone like small things slowing down — acceleration nearing a new state. Or just all she kept to herself, discretion of course.
And how the phone rang not in the middle but at the end.
A city fluxed of spaces renewable and dispensable, he had said in his speech, like a continuous outward-and-inward-breathing being — between flesh and liquid, both. “So if your house as you said, Mr. x-aydeez, is just somewhere on the way to somewhere else,” the boy later on the plane couldn’t contain himself, “the city you plan fluid from district to district, for those who live there to move and mingle — that is what you said, inventing a city for us that should be porous in its multiple perimeters, social, dynamic, made from our drought-sickened soil, sir, should I thank you?”
“It was hypothetical, not just for here,” the man protested—
“—and to be eem-pro-veesed each day, if memory serves,” said the boy, fourteen, who had swallowed an idea or two and taken them to points past what the visiting thinker himself might have foreseen — yet the boy himself unwary how he sounded in the presence of others, “—but multiple really means multiplying with you, sir, and you have done the math and maybe you would show me please.”
In his recollection she plucked a needle from his instep like a mistake he was sure or an experiment (oh he knew her), and in his ear cartilage he felt a fact that had always been there, like a pair of ears, counterpart hearings. Like why do you tell someone something?
To hear how it comes out.
He waited for the correspondent as their train wound through a steep and foggy valley to say something, but there was nothing to say at that moment, though Sam often knew what Xides thought.
That kid, singled out to travel with the distinguished visitor down to Durban not four but five years ago after a talk he had given — what a talker himself, that boy, with a couple of languages plus his own and Portuguese, though from a remote township — angular, disputatious, thin as a runner — over six feet tall in the aisle before he bent himself into his seat by the window in which though this was his first flight he had little interest, for it was Xides or what Xides had had to say that so exercised him. Valerie had seemed to pay little attention except to ask how the boy had been chosen.
“But your house it is your home you cannot treat it—” interrupted the Army officer, voice rising like no white person’s voice personally and richly who hung over the back of the seat ahead drawn by the talk as well as her job, which appeared to be escorting to Durban and back this boy with the mind and fierce charm and infrastructural impatience—“it is not just the city—” the Major smiled with her cheeks, her teeth—
— interrupted now in her turn by the round-headed interpreter in the aisle (whose services were not required) who leaned over to point out the famous gorge as the plane, banking to show the “1000 Hills,” began its approach pattern. The land coming up if it could only be left alive.
“If he had been my kid,” Xides added in his account of all this past and present to the correspondent…The distinguished visitor with this one last stop before he turned homeward, listened especially to the boy, and peered across him out the window at the tilt of the land as the boy completed his analysis, “So with all these thoughts you could plan your city, reinvent its corridors—d’accord—in a dynamic field locked into feedback operating a web without a weaver. But Mister “x-aydeez,” the long fingers tapping the man’s shirt sleeve, “with your city theory one could also move in and take over a city.” All the mileage spent for what — was it the look in the lovely eyes of the Major exclaiming, “Could they do” that produced in Xides an unprecedented spasm or was it a moment later? “Maybe you misunderstand me,” Xides had protested. “Structure is motion.” “What is that, to misunderstand?” said the boy.
“I would not forget this whatever he meant,” he told the acupuncturist engrossed in her work, who said, “He meant was he just to give you back what you wanted.”
“War is architecture, sir,” the boy had offered proudly, “it’s not only everything.”
The major had gotten up into the aisle, and when she was gone into the lav (to phone ahead, it turned out), the boy gripped his companion by the wrist and asked if Xides did not foresee America in ruins. And, yes, then came the back spasm, more like a radial artery jabbed to make the heart wince — or, further down, a quick kick to the kidney sustained even as you spun away chilled in the face, and the hand not on his wrist now but gripping his hand. “What is it?” the boy said.