“As if he had taken something from me and wanted to help,” said Xides to the acupuncturist, who drew the last needle. “A suspect, was the boy a suspect?” she said.
“Well-informed we now think.”
“We?” The word said as she had asked earlier how the boy was picked for this trip.
“You don’t think I set him up?”
“I know you, Mr. Xides. But what did he take from you?” That note of intimacy in her use of his name yet distance, and her words recalled what Xides had half-heard minutes before, someone who knew you—i.e., whom you might not recall—and a distinctly heard woman’s code, “We need to talk.”
The impact he’d had on her? “Mean of me, I’m not surprised it had an impact to say I might not trust you with the story.”
She made a sound. “You thought that was it?” A light of doubt in the voice, of faint contempt.
He looked her in the eye, those dark but he now saw gray and harboring eyes that saw he had spoken as another man setting a rule for her.
But the impact she had mentioned, he felt it now like a sound or a politeness. In his body, as in hers. Was it something that had been recognized by her through him? Or it had nothing to do with him at all. Like her saying she could just imagine and didn’t want to imagine what had happened in Durban when they landed.
The correspondent (hearing all about it the following week in China) would be surprisingly subdued at the account of the appointment with the acupuncturist and how it had bizarrely concluded. The story of the flight, this scene in a downward banking plane he knew from years ago, but, as Xides explained it in the train along the route to the dam, arched gravity mass like a bridge on its side convexed upriver in the notorious neighborhood of which half a million farmer families had lived, now, just before Valerie’s phone was to ring at around seven-fifty-five, Xides had found in the lost, now recollected, hand of the unlucky young fellow traveler to Durban (and back) or found in himself or — who knows? — the purr of Mahali’s electric vehicle, the answer to the missing first odometer. Why did the correspondent take it so seriously? — having heard of the loss from their friend the detective lieutenant after the night in the restaurant when the correspondent was out of the country — or was it the odometer that made him think? Now it came to Xides that the thief who had slipped the Cat Eye weeks ago out of its little two-track base fixed to the handlebar was almost certainly the boy in the park, only eleven or twelve but more at large than the African boy that day whose abrupt round-trip and subsequent detainment would prove less mysterious than whether he’d been set up and how.
“I’m moving my practice away from New York, we need to talk…”
“But not right away,” he said quickly.
She’d been meaning to tell him. He would get a referral of course.
The phone rang in the other room twice, and a voice, tentative, irritable, and, yes, familiar, of a strength vectored by years of opinionated speech, confirmed what Xides had guessed somehow. “He fixed my tire,” he said. Tonight at almost eight the call had found them, and as if to make sense of the Yellow Pages, the dresser drawer, daybed pillows not restored, ladder — was the guy staying here? — the voice had already, a moment before, though this was not really the important thing, been identified by the man lying in his undershorts, the small of his back now that he was about to get up at last comfortably flat like, more or less, his upper spine upon the sheet covering the table though how that obscure, mixed force, the voice on a machine not turned down unmistakable from weeks ago in camo jacket and sneakers, Bob Whey, had actually come to be out there that rainy night on the cobbles where he would recognize Xides, might alter what had happened here.
“He fixed my tire.” “He what?” Whey would hear only himself. Yet, softly to him, “Bob,” Valerie said, “Bob,” wanting to interrupt the message going on contagiously confusingly clear — the hybrid bike identified as Xides’ downstairs with Nuevo’s witness. It was eight o’clock, said the voice, “we have to talk, good stuff today — work to do.” “Bob,” she said, and, to Xides sitting up on the table, “I named you once, only a name, weeks ago, and he knew you, you had met” (though he can exaggerate), “and I had to go and mention your appointment times, that’s all”—softly not to interrupt the message, “He’s what he is.” The voice going on domestically—“…I can get a decent price for the compass…got a share on a storage downtown”—concluded, “You’re so…”
“You can do better than that,” Xides said when the message was done. He was into his trousers, then his shirt unbuttoned that needed to be tucked in after he unbuttoned the top button of his trousers, new black sneakers, his cell ringing, his checkbook, jacket, wallet.
“We can all do better maybe,” she said, taking his check—“I have some moxa somewhere, I’ll find it next time.”
Xides came back to her. He took her hand her left hand in his right (so much between them), he took her shoulder, he’d had it, angry the two of them, forgetting something her hand nearly reminded him of, and he said trivially he’d again forgotten to ask her about Qi being one-way or two-way he’d meant to ask her. She made a sound. It could wait, he said, and Does he know you’re moving? said in his chest silently for he had the answer.
Nuevo was down at the end of the block. As Xides coasted by and Nuevo called out, “Hey, hey—” Xides, seeing ahead half-stunned and careful, running a light, bound for the Hudson River bike path, feeling two drops of rain hit like ball bearings a magnet, did not look but was aware of Nuevo doing something with his lifted hand, speed, distance, future, loss, danger.
“You want to take a swim?” said one engineer; “it is five hundred feet deep,” said the other. “He was an Olympic swimmer,” said Xides elbowing the correspondent, who had asked what fraction of the 18G megawatts from the dam would serve the 2008 Olympics. No no, all for Yangtze cities.
What do you think about up here?
Despite crippling silt, this great upstream reservoir was green. Chemical green we are used to supposing. The two Chinese could not take the Americans to see the shafts and galleries networking the interior of the dam, this wall greatest since The Great Wall, but a diagram of a contraction joint was faithfully drawn on a pink pad showing how it and many others with a special grouting concrete would allow for routine cracks in future. “You are a writer,” the younger engineer said to the correspondent, who had a hundred catwalks in his memory.
When they handed in their helmets, Xides told of a plastic bag at his New York door containing the helmet he had left at the acupuncturist’s. Returned by?
Xides could only guess. Whey, said Sam, I would bet on it, what about you? he turned to the engineers, who nodded, smiling. A third Chinese had appeared.
The doorman had been tapping the top of his head of course, as if X were crazy. “You could have collected it Tuesday.” The engineers and the indelibly gray-haired security liaison in a button-down shirt listened to the Americans. “She had to cancel.”
“She doesn’t do that,” said the correspondent.
“You’re telling me?”
“I had it on good authority she doesn’t.”
“Well, I canceled the Friday.”
“You’ll never hear the end of it.”
“I could have used a session.”
The correspondent knew something was wrong. When something is wrong, a friend will sometimes know.