Also a rival. The Chinese had asked about “magnetic water,” said to be under test as a field insulator and lighting conveyer. “Invention or discovery, we understand it is yours Doktah Ex,” the elder engineer grinned. “But for which structure of this material we have yet to learn.”
“There is no telling. But it belongs to all of us,” said Xides, “and I would hope it might help the farmer. Also, I am not a doctor.” He asked about the other dam, the less well-known — was there a chance they could see it? Bows, not nods.
The structure of the water material itself was what the Chinese were angling for, the correspondent agreed with Xides. Xides thought of Bob Whey, the bare extent of him, ground plotted point by point, and speaking of a criminal war — of Xides’ contribution possibly. The other dam would wait.
Back in Beijing Xides purchased moxa on a rainy day with a state guide whose alternative occidental name was Grace. Meanwhile, the correspondent was getting as much as he could out of an interrogation of himself (on this seventh trip to the mainland) evidently inspired by documents he’d laid out neatly on his hotel bed when he left for breakfast regarding the diet pill Meridia the Chinese were allegedly competing with the Canadians to peddle a generic of.
What is wrong? Is it thinking? Or the back? Or is Xides back home already in his mind? Architect reflecting on the St. Louis-Arch-size (but taller) Central Chinese Television Tower window cavity: what’s it looking out on? “Media Park” for the people? Or cornered between adjacent “News” and “Production” limbs, the area named “Green Land” he didn’t need to revisit, you could see it from miles away like soaring Shanghai next to which New York is old, where buildings want to fall down. “What has architecture to do with anything?” he asked his friend. “No theory of bigness.” The correspondent said it sounded like Xides twenty years ago, “vacuum in front pushing from behind”: “Remember what you said about materials telling us what to do?”
Xides deposited a check for slightly more than eight thousand dollars American, a fee installment, in a Beijing branch of his bank. He was alone. Xides found the narrow enclosed lanes of the Hutong district. A statement, an idea like an act, was eluding him in a smell of peanut oil, of frying, a duck standing in a cage. Looking for a courtyard and house set back where he had once had an idea he couldn’t recall. Low warrens of wood structures, the privacy, an attraction for visitors to glimpse in Beijing and see as China. An observer. A nursery school with children at their nap — cells of a hive of hives, some new material that came to him. Grace of all people apprehended him here to the surprise of neither.
No problem, a university-trained guide. And in a nearby temple, with a great gong way upstairs, the correspondent joined them somehow. Xides made it easily up the stairs and later down the street. “I should have my head examined,” he said.
“That what the doorman meant?”
“She said you don’t have to like the patient, and I asked if she’d ever fired one. ‘It’d be me,’ she said.” “Valerie said that?” “Yes, she meant herself.” “Of course. You’re attached to her.” “Tougher things than that,” Xides said, turning to Grace, a tall girl with a fine sense of distance yet in touch with what was under discussion, what withheld. Though not going to be thought interested in what the men were going home to. “The moxa, it seems to have helped,” said the correspondent. Grace smiled her white, extraordinarily crooked teeth, two front ones grown in right in front of two others.
“I haven’t had a chance to use it.”
Their van was waiting. A bus and thickets of bikes on the move. Much to see out the window besides people in another bus. A bike mechanic plying his trade right out on a street corner, parts and tools strewn on the sidewalk. “You told her this same man had fixed your flat? The one who phoned her? A bike mechanic?” No, it was the middle of the night, he was just there in the street. “How strange,” said the correspondent.
On the plane coming back, the thought, his kidneys, that Valerie had left him to do what he would came to him instead of sleep and he thought he would go see his internist. He was alarmed to remember it, embedded in a dark capsule slipping past its own sound crossing the pole, stationary the cabin in time until he got up and went back to the galley to look out and see if he could see the Aleutians, the land bridge, some long-ago action down there. Looking to be surprised.
A door shut, a tight hatch seal in the ongoing plane’s invisible sound. “Something’s wrong,” the correspondent said, joining him. Aware of the radiant flight attendant, Xides was thinking, The guy that recommended Valerie, he didn’t know Sam.
Of course not, the correspondent had one of those badges on. They both laughed at this. Was it nonsensical? Well, at the materials show a badge came in handy, Xides mused. “You can tell from how they’ll glance at it,” the correspondent granted.
“And the guy wasn’t wearing one of course,” said Xides.
“Something else,” said the correspondent, but Xides said, “He spoke with authority?”
“He was more into titanium. He may have had…he may have…”
“May have had…?”
The flight attendant like a waitress interrupting a conversation asked Xides if he needed anything and he said he would like a bike to ride up and down the aisle. “What are you thinking?” she said.
“Why, taking someone up to the Acropolis.”
“You like Greece?”
“Which I myself once put off visiting though I was in Athens, I was scared of it.”
She had never been. Who was he taking? she asked surprisingly. She offered a bottle of water and he asked his friend again, “May have had…?”
“A chip on his shoulder, who knows.” The correspondent took the water himself. “A chip on his game leg, that’s right,” he said. “Looked at his watch, didn’t know why he was here, he said. I told him he did.” “Good for you.” “You say these things. Sometimes they’re true. Next thing he was talking about pins in joints, structural stuff, and I brought up a pretty well-known orthopedist whose name you know and then a friend with a bad back.”
“A ‘friend,’ you said.”
“‘An athlete?’ he said. ‘Architect,’ I did say. Then he said he could recommend someone, a regular little terrorist—” “What did he mean?”
“Strict.”
“That she saw through him maybe.” A Chinese woman emerged from the lavatory. “How undressed are you for the treatment?” “Shorts.” “Prone?” “On my back.” What had the guy been wearing? Army jacket camo. The correspondent didn’t like something. “Something else,” he said. “Where were you when you had that flat?”
A good reporter, the correspondent knew the street, the block, the highway. “Strange,” he said. The thought came to Xides again that he must have been recognized that night.
What was he doing there? said his friend.
“A breath of air?”
The correspondent set off into the aisle, touching a seat back with his free hand to steady himself, entering the shadowy sleep of the cabin, polite about what he hadn’t been told obviously. But how had the other man come to be out there in the dark street, the cobbles, the light rain, two in the morning?
Mother was half-Greek, Xides told the flight attendant, he had never been until he got married.
“Diana” produced from a metal drawer another bottle of water for him. So he was thinking of taking his wife up to the Acropolis?
Not exactly.
“You can see that,” she said.
The scene? he said with his eyes, frowning, wondering what she wanted.