So it was Bob Whey. Bob Whey had thought to run into Xides at the Materials show and had run into someone who’d written about him.
Bob Whey had recommended an acupuncturist, figuring it was Xides who would hear.
At Customs they asked Sam to open his case. “How ‘bout those other calls?” he said. “Same guy thirty minutes was it into the appointment?”
“You been talking to Eva.”
Starting to tap in a phone number at the airport, he stopped. If he were younger, she older. It had been three days shy of three weeks. At his doorstep, key in the lock, he still hadn’t phoned. How to see what was going on. Yellow Pages. Ladder. That difficult man she was back with who loved her. Loved something about her.
New life, new strategy inevitably developing. What was it, where was it? City not the site of, but the very medium of — what war this time?
It was another day and he phoned his internist and topped his bike tires up and got himself across the Bridge to Brooklyn to visit the compressed straw paneling in a new auditorium of his and the exposed recycled steel Smartbeams for one suspended mezzanine floor. His daughter at her college in Ohio did not take an interest in this old school she had commuted to as a child, cabbed and subwayed by him at seven-thirty in the beginning. A year later put on the bus, and as they pulled away at the window talking to her friend, her father standing out on the curb almost but not quite ignored. And now he had been consulted again about the sustainable “green” building at her college — which she kept her distance from — his part in it.
A sketch reformulating the position of a hundred and fifty sensors which were not even his job, constantly monitoring flows of energy, cyclings of matter. To reweave the human presence was how they put it that he had been asked to advise on, but later an equation had come to him like Nervi’s parabola and bare, sincere roofs, prefab beams, salt warehouse and Naval Academy swimming pool to beget another equation. Xides despaired of his own thoughts. When would she stop changing her major? It had been music; would it be again? He was tied up in double deadlines with cash value people were phoning about. The fish farming reservoir shapes networked for sluiced storm-water the filters didn’t yet quite track. Proud, though, of a high-end commune in eastern Washington, where his single-wall structures convey recycled light with this new water so far an industrial secret.
Warmed by the great skylight, she might have been clocking him, lap after lap, the Asian in the deck chair with next to nothing on, a passing plane aglint far away, when he stood up at the shallow end and felt her dark glasses at once beamed away from him. She was knitting — and young, her very thighs thinking at this moment; and not a resident, he felt. He placed her. Designer? Chemist? What was it coming to him, a movie theater lobby two nights ago he was certain; yet, now he thought of it, also lab offices at Einstein in the Bronx where, on his way to the caf in the next building over — a prolific little cactus, its pads and joints overflowing the pot and pausing to rest on a formica desk top to make their way along and rising like uncanny structure in motion, suppliant, stubborn, succulent — she’d been behind him as he left the Mag Res building with half the equation.
He pushed off for four more lengths of the pool, Sam not showing maybe, something happening here to Xides, Xides letting it, his back supple deep inside. Three schoolboys, two skinny, one fat, arrived from school here at a serene, serious mid-Manhattan rooftop club, were getting horsey at the edge as he made his turn at the far end. Until, halfway down, he was not moving but, face down, arms stretched like a diver’s, he might have been thought knocked dead by this explosion of plunging boys coming himself to rest eyes open into five feet of water luminous with particles, absorbing under the surface the violent ring of cries from the kids shoving and killing each other as he had felt their plunge shift the volumes about him, and his hearing; felt approach his eyes through refracted glimmer a saving lure but he saw it was also in his eyes too, atoms there stunned to note the water mobilizing certain thousands of those (sun-saving) bacteria (at his bidding even?) that make chains of crystals inside them into magnets to point themselves toward the pole, light’s very shadow.
A second explosion acoustical and dreamed by the water that filled his ears signaled in both of them not just the boys bombing the adjacent lane and the woman up on her feet (for in a corner of his eye he saw below her belly button her tiny bikini bottom’s waist and crotch practically converging — as his body the morning of Hutong could be subject to surveillance but not his half-lost vague thought of architect assembling solitary before Grace found him) before he himself brought his feet down now onto pool bottom like a tuck starting a back flip and reared, water pouring off his shoulders, startling the boys, surging over to hoist himself out, find his towel and flip open his cell five days home from China, though he had biked past Valerie’s early in the morning, run a red light hearing the doorman’s call behind him, and hoping the acupuncturist hadn’t been expecting his phone call, heard that thought given the lie now at poolside by, to his amazed dripping ear, the 617 number you were invited to leave messages at by a woman’s voice whose every word sounded like a beginning, as exact as an idea might be good and also vague, like low wood structures in the old courtyards of the Hutong, the settled strength of peanut oil frying, the half-baked idea he returned there for.
617 was Boston.
She had moved. He had been in China. His gaze reached that far but the Asian woman across the pool believed it was her he saw, and he said, above his cell, “Mag Res building” meaningless words above his cell for her to read or some bugger listening in to hear, water riding off his skin, his towel around his neck male and executive, several places at once, probing the woman in the glasses. And suspecting surveillance and hoping to see his friend at any moment, he recalled our own projection of the insides of the dam and almost regretted missing acupuncture the day before his flight to China because his daughter had needed him just at that hour.
To meet her at the bank (she was so busy). It wasn’t money. Was it just him she wanted? Though he brought money up. Which made her mad all over again. Really because the “older” boyfriend (whom she knew her father didn’t like — Hey, check it out) had decided that at twenty-seven he needed some space. It had started the night her dad had come to dinner, she told him. Then later they took a walk and bickered about the dinner and heard that explosion and had an argument about it, lights on in the windows of an apartment house they passed (“And it started to rain?” he said, and his daughter so fine in her wretchedness, which would pass, looked at him sharply — Yes, she had looked up into the rain, she liked rain, and people at their windows she took them in at that instant and for some reason wished she could have phoned her dad but by then he was somewhere on the bike path racing downtown and she had Mom’s hat that old floppy job in her hand and put it on, and her companion said, Your shoes (meaning, Why do you wear those heels?), and she stopped and had a look.
And giving her father a nice afternoon peck on the lips, a few words like all her little habits stayed with him as they parted after exactly (he could not bring himself to say it to her) forty-four minutes, “Not going back there,” was what Viv said with all that sweeping subtlety yet to be lived into, for he had heard himself saying those words once to someone.
So it was for his daughter that he had let the Friday acupuncture appointment go with a phone message. He would see Valerie when he came back from China but was on his way, she should know, to finding himself a Recycled Man. In which, as he recognized it at once as a lie, or an attempted one, there spread from chest to scalp, brain to instep its material truth as well.