Xides on the far side of the pool went to greet Sam in his street clothes with the palm of his free hand raised but the Asian woman had gathered up her magazines and vanished into the ladies’ locker room, leaving Xides with suddenly the full equation of how architecture out of your very body puts together times.
“You see that?” A shadowy band like a line drawn with a broad chisel-tip pencil enlarged with a cartoonist’s water brush was what the doctor pointed to on the luminous screen. “That’s a second lesion on top of the first which would have scared us with your back you now tell me about, if this second hadn’t appeared, but it looks like — (can you beat that?) no telling when, but…”
“Like what?” There’d been no reason to do the test, take these pictures, except the patient’s faith in some fly-by-night acupuncturist’s opinion, but…
“We’re seeing a second lesion which sets off this, this growth. That’s new organ we’re looking at. Kidney. Come back in four weeks. Damn.”
“Damn?”
“’Zif you’d had liver surgery.”
The correspondent knew the Asian woman but not from the pool. She was attached to the Chinese consulate.
Xides’ back seemed better. His daughter had long ago inherited his early rising. Now he had inherited her early-to-bed.
A couple passed. The woman on her cell.
Xides called the 617: “You were on the phone that night of the explosion, it was out on the North River, I could tell, and you were at the window looking down into the street, and a girl — a young woman — walking by looked up. It was raining and you were on the phone and she put on her hat. You said something to the guy on the other end of the phone, and he hung up on you. True?”
The correspondent did his homework. He remembered what you said. And he knew his man. The chemistry of materials and the melancholy wonder that they are us.
The metropolitan form in Africa (Xides would quote someone whose name he’d forgotten), reveals itself through its fugitive discontinuities. Look at Joburg. The unconscious of a city. Strata, residues, layers become provisional, precarious, in times of…what was the word?
“That boy who was arrested when you landed in Durban?”
“He was behind me, with the woman, the major who’d intervened to forestall something potentially incorrect the boy was on the way to saying.”
And on the tarmac you were welcomed.
“They took him in by another door while I was shaking hands with a couple of…I called to the major, who…the boy stopped and looked over his shoulder, people taking him by the arm, I hailed him, I don’t know what I said, I don’t know.”
And he?
“Words of mine. To the effect that—”
To the what?
“—‘urban design becomes repression,’ he cried out, I think, and was hustled away—‘architecture,’ I heard, ‘fantasy,’ I think, ‘the city becomes’—”
The acupuncturist had said a month ago she could imagine what came next.
Xides had made a fuss, been stunned, had inquired, and it was explained to him, and he wanted to cancel his appearance but didn’t.
In the evening Valerie’s return message was waiting for him, her voice more for him at first than the words: “It was a floppy hat…and she took it off right after she put it on and kicked one leg out as if to show her foot, and she looked up into the rain. At my building, I think. And she stopped and the guy she was with kept walking. And she stood there and turned and walked in the other direction.”
The metropolis becomes the place where, across warped space, the superfluity of objects is converted into a value in itself, the correspondent had put down. X he had called a “mystery man…interrogating self-doublingly”—a phrase cut by the editor at The Economist in favor of direct quoting.
Xides stopped to say Hi to Nuevo. What had Nuevo called out to him when he was on his bike day before yesterday?
“They left this.” A taped-closed shopping bag, double-bagged with XIDES in white gel ink on a black Post-it. “They did?” It was sort of heavy and you felt a subtle balance. He saw the green light of Valerie’s machine in the waiting eye of the doorman. The infinitely small appointment book with handwriting to match. Smaller and smaller, seeing then but a corner of it. This between them an angle an algorithm could turn back into the whole thing, like a sliver of kidney his whole body and more. Valerie would not have left the package.
Clea was there when he opened it. It was the binnacle compass, gimbal-mounted and of some value. You trip over it, you win it. He would not go back there. He could not think of another message to leave. He had told Valerie nobody had fired her. He had said, You don’t go back there, and she had said, You don’t. She had taken his advice in a form he now saw had always been there.
So was it he who had sent her back to Bob Whey?
Clea set the compass on a counter on newspaper and wiped it. It was greasy, it was filthy, she said. And then, “Do you need this?” she said, meaning want. A scrap of paper half-taped with a frayed strip of duct-tape to the bottom of the housing. “An honor,” it read, and Xides unpeeled it, and laughed at what he found on the other side, a piece torn from a photo he remembered, a broken nose of stone, the sphinx he knew Napoleon and his horse were looking at one day for the camera.
His companion for this moment, his cleaning woman, must have known him, his face. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
CHARACTER
In the year 1990 I tell this to a woman who is on a job with me, and we share an issue of justice, I believe, but at that moment of first meeting, little more. A recollection of hers inspires mine, and she hears me out. She happens to be an expert on sound.
One summertime I dreamt of varnishes. I was a boy. “Dream” in the sense of eat, sleep, think varnish, thin, mix, and apply again. And varnish remover.
I carved a model whaleboat. Chiseled it, I hear the split and scrape, gouged it out of a slab of stained hardwood that had been lying on the toolshed floor for weeks — for years. A base, a stand for a trophy, I can’t imagine what. The wood had this deep and independent gravity to it, and the finish brought up a richer, plum band or stripe across the top side like the dark gap between the good creamy rings of Saturn in my book. And I — who knew where the rakes were, three trowels, the pink skull of (I think) a cat at the foot of the neighbor’s termite-ridden fence post, a rusted little handsaw, the tuning fork my mother had left beside the kitchen sink, the wintergreen-tasting twigs and dirty red bark of the woodpecker’s preferred tree on the far side of the house, my sister’s bike covered by me with a plastic tarp when she went to camp, and here behind a blue coffee can (kerosene-smelling) of nails (to be used as a target when my town friend brought his air rifle out) my sister’s zippered kit of bike tools and an unused train ticket on the shelf above the workbench in this shed where I had learned for myself the carpenter’s rule Measure twice, cut once — I who (as my father put it) kept track as much as anyone around this joint had left where I’d seen it the middle of June this eighteen-inch block of maple inherited like the tool shed itself from the previous owner. Part of something else. Noticing it now I took it up off the floor and felt it and was drawn to it by a force of ownership.
For the first time I thought vaguely, What is going on around here? In fact, I loathed myself as a boy, despised the balsa wood of my old-fashioned model kits — can you imagine? These had been procured for me by my great-uncle, a Warrant Officer in the Coast Guard, and they were specialty items even in those days. I don’t know where he found them. A heavy cruiser, an aircraft carrier, slim destroyers side by side, a buoy tender, an old scale-model 83-foot harbor patrol boat. Today it’s all pre-cut plastic, and was even then. Whereas my great-uncle thought plastic an abomination. Granted it repels “ship worms” on a real boat, but then you get chronic barnacles and you need to apply anti-fouling paint. Plastic come to think of it may have been just about all he felt himself in extreme opposition to — such a quaint objection it seems now. I could cut a hull from a length of balsa when I was nine. A double-ended Macao junk had my blood on it. Airy as cork, completely dispensable meringue-light balsa wood for kids to carve like cheese.