MISTER X

The rider coming off the North River bike path, at risk even at two in the morning cutting across the highway and into an old side street, must have been recognized. That was what he later believed summoning from memory the figure who had emerged almost from nowhere, a warehouse doorway, into the rain just as he could feel his rear tire go. Across slick cobblestones a man was making his way toward him as he bent to look down at his wheel, forgetting his back and straightening up in some pain. He’s in no doubt he can defend himself but the man’s slight but curious limp is a challenge, not some panhandling drifter but on home ground, street lamp out, steam escaping a manhole cover twenty yards down the block. It was late. A car speeding north along the highway flashed shadows, and then a car southbound. “You don’t want to ride on the rim,” the man said. He was younger. Behind him a crack of light where a warehouse door was propped open. “The bad news is I can’t get to it till morning.”

Each man wearing a camouflage jacket, trimmed beard, glasses, sneakers—some fool thing shared between them, you almost felt. “Street fails you, cut through the house,” said the younger man, leading the way. No joke exactly, it sounded like some tactic of the war encroaching that you might have to use yourself. “I’ve got a flight in the morning,” said the other wheeling his bike. What was he getting into? “You’ll make your flight.” “It’s a long one.” “Sleep on the plane.” The younger man stole a look at him.

“I missed my turn but I know this street,” said the bicyclist. “You don’t miss much, eh?” said the other.

Through a nomad’s door they left the street now for a space of overhead floodlights like a new outside or a shoot. Areas of dim dimension reached through to the back of the building and seemingly beyond it southward. Orange peel somewhere, paint thinner, the insidious metal burn of welding earlier in the day in a plan not yet realized, a loose rot of garbage needing to go out, warm scent of sawn lumber, pipe tobacco and sweat close as a thought, all building the flow here, the host muttering some welcome—what did he say?—deciding if he wanted you here setting foot in the place, but he did.

An alcove in progress of raw sheet rock framed up. Computer video units, old, facing off at a distance. Sander disks. Filled poly-prop bags like logs wound for strength in a spiral form. Manuals stacked, working drawings spread out, a convection heater on a yellow extension cord running under a swivel chair, reappearing near a futon, a brick wall half demolished taped to it a photograph of Bonaparte on horseback facing the Sphinx with its nose broken off. Stacked next to a barbell and two dumbbells were ten- and twenty-pound weights. Over here the teeth of a worm-gear assembly honorably glistening on layers of Sunday Classifieds and a brass binnacle compass gimbal-mounted with a healthy needle when you tripped on it. A mess, all this, of things in themselves to work with, sheets of plexiglass, two aluminum studs bent but usable, resin blocks, gray areas of litter, even a perfectionist buried in here somewhere in future space, an extension ladder going going. A cork bulletin board crammed with intelligence, a lighting plot tacked up, a clipping of a couple dancing, a drinking zebra taken by a crocodile jumping up out of the water, tracing-paper maps like overlays of riverfront with shots of two city bridges. How did the guy keep it all straight?

Materials, he was explaining—that was what he was doing for the visitor as if the flat tire had been a means to bring you in and tell you about this multi-use neighborhood project like the latest thing. Though then, “Smart materials,” he said, like a joke between the two of them but the visitor looked upward, to where the second floor had vanished or become a twenty-foot ceiling. Resist impulse to pull out cell and take a picture.

This person in the night who’d fix your flat—but when?—was he kidding? “Whey. Bob Whey, w-h-e-y?” he said. “No tools? No tube?”

“Just me and the bike.” The visitor’s back half out again. His host eyeing him, “It’s been a tough evening,” said the man. “Tough day,” was the reply.

A day getting ready to go away. Plus two weeks of talk ahead, mainly his but coming at him like night terrain to a paratrooper. And then tonight, dinner on his best behavior, and afterward his first flat in years by accident taking this route of three or four routes sometimes at night when the city belongs to him, redoing it in his head, his chest, arms, and butt. The end of a difficult evening—and now this guy, one more city sell with some point probably of value offered in the end. Fix your flat but step in here, see what we got goin’ on. Parking his visitor’s bike up against a table-saw this not uninteresting guy who, whoever he was with, didn’t like to be alone. Self-taught veteran you felt, wounded person (?), with one jagged half-broken tooth—partners (he said—but you wondered) in this and the building backing onto it—semi-raw space from two city decades ago, how had it escaped?—who would talk himself out of a job you would bet.

“Do it from the ground up human scale, human materials.” “The ground?” the visitor weary now, “the ground—?” thinking, Who’s we—? “Groundscraper not skyscraper,” the other broke in, who’d been so mysteriously prompt out in the street, almost before the tire had blown. Perhaps a little unbalanced, like his limp, but no. “Decentralized community unit if we could only buy—you know what I’m saying, you do, I feel you do—designed fer—shoot, use what you have. Aren’t we glad the Towers went down?” (the voice rising, the bridges on the bulletin board coming back in focus)—“get outta this damn strait-jacket everywhere you look architects asked to come in but no chance to preciate the situation, study it, honor it, put the neighbor back in the hood. When’s it going to be our turn? All they can talk about is uncured violations.” The voice asking you for approval, how familiar these thoughts at a stretch they could have been the older man’s own once that he cut his teeth on, imagining these connected insides, the bare spaces of this building and the next, and a third building backing on the next block south (?). Yet this came to you now more a room you could live in, that leads to another also with a window, a ceiling, some circulation. These words in the middle of the night told a story, the speaker’s own—what was he saying, this almost structure taking instruction from…the body, that old architect’s dead end?—not seriously lame, this guy stranded though in a wee-hours expanding burrow—but he was halfway interesting: “Try another city,” he said as if to himself. “Boston for godsake.”

The visitor looked about him needing to get home, but the man counted on him.

For what?

To speak? Wasn’t there a materials show coming up in ten days? said the stranded bicyclist offhandedly, picking up a magazine off a chair, wincing. Whey seemed not to hear. “See a whole goddamn city planned for where was it Borneo, and one for Lake Victoria (?)—Jesus Christ.”

Welcomed off the street, he felt competed with, disturbed by this man Whey, his overlarge glasses. Half wanting you here, half what? Some violence just setting foot in a building—had Whey said that? Well, when was any empty building complete? said the visitor. “Most buildings are a lie,” was the reply, bitter, private.

“It’s how your work gets used.”

“Oh,” said the host with feelings one could deeply grasp, “you know it. My stuff’s been—you smile?—appropriated, God knows.” Whey draped his jacket over the bike seat. “Yup, it hurts, your own materials, flesh and bone,” said visitor.

“Quit before they fired me. Blow them off, the lot of them. Travel light,” the gesture took in the space.

“Bonaparte will find his Leonardo,” said the visitor, and when his host challenged the dates but Thanks for the company, you could ride that two-wheeler back there, Whey pointed—clear through into the next space, prob’ly easier on your back that angle, million years of insane evolution—he was irritated at Whey as if with his limp, his weights, something of a loser, his work underfoot, clippings tacked over one another, dancers, bridges, he knew in advance what was communicating itself to the visitor about his lower back, this successful traveler who couldn’t spend another minute here and, on two tracks somehow, his gray-and-black helmet hung from the handlebar stem, thought only of how to hobble home yet for a split second also of architecture as clothes, or the body.

Violence, the man had said—to even set foot in a building, let alone this in-progress—his hand describing a shape—multi-cellular experiment, this nest that takes its instruction from the body, its cue and summons—“said I was kidding myself.”

“Who did?”

“Just now.” Whey pointed at the phone on the floor.

“Kidding yourself about…?”

“All this.”

“It’s only the phone.”

“Depends who it is for godsake—‘Go into another line of work, asshole,’ was what it meant. That’s the phone for you,” said Whey, “then they tell you go get a breath of fresh air. I hung up but I took the advice.”

So that was how he had come to be out in the street.

“So. Missed your turn?”

“Yeah’d you hear the—” the visitor cupped his ear.

“The boom? You heard it? Explosion, whatever.” Whey pinched the flat, ran a finger up the rim. “How long since these wheels were trued?” Want to siddown? How far ya got to go? an odd ring to it. Hey that’s ten, twelve blocks from us.

Who was us? Someone who could live with this strewn floor. Here’s to the late-night advice about lower back but—

“Home is home,” Whey swept his jacket off the bike seat, “a fix—a fix—if you can just come off it. You see what’s here. All out in the open.”

What did Whey want? The visitor, ready to wheel his devoted bike into the night—is he just someone off the street? Summoned into some building that might never get done. God, an installation virtually. Two citizens in theory in the middle of the night. And someone coming to join them here? Or phoning? One didn’t ask. What was the emergency? “Don’t know where your thoughts turn up these days,” the man exacting some price. “Far from home,” said the other, thinking of the morning’s flight. “Zactly,” said the host, “criminal—” he tripped, lunged, got his footing—

“The war you mean.”

“Criminal as war. As war criminals if you want to know. And all this, this architecture, city planning theory (?), the military’re using it now, operational you hear. Glad you missed your turn anyhow.”

“You heard that bang out in the River whatever it was?” Why did the visitor ask, when his host had already said.

Surly now, some story in his eyes, preoccupied, not answering. Was he ready for his guest to go? Yet in their Army jackets, host and visitor together shared then the oddest thing of all stepping out onto the old irregular slabs of sidewalk, where Whey like a workman in broad daylight let out a whistle ear-piercingly through his teeth, and the roof-light of a taxi slid into view at the corner. Like some secret but one that hardly matters, next to this meeting.

Now the cab paused as if to back into this odd street of unrenovated commercial buildings, begrimed and fine—old cobbles a bike tire’s mine field he had known. The host shook his head at the twenty-dollar bill, a corner torn. They looked at each other. Something: what was it? Luck that Whey had looked out when he did? “Yeah I heard it,” Whey said.

“Yeah, I was looking out at the River and I missed my turn,” said the other. “Well, I was on the phone, I got it in both ears, I thought it was my head splitting again,” said Whey.

“And then?” said the other, for now the phone was ringing.

“Person on the phone’s saying, ‘Not long for this place’—her place she meant, hearing the explosion, I think. Sometimes you want your life back. Sometimes you don’t.” He laughed and pulled a remote out of his jacket pocket. “You never lost it,” said the other. “Well, I need a break.” “Don’t get locked out…” (what was the guy’s name?—propping the door ajar).

“A pleasure I’m sure.” The cab came up the wrong way, U’d and pulled over. “An honor in fact.” The visitor had said so little. Why an honor?—his coming and going sandwiched between two phone calls. The steel door swung shut upon the light, upon the host, his body, its progress, the body you did violence to yet in adapting took bizarre instruction from point by point in building the building, locating this dark street that knew him and he had bumped along late at night yet never quite noticed. And now the cabdriver with baseball cap and ponytail gathered with a shiny clasp, Russian, was known to him.

Not a huge surprise for this city traveler, her hand on the wheel, her nearness, her shoulders. She seemed to remember him, waiting for him to notice. Russian, a moonlighter from some Union Square spa. They had compared notes one night, two hold-up stories; then (may I?) their own handguns (the range he went to in a downtown basement, hers across the river in Long Island City, keeping up to snuff, permits up to date). They had even compared hands. A bond. She reaching up, he forward just past the divider, their own hands extending with a quite separate and ancient intent off the stem of the arm knowingly, yes—“what does it know?” she’d said. Yet rider and driver—tonight they matched discretion, no questions, the smell of her coffee, a lifted sandwich, the mayo and meat aroma of her late lunch lessening and another sweeter smell bearing him along—no regret realizing after all that his bike with its tire would have gone in the trunk, and oddly that some current was live in him from that chance encounter.

So now he was inspired to tell her about tonight. Though he wondered out loud why the man wouldn’t let him pay for fixing the blow-out, it was a job to be paid for; while she replying, “He had something else from you, I think,” made him think again of what they could do with this block. His thinking ten, fifteen years ago, proportions came to him, two types of structure neither enough by itself, not just for a block, a neighborhood, a wider scheme, it came to him, some wholeness always unfolding—and that parting word “honor” from his host, a fugitive city voice and somebody calling him back, stretching. All forgotten, except his nameless back, which on the ride home in a veritable couch of a back seat moved him to speak of his daughter in her “older” boyfriend’s place tonight, their bland, unforgiving food. The driver’s laugh at this inspired him to ask her in for a rub by the fireplace he had rebuilt, rethought, but he must pack and perhaps sleep. Yet dream then of the dark person who’d rung Whey at that hour. To dream is to know you’ve slept.

He was in Tel Aviv next day, and a team of people among the audience the day after come to hear him speak of space improvised for strategic flow, unlocked and its urban perimeter multiplied—and speak he can. That done, Basra, added last minute by a shadow agency like one hand not letting the other hand know whatever, and a night walk through a zone, a rattle of shots and a dull explosion in the near distance, a detour of small streets absorbed in the sketchy warren of back pain that brought with him the dead their ears ringing like memory inverting memory so space became more space. Two more stops. Turkey. And it was more like three weeks before he came home and even then seeing his bike where Clea, for it had been her day, had parked it in the basement hallway, helmet secured, putting in a call to his daughter a week before Christmas (who told of the explosion out on the river they’d heard taking a walk after he had left them), he had all but forgotten another New York night, its feeling and map, and to have the bike picked up (but there it was, unmentioned by Clea), and near forgotten the thing or two said to him about his back, that night, though there would come a time when he would summon them and they would come.

He would sketch it for us on the restaurant tablecloth. A disk bulging between vertebrae—another disk, another vertebra, stairway to nowhere, that lower back. Late-night entertainment for his friends at Caesar’s. The correspondent, when he was in town. The philosopher, who wanted to talk about the war, and laughed a deep belly laugh. Eva, who had her close-up view of his back agonies—that it was all about his daughter he was on the outs with. The detective lieutenant if they were in luck. The portly actor who had landed a part. Recently, a computer chick with a nostril ring, one-time notorious hacker now a hot website designer, who said What about surgery for that back? And sometimes, sitting down with them, the owner, Bob Austrian, who’d been known to call for one last bottle from the devoted but rather remote waiter who by now was leaning on the shadowy little bar, head tilted into his cell phone that had just snugly rung—champagne on the house once in candlelight for someone’s birthday—the correspondent’s, his eye for history on the tablecloth. Spills, crumbs, a word or two scrawled in ballpoint, a phone number, a name, upon request a math equation for the two plane curves for units of disaster housing approaching each other on an axis like whales nose to nose—and, closing down the place, our revered regular’s spinal cartoon like a section of ladder. Words fail you, he’d take a drawing every time. The doctor had shown it to him with some new software. What next?

“What would you do for a lower back cure?” said the philosopher. Oh it wasn’t that bad, the sufferer broke in—“Would you—?” “Hey, whoa,” said correspondent, knowing what was coming. “—kill for it?” The actor had a fit of coughing. “Would you?” No problem, the offending disk was now said to be happily disintegrating, soon there wouldn’t be a problem any more. “Said by…?” asked the web girl, when others laughed. “Seriously though,” said the philosopher.

“It’s his back,” said the correspondent, who had tried to forestall that insinuating philosopher-question. Because he knew his friend, what he was capable of beyond a drawing on a tablecloth headed for the laundry, and had followed his career with curious eloquence. Originally an architect of office blocks light in look transferring a transparency and lift to a lower hovering balance as if to clear an added space below. A man known for unimagined problems and their solutions—an engineering and forestry college in Ontario that unleashed upon the architect six months later a physical attack by the benefactor with typical Canadian temper when the several buildings were said to be like parts of a disassembled ship. An original, known now for his thinking about cities, their perimeters porous with self-improvising and opportunity, “multiple” in the old sense of multiplying. A risk-taker known for the future, for humane blueprints, yet, in destroyed urban places abroad, seeing scars to be not structurally just erased but worked with. In advanced circles recognized for materials, green steel, uncanny glass and canny polymers layered for holding light in an expansible or contractible wall unit serving linked labs, auditorium, conservatory, municipal hearings. Known for materials that thought for themselves, it was somewhat inaccurately said, and he was sniped at, consulted, respected, known and subtly unknown, his résumé like a dam arched against some river force. Revolutionary would perhaps not be putting it too strongly, the correspondent believed (the correspondent would soon report on him again though rarely spoke of him to others)—a man alone but open to the right helper if he got lucky; also a mystery, amid lasting issues of design and engineering, also respectful of others, even philosophers busy with homework on war appropriations who knew his background in math; always alive to the potential of streets, light, water, the limbs of a structure, a sudden tensile stroke of invention. This the correspondent knew, who was his friend and sometimes envied him.

For he could work anywhere. Dictated while bike-riding, that best of all angles sitting the saddle of his wise hybrid. Here’s to the North River bike path, here’s to genes, women, good manners, work, massage. Here’s to cortisone (which gave you a headache); ibuprofen, death on the kidneys you heard (so one morning he stopped taking it). Stamina notorious. Anything was better than standing on his feet, walking a few blocks and stopping. Or flying. (He kept it to himself.) Worst was getting his legs out of bed to the stab in the back like a sickening alarm or the phone that actually had woken him ringing inside his head with some message—for he wasn’t in pain, the pain was in him, he would say. It didn’t quit thinking, he said. Kayaking on hold, the run at dawn too, which had absorbed him, for the River could make him forget. His lower back always behind him not that it knew to haunt him. There was a pretty good upright piano at Caesar’s. He sat at it more easily than his own. Which was not an upright but a baby grand. Never knew what he would play, until his fingers touched down, he’d had a wild man for a teacher, an uncle, a non-teacher really.

The new acupuncturist he kept to himself. But here’s to her as well. Sometimes the cool ones come closest. She hadn’t recognized his name when he’d phoned her one long afternoon. Yet then she did, he sensed. He spelled it for her, X-i-d-e-s (why did he?), Xides (as in my), and said it again, Zai-deez. Who had referred him? Well, a journalist friend who didn’t know her but…had been given her name by…someone he’d sat next to at a briefing (?). Another writer? No idea.

She was thinking, and you could hear the faintest pause. She was on the move. Doing things, he felt. He heard the little clack of the blinds being raised. They both knew there was more. But she would see him.

In fact his friend the correspondent had said leave him out of it, he’d run into this guy at a structural materials show, metal glomming onto bone came up in the conversation and orthopedists, and in this way a certain friend, no name dropped, of the correspondent’s with back trouble came up whom he’d expected to see here but remembered was out of town. Whereupon the guy recommended an acupuncturist. Extremely good, uncanny, though a gal bent on remaking you from the ground down, and a great little terrorist.

It was an interruption, Tuesday Friday appointments, though he doubled up an errand that needed doing in her neighborhood.

She dressed in black and stood very straight, a person, pale, compact, and, when he thought about it, smooth or learned in her body. What’re you gonna do? Maybe she knew something and could help. Swami healers could diagnose over the phone sight unseen. What was the truth? He left it to her. Her hair, so darkly un-reflecting, was caught up behind in a clasp at her neck yet in front combed tight back into her scalp like a Hispanic girl’s on the subway first thing in the morning. She saw the two dark tucks where stabs had found his rib cage years ago. She had him prone at first, hard for him so mostly she put him on his back which he eased down flat on the table.

Belly, ankle, nostril, groin, you let her go where she would, she’s licensed. It was the needles, wasn’t it? Longer than he had thought, flexible, thread-thin, sensitive to where they went. Earlobe or right inside the ear the cartilage (the heel of her palm brushing his beard), placing her needles. Fine steel planted like markers, not at all an inoculation, she might string two or three together, he told Eva.

Needles placed to free the flow along the channels. Methodical, yet more. He resented coming, didn’t he? He would surprise her. She told him what she was doing. What did she know? It multiplied. She came and held a small mirror to his face. “Look at our color.”

The flush prickled his forehead and cheeks, you’d think he’d taken too much of something, niacin high potency or a couple of real drinks on top of his pills. “See the difference?” The phone went once in the other room almost answering her—was it the third time he’d seen her?—and seemed to tell her she would pick up. He made a sound back in his throat, “Mmhmm,” lying there wondering if the darkening pink in his face was good for the lower back or would last when he left. The mirror lingered.

Peering into the glass held above his face like a photo in a cell-phone camera—like swollen material—Look what we’ve accomplished, he heard her say. More than pink; stupid-looking, he thought. Cooked, and the timer went off. The phone had answered her question before she asked it. It was the needles, where she stuck them in. Her intricate treatment took effect crudely.

She saw her patients where she lived. He would stretch out on the table in the treatment room. There was a long couch, too—an open-out daybed, he figured, from the clear front line of the frame just visible beneath the three seat cushions. At either end of it stood glass-front bookcases displaying selected volumes, leather-bound Materia Medica, racks of stoppered phials, small blue-and-white plastic dispensers containing white remedy pellets. He was actually tired of his back acting up. He wanted her to do something for him, and he told her this.

It was when she first had sat him down to tell her what had been going on. You came in through the front door and just beyond the foyer a desk came into view against the near wall, a small, neat, dark-lacquered table, no more than that; a chair for her, a chair for you. They reviewed what he was taking. Illnesses? Never. Work? He let it be vague—urban space, an idea person—(he did not say architect or planner). He traveled some (didn’t tell her that he was in demand). Exercise? Violent. Eating, alcohol, sex? Sure. Allergies, none. She was at home here with him. She was a thinker. She had a look at his tongue. He smiled, his cheekbone itched. He would write an account of himself, please, for next time, a page would do. He didn’t know what she knew. He had noticed a traveling clock somewhere. She didn’t wear a watch. He wanted to know nothing about her, he was fifty-two. He couldn’t help what he knew. His appointment times inscribed in her little book so little it made, like her minute handwriting, a statement that what mattered was elsewhere. And, among other things, it was him. Or some feminine economy. The chairs were of black maple, he thought, but spare and light to lift, a clarity to sit in, a sweet, unpainted smell or their making itself gave less weight, you could certainly stand on them. She led him away into the other room.

Her quick way of talking made you forget the silences. Or remember them, because when you started to say something, it reminded her, and she was off, almost. Yet quiet. A dominant person. You must listen. He could time her pauses. She belonged to him not quite for an hour. Prick the outside, change the in-. Leaving, he had a sensation of warmth circulating laterally across his back and belly.

A current they knew was there, she had said, but didn’t wholly grasp. How come? he said. She looked at him.

Young, she called him Mr. X the third time he saw her. Mr. X? It didn’t seem like her. A nickname was new for him yet was this one? It went unmentioned to his friends. Like her address, which surprised him yet with one of those familiar New York coincidences no more odd than meeting his daughter by chance on the subway one night. Now, who would say “Mr. X”? Some wife.

His Qi was pretty good, she thought. He had heard of it. A flow, a something, but that’s not quite it. He went to China but he’d heard about Qi here. Here it all seemed to make more sense, where chance was choice or freedom. He knew what it was, Qi, so long’s he didn’t have to say what it was. Qi was…“like us, the flow of it,” he said. “Let’s surprise old Qi.” He was taking a hand, maybe a little obnoxious, he said passing his eye over her. Like a stream, he went on. To be undammed…or electricity? Like magnetic water, a new highly classified material.

“Qi is what it does,” she lowered the elastic of his boxers. Qi, he said. Good, she said softly, at work. What if she were wounding him? She wouldn’t. She could. And where would such an unthinkable suspicion come from? Qi. He felt not even a jab but a response from inside him to the point. (If she would only scratch him there, he itched.) Did he breathe? she asked. God yes, he was a runner.

She had studied in China, his friend the correspondent happened to recall. Here’s to Chinese medicine, let’s not make too much of it. Acupuncture was pain-management was what you heard, migraine, arthritic knee, carpal tunnel, sciatica, pitcher’s elbow—and he had hired her. Snoring as well, he’d heard, someone else’s problem. Inoperable malignancy.

China, you do what the doctor says, if he doesn’t help you you fire him, she said. Was that true? he asked. She didn’t say. But she had a mentor somewhere she could run things by, he said. She had. She had a fine and prominent and private nose and he thought she was quite intelligent and was an early riser. He didn’t need to know her secrets. Valerie Skeen was her name. Her power given to her by you. In a way. The paths inside you that might cross with motion even when you were still. Chinese medicine, but he had been in China on other business. When he closed his eyes, she would sometimes say things. “So I gather you don’t exactly build buildings now but…” He let it go, it was their third or fourth time together. “…you make cities better?—that kind of thing?” she said. She waited a moment. “You think up cities, I believe,” she said, imagining it perhaps. She’d heard it somewhere obviously.

“Every architect I know has something that won’t get built up his sleeve,” he said. He opened his eyes. “A lie lies like a path through that commonplace,” he said. He was proud. “I’m a fool,” he said, and was proud of having said it to a woman. “But also something that will get built,” she said.

She didn’t yet say what it was, what was happening with him. She spoke of how we didn’t know why it worked. It was him in a way, so it touched him. Was it up to him, then, to do what would decide her? Was acupuncture like nothing else? Meridians came up. A map inside you but moving. Channels keeping the organs going. One way streets? he said. Maybe she thought he was stating not asking.

There were no words for it connecting inside with outside, if you believed it (or had to). It was Qi. He dreamt early in the morning. His lower back was on hold, dozing. What day was it? Her mouth was expressive in silence, it was alert. What was there for him to do at her place? He went there to lie down and have her treat him. Courtesy between them like fine lust. Appointments came and went.

He asked if these prescription drug bargains came in on her e-mail too with messages weirdly added on about Iraq, abuse, bizarre events (she didn’t exactly find it funny), he was about to give examples, the occasional genocide, often the war—cut-rate Lotrel, pain-killer Celebrex, many of them Canada cut-rate, Levitra, Xanax—

“For anxiety,” she said. He laughed, remembering an early morning dream.

She didn’t have e-mail. “So that’s one thing you won’t lose if they switch us off,” he said. “Us?” They could switch off a whole society. “Would we do it to ourselves?” Well, we wouldn’t do it to our own grid, we were hostages to electricity we had too much to lose—he’d been in Auckland in ’98. “Well, Auckland,” she said, and “If the phone fails you you can always…”—she removed a needle from his instep—

“Go knock on their door,” he said, he didn’t know why. He had dreamt early in the morning just at dawn of forgetting how to ride his bike, losing your own infrastructure. This woman probably didn’t even have TV.

He paid cash for these brown herb sticks of powerhouse moxa she gave him to take home like small incense cigars to light and hold as close as you could stand to the abdomen and hip points she identified. Was she making things worse? Homework, she called it. You want me, you get moxa, part of the package. It was her little joke. A little bit goes a long way, she said. The pain found itself diverted for now.

He could think, or maybe couldn’t not. One meridian had points independent of other meridians. But so close to Kidney Meridian you couldn’t tell unless you asked her. Conception Meridian it was called. Yes, from pregnancy but also Responsibility Meridian it was called, she said. It went down along middle pelvis very near Kidney Meridian then external genitals and anus. She hadn’t any plans to…? No.

What does she do? his friends had wanted to know. He was a good describer, more even than one would want to know. A pain-killer’s not a cure, we’ll have to see, he said. Frankly sometimes you drift off. This stuff was ancient. Adjust the balance was what she’d said. “Of limited value use with you,” said the correspondent. Actor had heard it was good for snoring. To Eva there wasn’t much to tell—who’d already traced the back pains to his daughter, a diagnosis a little sad coming from her.

How Valerie spun a needle, he would describe. But not the mirror. Not the phone ringing.

She brought him the mirror to see himself. Held between thumb and middle finger.

“Here, look at your face.” Showing off what she’d done. The phone rang uncomprehendingly in the other room and stopped, denied its path. It had rung at the same time Tuesday. Like eyes that can hear. But what?

She had the machine turned down but not the first ring and a half. He had closed his eyes and saw the ceiling. “They fire you, then they won’t leave you alone,” she said. To herself she said it. And for him. “Scared of you but,” he said. The needle in his heel ached, he’d resisted the needle. A reflex, she told him, how had he learned to do that? “Scared not of me,” she said. It was the fourth time he’d come to see her.

There was a red Buddha carved of wood quite massive-seeming on a polished wooden pedestal in the living room. The pedestal shaped like a cushion. Beside a stone pool grew two white flowering plants. How did they stand so tall in their pots without bending and how did she keep the water so still? In a corner stood all by itself a two-part shoji screen near the answering machine with the green light, no chair near the phone—and elsewhere, the distances finely maintained, a towering glass vase on the floor held stalks of grain, which struck him as beautiful or successful. A tiny alcove kitchen, a dark and silver shadow waiting that you could almost miss—where two knives hung magnetized.

She took time and she made it pass. He saw her. Where did the steep pain go? A weight, yet there poised with her. A delusion and real. They were getting somewhere. She was doing something. A route the needles plotted. He never saw the marks when he went home.

Back pain? she asked. Got worse. So the treatment…? It was kind of working Tuesday and Wednesday—(“What was that like?” she asked—“Like less gravity, a shot of ozone”) but then yesterday not. She studied the man extended before her in his shorts. It was Friday. She spun her point between finger and thumb. She wouldn’t say certain things. That she hadn’t liked him but had found him to be quite an OK patient. That she’d heard of him before he ever phoned her but he was nothing like that when you got to know him. Why had he found her? he wondered.

Had he used the moxa? Damn right, singed himself.

“Nobody fired you,” he said, hearing in his own words that she meant that person, a former patient, had also dumped her.

The needle jabbed his foot this time. Nothing she had done. Messaging soft tissue up to his hand, open for a needle between thumb and index. “Once burned, twice shy, my dad said.” Her authority was close. She was a healer. Or it was what she had always done. “You don’t go back there,” he said. “You don’t,” she said.

Later he remembered his back. It came to him that, yes, the caller who had fired Valerie had left her. She had been his girlfriend, it came to him. Unprofessional. The main thing seemed elsewhere. Shielded by perspective. Closeness. A secret that would come out and be less big a deal than what we knew already.

“Strong spleen,” she had said, it was a Tuesday, a March sleet storm snare-drumming down the window. Terrific, he had said. Yes, it helps. It’s better, he said. She nearly smiled. He’d almost ruptured it once. Lucky, she said. Yes, it was. Senior high, a car crash, he wasn’t driving.

“So who was?”

X’s uncle who was only three years older.

“Why was it lucky?” the acupuncturist asked.

“It got me into what I do.”

Was that true? she said.

Well, fear of spaces.

The phone rang and stopped. He explained that he had come out of anesthesia and seen the ceiling sliding open on the floor above which, listen, was a sky full of buildings turning and in motion mapped by someone he was sure, and then he couldn’t breathe gagging on mucus, or thought he couldn’t. Had she any idea what that was like? It was like a bleb he had ruptured once letting in air around the outside of one lung collapsing it. She asked how that had happened. He had stretched and wrenched himself at the end of a dive off a springboard to make the entry straight up. The lung healed itself. Scars in there. “We’ll never know,” she said.

Spleen? he said after a moment.

It got rid of impurities.

Was that a good thing? She ignored this. “They show up in the tongue moss. As smoke, what we call smoke.” “Sounds like a rough night, smoky tongue moss,” he said. She looked at him. Where was her secret? The guy kicking her out by leaving himself.

When Xides undressed he would take off his watch. Was he developing needle memory? When Valerie showed him his face it would be about thirty minutes and he lay there. This was when the phone decided to ring. You could do without it.

“Is it right there at the needle that you get into the Qi?” “Down here too.” She pointed to the groin area where he knew there was a needle but didn’t look below her hand, her face. It was like water in a bark canoe, he told her, the leak you see in the floor isn’t right over the break in the outer skin. Asked how his back was, he didn’t know today. Her hand was close and out of sight, she spun the needle, twiddled it, three or four seconds in his belly, he thought—could you work two meridians, he thought, did two cross? He would find out himself. “We don’t know how it works,” she said softly. “If it works,” he said. “It works.” “Unless it doesn’t.” “That’s right.”

“Your Qi…,” he persisted. “Yours,” she said. “Works on mine?” he said. (They didn’t yet think as one.) “Your technique I mean. You’re remote but you still do your work.” “I’m not remote,” she said.

He muscled himself down off the table when they were done, pulled on his pants, buttoned his shirt, tied his shoelaces, wrote a check. Felt like a warehouse. She wrote a remedy for him to do something about his sleep, handed him a slip of paper thin as onion-skin. He said he’d gone back to swimming, it was good for his back, the friend who’d recommended her was a great swimmer or had been—

It could chill your kidneys, she said.

—and good for his mind, he wanted her to know (as if he were fond of her), he had an idea for nested pools like the public place in Hong Kong but more stacked than tiered, did she know Hong Kong? On the way to someplace else, he thought she said quickly.—You need to regulate your bodily functions like drinking, eating, standing up straight. That’s indispensable. Otherwise—she was saying, looking at the paper in his hand…—he felt her like a hand inside his heated face, and wanted to speak of winter fishing in Wisconsin but he needed to pee yet still more to get out of here, it was the treatment.

Did he eat a lot of meat? she asked. He summoned up for her like an invitation a monster weekend night-hiking down into the Grand Canyon with a retired IRS supervisor now supermarket checkout buddy at the tourist center, thirteen hours South Rim to North watched by big white-tailed squirrels, next night (and day) sixteen hours back through Bright Angel and flashlighting rocks and a wild burro and, up above along the switchbacks to the car, cliff chipmunks you hardly knew were there, a tassel-eared squirrel, another shadow in the dark moving around behind him or nothing but a function of his own climb. IRS buddy cooked a fat king snake in its skin on a Coleman stove, what he’d been getting to, dead but it started wriggling again, like tossing a fish back or an eel with its head chopped off.

She said, “Your e-mails about prescription drugs? You don’t know what’s in them.” It was what came with them, he told her, news messages. “About?” He recalled it verbatim: an improvised explosive device not clear if 13-year-old boy knew he was carrying a bomb. Among the dead were 3 Iraqi civilians and a Kurdish soldier guarding an Iraqi police station, al-Herki said, decision came Monday after talks comprehensive and productive between Rice and Olmert went from casual conversation one hundred eighty degrees from that. Cut-rate Lotrel, Xanax, Celebrex, Retin A…Then he remembered a suicide bombing, a shrine in Samarra, and Iran’s nuclear plant—and a violent accident underscores the danger of working with wild animals, said a solitary message. It was only information, he said. Her smile faded. He was leaving.

“Those things you wrote me.”

“Showing off.”

She laughed, such a hard laugh, brief. “I thought the phone was going to ring,” she said. He was embarrassed. “The accident, you were what, eighteen?” “Sixteen.” “I guess it wasn’t your signature city you got drawn into in those days. But bridge houses on an old El, all that that…” Where did she get her information? he asked. “You knew at sixteen, looking at the ceiling.” He’d known nothing. He’d had an aunt who designed for Bucky Fuller, did the architect work actually but no one would ever know. She got no credit.

For her ideas? Valerie said.

The front door swung shut behind him. He had left her. The elevator in this well-appointed apartment house on its way up, a phone went, if it was hers. Her laugh a moment ago had been like someone else. The Chinese. He belonged to the city. What had she meant by bodily functions? He tried to straighten up. No one stepped out of the elevator. He never saw patients coming or going.

He thought about her when he was with his friends. And when he was thinking. Acupuncture as anesthesia. Patterns of disharmony. Sometimes she began with his tongue. Mossy. That mean green?—he was joking. No, it was the coating, the fur. After-a-rough-night fur? he interjected. Did he have rough nights? she said. He stared at her. No, she said, it was how the coating—he had it out again down over his lower lip—was implanted on the tongue material. His coating was thin, but OK.

Thank God for that.

She said it was his back but it was more his kidneys. “Oh is that all?” “A weakness there.” He asked if they were getting anywhere. Beyond pain management did he mean? she came back at him. She questioned him. Any unexplained fevers? Did he work regular hours? He was always working.

Call that regular hours?

People called him.

Who?

College president, consult on a “green” building. Do you get yourself into things? The college came to mind, he shut his eyes, students, self-defense. Sometimes he worked all night, he said.

When she got him on the table she stuck his right palm, which he didn’t like. “What is it?” Skin, he said. Yes, she murmured. Lucky he wasn’t on a serious blood-thinner, he said, he touched her. Not at your age, she said, and acupuncture did not cause bleeding, it could be used to stop it.

He was being touched but along a line that crossed another this time he was sure. “What is it?” he said. “You came in armored,” she said, “you should see yourself.” “I come here to see you.” It was less a needled point he felt now. She had been working two meridians, and we would see. Skin was elastic, he said, containing most of him openly. They thought about it. He found a growing warmth, an erection not only in his face, and welcomed not what was happening to him at this moment but in his shorts its embarrassment. She had paused to appreciate his look. His flush? Skin, he said out loud, remembering work and all this strange travel, always a stretch, and that the Chinese, who had thought up pasta, hadn’t they (?), though not all its shapes—had asked him to consult and they would have to talk about that. He and she.

But the phone rang—like clockwork. He didn’t feel flushed but she handed him the mirror and left him there, his face looked normal. An unusual second ring joined them, the machine wasn’t behaving.

Needles heel to arm, trajectories into the Qi marking targets all over his front, he listened to footsteps he knew quite well stop. She would be arrested before the shoji screen, its spiritual grid, the rosewood frame dyed black—and she was looking at the still water in the miniature pool, he could hear her thinking a divided thought under the eye of the caller, and his perspiring face in the mirror made him dizzy. It was a rival. She would be back. She was in the doorway.

“It was on,” said the man lying there in his underwear, feeling definitely something. “I’m back,” she said, unlike herself, “excuse the interruption.” “There are none.” “That’s a relief,” she said, attending to her needles (pelvis points not quite right for Kidney Meridian, he thought).

She’d forgotten and gone to answer the phone and something had changed. She was angry and this irritated her patient. No, it had never occurred to him, he said, fumbling over to her the mirror, closing his eyes—“but there are no pure interruptions.” “Your work,” she tried to say something, “your passion.” He could tell with his eyes closed as he felt a needle in his foot turn that she was trying (but why now?) to speak of him: “Aren’t you all about…?”

“Why does he call when I’m here?”

“At least it’s not one of those three-in-the morning jobs,” she said. Coarse for her.

Unlike her. Even a breach of something, but what? Keeping things separate. She hadn’t denied that it was him. But could the person know who was here? She had heard her caller in the phone ring. That was it.

The one who had fired her was what Xides suspected.

“No interruption,” he murmured, surprised. “Well, that’s one thing I’ve gotten out of this…what’s going on inside,” he said. “Cities that can access each of us?” she said, persisting.

“If we used what we had. Our materials.”

“Materials?” she said, fine-tuning a needle. “Cities,” she said. What was she doing? What was between them? “Yes, cities that can access—” (she had heard it somewhere)—

“I don’t love hearing myself.”

“People know who you are,” she said.

“But not what, God help me.” He was talking. What cities did she like?

She had a friend in Boston.

Xides had an idea, he told her, he needed to go back to where he’d had it first—something that needed a new material to build though it had been around a long time. An idea? she said. He despaired of it. What was the idea? she said. Yes, exactly, he said. “And someone takes what you thought up,” he said—changing the subject, seeing maybe vertigo was what the mirror had given him upside down—

“And turns it into something,” she said.

A schoolboy on a plane from Mozambique to Durban he would tell her about sometime, he said, whether he trusted her or not, he added meanly.

Me?

He’d said too much. A spasm in his being, he’d betrayed his own confidence. Her intelligence and courage were all he trusted. They seemed to talk fast. We had Kidney Meridian, what was the other one? Triple Burner?

Several, she was saying: Triple Burner a name only, more a relation, not a shape, between lungs, kidney…spleen, small intestine…organs that regulate water—old ideas, she said offhandedly like someone else, a person he could almost hear. (A mentor? The person in Boston?) They talked about China, Qi, the effect on it of organs it passed through. Passed near? Or through the neighborhood of? He needed somehow to see what we were talking about. He kept after her though because he had been mean about the African boy incident.

“Have you seen your internist?” she said.

He opened his eyes as she freed a needle, then another. His silence like gravity. What were his vertebrae to her? He knew some anatomy. (Did she really?) His disks, the tilt of his pelvic bone, his tail bone, his overly forward aiming neck bone. Yet his mind. He had seen forty operations, he thought.

“What materials?” she said, and he was off like a fool. A material he told her about strong as steel, yet warmer feeling, adapted at great expense for a war museum for ultra-light roofing and siding that might move in the wind like aspens up the slope of a valley he knew in New Mexico—

New Mexico—?

This metal, it was even an element—titanium.

“Titanium,” she said, recalling something. Why had he thought she would drop him? It was the phone. His mind she did take an interest in. Skin-deep, deeper still. She’d probably heard of titanium for implants? “That too,” she said. His own dentist, she used it he happened to know, who joined him in a half triathlon two years ago in Rhode Island that he finished in six and a half hours. Was he bragging? Valerie didn’t know—about what? She didn’t think so. She was holistic, he said. Cutting the swim time through keeping the body parallel—their coach called it vessel-shaping, he added. Parallel to what? Valerie asked, for she was a swimmer. To the water. Swimming at night, seeing less, knowing more, he said. Whose coach? she asked, his and the dentist’s?

Valerie sat him down at the desk one Tuesday. Why? He was ready with his tongue. She had her little book out, her thought marshalled. “No,” she changed her mind, “let’s go in there.” Later the phone rang and she came back from not answering it and spoke of his work as if the aborted call brought her these thoughts. What he’d spoken about abroad she seemed almost to know—a porous perimeter, structures at the edge of an outer neighborhood that you could pass through like a democracy field with unmarked lines of approach. Or wait, changing the subject for he didn’t trust himself—or her (though who would she tell—and how had she known?)—a rich family in Peking ages ago built a series of linked mansions, city within a city. He described it all—it stopped her—but the idea (for he hadn’t changed the subject after all) we could use and turn into its opposite, right here. For people. For city space might have no borders. It was all worked out, two sides of it, killer analysis. And would’ncha know, the military got hold of it. “So I’ve heard,” she said. (What had got him started? Her? Her call? A dim scrape of moving on the floor above, like furniture dragged?) “Think of all those floors in skyscrapers interrupting circulation or here in your own building even for privacy’s sake.”

“Privacy,” she said, doing something (but what had she meant, So I’ve heard—“Sky’s the limit on rent, I’m afraid—well, there was Leonardo,” she said. (Wasn’t she stabilized? Not this building.)

“Leonardo?” like a phone ringing a remark half recalled in his crowded life then gone. “His ideas got used,” she began.

“If you’re any good they do,” he said.

She would remember that, she said. “Pass it on,” he said, “if your ideas aren’t any good they get used just the same.” He mentioned a group down in—he was just talking—he stopped. Well, no, he would be talking to a bunch of—far from here—(“You have your fans,” she said almost like a bitch) and like a…like a…he would spot among the two hundred a clutch of military in the middle of the auditorium, a territory within, out of uniform but you knew. Had they come because of what they would do when they went back to civilian life (if ever)? “But no.”

“Like a what?” said the acupuncturist.

“A stain.” He was not just talking.

“You think war is life’s indispensable risk,” she said. (How did she know that?) His correspondent friend called it naïve of him—“what are you doing night-walking in a war zone?” his friend complained. Naïve? Xides at least knew he didn’t know what was going on. Naïve? It got him going. When he had heard an on-site American colonel swear that better bombing in Bosnia would have dropped the bridges into the river, dissolved the infra (coupled with serious offensive hacking)—war over.

Then you get into real self-defense structure, Xides told the surprised colonel.

Naïve? He was smarter than others who were embedded in the events, these operations against insurgents, and if he didn’t make himself clear…“You do,” said the woman between him and the light. Was it some dreary healing he heard in her listening voice?—“We must talk,” he remembered later she’d said. It disappointed him. But one thing he was not was naïve. So she could forget Naïve Meridian, if there was one. She made a sound, like the softest vanishing laughter.

Because here it was Tuesday again. In the dumb progress of his treatment, Could Qi flood you? he asked. It was not really like that—a river, she said. His eyes closed, he dismantled the adjacent daybed opening the damn thing stretching the material. (Was Qi a two-way street? And why “daybed”? Why Leonardo? And e-mail—was she too good for e-mail?)

“You said you were technically (?)—in what you wrote me—”

He knew what it was, her trick not in the needles only.

“—a widower (?)” she said. What he’d written for her had been all things he did, not was. He traveled, he spoke, went to the theater, because he thought performers had something (he’d written her). They were quick, crazy to be up there, foolish, quite true, gutsy. He kayaked in the North River, good upper-body technique he’d been told until his back acted up. Drank socially, and too much doubtless, but held it. He ate anything. Could manage no more than four and a half hours of sleep at best, made night rounds with a police lieutenant. He still grew miniature Asian trees in a small lighted space of his house—or they grew. His girlfriend had served as a naval officer and now painted large paintings of animals that sold. All this he had written down quite truthfully. He had killed a person once and did not recommend that mode of self-defense. He had his pride, didn’t let people do things for him for nothing, he’d written, and he reckoned all this didn’t tell his holistic healer much she could use. A lesson to him. He liked her, he’d added at the end.

“So you were technically still…?” Yes. “Married.” Yes, he had a daughter nineteen, away at college. “She makes you a widower?” “We were divorcing.” The logic popped his ears coming in for a landing, was it the acupuncture? Inside of right knee local-calling the heel or long-distancing collarbone? Limbs mixing from inside surprised at what got said.

“Getting unmarried,” said the young woman. “Oh boy,” he said. “Was it convenient this way?” “Not for my daughter.” His foot he realized later hurt. “Who exactly left who?” “Exactly.” “Were you lucky to be left?” One of them had the upper hand for a moment, was it because Valerie had gone too far?

“Was that it?” he said.

“You left but then she did it better?”

“It saved some money.”

The acupuncturist contemplated his belly like a thing. “You were lucky to be left I mean. But no going back.”

“That’s divorce. Like getting out of bed in the morning.”

“We know about that.”

That she would speak like an authority on this made you wary. “She was not interested,” he said.

“In?” “What I do.”

“Why should she be?”

“It’s your goddamn wife.” Xides reached for a needle in his belly to take it with his thumb and finger, Valerie intercepted, and he gripped her fingers like an animal biting. He expelled what was in him, all the needles and Qi and blood but here’s to the needles they were still in there helping him. He raised his knee to reach another needle but listened to her: “My partner’s knee, sinuses, headaches I could care about, aching back, his habits. Him.” “Him.” “Pain in the leg I can help, stomach, foot, head. I don’t have to imagine a city he is planning for Africa or down the street.”

“She was mending things at the last moment,” he said wondering who was the “he” planning the city. “Your wife mending things?” “My daughter more.”

“Between you and her mother.” “No, between them.” “That’s different.” Valerie had spoken.

“A floppy hat she wanted her to have. She was…”

Valerie reached out a book from the bookcase, female and professional in her single motion, so collected and expecting credit for it. “Your wife (?).” “Yes, she was graceful.” “And long after,” said the young woman, whatever that meant.

“I might sit us down and ask what was going on,” he said.

“You?”

“I felt cursed.”

“You believe in such things?”

“Saying them.”

Dismissing a city for Africa, was it Xides she meant? Would she know such a thing?

But “down the street”—who was that? Some small-scale chore he’d also undertaken once. What had he told her? She had said he had good teeth.

She put the book aside.

“Your own partner ignores your work, your acupuncture, and it wouldn’t matter to you? Your goddamn life.”

“Any more than you have to like the patient,” she said.

“You’re trying to impress me. Have you ever fired—?”

“It’d be me I fired.”

“—one here in your little home.”

“I like the windows. I look out into the street when I’m on the phone (?).”

It was always a lesson, he said.

“Like the rent,” said the young woman, at his side again. “You people want too much,” she said.

Well that was something, he said.

“No.” She laid her hand upon his forehead. Did she smooth his hair back? He couldn’t believe her. “Do you breathe?” she said, and as if she weren’t mad at him: “The gods have laid on him a restless heart that will not sleep,” was what she said.

It chilled him, it was pretty silly. Or was she, an unprotected tenant he happened to know (and maybe high-rent), meditating some parting of the ways? It was a mistake to think of her belonging to him for this hour twice a week, and he actually had not made that mistake. He was adjustable, even if his daughter knew his schedule and when he went to acupuncture. He breathed a droll breath out. He was real anyhow. Had Valerie changed the subject?

She asked his view of the Twin Towers. His view? He had been unable to think about them: that they were two was probably the thing, he said. Neither one worked by itself. Did they together? He’d never set foot inside. Had been invited to Windows on the World once, the restaurant, but couldn’t make it. Knew the part-time theater guy Jim Moore, who helped the French high-wire guy with the famous walk. He and the acupuncturist thought about this. “Travel light,” she said.

“Friday could you come at seven?” she asked presently, it was what she’d had in mind all along, a wavy needle going back into the white cardboard box unused, P.M. of course. Why the change? he asked. It was like her not to answer for a moment. The desk, the table in the other room, black maple structure, why had she sat him down there and then skipped this change and brought him into the treatment room. OK, seven. “Thank you,” she said, a frankness covering more than their next appointment. He had done something for her. What?

He would do his Friday errand in her neighborhood this time before seeing her. “Maybe I’ll come a different way,” he said. “Let’s see,” she said, “the bike path exits right over here, doesn’t it?” He could always stop seeing her.

“How is the back?” The actor pulled up a chair from the next table arriving after the show Wednesday night, needing a drink and the menu, which he knew by heart.

“Hearing’s improved,” said Xides. Everyone laughed. “That’s a beginning,” said the web designer, who was smart, had been in rehab, knew more about the war sometimes than the correspondent (who was out of the country), more about everything than anyone but was likable and somehow dark. The actor reached across for her hand. “He’s got a habit but you can’t see the needle marks,” Eva said. A painter of realistic animals, she had drawn on the tablecloth a picture of the notorious lower back. “Guy who recommended her called her a great little terrorist, according to Sam,” said Xides. The philosopher liked it. “He knows something.” “Whoever he is,” said Xides. “Didn’t have his name tag on.”

“Well he knows her.”

“She doesn’t know it but she’s getting me ready for my trip,” said Xides taking the whole thing lightly for his own reasons. “You should bring her here,” said the philosopher. “Why do you go?” said Eva, meaning China. The web girl made a sound. She knew a great acupuncturist in Chinatown, she could get his number. This was received in silence. “But he lost his odometer on the way up to see her,” said Eva. “How do you do that?” said the philosopher. “How do you know you lost it?” the detective raised his untrimmed Irish eyebrows, “maybe it was stolen.”

“On the bike path?” The actor bit into the last of someone’s baguette as the waiter brought his drink, and, his mouth full, had a good laugh with the philosopher, who said it was not the mileage.

“She only knows what she’s doing,” said the website girl then. Xides thought she was improving. He wondered why she came here. She felt at home. “Well, she’s holistic,” he said, dripping wine on Eva’s picture as he gave himself some more. “She’s professional,” said the girl offering her glass against his in a curious one-on-one.

Valerie had come back into the treatment room from the call she didn’t take. “Your regular’s after you,” he said, but she had spoken of Xides’ work. It was acute. It struck him. It was Leonardo she cited whose ideas got picked up. Xides had said that himself. He’d said these things more than once. Where? Like the matter with energy. Like Corbu at nineteen beginning with the rib-cage and maybe modular heart and see what cities became. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. Was it something she had said? Maybe not.

What is pain? the philosopher was asking, but now said he’d heard Xides would be getting back to pure math. Xides joked that he still had that two-hole doughnut in mind he once cared to know could stretch into a sphere with two handles. The philosopher was nodding seriously. But Xides wondered what he carried around with him these days. Missing his friend the correspondent here at Caesar’s who knew his thinking but they would soon meet. Something else he couldn’t put his finger on. Night streets came to mind, like a cloud of gas swarms of citizenry spread between high-rises. Yesterday pausing halfway down the catwalk of a suspension bridge cable he saw not the city he was thinking about but, dizzyingly, his daughter in her stroller, her mere life. And bicycling the river path, he could see through the surviving trees, the neighborhoods all the way up to the sweatshirted picnickers in long basketball shorts one night on the riverside, aiming the red barrel of a telescope at, he could have sworn, the Palisades.

The odometer he let go, a clip-on, and replaced it erasing with it the proof—the credit in city miles for exercise and all that he’d glimpsed—all his regret about time, which you need not seek but will stretch at the expense of others.

It came to him later with Eva burning moxa close to his skin, close as he could stand, acrid, truthful, a pungency to get used to, that the calls thirty minutes—he said it out loud: “These calls she gets at thirty minutes into the appointment—”

“What about them?”

“I don’t hear them, the machine takes them, but I feel they’re—”

“From the same person?” Eva withdrew the moxa.

“That’s right.”

“Is this stuff doing you any earthly good?” She stretched to drop it in the ash tray (in the shape of a life preserver that had hardly been used in twenty years), and her dressing gown fell open. In her face fine shadows, in her eyes the acupuncturist perhaps, in her habits always prepared, semper paratus from her Navy days, Marines, Coast Guard, he didn’t have it quite right, semper was right. She was gone. Was that true, “Valerie” was just trying to fix him up for his next trip? he heard her ask, No, not true; long-term care. A laugh from the bedroom. “She better take care, a caller like that.”

A drawer pulled out, he got up to follow, content that they were going to the theater Thursday, a place he felt at home, the warehouse down under the Manhattan Bridge near the docks.

How did he know it was the guy who had left Valerie?

Eva flung her robe over his head and tumbled him onto the bed.

Her pale hair unpinned, he was telling her now, somehow a little falsely, that in some Asian tongue one syllable of the word for “moxa” meant “acupuncture.”

A pattern of disharmony was what the acupuncturist was after.

Had her kidney meridian patient shown up ever with a helmet in his hand, that Valerie should mention the bike exit? The once he’d biked to her she’d had no way of knowing. He’d gone without his helmet. (And lost his odometer.)

Was she taken with him? They must talk, she’d said the last time, he recalled, when she’d said he did make himself clear, he did. And he told her the scale of what she was working on inside him was scary. They might get to be friends, he had told the correspondent.

To Clea, his cleaning woman from Grenada whom he loved because she fixed the window shade in the bedroom and could cope with the breaker box in the basement (“down in the mines,” they called it) and found an empty pill bottle beside the kitchen phone and knew what they were for, he spoke of all this news coming in on Outlook Express piggybacked, sometimes attached, with ads for prescription meds, as if she would understand him. Plavix against heart attack and stroke (?). Canadian cut-rate meds, but why the bombing of a shrine in Samarra got sort of smuggled in with Levitra or Retin A and sort of tacked onto a family violence case and someone’s stepson a victim of bad fathering, the item said, and fed a diet of Trix cereal and Chicken McNuggets, you couldn’t figure the connection with cut-rate prescription meds, and personal messages cut short in the middle, with a plot in Basra to ship explosives into the Holland Tunnel and blow a hole into the river. Clea said people took too much medicine but maybe they have problems like we do. She didn’t know. She e-mailed her family with her friend’s laptop, that was it, except for her sister in Toronto. It saved on the phone. Items on a list, microwave timer off, how Mr. Xides was sleeping with his back—an intimacy between them, and at last, like some small action detected in a landscape, the man who’d returned the bike with the tire fixed having told him one night what was good for his back, materialized in conversation like a wake-up call with Clea just as Eva phoned about a bite to eat before the play, she was on her way, so he only later recalled Clea saying, Looking out for you, as she straightened the books on the night table.

Old Ibsen warehoused practically under the giant arch of a so-so bridge, they reviewed what they had just witnessed on stage: the mob hooting, yelling, Dr. Stockman thundering that the majority was always wrong—when someone among his hostile fellow citizens quite piercingly whistled. And now not a cab to be found at ten-twenty, a current of wind off the East River, a garbage can lid rattling down the sidewalk at them out of nowhere, they’d have to walk it to the Madison Street bus or the East Broadway F train. A taxi appeared, night yellow before they knew it, and he and Eva settled back behind a rangy old Haitian woman at the wheel. He turned to Eva and she felt the twinge in his mouth touching hers and knew the bike was good for his back only some of the time but she wasn’t challenging the pain-killer acupuncturist, while to him, his place vacuumed, bathroom scrubbed down but the basin faucet gasket leaking, it was the piercing working whistle that came back of the guy summoning a cab he must have known was around the corner that night near the other river as prompt as his appearance out on the cobblestones almost before X’s tire had blown.

A challenged rider these days, mostly giving the bike a rest, he felt the jarring cobbles like vertebrae, like abandoned code, at 6:15 Friday pedaling into that once-forgotten block. Its time has come. The street wet from a hydrant now shut, the bicyclist hardly sees a Fire Captain in his hat getting back in a car pointed the wrong way toward the highway. A gray construction veil drapes a six-story building, two buildings, screening the street from mortar and brick dust sprayed by grinding and repointing these warehouse façades, asbestos back in the seams. Heavily supported on the old sidewalk paving stones by giant steel legs, the second-floor-level pedestrian bridge is flagged on its spiraling razor fence against perimeter intruders by a sign vowing landmark condos next year. An area subtly exploding from old, disused commercial to residential, and on a steel door through which X had passed, two work permits, identical from here. And advice about your back sounding a night of routine New York emergency (was it three months gone by?) its signature the rhythm on these cobblestones of a Samaritan accosting him and leading the way indoors. Where work in progress could look less building than dismantling there in Bob Whey’s clutter of—his name came back in one piece and was gone—tools, materials, floorboards darkened by a century of use, fugitive photos like overlapping bulletins, vehement palaver, veiled compliment, that night, that hour.

But now the bicyclist rode up onto the sidewalk strewn with rubble, and his palms upon his handlebars sensed only space in there now where not even a phone waited on the gritty floor, you felt sure, or the two calls one knew of. The heavy-duty door shadowed by the scaffolding overhead did not know him when he pulled on the handle, hearing the car idling behind him and then a shot from its horn. “You got business here?” said the voice of the Fire Captain standing on the far side of his car, who recognized him when he turned. “As you were, Mr. Xides—you remember me from the Mayor’s—?” “Yes of course.” Was he in on this? Neighborhood renewal? No, just remembering. Well, onward and upward, Mister Xides. Captain? Captain? An explosion that night. What night? Bayonne or someplace out on the river weeks ago. Got me. Could be anything. A touch on the horn pulling out.

“Yer late,” said the young Parks person, when he came off the bike path at six-forty. “You too,” he said. In the bed of her utility vehicle parked like a toy lay two rakes. On a bench a couple of street kids who’d love to get their hands on the wheel. The one he recognized said, “Been to Africa lately?” This amused the boys. “Gotcha bike,” said the young woman, who lifted the fan-shaped leaf rake by its plastic handle and let it fall, she had a call on her cell, a piece of song. Slow-moving in her ample brown trousers, she liked him, or recognized him, he read her metal name-tag over her uniform shirt pocket. Late for what? For this. He would let the stone paths and old apartment houses, high also because of the River below, and people come to him. There passed an expensive dog, lanky, fragile, learning sort of flowingly to heel. He propped the bike behind a bench, and eased himself down. “You got back misery,” the girl said, starting up. “Well, I come here,” he said.

“You do. I see you.” She had a thought. “Sitting there like a…”

“An architect, sort of.”

“Never woulda guessed.”

“How many miles did you ride?” said the wise-guy boy.

“So long, Mahali.”

Two men in ties and jackets pedaled up the last stretch of exit ramp. The bald one in the lead spinning low gear at a great rate, trousers clipped, the elder, gaining on him, leaned into his un-shifted high and, stroke on stroke, rose up on the pedals like a kid to make it to the top. Scarred and patinaed old briefcases rat-trapped behind, Friday emotions of each man aimed homeward, inward, maybe berserk, if you knew these faces. A quiet sound coming, the electric moan of the Parks Department “off-road” easing by again. A back-fire down the street to the east. “I thought you lived around here…” “I did.” “Before my time?” “Before your time.” She liked him, she was observant. “Gotcha helmet.” Accommodating, this black girl, hospitable, precise. She could almost touch him.

The boys on their bench had something on their mind, Mahali gone. Seeing him muttering at a little mike was part of her day, or what had become an errand for him slipped into her job, him just sitting for a few minutes here. A tablecloth of wine spills, crumbs, equations, came before him, his late-night friends, actor, academic, artist; detective who never forgot a walk, like a dog a smell, and could identify a person in the corner of his eye; but most, the correspondent, who had asked how was it going with the little terrorist?

Just in time watched by early headlights of a car unparking, he locks the bike’s wheel and the diagonal down-tube of its frame to a stanchion, unclips the Cateye odometer, pockets it. The helmet under his arm eyed by the Cuban doorman who has seen it all bears a whole convex potential of races and demolitions, roller blades and training wheels and once a good lay in the countryside without ever taking it off: a future curving up over the mind, smuggling into the China trip, you hope, a look at both (rather than just the better known of) the two giant dams inland after the Beijing stop where Xides, professionally summoned, would shortly meet his friend the correspondent to inspect the 768-foot-high A tower, in essence less upward than a colossal frame through whose limbs, jogged and trapezoidal, circulate TV production studios, broadcasting, media, God knows what all allegedly non-hierarchical around the multi-D window cavity through which is to be seen depending where you are the more and the less, city, nation, a blank, the frame’s glazed skin of international sign language like the bracing wrapping in the façade plane holding the building up—

—yet waiting for him back over the polar cap a return flight he looked forward to already—a homecoming next month felt this evening against his arm and ribs, the helmet’s hard arc, cupped rim, and the hand of the acupuncturist whom he wanted, sometimes in friction, discord, mystery, to please, who yet had picked up from him cheap surely beyond what any healer, restored in some corner of her own seeking, might learn. Though why had she imagined him bicycling to her?

“Late today,” said Nuevo.

At Xides’ greeting—his stupid question “She there?”—did Nuevo roll his eyes letting you in on something that had happened? This building. People. An abyss above.

A knife missing from the magnetic strip in the dark kitchenette. A small black-and-white TV he didn’t recall on the living room floor next to the tall plants that had shed two white blooms waiting to be swept up. A Time Out magazine on his chair by the table near the foyer. A current in the apartment asking, asking—enfolding the voice that as he came in through a front door propped open with the Yellow Pages in the way yet letting him in, had directed him to go into the treatment room, a dresser drawer not perfectly closed, a ladder folded against her closet door, two couch pillows belonging to the day bed adrift against a book case. Though where was she as he took off his clothes and his glasses, as he tried to get his back to flatten down on the table pad and its sheet.

And the Yellow Pages?

After a time, a sound from the other room, of trust. His and Hers, a reverie while he awaited her steps.

The correspondent, interrupting him last week, had asked particularly about the acupuncturist, the little terrorist—Xides’ curiously lowered voice, once described in print by his friend as physically inside his thought, at that moment brainstorming disaster housing. These blue tarps the Commission pitched by the thousand “that looked like swimming pools from a chopper—refugees on the move inside their own borders nowadays—”

One outa three hundred homeless globally, the listener puts in for Xides (worked up) to add: “We can do better.” You’re sounding like a politician, the listener put in against his friend’s thoughts: “Afghan, Iraqi—” (Indonesia Colombia Bosnia, the listener put in, hearing some new trouble looking for words from years ago almost, this architect originally)—“superadobe would work better for godsake, Sam, local-earth with barbed wire for mortar.” These grain-storage bags of hemp they recycled as tents, the Jap firm—if conditions changed you could add on a little four-foot wing—post-explosion, post-quake, post-flood, post-contamination, post-epidemic, post-words, post—The correspondent would remember after “X” was gone—but who’s this “we” that could “do better”? the correspondent wanted to know—only kidding—leaving the next morning for China a few days ahead of Xides. Only to get thrown back at him by his old friend strangely exercised, “Where’s this X stuff coming from, Sam?”

“Unknown,” was the reply—Xides an intriguing unknown in the equation of our future together, the correspondent had written before and would again, moved by his old friend who, when asked about “the little terrorist” that acupuncturist “of yours”—had said the scale was getting to him. The scale? From inside. Ah. “My own.” Large?

And small.

X would mesh the fingers of one hand through those of the other, edgy, maybe just that everything you do eventually gets torn down, hearing lately coming back from the tactical jungle civil dreams of his own on urban circulation picked up only to be implemented by military listeners, that is to draw blood yet in terms of economy and political stability maybe improving in fact his original thoughts on horizontal stretch. How motion might, decentralized, shift the “syntax” of a city, this new breed had it, improvise access flows to open insurgents to penetration where even state-of-the-art defenses against nuclear ends are “architecture” nowadays, perhaps even the contemplation of de-spare-parted sewage plants, depowered to leave sewage pools in the streets and river levels low.

Neighborhood renewal where it’s the neighbors that get replaced. And who were the insurgents? Imam followers such as mutah believers in temporary marriage? Other Muslims who condemn festival dramas and art depicting humans? Suicide strategists or self-anointed Gospel free-enterprisers who knew the drill? He explained magnetic water as a material to the correspondent who confessed that “acu”puncture always suggested “aqua” to him though this was incorrect; but it told Xides that man to man the correspondent was thinking about what went on at those sessions.

His eyes shut to hear her steps. Did he almost place that old Sam-sung TV? A thing on the move in the other room as if it were near the ladder in this room, he thought, seeing double, keener then than an instrument an unholy scent of cut orange came with her hand and a faint rinse of detergent. She asked how he’d been. As if it were longer than this past Tuesday.

Did he want to take off his watch, was an order, not a question. How was the pain in the small of the back and did he feel it ever in his belly? They needed to talk. It was her breath he smelt orange on too.

Taking his watch, Any fever? Why did she ask, needling his ear now? She thought she’d seen a slight swelling in his right ankle last time.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.