Night Soul and Other Stories (5 page)

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.