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-ay deez , 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 mult iplying 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
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-ay deez , 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 mult iplying 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
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