Night Soul and Other Stories by Joseph McElroy Read Free Book Online

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