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

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,