Free Night Soul and Other Stories by Joseph McElroy

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 tech nique 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