Ripper Read Free Page B

banister on the stairs and two period lamps that, if they had been genuine Lalique, would probably have suffered the same fate as the pillars and the doors. The doorman’s lodge had been bricked up, and twenty feet lopped off the once bright, spacious lobby to build windowless, cavelike offices. But as Ryan arrived that morning, the sun shimmered on the yellow-gold windows, and for a magical half hour the space seemed suspended in amber, the walls dripping caramel and the lobby fleetingly recovering some of its former splendor.
    Ryan went up to Treatment Room 8, prepared to agree to any therapy, however bizarre. He half expected to see Indiana decked out like a priestess; instead she greeted him wearing a white coat and a pair of white clogs, her hair pulled back into a ponytail and tied with a scrunchie. There was nothing of the sorceress about her. She got him to fill out a detailed form, then took him back out into the corridor and had him walk up and down to study his gait. Only then did she tell him to strip down to his boxer shorts and lie on the massage table. Having examined him, she discovered that one of his hips was slightly higher than the other, and his spine had a minor curvature—unsurprising in a man with only one leg. In addition she diagnosed an energy blockage in the sacral chakra, knotted shoulder muscles, tension and stiffness in the neck, and an exaggerated startle reflex. In a word, he was still a Navy SEAL.
    Indiana assured him that some of her therapies would be helpful, but that if he wanted them to be successful, he had to learn to relax. She recommended acupuncture sessions with Yumiko Sato, two doors down, and without waiting for him to agree, picked up the phone and made an appointment for him with a Qigong master in Chinatown, five blocks from the Holistic Clinic. It was only to humor her that Ryan agreed to these therapies, but in both cases he was pleasantly surprised.
    Yumiko Sato, a person of indeterminate age and gender who had close-cropped hair like his own, thick glasses, a dancer’s delicate fingers, and a sepulchral serenity, took his pulse and arrived at the same diagnosis as Indiana. Ryan was advised that acupuncture could be used to treat his physical pain, but it would not heal the wounds in his mind. He flinched, thinking he had misheard. The phrase intrigued him, and some months later, after they had established a bond of trust, he asked Yumiko what she had meant. Yumiko Sato said simply that only fools have no mental wounds.
    Ryan’s Qigong lessons with Master Xai—who was originally from Laos and had a beatific face and the belly of a Laughing Buddha—were a revelation: the perfect combination of balance, breathing, movement, and meditation. It was the ideal exercise for body and mind, and Ryan quickly incorporated it into his daily routine.
     
    Indiana didn’t manage to cure the spasms within three weeks as promised, but Ryan lied so he could take her out and pay for dinner, since by then he’d realized that financially she was bordering on poverty. The bustling yet intimate restaurant, the French-influenced Vietnamese food, and the bottle of Flowers pinot noir all played a part in cementing a friendship that in time Ryan would come to think of as his greatest treasure. He had lived his life among men. The fifteen Navy SEALs he’d trained with when he was twenty were his true family; like him they were inured to rigorous physical exertion, to the terror and exhilaration of war, to the tedium of hours spent idle. Some of his comrades, he had not seen in years, others he had seen only a few months earlier, but he kept in touch with them all; they would always be his brothers.
    Before he lost his left leg, the navy vet’s relationships with women had been uncomplicated: sexual, sporadic, and so brief that the features of these women blurred into a single face that looked not unlike Jennifer Yang’s. They were usually just flings, and when from time to time he did fall