“Awright,” I sulked, “I can take a hint,” and slammed shut the book.
Then I wondered: What just happened? Still reeling from my swift eviction from Muni’s creation, I was neither here nor there; I came back only by gradual degrees to an awareness of 1968, to which I was banished. The shop now appeared to me less like a grotto than a moldy funk hole. If only, I found myself wishing, someone had come along to close the book’s cover while I was reading. Then, while my body remained sitting at Avrom’s desk, a hollow effigy no more substantial than a meringue, my spirit would have been happily trapped in Muni’s pages — where, incidentally, the draft board would never find me …
Such was my reasoning as I turned to withdraw the envelope from the pocket of my leather jacket draped over the chair behind me. I removed the letter, unfolding it with curious anticipation like a map that might give me back my bearings, then entertained a maverick notion: What if I went to war? It was after all a young man’s rite of passage since the dawn of history, to embark on the great adventure and return (if he returned) marked by an awful wisdom and a cauterized soul … And again I thought I heard the strident voice — a tinnitus no doubt prompted by my head injury — crying, “A nekhtiker tog! Are you nuts?”
I took a breath and carefully lifted my hampered leg from the desktop, planted it on the floor, and opened the drawer. A sepulchral odor rose from its interior. I rooted among the clutter of unpaid bills, the yellow fabric Magen David, a worn scrapbook full of buff-brown circus clippings, until I found a box of wooden matches. Striking one, I set fire to the letter.
I watched it burn until the flames threatened to scorch my fingers, then let it drift out of my hand. A flaking black carbon zephyr on orange wings, it lit on the desk atop Muni’s weathered volume, which ignited. A frayed corner of the book cover had absorbed the flame like a wick, and the book was instantly engulfed. I was fascinated to see how it seemed to welcome the combustion. I might have smothered the little blaze with a sleeve, snuffed it out like a candle; it was nothing but a lambent flickering. But instead I watched, interested, as the flames sprawled across the cloth cover, hardly believing the book could be so rapidly consumed. Then the small conflagration spread to some stray volumes on the desk, which proved equally flammable, their sparks rising like blown spores dispersed to the nearby shelves, where a wall of books seemed to have been awaiting its own incineration. In a few seconds the shelves had burst into trellises of efflorescent flame.
I remained transfixed by the sight until the door flew open and a cadre of National Guardsmen charged in, presumably alerted by smoke issuing from the shop. Callow weekend warriors not much older than me, they stormed the premises as if they meant to battle the fire with their rifles; they held kerchiefs over their faces and began to rush here and there at cross-purposes, calling for buckets of water. Close to choking myself, I was nevertheless ignored in the mayhem, still lacking the will to lift myself from the chair. Then one of the tall shelves toppled over, crashing to the floor in a spray of glittering sparks, out of which stepped, God help us, my beatified boss, having apparently followed me from the pages of Muni’s book. His pinions appeared to have grown considerably; covered now in an eider of frothy feathers, they even flapped a bit, fanning the flames. His countenance was more terrible than any of the crabby aspects he’d assumed in life: eyes flashing, hair floating (at least the few strands that were left to him), his scraggly beard curved like a cutlass at its tip. This was not a guardian but an avenging host, who loomed above me in utter indifference to the fact that I refused, despite my dread, to believe in him.
But there was nothing spectral about the talon-like hand he thrust into the desk drawer in front of me, extracting a pair of rusty scissors. He raised them above his head where they hung poised to settle scores with the young shmuck who’d torched his store and betrayed his legacy. I deserve this, I thought, and closed my eyes, still half-expecting I might wake up in my hospital bed. Peeking through my fingers, I watched in awe as the celestial geezer plunged the scissors not into my heart but my thigh, stabbing through the baggy pantsleg and cutting a seam in the plaster cast. Then clenching the instrument pirate-style in his gums, he ripped the layered plaster, which came apart like an opened cocoon, and liberated my leg. He raised me up by the sore armpits and shoved me toward the door, expediting my forward motion with a well-placed kick.
I stumbled coughing and half-blinded out onto the pavement, where I was greeted again by the unpeopled morning. Behind me the fire roiled, the shop’s dusty front window splintering from the inferno inside as the soldiers beat their retreat out the door. There were sirens in the near distance, men and trucks only minutes away, though I knew they would arrive too late. I wiped my watering eyes with my sleeve and suffered shooting pains throughout my body, an infestation of pins and needles in my game leg, all of which served only to animate me the more. I proceeded in a southerly direction along Main Street, its stores closed and boarded up against looters, the thoroughfare barren but for the odd sentry or armored tank. A phrase came into my head: “The royal road to romance,” which struck me as so comical that I tried a few warmed-over others. “He lit out for the territory with only the clothes on his back.” A breeze fluttered my torn pantsleg in unison with a banner hanging over the street announcing the commencement of this spring’s Cotton Carnival; a flyer taped to a lamppost advertising the Elder Lincoln Memorial Concert at the Overton Park Shell also waved. We flapped — the banner, the flyer, the flitting pigeons, and myself — like flags at a regatta, which somehow increased the hilarity of my circumstance. I had to stop and surrender to a fit of laughter, a whooping fulmination that escaped my seared lungs with a sound like a raucous sneeze.
“Gezuntheit!” came the sublime squawk from behind me. I might have glanced back over my shoulder at its source but instead stayed true to the words I’d spied Muni Pinsker scribbling on the page in his suffocating little room.
“Limping forward again,” he had written, “Lenny never turned around to give a look on the angel with the scissors and the flames. He figured was nothing already but rubble and ashes, the bookshop, like the district a few blocks to the north that they called it the Pinch.”
Acknowledgments
Portions of this book appeared in Fiction Magazine, J&L Illustrated, vol. 3, and jewishfiction.net, no. 14.
My thanks to Fiona McCrae and the very fine people of Graywolf Press, and as always to my steadfast friend and agent, Liz Darhansoff.
About the Author