“Rachel,” I said, trying to sound prophetic despite being flat on my back, head tilted to reverse the flow of blood, “there are more things in heaven and earth than you dreamed of in your folklore classes.”
“No doubt,” she replied without conviction.
“Rachel,” I confided in a voice that trilled a bit from the fluid draining into my throat, “I walked into a tree.”
“Uh-huh,” she breathed, hovering impatiently above me, the wind waving the showy black standard of her hair. “Listen, Lenny, my friends will be wondering what became of me.” Whereupon she removed my overcoat and spread it over me with the care she might have bestowed upon an invalid or a corpse, then set off in the direction of the bar.
The next day on the way to the Book Asylum I barged into a rack of vintage kangaroo-calf bicycle shoes, pleased at my ability to identify them even though they weren’t there. The rack clattered noisily nonetheless as it toppled in front of me. Of course I was an old hand at confusing what was there with what was not. An intrepid psychic traveler, I’d crossed thresholds into unexplored regions encountering dragons and bugbears of every stripe and paisley (keeping the Thorazine handy in case I couldn’t vanquish the dragon on my own). So what was the big deal about occasionally crossing over from what passed for real life into the pages of a bogus historical chronicle? Never mind that I approached the book with an ostrich-egg lump in my throat, since, in reading The Pinch, I was conscious of also approaching a rendezvous with myself.
Apprehension aside, the past put the present in the shade. The world from my North Main Street window was a toilet: the government was sliding toward fascism, the planet dying from neglect, and my lottery number put me in line to be shipped off on short notice to Vietnam. There, if I escaped the rockets and jungle rot, I would doubtless stumble into a man-trap and be impaled on envenomed stakes. Moreover — to offset the mind-fucking effects of The Pinch—I’d begun to read the newspapers, which reported that negotiations were at an impasse and no end in sight for the garbage strike. Undiscouraged by police harassment and the mayor’s inflexible stance, however, the sanitation workers persisted in marching every day. Their ranks had been joined by students, clergymen, and ordinary citizens, a few of them white.
In that atmosphere Avrom’s Asylum was as good as its name. The crowded shelves provided insulation from the unrest beyond its door, and there were times, I confess, when I thought I might like to hunker down in that dimly lit shop till the hard rain that was coming passed over. Then I reminded myself that I belonged to a reckless tribe, who ran out to greet the winds of change with open arms; I remembered that I was, albeit at my own speed, in pursuit of a beautiful girl.
“Avrom,” I said, as he gummed his fried egg sandwich (mine was pimento cheese), “I keep sort of stumbling into the past.”
I wasn’t really expecting an answer, though Avrom, his mouth crusted with yellow yolk dribbling into his beard, offered an offhand response: “Rabbi bar Hana that he once bumped into a frog as big as Mount Tabor, and like the eyelids of the morning were its eyes.”
As usual I wondered why I even bothered to confide in the old kocker, as he sometimes called himself. But for all his double-talk I suppose I invested in him a degree of authority, if only by virtue of the blue tattoo on his wrist. Surely someone who’d been where he’d been must’ve returned with some kind of momentous insight to impart. Though I admit I was reluctant to ask him about that particular journey, or what he might have lost along the way. I had after all my own concerns, and besides the old man never gave me a straight reply. “Better you should be your own shamus,” he would advise me, like he had the answers but thought it would be more educational if I found them myself. The thing was, before discovering Muni’s book I hadn’t really thought of what the questions might be.
Today’s was “Who’s Tyrone Pin?” That was the incongruous name to which the illustrations were attributed on the title page of The Pinch. Slouched in the understuffed armchair catty-cornered from Avrom’s desk, I braced myself to hear the obvious: “He made like it says the pictures—” Imagine my surprise when, instead of the usual runaround, Avrom said simply, “Why you don’t ask him?” It was a particularly unsettling reply given his previous assurance that all persons connected with the book were “gone with the wind.” That was Avrom’s phrase, which he seemed to think was original with him.
“And where would I find this Tyrone person?” I inquired, again expecting to be handed a riddle. By now it was apparent that Avrom was better acquainted with the book than he was willing to let on; like I said, he enjoyed making mystery. But since the answer was disturbing enough in its own right, the old man seemed to relish divulging it.
“He’s since the war an inmate by the Western State Mental Hospital at Bolivar.”
The information shook me to my socks. That the illustrator was living gave the book a kind of manifest presence in the world, made it more than just some indefinable artifact. But Avrom wasn’t finished. “He grew up in the Pinch, Tyrone — Katie and Pinchas Pin’s boy, a delicate kid, so I’m told.”
Hoping to further exploit his confidential mood, I pressed him. “Did you know them, the Pins?”
“Me, I’m a Shlomo-come-lately, who do I know? By the time I get here everyone is—”
“Gone with the wind — so you said.”
Later on I’m wondering what would be the point of making a trip to some ghoulish institution — which was Western State’s reputation — to talk with a lunatic. Reading the book was a daunting enough experience in itself, especially now that I’d begun running into North Main Street’s long-extinct merchandise. I stepped on an unreal roller skate and coasted a few hair-raising moments before I went sprawling; I barked my shin on the phantom fender of a 1908 Packard motor carriage and even glimpsed some ectoplasm in a serge waistcoat, watch fob, and gartered sleeves. Such occasions, despite the panoply of bruises I was collecting, were tantamount to waking up in a dream. I might have written off the incidents as acid flashbacks, but since I’d become so absorbed in the book, I was less inclined to sample the psychoactive stuff in my pantry. I used to declare with Stephen Dedalus the wish to wake up from the nightmare of history, but nowadays I had to struggle just to rouse myself enough from The Pinch to take notice of current events. Not that I struggled very hard. I was thus straddling two worlds when Rachel Ostrofsky came back into the 348 all alone.
4 A Local Apocalypse
Until the earthquake, when North Main Street rippled like a beaten carpet and rolled like a wave, things had been relatively quiet. Of course, owing to Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya and his followers’ infernal tampering with the cosmos, there had been instances of what might be deemed the miraculous. But such events had been minimal, a mere trickle compared to the flood that followed the quake — which events included, incidentally, a flood.
But on the day that Jenny Bashrig was discharged from the St. Joseph Hospital, all that was yet to come. Muni had not visited her during her convalescence, and it was with shame that he watched her hobbling on crutches through the door of Rosen’s Delicatessen. When they’d tumbled together from the rope above the alley, the girl struck the ground first with Muni landing on top of her. He’d heard the bone snap and seen the leg’s unnatural angle as he rolled off, shaken but unharmed, onto the gravel, convinced she had deliberately broken his fall. While she lay moaning and convulsed in pain, Muni cried for help, alerting Mrs. Rosen, who hastened in her billowing nightclothes to fetch Dr. Seligman. The bathrobed doctor, after a swift inspection of her injury, phoned for an ambulance to come and haul her away. Attendants lifted her onto a stretcher and Muni averted his glance from her sloe-eyed stare and the bandy state of her splintered limb beneath the rumpled blue gown. He dodged Dr. Seligman’s questions as to how he happened to be abroad at that hour in a torn nightshirt, and avoided what he perceived as the accusatory gaze of the blind fiddler on his corner. To say nothing of the neighbors who’d begun to poke their heads from their second-story windows. That was the last he’d seen of Jenny until he glimpsed her a week later from behind the plate glass of Pin’s General Merchandise, as she was being helped by Old Man Rosen from the rear of the Argo Electric ambulance.