That was the cue for Jimmy Pryor, kicking back the carpet, to place his little monk on the floor, strike a match, and set fire to its robe. The whole room flashed on those images of the Vietnamese monks who’d immolated themselves in protest against the decimation of their country. The flaming puppet crumpled and fell face-forward in a stinking mess of melting rubber, felt, and fleece. Then I sensed how the chilly menace of headline events had filtered through the walls of Beatnik Manor, which I’d previously thought were impenetrable.
Everyone’s attention remained glued to the greasy spot where the puppet had been; which was when, egged on by the chemical buzz in my brain, I decided it was up to me to break the spell. “I was with the marchers that got Maced at Main and Beale,” I announced. “We had to run like hell to keep from being beaten to bonemeal. My eyes are still stinging from the spray.” And as no one seemed properly agog: “You had bodies lying in the street just like sacks of uncollected garbage.” I realized, however vaguely, that the image was inappropriate; I’d confused the incident with the condition of the streets during the Yellow Fever epidemic as described in Muni Pinsker’s book. Still I throbbed with anticipation, waiting for the room to recognize the largeness of my experience and pepper me with questions. But beyond a polite grunt on the part of Ira Kisco, I was mostly ignored.
Elder Lincoln, the plastic pick stuck in his ’fro like a half-buried cleaver, was still nodding his head over Jimmy’s monk flambeau. “Martyrs,” he opined, “that’s what the movement needs all right. Specially martyrs that take a few pigs along with them.”
After the immense effort it had taken me to formulate my speech, I struggled against a tail-spinning temptation to sulk; I summoned the waning effects of the acid to see myself as “tameless, swift, and proud,” rather than just a boorish drug mule endured for the sake of the booty I brought.
She made a beeline toward me across the barroom, and while my heart hummed like the Lorelei, I tried to assume an air of careless unconcern.
“Red devils, yellow jackets, blue angels …,” I offered.
“I want to talk to you,” said Rachel, who’d yet to remove her corny tam-o’-shanter. A few tendrils peeked from beneath the cap to caress her downy cheek.
“Maybe you’d prefer some crystal meth for the business lady’s trip?” I said, as she was behaving in such a business-like manner.
“Can you please be real for a minute?” she asked.
I pondered the question: since having found myself a character in a book, I had, understandably, an ever more arbitrary sense of reality. “Where’s Dennis?” I inquired, pretending to yawn.
She frowned. “That’s none of your business.” It gratified me to have provoked her, though her dark eyes were already softening, nostrils unflaring. “Dennis and I decided we needed some time apart.” I must have shown some relief, because she cautioned me: “Look, Lenny”—I savored her invocation of my name; I enjoyed looming over her by half a head, though her slenderness made her appear taller than she was—“that night with you, it never happened, okay? Call it an out-of-body experience.”
I winced, my eyes involuntarily traveling over the body I’d remained outside of. “More’s the pity,” I muttered.
She gave me a look lest I forget my unspoken shame. “Like I said, it never happened,” she reiterated. Then she sighed, rolled her eyes toward the ceiling: this was not how the conversation was supposed to go. Here she’d come down all alone to the city’s seedy underbelly to find a guy who should have been flattered by the gesture but was instead being childishly difficult. Meanwhile the place was relatively quiet for a change. Lamar, in his bottle-green frock coat, was playing at master of ceremonies; he had pulled the plug on the jukebox, mounted a projector on a table, and was showing, through a dust-filled cone of light, an animated pornographic film: Snow White serially violated by industrious dwarves. I fluctuated between relishing Rachel’s embarrassment and concealing my own.
“Can’t we just be friends?” she asked.
Didn’t she know that those were the most dreaded words a woman can say to a man? On the other hand, it was a kind of touching if pathetic request that must have hurt her pride to make. But I was resolved to stand as firm against her humility as I did against her condescension. Remarkably clearheaded despite (or thanks to) the evening’s stimulants, I asked her point-blank, “What do you want?”
“I want to hear what you really know about the Pinch.”
I blinked: she’d pronounced the open sesame that relaxed all hostilities, instantly rendering me a helpless conduit for the particulars of Muni Pinsker’s world. “I know,” I began, “that the night they turned on the electric lights for the first time, Lily Altfeder found her long-lost parrot, stiff but still upright on top of her hall tree. I know that Emile Grossbart, the watchmaker, was accustomed to wearing his truss outside his pants. I know that Eddie Kid Wolf performed feats of strength onstage at the Idle Hour Talent Show. He started by lifting a longhorn calf over his head and continued through all the months it took the calf to grow into a steer. Then he kept it tethered in the yard behind his family’s rag shop till it drowned in the flood—”
“What flood?”
“The flood that followed the earthquake.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Because it seemed that a sampling of Rachel’s oral history informants had referred to some nameless event that occurred on North Main around the eve of the First World War. “That’s what they say, ‘Something happened.’ Of course they were just kids at the time, but while none of them seem able to specify exactly what took place, they all agree it was momentous and afterward nothing was the same. When I ask them about an earthquake, nobody remembers. Either they know something they’re not telling me or they’re suffering from collective amnesia.”
Whatever the case, Rachel was determined to put together an accurate time line for the history of the Pinch. She’d gone to the public library to check old newspaper records and discovered that there had indeed been seismic activity along the New Madrid Fault in the summer of 1913. But apparently the temblors were barely perceptible and damage to the city minimal. She’d looked high and low for references to physical consequences around North Main Street but so far had turned up zilch.
I enjoyed watching her grow animated as she described her vocational sleuthing and at one point exclaimed, “Nancy Drew!” which she ignored. Then coming to the heart of the matter she asked me, “Do you know of any local documentation about the quake?”
A grin unzippered itself across my face. “I’ve got pictures,” I said.
Rachel actually clapped her hands in excitement, and the sound reverberated in my insides like rosy thunder.
In my apartment we knelt on the knobbly floor and I opened the book to show her an illustration of the upside-down oak tree in the park. Its tortured roots were thronged like a grandstand with creatures running the gamut from ordinary citizens to grotesques with articulated wings. The colors were eye-popping but conformed to nothing under heaven.
“These are just fanciful illustrations,” she complained, bewildered and disappointed. “I want photos, documents …” But when I affected offense and made to take the book away from her, she refused to let it go, her eyes still fixed on the images.
“He’s still alive,” I told her.
“Who?”
“The illustrator, Tyrone Pin, he’s still alive.”
Heaving a fretful sigh, she said I could perhaps introduce her to the artist sometime: who knew but he might fill in some of the holes in her investigations. She had yet to remove her cap or coat, and when I invited her to do so she said she had to leave. My throat contracted like Chinese handcuffs, the tip of my tongue aching to trace the orchid pink whorl of her ear; her scent alone was a volume of The Arabian Nights. To her back as she departed I murmured that I adored her, and scarcely turning her head she admonished me to get over it. When I followed her onto the landing, she called up from the bottom of the stairs, “And forgodsakes don’t cry.”