Today (which was Monday?) could also be said to contain other Mondays, and Wednesdays, other years. Uncle Pinchas had early on advised his nephew that time was prone to a certain elasticity in the Pinch, due to the cabalistic meddling of the crackbrained fanatics in their midst. And this morning, as Muni and Jenny tramped on stilts through the altered landscape, they passed into and out of odd patches — beneath the shadow of a bridge ramp that trembled from vehicles passing overhead, past saddled horses tethered at a trough in front of a galleried saloon — that did not conform to the current scene. That scene involved whole families filling striped pillowslips with sand from the boils that had erupted around the bottomless pit in the park; these they piled in front of the shops to make embankments that would confine the lagoon to a canal no wider than the street itself. Some of the sandbags they transported by raft to the bayou to construct a dike across the initial breach. They worked, Muni’s neighbors, with the steadfast diligence of pyramid builders, though their labors seemed also to partake of equal parts make-believe.
“Jenny,” said Muni who needed her compliance, “we’re having fun, no?”
“You,” replied Jenny with feigned irritation, all the while manning her stilts like a natural extension of her legs, minus the limp, “you wouldn’t know fun if it bit your hiney. Anyhow, after a flood doesn’t usually come cholera and dysentery? So how is it we got instead a seagoing jamboree?”
Indeed, some of the neighbors navigating the channel could be heard shouting to one another in half-baked nautical terms. They cursed like sailors as they slung more bags atop the pillowcase parapet, behaving in their newfound swagger as prodigally as their offspring, whose summer vacation from school was now indefinitely extended. Some of the children, having captured the rebbe’s headless golem, were using its hollow corpus as a flotation device, though it continued to show signs of a twitching animation. Others gawked at the play of their reflections in the shop windows, which had acquired irregular features such as halos and donkey heads. In his exuberance Muni took the liberty of nibbling Jenny’s ear, prompting laughter that resulted in a dangerous wobbling. Self-conscious, he looked about to see who might have observed them, though a couple canoodling on stilts above standing water scarcely constituted a special attraction on such a morning.
They had taken a turn around the lagoon and arrived back at the entrance to Pin’s General Merchandise. There Muni slid down the twin poles onto the rampart, picked the splinters from his palms, and waded into the broth that engulfed the store. Above him Jenny abandoned the stilts to step through an upstairs window. Inside, Uncle Pinchas, pants rolled to the knees, was bailing water with a brass cuspidor. He seemed to be making headway, since the previously boggy depth was diminished to a shallow sludge.
“Nu, Uncle,” said Muni, but Pinchas scarcely acknowledged him. He tried again with a jovial Old Country greeting, “Uncle Pinchas, how fares a Yid?”
Pinchas paused in his activity to give his nephew a look through moisture-beaded spectacles. Apparently satisfied that the young man was as addled as the rest of his community, he said with a grim defiance, “How do you think?”
Muni took in the bowed walls and blistered counters already smutted with fungus, the warped glove cases and scrap albums fat with scalloped pages the proprietor was trying to flatten with C-clamps. Few commodities remained unspoiled: the dry goods were drenched, sacks of spuds sending runner-like eyes through their burlap — though (Muni found himself thinking) wasn’t a ravaged business finally incidental in the scheme of things? Why did his uncle seem so resistant to the general levity? Pinchas had exchanged the cuspidor for a box of lumpy corn starch, which he began sprinkling over his dripping inventory as a de-humidifyi ng agent. Muni gently grasped the arm that shook the box. “So, Uncle,” he said, “explain me again what happened.” For hadn’t he always relied on Pinchas to make sense of this singular neighborhood? And perhaps in explaining, his uncle would snap out of his mood.
“What can I tell you?” he said. “The Pinch is the place where things that don’t happen, happen. So maybe what happened, it ain’t exactly takink place.”
Which hardly qualified as an answer. When Muni continued to gaze at him expectantly, Pinchas sighed and said, “Come upstairs.”
Over weak tea at the kitchen table Pinchas gave his nephew a further account of the pernicious kibitzing of Rabbi ben Yahya and his zealots. “The Shpinkers, they don’t know from ruination and revelation the difference. They starve themselves and make their mikvah in ice water; flog themselves bloody and twist like pretzels their joints when they worship. They dress up in French underwear the holy scrolls and pray like demons in heat until what’s above spins out from its axis and collides with below.” He bumped his chafed knuckles together in illustration. “Then comes the cataclyzz: the earth opens and out pours the creatures from superstition, and time don’t flow anymore but sits still like a stagnant sump. This they call mashiach tseyt, Messiah time, which it will herald Messiah himself. Everything is prepared for his coming. That’s what they believe, the meshuggeners.”
“But what do you believe, Uncle?” asked Muni.
Pinchas removed his spectacles, squeezed the hump at the bridge of his nose. “I believe my Katie is ill.”
It was then that Jenny entered from the bedroom damp-eyed and distraught.
“I called in Doc Seligman,” continued Pinchas. “He didn’t even need to look at her; he knows already she’s sick. I’m crying hospital, but the doc says, ‘You tell her; to me she don’t listen.’ Anyway, he says, she’s better off now at home. What she’s got, a hospital can’t cure it.”
Muni asked if his uncle had sought a “second opinion,” a phrase he’d heard bandied about.
“I got already from Seligman a second opinion, and a third.”
It made a kind of cloudy sense that the hospital had been ruled out, now that the Pinch had become an essentially isolated province, but why had Pinchas so readily accepted Katie’s condition? “But Uncle,” his nephew protested, though before he could press the issue further, he was distracted by Jenny, who, standing at his shoulder, had begun softly to sob. Muni turned to her, perplexed, since this drama surrounding his aunt seemed so fundamentally out of tone with the character of a burnished new world.
Still he made a point of visiting his bedridden aunt. Her hair, bleached of its carroty essence, was the gray of rain-washed shingles, her pallid flesh interlaced with blue veins like marble. Her eyes, with their gas-green flame virtually extinguished, were a milky opalescence. Seeming embarrassed by the depredations of her accelerated aging and the cloying odor she exuded, Katie nevertheless rallied the strength to tease him with the neighborhood gossip.
“Nephew and Jenny sitting in a tree,” she intoned, “k-i-s-s …,” the letters dissipating in a throaty aspiration.