At first I might have discounted the experience as the aftereffects of hallucinogens, which I wasn’t unfamiliar with. Such phenomena were common enough, especially when you’d stopped using the stuff as abruptly as I had: it left fluorescent echoes in the brain. But lately the echoes had more volume and substance than their original source. To read about the entertainments at the Idle Hour Theater, where every night was Talent Night, was to find myself in the audience among spell-struck neighbors. Onstage the citizens tried to outdo one another in performing wonders, though the miraculous had become relatively prosaic in those parts. Everybody was a magician. Harold Dlugach made a solemn show of lighting his brother Morton’s poots, from which fabulous salamanders materialized in the resulting blue flames; the Shpinker Hasids extracted the souls of local suicides from mirrors and ladies’ reticules, then released them like carrier pigeons with messages to God. (Muni wrote that, sequestered for so long, ben Yahya’s Hasids were now ubiquitous, whereas their rebbe seldom entered society anymore and looked peaky whenever he did.)
Sometimes I confused what I read with what I imagined I’d read, or passed through, as when wide awake I dreamed that I sloshed into Pinchas Pin’s General Merchandise: I climbed the stairs and padded down the short hallway to peer into the little cupboard of a room, where a gaunt man with pouched eyes sat on a bed in his skivvies inscribing the deeds of the neighborhood. What would happen, I wondered, if I nudged aside his shoulder, displacing his writing hand to make room for mine, instead of simply retreating back to my own half of the century?
8 Beale Street
When Jenny entered his room, stepping from her stilts through the window holding aloft a covered dish, Muni could scarcely bring himself to look up from his labor. She peered over his shoulder and he made automatically to conceal the writing with his hand. He needn’t have: the cursive was nearly illegible, a combination of Hebrew-laced Yiddish and the English he was trying to domesticate with the help of a broken-spined dictionary. Besides, Jenny was virtually unlettered.
“It’s a secret what you’re scribbling?” asked the girl.
“Not altogether,” said Muni, still abstracted, “but it’s not yet ready for the public consumption.”
“Neither are you,” she teased, mussing his already unkempt hair. He had lost weight and his unwashed undershirt had a vinegar smell. She set down the plate of kugel, removed the half-eaten plate of buckwheat groats she’d left there before; then leaning over him, she pulled his face to her breast and brushed the crown of his head with her lips.
“You’re crazy as a bedbug,” was her whispered diagnosis.
With his nose tucked in the voile crease between her tsitskehs, he inhaled her essence of lilac and cold cuts, and wondered why he did not rise from the cot to take her in his arms. Desire aside, Muni didn’t want to disappoint her; she’d been tolerant thus far of his elusiveness, never blaming him for running away. He was keenly aware of their deferred intimacy and wondered if his reluctance to hold her involved a portion of guilt; though whether or not their sins were permissible in this unorthodox climate was frankly immaterial to him now: his ache was acute and the moment opportune. So why was he still incapable of leaving off his employment for the sake of the girl? The answer was as inescapable as fate.
“Yenny,” he said to her whisper-soft breasts, which muffled his words, “I am by Norf Main Freet iss instrumum.” Lifting his head. “When it speaks — and it don’t never stop talking — I must listen and take down every word.”
Jenny shoved him to arm’s length, disburdened herself of a weighty sigh. “You poor deluded putz,” she said, not without a tinge of genuine rancor, and barged out of the room to check on Katie Pin.
Attending to Pinchas’s wife and helping the Rosens in their effort to feed a community that lived essentially on air was keeping her busy. She saw to the needs of the failing Katie, spoon-fed and sitz-bathed her, emptied her slops and read her articles on society scandals from back issues of Harper’s Weekly. She kept the shades drawn to keep out the insult of the neighborhood’s radiance and shooed her husband from the bedroom, though he protested, “Katie, I hate you already, God forbid! Now will you let me in?” Because he thought — this was his logic — that if she believed he no longer loved her, she wouldn’t mind so much his watching over her decline. But Katie only screamed at him as Jenny explained before closing the door, “She don’t like you should see her dilapidate.” He watched anyway, peeking in while she was sleeping to ensure that there was still some indication of her breathing. Her once robust form was turning practically diaphanous in its degeneration, the only body in the Pinch that was visibly aging, and it seemed to her frantic husband that his wife suffered the martyrdom of age for all the others who’d been given a pass.
Eventually Jenny stopped invading the Pins’ apartment through Muni’s window. How many times could she be expected to endure the same rude reception? His absorption in his febrile occupation had become a completely hermetic activity; it was an exercise made further exasperating by the ambivalent face he showed her whenever she managed to get his attention, though on her final few visits she’d failed to arouse even that tepid response. Muni had barely bothered to look up from his hen-scratching. Unshaven, unlaundered, and increasingly thin, he looked much as he had on the day he’d arrived on North Main Street from overseas. Back when he was a sleepwalker and she a ropewalker — avocations that who would have thought so compatible? Now he was a delirious insomniac like so many of their neighbors, some of whom repeated after Rabbi ben Yahya that “sleep is the unripe fruit of death.” The Shpinker rebbe’s bromides were frequently on their lips of late.
Jenny wondered if Muni ever left his smelly cell anymore, strewn now with his uncle’s books — whose formal devices he appropriated as needed — and the drift of pages scored with his fitful scrawl. For books Jenny had little use, and as for the writing itself, who did Muni Pinsker think he was? Were the angels dictating to him a new testament that the work should preclude all other concerns? It wasn’t lost on her how the very environment that inspired his labor had also made him a shut-in — was he even aware of the irony? But her anger was mixed (she couldn’t help it) with anxious concern. She worried about his well-being and even reserved some small part of her nature in which to admire his obsessive industry: how it displaced all else in his purview, including his regard for her. It was a passion that duplicated the charged atmosphere of the Pinch itself, which spilled beyond the boundaries of any given day to overflow the rest of existence.
“It’s this stupid street that’s drove you nuts,” Jenny concluded on her last pass through his room, never asking why she herself remained proof against the neighborhood’s questionable influence. And still receiving no response from her sometime hartseniu, her lover, she gave way to a livid “You’re not a person anymore!”