What’s more, the money he’d pinned to the inside of his union suit was no longer there. “Mutzlekh!” Pinchas congratulated himself. “You got now nothing left to lose.” He trudged on, thinking he might find an officer to accompany him back to the brothel and demand that his funds be returned. But after he’d turned a corner or two without spotting a cop, Pinchas doubted he would even be able to retrace his steps. Besides, he still retained his Old Country distrust of police; and given the state of the infected city, infernal in the light of the fever fires, he figured the police would have better things to do than to retrieve an indigent immigrant’s purloined purse.
He’d found his way back to Main Street, which was desolate as an outpost. One step ahead of the fatigue that was threatening to overtake him again, he plodded on, crossing a street between palisades of rotting cotton and entering a park that overlooked the river’s traveling expanse. A leaden sky marbled with moonlight illumined a cluster of paddle wheelers (perhaps in quarantine) riding at anchor below the levee, their smokestacks contributing to the fouled atmosphere.
Pinchas coveted the few benches that crowned the bluff, but they were already occupied by silhouettes in various stages of tribulation. One hugged himself as he sat rocking furiously back and forth; another recited verses in Latin, and the peddler knew enough of gentile customs to assume the poor soul was administering some type of sacrament to himself. The petrified attitude of another invited an enterprising young thief, employing a hook and line to avoid contamination, to fish in his pockets for spoils. It occurred to Pinchas that, if he were willing to risk the contagion, he might secure a suit of clothes from a stiff, but his main objective at the moment was simply to lie down. His weariness had acquired a nauseous component; his head ached and his stomach had begun to cramp. This was possibly due to the onset of heatstroke, he reasoned, though that affliction did not commonly occur after dark. Still, he felt that his very skin was on fire, even as he’d begun to be racked with chills.
He steered his unsteady steps toward a mulberry hedge, behind which he hoped to find some privacy. Rounding the hedge he came upon a young woman lying supine on the ground, her features marmoreal, her gorged blue breast bared to the living infant that fiercely sucked at it. “Gott in himmel,” gasped Pinchas, who believed in neither God nor heaven. In fact he was by then more prepared to expect the kind of intervention that directly took place: when a yipping, half-naked bedlamite, death riding the flapping tails of his gown, appeared out of nowhere to shove Pinchas to the ground; then scarcely breaking stride, he stooped to pluck the tyke from the dead mother’s breast and carry it away.
His cheek pressed against the prickly grass, Pinchas understood that what he’d witnessed had no place in a sensible world — or was it the peddler himself who no longer belonged? He was almost grateful when he felt his griping gut uncoil, giving up along with his insides a vital spark at the quick of his being in a muddy emulsion of pitch-black blood. His last conscious thought was how convenient it was that his remains should already be swaddled in their graveclothes.
When reading aloud to Rachel from The Pinch, I would glance at her from time to time, watching for signs that she thought the words were more than stories. Certainly she was receptive, often changing positions on the mattress to make herself more comfortable: she hugged her knees, stretched her legs to loll on her side, tilted her head to catch a peculiar turn of phrase; sometimes she admitted an inward smile, sometimes laughed outright. But I could tell that the book remained for her merely a book, the stories only stories, a whimsical gloss on the factual history of North Main. Occasionally her attitude infected mine, reducing Muni’s chronicles to diversions for the gullible, fabrications that had little in common with the real life of the street. And honestly, there were times when it was a relief to share that perspective. Meanwhile I never let on that at some point in the narrative we would run into yours truly; then fact and fancy would collide or maybe blend into one and the same.
Her unwilling suspension of disbelief aside: naked, Rachel was herself a catalog of enchantments. She was tickled when I undressed her, not from the undue exposure so much as from her amusement at my shaking hands and chattering teeth. “Such an enfant terrible!”she would tease me. “Scared of a naked lady.” And it was true that no bogey I’d encountered during my pharmaceutical escapades had instilled in me such awe as Rachel’s close-pored flesh. Her breasts, when I lay my cheek against them, were soft as spongecake, her belly like the trough of a salt lick I traced with my tongue. Her burnished thighs fluctuated like waves, parting to reveal a floating garden I swam toward from over the crest of a hip. Entering her I tried not to lose myself, and looked to her human face to gauge the rectitude of my progress; but the moods of her face kept changing till I didn’t know whether I clung to a heroine or a whore or an impish child.
Okay, so the multitudes she contained gave me a fright — and then they didn’t; because letting go (and I could let go tumultuously since Rachel was on the pill) I would find myself again in familiar surroundings. For there sat tailor Bluestein at the machine in the window of his shop, sewing garments with odd apertures for the mutant creatures that sheltered in the outhouse behind his building. The merchant Shapiro was advising Mrs. Grunewald that the fabric she fingered was a sample from the pargod, the curtain that surrounded the Lord’s holy throne. “Note the irregularities that they’re unborn souls stitched into the material like pinned butterflies.” The butcher Makowsky sank his cleaver into marbled meat carved from a flank (or so he claimed) of the Messiah Ox, and the pot at Ike Taubenblatts’ pinochle game was stuffed with forfeited shadows. Ridblatt delivered fresh challah to Rosen’s Deli, where the alter kockers tore off pieces and stuffed their faces, the bread foaming like a benign hydrophobia in their toothless mouths. But Rachel lived elsewhere, and after I’d tarried a spell on North Main Street I made the journey back to my bed, where we would twine, my girl and me, like those vines that grew over the graves of legendary lovers.
And so I had for a time the best of both worlds.
He opened his eyes to darkest eternity. Of course Pinchas Pinsker had never supposed there would be an afterlife, and it humbled him to find himself in one, though this straitened confinement hardly qualified as any kind of a life. It angered him as well, his cramped situation, or at least he registered an emotion that might have risen to the status of anger had he had the strength for it. Because an afterlife gave the lie to the strict rationalist view he’d adhered to since rejecting the Torah of his student days; it vindicated all the narishkeit he thought he’d left behind him in the shtetl. His nose twitched against the stink of the effluvium that saturated his winding sheet. This must be Sheol, the inky perdition to which Jewish no-goodniks were everlastingly sentenced; though it seemed to Pinchas he’d scarcely had time in his brief life to earn such a bleak retribution. Granted, his few virtues might not have merited Paradise — but Sheol? Had he really been so great a sinner?