Tonight Muni munched a stale rugelach from the dish he’d taken to the kitchen to offer Pinchas, who was absent, but Muni never missed him since he followed his uncle’s every movement in the history he was busy composing. Or was it the reverse? His uncle did whatever Muni wrote that he did. Along with ongoing events the nephew recorded others that came before and after, which also somehow happened concurrently: such as General Bedford Forrest’s cavalry charge through the doors of the Gayoso House Hotel, and a monthlong camp meeting on the bluff, where the bull pen was filled with straw so that attendees who got the holy shakes would not be injured — all of which took place even as the butcher Makowsky and Bluestein the mohel merrily prepared to circumcise young Nathan Halprin’s heart.
These things Muni cited while remaining holed up in his cell for an indefinite time, time itself having become as still as standing water. The length of his tangled hair and beard attested to the fact that time still flowed, however, and the music from the fiddle outside his window was both doleful and demoniac.
At the news of Katie’s untimely passing imparted to him by Jenny Bashrig, who abandoned the Pinch soon after, Pinchas Pin never budged. He stayed fixed to the kitchen chair he’d sat vigil in for weeks. Banished from the bedroom by a wife who didn’t want him to witness her suffering, he had wondered if his obedience were due to consideration or cowardice. Still he’d trusted her to the care of Doc Seligman and the watchful Jenny; told himself that when the crisis passed, as it must, she would welcome him back into her presence, where he would find her hale and lovely again, and less cruel. But that outcome had not ensued, and so Pinchas was determined to remain obstinately unmoving until such time as Katie’s fate was reversed. After all, there had never been a satisfactory diagnosis, and an affliction without a name was no affliction at all, and therefore had no power to vanquish its victim. So, mulish, he sat and waited beyond the time when garments should have been rent, mirrors turned to the wall, the burial society called in to wash the corpse. Never mind: tradition no longer figured in Pinchas’s frame of reference, just as illness and death had no place in the present-day Pinch. His neighbors, with their chronic complaints of shingles, piles, furuncles, goiters, and fatty hearts, were not complaining anymore. They had surrendered to an epidemic of unbridled felicity that supplanted illness and death; dying they would now have regarded as bad form.
The lights that streamed through the kitchen window from the jubilee beyond made auroras of the waving chintz curtains, while Pinchas continued to sit in dull denial. Grief at this stage was its own anesthesia: he felt nothing. Oh, maybe some bitterness, as when he suspected that his wife’s malady was his punishment for failing to lie with her as her husband these past several years. But if so, hadn’t he been punished enough? “Katie, come back already!” he shouted, then had a laugh at the sheer idiocy of his outburst; then forced himself finally to his feet and went to see if she might have obeyed his summons.
He was met at her door by a sickly-sweet odor that filtered into his nostrils and penetrated his guts where feeling began to return. The resulting pain was exquisite, as when (wrote Muni) frozen limbs begin to thaw. Stumbling into the bedroom, he found a blue marble woman — her ice-gray hair threaded with rust — laid out in her nainsook chemise as on a tomb. But before Pinchas could fall upon her as his pain dictated, a thing happened that would have violated the limits of his freethinking consciousness, had that consciousness not been already so savaged: for Katie’s spirit — he assumed it was her spirit though it wasn’t in the least diaphanous and looked instead uncommonly alive — had begun to detach itself from her dormant body and, once free, rushed directly out of the room. Pinchas watched her departure, wondering if he were the catalyst, that even in the tranquility that had succeeded her suffering, his wife preferred to elude his regard. But so urgent and quick did her risen shade appear that it rendered all but superfluous her supine form; it was in every way the animated likeness of the original, which confused Pinchas as to whether you could even say that the ghost was deceased. And as dead was still not a concept he was able to attach to his wife, Pinchas managed to overcome a disabling anguish and lumber after her out the door and down the hall.
“Katie, my dove,” he called to her, “this is foolishness, no?”
He had some vague intention of overtaking the apparition, because the more distance her spirit put between itself and his wife’s remains, the more permanent did that separation become. He realized as well that this logic, unique to the moment, was at the same time entirely groundless, though it must have some basis in reason — mustn’t it? — since Pinchas was a reasonable man.
“Och, Katie,” he cried, “I’m loving you beyond logic!” and would follow her, dead or alive, wherever she led. Or so he believed.
Once outside, Pinchas sloshed into the canal that the neighbors declared had its source in Eden, whose surface the shade walked briskly across. For their part his neighbors, if not playing at being shopkeepers and artisans, could be seen prospecting with strainers for the nacreous dream residue that bobbed like manna atop the shimmering stream. The jeweler Gottlob led his goose of a daughter through seasons that changed from one block to the next, bundling and unbundling her in her peacoat accordingly; the pharmacist Blen waved a butterfly net from his wherry to try and snatch a monkey-faced ziz bird out of the air. The North Main Street Improvement Committee was convened in the back of Makovsky’s to propose names for emotions that no one had previously experienced. So preoccupied were the citizens of the Pinch with their manifold phenomena that they scarcely noticed the bespectacled merchant in pursuit of his wife’s fugitive ghost.
On the crest of the little hill that was formed by the great oak’s uprooting, Katie paused a moment as a breeze stirred her auburn hair and pasted her chemise against her well-knit bones. Above her in the violet sky a cloud hung from a crescent moon like a rag from a scimitar; an owl hooted and the merchant’s phantom wife ducked without a backward glance below the surface of the earth. She sank among the inverted limbs that extended into the fissure as if she were descending a staircase. Having mounted the hillock behind her and peered over the brink into darkness, Pinchas balked in his pursuit; he’d come (it seemed) as near to the abyss as his tether would stretch. Weak from days without eating and further debilitated by a fathomless sorrow, he was snapped back to a plausible sanity: Katie’s ghost was not Katie; the wraith swallowed up by the earth’s open maw had nothing to do with his beloved wife. Hysteria had given way to a soberer rationale: he was a retail merchant again, and rather than follow a shade into the sunless unknown, Pinchas elected to turn around and retrace his steps back home.
He left the park and again confronted the spectacle of a neighborhood he perceived as a perverse impersonation of itself. But no sooner had he arrived at the bank of the canal than he realized that he’d succumbed to a stunning failure of nerve. Katie’s specter had more vitality than the corpse growing stiff back in the apartment to which he knew he couldn’t bring himself to return; the ghost had the greater claim to his allegiance, and Pinchas hated himself for having turned around. Isolated from his preposterous community by grief, he belonged to neither this world nor any other. Deeply ashamed, he stepped into an empty coracle moored to a hitching post in front of Poupko’s Hosiery and began paddling toward the place where all the lunacy had begun.
Mr. and Mrs. Padauer were leaving as Pinchas arrived. As they passed him on the landing above Hekkie’s Hardware, they were debating whether it was actually possible to travel beyond the borders of the Pinch.