Undeterred, I stepped into the vacant lot next to my building and shinnied up a budding mimosa tree to a second-story window. From a swaying limb I managed to raise the unlatched sash a few inches before it stuck; then I slithered into the room, in effect illegally breaking into my own life. Even standing amid the cuckoo’s nest of my unshelved library, I felt like a burglar. I had a fleeting urge to organize the books, arrange them in uniform stacks according to subject and author; the exercise would unclutter my mind and provide a blueprint for an ordered existence. Because the truth was I felt no more like I belonged in those mildewy rooms than I did in Rachel’s harmonious abode. Muni’s homely beige book lay splayed open on the mattress where we’d left it. I stooped to pick it up, closing the covers as if afraid its contents might spill out, then tucked the book under my belt. As I ducked out the window back into the tree, I promised myself I’d return with a wheelbarrow to cart the whole library back to Avrom’s.
I grappled down a branch of the mimosa until I felt my feet touch the weedy ground, but rather than drop back into the lot, I pushed off again with my toes. The limber branch tossed me into the air like a trampoline. I bounced high and, when the branch nodded back toward the earth, bent my knees and shoved off again. I let out a whoop, wanting just to keep bouncing — a human yo-yo — between North Main Street and the shell-pink firmament, but the bough snapped and I came crashing to the ground amid a furor of exploding dandelions. Rattled but unhurt, I rolled over to find that I’d landed on the open pages of Muni’s book, which I credited if irrationally with having broken my fall.
I located a phone booth and dialed the office of Bernie “the Mouthpiece” Rappaport, who made it clear he had no time for anyone associated with Lamar Fontaine, whose flight from justice had left his attorney holding the bag. He explained the situation in brisk officialese, using jargon like “angary” and “writ of replevin” until I begged him to please speak in plain English. Then he told me that the former owners of Lamar’s properties, which the scofflaw had failed to develop since their purchase, had invoked a legal loophole supporting their reclamation of the deeds. The tenants of said properties — of whom, to my knowledge, I was the only one — were to be promptly turned out.
Back at her apartment I fretted over my eviction to Rachel, who asked me, “Where will you go?” Which left me to understand that, assurances of abiding affection aside, she wasn’t renewing the invitation to stay longer with her.
When later that same day I pounded on the door of the Book Asylum, mysteriously locked during business hours, nobody answered. I stood on the sidewalk with nothing but my bintl of belongings and the increasingly dog-eared copy of The Pinch, feeling that all doors had been bolted against me.
“Where’s Avrom?” I asked Mr. Zanone in his flyblown nut shop next to the Asylum. (The irony of their juxtaposition was not lost on me.) He was an old codger, Zanone, whose stubble-dusted dewlaps trembled like udders when he spoke; his red-rimmed eyes blinked every time the mechanized Mr. Peanut tapped his cane against the window, where a silver dollar protected the glass from the cane’s nickel tip. He told me that, after being discovered barely breathing on the floor of his shop by a passing pedestrian (a demonstrator who fanned him with his I AM A MAN placard till the ambulance arrived), Avrom had been taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital.
I found him on a harshly lighted ward whose odor of mortification was only slightly mitigated by the tang of cleaning solvents. The rows of beds containing patients in varying stages of decrepitude were separated by folding privacy screens. Loomed over by a metal pole like the tree in Godot hung with transparent fruit, Avrom lay flat on his back in the adjustable bed. He was connected by tubes, hoses, and what looked like electrodes to a console of winking and ticking machinery. At first sight of him I was put in mind of the victim of some ghastly experiment — as if the machines, rather than sustaining him, had sucked the essence out of him and left in his stead the husk of a sick old man. But such a notion was gilding the lily in the case of Avrom, upon whom the worst had already been perpetrated. On the trolley table beside a beaker of water and a bowl of untouched pablum lay his thick glasses, which left his open eyes looking as vulnerable as poached eggs. I approached his bedside reluctantly, a little ashamed of my aversion to being in such close quarters with the ebbing geezer. His glaucous eyes, registering a visitor, rolled slightly in my direction, and in a voice just above a hoarse whisper he declared, “I ain’t contagious.”
Feeling guilty for having failed among other things to bring a gift, I asked him, “Avrom, what can I do for you?”
“Don’t do for me no favors,” he groused, and let loose a whistling exhalation.
“I thought I should ask …”
A turquoise-veined hand worked its way from beneath the sheet to clutch my wrist, which made me recoil as from a tentacle. “Awright,” he said, “you can mind in my absence the shop.” He made a gruesome sound in his throat that may have been intended for a chuckle. “I think will be permanent, my absence.”
This last was pure melodrama, no doubt meant to reinforce my guilt. “You’ll be up and around again in no time,” I said, because wasn’t that what you were supposed to say?
His fluid-filled lungs gurgled like water down a plughole, giving the lie to my blandishment. “And don’t sell cheap the incunabula,” he managed.
“Incunabula?” There were no incunabula.
I cautioned myself not to be fooled. Death was for Avrom an anticlimax; it was a sham even if it was real. If he expected me to honor his words with the weight of some final request, he was sorely mistaken. It was the age of Sgt. Pepper and Benny Profane; my fellow freaks were milling peyote buttons in supermarket coffee grinders, cultivating their hysteria with pleasure and terror, and I too had other fish to fry. To quell the disquiet in the pit of my stomach, I announced that, with all due respect, I would prefer not to return to the bookstore.
He relaxed his grip on my arm but gave no indication that my answer had discouraged him. “It’s bashert,” he muttered, actually showing the teeth I was relieved to see were still in his head, “your destiny.”
I inclined my chin at the word. “Since when have I got a destiny?” I wanted to know.
A rattling cough, then: “It is written.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard.”
“Where is it written?”
He was having such difficulty speaking now that I thought I should leave him alone; there was no point in pretending that I didn’t know what he meant, but I still needed him to give me the news in no uncertain terms.
“In the book”—he coughed again raggedly—“that you took it already hnh from mayn gesheft.”
I could have said I’d taken any number of volumes from his business, but I was ready to stop playing dumb. “I thought you didn’t read it.”
“So hnh I lied.”
“Lied that you didn’t read it or lied that ‘it is written’?”
“What’s the difference?” he burbled. “What you got hnh hnh better to do?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d accused me of purposelessness, but he should understand that things had changed: I had plans, or at least plans to make plans; I had a girl and was in no mood to accept a life sentence of dismal seclusion in a cave of outré books. Did he think that, because he’d been where he’d been and was going where he was going, his words had some special gravitas? His flesh was yellow cheesecloth, his breathing the sound of oil in a skillet, and I wished a nurse would come forward to insist I leave the patient alone to get his rest. I fiddled with a control that raised the angle of the bed in the hope it might take some pressure off his lungs, and tilted a glass of water to his parched lips.