Firmin (18 page)
Authors: Sam Savage
Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General
I began to spend most of every day on my back, all four feet in the air, dreaming and remembering, or else playing the piano, remembering and dreaming. I could see that my dreams were changing. They were getting soft and nostalgic, with a kind of crepuscular flare around the edges, and I didn’t have many exciting adventures anymore. I missed the past terribly, even the awful parts. I never forget anything that has happened to me and scarcely anything that I have read, so by that time I had stored up an awful lot of memories. My brain was like a gigantic warehouse - you could get lost in it, lose track of time, peeking into boxes and cases, wandering knee-deep in dust, and not find your way out for days. Sometime shortly after I moved in with Jerry I had begun to play with the past, tweaking it this way and that to make it more like a real story, and I had begun mixing my memories with my dreams. This was probably a mistake, since the more I played with them the more they came to resemble each other, and it was harder and harder for me to tell the things I remembered from the things I had invented. I was now, for example, unsure which of the figures was really Mama, the fat greedy one or the thin, worn sweet one, and whether her name was Flo or Deedee or Gwendolyn. All the archives existed only in my mind. I had no external check, no diary, no old family friend. How could I verify? All I could do was compare one mental image with another image, equally suspect, and in the end they all got tangled together. My mind was a labyrinth, enticing or terrifying according to my mood. I was losing my footing, and the odd thing was that I didn’t care.
Things were ending fast. The ship was sinking, and a week after Shine started tossing books overboard, the Old Howard burned. This was a theater that a long time ago had been famous all across America. I used to trudge by its abandoned hulk on my way to the Rialto. Facade of gray stone, enormous gothic windows, it looked like a church except for the huge sign jutting halfway across the street with THE OLD HOWARD spelled out in lightbulbs. I always hoped they would turn the lights on, but they never did. And it looked like a church for a reason - it had been built as one by the Millerites, a religious sect whose zealots believed that the world was coming to an end. They were right about that, of course. But using the Bible and a lot of suspect math, they had calculated that this would occur on October 22, 1844. In preparation for that event, thousands of true believers sold everything they owned, and then they built a huge fortress of a church in order to have a safe place to be in while it was happening. I loved reading about those people. They were just like me, carrying around with them all the time this huge sense of calamity. When the sun rose on October 23, same as before, they were naturally very disappointed. They sold the church, and I don’t know what happened to them then. I guess life must have seemed pretty boring after that. The church became a theater - Edwin Booth played there - a vaudeville house, and finally a strip joint. In 1952, which was still long before my time, the city closed it down for good. They said the shows were lewd and immoral. They objected especially to Sally Keith, who wore tassels on her tits and buttocks that she could spin like airplane propellers in opposite directions. I wish I could have seen that. Afterward, the Howard was just a rat house. Half the rats in the Square lived there.
And now at last the world really was ending, and the Howard was going with it. I was in the Balloon when it burned. Everybody in all the stores rushed out to see the fire. Even Shine went out, just jumped up and left, locking the door behind him. It was the middle of the day and he didn’t even put up a ‘back soon’ sign. If I hadn’t known it already, that alone would have told me he was through with the book business. We both were. The sirens wailed off and on the whole afternoon, and when I went by that night only the outer walls were still standing, a smoking ruin, and the street was full of ashy mud. A few people were walking up and down in the mud holding signs that said SAVE THE OLD HOWARD and PRESERVE OUR HERITAGE. It had never looked to me like anything particularly worth saving, and I had never cared for the low-life rats who lived there. Good riddance, I thought. At dawn the ruin was still smoking, when they brought in the huge crane. It had an enormous iron ball on the end of a steel cable, and when the crane moved its arm back and forth the ball began to swing, and it swung higher and higher until, with the ball high on the backswing, the crane suddenly surged forward, and the ball swung forward and down and up and crashed against the side of the Old Howard. The walls must have been really strong, because they couldn’t knock them down with the crane. And that was when they sent in the sappers, who put dynamite under the walls and set it off. They did this three times, and each time another wall came crashing down, and a billowing wave of ash and dust rolled down the street for blocks and made the dirty buildings a little bit dirtier.
The next morning General Logue gave the signal, and the acres of heavy machinery began the final assault on the Square, chewing at its edges, eating it up a building at a time. They used cranes with wrecking balls and enormous armored bulldozers whose drivers wore helmets and goggles and rode in steel cages. Each time a building would come crashing down the workers would cheer, and then they loaded the broken pieces into gigantic dump trucks that carted them away. It went on like that for weeks. The streets were full of smoke and dust and the roaring of machines, and now and then an enormous
whump
rattled the store windows, and that was the dynamite.
whump
rattled the store windows, and that was the dynamite.
For rats, peace is a lot like war anyway, so most of them went on with their lives as best they could. The average rat doesn’t see much difference between a standing building and a pile of rubble, except that rubble is a better place to hide in. When a building came down, the rats retreated to the ruins of the basements, into broken drains and cracks in the rubble. The
Globe
ran a story about the rats in the ruins, and then Logue sent in white-suited teams to finish them off with poison gas that they pumped into the rubble through hoses. That was when the exodus began in earnest. Every night I passed long lines of them heading out, sometimes whole families together. The
Globe
story had been headlined DEMOLITION UNCOVERS RAT NATION. It called the whole neighborhood ‘sleazy and rat infested.’
Globe
ran a story about the rats in the ruins, and then Logue sent in white-suited teams to finish them off with poison gas that they pumped into the rubble through hoses. That was when the exodus began in earnest. Every night I passed long lines of them heading out, sometimes whole families together. The
Globe
story had been headlined DEMOLITION UNCOVERS RAT NATION. It called the whole neighborhood ‘sleazy and rat infested.’
Infested
is an interesting word. Regular people don’t infest, couldn’t infest if they tried. Nobody infests except fleas, rats, and Jews. When you infest, you are just asking for it. One day I was talking to a man in a bar, when he asked me what I did for a living. I answered, ‘I infest.’ I thought that was a pretty ironic thing to say, but the man didn’t get it. He thought I had said ‘I invest’ and started asking me for tips on where he should put his money. So I suggested he invest in construction. The shithead.
is an interesting word. Regular people don’t infest, couldn’t infest if they tried. Nobody infests except fleas, rats, and Jews. When you infest, you are just asking for it. One day I was talking to a man in a bar, when he asked me what I did for a living. I answered, ‘I infest.’ I thought that was a pretty ironic thing to say, but the man didn’t get it. He thought I had said ‘I invest’ and started asking me for tips on where he should put his money. So I suggested he invest in construction. The shithead.
And then the Rialto closed. I went one night and it was dark. No more Lovelies and no more popcorn. Now I had to scrounge in the streets and ruins like the others, and I started seeing dead rats, sometimes in the middle of the sidewalk. Food was getting scarce, mostly just the leftovers from the workers’ lunches, and that was when the horrors began. Some of the starving rats were eating the corpses of their fellows like jackals. I felt ashamed for them, and at the same time I was ashamed at feeling ashamed. Even in the best of times I had not been strong or quick. I limped now, and I was not young anymore. I was hungry all the time. When would I eat corpses? Or would I be crippled by all-too-human scruples, a monster to the last? At night the gutters were full of rats on the run. I thought I glimpsed a couple of my brothers, but I was not sure. It had been a long time, and rats look a lot alike. I sometimes passed in my wanderings whole standing buildings with their facades torn off, all the rooms standing open to the air, some with the furniture still in them and wallpaper on the walls and bathrooms complete with a sink and toilet. They looked like enormous dollhouses.
One morning Shine arrived at the store accompanied by two men in overalls. The men took the desk and chair and all the bookcases that weren’t attached to the walls, and they loaded them into a big truck called Mayflower and left. After they had driven away, Shine walked around the shop a while. He did not cry this time. There were still a few books scattered about on the floor and he walked around kicking them. Then he went out and locked the door. I watched him drop the key into his jacket pocket and turn down the street. I never saw him again.
Chapter 15
A
t that point I still had every intention of following Shine’s example, and that of hundreds of my kind. Any minute, I thought, I’m going to beat it out of here. I thought that maybe I would try and find another bookstore somewhere, perhaps across the river in Cambridge, or maybe go to the Common and hook up with one of Jerry’s old pals. And yet something I could not explain even to myself, a lethargy or maybe a torpor, kept me from making the move, and every day I put off going. I was still able to scrounge enough food to get by, though never enough to satisfy. The destruction had now reached Brattle Street, and it was clear that in not many days it was going to break over Cornhill. I felt weary and old. A rat’s life is short and painful, painful but quickly over, and yet it feels long while it lasts. For days, when I was not hunting up less and less food in the streets, I wandered around the empty store. There wasn’t much left to read, just a few boring religious pamphlets. I read them anyway.
t that point I still had every intention of following Shine’s example, and that of hundreds of my kind. Any minute, I thought, I’m going to beat it out of here. I thought that maybe I would try and find another bookstore somewhere, perhaps across the river in Cambridge, or maybe go to the Common and hook up with one of Jerry’s old pals. And yet something I could not explain even to myself, a lethargy or maybe a torpor, kept me from making the move, and every day I put off going. I was still able to scrounge enough food to get by, though never enough to satisfy. The destruction had now reached Brattle Street, and it was clear that in not many days it was going to break over Cornhill. I felt weary and old. A rat’s life is short and painful, painful but quickly over, and yet it feels long while it lasts. For days, when I was not hunting up less and less food in the streets, I wandered around the empty store. There wasn’t much left to read, just a few boring religious pamphlets. I read them anyway.
Two mornings ago the rain was coming down hard, washing dust and debris off the piles of rubble and forming muddy rivers in the street. On the floor of Pembroke Books, crossed by the shadows of raindrops, were scattered the remains of several suppers that I had dragged in from the street, morsels and crumbs of food mixed with the orts and offal of the rat life - a greasy wrapper, a greasy strand of bacon rind, peanut shells, pizza crust. The men had stopped working because of the rain, and the roar of the machines had stopped, and now just the rain was roaring. I felt agitated and depressed and spent the morning dragging back and forth in the store, back and forth. The rain did not let up; at noon the day was already growing dark, and I decided to go upstairs and play. It was hard going up the Elevator, and in the silence my breath was loud.
The light was different in the room. I noticed that as soon as I poked my nose up out of the hole. It was not raining, and sunlight was streaming through the open window. The furniture was all back, the bed and the enamel-topped table, the old leather chair, the bookshelves, and all the books. The closet door was ajar, and I saw that it was full of junk again. The rusty trash can was still there and my piano with its chips and scratches. Jerry, I thought, Jerry is coming home. I formulated RESURRECTION and let it glow there. I sat down at the piano and doodled around a little, just to loosen the old fingers, waiting for the footsteps on the stairs; then I went into Cole Porter, ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ and ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’ In the end, I would rather be Cole Porter than God. I moved on to Gershwin and ‘I Got Rhythm,’ and soon I was really getting into it, the piano was jumping and I was bouncing around on the bench and singing at the top of my voice. But even lost in the music as I was, with pictures floating in and out between my ears so fast it made me dizzy, I was aware that someone had entered the room very quietly and was now sitting on the bed behind me. I could feel the listening. I thought, Jerry. I kept right on singing, and while I sang I slowly turned my head and looked.
I had never seen her in color before, and I did not recognize her at first. She was sitting on the bed, hands folded in her lap, rings on her fingers. She had on the black dress she wore in
Swingtime
. I had loved the way she looked then and the way the swirling dress would float up to her hips when she danced. It was the dress that clued me in to who she was. She had changed that much. Only her voice had not changed. ‘Gee, that’s swell,’ she said, ‘please don’t stop.’ So I kept going. I went through the whole piece again, this time with my own variations, and then I stood up and bowed. I signed good-bye zipper, and I could see that she understood. She laughed, and it was not like your laughter. She was still beautiful, even though I could see that something heavy, time or sadness, had pooled in vague loops below her chin and crinkled the corners of her eyes. They were blue.
Swingtime
. I had loved the way she looked then and the way the swirling dress would float up to her hips when she danced. It was the dress that clued me in to who she was. She had changed that much. Only her voice had not changed. ‘Gee, that’s swell,’ she said, ‘please don’t stop.’ So I kept going. I went through the whole piece again, this time with my own variations, and then I stood up and bowed. I signed good-bye zipper, and I could see that she understood. She laughed, and it was not like your laughter. She was still beautiful, even though I could see that something heavy, time or sadness, had pooled in vague loops below her chin and crinkled the corners of her eyes. They were blue.
I went to the window. It was dark outside. She came over and stood behind me. I could feel her looking. I could feel the black dress like a cloud behind me. I was aware of being tall.
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