Firmin (15 page)
Authors: Sam Savage
Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General
We stayed in that spot most of the day, right through rush hour, and I got to watch the light changing in the trees, and a few people did buy books, while some others just stopped to talk. Most of the talkers were people like Jerry, with obviously no money for books. They chatted, gossiped about acquaintances they had in common, and joked about being broke. They called each other ‘man.’ They were all very interested in me, and twice someone asked Jerry if I was tame, and he answered the same both times, ‘No, man, he’s not tame - he’s
civilized
.’ And then one of them - Gregory was his name - turned to me as he was leaving and said in a very casual and offhand way, ‘So long, man.’ That really killed me.
civilized
.’ And then one of them - Gregory was his name - turned to me as he was leaving and said in a very casual and offhand way, ‘So long, man.’ That really killed me.
Though almost no one ever knocked on Jerry’s door, he knew a lot of friendly people, and they greeted him in passing - ‘How’s it going, Jerry?’ ‘Hangin’ in there, Jerry?’ - even the cops. If you are lonely, I think it helps to be a little crazy as long as you don’t overdo it. That’s my policy anyway. And in the end, Jerry did make a few sales of
The Nesting
. I think people were attracted by the colorful picture of the giant rat. Whenever somebody bought a copy Jerry autographed it for him and threw in a copy of the other book and his business card as bonuses. The business card said:
The Nesting
. I think people were attracted by the colorful picture of the giant rat. Whenever somebody bought a copy Jerry autographed it for him and threw in a copy of the other book and his business card as bonuses. The business card said:
E. J. MAGOON
‘The smartest man in the world’
Artist Extraordinaire & Extraterrestrial
And that was how he signed his books too. Artist Extraordinaire & Extraterrestrial. People seemed to get a kick out of that. Not everybody, of course, not the real bourgies. Some of them, the ones with the briefcases and suits, just looked at Jerry and smirked. You could see them talking to each other and laughing. They had nice teeth. But whenever their gaze happened to meet mine, I handed them a cold steely stare of such utter contempt that they couldn’t stand it. Wiped the smirks right off their smooth faces.
Now and then people stopped to argue with Jerry and try to make him look stupid. They couldn’t stand the idea that this old rumpled guy with the wagon was the smartest man in the world. So they would say, ‘If you are the smartest man in the world, how come you’re selling books out of a wagon?’ and other bourgeois idiocies of that sort. Jerry never got mad, though. He very patiently explained to them how in fact he was rich because he was free, because he was not a wage slave and did not bust his ass eight hours a day at some meaningless job. He never raised his voice, he listened to them when they spoke, and sometimes after a while they started having real conversations about serious matters, and you could tell that they had started to like him. Some of them even started telling him how unhappy they were, about their stupid jobs and miserable marriages, and more often than not they ended up buying a book. I guess they hoped it would cheer them up when they got home.
Jerry’s other novel did not have a colorful cover. It was really just a stack of loose pages that he had printed himself in a little job shop in the Square. He had turned the loose pages into a book by sandwiching them between two sheets of brown cardboard, punching holes through the stack, and sewing the whole mess together with white grocery string. It struck me as a pretty shitty-looking affair. But of course I would feel that way, given my background. Using a blue crayon he had written the title by hand on each book in big block letters: THE RESCUE PROJECT.
The story begins on the planet Earth about a hundred years after a vast thermonuclear war between the ‘last empires,’ the USA and the USSR, has utterly destroyed civilization. Besides pretty much destroying every city and even the small towns, the war had instilled in the surviving rural populations a visceral aversion to all forms of technology, which they saw as somehow responsible for the calamities that had befallen them. There were no more real governments as we know them, only roving bands of warlords and small loose-knit communities of peasant farmers. These farmers tilled the soil with simple wooden plows and mules, and when they plowed at night the radioactive soil glowed in the plow’s wake like phosphorus. All over Earth people suffered from unimaginable diseases, including a great many that had not existed before the holocaust, and many of these affected the skin so that most of the people were covered with painful boils. Because of the radiation permeating every inch of the planet, half the children were born damaged - crippled, blind, or imbecilic. The old religions and ideologies, which had played such prominent roles in fomenting the final war, the memory of which was wedged as a recurrent nightmare in the collective unconscious, had been utterly discredited. But considering how ignorant and brain damaged everyone was, new religions sprang up like daisies. Most did not spread far or last long, however, until the birth of the Castaways.
This new sect was founded by a particularly bloody-minded warlord named John Hunter. He had been raping and pillaging in a small village one day when he was knocked from his horse by a tree limb. Though apparently unhurt, soon afterward he began receiving messages from outer space, and from these he learned that human beings were not originally from Earth at all and had not evolved along with the other species but had arrived as castaways from the wreck of a spaceship. The teachings of this new religion were in perfect harmony with the feeling everyone at that time had of not belonging on the planet. It was hardly the sort of planet anyone would want to belong on. John Hunter told the people that what they needed to do was be rescued, and to do that they needed some way to signal passing spaceships. Of course they had only the simplest technology, no radio or anything like that, so signaling spaceships presented a problem. But John Hunter had the answer. He told them they had to build a pyramid so big it would be visible from space. He spent two years laying it all out with stakes, attracting more and more followers as he went. The base of the pyramid, as it was finally staked out, entirely covered the ancient states of Nebraska and Kansas and much of Missouri, Iowa, and South Dakota.
Wild with fervor, the masses of people set to work, quarrying and transporting stone. Millions were soon deliriously at labor. In time, engineering skills increased, bureaucracies sprang up. To feed the millions of workers agriculture expanded and intensified. The iron plow, the disk, and the harrow were introduced, and even crude threshing machines. An enormous palace and temple complex was built at each corner of the pyramid for John Hunter and his priests. When John Hunter finally died, he was succeeded by his brilliant and ruthless son Kevin Hunter, and he in turn by the weak and dissipated Wilson Hunter, and so forth until the last leader, the utterly mad Bob Hunter. By that time the labor had gone on for 110 years, and the expense of building the giant pyramid had used up most of the planet’s meager resources, while the population was increasingly ravaged by mutation and disease. The last human remnant finally perished in a snowstorm while trying to haul an enormous block of granite from Michigan. Centuries later a space-traveling species actually did land on Earth. They were amazed at the vast unfinished pyramid, and they built a large research center on Earth just to study it, but they never were able to figure out what its purpose was.
I didn’t like this story quite as much as
The Nesting
, maybe because there were no rats in it. I liked the generational saga, though, and the way the Hunters, their brains corrupted by power and radiation, got weaker and crazier as time went on. I liked the message. Jerry says people won’t publish his books because they are afraid of the message. But I guess that is pretty much my view of life anyway, every day a little weaker and crazier.
The Nesting
, maybe because there were no rats in it. I liked the generational saga, though, and the way the Hunters, their brains corrupted by power and radiation, got weaker and crazier as time went on. I liked the message. Jerry says people won’t publish his books because they are afraid of the message. But I guess that is pretty much my view of life anyway, every day a little weaker and crazier.
Chapter 12
J
erry and I had a lot of good times together. I especially loved our breakfasts, the saucer of strong coffee with milk, and reading the paper together. One day at breakfast we read a long article in the
Globe
about Adolf Eichmann. It showed pictures of trainloads of starving people reaching their skinny arms out through the slats of cattle cars, and piles of emaciated corpses - they had rat faces - and Jerry said it made him ashamed to be human. This was a new idea to me.
erry and I had a lot of good times together. I especially loved our breakfasts, the saucer of strong coffee with milk, and reading the paper together. One day at breakfast we read a long article in the
Globe
about Adolf Eichmann. It showed pictures of trainloads of starving people reaching their skinny arms out through the slats of cattle cars, and piles of emaciated corpses - they had rat faces - and Jerry said it made him ashamed to be human. This was a new idea to me.
I came to really enjoy coffee, and wine too, though never wine in the morning, and not usually in the afternoon either unless it was raining. When suppertime rolled around, Jerry usually fixed things out of cans. Our favorite was Dinty Moore beef stew. Sometimes he cooked some rice to go with it, and at other times, when we were short on cash, rice and soy sauce might be the whole meal. Jerry’s mustache was really very bushy and it attracted bits of rice like a magnet when he ate - they seemed to just fly into it. Later on, when I felt secure in our relationship, I used to ferret the bits out with my paws and eat them. That always made him laugh. When he laughed it was easy to imagine that he was the happiest man in the world and not just the smartest.
He did not always go out at night, and sometimes - more and more frequently as the weeks rolled by and the weather turned cold - we spent the evenings sprawled in the old leather armchair together listening to records, lots of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday. He had a real hi-fi with speakers on both sides, and we drank the red wine that he brought home in jugs from Dawson’s Beer and Ale on Cambridge Street. I did not have my own glass, so I sipped from his. I usually sat on the chair arm, and sometimes I got so drunk I fell off and landed in his lap. He laughed, and even though I was not able to laugh I felt good and it was the same as laughing. I had always liked jazz, because of Fred Astaire, and now I grew fond of modern stuff too. We played an L.P. called
No Sun in Venice
over and over, it was so cool and sad, with Milt Jackson on vibes. The vibraphone sounded to me like a lonely rat walking down an empty street in a city made of glass, his paws chiming on the pavement, a clear, high lonely sound that echoed off the buildings.
No Sun in Venice
over and over, it was so cool and sad, with Milt Jackson on vibes. The vibraphone sounded to me like a lonely rat walking down an empty street in a city made of glass, his paws chiming on the pavement, a clear, high lonely sound that echoed off the buildings.
Sometimes late at night, lying in my box in the dark, on the towel from the Roosevelt Hotel (invisible now beneath the cotton I had pulled out of Stanley), I could still hear the music in my head. I would let it play. I would open my eyes in the dark and think about the Lovelies. I would rub my thoughts against the velvet of their skin, root in the shadowy warmth of their crevices. The longing was so intense - it was a long, hot line running the length of my body. I was never able to fathom how Jerry could bear it, trudging alone through a womanless world, mumbling to himself, big head wagging. Had I been human I would have descended to the streets, accosted the first attractive young one I met, my black eyes glittering above a chinless smile, and I would have beguiled, bought, or ravished. But Jerry just shuffled along in arctic solitude, so lonely he would talk to a rat.
Still, during those good times, at breakfast with the paper or listening to music in the big chair at night, I sometimes experienced a new kind of happiness. It was not like the brilliant gaiety of the old days in the bookstore. It was softer and warmer and almost brown.
Sometimes we let ourselves get carried away and played Bird as loud as it would go, with Jerry doing the drums on the chair arms and me pounding the piano and the whole joint, as they say, jumping. We were so loud that twice the man who lived in the next room - his name was Cyril and he had hair growing out of his nose and sometimes at night we could hear him sobbing - came and beat on the door with the flat of his fat hand and shouted at us to turn it down. And those two times, plus the visit from the fire marshal, were the three times we ever got knocks on our door.
Jerry taught me a lot about jazz, about improvisation and playing the changes and things like that, and later on I worked these into my own music. Sometimes I played while Jerry talked. I wore a white shirt with blue stripes and a garter on my sleeve just like the one Hoagy Carmichael has on in
To Have and Have Not
, and I carried on a kind of soft musical doodle in the background the way he does in the movie, while Jerry sipped his wine and reminisced about his childhood, which was now very far away in Wilson, North Carolina, and about the time he was in the army. He had joined up right at the beginning of the war, the Second World War. When they found out he was a farm boy they assigned him to the Remount Corps and shipped him off to train mules in Texas, where one day a huge gray one named Peter kicked him in the head. The blow knocked his left eye off to one side, where it stayed. Besides recurrent headaches and double vision, Peter’s kick brought with it a little check in the mail every month. ‘So you see, Ernie, that fucking mule did me a real favor.’ One of the great things about Jerry was the way he could always see the big picture.
To Have and Have Not
, and I carried on a kind of soft musical doodle in the background the way he does in the movie, while Jerry sipped his wine and reminisced about his childhood, which was now very far away in Wilson, North Carolina, and about the time he was in the army. He had joined up right at the beginning of the war, the Second World War. When they found out he was a farm boy they assigned him to the Remount Corps and shipped him off to train mules in Texas, where one day a huge gray one named Peter kicked him in the head. The blow knocked his left eye off to one side, where it stayed. Besides recurrent headaches and double vision, Peter’s kick brought with it a little check in the mail every month. ‘So you see, Ernie, that fucking mule did me a real favor.’ One of the great things about Jerry was the way he could always see the big picture.
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