Firmin (17 page)
Authors: Sam Savage
Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General
So I went back to the bookstore and with great difficulty - I was bruised all over - climbed up into the Balloon and just waited. Shortly after dawn I heard shouts in the street and then the siren. It came, and in a little while it went away, frightened and wailing, to die somewhere in the city west of the Square.
When Shine opened up at nine, they all rushed in, and the heads bobbed and nodded around the desk like apples in a drum of rough water. They talked of the accident a while - they all ran their mouths at once, and the only evident fact to float up from the babble was that Jerry Magoon had fallen down the stairs and been taken unconscious to Mass General - and then they went on to other things, to Alvin’s mother’s broken hip and the Red Sox.
I went back upstairs to the room. It was already as if he had been gone for years. I couldn’t get the top off Skippy. There was a full loaf of Sunshine bread on the table and I gnawed through the plastic and ate some of that. I sat all night in the big chair. To keep my mind off Jerry, I went to Paris to look for the house where Joyce had once lived, but the street signs had melted and I couldn’t find it.
I was in the Balloon for opening time the next day. The heads filed in and bobbed. Shine had already been to the hospital to ask after Jerry. They had told him he was unhurt by the fall but had suffered a stroke, was unconscious and being fed through a tube, and they did not expect him to recover. He might die tomorrow, he might die in a year.
‘Well,’ George said, ‘at least he’s going to be asleep when he goes. I hope to fuck I die in my sleep, right in the middle of a nice dream.’ He was going on to tell about a dream he had had, when Alvin interrupted.
‘Yeah, and what if it’s in the middle of a fucking nightmare?’
‘Well, at least that’ll be the end of the nightmare,’ Shine said, and he gave a funny little laugh.
‘No shit,’ Alvin said.
I didn’t want to listen to any more sad jokes about death, so I took the Elevator back up and ate another half slice of Sunshine and climbed into the big chair and dreamed Jerry back to life.
I was sure he was never coming home, so I guessed it was O.K. now to root around in his things. When someone is dead, or as good as dead, it’s not snooping, it’s research. I wanted so much to find the story of the rat. Ever since I had heard him tell Norman about it, I had been sure that somehow that story would have an answer for me. An answer to what? Well, I know it sounds really stupid to say it, but I guess I was still looking for the meaning of my ridiculous life, and I thought that maybe Jerry had found it, or at least was on the trail of it, and that this was the reason he was writing a book about a rat. So a couple of days after he left I climbed up on the table and opened the notebook called ‘The Last Big Deal’ - he had been writing in it the whole time we were together - and from there I leapt to the bookcase and one by one pulled the other notebooks from the shelf. Each had a title and a date framed in the white rectangle on its cover - they went all the way back to 1952 - ’The Phoenix Dove,’ ‘The Continuum Project,’ ‘Dog Star Rising’ - twenty-two in total, and all the same: ideas for possible novels, plots partially developed, a character half-sketched, page upon page of notes on background, and now and then a first paragraph or two, worked and reworked, an entire page rewritten to incorporate the change of a single word. A lot of the projected novels seemed to end with the destruction of the planet. I read all day for a week. I had to stop at night, since I could not reach the light switch on the wall. The notebooks were full of wonderful ideas, and during the long dark nights I made some of them come true in my dreams. But there was no story of a rat. The word
rat
did not appear, not even once.
rat
did not appear, not even once.
I hung around, eating Sunshine and playing the piano. I played, and I thought of Mama, who had disappeared, and Norman, who had failed to exist, and always Jerry, who had ceased to exist, and of course myself, who was not sure he wanted to exist. I realized that I had not really known what lonely was before.
Two weeks later Jerry’s parents arrived - I had just enough time to dive under the sink before the door opened. It had never occurred to me that an old guy like Jerry could have parents. They were incredibly old, both of them white-haired and bent and ancient, with wrinkled gray skin like gnomes. They had kind faces, especially his mother, who must have been a tall woman once but was now bent way over. They looked like they had come out of a fairy story, and I let the mother come into my thoughts as the Old Woman. They had a dark-haired man with them, who was younger but not truly young, and who I guessed was Jerry’s brother, since he had a big head too, and I called him the Youngest Son. The father was very dignified-looking, in a dark suit and tie, and had a broad thin-lipped mouth that did not open often or wide, and whenever it did open to let a few words escape, it quickly clapped shut again like a trap, chopping off the final syllables of each sentence like the tail of a fleeing animal. I named him the King. I watched from the sink while they packed everything up, putting the things that were not in boxes into boxes and taking the things that were in boxes out and looking at them and then putting them back in again. It took them all day. They were not reverential about Jerry’s notebooks. They just flipped through a few pages and tossed them in a box.
The only thing that seemed to interest them was a shoe-box full of letters. They all three sat on the bed, the mother sitting between the two men, the box on her lap, and she took the letters one by one from their envelopes and read them aloud, while the other two nodded in recognition. It took me a while to catch on that she was reading back their own words, that these were
their
letters to Jerry - chatty and diffuse, filled with local gossip (who had gotten married or died and whose daughter had run off and whose son had wrecked the brand-new Oldsmobile), littered with redundant little questions (‘And who do you think got married last week?’), and pocked with exclamation points, which the mother read out as if they were words (‘And Sissy’s husband Carl was stopped for speeding and guess who was in the car, it was Ellen Brunson exclamation mark exclamation mark’). And pretty soon all three of them were crying, even the King, his wide mouth turning down. It made him look like a sad clown. And the mother kept reading even while she cried, which made things even worse. Nothing of Jerry’s had made them cry, not even his poor ragged underwear and certainly not his pathetic half-empty notebooks. I guess what they were really crying over was themselves and their own lost past. I can’t imagine my own family crying over anything. In some ways humans are not very lucky. Peeking out from under the sink at the three of them sitting there on the bed weeping, the mother and the father and the son, I renamed them the Holy Family.
their
letters to Jerry - chatty and diffuse, filled with local gossip (who had gotten married or died and whose daughter had run off and whose son had wrecked the brand-new Oldsmobile), littered with redundant little questions (‘And who do you think got married last week?’), and pocked with exclamation points, which the mother read out as if they were words (‘And Sissy’s husband Carl was stopped for speeding and guess who was in the car, it was Ellen Brunson exclamation mark exclamation mark’). And pretty soon all three of them were crying, even the King, his wide mouth turning down. It made him look like a sad clown. And the mother kept reading even while she cried, which made things even worse. Nothing of Jerry’s had made them cry, not even his poor ragged underwear and certainly not his pathetic half-empty notebooks. I guess what they were really crying over was themselves and their own lost past. I can’t imagine my own family crying over anything. In some ways humans are not very lucky. Peeking out from under the sink at the three of them sitting there on the bed weeping, the mother and the father and the son, I renamed them the Holy Family.
Late that afternoon two men came and took everything away - the books, notebooks, the furniture, even the pots and pans, everything but the garbage can and the piano. I guess they figured nobody could want a rusty garbage can or a kid’s broken piano. I didn’t care about the can, since I had nothing to throw away, but I was happy about the piano.
Chapter 14
T
ired of eating Sunshine, I went back to foraging at the Rialto. They were still showing the same movies, but now there were fewer spectators, if that’s what you call them, and less to eat on the floor. I did not have much of an appetite in any case, not for popcorn or Snickers or anything, really. And I did not spend a lot of time in the bookstore anymore. It depressed me and Shine disgusted me. I just dragged around aimlessly, heavy with grief. It was not the kind of grief where you wail and pull your hair. It was more like an encompassing boredom. I was heavy with boredom. Life bored me, literature bored me, even death bored me. Only my little piano did not bore me, and as the weeks dragged by and the book business grew slower and sadder, I spent more time plunking the ivories and singing to myself. Sometimes I forgot to eat, or I didn’t forget but it was too much trouble to take the Elevator all the way down and roam the smoke-filled streets to reach the Rialto. I could run my paws down my sides and feel the ribs sticking up like the black keys of a piano. Fewer and fewer customers came to Pembroke Books; even the literary porn business was falling off. And Shine had finally stopped buying - no more estate sales, no more scraping of station-wagon bumpers on the sidewalk. And the ornate antique cash register vanished, sold to a dealer in Back Bay. Now he made change from a gray metal box. And every day there were fewer books on the shelves, lots of empty spaces. No more Dostoyevsky under D, no more Balzac under B. One after another, the Big Ones were catching the last train out. Shine still kept up a brave face, but I remembered the old days and could tell that he was just going through the motions.
ired of eating Sunshine, I went back to foraging at the Rialto. They were still showing the same movies, but now there were fewer spectators, if that’s what you call them, and less to eat on the floor. I did not have much of an appetite in any case, not for popcorn or Snickers or anything, really. And I did not spend a lot of time in the bookstore anymore. It depressed me and Shine disgusted me. I just dragged around aimlessly, heavy with grief. It was not the kind of grief where you wail and pull your hair. It was more like an encompassing boredom. I was heavy with boredom. Life bored me, literature bored me, even death bored me. Only my little piano did not bore me, and as the weeks dragged by and the book business grew slower and sadder, I spent more time plunking the ivories and singing to myself. Sometimes I forgot to eat, or I didn’t forget but it was too much trouble to take the Elevator all the way down and roam the smoke-filled streets to reach the Rialto. I could run my paws down my sides and feel the ribs sticking up like the black keys of a piano. Fewer and fewer customers came to Pembroke Books; even the literary porn business was falling off. And Shine had finally stopped buying - no more estate sales, no more scraping of station-wagon bumpers on the sidewalk. And the ornate antique cash register vanished, sold to a dealer in Back Bay. Now he made change from a gray metal box. And every day there were fewer books on the shelves, lots of empty spaces. No more Dostoyevsky under D, no more Balzac under B. One after another, the Big Ones were catching the last train out. Shine still kept up a brave face, but I remembered the old days and could tell that he was just going through the motions.
The eviction notices were going out a block at a time, and after each mailing, boards went up over more windows, moving vans backed up to doors, and more buildings burned, ruins smoldered, and trash fires flickered in the empty lots. The boarded-up buildings bore yellow signs: KEEP OUT, PROPERTY OF THE CITY OF BOSTON, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. To the west of the Square itself whole city blocks were missing, you could see a lot of sky, and at night the stars wept. The storekeepers, Alvin and George and several whose names I did not know, bobbed around Shine’s desk and drank coffee and shrugged and whined. Alvin said, ‘We might as well live in fucking Russia,’ and everybody agreed with that and bobbed to it, and then somebody said, ‘You can’t fight City Hall,’ and they all nodded. George said it was stupid to get all worked up over something you can’t do anything about anyway, and everybody agreed with that too. Then they started talking about Bernie Ackerman’s heart attack and had moved on to ulcers, when Shine, who had not said anything for a while, spoke up in a voice so low they all listened.
‘Well, I’m sure as hell going to do
something
,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to sit on my ass while they haul me out with the furniture.’
something
,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to sit on my ass while they haul me out with the furniture.’
They all, of course, wanted to know what he was going to do, but he wouldn’t tell them. He just said, ‘Something.’ And then he said, ‘You’ll see.’
The thing is, I knew all about the bumps for destructiveness and secretiveness that Shine was concealing on his temples, and I had long ago moved out of my bourgeois phase, so despite my current aversion to his character, I was pretty excited by these words. One thing I was sure of, Norman Shine was not afraid of anybody. I thought of barricades, burning cars overturned in the narrow streets, Molotov cocktails. Or perhaps a great moral struggle like the Negroes in the South I had read about in the
Globe
, a nonviolent sit-down in front of the shop - Shine, Sweat, Vahradyan sitting in the middle of the street, strippers in plaid skirts and cardigans bringing them sandwiches, lots of reporters, an outpouring of public sympathy, a red-faced mayor. Wrong again.
Globe
, a nonviolent sit-down in front of the shop - Shine, Sweat, Vahradyan sitting in the middle of the street, strippers in plaid skirts and cardigans bringing them sandwiches, lots of reporters, an outpouring of public sympathy, a red-faced mayor. Wrong again.
A few days after saying he was going to do something, Shine put up a big handwritten sign in the front window.
FREE BOOKS
ALL YOU CAN CARRY IN 5 MINUTES
So this was what he called doing something. Giving away all the books like this was an act of such generosity and bespoke such exquisite despair that I almost fell in love with him again. Free books, like after the revolution. I wished Jerry were there to see it. The sign had an immediate effect - it’s amazing the way freebies can get people moving - and the next five days were chaos. After the
Globe
ran a story on it, so many people showed up for their five-minute raid on the bookstore that policemen on horseback had to be called in to control the crowd, which at one point stretched all the way down Cornhill and around the corner. They came outfitted with paper bags, knapsacks, cardboard boxes, even suitcases, and they loaded up. Some people got carried away and took things they really didn’t want, and in the evening after closing time the street was strewn with cast-off books. Shine went out with a paper bag and picked them all up, and the ones that weren’t too damaged he put back on the shelves, ready for the next day’s stampede, and the rest he threw away. It was exciting at first, and then it was sad. It was sad to walk around the shop at night, a place where I had spent my whole life, my home really, and see all those empty shelves. It was especially sad that Sunday, when it rained. I went down and sat on the red cushion in the chair and looked out the store window and watched the rain run in muddy trickles down the dusty pane. I rested my cheek on a paw and thought of the French poet Paul Verlaine, who wrote a famous poem about the rain falling on a city. When it rains, the poem says, the heart weeps. I knew just what he meant, even though that was Paris, France, and this was Scollay Square in Boston. And that was when I missed Norman the most. I missed our conversations over coffee, my feet in tassel loafers up on his desk, cozy in the warm, bright shop, while outside the rain was falling. Sometimes I called him back for a visit, and we discussed the case of Shine, his triumphs and his failings, but it wasn’t the same as when I had thought he was real.
Globe
ran a story on it, so many people showed up for their five-minute raid on the bookstore that policemen on horseback had to be called in to control the crowd, which at one point stretched all the way down Cornhill and around the corner. They came outfitted with paper bags, knapsacks, cardboard boxes, even suitcases, and they loaded up. Some people got carried away and took things they really didn’t want, and in the evening after closing time the street was strewn with cast-off books. Shine went out with a paper bag and picked them all up, and the ones that weren’t too damaged he put back on the shelves, ready for the next day’s stampede, and the rest he threw away. It was exciting at first, and then it was sad. It was sad to walk around the shop at night, a place where I had spent my whole life, my home really, and see all those empty shelves. It was especially sad that Sunday, when it rained. I went down and sat on the red cushion in the chair and looked out the store window and watched the rain run in muddy trickles down the dusty pane. I rested my cheek on a paw and thought of the French poet Paul Verlaine, who wrote a famous poem about the rain falling on a city. When it rains, the poem says, the heart weeps. I knew just what he meant, even though that was Paris, France, and this was Scollay Square in Boston. And that was when I missed Norman the most. I missed our conversations over coffee, my feet in tassel loafers up on his desk, cozy in the warm, bright shop, while outside the rain was falling. Sometimes I called him back for a visit, and we discussed the case of Shine, his triumphs and his failings, but it wasn’t the same as when I had thought he was real.
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