Firmin (5 page)
Authors: Sam Savage
Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General
Luweena and Mama having scooped up all the popcorn, we went on down Hanover, sliding along the gutter to the nearly deserted Square. The Square was, as people liked to say, a cesspool, and indeed the damp asphalt glistened under the streetlights like water. A woman, followed closely by a man, passed without seeing us. Walking rapidly, they turned and disappeared into a doorway under ROOMS. I shall never forget the sound the woman’s heels made against the sidewalk. We crouched in a drain till they had gone inside, the door closed behind them. Then, following Mama’s lead, we raced across the broad expanse of the Square as fast as we could go, as fast at any rate as Mama could go. In those days Luweena and I were still light on our feet. Reaching the opposite sidewalk, Mama found a puddle of beer, and she and Luweena refused to go on until they had lapped up every drop of it. My anxiety had by then migrated from the margins of my consciousness to dead center and I was beginning to quiver with fear. I thought, To hell with food. I wanted to run back home to the warm safety of the bookstore, but I was terrified of being separated from Mama. I was especially frightened by the trucks that now and then went thundering past us, their headlights throwing enormous shadows against the walls, though Mama did not even look up, and after a while neither did Luweena. And then we went on down the street. We passed in front of the darkened gothic-windowed hulk of the Old Howard, which had once been a famous theater but had been closed for years. A lot of low-class rats lived there. It was, Mama said, a good place to get killed. In the end, after more lapping and licking at sidewalk puddles, we found food - hot dogs, pickles, buns, ketchup, mustard - in the big blue bins in back of Joe and Nemo’s. Other rats were there too but we stayed away from them. We are not a close-knit species. Then it was back out by the Red Hat Bar, and more puddles. Most of these were urine, but there were enough booze pools as well to keep Mama busy, and Luweena too. Bad genes, I guess. And the two of them grew increasingly reckless on the way home, at times walking in the middle of the sidewalk on Cambridge Street and singing. Not me, though. I skulked along right next to the buildings or in the gutter and pretended I didn’t know them. In fact I kept my distance in the hope that if some huge calamity fell out of the sky on their heads it would miss me.
I am trying to tell the true story of my life, and believe me, it is not easy. I had read a great many of the books under FICTION before I halfway understood what that sign meant and why certain books had been placed under it. I had thought I was reading the history of the world. Even today I must constantly remind myself, sometimes by means of a rap on the head, that Eisenhower is real while Oliver Twist is not.
Lost in the World: Epistemology and Terror
. Thinking back on my account of that first sortie with Mama and Luweena out into the wilderness beyond our basement, I see that I have left one small incident out. It was a perfectly trivial incident in my view but one that, were it discovered later, you would throw invidiously back in my face. I can already see you, swiveling around in your swivel chair and shrieking with delight. And besides, it was not an incident exactly, it was more like an incitement, or rather an attempt at incitement, by Luweena’s furry behind.
Lost in the World: Epistemology and Terror
. Thinking back on my account of that first sortie with Mama and Luweena out into the wilderness beyond our basement, I see that I have left one small incident out. It was a perfectly trivial incident in my view but one that, were it discovered later, you would throw invidiously back in my face. I can already see you, swiveling around in your swivel chair and shrieking with delight. And besides, it was not an incident exactly, it was more like an incitement, or rather an attempt at incitement, by Luweena’s furry behind.
While I was following her down the alley, it went, as I mentioned, up and down in front of my nose. Up and down. And the ridiculous thing was, she insisted on carrying her tail at a stimulating angle as well, an angle that I can fairly describe as brazen. Brazen and provocative. As we crept in single file down the alley, her behind filled my whole field of vision, invaded my consciousness and prevented me from thinking of anything else, even food and danger. And then of course there was the odor. I don’t suppose I can make you understand that aspect of the thing, the irresistible power of that fragrance. It drove me to within an inch of leaping upon her like a madman. I felt myself being thrust forward by my groin. I saw myself leaping upon her from behind and sinking my incisors into the fur of her neck, while she curved her long muscular back, lifted her ass in the air, and with a squeak of delicious agony gave herself to me. It was horrible. But it was also mercifully brief. We were near the end of the alley already, approaching the lights of Hanover Street. A truck rumbled past and my sudden passion, strong as it was, vanished like smoke in its thunder. Nothing had happened. And nothing would happen, since at that moment we were already only yards and minutes from the turning point when I was to stand on the sidewalk, one foot lifted, and look up at the angels. Let me open my heart: that urge to ravish my sister in an alley was the last moment of normal sexual desire I ever experienced. When I set out that night I was, despite my intelligence, a fairly ordinary male. When I returned I was well on my way to becoming a pervert and a freak.
Chapter 4
I
n the world outside my beloved bookshop it was dog eat dog and devil take the hindmost. Everything out there was determined to do us mortal harm, always. Our one-year survival chances were close to zero. In fact, statistically speaking we were practically dead. I did not know this for a fact yet, but I had an intuition all the same, the kind of awful inkling people get on the decks of sinking ships. If there is one thing a literary education is good for it is to fill you with a sense of doom. There is nothing quite like a vivid imagination for sapping a person’s courage. I read the diary of Anne Frank, I became Anne Frank. As for the others, they could feel plenty of terror, cringe in corners, sweat with fear, but as soon as the danger had passed it was as if it had never happened, and they trotted cheerfully on. Cheerfully on through life till they were flattened or poisoned or had their necks cracked by an iron bar. As for me, I have outlived them all and in exchange I have died a thousand deaths. I have moved through life trailing a glistening film of fear like a snail. When I actually die it will be an anticlimax.
n the world outside my beloved bookshop it was dog eat dog and devil take the hindmost. Everything out there was determined to do us mortal harm, always. Our one-year survival chances were close to zero. In fact, statistically speaking we were practically dead. I did not know this for a fact yet, but I had an intuition all the same, the kind of awful inkling people get on the decks of sinking ships. If there is one thing a literary education is good for it is to fill you with a sense of doom. There is nothing quite like a vivid imagination for sapping a person’s courage. I read the diary of Anne Frank, I became Anne Frank. As for the others, they could feel plenty of terror, cringe in corners, sweat with fear, but as soon as the danger had passed it was as if it had never happened, and they trotted cheerfully on. Cheerfully on through life till they were flattened or poisoned or had their necks cracked by an iron bar. As for me, I have outlived them all and in exchange I have died a thousand deaths. I have moved through life trailing a glistening film of fear like a snail. When I actually die it will be an anticlimax.
One night not long after our orientation trip around the Square, Mama went up top as usual, and she never came back. I saw her a couple of times over the next few months hanging out with the floozies in back of Joe and Nemo’s; then she vanished altogether. And that was the end of our little family. Every night after that somebody else went missing until finally only Luweena, Shunt, and I remained. And then they left too. They had trouble believing that I meant to stay on. To them I was mad, but harmless. They did not at all approve of what I was doing. The bookstore was after all a lousy place to live, and Mama had only chosen it in an emergency. Despite our past differences, the last day was almost touching. Luweena gave me a hug, and Shunt, embarrassed, handed me a little punch on the shoulder. They were disappearing beneath the door when I called after them, ‘So long, you bunch of cocksuckers, you subhuman jerks.’ I really told them off, and after that I felt better.
I moved into a little place I had arranged in the ceiling above the shop, midway between the Balloon and the Balcony, where I could keep track of things, while I continued my education at night in the basement, devouring book after book, though no longer literally. Well, that’s not entirely true. Dwelling as I did each night in the mysterious interstices between reading and snacking, I had discovered a remarkable relation, a kind of preestablished harmony, between the taste and the literary quality of a book. To know if something was worth reading I had only to nibble a portion of the printed area. I learned to use the title page for this, leaving the text intact. ‘Good to eat is good to read’ became my motto.
Sometimes, to give my burning eyes a rest, I would go spelunking in the erstwhile ancestors’ old shafts and secret rooms, and there one night, while creeping along behind the baseboard, I ran up against a dam of fallen plaster, a barrier I had previously mistaken for a portion of a wall but now saw was in fact a blocked tunnel. The obstructing pieces were quite large and angular and were snugged tightly together, so it took me considerable time and effort to break my way through and discover, concealed behind them, a new hole. This was a handsome, almost circular opening, right through the baseboard into the main room of the store. Cunning, or perhaps just lucky, the industrious ancestors had driven it through just behind an old iron safe, at a spot practically invisible to any people in the shop. The Balcony and the Balloon, precious as they were, amounted only to lookouts, observatories suspended like aeries above the mingle and fray of the business, and had not given me actual entrance to the store and to its vast trove of fresh books, as did this new discovery. With what I thought was a fine sense of deliberate irony, I named it the Rathole. I could have named it the Gate of Heaven.
After that I pretty much abandoned the basement for the superior books upstairs. Room after room of them. Some were bound in leather, their pages edged with gold, though I personally preferred paperbacks, especially the ones from New Directions, with their black-and-white covers, and the serious, austere ones
from Scribner’s. If I were a person reading in a park I would always carry one of those. The basement had been good to me, but it was upstairs that I really felt myself blossoming. My intellect grew sharper than my teeth. Soon I could do a four-hundred-page novel in an hour, knock off Spinoza in a day. Sometimes I would gaze around me and tremble with joy. I could not understand why this had been granted me. Sometimes I imagined it was part of a secret plan. I thought, Could it be that I, despite my unlikely appearance, have a Destiny? And by that I meant the sort of thing people have in stories, where the events of a life, no matter how they churn and swirl, are swirled and churned in the end into a kind of pattern. Lives in stories have direction and meaning. Even stupid, meaningless lives, like Lenny’s in
Of Mice and Men
, acquire through their place in a story at least the dignity and meaning of being Stupid, Meaningless Lives, the consolation of being exemplars of something. In real life you do not get even that.
Of Mice and Men
, acquire through their place in a story at least the dignity and meaning of being Stupid, Meaningless Lives, the consolation of being exemplars of something. In real life you do not get even that.
I have never been very brave in a physical way, or in any other way either, and I have had a hard time facing up to the blank stupidity of an ordinary, unstoried life, so I very early on started comforting myself with the ridiculous idea that I really did have a Destiny. And I began to travel, in space and time, in my books, looking for it. I dropped in on Daniel Defoe in London for a guided tour of the plague. I heard the bell ringer calling, ‘Bring out your dead,’ and I smelled the smoke from the burning corpses. It is in my nostrils still. People were dying like rats all over London - in fact the rats were dying too, like people. After a couple of hours of this I needed a change of scene, so I went to China and climbed a steep narrow path through bamboo and cypress, to sit for a while in the open doorway of a small mountain but with old Tu Fu. Staring silently out at the white mist swirling up from the valley, listening to the wind blowing through the reed curtains and the faint reverberations of distant temple bells, we were each ‘alone with ten thousand things.’ After that I shot back to England - hopping over oceans, continents, and centuries as easily as stepping off a curb - where I built a small fire by a cart road so that poor, doomed Tess, grubbing turnips in a bleak windswept field, could warm her chapped hands. I had read her life twice through to the end already - I knew her Destiny - and I turned my face away to hide the tears. Then I journeyed with Marlow aboard a ragged steamer up a river in Africa looking for a man named Kurtz. We found him all right. Better for us that we hadn’t! And I introduced people. I put Baudelaire on the raft with Huck and Jim. It did him a lot of good. And sometimes I made sad people happier. I let Keats marry Fanny before he died. I couldn’t save him, but you should have seen them on their wedding night, in a cheap
pensione
in Rome. To them it was a fairy palace. I let the books enter my dreams, and sometimes I dreamed myself back into the books. I held Natasha Rostova’s tiny waist, felt her hand resting on my shoulder, and we danced, seeming to float on the swells of the waltz, right across the gleaming parquet of the ballroom and out into a garden hung with paper lanterns, while the dashing lieutenants of the Imperial Guard furiously twisted their mustaches.
pensione
in Rome. To them it was a fairy palace. I let the books enter my dreams, and sometimes I dreamed myself back into the books. I held Natasha Rostova’s tiny waist, felt her hand resting on my shoulder, and we danced, seeming to float on the swells of the waltz, right across the gleaming parquet of the ballroom and out into a garden hung with paper lanterns, while the dashing lieutenants of the Imperial Guard furiously twisted their mustaches.
You laugh. You are right to laugh. I was once - despite my unpleasant mien - a hopeless romantic, that most ridiculous of creatures. And a humanist too, equally hopeless. And yet despite - or is it because? - of these failings I was able to meet a lot of fabulous people and a lot of geniuses too in the course of my early education. I got on conversational terms with all the Big Ones. Dostoyevsky and Strindberg, for example. In them I was quick to recognize fellow sufferers, hysterics like me. And from them I learned a valuable lesson - that no matter how small you are, your madness can be as big as anyone’s.
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