by Sam Savage
Nigel has eaten his pencil, all but the part inside the wheel and the metal bit that held the eraser, and he ate the eraser too, I noticed when I went over to give him a piece of my apple this morning—not eaten the pencil, actually, so much as shredded it; bits of blond wood and yellow paint are scattered about in the shavings.
After supper on the day following Brodt’s visit, it was still light out, and I was at the window looking down on the people clustered at the bus stop across the street, when suddenly a small child, a boy, I think, broke from the crowd and ran into the street, directly into the path of a car. There was a tremendous screeching of brakes that for a moment I thought was the child screaming, and the car stopped. The rear of the car rose into the air as it was stopping, and then, after it had stopped, seemed to remain that way, tilted forward, as if aghast. Then the rear of the car settled slowly back, descending with a sighing sound, I thought. The little boy stood just a foot or so in front of the car’s grill. From up here he seemed to be staring into the windshield. A woman in a blue dress rushed out of the crowd, wrapped the child in her arms and carried him back to the sidewalk. The two of them went a little ways off from the crowd. She knelt in front of the child, holding him at arms-length from her. I don’t know how much time had passed, a few seconds or several minutes, when the car that had nearly struck the child began slowly to roll forward again, and that must have been the cue: as soon as it was rolling forward everything else started to move, the voices of the people at the bus stop floated up, I heard someone shouting, the child wailed, and all was just as before. I did not give Nigel any pellets this morning, as he has not touched the ones he has, that I gave him three or four days ago, when I fed him a big handful, or the apple, so he can’t be hungry. I don’t know how much a rat is supposed to eat, but this one is eating very little.
They forgot me at Potopotawoc. I was supposed to be there for just three weeks in the fall, officially there, as opposed to still there but forgotten, and they lost sight of me, despite the fact that I was right there in front of them day after day for almost two years; lost sight of me, so to speak, among the falling leaves; a year and eleven months. I say they forgot me, but of course that is a psychological remark, and I obviously can’t know what was going on in their heads. Perhaps I was not forgotten at all, perhaps I was pointedly ignored. For two years I was ignored or forgotten. Given the silent treatment, sent to Coventry. Not entirely: sometimes I was paid too much attention, so they could not have forgotten that I was there, nor had Clarence, who sent postcards from all sorts of places, New Orleans, Key West, Tampa. They always ended, “and Lily sends her love.” When I say that it is a psychological remark, I am referring to my own psychology. “For two years Edna lived abandoned and forgotten” was how it felt. One night a large group of campers came and built a bonfire in front of my house. I was afraid it was a lynching party. They stood around the fire laughing and talking and sometimes singing. Then they gathered in front of my door, and I opened it and stood in the doorway while they sang “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Some of them spent the night there, sleeping on the pine needles beneath the trees. When the sun rose they wandered off, wrapped in their sleeping bags and blankets; in the dawn mist they looked like wandering monks. Several of them were like that, wrapped in robes, moving about in the fog under the trees, when time stopped, just as it stopped for the car and the little boy, briefly, and they became a painting. A moment later they were walking away again, grumbling and cursing. They left behind a great deal of litter, and the next day I went out and cleaned everything up, beer cans and bottles and paper wrappers and sticks tipped with bits of marshmallow, and I put it all in a plastic bag and carried the bag up to the Shed. I want to say that I emptied the bag on the floor of the cafeteria, but in fact I just thought of doing that, because of the mess they had left in front of my cabin. I could not think of anything to type at Potopotawoc. Sometimes I copied things out of magazines, I typed an entire issue of the New Yorker, including the ads. I might have done that more than once. Everything I typed there was meaningless. It has been a long time since I have dwelled on Potopotawoc, dwelled in the sense of turning it over in my mind and trying to understand, which is quite different from obsessing. I told Clarence I was not obsessing, that I was merely thinking about it. Sometimes I cried about it, sitting on a rusted combine or threshing machine or whatever it was, at the edge of the pine woods. Nigel can scarcely haul himself forward. His breathing seems to be more rapid, and it makes a clicking sound. I had not noticed his sides heaving like that before. He was this way when I awoke yesterday morning. I have moved his water bottle, attaching it so the spout is closer to his head. I sat at the kitchen table and cleaned and oiled Poplavskaya’s typewriter. I tried to make it type and discovered the way in which it is broken: the carriage return mechanism doesn’t work, a pawl that is supposed to engage the gear has snapped, so even though the keys all function, the typewriter is practically useless except for typing things that are one line long. I typed a postcard to Potts: “Nigel is having the time of his life.” I have not thought of anything else short enough to type. Very little in life is that short. The postcard came out smudged with oil and rust. It looks like a postcard written fifty years ago, as in a sense it is. And the business with the exploding house: I look back and think, Who was that woman? As if I had temporarily lost my way, lost my bearings and wandered off the road, so to speak, into a thicket, or had gone temporarily out of my mind. That would explain a lot. Out of my mind for a couple of weeks in certain respects, not out of it entirely or always. “Edna had a bee in her bonnet” is how my mother might have put it. And when I would refuse to stop typing, after he had been calling me for a while, Clarence would come to the bottom of the stairs and shout, “Are you out of your mind, Edna?” It was not a question. He might be sick, I suppose. He drags himself along in what could be construed as a sickly fashion, though that might be the way a rat of his age is supposed to walk for all I know, or the way a rat is supposed to walk on shavings. I did not pay attention to how he was walking before; maybe they all walk like that. How would I walk in wood shavings up to my knees? If he is sick it is from eating paint, probably. It might not be a book, it might be an introduction, or maybe a long preface. I have posted a new note, taped it up next to the one that says: Feed the Rat. It makes sly reference to my interest in Henry Poole and his house, which seems strange to me now. I think I should call it my erstwhile interest, and that—my erstwhile interest—seems bizarre now, since I no longer know what there was about it that interested me. I am not making myself clear. It is like thinking that you have caught a fly, but then when you open your fist slowly, you discover there is nothing in it. You were holding your fist tightly shut, convinced you had a fly inside, and the whole time there was nothing in it, and it feels strange and bizarre and a little shocking when you open your fist and discover that. The new note says: “People in glass houses should not read newspapers.” As a thought, this strikes me as puzzling and profound. Clarence said once that I never considered anything profound unless it was puzzling. He made that remark after I had told him The Misfits was not profound.
Someone was pushing the door buzzer. Or better: someone was buzzing at the door, that sounding more the way it felt from inside, from inside the apartment, I mean, the doorbell buzzing, the dour buzzer bellowing, and there was a buzzing of voices without. Now they are knocking. My thought is not to answer. I am not going to answer. It is Giamatti, I am sure.
I went to the window to see if I could catch a glimpse of whoever it was as they were leaving. I did not see anyone. I Can’t see the portion of the sidewalk that is right next to the building unless I lean far out, and I am reluctant to do that. Perhaps they didn’t leave. I suppose it might have been Potts. If it was Potts and she went into her place after knocking, I would have heard the door opening and closing. I don’t normally hear Potts when she is moving around inside her apartment, but I always hear her going in and out. Anyway, it is t
oo soon for Potts. I am going to have to change a lot of this, and I will want to leave Potts out.
I was standing at the window looking down, when I felt that Nigel had died. “Edna was invaded by an impression of sudden death behind her” was how it was. I turned around to see. He was inside the plastic tube with, as always, a portion of his tail protruding. I tapped on the glass but he did not stir, the tail did not twitch. I reached in and lifted one end of the tube; his head slid out the other end. His eyes were shut, mouth agape, incisors manifest. I lifted the tube higher in order to peek inside, and he slid most of the way out, dangling from the end of it. I dumped him directly from the tube into a Ziploc. Under the impact of his weight the bag slipped from my grip and struck the floor with a thump, a dull thud, I want to say, as of a dead thing, and he fell out. Using the tube and the edge of a foot I worked him back inside. He is in the freezer now, in the door to the freezer, as I don’t want him on top of the vegetables.
At the agency yesterday, filling out more forms, running into more problems. They asked, “Where do you live?” And I said, “In hell.” And the girl asked, “Where’s that, ma’am?” I tapped my chest and said, “In here, in here.” Ditto for occupation: they always have a blank for that one. I used to write “none” but discovered this suggests to them that I am unemployed, which is so far from the truth it is laughable. I tried to get around it by writing “waiter” instead, but that did not work either: they wanted the name of my employer, and when I said, “self-employed,” they were incredulous. They had thought I meant a waiter on tables. They wanted someone to accompany me home, but I said no. I wanted to say to them, “When I had nothing …” I could picture myself with nothing, but the fact is I have always had a little bit. I have never had the courage to have nothing, to be nothing.
If lives had chapters, the final chapter in Clarence’s life would open in a house with yellow-flowered wallpaper and close outside a sawmill in Georgia. We had driven south, almost to the Gulf, a rented trailer hitched to a our station wagon carrying everything we owned swaying wildly behind us. At one point during the trip, Clarence compared going down there, which is where he came from, though not that particular region of it, to an animal going to ground, a thing one normally says about hunted animals, when they go into a hole to hide. We unloaded at a small farmhouse with asbestos siding, yellow wallpaper, and a front porch that had collapsed on one side, belonging to the owner of the pharmacy where Clarence had found a job. Surrounded by pine woods, where there had once been fields, it was not a farmhouse anymore. There were no farmhouses anymore anywhere around, because the soil was exhausted, Clarence said; just widely scattered, insubstantial, and generally run-down dwellings inhabited by people who drove long distances to work every day. The pine woods were hot and dusty. The trees were not tall and they grew close together, stunted big-leafed oaks and gums mixed in with the pines. The woods smelled of dust and resin, and at night the insects were deafening. Abandoned farm machinery—I am not sure what kind of machinery, incomprehensible shafts, wheels, and teeth—lay scattered at the edge of the woods, vine-wrapped and rusted, with small trees growing up through the interstices. Every weekday morning Clarence put on a white coat and drove twenty-three miles to work at a drugstore in town, where he made the acquaintance of Lily, who worked at the drugstore also and dressed in blue, because she was not a pharmacist. The wallpaper was pale-yellow with deep-yellow flowers, the same in every room. When we moved in it was hanging off the walls in places, and Clarence pulled on the loose pieces, kept pulling until they broke and left tapering torn streaks down the walls. He lived in that house for several years, with me at first and then with Lily, and then, when I came back from Potopotawoc, with me and Lily. He stopped being a writer there and died between the house and the town, when he ran off the road and hit a truck in the parking lot of a sawmill. When just the two of us lived there, he was still calling himself a writer and would show people his book and the magazines with his stories, but I don’t think he really believed that he would become one again. I don’t remember typing there. I have wondered sometimes whether he went on calling himself a writer after I left, or was he doing it only for my benefit, still. He probably did, though, since there was no one around who could know it was not true. I am not sure if Clarence died in the car or in the hospital. I am certain that at some point he was dead in the hospital. I might call it The Book of Suffering. I am referring now to Clarence’s suffering. If he could read this, he would say “Are you trying to be funny?” He would mean, of course, am I trying to be ironic.
I let Lily sit in front the first time we all three rode in the car, because she was the guest, though later, when she was denizen and I interloper, it became customary for me to sit in back. I chose to sit in back, I think, because I did not like Lily’s head appearing over the seatback next to me, when she leaned over to talk to Clarence while he drove. She talked to him almost constantly when we were driving places. Riding in back I sometimes listened to them talking to each other, but usually I looked out the open window at the exhausted soil, their voices drowned by the wind, or I stretched out on the seat bench and slept. Because the yellow-papered house was in the middle of what Clarence called the dullest place in America, they fell into the habit of taking road trips out of there, and sometimes I went with them and sometimes I stayed behind. Montgomery, Chattanooga, and Savannah are some of the places they went without me, as I recall. They would send me a picture postcard and be back before it arrived. Clarence would bring the mail in from the box on the highway and say, “Well, what do you know, Edna has a card from Savannah,” if that was where they had been. Once when I went with them we drove down to the Gulf and went swimming in the ocean, if the Gulf of Mexico is an ocean. A gulf is part of an ocean, of course, though it would be bizarre if I said we went swimming in part of the ocean, as if anyone could swim in a whole ocean. On the way back we stopped for gas somewhere north of Panama City. Across the highway from the filling station was a sort of backyard theme park called Jungle Adventures or some such thing, and Clarence insisted on walking over there. He was fascinated by things like that, tawdry, run-down things, because of his childhood, which was full of them, heartbreaking things that he was not able to forget about. We bought tickets from a teenage boy sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck parked at the entrance. Clarence later said the boy reminded him of himself when he was that age, though I failed to see the resemblance. The theme park consisted mainly of half-a-dozen life-sized African animals, several dinosaurs, and some picnic tables scattered about under the trees. The animals were made of a smooth hard material, plastic or fiberglass, I suppose, that rang hollow when you knocked on their sides. At the edge of the park, practically on the shoulder of the highway, mounted on a large plywood sheet supported at the back by a series of slanting two-by-fours, was a life-sized painting of a big-game hunter, quaintly Edwardian in khaki plus fours, high socks, and pith helmet. He was clasping an enormous, still-smoking gun, which Clarence thought was a .416 Rigby, and resting a foot on the head of a lion with a lolling purple tongue. There was an oval hole in the plywood where the hunter’s face would normally be and that made the whole thing look like a painting by Magritte. The idea was to stand behind the plywood sheet and stick one’s head into the hole and be photographed. First Lily and then Clarence put their head through while I snapped pictures of them. At this moment I can look up and see the photograph of Clarence that I taped to my window, in which he has a foot on an actual lion. I don’t have the picture I took of him with his head in the cutout and a foot on a fake lion, but if I did I would tape it up next to the other. That would be ironic.