by Sam Savage
Potts failed to inform me that her rat is a nocturnal creature. I ought to have known it, of course, because of the rats in Mexico: when we lived in Mexico for two months one summer, rats roamed everywhere at night. And I once had lots of noisy nocturnal mice in this place too, until Giamatti sent a man over who put poison everywhere—he even pried loose the baseboards and put poison behind them—and since then I have not seen any mice at all. I am not sure how much I can type today, feeling the way I do. It is the way I used to feel in the months before Potopotawoc, even when the sun was out. Maybe tired is not the word. Empty and wasted are the words. I was almost asleep when it started: a small brittle noise like someone snapping wooden matches, then a dry crunching like someone eating popcorn, then a hollow scraping, then a rustling like dry leaves blown across a sidewalk, then a repetitious creaking like a rusty hinge being worked back and forth, and then a rhythmic swishing like a piece of paper being slid in circles on a floor, that last, I think, being the noise it makes running inside the little yellow wheel. At first I made an effort to assimilate the noise to the wider sounds of the city outside, but it detached itself, insisting I am here, I am near, I am alive. I had the bedroom door open as usual, and only a few feet of hallway lay between me and the rat. I very much dislike being shut up in small dark rooms, have disliked it ever since the woman who came after Nurse would lock me in a closet when I screamed, when I had what they, that woman and others, called a screaming fit. Her name was Rasmussen. That was her last name, though it was all anyone ever called her, except my father when he was jolly from drinking, when he called her Rasputin. She possessed an extravagant bosom, very pale hair, a small nose, and a broad pale face that broke out in splotches when she was angry. Nurse had held me in her arms and rocked me when I had a screaming fit, but Rasputin could not stand the sight of me. Even so she did not lock me up for every episode, only for the ones that went on for a long time, hours and hours it seems to me in retrospect, when she must have reached her wits’ end. I would lie on the floor, on my stomach, screaming, and she, having lost her wits at last, would rush at me from behind, grab me by a wrist or ankle, and drag me across the floor (I would be clutching at rugs, chairs, etc., as we went) to the nearest closet, and yanking me to my feet, shove me inside, then jam a chair under the doorknob. Sitting on the floor in the pitch-dark, on boots and shoes as often as not, I would batter the door with my feet. One day I kicked so violently I shook the chair loose and escaped into the yard, where I ran shrieking in and out of flowerbeds and hedges until brought down by the gardener beneath a verdant swan. After that she would lean her shoulder against the door, which made me kick even harder, encouraged by the feel of her body on the other side absorbing the impacts through the wood. I would hit and kick the door and throw myself against it and against the walls—and, I recall vividly, against the ceiling also, though that does not seem plausible now—screaming and hurling myself against them, for all the world like a moth in a lampshade. Not like a moth, actually, because moths don’t scream, or not in a way that we can hear, though perhaps they make an extremely thin high-pitched wail beyond the range of our hearing, fortunately. How awful it would be if in addition to clicking against the shade and bulb moths made angry high-pitched screaming sounds. If that were the case one could imagine someone saying, “That’s Edna in the closet screaming like a moth.” Rasputin covered my bruises with face powder afterwards, so people would not notice, and I would wash it off in the bathroom at bedtime and study the bruises in the mirror and feel satisfied.
Just when I was growing accustomed to one of the rat’s noises and beginning to drift off to sleep, it would leap to another—abandon crunching, for example, in order to scurry madly. But more iniquitous than the sounds were the intervals between them, when he made not a peep, taunting me with silence instead: I lay there, stretched out on the bed, exasperated and desperate, and waited for him to start up again, waiting, I want to say, impatiently for him to start up again. I thought of the rats in Mexico, which had seemed to go about their business in perfect silence, of the solemn way they would look up at me when they paused under the streetlight. How dignified, circumspect, and courteous they were, compared to the berserk creature in my living room. After a long while I got up and closed the door. The noise was barely audible then. But with effort I could still hear it, and I could not stop myself from making the effort, and then it was worse than before, owing to the intensity with which I focused on it, with which I was compelled to focus on it, now that it had become faint. I thought of Mr. Potts lying in the terminal dark being gnawed by cancer, while next to his bed a rat was chewing. I felt gnawed by cancer. I got up again and dragged my big square window fan out from under the dresser and switched it on, though it was too cold for a fan. I pulled the blanket up over my head and folded the pillow up around my ears like a muff. The scraping and whirrings of the rat, small and vital, vanished at last in the larger whirring, mechanical and electrical, of the fan. The sounds of dead things, by which I mean mechanical and electric things, are seldom as annoying as the sounds living creatures come up with, I have noticed. Snoring, for example, or smacking one’s lips while one eats or making little whistling noises while one works, as Clarence did, are just some of the irritating sounds that humans make; and as for animals, there is barking at night and purring while one is trying to think, as well as the various rat and mouse noises I have been discussing. I suppose we cannot help thinking in the case of people and animals that they have come up with the noises for the sole purpose of annoying us. I once threw a glass of water at Clarence to make him stop whistling. And there were the parrots in Venezuela, which were such a torment to him. Despite being awake half the night, I was up at the crack of dawn, and the first thing I saw when I stumbled into the living room was the rat asleep in its tube, its rat tail poking out. I don’t know which is more revolting, the little pink hands or that long, hairless, strangely sinister worm. I stared at it lying there, placid and slightly curled, and it occurred to me that it was only pretending to be inert, that any second it was going to whip about. The sun had just come up and I was back at my post, but I was not typing yet—I was drinking coffee and thinking about typing, adumbrating the various items I would want to type up once I got started—when I heard Potts leaving, suitcase thumping down the stairs to the street—thirteen stairs, thirteen thumps—and clicking over the tiles in the vestibule, the street door opening with a faint whang and closing with a sigh and a click. A car door slammed, a car engine became loud, then soft. The morning was very quiet. Today is Sunday. Potts does not in the normal course of things make noises that I can hear from my place, except in winter when she goes down the stairs wearing boots with hard, racketing heels. Even so, now that I know she is gone a different kind of silence has descended on the building; not the silence of no noise, I want to say, the silence of no person. In the back of my mind I must always have been aware that she was somewhere about, just under my feet, busy with her life. And I ought not to have said that a different kind of silence descended, when actually it is rising out of the apartment below me, seeping through the floor on which my chair is sitting; rising, I want to say, like smoke. Thinking about the silence down there, I have a mental picture of the aquarium and the fish swimming quietly back and forth, with drifting fins. I wonder if Potts thought to open the curtains before leaving. In my picture the fish are swimming in dense twilight. They can wait until tomorrow for their breakfast.
I slept last night with the door shut and the fan running. This morning I went down and fed the fish and then walked around the block to the other side of the ice cream factory, to the diner for breakfast. Walking that way I sometimes see groups of workers standing in the parking lot, taking a cigarette break, dressed in snowsuits even in the warmest weather, but there was no one this morning. The waitress said she was surprised to see me on a weekday. I told her I was on vacation. After breakfast I walked to the park and sat there, and then I came home and had lunch. I had meant to l
ie down for a few minutes after lunch but slept half the afternoon instead. The rat has come out of its tube; I can hear it behind me scratching in the shavings. I don’t understand why people want to keep rats as pets, or any animal for that matter, except cats and dogs. And parrots, I suppose. When we were in Venezuela we stayed part of the time in a hotel where there were parrots everywhere. They were wild parrots—the hotel put out food to encourage them to hang around in the courtyard and gardens, where they kept up a tremendous racket, such a potpourri of hoots and whistles. I thought it was lovely, but Clarence, who was trying to work the whole time we were there, complained about it to the management, and they promised to try and quiet the birds but of course did nothing. I said, “What do you expect them to do, shoot them?” We were in Venezuela because they were making a movie there. They were working from a script that everyone agreed was atrocious, when the chief writer, whom they all blamed for the problems they were having with the shooting, went off in a huff, leaving Clarence to fix the script up by himself, even though he did not know the first thing about film writing and had only gotten the job because he was a friend of the main writer, the one who left even after Clarence had begged him to stay. I don’t recall the name of the movie, or if it even had a name, since it was never finished, but it involved human sacrifice. Clarence was having a terrible time with the script, being obliged to retain all the awful parts they had shot already. The director and the producer, who could see as well as anyone that they were heading for disaster, were in constant dispute over the direction the film should take, and they kept changing their minds, forcing Clarence to rewrite the same scenes over and over. There were no air conditioners in Venezuela in those days, just electric fans, and it was extremely hot. And when the great stone pyramid they had built just for the movie burned to the ground, Clarence had to go back and rework the whole thing once again, taking out the Aztecs and transposing the story to a convent, because there was an abandoned convent near where we were shooting. The pyramid was not made of actual stone, obviously; it was made of wood and covered with canvas painted to look like stone. I sat in the courtyard drinking iced tea and writing letters to everyone I could think of, while Clarence was drinking Scotch in our room, and in between the noise of the parrots—and other birds too, there were a lot of other species of noisy birds—I could hear the tick-tick of his typewriter. More than once, I think even several times during the last week or so, he was seen leaning out the window screaming at the parrots. The electric fans had metal blades in those days, with just the most cursory sort of guard on them and openings big enough to put a fist through. We argued a lot during our stay there, Clarence objecting to my friendships with some of the crew, and I would be talking, trying to explain about the friendships, and Clarence, shirtless and sweating at his desk, would hold a pencil against the fan blade. It made an awful clatter, and of course I would have to cease talking and just wait until he stopped doing that. He was also angry, I am sure, because I would not help him with the script. The truth is I could not have helped him had I wanted to. There are certain types of things I cannot possibly write, cannot, I mean, possibly bring myself to write. All Clarence’s class resentments would come out then, when I would have to refuse, and he would accuse me of all sorts of things. He finally did put his fist into the fan, and it chewed his knuckles up. He told people later, when they noticed the scars, that he had done it in a fight. He meant for them to think it was a fistfight, of course. This table is not really suitable for typing—not sturdy enough to withstand the vibrations. Had I known at the time that I would one day be typing again, I would have bought a desk instead. I type, and the pages I have typed already and placed in a neat stack behind the machine jiggle their way across the tabletop, inching millimeter by millimeter (if one can say that) across it until they reach the edge, where they cantilever out, farther and farther out over the edge until they suddenly tip downward and cascade off, as several have just done, one after the other, like lemmings. I could type in the kitchen instead, if I wanted. There is a sturdy table topped with white tiles in there, or I could just move that one into the living room, if I felt up to it. I don’t feel up to it. The moving men had to remove the legs to get it in there, and besides, the sun does not rise in the kitchen, cannot be seen rising from that room. I am thinking of moving the rat’s cage, into the bathroom perhaps, where I won’t have to see the animal constantly. I considered carrying it back down to Potts’s place but doubt I could manage that alone. I am not sure where I can put it in the bathroom, unless on top of the laundry hamper. And now I see that I have made Clarence look ridiculous, without intending to, when I described him leaning out the window screaming at the parrots. I suppose some people will wonder about my motives—though he would have looked even more ridiculous had I gone into detail. I did not even mention that while he was doing that, howling out the window and such, he was naked except for a ragged straw hat. The hotel staff would rush into the courtyard and stand in little clusters nudging each other and grinning up at him whenever they heard him start up. He wore the hat day and night, because it was comfortable, he said, though it was really because he did not want people seeing how bald he had become. People who got to know Clarence at that time could not have had the slightest inkling of what he was like before, how extraordinary he was in certain respects. By saying “what he was like before” I have now made it sound as if some dramatic thing happened at some point and after that “he was not his old self,” as the saying goes. I suppose some people reading this will think, “Well, before what exactly?” Well, in this case, in the case of Clarence, it was before nothing—when I say how extraordinary he was before, I just mean before a dozen more years of being Clarence.
I had a birthday party, and Mama failed to show up. We all stood around a long time, just waiting, and then Papa whispered something angry, making the parlor maid’s face redden, and they brought the cake in anyway, and it was an angel food cake. The party was just me and the servants, plus Papa for a few minutes. I refused to blow out the candles, so Nurse blew them out for me, kneeling behind me with her head next to mine as if we were blowing them out together, though I knew that I was not blowing out anything. She explained that Mama was not there because she was caught up in the social whirl. It was, Nurse said, impossible for Mama to get away, no matter how much she wanted to. I must have been quite upset, because I remember that later in my room when Nurse brought me another piece of cake, I just ate the icing off and crumbled the rest and pushed the pieces down into the heat vent. Days later I saw ants going in and out of the vent, and the gardener came up and sprayed something down inside it. When I thought of the social whirl in those days, I pictured an enormous vortex. It looked a lot like the Maelstrom whirlpool in one of my picture books, but instead of swirling water it was made out of swirling people, men and women in evening clothes whirling round and round, arms and legs flailing wildly as they struggled to escape by scrambling up the nearly vertical walls of the vortex in order not to be sucked down into the bottomless hole at the center. Later when I was grown I several times had the same image in nightmares, except then I was the only person in the whirlpool. I think Papa, being a genuine sportsman, was sorry I was not a boy, and Mama also was sorry, and for many years they tried to engender one, but they never engendered anything. I imagine the effort made Papa feel better, but Mama told Nurse that it made her feel pummeled, told her while I was sitting there. Not just Nurse and Mama but other people also were in the habit of talking as if I were not there, because I was a girl, I suppose, or because they thought I was lost in my own world and not taking in what they said. After a few years Mama had had enough, apparently, and began locking the door to her bedroom. Papa, however, being a man and, I imagine, quite virile, had not had enough. After a long while, after many meals with Mama off in the far distance making silence and throwing it at him, while I sat in the middle distance with my head down stirring mashed potatoes into muddy pools, and after he had tried the door many t
imes, whispering hoarsely and rattling the knob, he finally understood that this was a habit she had fallen into, and then he also had had enough; and at those times, having had enough of the one and not of the other, he would retire to the study after supper and drink brandy until his face was red. The study was a comfortable room, a person could sit in it and not have her shoulder blades jabbed, so anyone who wanted to sit anywhere in our house for very long always sat there, except Mama. When Papa drank he sat there a long time, as I recall. It had leather chairs, a leather-topped table, leather-covered books, and a leathery old butler named Peter who stood behind Papa’s armchair and poured. Those were all comfortable things, and I suppose they made Papa feel comfortable sitting there, even when he was unhappy, which would be the reason he could sit there for a long time, because he was unhappy but comfortable. We also had a large comfortable dog named Rupert who enjoyed listening to Papa talk even when he, Papa, was tight and no one else could understand him. But after a while Papa would have enough of the study also, and then, having had enough of one and not of the other, he would stumble back upstairs and beat on Mama’s door with his fist. This happened, it seems to me, a great many times, and then one night when it was about to happen again Mama had had enough of that too, and she threatened to shoot him through the door. I don’t suppose it really happened as many times as it seems, and it is possible she only threatened to shoot him once, threatened once to shoot him—fill him full of bullets, is what she said—and it only appeared to be happening all the time because it was so frightening. I don’t know if this is useful. My bedroom was across the hall from Mama’s, and when Papa began hammering on her door, I would think of places to travel, and after he had gone downstairs I would turn on the light and open the little box with the stamps and lay the stamps out on the bed and pretend that they were island countries scattered across the ocean of the bedspread. I would lay them out in different patterns, in a clump like Fiji or strung out in a line like the Marianas, and spend a long time considering the order in which I would visit them. I would imagine the king or president or whoever was pictured on the stamp coming down to the beach with his entourage to welcome me when I landed, and the entourage would include elephants and horses, usually, and I would fall asleep imagining this, and next morning the maid would have to help me retrieve my stamps from the tousled bedcovers.