by Sam Savage
“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.
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 shoebox 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.
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.
Tired 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.”
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.
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.
I began to spend most of every day on my back, all four feet in the air, dreaming and remembering, or else playing the piano, remembering and dreaming. I could see that my dreams were changing. They were getting soft and nostalgic, with a kind of crepuscular flare around the edges, and I didn’t have many exciting adventures anymore. I missed the past terribly, even the awful parts. I never forget anything that has happened to me and scarcely anything that I have read, so by that time I had stored up an awful lot of memories. My brain was like a gigantic warehouse—you could get lost in it, lose track of time, peeking into boxes and cases, wandering knee-deep in dust, and not find your way out for days. Sometime shortly after I moved in with Jerry I had begun to play with the past, tweaking it this way and that to make it more like a real story, and I had begun mixing my memories with my dreams. This was probably a mistake, since the more I played with them the more they came to resemble each other, and it was harder and harder for me to tell the things I remembered from the things I had invented. I was now, for example, unsure which of the figures was really Mama, the fat greedy one or the thin, worn sweet one, and whether her name was Flo or Deedee or Gwendolyn. All the archives existed only in my mind. I had no external check, no diary, no old family friend. How could I verify? All I could do was compare one mental image with another image, equally suspect, and in the end they all got tangled together. My mind was a labyrinth, enticing or terrifying according to my mood. I was losing my footing, and the odd thing was that I didn’t care.
Things were ending fast. The ship was sinking, and a week after Shine started tossing books overboard, the Old Howard burned. This was a theater that a long time ago had been famous all across America. I used to trudge by its abandoned hulk on my way to the Rialto. Facade of gray stone, enormous gothic windows, it looked like a church except for the huge sign jutting halfway across the street with THE OLD HOWARD spelled out in lightbulbs. I always hoped they would turn the lights on, but they never did. And it looked like a church for a reason—it had been built as one by the Millerites, a religious sect whose zealots believed that the world was coming to an end. They were right about that, of course. But using the Bible and a lot of suspect math, they had calculated that this would occur on October 22, 1844. In preparation for that event, thousands of true believers sold everything they owned, and then they built a huge fortress of a church in order to have a safe place to be in while it was happening. I loved reading about those people. They were just like me, carrying around with them all the time this huge sense of calamity. When the sun rose on October 23, same as before, they were naturally very disappointed. They sold the church, and I don’t know what happened to them then. I guess life must have seemed pretty boring after that. The church became a theater—Edwin Booth played there—a vaudeville house, and finally a strip joint. In 1952, which was still long before my time, the city closed it down for good. They said the shows were lewd and immoral. They objected especially to Sally Keith, who wore tassels on her tits and buttocks that she could spin like airplane propellers in opposite directions. I wish I could have seen that. Afterward, the Howard was just a rat house. Half the rats in the Square lived there.
And now at last the world really was ending, and the Howard was going with it. I was in the Balloon when it burned. Everybody in all the stores rushed out to see the fire. Even Shine went out, just jumped up and left, locking the door behind him. It was the middle of the day and he didn’t even put up a “back soon” sign. If I hadn’t known it already, that alone would have told me he was through with the book business. We both were. The sirens wailed off and on the whole afternoon, and when I went by that night only the outer walls were still standing, a smoking ruin, and the street was full of ashy mud. A few people were walking up and down in the mud holding signs that said SAVE THE OLD HOWARD and PRESERVE OUR HERITAGE. It had never looked to me like anything particularly worth saving, and I had never cared for the low-life rats who lived there. Good riddance, I thought. At dawn the ruin was still smoking, when they brought in the huge crane. It had an enormous iron ball on the end of a steel cable, and when the crane moved its arm back and forth the ball began to swing, and it swung higher and higher until, with the ball high on the backswing, the crane suddenly surged forward, and the ball swung forward and down and up and crashed against the side of the Old Howard. The walls must have been really strong, because they couldn’t knock them down with the crane. And that was when they sent in the sappers, who put dynamite under the walls and set it off. They did this three times, and each time another wall came crashing down, and a billowing wave of ash and dust rolled down the street for blocks and made the dirty buildings a little bit dirtier.
The next morning General Logue gave the signal, and the acres of heavy machinery began the final assault on the Square, chewing at its edges, eating it up a building at a time. They used cranes with wrecking balls and enormous armored bulldozers whose drivers wore helmets and goggles and rode in steel cages. Each time a building would come crashing down the workers would cheer, and then they loaded the broken
pieces into gigantic dump trucks that carted them away. It went on like that for weeks. The streets were full of smoke and dust and the roaring of machines, and now and then an enormous whump rattled the store windows, and that was the dynamite.
For rats, peace is a lot like war anyway, so most of them went on with their lives as best they could. The average rat doesn’t see much difference between a standing building and a pile of rubble, except that rubble is a better place to hide in. When a building came down, the rats retreated to the ruins of the basements, into broken drains and cracks in the rubble. The Globe ran a story about the rats in the ruins, and then Logue sent in white-suited teams to finish them off with poison gas that they pumped into the rubble through hoses. That was when the exodus began in earnest. Every night I passed long lines of them heading out, sometimes whole families together. The Globe story had been headlined DEMOLITION UNCOVERS RAT NATION. It called the whole neighborhood “sleazy and rat infested.”
Infested is an interesting word. Regular people don’t infest, couldn’t infest if they tried. Nobody infests except fleas, rats, and Jews. When you infest, you are just asking for it. One day I was talking to a man in a bar, when he asked me what I did for a living. I answered, “I infest.” I thought that was a pretty ironic thing to say, but the man didn’t get it. He thought I had said “I invest” and started asking me for tips on where he should put his money. So I suggested he invest in construction. The shithead.
And then the Rialto closed. I went one night and it was dark. No more Lovelies and no more popcorn. Now I had to scrounge in the streets and ruins like the others, and I started seeing dead rats, sometimes in the middle of the sidewalk. Food was getting scarce, mostly just the leftovers from the workers’ lunches, and that was when the horrors began. Some of the starving rats were eating the corpses of their fellows like jackals. I felt ashamed for them, and at the same time I was ashamed at feeling ashamed. Even in the best of times I had not been strong or quick. I limped now, and I was not young anymore. I was hungry all the time. When would I eat corpses? Or would I be crippled by all-too-human scruples, a monster to the last? At night the gutters were full of rats on the run. I thought I glimpsed a couple of my brothers, but I was not sure. It had been a long time, and rats look a lot alike. I sometimes passed in my wanderings whole standing buildings with their facades torn off, all the rooms standing open to the air, some with the furniture still in them and wallpaper on the walls and bathrooms complete with a sink and toilet. They looked like enormous dollhouses.