Firmin

by Sam Savage

  One morning Shine arrived at the store accompanied by two men in overalls. The men took the desk and chair and all the bookcases that weren’t attached to the walls, and they loaded them into a big truck called Mayflower and left. After they had driven away, Shine walked around the shop a while. He did not cry this time. There were still a few books scattered about on the floor and he walked around kicking them. Then he went out and locked the door. I watched him drop the key into his jacket pocket and turn down the street. I never saw him again.

  At that point I still had every intention of following Shine’s example, and that of hundreds of my kind. Any minute, I thought, I’m going to beat it out of here. I thought that maybe I would try and find another bookstore somewhere, perhaps across the river in Cambridge, or maybe go to the Common and hook up with one of Jerry’s old pals. And yet something I could not explain even to myself, a lethargy or maybe a torpor, kept me from making the move, and every day I put off going. I was still able to scrounge enough food to get by, though never enough to satisfy. The destruction had now reached Brattle Street, and it was clear that in not many days it was going to break over Cornhill. I felt weary and old. A rat’s life is short and painful, painful but quickly over, and yet it feels long while it lasts. For days, when I was not hunting up less and less food in the streets, I wandered around the empty store. There wasn’t much left to read, just a few boring religious pamphlets. I read them anyway.

  Two mornings ago the rain was coming down hard, washing dust and debris off the piles of rubble and forming muddy rivers in the street. On the floor of Pembroke Books, crossed by the shadows of raindrops, were scattered the remains of several suppers that I had dragged in from the street, morsels and crumbs of food mixed with the orts and offal of the rat life—a greasy wrapper, a greasy strand of bacon rind, peanut shells, pizza crust. The men had stopped working because of the rain, and the roar of the machines had stopped, and now just the rain was roaring. I felt agitated and depressed and spent the morning dragging back and forth in the store, back and forth. The rain did not let up; at noon the day was already growing dark, and I decided to go upstairs and play. It was hard going up the Elevator, and in the silence my breath was loud.

  The light was different in the room. I noticed that as soon as I poked my nose up out of the hole. It was not raining, and sunlight was streaming through the open window. The furniture was all back, the bed and the enamel-topped table, the old leather chair, the bookshelves, and all the books. The closet door was ajar, and I saw that it was full of junk again. The rusty trash can was still there and my piano with its chips and scratches. Jerry, I thought, Jerry is coming home. I formulated RESURRECTION and let it glow there. I sat down at the piano and doodled around a little, just to loosen the old fingers, waiting for the footsteps on the stairs; then I went into Cole Porter, “Miss Otis Regrets” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” In the end, I would rather be Cole Porter than God. I moved on to Gershwin and “I Got Rhythm,” and soon I was really getting into it, the piano was jumping and I was bouncing around on the bench and singing at the top of my voice. But even lost in the music as I was, with pictures floating in and out between my ears so fast it made me dizzy, I was aware that someone had entered the room very quietly and was now sitting on the bed behind me. I could feel the listening. I thought, Jerry. I kept right on singing, and while I sang I slowly turned my head and looked.

  I had never seen her in color before, and I did not recognize her at first. She was sitting on the bed, hands folded in her lap, rings on her fingers. She had on the black dress she wore in Swingtime. I had loved the way she looked then and the way the swirling dress would float up to her hips when she danced. It was the dress that clued me in to who she was. She had changed that much. Only her voice had not changed. “Gee, that’s swell,” she said, “please don’t stop.” So I kept going. I went through the whole piece again, this time with my own variations, and then I stood up and bowed. I signed good-bye zipper, and I could see that she understood. She laughed, and it was not like your laughter. She was still beautiful, even though I could see that something heavy, time or sadness, had pooled in vague loops below her chin and crinkled the corners of her eyes. They were blue.

  I went to the window. It was dark outside. She came over and stood behind me. I could feel her looking. I could feel the black dress like a cloud behind me. I was aware of being tall.

  From the window I looked out over a vast plain of rubble, as in the pictures of Hiroshima, reaching all the way to the horizon. I was surprised the destruction had gone so far; it had not been planned that way. From the alley below my window to where it crashed into the sky lay a rocky prairie. It had been made by breaking buildings, breaking them up into windows, doors, stair treads, boards, bricks, doorknobs, and breaking these in turn into pieces so small they did not even have names, and spreading all of it out and grinding it down and running it over until it had no meaning left and was nothing but rubble and emptiness, and in the middle of it all stood the Casino Theater. It was flooded with light, and you could see the scars on its sides where the adjacent buildings had been torn away. With no street to be on, it was a building with no address. I named it the Last Thing Standing. On each side of the ticket window were the two angels I had first seen the night Mama took Luweena and me on orientation. They were still wearing black rectangles across their breasts and crotches, one foot lifted as if dancing. Music, faint and tinny, like something made by a music box, was coming from the building, wafting across the rubble. It was incredibly sad, the nostalgic down-at-the-heels sadness of an old circus on the edge of bankruptcy. The entire theater was illuminated and on the marquee in white running lights with no bulb missing were the words THE NEXT BIG DEAL and below that ALL TICKETS HALF PRICE.

  They were lining up at the ticket window, three or four abreast, the line snaking across the rubble field. And people were still arriving by ones and twos, walking in out of the darkness from every direction. They carried bundles and suitcases, and some led children by the hand. They were happy to be approaching the lighted area around the theater, but no one was running, and they made no sound at all, or only small sounds, whimperings and scrapings and the like, that were drowned by the music, faint as it was. Hundreds and hundreds of people in a line shuffling silently forward between the angels, who each raised one foot as if dancing. I posted REFUGEES beneath the picture. And I thought, Jerry would have gotten a kick out of this.

  Ginger was standing beside me at the window. I was wondering if she could see it too, when she said, “That’s where I’m working. Every night I take my clothes off in a number called ‘The Dance at the End of the World.’ It drives ’em crazy.”

  I thought, You work as a stripper?

  “Only as a night job.”

  So you can read my thoughts.

  “Your thoughts and more than your thoughts—your beliefs and desires.”

  I don’t believe anything.

  “You believe you are a rat.”

  The music grew suddenly louder, swelling to a slow swing tune with lots of brass.

  “Here, this is for you,” she said. She handed me a box of popcorn. The box was red and white and had a picture of a clown on it with a geyser of popcorn erupting from the top of his hat.

  And there, in the middle of Jerry’s old room, she began to dance. I had never seen her dance like that, except maybe sometimes in my head. It was the sort of stepless dance the Lovelies did in the Rialto after midnight, a bump and grind, hips undulating to the beat, slow and hard. I climbed up into the armchair with my popcorn, and I watched. She stepped from her dress, and picking it up on the toe of her foot, sent it sailing into a corner. She had nothing on underneath. She danced naked. She caressed the rat nest of fur between her legs. Her eyes were half-closed, her lips parted. I have never really understood this expression, though I think it indicates a special kind of human longing. I was sorry we did not have a rug so she could do that part too. And then she swooped upon me, picke
d me up, and we danced together. She danced and I floated. She held me between her breasts. I buried my head in her smell; it was like wet leather. We swayed and whirled; it was like flying. And the walls of the room moved out, like a stage set, and we were dancing in a huge white place. I closed my eyes and imagined we were flying over the city and all the people in the streets were looking up and pointing. They had never seen anything like it, a naked angel carrying a rat. We danced a long time, we danced faster, the music grew louder, it was madness and frenzy. Then suddenly it stopped. The silence came crashing in and the walls rushed back into place. She let herself fall backward onto the bed. She was laughing, still holding me to her. I could feel her chest rise and fall beneath me. And I felt the grip of her fingers loosen on my back, and when I looked up her eyes were shut. I wriggled from her grip and slowly crept toward her face, smelling the smell of her neck and then the warm smell of her breath. Little diamonds of sweat glistened on her upper lip, and I drank them one by one. They were salty. I knew from my reading that this was also the taste of tears.

  She sat up, pitching me backward onto the bed.

  “Time’s up,” she said. She crossed the room to where she had kicked her dress. She bent over and I saw she was slipping her legs into black pants.

  What happened to the dress?

  She didn’t answer. After the black trousers came a white shirt and then a black business jacket to match the trousers. She was leaving. Had I been a man I could have groveled at her feet, clung to her ankles and wept. I didn’t want her to go, ever.

  Don’t go.

  Her face grew hard. “Don’t be stupid, Firmin. This really is the end.”

  No. I’ll make you stay. Watch this.

  I did all my tricks for her. I couldn’t do a full flip anymore because of my bad leg and my old age and my heavy head, and each time I tried I landed on my back, which for laughs turned out to be just as good. Then I went to a book and pretended to read. She laughed. But she was leaving anyway. Through the window I could see the dawn breaking.

  “The job at the Casino is night work. My day job is with the city.”

  You work for them? But, Ginger, you can’t do that. They are the enemy.

  “Everyone has two jobs, Firmin, a day job and a night job, because everyone has two sides, a dark and a light. You do, they do, I do. No one can escape it.”

  Then I noticed an enormous briefcase on the metal table. She snapped it open and riffled through a sheaf of official-looking papers, finally pulling one out and holding it toward me. “Everyone is his own enemy, Firmin, you should know that by now.”

  She laid the paper open on the floor in front of me. I stood on it and read, NOTICE OF EVICTION.

  I let my gaze run down the page to the final paragraph. “And pursuant thereof, the Rat Firmin, trespasser, vagabond, bum, pedant, voyeur, gnawer of books, ridiculous dreamer, liar, windbag, and pervert, is hereby evicted from this planet.” It was signed by General Logue himself.

  Why do you give me this? It’s an eviction notice.

  “Or an invitation. It’s up to you.”

  She left, pulling the door shut behind her. I could hear the sharp click of the latch, followed by the long descending clicks of her heels going down the stairs. There was a soft curving sound that was the street door opening, and then the noise, growing suddenly louder, of a bulldozer moving up Cornhill, its steel treads clicking.

  I scrambled up on the armchair and stretched out on my back, four feet in the air. I closed my eyes. I did more than close them, I scrunched them up. I hauled out my little telescope and looked for Mama. I started to tell the story of my life. It began, “This is the saddest story I ever heard.” I lay there all morning, the sentences arriving like caravans out of the desert, bringing pictures. I wondered what I was going to call it. But the story kept getting mixed up with water. At first it was glasses of water popping up in the wrong places, then it was buckets of water, and finally it was rivers and torrents of water, the poor camels upside down in it, knobby legs flailing as their humps dragged them to the bottom. I was terribly thirsty. Maybe it was the salt of her sweat that made me feel this way, but I knew I had to find water. I climbed out of the chair where I would gladly have spent the rest of my life had there been water and took the Elevator down. I was weaker than I had thought, and several times I almost fell. I wondered whether I could ever get back up.

  I got off at the store. The front window was smashed and the rain had left a thin puddle at the edge of the sill. I drank it all and then licked the dampness from the big pieces of broken glass. I crawled into the corner where the cash register used to stand and fell asleep. For the first time in weeks I did not dream anything. Late that afternoon I was awakened by a tremendous jolt, followed by a shower of dust and plaster. I opened my eyes again. A narrow fissure had opened in the wall above me. I poked my head into it and looked out at what was left of our street. Most of the buildings that had lined the other side were gone, and in their place rose mountains of rubble. A huge yellow machine, mud splattered and growling, was roaming like a dinosaur through the canyons. Its name was Caterpillar. As I watched, it opened an enormous mouth and began to chew up a concrete pillar that had once been part of the back wall of Dawson’s Beer and Ale, the bits and pieces tumbling from its jaws like rice from a baby’s mouth. A Window on the End of the World. After a few minutes I turned away. I had spent a lifetime looking at the world through cracks, and I was sick of it.

  Yet even as I turned from that fissure, with its view of the dying present, it was only to face another, this one a crack in time. Memories were pouring through it like an ocean.

  And I was thirsty again. I went down to the basement, using the steps this time, to see if there was any water left in the toilet. By the time I had reached the bottom step the whole building was shaking. The concrete floor seemed to undulate beneath my feet. The fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling, which had flickered and hummed overhead while I, so long ago, just yesterday, had chewed and read my way toward another kind of light, had flickered out weeks ago. Now it was swinging like a dark pendulum, swinging and shaking, to the rhythm of the great waves of destruction breaking over Cornhill. I passed beneath it, and an instant later it crashed to the floor behind me. Curved bits of milky glass flew across the room, some of them falling on my head and back like a dry rain. Rat’s feet over broken glass, quiet and meaningless. The door under RESTROOM was open and the toilet bowl lay in two pieces on the floor. No water there. In my dry cellar. Ginger was right, this really was the end. I thought of my little piano up on the top floor, crushed beneath falling beams. There was nothing I could do to save it now. When the first beam struck it, I imagined it giving forth a last tiny sound of its own, and no one would hear it. I thought about climbing to the top of one of the giant dollhouses and throwing myself off, but I didn’t think I weighed enough to die that way. I would just float to the ground like a leaf. I mention those thoughts because that was what was going through my head when I caught sight of the book. It was jammed under the water heater, just a corner showing. I recognized it right away and went over and pulled it out. I could see the marks of my baby teeth on the cover, and some of the torn pages still showed the prints of Flo’s dirty paws where she had braced herself for tearing.

  And then I was sure.

  It took a long time and all my strength to work the book around behind the heater and into what was left of our old nest in the corner, a few piles of soiled confetti with almost no smell left. Once in there I could scarcely hear the sounds of the world. The roar of trucks became the wind. The crashes and booms of falling walls were the surf beating on black rocks. And the sirens and car horns became the sad calls of seabirds. It was time to go. Jerry used to say that if you didn’t want to live your life over again, then you had wasted it. I don’t know. Even though I consider myself lucky to have lived the life I did, I would not like to be that lucky twice. I tore off a piece from the back of the book and folded it over and ove
r. It became a wad. I made myself a little dip in the confetti, and holding the wad down with my forepaws, I read what was written on the top, and the words rang in my ears like trumpets: “Ho hang! Hang ho! And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free.” I turned around once in my nest. I unfolded the wad, unfolding it all the way out till it was once more a piece from a page, a page from a book, a book from a man. I unfolded it all the way out and I read: “But I’m loothing them that’s here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary.” I stared at the words and they did not swim or blur. Rats have no tears. Dry and cold was the world and beautiful the words. Words of good-bye and farewell, farewell and so long, from the little one and the Big One. I folded the passage up again and I ate it.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Scollay Square was an actual place, its destruction an actual event. Firmin, however, is a work of fiction. I have sometimes distorted—or permitted Firmin to distort—events and geography for the sake of the story. For example, though Edward Logue, supervisor of the “renovation,” was indeed a bombardier during the Second World War in Europe, he was not, as far as I know, nicknamed the Bombardier, nor I think did he include photographs of the ruins of Stuttgart and Dresden in his résumés. And though the Millerites’ original tabernacle was in fact turned into a theater, that building burned to the ground in 1846; the Old Howard Theater that Firmin would have known was built to replace it. And while there really was a Rialto Theater and it was indeed known as the Scratch House, I don’t know that it showed pornographic movies after midnight. I am indebted to David Kruh’s Always Something Doing: Boston’s Infamous Scollay Square for much information about the history of the Square, though Mr. Kruh is not of course responsible for any of the distortions or errors. Finally I would like to acknowledge a debt to the late George Gloss, owner of the Brattle Book Shop in old Scollay Square, who sold me for next to nothing volumes I still own today, who probably never possessed a safe full of banned literature, and who, faced with the destruction of his store, gave away all the books you could carry in five minutes.