Firmin (11 page)
Authors: Sam Savage
Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General
I slept a long time. And when I woke I was not in heaven, unless heaven is a dusty place between two wooden joists. I still felt very weak but could not suck blood from my gums anymore. I was terribly thirsty and hungry as a wolf. The light from below streaming up around the edge of the Balloon was filled with dancing motes. Watching them, I was moved almost to tears by the beauty of it all. I crawled a few steps, and the feeling of the roughness of the laths against my feet was inexpressibly sweet. I crawled to the edge of the Balloon and looked down. He was sitting at the desk reading the paper as if nothing had happened. Looking down at his bald pate, I now had no trouble guessing at what sinister bumps he cunningly concealed beneath that monkish wreath of curly hair. I could easily have loosened the light fixture and sent it crashing down on his unprotected skull. Odd as it may seem, while such a thought did cross my mind, it found no purchase there. Throughout my life an enormous fatalism has always protected me from feelings of bitterness and rancor. And besides, it would be revenge on a phantom, since the Norman I had known and loved had turned out not to exist at all, to be in fact just a figment of my imagination, the product of an enormous misunderstanding for which I alone was to blame. He had turned out to be just another character in my dreams, with no more substance than the mad poet who the week before had been beating on Sarah Bernhardt’s door. I was heartbroken.
Rat Poison, or a Love Betrayed
. Everything I had thought fixed and firm had come unglued, and yet at the same time I felt reborn. I was ready, as they say, to turn the page. With Pembroke Books on the short path to oblivion and with its owner a murderer, bearing on his temples the mark of Cain, it was time to make plans.
Rat Poison, or a Love Betrayed
. Everything I had thought fixed and firm had come unglued, and yet at the same time I felt reborn. I was ready, as they say, to turn the page. With Pembroke Books on the short path to oblivion and with its owner a murderer, bearing on his temples the mark of Cain, it was time to make plans.
Chapter 8
T
here are two kinds of animals in the world, those with the gift of language and those without. Animals with the gift of language in turn fall into two classes, the talkers and the listeners. Most of the latter are dogs. Dogs, however, being exceedingly stupid, bear their aphasia with a kind of servile joy, which they express by wagging. That was not the case with me - I could not stand the thought that I would pass all my days in silence.
here are two kinds of animals in the world, those with the gift of language and those without. Animals with the gift of language in turn fall into two classes, the talkers and the listeners. Most of the latter are dogs. Dogs, however, being exceedingly stupid, bear their aphasia with a kind of servile joy, which they express by wagging. That was not the case with me - I could not stand the thought that I would pass all my days in silence.
Long ago, when I was just beginning my love affair with humans, I had come across in my reading various ingenious devices designed to mitigate that species’ natural inclination to malfunction and decay: prosthetic limbs, dentures, trusses, hearing aids, and eyeglasses. And so I early on hatched the idea of supplementing my natural deficiency with some sort of mechanical apparatus. When I first encountered the word
typewriter
, it was without explanation, as something obvious and familiar, and I was able to glean only that it was a thing with keys over which the nimble fingers of women sometimes flew. At first I thought it must be a kind of musical instrument and was puzzled by its connection with
clatter
. When I finally figured out that it was a machine for putting words on paper, I was tremendously excited. Though there was no typewriter anywhere that I could put my paws on, just the idea of it loosed a flood of images. I saw myself planting brilliant typewritten notes around the shop for Norman to find and puzzle over. In my dreams, he found them and scratched his head and left little missives in reply.
typewriter
, it was without explanation, as something obvious and familiar, and I was able to glean only that it was a thing with keys over which the nimble fingers of women sometimes flew. At first I thought it must be a kind of musical instrument and was puzzled by its connection with
clatter
. When I finally figured out that it was a machine for putting words on paper, I was tremendously excited. Though there was no typewriter anywhere that I could put my paws on, just the idea of it loosed a flood of images. I saw myself planting brilliant typewritten notes around the shop for Norman to find and puzzle over. In my dreams, he found them and scratched his head and left little missives in reply.
Well, we already know how Norman let me down. The typewriter ditto. I dug up detailed descriptions and labeled drawings, and I even saw them at work in the movies. The verdict was unequivocal: too big, too heavy. When you are small, it is not enough to be a genius. Even if I could depress the keys, perhaps by jumping on them from a height, I would never be able to wind paper into the roller - rats are not good at knobs - or work the long silver lever that made the carriage rasp back into place. I had learned from the movies that a typewriter really does make a kind of music, and I knew that I was never going to hear it for myself, the bright
ping
of accomplishment at the end of a line or the long applauding scrape of the carriage slamming back to start another. As things have turned out, when I finish a line I hear nothing, just the silence of thoughts falling endlessly down the hole of memory.
ping
of accomplishment at the end of a line or the long applauding scrape of the carriage slamming back to start another. As things have turned out, when I finish a line I hear nothing, just the silence of thoughts falling endlessly down the hole of memory.
But as I have said before, I can be very persistent when I want something badly enough, and I did not give up on the idea of conversing with humans. Only a couple of weeks after abandoning the typewriter project, I had discovered under LANGUAGES a slim yellow pamphlet called
Say It Without Sound: A Pictionary
, and there I found pictures of dozens of the signs used by the deaf to speak. When I first came across this book I was sure that at last I had found what I sought. Common words were arranged alphabetically, as in a dictionary, and opposite each entry as its ‘definition’ was a photo of a pretty woman in a red sweater making the corresponding sign. It was because of her, I suppose, that the idea of signing became associated with Lovelies. Next to the word
friend
, for example, was a picture of the shapely-sweatered Lovely holding her left and right index fingers together. Friendly fingers close together. So I got my hopes up again. Foolishly, it turned out, since I soon discovered that whoever had devised this silent language had intended it for creatures equipped with fingers. With what I had in the way of feet and claws, I found it impossible to stammer out even the most rudimentary phrases. I could manage at best a kind of digital stutter. I stood in front of the mirror, painful as that was, and balancing on the rim of the sink, struggled to say in sign, ‘What do you like to read?’ I tried letting my body stand for a palm and my legs for fingers and then midway through the phrase changed the principle and let my forelegs stand for arms and my hind legs for thumbs. Slapping my chest now, then crossing my legs, then curling up in a ball, I flung myself frantically about like a man with his clothes on fire. It was useless.
Say It Without Sound: A Pictionary
, and there I found pictures of dozens of the signs used by the deaf to speak. When I first came across this book I was sure that at last I had found what I sought. Common words were arranged alphabetically, as in a dictionary, and opposite each entry as its ‘definition’ was a photo of a pretty woman in a red sweater making the corresponding sign. It was because of her, I suppose, that the idea of signing became associated with Lovelies. Next to the word
friend
, for example, was a picture of the shapely-sweatered Lovely holding her left and right index fingers together. Friendly fingers close together. So I got my hopes up again. Foolishly, it turned out, since I soon discovered that whoever had devised this silent language had intended it for creatures equipped with fingers. With what I had in the way of feet and claws, I found it impossible to stammer out even the most rudimentary phrases. I could manage at best a kind of digital stutter. I stood in front of the mirror, painful as that was, and balancing on the rim of the sink, struggled to say in sign, ‘What do you like to read?’ I tried letting my body stand for a palm and my legs for fingers and then midway through the phrase changed the principle and let my forelegs stand for arms and my hind legs for thumbs. Slapping my chest now, then crossing my legs, then curling up in a ball, I flung myself frantically about like a man with his clothes on fire. It was useless.
Desperate situations, however, breed desperate hopes, and so after being nearly poisoned to death by Shine I went back to the idea of signing. At this point I figured a rudimentary phrase might be all I needed, just something to let people know that I was smart and friendly. It had been a long time since my first attempts, and though few things left the store without my knowledge, I was apprehensive that someone might have slipped out with the pamphlet one day when I was away at the Rialto or ratnapping in the ceiling. Someone deaf, of course, and therefore very silent. So as soon as Shine had locked the door that night and coughed once (a habit he had, a kind of hello to the evening), and carried his footfalls down the street, I tumbled to the ground floor and tore across the shop to the corner where the book used to be. And where it was still: a yellow slice sandwiched like cheese between the dark pumpernickel of a Serbo-Croatian dictionary and the paler rye of Langston’s
Fundamentals of Business German
. When with great effort I had contrived to dislodge it from the shelf, I noticed that the price penciled on the inside cover had shriveled from twenty-five cents to a nickel.
Fundamentals of Business German
. When with great effort I had contrived to dislodge it from the shelf, I noticed that the price penciled on the inside cover had shriveled from twenty-five cents to a nickel.
Turning the pages slowly, I questioned the Lovely. I was looking for the simplest and most intelligible phrase permitted by my physiological limitations, and in no time at all I had learned to say ‘good-bye zipper.’ It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was the best I could manage. I was able to say this by standing on my hind legs and waving a forepaw - waving good-bye - followed by a zipping motion up my chest with the same paw. I practiced in front of the mirror, wave-zip, wave-zip, until I had it down pat - which brought me face-to-face with a new problem: who was I going to say this to? Obvious answer: a deaf person. Which at least gave me a new goal in life: find a deaf person. Deaf people, however, do not grow on trees. I kept my eyes open, hoping one would just happen to walk into the store, in which case I planned to rush out and introduce myself. I don’t think any ever did, though one day an old man came in and spent a long time browsing and finally picked out a book and paid for it without saying a word. So he might have been deaf. But with Shine around I figured I could not take any chances. The man was old and frail, and had I rushed out and thrown myself at his feet, he might not have been able to protect me.
I had never physically traveled outside of Scollay Square, but I knew a lot about Boston from books and maps and could see it all in my head stretched out below me, Arlington to Columbus Point, as from an airplane. Now, like a true Axion, my task was to make contact with the dominant species. I had of course already tried that with Shine and had nearly met an Axion’s fate. But wide reading had left no doubt in my mind that in addition to crowds of sadists, fiends, psychopaths, and poisoners, the dominant species also sported exemplars of gentleness and compassion, and that most of the latter were women. I could have sought contact in the streets of the Square, but something in the faces there warned me not to. I have already confessed that at the time I was still very bourgeois, and consequently I wanted as my first interlocutor, as, so to speak, my virginal partner in human converse, what I then thought of as a superior class of person. With the most likely spots for that sort of superior female person - the campuses of Wellesley and Radcliffe and the Saint Claire Nunnery in Jamaica Plain - out of reach, I fell back on the Public Garden, just a few blocks west of the Square. And in this you see again that despite a tendency to pickiness I have all four feet on the ground and can be quite practical when I have to.
I needed a rainy night for travel, when people would be too busy clinging to the newspapers and umbrellas above their heads as they dashed between cars and doorways to notice a small, low animal creeping its way westward beneath the parked vehicles. I did not have to wait long. The following Saturday, Shine left the shop at five o’clock under the dripping dome of a black umbrella. And sometime after midnight, when I set out for the Public Garden, the rain was coming down hard, though the asphalt beneath the cars was still dry and warm. Only the intersections presented problems, open spaces to be crossed at a sprint. I bided my time at those places - I had not forgotten poor Peewee - and it was nearly dawn when I finally crossed the Common and made my final dash into the Public Garden.
The grass there was soft and smelled good and sweet. It was my first grass, and I ate some. The rain had stopped, and the sky was paling in the east. After crawling under parked cars, from car to car all the way up Tremont Street, my legs and the underparts of my body were black and matted with grit and oil. I cleaned myself as best I could, then crept under some bushes and slept. When I woke, the sun was shining, and I saw the trees. I had never seen real trees before. The bush I was hiding under was near a concrete path that ran all the way across the Public Garden. I looked out and saw people in nice clothes walking. Church bells were ringing. I had a strange detached feeling, as if I were seeing myself from above. A rat that should be dead was not dead. Weak and dirty but in no way dead, he was alive under a bush, and he had a plan.
I watched the people walking, watched what they did with their hands. Were their hands talking? All morning I watched hands swing by sides, hide in pockets, pat down wind-ruffled hair, wave hello, point at squirrels, make fists, toss peanuts, pick noses, scratch crotches, and hold other hands. The hands all went busily about these affairs without ever speaking. I ate grass. Twice I darted out and pinched peanuts meant for squirrels. It was not enough. I had not eaten a real meal for over a day. I was feeling weak, and the weakness made me afraid.
It was nearly dark when I saw them coming, two women and a little girl between them, walking up from Arlington Street. They were wearing nice clothes and had shiny shoes. Above the girl’s head the women’s hands were talking. I was sorry that I had not spent more time studying the pictionary so that I could understand what the hands were saying. My heart was pounding. I worried about my weakness, that in my fear and excitement I was going to faint. I watched as they came closer, and when they were close I rushed out into the middle of the walk, and my paws said ‘good-bye zipper.’ I tried to shout it by making my gestures as violent as possible. Good-bye zipper. Good-bye zipper. Absurdly, I tried to heighten the effect by squeaking as loud as I could. I could tell that I was getting through. The women and the girl had stopped and all three were staring open-mouthed. Good-bye zipper. I had to stand on my hind legs to say this, and in my enthusiasm I lost my balance and fell over backward. One of the women started making a breathy grunting sound, huh huh huh, she might have been laughing, and then the little girl screamed. I am not clear on the exact progression of events after that. Some people were shouting ‘Rat, rat!’ A man’s voice said, ‘Of course it’s not a squirrel,’ and another voice said, ‘It’s having a fit,’ and a third said, ‘Rabies,’ and then they all were talking at once. A man came with a walking stick and tried to poke me in the stomach. I was back on my feet and running, and the man tried to strike me with the stick. I heard it crack against the pavement, and then it went up in the air and whooshed and came down on my back just as I made the grass edge, and someone shouted, ‘Don’t hurt it.’ I got into the row of bushes and ran. I did not feel any pain but I knew that I was dragging something heavy behind me. I turned my head and saw that my left leg was twisted the wrong way. It did not move as I ran, and I dragged it behind me like a sack.
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