Firmin (19 page)
Authors: Sam Savage
Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General
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?
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, picked 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.
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.
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 sea-birds. 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 over. 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. 0 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.
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