Firmin (6 page)
Authors: Sam Savage
Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General
And you don’t have to believe stories to love them. I love all stories. I love the progression of beginning, middle, and end. I love the slow accumulation of meaning, the misty landscapes of the imagination, the mazy walks, the wooded slopes, the reflecting pools, the tragic twists and comic stumbles. The only literature I cannot abide is rat literature, including mouse literature. I despise good-natured old Ratty in
The Wind in the Willows
. I piss down the throats of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling,
cute
, they stick in my craw like fish bones.
The Wind in the Willows
. I piss down the throats of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling,
cute
, they stick in my craw like fish bones.
And now, at the end of it all, I cannot make myself believe anymore that many real people have Destinies, and I am sure that rats never do.
Despite my intelligence, my tact, the delicacy and refinement of my feelings, my growing erudition, I remained a creature of great disabilities. Reading is one thing, speaking is another, and I don’t mean public speaking. I do not mean that I suffered from social phobia, though that was in fact the case. No, I mean actual vocal utterance - of that I was not capable. Loquacious to the point of chatter, I was condemned to silence. The fact is, I had no voice. All the beautiful sentences flying around in my head like butterflies were in fact flying in a cage they could never get out of. All the lovely words that I mulled and mouthed in the strangled silence of my thought were as useless as the thousands, perhaps millions, of words that I had torn from books and swallowed, the incohesive fragments of entire novels, plays, epic poems, intimate diaries, and scandalous confessions - all down the tube, mute, useless, and wasted. The problem is physiological: I don’t have the right kind of vocal cords. I spent hours declaiming Shakespeare’s lines. I was never able to get beyond a few incomprehensible variations on the basic squeak. Here is Hamlet, dagger in hand:
squeak squeak squeak
. (And there is Firmin crushed beneath a barrage of boos and seat cushions.) I do better with the lines where Macbeth talks of life being a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing: a few pathetic squeaks serve pretty well there. Oh, what a clown! I laugh, in order not to weep - which, of course, I also cannot do. Or laugh either, for that matter, except in my head, where it is more painful than tears.
squeak squeak squeak
. (And there is Firmin crushed beneath a barrage of boos and seat cushions.) I do better with the lines where Macbeth talks of life being a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing: a few pathetic squeaks serve pretty well there. Oh, what a clown! I laugh, in order not to weep - which, of course, I also cannot do. Or laugh either, for that matter, except in my head, where it is more painful than tears.
It was during the period of tunnel exploration - I was still very young, having scarcely graduated from the children’s classics and possessing only a shaky grasp of the world - that I saw myself in a mirror for the first time. The door under RESTROOM carried a handwritten sign that said PLEASE KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED. And people did. After the noise of rushing water and before the sound of footsteps on the stairs, there had always intervened the forbidding click of a latch. I was in the corner behind the water heater the day the silence fell, louder than any click, between the flushing and the footfalls. I knew right away what had happened, and when the shop closed that evening I crept out into the flickering. The door under RESTROOM stood open, and a light was on in the small chamber beyond, brighter than anything I had ever imagined. At first I was dazzled by the light and bewildered by the porcelain figures within. These closely resembled the altars I had seen in
A Child’s Picture Bible
, and I assumed I was entering some sort of temple. The smooth white surfaces and the shiny silver fixtures seemed very solemn. (At that age I still had difficulty distinguishing between solemn and sanitary.) I first explored the rim of an oval basin half-filled with water, its interior streaked with brown stains, and then I nibbled a bit from a roll of soft white paper attached to the wall beside it - it tasted like Emily Post. From there I was able to jump to the high altar, which turned out to be another basin, but empty this time, with a round silver-rimmed hole at the bottom. Above it, slanting slightly downward, hung a large metal-framed mirror in which the room behind me tilted crazily. Though my intellect was still fairly undeveloped, I grasped immediately the principle of the thing. I stood on my hind legs on the basin’s outer rim, and by stretching my body up as high as I could I managed to see myself plain for the first time. I had of course seen the members of my family, and I suppose I really ought to have been able to infer my own appearance from theirs. Yet we differed in so many important ways, I had assumed - willfully assumed, I now realized - that we would differ in this respect also.
A Child’s Picture Bible
, and I assumed I was entering some sort of temple. The smooth white surfaces and the shiny silver fixtures seemed very solemn. (At that age I still had difficulty distinguishing between solemn and sanitary.) I first explored the rim of an oval basin half-filled with water, its interior streaked with brown stains, and then I nibbled a bit from a roll of soft white paper attached to the wall beside it - it tasted like Emily Post. From there I was able to jump to the high altar, which turned out to be another basin, but empty this time, with a round silver-rimmed hole at the bottom. Above it, slanting slightly downward, hung a large metal-framed mirror in which the room behind me tilted crazily. Though my intellect was still fairly undeveloped, I grasped immediately the principle of the thing. I stood on my hind legs on the basin’s outer rim, and by stretching my body up as high as I could I managed to see myself plain for the first time. I had of course seen the members of my family, and I suppose I really ought to have been able to infer my own appearance from theirs. Yet we differed in so many important ways, I had assumed - willfully assumed, I now realized - that we would differ in this respect also.
In the end, seeing myself for the first time was not at all like seeing just any old rat. The experience was more personal, and more painful too. While it was easy enough to gaze at the unlovely shapes of Shunt or Peewee, it was horrible to have to look upon my own similar aspect. I realized, of course, that the intensity of this pain was in exact proportion to the enormity of my vanity, but that thought only made things worse. Not just ugly, but vain as well - which only added ridiculous to the pile. There I stood, tilted slightly, in irrefutable detail - short, thick-waisted, hairy, and chinless. Firmin: fur-man. Ridiculous. The chin, or the lack thereof, caused me special pain. It seemed to point - though in fact this nonentity was incapable of anything as bold as pointing - to a gross lack of moral fiber. And I thought the dark bulging eyes gave me a revoltingly froglike air. It was, in short, a shifty, dishonest face, untrustworthy, the face of a really low character. Firmin the vermin. But the details - no chin, pointy nose, yellow teeth, etc. - were not important in themselves when compared to the overall impression of ugliness. Even back then, when my ideas of beauty reached no further than Tenniel’s drawings of Alice, I knew that
this
was ugly. And the contrast, the heartbreakingly unbridgeable
distance
, became only greater when later on I became aware of truly beautiful creatures like Ginger, Fred, Rita, Gary, Ava, and all the Lovelies. It was not tolerable.
this
was ugly. And the contrast, the heartbreakingly unbridgeable
distance
, became only greater when later on I became aware of truly beautiful creatures like Ginger, Fred, Rita, Gary, Ava, and all the Lovelies. It was not tolerable.
From then on I went to great lengths to avoid my own reflection. It was easy to stay away from mirrors, but windows and hubcaps were a different story. Whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in one of those, I was instantly horrified, as if I had seen a monster. Of course I quickly recognized that the monster was just myself again, and I cannot describe the grief I then felt. So I developed a little mental trick: whenever this happened, instead of saying ‘that’s me’ and bursting into tears, I would say ‘that’s him’ and run away.
During those early days, and especially after I had won access to the main floor, I burned the candle at both ends, and except for the times when hunger drove me out into the world to scrounge for food, I used up most of my night hours reading and traveling in the bookshop and spent the better part of every day glued to the Balloon or the Balcony, fearful of missing something of the goings-on below. Twice I was so tired at night that I fell asleep on a book, and each time woke with a start at the rattle of a key in the front door - Norman was opening the shop - only to dive through the Rathole in the nick of time. And once, nodding off at my post, I almost fell out of the Balloon.
It was from the Balloon that, some weeks earlier, I had glimpsed Norman for the first time. I had not glimpsed all of Norman though, just the shiny dome of his head, and the tops of his shoulders and arms. He was not Norman yet either, he was still just the Owner of the Desk. It had taken me a long time to screw up the courage to peer down from the Balloon during store hours. But then early one morning I finally managed. Hearing no sound from below but the plaintive creaking of the chair and an occasional rattle of paper, I placed a cautious eye at the rim of the Confidential Crack, and I saw him there at the desk. Elbows on the chair arms, he was reading a newspaper. With my amazing eyesight I could read the paper as well, but at that moment I was more interested in reading what was written on Norman’s bald head. My life has been marked by a series of extraordinary coincidences - for a long time I took these as further signs that I was in possession of a Destiny - and it so happened that just before I looked down on Norman’s head for the first time I had been learning a thing or two about skull-reading.
I had been working under RARE BOOKS AND FIRST EDITIONS for the previous week or so and had spent part of the previous night hunched over Franz Joseph Gall’s
The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular
, a ground-breaking work on phrenology. While I was skeptical at first that a person’s character could be read from the bumps and dimples on his skull, a systematic palpation of my own furry pate - by means of a forepaw - had disclosed large protuberances (amounting almost to deformations) right where you would expect them. The bulge on my forehead - a wartlike knob I habitually rub when puzzled - is indicative, according to Gall, of prodigious linguistic endowment, while the sad-sack ridges below my eye sockets are signs of an elevated ‘spiritual’ temperament. I also discovered at the base of my skull telltale bulges for ‘adhesiveness’ and ‘amativeness,’ indicating the presence - and can I deny it? - of ‘a tendency to form strong attachments to others’ and ‘a proclivity to lust and carnal appetite.’ Finally, just to show that even a skull is capable of a little irony, I bear on my temples small but unmistakable ridges produced by the outward thrust of irrepressible Hope.
The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular
, a ground-breaking work on phrenology. While I was skeptical at first that a person’s character could be read from the bumps and dimples on his skull, a systematic palpation of my own furry pate - by means of a forepaw - had disclosed large protuberances (amounting almost to deformations) right where you would expect them. The bulge on my forehead - a wartlike knob I habitually rub when puzzled - is indicative, according to Gall, of prodigious linguistic endowment, while the sad-sack ridges below my eye sockets are signs of an elevated ‘spiritual’ temperament. I also discovered at the base of my skull telltale bulges for ‘adhesiveness’ and ‘amativeness,’ indicating the presence - and can I deny it? - of ‘a tendency to form strong attachments to others’ and ‘a proclivity to lust and carnal appetite.’ Finally, just to show that even a skull is capable of a little irony, I bear on my temples small but unmistakable ridges produced by the outward thrust of irrepressible Hope.
Peering over the edge of the Balloon, I mapped the hills and dales of Norman’s bean. Posted there as plain as day were the signs of intelligence, spirituality, mental energy, firmness, and - this was the best of all - a regular hillock pointing to ‘philoprogenitiveness,’ defined by Gall as a ‘particular feeling that leads one to watch over and provide for helpless offspring.’ This discovery of the true nature of the Owner of the Desk filled me with happiness - for the first time in my life I did not feel alone in the world. It gave me a sense of security and - as Gall might have put it - a strong feeling of adhesiveness. I was instantly in love.
Here I seem to hear sounds of impatience, a pointed shifting of a chair, a deliberate snort. The sight of my happiness, I suppose, goads you into pointing out the painfully obvious, and you wonder aloud if it had never occurred to me that I might not exactly belong to the category of ‘helpless offspring.’ The short answer to that one is: never. Looking back I can see that the whole near-tragedy, which I shall get to shortly, was caused by the simple fact that Norman’s head was not entirely hairless. My investigation of his character, however diligent, was blunted by an ill-kempt growth of dark curls shrouding his temples. Had I been able to perch on a shoulder and explore those temples with my forepaws I have no doubt as to what I would have found: crescent-shaped ridges over the ears, indicating ‘destructiveness,’ aided and abetted by a pair of wedge-shaped bulges, pointing to ‘secretiveness.’ But all that was in the future. For now it is appropriate to place beneath the picture of Norman at his desk the caption THE FIRST HUMAN BEING F. EVER LOVED.
Chapter 5
I
traveled in my books but I no longer ate them, and food - the mundane, illiterate kind - was a constant problem. I was forced to leave the shop every night, ramp up my courage and creep out under the cellar door, to forage around the Square, cringing in shadows, creeping down drains, racing from dark spot to dark spot.
Diary of a Nightcrawler
. As the year wore on, the days growing colder, then warmer, I began to notice changes in the neighborhood, and I don’t mean the stunted flowerings of a few ragged clumps of grass and daffodils. Indeed, the changes I am referring to stood in ironic contrast to those meager burgeonings. On nearly every block businesses were vanishing, and at night the side streets, and even the Square itself, emptied out earlier. Apart from the knots of sailors in the doorways of bars, there was often no one around after eleven. There were more broken windows in the buildings, and these often went unmended or were replaced by plywood sheets. Trash piled up in alleys and even on the sidewalks in front of some stores. Cars were abandoned at the curb, to be slowly picked to pieces by scavengers, and the brick buildings themselves seemed to sag with age, as though, like old people or old rats, they had lost the will to hold themselves erect. Rats moved into the cars, building cozy burrows in the seats.
traveled in my books but I no longer ate them, and food - the mundane, illiterate kind - was a constant problem. I was forced to leave the shop every night, ramp up my courage and creep out under the cellar door, to forage around the Square, cringing in shadows, creeping down drains, racing from dark spot to dark spot.
Diary of a Nightcrawler
. As the year wore on, the days growing colder, then warmer, I began to notice changes in the neighborhood, and I don’t mean the stunted flowerings of a few ragged clumps of grass and daffodils. Indeed, the changes I am referring to stood in ironic contrast to those meager burgeonings. On nearly every block businesses were vanishing, and at night the side streets, and even the Square itself, emptied out earlier. Apart from the knots of sailors in the doorways of bars, there was often no one around after eleven. There were more broken windows in the buildings, and these often went unmended or were replaced by plywood sheets. Trash piled up in alleys and even on the sidewalks in front of some stores. Cars were abandoned at the curb, to be slowly picked to pieces by scavengers, and the brick buildings themselves seemed to sag with age, as though, like old people or old rats, they had lost the will to hold themselves erect. Rats moved into the cars, building cozy burrows in the seats.
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