Firmin Page 10

  I was close to that point when I started work on the Great Hole. I have learned a lot about holes over time, about where you are likely to find one—ill-fitting light fixtures, loose baseboards, and wherever plumbing has been run through walls or floors—and patient exploration inch by inch had convinced me that in Jerry’s room there was nothing of the sort. The only hole of substance, if substance is the word, was a small crack around the drainpipe of the sink, big enough for a fat mouse, just maybe, but not for even the most emaciated of rats. But as heir and student of the ancient Pembroke diggers I was not daunted, and one day while Jerry was out I set about making the little crack into a big crack. I called it Constructing the Great Hole. It was not that hard, really. Decades of dampness had left the wood spongy and eminently gnawable, and in two short days I had the hole finished, edges nicely smoothed and corners rounded.

  Waiting to try it out, I could scarcely contain my excitement. I paced the room like a madman, pulled out books and left them open on the floor—I couldn’t keep my mind on the words—or gnawed distractedly, and noisily, at the edges of my box. At one point Jerry threw down the newspaper he was reading and shouted at me, “For Christsake, Ernie, can’t you sit still for one fuckin’ minute?” Luckily for our relationship, a little later that afternoon he finally got up, looped on his tie, and left. As soon as I heard the street door open and shut behind him, I lowered myself down. I hated deceiving him like that, but how could I explain? Had I been able to write I might have left him a little note: “Dear Jerry, I have eaten a hole in your floor and gone for a small walk. Forgive me and don’t worry. Love, Ernie.” Or maybe I would have said “Your Ernie.”

  Beneath the floor I found the usual dusty canyons between the joists, but no sign, no tooth marks or tunnels, that the ancestors had ever ventured this far. I followed the sloping drainpipe across the floor to where it connected to a much larger pipe that came up through a dark shaft from far below. I pushed a bit of broken plaster over the edge and listened to it ricocheting off the walls of the shaft, followed by silence from a long way down. I figured this was the same shaft and big black pipe that I had used to climb up out of the basement that fateful day so long ago. I had learned a lot more about plumbing since then, because of all the books I had read under HOME IMPROVEMENT. I knew, for example, that this black pipe was the central drain line into which all the sinks and toilets in the building emptied, which is why it was so big, and that it was connected at the top to a smaller vent pipe in the roof that kept a vacuum from forming when someone flushed a toilet. I loved knowing things like that, even though knowing how a toilet works is not the same as flushing one, a pleasure I could only dimly imagine. In the Dry Sewers of the Mind: Fantasies of an Armchair Plumber.

  I named this central shaft the Elevator. It went straight down to the basement of Pembroke Books, with stops on every floor. Clambering up and down the shaft was difficult this time, much more difficult than during any previous escalade, and not just because of my damaged leg. I wished it had been just my leg. I often had to pause to catch my breath and I could not hang by my forepaws the way I used to.

  That first time down I stopped off at the dentist’s office on the second floor. It had two rooms, a waiting room and a drilling room. It had white walls, a linoleum floor, smooth and oily, and a smell like wet newspaper. In the center of the drilling room stood an enormous chair mounted on a steel pedestal, with the drilling instruments hanging from a rack beside it. There was nothing to eat in either room and nothing to read but a pamphlet on tooth decay with color pictures of rotting teeth. I ran my tongue over my own front teeth—no problems there. I shall die, and centuries from now archaeologists—will there still be archaeologists?—will dig up my long yellow teeth and say, “Look at these, Joe, no cavities.” Like the little boy in the pamphlet who says, smiling brightly, “Look, Mom, no cavities!” Look, Mom, no cavities. Oh, Flo, funny old Flo, she had her ways, ways that seem almost winning now, her odd gait, stupendous snores, and funny-tasting milk. No cavities, but memory, corroding, carious. I notice you do not laugh at my jokes anymore. Where has the laughter gone?

  Once I had access to the Elevator I fell into the habit of slipping down to the bookstore whenever Jerry was away. I even started taking in shows at the Rialto again. That was the only establishment in the whole neighborhood where business was actually up. I suppose with so many other places closed down and boarded up there was not much for people to do anymore, so they went to the movies. Jerry sometimes got home before me. He could see that I was taking trips on my own, and he clearly did not mind. He treated me like an equal. I would haul myself up through the hole, and Jerry, sitting at the table, would turn and say something like “’Lo, Ernie, how was your walk?” It broke my heart that at those moments I could not say, “Hi, Jerry, it was swell.”

  Now that I could reach the bookstore again, I often hung out there at my usual posts during the day, peering down from the Balloon, looking out from the Balcony, always cautious, hidden, just an eye and the tip of my nose showing, and I sometimes spent whole nights there reading. The bookstore was not at all the happy place it had once seemed. An air of defeat hung over it, and a depressing layer of actual dust as well. Shine obviously had not been using his turkey duster lately. No duster and no whistling, and huge bags like bruises under his eyes. And there were not nearly so many customers as before. People just did not come to this part of town anymore. I guess in their minds it was already gone.

  It was a beautiful September morning when Jerry took me to the Common the first time. We had just finished our usual breakfast of toast and strong coffee, when he reached up and brought the red wagon down from the pinnacle of boxes. I expected him to load up the waffle iron and toaster that had been lying in the closet for weeks, but instead he pulled down the topmost box from the stack, placed it on the floor, and began taking books out of it and piling them in the wagon. I caught sight of the red and yellow cover of The Nesting, the dripping red fangs of the giant rat, but there were also many copies of another book, this one with a plain cardboard cover and the pages falling out. He loaded a bunch of each, and then he picked up the wagon and books together in his arms—he was that strong—and I listened to his footsteps stumping down the stairs. I was on the verge of taking the Elevator down to see what was going on in Pembroke Books, when I heard him stump back up. “Come on, Ernie,” he said. He bent down and scooped. He lifted me onto his shoulder, and, perched there, clinging with one paw to a lock of loose hair, I rode down on him to the sidewalk.

  I had ridden on his shoulder before, around the room, and had always loved it. I liked to pretend that he was a camel and that I was Lawrence. The first time he put me up there, of course, I used the occasion to investigate his temples. After my bad experience with Norman Shine I was not taking anything for granted. But poking around in the undergrowth I had found no crescent ridges, just a reassuringly planar surface somewhat scaly with dandruff, so under Jerry’s picture I had posted HONEST and KIND.

  Kneeling beside the wagon, Jerry arranged the books in stacks with their titles facing up. I climbed on top of the tallest stack, and he pulled the wagon and the books and me in the warm sunshine all the way down Tremont Street to the Common, which is how I got into the selling side of the book business again.

  Only once before had I seen the human world by daylight, in full sunshine, the tall buildings and the leafy trees and the different-colored flowers and the people passing, and that time I had been nearly numb with fear. This time, riding in Jerry’s wagon, I had no fear and was able to look into people’s faces and up at the trees and feel what I think they call joy. I formulated “a beautiful world” and let it float off into the blue sky, rippling like a banner. Sure, envy was there too, a taste in my mouth bitter as bile—after all, it was not my world—but I swallowed it. People stared at us as we passed, especially at me, and I looked back at them with my black unblinking eyes.

  We set up shop next to the Park Street subway station. J
erry propped a cardboard sign against the wagon. It said, in hand-painted letters, BOOK SALE—NEW BOOKS AUTOGRAPHED BY THE AUTHOR. I had, of course, considerable experience with this sort of merchandising effort, and had my advice been asked (if only it could have been!), I would have suggested—tactfully and without playing the know-it-all—that we go out and buttonhole people. I would have said, “Jerry, boy, you gotta stick the goods under their fat noses, make ’em cough it up just to get you off their back.” I would have been like an old grandfather in a movie giving advice to a kid just setting out in the world (I can see him there with his weak chin and slicked-back hair). But Jerry was not pushy like that. As a businessman he was really terrible. He just leaned against the station wall, smoking one cigarette after another, and waited for people to come up. We did not get very many customers that way.

  In the afternoon, after the schools let out, a pack of big kids passed on the other side of Park Street, and they shouted across at us, chanting in unison “Magoon, Magoon, man from the moon” over and over. Jerry had a lot of self-control—he did not look once in their direction, and you would never have known that he even heard them. Some smaller kids came by too. They came because of me, and they knelt beside the wagon and talked to me in baby talk and tried to coax me into doing tricks as if I were some kind of monkey. One little moron held out his pencil and said, “Bite this, rat, bite this.” That from a kid who probably stumbled over Dick and Jane—it was really humiliating.

  We stayed in that spot most of the day, right through rush hour, and I got to watch the light changing in the trees, and a few people did buy books, while some others just stopped to talk. Most of the talkers were people like Jerry, with obviously no money for books. They chatted, gossiped about acquaintances they had in common, and joked about being broke. They called each other “man.” They were all very interested in me, and twice someone asked Jerry if I was tame, and he answered the same both times, “No, man, he’s not tame—he’s civilized.” And then one of them—Gregory was his name—turned to me as he was leaving and said in a very casual and offhand way, “So long, man.” That really killed me.

  Though almost no one ever knocked on Jerry’s door, he knew a lot of friendly people, and they greeted him in passing—“How’s it going, Jerry?” “Hangin’ in there, Jerry?”—even the cops. If you are lonely, I think it helps to be a little crazy as long as you don’t overdo it. That’s my policy anyway. And in the end, Jerry did make a few sales of The Nesting. I think people were attracted by the colorful picture of the giant rat. Whenever somebody bought a copy Jerry autographed it for him and threw in a copy of the other book and his business card as bonuses. The business card said:

  E. J. Magoon

  “The smartest man in the world”

  Artist Extraordinaire & Extraterrestrial

  And that was how he signed his books too. Artist Extraordinaire & Extraterrestrial. People seemed to get a kick out of that. Not everybody, of course, not the real bourgies. Some of them, the ones with the briefcases and suits, just looked at Jerry and smirked. You could see them talking to each other and laughing. They had nice teeth. But whenever their gaze happened to meet mine, I handed them a cold steely stare of such utter contempt that they couldn’t stand it. Wiped the smirks right off their smooth faces.

  Now and then people stopped to argue with Jerry and try to make him look stupid. They couldn’t stand the idea that this old rumpled guy with the wagon was the smartest man in the world. So they would say, “If you are the smartest man in the world, how come you’re selling books out of a wagon?” and other bourgeois idiocies of that sort. Jerry never got mad, though. He very patiently explained to them how in fact he was rich because he was free, because he was not a wage slave and did not bust his ass eight hours a day at some meaningless job. He never raised his voice, he listened to them when they spoke, and sometimes after a while they started having real conversations about serious matters, and you could tell that they had started to like him. Some of them even started telling him how unhappy they were, about their stupid jobs and miserable marriages, and more often than not they ended up buying a book. I guess they hoped it would cheer them up when they got home.

  Jerry’s other novel did not have a colorful cover. It was really just a stack of loose pages that he had printed himself in a little job shop in the Square. He had turned the loose pages into a book by sandwiching them between two sheets of brown cardboard, punching holes through the stack, and sewing the whole mess together with white grocery string. It struck me as a pretty shitty-looking affair. But of course I would feel that way, given my background. Using a blue crayon he had written the title by hand on each book in big block letters: THE RESCUE PROJECT.

  The story begins on the planet Earth about a hundred years after a vast thermonuclear war between the “last empires,” the USA and the USSR, has utterly destroyed civilization. Besides pretty much destroying every city and even the small towns, the war had instilled in the surviving rural populations a visceral aversion to all forms of technology, which they saw as somehow responsible for the calamities that had befallen them. There were no more real governments as we know them, only roving bands of warlords and small loose-knit communities of peasant farmers. These farmers tilled the soil with simple wooden plows and mules, and when they plowed at night the radioactive soil glowed in the plow’s wake like phosphorus. All over Earth people suffered from unimaginable diseases, including a great many that had not existed before the holocaust, and many of these affected the skin so that most of the people were covered with painful boils. Because of the radiation permeating every inch of the planet, half the children were born damaged—crippled, blind, or imbecilic. The old religions and ideologies, which had played such prominent roles in fomenting the final war, the memory of which was wedged as a recurrent nightmare in the collective unconscious, had been utterly discredited. But considering how ignorant and brain damaged everyone was, new religions sprang up like daisies. Most did not spread far or last long, however, until the birth of the Castaways.

  This new sect was founded by a particularly bloody-minded warlord named John Hunter. He had been raping and pillaging in a small village one day when he was knocked from his horse by a tree limb. Though apparently unhurt, soon afterward he began receiving messages from outer space, and from these he learned that human beings were not originally from Earth at all and had not evolved along with the other species but had arrived as castaways from the wreck of a spaceship. The teachings of this new religion were in perfect harmony with the feeling everyone at that time had of not belonging on the planet. It was hardly the sort of planet anyone would want to belong on. John Hunter told the people that what they needed to do was be rescued, and to do that they needed some way to signal passing spaceships. Of course they had only the simplest technology, no radio or anything like that, so signaling spaceships presented a problem. But John Hunter had the answer. He told them they had to build a pyramid so big it would be visible from space. He spent two years laying it all out with stakes, attracting more and more followers as he went. The base of the pyramid, as it was finally staked out, entirely covered the ancient states of Nebraska and Kansas and much of Missouri, Iowa, and South Dakota.

  Wild with fervor, the masses of people set to work, quarrying and transporting stone. Millions were soon deliriously at labor. In time, engineering skills increased, bureaucracies sprang up. To feed the millions of workers agriculture expanded and intensified. The iron plow, the disk, and the harrow were introduced, and even crude threshing machines. An enormous palace and temple complex were built at each corner of the pyramid for John Hunter and his priests. When John Hunter finally died, he was succeeded by his brilliant and ruthless son Kevin Hunter, and he in turn by the weak and dissipated Wilson Hunter, and so forth until the last leader, the utterly mad Bob Hunter. By that time the labor had gone on for 110 years, and the expense of building the giant pyramid had used up most of the planet’s meager resources, while the population wa
s increasingly ravaged by mutation and disease. The last human remnant finally perished in a snowstorm while trying to haul an enormous block of granite from Michigan. Centuries later a space-traveling species actually did land on Earth. They were amazed at the vast unfinished pyramid, and they built a large research center on Earth just to study it, but they never were able to figure out what its purpose was.

  I didn’t like this story quite as much as The Nesting, maybe because there were no rats in it. I liked the generational saga, though, and the way the Hunters, their brains corrupted by power and radiation, got weaker and crazier as time went on. I liked the message. Jerry says people won’t publish his books because they are afraid of the message. But I guess that is pretty much my view of life anyway, every day a little weaker and crazier.

  Jerry and I had a lot of good times together. I especially loved our breakfasts, the saucer of strong coffee with milk, and reading the paper together. One day at breakfast we read a long article in the Globe about Adolf Eichmann. It showed pictures of trainloads of starving people reaching their skinny arms out through the slats of cattle cars, and piles of emaciated corpses—they had rat faces—and Jerry said it made him ashamed to be human. This was a new idea to me.

  I came to really enjoy coffee, and wine too, though never wine in the morning, and not usually in the afternoon either unless it was raining. When suppertime rolled around, Jerry usually fixed things out of cans. Our favorite was Dinty Moore beef stew. Sometimes he cooked some rice to go with it, and at other times, when we were short on cash, rice and soy sauce might be the whole meal. Jerry’s mustache was really very bushy and it attracted bits of rice like a magnet when he ate—they seemed to just fly into it. Later on, when I felt secure in our relationship, I used to ferret the bits out with my paws and eat them. That always made him laugh. When he laughed it was easy to imagine that he was the happiest man in the world and not just the smartest.