Firmin Read online

  Directly beneath me stood a large cluttered desk and a chair with a red cushion. This desk and chair were where Norman sat, or would sit. I still did not know Norman—for some time yet he was to sit in my mind simply as the Owner of the Desk—but the clutter on the desk, the upright steel spike stacked to its tip with a ragged foliage of impaled receipts, the shiny arms of the chair, and of course the red cushion itself with its buttocks-shaped depression in the center, possessed an aura of seriousness and dignity that, considering my background, I found perfectly irresistible.

  This ceiling crack, shaped like a C for Confidential, became one of my favorite spots. It was a window on the human world, my first window. In that way it was like a book—you could look through it into worlds that were not your own. I called it the Balloon, because that was the feeling I got looking down, as if I were floating above the room in a balloon. A few days later I discovered a second very good place all the way at the other end of the ceiling in the direction of the alley. This one was a jagged hole in the plaster where a makeshift partition met the ceiling. I could lower myself through this hole and down onto the top of one of the tall glass-fronted cabinets where Norman kept the rare books, and from there I commanded a magnificent view of the main room of the shop, including the front door and Norman’s desk and chair. I named it the Balcony. (Today the words balcony and balloon, dactyl and iamb, have become fused end to end to form a kind of cradle, or a sad little boat. Sometimes I climb in the boat and float around. Or I lie in the cradle and rock and suck my toe.) I later learned that this room, which at the time seemed to me practically oceanic in its vastness, was in fact only one small piece of the operation. Norman had room upon room. At some point long before my time he had acquired the two shops next door to the original bookstore and had knocked holes in the connecting walls. Passing through narrow doorways, so narrow people had to take turns going through or else walk sideways and rub stomachs, you entered the rooms one after another, and they were full of books too. I used to think that all those rooms connected by little doorways were like something a giant rat would build, and I enjoyed that thought once, before Norman let me down.

  Sometimes the books were arranged under signs, but sometimes they were just anywhere and everywhere. After I understood people better, I realized that this incredible disorder was one of the things that they loved about Pembroke Books. They did not come there just to buy a book, plunk down some cash and scram. They hung around. They called it browsing, but it was more like excavation or mining. I was surprised they didn’t come in with shovels. They dug for treasures with bare hands, up to their armpits sometimes, and when they hauled some literary nugget from a mound of dross, they were much happier than if they had just walked in and bought it. In that way shopping at Pembroke was like reading: you never knew what you might encounter on the next page—the next shelf, stack, or box—and that was part of the pleasure of it. And that was part of the pleasure of the tunnels too—you could never be sure what was around the next turn, at the bottom of the next shaft.

  Even during those first heady weeks of exploration, I did not neglect my education. I never went into the tunnels without first spending a few hours with my books. And I made tremendous progress. I was soon able to comprehend even so-called difficult novels, mostly Russian and French, and was making headway in simple works of philosophy and business administration. It is clear to me now, from my subsequent researches, that such accomplishments were possible, organically speaking, only on the basis of a steady growth in my frontal and temporal lobes, accompanied, I surmise, by a tremendous swelling of the angular gyrus. Reasoning backward from effect to cause, I feel justified in assuming that my cranium also conceals beneath its humdrum exterior an exceptional lateral elongation of Wernicke’s area, a deformation that is normally associated with precocious verbal skills, though it is also, I concede, present in certain rare forms of idiocy. I attribute this unusual growth to a stimulating environment, though no doubt diet was a factor as well. It had, however, an unfortunate side effect in that my head grew so heavy I had difficulty holding it up. The cerebral muscularity, you see, was not accompanied by a corresponding corporal robustness. I was still distressingly runty. I was a pip-squeak, a shrimp.

  It is practically an axiom in psychiatry that precocious intellect combined with physical weakness can give rise to many unpleasant character traits—avarice, delusions of grandeur, and obsessive masturbation, to name just a few. And indeed it is because certain so-called experts possess, via the most rudimentary handbooks, such a ready-made insight into the very depths of my character that all my life I have taken pains to avoid them—I am referring to psychiatrists. This aversion is only natural, I think, when you consider that among other lamentable effects occasioned by my condition one invariably finds a near-pathological need to hide or, that failing, to wear masks.

  The combination of a heavy head and weak limbs forced me to adopt a ponderous gait, and while later in life I fancied that this lent me a methodical and dignified air, at the time it only made me seem all the more freakish. I could not help wagging my enormous head from side to side as I walked, or lumbered, which gave me a rather bovine appearance. And front-loaded as I was, I had a strong tendency to pitch forward onto my face, to the great amusement of others.

  Such ponderousness, so grotesque in a creature of my stature, was particularly unfortunate at this period, when I had reached a stage of life that called for maximum alacrity. While nothing in the behavior of my siblings suggested that their brains were expanding, their masticatory apparatuses had undergone considerable development, as I could testify from many painful nips. I chewed on paper, they chewed on me. The asymmetry was nasty. All of us were ready for solid food. We were all in fact ready to throw in the towel on family life, and Mama discerned this through her vapors at last. Our flashing incisors must have seemed to her like glimmers of light at the end of the long maternal tunnel. Lured by that light she rose to the task of teaching us to get by without her, setting us up so she could split and go off and lead the life of a swinger again.

  Our education was simple and practical. Two by two we tagged along behind Mama on her trips up top, where we were expected to learn by observing her technique. There was not going to be any more easy slurp and guzzle: from now on we would confront an entirely new style of existence. Anthropologists regard hunting and gathering as the most primitive stage of civilization, but ours was even lower than that. Call it scrounging and scraping. It was almost entirely night work. The basic positions were crouch, skulk, and hunker. The sustaining moves were creep, scurry, and dart. When my turn came I was paired with Luweena. I was pleased with this, since she had always treated me with indifference, offering me neither nips nor drubs, which was all to the good, since she was of large athletic build and once during a melee had bitten off most of Shunt’s ear. I had always been aware—and wary—of her build, but that night, just as we were starting out, I noticed for the first time how furry she was behind. It was not only her teeth that were growing. Preoccupied as I was with my explorations, I had let this new development slip up on me, but now the view of her furry cheeks bobbing in front of me became utterly distracting, and I felt toward her a sudden violent anger.

  With Mama in the lead we crept under the cellar door and out into the world. I had thought of myself as being better prepared than any of the others for what we would encounter outside. It was I after all who had spent many hours sitting in my Balcony gazing out across the shop toward the front window. I had seen something of the world in that window—people and cars passing and part of the building across the street. Once I saw a policeman on a horse, and once it rained. But stepping out into the night street behind Luweena and Mama I knew right away that my picture of the world, limited and rectangular as it was, bore scarcely any resemblance to the enormity of the thing itself. I felt like an earthling stepping out onto the surface of Jupiter. We stepped out onto a hard black desert. The streetlight directly above us hung like
a sun in a black sky. From somewhere, perhaps the streetlight, came a faint high-pitched scream that was painful to the ears and in the long run maddening in its persistence. On both sides, crumbling four-story buildings loomed like the walls of a vast canyon. Even at that early stage of my education I had read enough to formulate “vast canyon of loneliness.” I formulated it and shivered. Now and then a car passed with blazing eyes, and the floor of the desert shook. It was very cold, and something like an icy comb was running through our fur. It was wind. Luweena, of course, with her more limited background, ought to have been even more amazed than I was. I would have expected her to cringe or at least gape in wonder or be in some way flabbergasted, and I was shocked to see her just sniff the air and trot off after Mama as though she regarded walking on Jupiter as a perfectly normal thing to do. As for me, I was still sheltered by my relative ignorance, and only a vague disquiet gnawed at the margins of my mind.

  We went in single file, moving fast and staying as close to the buildings as we could, up Cornhill and then down a narrow alley. I brought up the rear. The alley was dark and had the same smell as under RESTROOM, but stronger. There must have been some kind of food there, for I could hear Mama and Luweena crunching on something in the darkness up ahead. They didn’t share, and when I came up all I found was a piece of lettuce. It tasted like Jane Eyre. We came out of the alley on Hanover Street, directly across from the bright blaze of the Casino Theater. On a jutting marquee, in yellow lights that ran round and round were the words GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS and BEST IN BOSTON. Beneath the marquee, on either side of a glass ticket window, were life-sized black-and-white photos of what I have since learned to identify as good-looking women. They were not wearing any clothes except for high-heeled shoes and diamond tiaras in their hair, while two long black rectangles blocked out their breasts and the tops of their thighs. One woman had light hair and one had dark hair. They each had one foot lifted. Caught by the camera in the midst of dancing, they floated frozen in midstep: the stroke of the shutter had severed them from time like a guillotine. Mama and Luweena had paid them no attention at all. They had gone instead right up to the theater door under EXIT and were now busy stuffing their cheeks full of the popcorn someone had spilled there. Luweena clearly had a natural gift for scrounging and scraping. I did not even try to join them this time. I just stood there looking up at the posters, one foot in the air. Despite my wide reading, even my digestion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I had only a pale intellectual’s grasp of this aspect of the world. I had not actually experienced anything like it before. Now, looking back over my life, I can see that this moment, when I stood gaping at those almost naked creatures, those angels, marked what biographers like to call a turning point. I shall do the same and say that on November 26, 1960, in front of the Casino Theater on a side street off Boston’s Scollay Square, my life path turned. But of course I did not know that yet. At that point I did not even know I was in Boston.

  Luweena and Mama having scooped up all the popcorn, we went on down Hanover, sliding along the gutter to the nearly deserted Square. The Square was, as people liked to say, a cesspool, and indeed the damp asphalt glistened under the streetlights like water. A woman, followed closely by a man, passed without seeing us. Walking rapidly, they turned and disappeared into a doorway under ROOMS. I shall never forget the sound the woman’s heels made against the sidewalk. We crouched in a drain till they had gone inside, the door closed behind them. Then, following Mama’s lead, we raced across the broad expanse of the Square as fast as we could go, as fast at any rate as Mama could go. In those days Luweena and I were still light on our feet. Reaching the opposite sidewalk, Mama found a puddle of beer, and she and Luweena refused to go on until they had lapped up every drop of it. My anxiety had by then migrated from the margins of my consciousness to dead center and I was beginning to quiver with fear. I thought, To hell with food. I wanted to run back home to the warm safety of the bookstore, but I was terrified of being separated from Mama. I was especially frightened by the trucks that now and then went thundering past us, their headlights throwing enormous shadows against the walls, though Mama did not even look up, and after a while neither did Luweena. And then we went on down the street. We passed in front of the darkened gothic-windowed hulk of the Old Howard, which had once been a famous theater but had been closed for years. A lot of low-class rats lived there. It was, Mama said, a good place to get killed. In the end, after more lapping and licking at sidewalk puddles, we found food—hot dogs, pickles, buns, ketchup, mustard—in the big blue bins in back of Joe and Nemo’s. Other rats were there too but we stayed away from them. We are not a close-knit species. Then it was back out by the Red Hat Bar, and more puddles. Most of these were urine, but there were enough booze pools as well to keep Mama busy, and Luweena too. Bad genes, I guess. And the two of them grew increasingly reckless on the way home, at times walking in the middle of the sidewalk on Cambridge Street and singing. Not me, though. I skulked along right next to the buildings or in the gutter and pretended I didn’t know them. In fact I kept my distance in the hope that if some huge calamity fell out of the sky on their heads it would miss me.

  I am trying to tell the true story of my life, and believe me, it is not easy. I had read a great many of the books under FICTION before I halfway understood what that sign meant and why certain books had been placed under it. I had thought I was reading the history of the world. Even today I must constantly remind myself, sometimes by means of a rap on the head, that Eisenhower is real while Oliver Twist is not. Lost in the World: Epistemology and Terror. Thinking back on my account of that first sortie with Mama and Luweena out into the wilderness beyond our basement, I see that I have left one small incident out. It was a perfectly trivial incident in my view but one that, were it discovered later, you would throw invidiously back in my face. I can already see you, swiveling around in your swivel chair and shrieking with delight. And besides, it was not an incident exactly, it was more like an incitement, or rather an attempt at incitement, by Luweena’s furry behind.

  While I was following her down the alley, it went, as I mentioned, up and down in front of my nose. Up and down. And the ridiculous thing was, she insisted on carrying her tail at a stimulating angle as well, an angle that I can fairly describe as brazen. Brazen and provocative. As we crept in single file down the alley, her behind filled my whole field of vision, invaded my consciousness and prevented me from thinking of anything else, even food and danger. And then of course there was the odor. I don’t suppose I can make you understand that aspect of the thing, the irresistible power of that fragrance. It drove me to within an inch of leaping upon her like a madman. I felt myself being thrust forward by my groin. I saw myself leaping upon her from behind and sinking my incisors into the fur of her neck, while she curved her long muscular back, lifted her ass in the air, and with a squeak of delicious agony gave herself to me. It was horrible. But it was also mercifully brief. We were near the end of the alley already, approaching the lights of Hanover Street. A truck rumbled past and my sudden passion, strong as it was, vanished like smoke in its thunder. Nothing had happened. And nothing would happen, since at that moment we were already only yards and minutes from the turning point when I was to stand on the sidewalk, one foot lifted, and look up at the angels. Let me open my heart: that urge to ravish my sister in an alley was the last moment of normal sexual desire I ever experienced. When I set out that night I was, despite my intelligence, a fairly ordinary male. When I returned I was well on my way to becoming a pervert and a freak.

  In the world outside my beloved bookshop it was dog eat dog and devil take the hindmost. Everything out there was determined to do us mortal harm, always. Our one-year survival chances were close to zero. In fact, statistically speaking we were practically dead. I did not know this for a fact yet, but I had an intuition all the same, the kind of awful inkling people get on the decks of sinking ships. If there is one thing a literary education is good for it is to fill you with a sens
e of doom. There is nothing quite like a vivid imagination for sapping a person’s courage. I read the diary of Anne Frank, I became Anne Frank. As for the others, they could feel plenty of terror, cringe in corners, sweat with fear, but as soon as the danger had passed it was as if it had never happened, and they trotted cheerfully on. Cheerfully on through life till they were flattened or poisoned or had their necks cracked by an iron bar. As for me, I have outlived them all and in exchange I have died a thousand deaths. I have moved through life trailing a glistening film of fear like a snail. When I actually die it will be an anticlimax.

  One night not long after our orientation trip around the Square, Mama went up top as usual, and she never came back. I saw her a couple of times over the next few months hanging out with the floozies in back of Joe and Nemo’s; then she vanished altogether. And that was the end of our little family. Every night after that somebody else went missing until finally only Luweena, Shunt, and I remained. And then they left too. They had trouble believing that I meant to stay on. To them I was mad, but harmless. They did not at all approve of what I was doing. The bookstore was after all a lousy place to live, and Mama had only chosen it in an emergency. Despite our past differences, the last day was almost touching. Luweena gave me a hug, and Shunt, embarrassed, handed me a little punch on the shoulder. They were disappearing beneath the door when I called after them, “So long, you bunch of cocksuckers, you subhuman jerks.” I really told them off, and after that I felt better.