Firmin Page 6

  The neighborhood—which the Globe sometimes called “historic” but more often referred to as “blighted” and even “rat infested” (true!)—was a bulwark in the path of progress, so the mayor and the city council wanted to move it out of the way, and it seemed that the best way of doing that would be to flatten it and then cover it over with cement. The Globe published some drawings of how Boston was going to look when they finished, when it would gleam like Miami across the gray waters of the harbor. They planned to replace Scollay Square with a large flat piece of concrete, and on top of that, to frighten people, they were going to put government buildings, like forts. Norman looked at the pictures of the buildings in the paper and just shook his head. And above him in the Balloon I shook my head too.

  Destroying that much of the city was going to be a big job. The buildings were old and had deep roots and did not want to go. So the mayor and the city council went looking for the right man, someone who understood the difficulties of applying heavy machinery to very old buildings and narrow streets, and they found Edward Logue. He was nicknamed the Bombardier, because that was what he had been during World War II. In a B-24. So he had had firsthand experience with the largest urban renewal project in human history. He sent the mayor and the city council pictures of Stuttgart and Dresden and told them, “I can make Scollay Square look like that.” He got the job. They put a huge photo of him in the paper, standing next to the mayor. They were holding hands, but they were not looking at each other—they were smiling at the camera. Logue was the man for the cataclysm. When I saw the picture, I couldn’t stop myself from dressing him up in the uniform of the Wehrmacht, and then I promoted him to general. And so life wore on. We kept one eye on the business and one on General Logue, and a sense of doom began to gather around us like a poison mist.

  Pembroke Books was a very well-known bookshop, the kind of place famous people sometimes visit. More than once I had heard Norman tell about how Jack Kennedy, who had become president of the United States, used to drop in for coffee and a chat when he was just a congressman, and also Ted Williams, who was a famous hitter for the Red Sox. I didn’t care much about them. But Norman also liked to tell people about the time the famous playwright Arthur Miller stopped in to buy a copy of his own play. I wished I could have been there. I kept hoping he would come back, or if not him somebody else—John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, or even Grace Metalious. None of them lived that far away. And then there was Robert Lowell, who lived around the corner. But he never came either.

  Only one writer ever came in during my tenure and he was a disappointment at first. He was not famous yet, and Alvin, talking to Norman one day when the writer had just left the shop, called him “that bohemian character.” At that time I was still in my bourgeois phase and so this was not yet an appellation that I aspired to. Norman also once described him as an experimental novelist, though he might have meant that as a joke. At other times he called him a crackpot and a drunk. This writer lived upstairs from the bookstore, though I did not know that yet—I did not even know there was an upstairs. You reached his place through a doorway between Pembroke Books and the Tattoo Palace. This doorway was under ROOMS and the door itself had frosted glass on its top half and DR. LIEBERMAN PAINLESS DENTIST written in a semicircle of gold letters on the glass. Usually when this writer stopped in the store he was on his way someplace else, often faraway places like Harvard Square across the river in Cambridge, and he was going there on a very old bicycle with a large wire basket in front. It had green fenders and between the bars a little white button for the horn. I don’t know if the horn worked. He often left the bicycle leaning against the store window, despite the fact that Norman had asked him not to. I did not know how to admire that trait yet, so I took Norman’s side and at first did not feel a lot of respect for this writer. He was not at all a young man and I thought he had better hurry if he was going to be famous. That’s how bourgeois I was. He was the only man I had ever seen with hair to his shoulders. It was gray and thinning and bound at the top by a blue headband like an Indian’s. Otherwise he did not look anything like an Indian. His name was Jerry Magoon. He was a short stocky man with a big head. He had a small Irish nose, a big drooping mustache over a wide thin-lipped mouth, and blue eyes, one of which was always staring off to the side. People could never be sure if he was looking at them or not. And he always wore the same rumpled blue suit and black knit tie. This gave him an oddly contradictory appearance, as if on the one hand he was trying to be neat and proper and on the other hand he was sleeping in his clothes.

  Except for the suit and tie, he looked like a prospector in one of the Rialto westerns and before I learned his name I always called him the Prospector. Later I called him the Smartest Man in the World. He came often during my tenure at the store. He was one of the regulars, and he always hung around a long time, usually in the basement, where the cheapest books were, pulling volumes out of the shelves, leafing through them, and putting them back, and sometimes, when he found one he liked, he would read it all the way through just standing there. While he read he mumbled to himself and wagged his big head. It was a long bike ride to Cambridge and he was a pretty old man, so I supposed he was in no hurry to get going. And Norman didn’t seem to mind. After a while it occurred to me that Norman was in fact quite fond of the writer, so I got fond of him too.

  He sometimes helped Norman unload the station wagon full of books, and once Norman paid him to wash the front windows. He did a good job. Usually he did not buy anything—he was obviously very poor—but one day in early spring he left with a big bag full of books. I could not see what was in the bag, but that evening I was able to reconstruct it from the gaps in the shelves. It was all religion and science fiction: Buber’s The Way of Man: According to the Teaching of Hasidism, Asimov’s The Stars, like Dust, Van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher, Bultmann’s History and Eschatology, and Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy. These were some of my own favorite works. On a later visit he went off with every book we had on insects. And Norman asked him that time, while he was packing them up, what he was working on those days. I nearly fell out of the Balloon when I heard his answer.

  “I got a new novel going,” he said, “about a rat. The furry kind. They’re really going to hate this one.”

  Norman laughed. “A sequel?” he asked.

  And Jerry answered, “No, this is something entirely different. I’m through with that kind of obvious stuff. You got to keep moving, you know. Like sharks. You stop and you drown.”

  Apparently Norman did know, because he just nodded and handed Jerry his books.

  From then on, whenever a new batch of books arrived I tore through it looking for Jerry Magoon’s novel. Miracles do happen—I was sure of that. In fact I acknowledged it every time I arrived safely home from the Square, when I let a sigh of gratitude for one more miracle granted float up in the general direction of heaven, and I acknowledged it again the night I laid paws on the novel. It was a cheaply printed paperback of 227 yellowing pages. On the cover, against a canary yellow background, New York City was in flames, while wreathed in smoke above the blazing skyline loomed an enormous rat, bigger than the Empire State Building, with red eyes and dripping red fangs. The title appeared in blood red strokes at the top of the page: The Nesting. And at the bottom, in letters that struck me as insultingly small, was the name E. J. Magoon. I realized after reading the book that the folks at Astral Press, which had published it in 1950, had possessed a real gift for hyperbole—the book in fact did not contain any giant rats, though it did have plenty of burning cities toward the end.

  For a century prior to the present age, the gentle and enormously intelligent inhabitants of Axi 12, a planet located at the far edge of our galaxy, had been sending robotic probes to study the planet Earth, which was the only planet in the whole galaxy apart from their own inhabited by advanced life-forms. These probes had collected an enormous amount of data on Earth and its creatures, and the Axions believed that the tim
e had come to initiate actual contact with earthlings, though they knew this would not be easy. Axions, while far more advanced than earthlings, both ethically and intellectually, had the misfortune from an earthling’s point of view of looking like garden slugs. They were also the size of Shetland ponies. Being quite intelligent, they had the good sense to recognize that their appearance might give earthlings wrong ideas about the Axions’ superior morals and intellects. It was even conceivable that the earthlings might refuse to make friends with pony-sized slugs. Luckily, these superior sluglike creatures were also in possession of advanced protoplasmic morphing techniques, and they decided to send to Earth an exploratory expedition made up of a dozen Axions who had been previously morphed into the shape of Earth’s dominant species. Furthermore, in order that these explorers might learn to fully understand the earthlings’ customs and language prior to initiating contact, they were sent as infants, extraterrestrial changelings, to be reared by unwitting Earth mothers as their own. Hence the book’s title. When these changelings reached adulthood, masters of Earth’s language and customs, with friends and associates—and even siblings and parents—among the dominant species, they would be perfectly placed to serve as mediators between earthlings and Axions.

  It seemed like a good plan, but unfortunately, despite the decades of orbital snooping and analysis, the Axions’ robotic probes had made a stupid mistake, wrongly concluding that the earth’s dominant species was the Norway rat. As a consequence of this error, one day in 1955 a dozen unwitting female rats welcomed into their nests an equal number of protoplasmically morphed Axions, now indistinguishable from the rats’ natural offspring. The Axion children soon recognized the mistake. Yet the bewildered changelings—led by the dashing Alyak—valiantly tried to carry on with the mission of making contact with the dominant species, which they now saw was the humans. The rest of the book was taken up with detailed descriptions of their gruesome deaths at the hands of this merciless species, even though the real rats, who still thought of the Axions as their own, made noble and self-sacrificing attempts to save them. Each time an Axion was murdered on Earth, exact imagery of his death was transmitted telepathically across the galaxy to Axi 12, and so horrible were the pictures that they roused even the peaceful and ethically superior Axion public to fury. Though it took their spaceships a few years to reach Earth, when they got there they turned it into a fireball. Hence the burning cities on the cover. In the epilogue, set in 1985, all humans have perished, along with all other large carnivores, while on the charred crust of the ruined planet, the Norway rat rules unchallenged.

  I closed The Nesting and sat on it. I was on the verge of tears, and next to Jerry’s name I posted the words SOUL MATE and SOLITUDE. I understood now that he needed the big wire basket on the front of his bicycle just to cart around his enormous despair and that the eye that looked off to the side was staring out at the blank nothingness of human life and the infinity of time and space, a nothingness and an infinity that he had brought together in his book under the name of the Great Empty. And you can imagine the sort of boost the novel gave to my own self-esteem. No more damp spots in the jungle, no more meaningless words and gestures—I had a whole new story. To the labels of PERVERT, FREAK, and UNNATURAL GENIUS, I could now append the justificatory adjective EXTRATERRESTRIAL. It helps a lot, on lonely nights, to be able to look up at the stars and see them not as flakes of burning ice in the Great Empty but as the window lights of home. Unfortunately, being an extraterrestrial does not confer any of the practical advantages of wealth or fame, nor does it at all increase the likelihood of your getting through the day without some calamity falling on your head. And besides, I never really believed the story.

  During business hours, when I was not asleep or hanging out of the Balloon, you could find me on the Balcony. Nothing that happened in the store below escaped my scrutiny. When Norman made an especially big sale, ringing it up on the ornate antique cash register that stood on a stand by the door, I clapped my paws and silently shouted, “Way to go, Norm!” Cheers from the Sidelines of Life.

  Pembroke Books was a big store—four rooms full of books, not counting the basement—and Norm knew it like the back of his hand. But even he was fallible. Occasionally he sought and did not find, stabbed and came up empty. When this happened, it was painful to watch. I remember one time in particular. The quarry was the slim Ballad of the Sad Café. The pursuer was a dwarf, a young woman dressed in a camel’s-hair coat so large it hung around her like a tepee and dragged on the ground. The bottom edge was rimmed with mud. She had been hanging around for a while, apparently browsing, but I think really just working up the courage to speak. As soon as she had voiced her request—if voiced is the word for her blushing whisper—Norman had spun on his heels and strode confidently back to the shelves of paperback novels, his arm outstretched before him, his thick fingers curling in anticipation. You could almost imagine the book jumping off the shelf into his hand. But this time, you would imagine in vain. This time, the vast cerebral file-and-retrieve system failed to perform. You could almost hear the clunking sound in Norman’s head as the apparatus malfunctioned. No book leaped, no fingers grasped. I watched with growing anxiety as he searched up and down the shelf where it was supposed to be, tapping the rows of books nervously with his forefinger as if counting them, and then ransacking the shelves above and below, his gestures ratcheting from smoothly confident to convulsive and distraught. When finally it was clear to everyone that the book was simply not there, obviously not there, painfully not there, his manly shoulders sagged in defeat.

  “Well, I thought we had it, but it seems I was mistaken. I am truly sorry.”

  He said this to the floor just in front of his feet, unable to look the disappointed customer in the eye. He looked awfully upset, and I could tell he had upset the dwarf as well, who no doubt regretted she had ever asked. Oh, how I longed then to leap from my hiding place, to call out, “Here it is, Mr. Shine”—I would be careful to call him “Mr. Shine” to his face—“I have it over here—it got slipped in with the cookbooks.” Astonished, he would stammer, “B-but how did you know that?” And I would say, “Pembroke Books is more than just a business to me, sir—it is my home.” He would be terrifically impressed, and also moved. And that would be just the beginning. In my dream he took me on as an apprentice. I rapidly “rose through the ranks” to chief clerk. I wore a green eyeshade. I loved the way I looked in that eyeshade, sitting at the front desk late at night, catching up on paperwork—I reminded myself of Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.

  The news from out in the world was bad. According to the Globe, General Logue had submitted his final battle plans to the city council. Lawyers for a couple of doomed families west of the Square were fighting on, but their cause was considered hopeless. And in June, the council gave its approval: in a matter of months the destruction would begin. Acres of heavy machinery stood on the outskirts, oiled and waiting. Every night or so after the council’s decision another building burned as landlords struggled to cut their losses. The nights were laced with sirens, and sometimes the smoke was so thick it was hard to breathe in the streets. I kept working on my “Ode to Night.” I thought of it as “His Famous ‘Ode to Night.’” Yet even with the store on its deathbed Norman kept on buying books. I guess he was like a shark too, worried about drowning.

  I was always the dreamy type. And given my situation, what else could I be? But I also knew how to put four feet on the ground when I had to. And then—drenched, so to speak, by the drizzle of the real—I felt bad that in practice I could do nothing to help old Norman out. Feelings of Inadequacy and the Origin of Depression in Males. So I began to bring home little gifts. One night while scavenging popcorn on the floor of the Rialto, I found a gold ring. It was in the form of two intertwined serpents. At the top of the ring the opposite-facing heads lay side by side. They had tiny emeralds for eyes. Though I could have put the ring in a place where it would be found by the cleaning ladies, I d
id not do that. In fact, I stole it without the slightest twinge of conscience. I had long before discovered on my cranium a longish lump, almost a ridge, which according to Hans Fuchs—the man who first made use of Gall’s science for practical police work—is a sure sign of “criminal proclivities” and “moral degeneration.” In fact, except for an obvious disqualification, I fit perfectly into Fuchs’s category of monstrum humanum, the lowest order of criminal types. I knew there was no point in putting my conscience up to a battle it was bound to lose. As I said, I can be quite practical when I have to be. So I carried the ring home and placed it on Norman’s desk next to his coffee mug, and there he found it the next morning. Clasping it with thumb and forefinger, he studied it a long time, he even tried it on, holding his hand out in front of him and turning it from side to side like a woman. Then he put it in a desk drawer. I figured he would think a customer must have lost it and I expected him to tack up a paper saying RING FOUND—CONTACT MANAGEMENT. He did not do that, though, and a week later I noticed the ring on his finger.