Firmin Read online

  Another time, when I was skulking home from the Rialto just before dawn, I came across a man and a girl having some sort of dispute on Cambridge Street, which was deserted except for them. She was really going at him, shouting “You fucker, you goddamn fucker” over and over, and each time she said “fucker” she stamped her foot, as if keeping count of how many times she could say “fucker” in a row. The man was swaying and trying to hold her by the shoulders but she kept shaking him off. He seemed really loaded, the way he was swaying. She had on silver shoes with very high heels, which reminded me of my Lovelies and made me feel sorry for her. Mentally, I was on her side, for what that was worth. In fact it was worth exactly nothing—why should a pretty girl like her give a shit that some scroungy little rat was on her side? She was holding a big bouquet of yellow roses in her hand, and at the end of perhaps the fifteenth “fucker” she slapped him right across the face with the flowers, which went flying everywhere, and then she ran across the street and down into the subway. I shouted silently, “Take that, you weasel!” The man just stood there a while, swaying slightly as if to a gentle breeze, among all those scattered roses like yellow flames on the sidewalk. Then he started stepping on them, pushing them down against the pavement with a twisting motion of the toe of his shoe. This was mirrored by a nearly identical twisting motion of his mouth. She stamps, he twists. He didn’t miss even one. And then he walked slowly away down the street. I waited to make sure that he was not coming back, then I crept out and grabbed one of the roses, the one that seemed least damaged, and carried it home, where I straightened it out as best I could. It was almost opening time when I finally got it into the empty coffee mug on Norman’s desk. I would have liked to put water in too but I had no way of doing that.

  When I saw Norman’s reaction to the flower, it occurred to me that I might have gone too far. He seemed frankly spooked. He stared at the strange yellow rose in his coffee cup, his eyes widening, and then he looked all around, even under the desk, as if worried somebody was about to jump out at him. He took the rose out of the mug and laid it on the desk. He kept shooting glances at it during the morning, as if he expected it suddenly to do something to explain its presence, and then after lunch he tossed it in the trash can. My gift had backfired. Instead of comfort, I had handed Norman just one more thing to worry about, and I was sorry. I didn’t bring him any more presents after that.

  I have never been right in the head, but I am not demented. You may raise an eyebrow here, you may raise both eyebrows, but the fact remains, daydreams and mental tricks are one thing, nuts is another. And I am not the kind of creature who can be crazy without knowing it. There are many people who are much worse off than I am. I have this from no less an authority that Peter Erdman, author of The Self as Other. In that book Dr. Erdman recounts true tales of enormously fat people who can stand in front of a mirror and see an image of themselves no thicker than a Paris mannequin, and others, emaciated, who look in the mirror and see fat bulging like jelly rolls. They actually see this. Now that’s crazy. With me, the problem has never been in the mirror—no one ever lives there but the same chinless fellow—but in the image of myself away from the mirror, the one I see when I lie on my back and look at my toes and tell myself all the wonderful stories, when I engage in what I call dreaming, taking the senseless stuff of life and giving it a beginning, middle, and end. My dreams contain everything—everything, that is, except the monster in the mirror. When I dream a sentence like “The music died away, and in the silence all eyes were on Firmin, who stood aloof and unflinching in the doorway of the ballroom,” I never see an undersized chinless rat in the doorway of the ballroom. That would have a very different effect. No, I always see someone looking very much like Fred Astaire: thin waist, long legs, and a chin like the toe of a boot. Sometimes I even dress like Fred Astaire. In this particular scene I am in tails and spats and top hat. Legs crossed at the ankles, I am leaning casually on a silver-pommeled cane. Do you find it difficult to hold your eyebrows in that position? Sometimes, when I drop in for a cup of coffee with Norman, I am wearing a tan cardigan and tassel loafers. I lean back in my chair, throw my feet up on the desk, and we talk books and women and baseball. Next to that picture I have posted the phrase A GREAT CONVERSATIONALIST. And sometimes, still looking a lot like Astaire—but now dissipated, world-weary, a Lucky Strike hanging from my lip, like a Frenchman—I am pounding away with desperate fury at an old Remington. I love the sound the carriage makes when I tear out one page and furiously crank in the next. I could go on and on, tell you about the knock on the door, the way Ginger comes in, shy, carrying a cheese sandwich she has made for me, the look in her eyes. I could even tell you what is written on the pages that are piling up next to the typewriter.

  There is a passage in The Phantom of the Opera where the phantom, a great genius who lives hidden from sight because of his great ugliness, says that the thing he wants most in the world is simply to stroll in the evening along the boulevards with a beautiful woman on his arm, like an ordinary bourgeois. To me that is one of the most moving passages in literature, even though Gaston Leroux was not a Big One.

  Every week the paper brought more depressing news about the so-called renovation of Scollay Square. Many local businesses had already closed, following enormous going-out-of-business sales, and now stood dark and empty behind plywood sheeting, while others had simply burned to the ground. Even so, Norman kept at it. And we still had good days, though none like the old days. Fewer customers even on the best days, and on rainy days Norman did not even bother hauling out the feather duster. I occasionally saw customers blowing the dust off the books before they opened them, but he seemed never to notice. He slogged on, but you could tell his heart was not in it.

  I slogged on too. With business down I had more time to work on dream structures. They were enormous dreams, like novels. I sometimes spent days on a single scene. Maybe it was a picnic at Revere Beach. Maybe it was the summer of 1929, and the stock market is about to crash and nobody knows it. What are they wearing? What kind of shoes? What sort of underpants? How do they cut their hair? What does the car look like? What do the seats feel like? How much does gas cost? Have they brought along a book? What are the sandwiches made of? What are they wrapped in? What brand of cigarette? Of soda? What kind of bird is that singing? What is that tree it is hiding in? All this would be a fairly easy assignment for me now. I have dreamed my way into things as far away as Tang China, Machu Picchu, and the seventy-third floor of the Empire State Building.

  Late one night, I was busy with my mad French poet dream. I—or he or Fred Astaire, it doesn’t matter—had lost a leg fighting on the side of the Paris Commune. Years of pain and absinthe had driven him—me, us—crazy. In the present scene, set on a rainy night, we see him in a narrow Paris street beating with a fist on the front door of a house belonging to the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. In his other hand he clutches, wrapped in oilcloth against the rain, fragments of his great mad poem “Ode à la Nuit.” I was in the basement reading about Sarah Bernhardt in the Encyclopedia Britannica, when I was startled by the noise of the shop door opening. Diving into the ancestral hole, I scrambled up ink black shafts and reached the Balcony just as Norman was hanging up his raincoat. So it was raining in Boston too. He had never before returned to the shop after closing, and I followed him with worried eyes as he walked from aisle to aisle, looking all about him as if this were the first time he had ever been there. Then he sat down in his usual chair. He sat on the familiar red cushion, placed both hands flat on the desk, and began to cry. He did not make any sound, did not cover his face, the tears just ran silently out, mixing with the raindrops on his cheeks and chin and falling on his shirt. Silently I called out, “Courage, Mr. Shine. Tomorrow’s another day. Don’t do anything foolish.” I felt so bad that all I could think of were clichés. I even considered pitching myself headfirst from the Balloon just to distract him.

  But what I really wanted to do, what in fact I almost
did, was to rush out of the Rathole, throw myself at his feet, and madly kiss his shoe. He would be deeply touched. He would take me with him when he moved. It is interesting the way illusions have no end. What would Norman really think if a rat rushed from behind a safe and attached itself to his shoe? In the real world there are differences that cannot be bridged.

  Life is short, but still it is possible to learn a few things before you pop off. One of the things I have observed is how extremes coalesce. Great love becomes great hatred, quiet peace turns into noisy war, vast boredom breeds huge excitement. It was the same with Norman and me. I would say that that night in the shop when Norman wept and I floated, almost weeping, overhead, was the high point of our relationship, our moment of maximum closeness. Great intimacy spawns huge estrangement. That was a Saturday night. The shop was always closed on Sunday so I did not see anything of Norman the next day. Sunday night I came back from the Rialto feeling sick. Bad wiener, probably. This had happened before, and I was not worried. And though I felt better Monday morning, I was still a little seedy, so I decided not to risk a run to the Rialto the following night even though that would mean no food before the run on Tuesday. Norman was back at his desk with newspaper and coffee, and I was in the Balloon, alert for signs of distress. I watched him closely as he very slowly lowered his coffee cup, so slowly he barely rippled his right eye and cheek floating like lily pads on the brown water. I wondered, was this strangely retarded motion another symptom of grief? Because of my aversion to mirrors, I had never quite gotten the hang of the rules of refraction. So I did not immediately grasp that if I could see his eye, then he could see mine. Oblivious to the implications of that fatal symmetry, I continued to lean out over the edge of the Balloon while Norman pushed slowly back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head as if stretching. He was now looking straight up at the ceiling, and for a long moment his gaze, dark and somber, mingled with mine, black and glittering. Terror and Recognition. Then I jerked my head back and retreated into the darkness between the joists, where I crouched in a tumult of fear and delight. He had seen me! What would he do now? I was no longer alone. I tried to recall his eyes. What were they saying? In retrospect I imagined I had seen love there. Intelligent, kind Norman, of course he had been able to overlook the vanishing chin, the hairy cheeks, of course he had been able to see past the glittering eyes and into the soul of a fellow artist and businessman.

  I passed the rest of that day deep in hiding. Only when I had heard the shop door close and lock and Norman’s footsteps fade away down the sidewalk did I creep up to the Balcony to take a look around. Back in April I had carried loads of shredded paper up from the old familial nest into the Balcony and with it I had humped up a little fauteuil. It had been pleasant to sit there and watch what was going on in the store below. Sometimes I had stayed on up there after closing time, dreaming away, while the yellowing evening slowly filled the shop with a kind of airy grief. I loved the deepening shadows and the sadness that always overtook me then. But on the evening in question I saw right away that while I, quivering with fear and hope, had been holed up between the joists, Norman had paid a covert visit there. The fauteuil had been shoved aside and pretty much wrecked, and next to it lay a little heap of strange food. A little pile of cylindrical neon green pellets. They smelled good, so I nibbled. They were oddly delicious, tasting like a blend of Velveeta cheese, hot asphalt, and Proust. I recalled the look in Norman’s eyes at the moment when they had met mine, and I thought, So it was love after all. And in that way began—and briefly endured—one of the happiest moments of my life. I was sure now that I was not alone. I belonged to someone. I nibbled again. In all my months of scrounging, the Rialto had never delivered up a food like this one. It was smooth like gumdrops, crunchy like popcorn, and had, as I mentioned, a flavor at once delicious and odd. I tried to imagine a name and settled on Normans, as in “A box of Normans, please.” It made me sad that I was still too queasy from wiener poisoning to eat more than a few of the nicely bite-sized pieces.

  Afterward I fell asleep right there on the Balcony. I dreamed I was dancing with Norman. I was dressed in one of Ginger Rogers’s silk gowns and he was wearing in his lapel the yellow rose I had given him. He was feeding me Normans with his fingers while we danced, pushing them one at a time into my mouth, pushing in one for each downbeat of the music. This was pleasant at first, but then, when he would not stop even after I was gagging but kept on forcing them in, it turned nightmarish. I woke up coughing and full of anguish. I tried to vomit but couldn’t.

  The next morning I felt worse. I was dizzy and had a painful cough, and there was a roaring in my ears like rushing water. I went back and ate some more of the new food and felt a little better. But that evening I was worse again and so weak that taking even a few slow steps was like climbing a mountain. I had not had anything to drink for two days, and now all I could think about was water. I saw, looking down from the Balloon, that Norman had not rinsed his cup. Half an inch of brown liquid languished at the bottom. I decided to go get it, and I half climbed, half fell down the central shaft to the Rathole. When I reached the floor, I discovered that the hole had been partially blocked by a small cardboard box. It took all my strength to push it away from the opening. It was heavy because it was filled almost to the top with Normans. I was climbing over it to get out of the hole when I caught sight of the label. It said “RatOut.” It also said, as subtext, “Normans, my ass.” It did not say “delicious and wholesome snack.” It did say “kills in one feeding.” I wondered if the half-dozen pellets I had swallowed would count as one feeding. I read on: “For control of mice, Norway rats, and roof rats in homes, farms, and businesses.” I was not sure if I was Norway or roof, though it apparently did not matter. “Keep out of reach of children and pets.” Cruel words to one who had briefly imagined that he might be both. I was dying, like Peewee, but slower, and not killed accidentally, but murdered. I made it to the coffee and drank it, and then I spent over an hour crawling back up to the nest. Even lying down I could not get my breath. I kept coughing, and when I wasn’t coughing my lungs made a wheezing sound like someone screaming from the bottom of a deep hole. When I sucked on my gums, I could taste the blood. I imagined myself dying. Fred Astaire, the great dancer, dying. John Keats, the great poet, dying. Apollinaire, delirious, dying. Proust, beautiful eyes in shrunken face, dying. Joyce dying in Zurich. Stevenson dying in Samoa. Marlowe dying, murdered. I was sorry no one was going to be there to see it. The beautiful butterflies were going to fold their wings and I was going to die like any other rat.

  I slept a long time. And when I woke I was not in heaven, unless heaven is a dusty place between two wooden joists. I still felt very weak but could not suck blood from my gums anymore. I was terribly thirsty and hungry as a wolf. The light from below streaming up around the edge of the Balloon was filled with dancing motes. Watching them, I was moved almost to tears by the beauty of it all. I crawled a few steps, and the feeling of the roughness of the laths against my feet was inexpressibly sweet. I crawled to the edge of the Balloon and looked down. He was sitting at the desk reading the paper as if nothing had happened. Looking down at his bald pate, I now had no trouble guessing at what sinister bumps he cunningly concealed beneath that monkish wreath of curly hair. I could easily have loosened the light fixture and sent it crashing down on his unprotected skull. Odd as it may seem, while such a thought did cross my mind, it found no purchase there. Throughout my life an enormous fatalism has always protected me from feelings of bitterness and rancor. And besides, it would be revenge on a phantom, since the Norman I had known and loved had turned out not to exist at all, to be in fact just a figment of my imagination, the product of an enormous misunderstanding for which I alone was to blame. He had turned out to be just another character in my dreams, with no more substance than the mad poet who the week before had been beating on Sarah Bernhardt’s door. I was heartbroken. Rat Poison, or a Love Betrayed. Everything I had thought fixed and firm ha
d come unglued, and yet at the same time I felt reborn. I was ready, as they say, to turn the page. With Pembroke Books on the short path to oblivion and with its owner a murderer, bearing on his temples the mark of Cain, it was time to make plans.

  There are two kinds of animals in the world, those with the gift of language and those without. Animals with the gift of language in turn fall into two classes, the talkers and the listeners. Most of the latter are dogs. Dogs, however, being exceedingly stupid, bear their aphasia with a kind of servile joy, which they express by wagging. That was not the case with me—I could not stand the thought that I would pass all my days in silence.

  Long ago, when I was just beginning my love affair with humans, I had come across in my reading various ingenious devices designed to mitigate that species’ natural inclination to malfunction and decay: prosthetic limbs, dentures, trusses, hearing aids, and eyeglasses. And so I early on hatched the idea of supplementing my natural deficiency with some sort of mechanical apparatus. When I first encountered the word typewriter, it was without explanation, as something obvious and familiar, and I was able to glean only that it was a thing with keys over which the nimble fingers of women sometimes flew. At first I thought it must be a kind of musical instrument and was puzzled by its connection with clatter. When I finally figured out that it was a machine for putting words on paper, I was tremendously excited. Though there was no typewriter anywhere that I could put my paws on, just the idea of it loosed a flood of images. I saw myself planting brilliant typewritten notes around the shop for Norman to find and puzzle over. In my dreams, he found them and scratched his head and left little missives in reply.