Things were ending fast. The ship was sinking, and a week after Shine started tossing books overboard, the Old Howard burned. This was a theater that a long time ago had been famous all across America. I used to trudge by its abandoned hulk on my way to the Rialto. Facade of gray stone, enormous gothic windows, it looked like a church except for the huge sign jutting halfway across the street with THE OLD HOWARD spelled out in lightbulbs. I always hoped they would turn the lights on, but they never did. And it looked like a church for a reason - it had been built as one by the Millerites, a religious sect whose zealots believed that the world was coming to an end. They were right about that, of course. But using the Bible and a lot of suspect math, they had calculated that this would occur on October 22, 1844. In preparation for that event, thousands of true believers sold everything they owned, and then they built a huge fortress of a church in order to have a safe place to be in while it was happening. I loved reading about those people. They were just like me, carrying around with them all the time this huge sense of calamity. When the sun rose on October 23, same as before, they were naturally very disappointed. They sold the church, and I don’t know what happened to them then. I guess life must have seemed pretty boring after that. The church became a theater - Edwin Booth played there - a vaudeville house, and finally a strip joint. In 1952, which was still long before my time, the city closed it down for good. They said the shows were lewd and immoral. They objected especially to Sally Keith, who wore tassels on her tits and buttocks that she could spin like airplane propellers in opposite directions. I wish I could have seen that. Afterward, the Howard was just a rat house. Half the rats in the Square lived there.
And now at last the world really was ending, and the Howard was going with it. I was in the Balloon when it burned. Everybody in all the stores rushed out to see the fire. Even Shine went out, just jumped up and left, locking the door behind him. It was the middle of the day and he didn’t even put up a ‘back soon’ sign. If I hadn’t known it already, that alone would have told me he was through with the book business. We both were. The sirens wailed off and on the whole afternoon, and when I went by that night only the outer walls were still standing, a smoking ruin, and the street was full of ashy mud. A few people were walking up and down in the mud holding signs that said SAVE THE OLD HOWARD and PRESERVE OUR HERITAGE. It had never looked to me like anything particularly worth saving, and I had never cared for the low-life rats who lived there. Good riddance, I thought. At dawn the ruin was still smoking, when they brought in the huge crane. It had an enormous iron ball on the end of a steel cable, and when the crane moved its arm back and forth the ball began to swing, and it swung higher and higher until, with the ball high on the backswing, the crane suddenly surged forward, and the ball swung forward and down and up and crashed against the side of the Old Howard. The walls must have been really strong, because they couldn’t knock them down with the crane. And that was when they sent in the sappers, who put dynamite under the walls and set it off. They did this three times, and each time another wall came crashing down, and a billowing wave of ash and dust rolled down the street for blocks and made the dirty buildings a little bit dirtier.
The next morning General Logue gave the signal, and the acres of heavy machinery began the final assault on the Square, chewing at its edges, eating it up a building at a time. They used cranes with wrecking balls and enormous armored bulldozers whose drivers wore helmets and goggles and rode in steel cages. Each time a building would come crashing down the workers would cheer, and then they loaded the broken pieces into gigantic dump trucks that carted them away. It went on like that for weeks. The streets were full of smoke and dust and the roaring of machines, and now and then an enormous whump rattled the store windows, and that was the dynamite.
For rats, peace is a lot like war anyway, so most of them went on with their lives as best they could. The average rat doesn’t see much difference between a standing building and a pile of rubble, except that rubble is a better place to hide in. When a building came down, the rats retreated to the ruins of the basements, into broken drains and cracks in the rubble. The Globe ran a story about the rats in the ruins, and then Logue sent in white-suited teams to finish them off with poison gas that they pumped into the rubble through hoses. That was when the exodus began in earnest. Every night I passed long lines of them heading out, sometimes whole families together. The Globe story had been headlined DEMOLITION UNCOVERS RAT NATION. It called the whole neighborhood ‘sleazy and rat infested.’
Infested is an interesting word. Regular people don’t infest, couldn’t infest if they tried. Nobody infests except fleas, rats, and Jews. When you infest, you are just asking for it. One day I was talking to a man in a bar, when he asked me what I did for a living. I answered, ‘I infest.’ I thought that was a pretty ironic thing to say, but the man didn’t get it. He thought I had said ‘I invest’ and started asking me for tips on where he should put his money. So I suggested he invest in construction. The shithead.
And then the Rialto closed. I went one night and it was dark. No more Lovelies and no more popcorn. Now I had to scrounge in the streets and ruins like the others, and I started seeing dead rats, sometimes in the middle of the sidewalk. Food was getting scarce, mostly just the leftovers from the workers’ lunches, and that was when the horrors began. Some of the starving rats were eating the corpses of their fellows like jackals. I felt ashamed for them, and at the same time I was ashamed at feeling ashamed. Even in the best of times I had not been strong or quick. I limped now, and I was not young anymore. I was hungry all the time. When would I eat corpses? Or would I be crippled by all-too-human scruples, a monster to the last? At night the gutters were full of rats on the run. I thought I glimpsed a couple of my brothers, but I was not sure. It had been a long time, and rats look a lot alike. I sometimes passed in my wanderings whole standing buildings with their facades torn off, all the rooms standing open to the air, some with the furniture still in them and wallpaper on the walls and bathrooms complete with a sink and toilet. They looked like enormous dollhouses.
One morning Shine arrived at the store accompanied by two men in overalls. The men took the desk and chair and all the bookcases that weren’t attached to the walls, and they loaded them into a big truck called Mayflower and left. After they had driven away, Shine walked around the shop a while. He did not cry this time. There were still a few books scattered about on the floor and he walked around kicking them. Then he went out and locked the door. I watched him drop the key into his jacket pocket and turn down the street. I never saw him again.
Chapter 15
At that point I still had every intention of following Shine’s example, and that of hundreds of my kind. Any minute, I thought, I’m going to beat it out of here. I thought that maybe I would try and find another bookstore somewhere, perhaps across the river in Cambridge, or maybe go to the Common and hook up with one of Jerry’s old pals. And yet something I could not explain even to myself, a lethargy or maybe a torpor, kept me from making the move, and every day I put off going. I was still able to scrounge enough food to get by, though never enough to satisfy. The destruction had now reached Brattle Street, and it was clear that in not many days it was going to break over Cornhill. I felt weary and old. A rat’s life is short and painful, painful but quickly over, and yet it feels long while it lasts. For days, when I was not hunting up less and less food in the streets, I wandered around the empty store. There wasn’t much left to read, just a few boring religious pamphlets. I read them anyway.
Two mornings ago the rain was coming down hard, washing dust and debris off the piles of rubble and forming muddy rivers in the street. On the floor of Pembroke Books, crossed by the shadows of raindrops, were scattered the remains of several suppers that I had dragged in from the street, morsels and crumbs of food mixed with the orts and offal of the rat life - a greasy wrapper, a greasy strand of bacon rind, peanut shells, pizza crust. The men had stopped working because of the rain, an
d the roar of the machines had stopped, and now just the rain was roaring. I felt agitated and depressed and spent the morning dragging back and forth in the store, back and forth. The rain did not let up; at noon the day was already growing dark, and I decided to go upstairs and play. It was hard going up the Elevator, and in the silence my breath was loud.
The light was different in the room. I noticed that as soon as I poked my nose up out of the hole. It was not raining, and sunlight was streaming through the open window. The furniture was all back, the bed and the enamel-topped table, the old leather chair, the bookshelves, and all the books. The closet door was ajar, and I saw that it was full of junk again. The rusty trash can was still there and my piano with its chips and scratches. Jerry, I thought, Jerry is coming home. I formulated RESURRECTION and let it glow there. I sat down at the piano and doodled around a little, just to loosen the old fingers, waiting for the footsteps on the stairs; then I went into Cole Porter, ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ and ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’ In the end, I would rather be Cole Porter than God. I moved on to Gershwin and ‘I Got Rhythm,’ and soon I was really getting into it, the piano was jumping and I was bouncing around on the bench and singing at the top of my voice. But even lost in the music as I was, with pictures floating in and out between my ears so fast it made me dizzy, I was aware that someone had entered the room very quietly and was now sitting on the bed behind me. I could feel the listening. I thought, Jerry. I kept right on singing, and while I sang I slowly turned my head and looked.
I had never seen her in color before, and I did not recognize her at first. She was sitting on the bed, hands folded in her lap, rings on her fingers. She had on the black dress she wore in Swingtime. I had loved the way she looked then and the way the swirling dress would float up to her hips when she danced. It was the dress that clued me in to who she was. She had changed that much. Only her voice had not changed. ‘Gee, that’s swell,’ she said, ‘please don’t stop.’ So I kept going. I went through the whole piece again, this time with my own variations, and then I stood up and bowed. I signed good-bye zipper, and I could see that she understood. She laughed, and it was not like your laughter. She was still beautiful, even though I could see that something heavy, time or sadness, had pooled in vague loops below her chin and crinkled the corners of her eyes. They were blue.
I went to the window. It was dark outside. She came over and stood behind me. I could feel her looking. I could feel the black dress like a cloud behind me. I was aware of being tall.
From the window I looked out over a vast plain of rubble, as in the pictures of Hiroshima, reaching all the way to the horizon. I was surprised the destruction had gone so far; it had not been planned that way. From the alley below my window to where it crashed into the sky lay a rocky prairie. It had been made by breaking buildings, breaking them up into windows, doors, stair treads, boards, bricks, doorknobs, and breaking these in turn into pieces so small they did not even have names, and spreading all of it out and grinding it down and running it over until it had no meaning left and was nothing but rubble and emptiness, and in the middle of it all stood the Casino Theater. It was flooded with light, and you could see the scars on its sides where the adjacent buildings had been torn away. With no street to be on, it was a building with no address. I named it the Last Thing Standing. On each side of the ticket window were the two angels I had first seen the night Mama took Luweena and me on orientation. They were still wearing black rectangles across their breasts and crotches, one foot lifted as if dancing. Music, faint and tinny, like something made by a music box, was coming from the building, wafting across the rubble. It was incredibly sad, the nostalgic down-at-the-heels sadness of an old circus on the edge of bankruptcy. The entire theater was illuminated and on the marquee in white running lights with no bulb missing were the words THE NEXT BIG DEAL and below that ALL TICKETS HALF PRICE.
They were lining up at the ticket window, three or four abreast, the line snaking across the rubble field. And people were still arriving by ones and twos, walking in out of the darkness from every direction. They carried bundles and suitcases, and some led children by the hand. They were happy to be approaching the lighted area around the theater, but no one was running, and they made no sound at all, or only small sounds, whimperings and scrapings and the like, that were drowned by the music, faint as it was. Hundreds and hundreds of people in a line shuffling silently forward between the angels, who each raised one foot as if dancing. I posted REFUGEES beneath the picture. And I thought, Jerry would have gotten a kick out of this.
Ginger was standing beside me at the window. I was wondering if she could see it too, when she said, ‘That’s where I’m working. Every night I take my clothes off in a number called “The Dance at the End of the World.” It drives ’em crazy.’
I thought, You work as a stripper?
‘Only as a night job.’
So you can read my thoughts.
‘Your thoughts and more than your thoughts - your beliefs and desires.’
I don’t believe anything.
‘You believe you are a rat.’
The music grew suddenly louder, swelling to a slow swing tune with lots of brass.
‘Here, this is for you,’ she said. She handed me a box of popcorn. The box was red and white and had a picture of a clown on it with a geyser of popcorn erupting from the top of his hat.
And there, in the middle of Jerry’s old room, she began to dance. I had never seen her dance like that, except maybe sometimes in my head. It was the sort of stepless dance the Lovelies did in the Rialto after midnight, a bump and grind, hips undulating to the beat, slow and hard. I climbed up into the armchair with my popcorn, and I watched. She stepped from her dress, and picking it up on the toe of her foot, sent it sailing into a corner. She had nothing on underneath. She danced naked. She caressed the rat nest of fur between her legs. Her eyes were half-closed, her lips parted. I have never really understood this expression, though I think it indicates a special kind of human longing. I was sorry we did not have a rug so she could do that part too. And then she swooped upon me, picked me up, and we danced together. She danced and I floated. She held me between her breasts. I buried my head in her smell; it was like wet leather. We swayed and whirled; it was like flying. And the walls of the room moved out, like a stage set, and we were dancing in a huge white place. I closed my eyes and imagined we were flying over the city and all the people in the streets were looking up and pointing. They had never seen anything like it, a naked angel carrying a rat. We danced a long time, we danced faster, the music grew louder, it was madness and frenzy. Then suddenly it stopped. The silence came crashing in and the walls rushed back into place. She let herself fall backward onto the bed. She was laughing, still holding me to her. I could feel her chest rise and fall beneath me. And I felt the grip of her fingers loosen on my back, and when I looked up her eyes were shut. I wriggled from her grip and slowly crept toward her face, smelling the smell of her neck and then the warm smell of her breath. Little diamonds of sweat glistened on her upper lip, and I drank them one by one. They were salty. I knew from my reading that this was also the taste of tears.
She sat up, pitching me backward onto the bed.
‘Time’s up,’ she said. She crossed the room to where she had kicked her dress. She bent over and I saw she was slipping her legs into black pants.
What happened to the dress?
She didn’t answer. After the black trousers came a white shirt and then a black business jacket to match the trousers. She was leaving. Had I been a man I could have groveled at her feet, clung to her ankles and wept. I didn’t want her to go, ever.
Don’t go.
Her face grew hard. ‘Don’t be stupid, Firmin. This really is the end.’
No. I’ll make you stay. Watch this.
I did all my tricks for her. I couldn’t do a full flip anymore because of my bad leg and my old age and my heavy head, and each time I tried I landed on my back, which for laughs
turned out to be just as good. Then I went to a book and pretended to read. She laughed. But she was leaving anyway. Through the window I could see the dawn breaking.
‘The job at the Casino is night work. My day job is with the city.’
You work for them? But, Ginger, you can’t do that. They are the enemy.
‘Everyone has two jobs, Firmin, a day job and a night job, because everyone has two sides, a dark and a light. You do, they do, I do. No one can escape it.’
Then I noticed an enormous briefcase on the metal table. She snapped it open and riffled through a sheaf of official-looking papers, finally pulling one out and holding it toward me. ‘Everyone is his own enemy, Firmin, you should know that by now.’