She laid the paper open on the floor in front of me. I stood on it and read, NOTICE OF EVICTION.
I let my gaze run down the page to the final paragraph. ‘And pursuant thereof, the Rat Firmin, trespasser, vagabond, bum, pedant, voyeur, gnawer of books, ridiculous dreamer, liar, windbag, and pervert, is hereby evicted from this planet.’ It was signed by General Logue himself.
Why do you give me this? It’s an eviction notice. ‘Or an invitation. It’s up to you.’
She left, pulling the door shut behind her. I could hear the sharp click of the latch, followed by the long descending clicks of her heels going down the stairs. There was a soft curving sound that was the street door opening, and then the noise, growing suddenly louder, of a bulldozer moving up Cornhill, its steel treads clicking.
I scrambled up on the armchair and stretched out on my back, four feet in the air. I closed my eyes. I did more than close them, I scrunched them up. I hauled out my little telescope and looked for Mama. I started to tell the story of my life. It began, ‘This is the saddest story I ever heard.’ I lay there all morning, the sentences arriving like caravans out of the desert, bringing pictures. I wondered what I was going to call it. But the story kept getting mixed up with water. At first it was glasses of water popping up in the wrong places, then it was buckets of water, and finally it was rivers and torrents of water, the poor camels upside down in it, knobby legs flailing as their humps dragged them to the bottom. I was terribly thirsty. Maybe it was the salt of her sweat that made me feel this way, but I knew I had to find water. I climbed out of the chair where I would gladly have spent the rest of my life had there been water and took the Elevator down. I was weaker than I had thought, and several times I almost fell. I wondered whether I could ever get back up.
I got off at the store. The front window was smashed and the rain had left a thin puddle at the edge of the sill. I drank it all and then licked the dampness from the big pieces of broken glass. I crawled into the corner where the cash register used to stand and fell asleep. For the first time in weeks I did not dream anything. Late that afternoon I was awakened by a tremendous jolt, followed by a shower of dust and plaster. I opened my eyes again. A narrow fissure had opened in the wall above me. I poked my head into it and looked out at what was left of our street. Most of the buildings that had lined the other side were gone, and in their place rose mountains of rubble. A huge yellow machine, mud splattered and growling, was roaming like a dinosaur through the canyons. Its name was Caterpillar. As I watched, it opened an enormous mouth and began to chew up a concrete pillar that had once been part of the back wall of Dawson’s Beer and Ale, the bits and pieces tumbling from its jaws like rice from a baby’s mouth. A Window on the End of the World. After a few minutes I turned away. I had spent a lifetime looking at the world through cracks, and I was sick of it.
Yet even as I turned from that fissure, with its view of the dying present, it was only to face another, this one a crack in time. Memories were pouring through it like an ocean.
And I was thirsty again. I went down to the basement, using the steps this time, to see if there was any water left in the toilet. By the time I had reached the bottom step the whole building was shaking. The concrete floor seemed to undulate beneath my feet. The fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling, which had flickered and hummed overhead while I, so long ago, just yesterday, had chewed and read my way toward another kind of light, had flickered out weeks ago. Now it was swinging like a dark pendulum, swinging and shaking, to the rhythm of the great waves of destruction breaking over Cornhill. I passed beneath it, and an instant later it crashed to the floor behind me. Curved bits of milky glass flew across the room, some of them falling on my head and back like a dry rain. Rat’s feet over broken glass, quiet and meaningless. The door under RESTROOM was open and the toilet bowl lay in two pieces on the floor. No water there. In my dry cellar. Ginger was right, this really was the end. I thought of my little piano up on the top floor, crushed beneath falling beams. There was nothing I could do to save it now. When the first beam struck it, I imagined it giving forth a last tiny sound of its own, and no one would hear it. I thought about climbing to the top of one of the giant dollhouses and throwing myself off, but I didn’t think I weighed enough to die that way. I would just float to the ground like a leaf. I mention those thoughts because that was what was going through my head when I caught sight of the book. It was jammed under the water heater, just a corner showing. I recognized it right away and went over and pulled it out. I could see the marks of my baby teeth on the cover, and some of the torn pages still showed the prints of Flo’s dirty paws where she had braced herself for tearing.
And then I was sure.
It took a long time and all my strength to work the book around behind the heater and into what was left of our old nest in the corner, a few piles of soiled confetti with almost no smell left. Once in there I could scarcely hear the sounds of the world. The roar of trucks became the wind. The crashes and booms of falling walls were the surf beating on black rocks. And the sirens and car horns became the sad calls of sea-birds. It was time to go. Jerry used to say that if you didn’t want to live your life over again, then you had wasted it. I don’t know. Even though I consider myself lucky to have lived the life I did, I would not like to be that lucky twice. I tore off a piece from the back of the book and folded it over and over. It became a wad. I made myself a little dip in the confetti, and holding the wad down with my forepaws, I read what was written on the top, and the words rang in my ears like trumpets: ‘Ho hang! Hang ho! And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free.’ I turned around once in my nest. I unfolded the wad, unfolding it all the way out till it was once more a piece from a page, a page from a book, a book from a man. I unfolded it all the way out and I read: ‘But I’m loothing them that’s here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. 0 bitter ending! They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary.’ I stared at the words and they did not swim or blur. Rats have no tears. Dry and cold was the world and beautiful the words. Words of good-bye and farewell, farewell and so long, from the little one and the Big One. I folded the passage up again and I ate it.
Author’s Note
Scollay Square was an actual place, its destruction an actual event. Firmin, however, is a work of fiction. I have sometimes distorted - or permitted Firmin to distort - events and geography for the sake of the story. For example, though Edward Logue, supervisor of the ‘renovation,’ was indeed a bombardier during the Second World War in Europe, he was not, as far as I know, nicknamed the Bombardier, nor I think did he include photographs of the ruins of Stuttgart and Dresden in his r’sum’s. And though the Millerites’ original tabernacle was in fact turned into a theater, that building burned to the ground in 1846; the Old Howard Theater that Firmin would have known was built to replace it. And while there really was a Rialto Theater and it was indeed known as the Scratch House, I don’t know that it showed pornographic movies after midnight. I am indebted to David Kruh’s Always Something Doing: Boston’s Infamous Scollay Square for much information about the history of the Square, though Mr Kruh is not of course responsible for any of the distortions or errors. Finally I would like to acknowledge a debt to the late George Gloss, owner of the Brattle Book Shop in old Scollay Square, who sold me for next to nothing volumes I still own today, who probably never possessed a safe full of banned literature, and who, faced with the destruction of his store, gave away all the books you could carry in five minutes.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Author’s Note
Sam Savage, Firmin
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