Firmin by Sam Savage
The story begins on the planet Earth about a hundred years after a vast thermonuclear war between the ‘last empires,’ the USA and the USSR, has utterly destroyed civilization. Besides pretty much destroying every city and even the small towns, the war had instilled in the surviving rural populations a visceral aversion to all forms of technology, which they saw as somehow responsible for the calamities that had befallen them. There were no more real governments as we know them, only roving bands of warlords and small loose-knit communities of peasant farmers. These farmers tilled the soil with simple wooden plows and mules, and when they plowed at night the radioactive soil glowed in the plow’s wake like phosphorus. All over Earth people suffered from unimaginable diseases, including a great many that had not existed before the holocaust, and many of these affected the skin so that most of the people were covered with painful boils. Because of the radiation permeating every inch of the planet, half the children were born damaged - crippled, blind, or imbecilic. The old religions and ideologies, which had played such prominent roles in fomenting the final war, the memory of which was wedged as a recurrent nightmare in the collective unconscious, had been utterly discredited. But considering how ignorant and brain damaged everyone was, new religions sprang up like daisies. Most did not spread far or last long, however, until the birth of the Castaways.
This new sect was founded by a particularly bloody-minded warlord named John Hunter. He had been raping and pillaging in a small village one day when he was knocked from his horse by a tree limb. Though apparently unhurt, soon afterward he began receiving messages from outer space, and from these he learned that human beings were not originally from Earth at all and had not evolved along with the other species but had arrived as castaways from the wreck of a spaceship. The teachings of this new religion were in perfect harmony with the feeling everyone at that time had of not belonging on the planet. It was hardly the sort of planet anyone would want to belong on. John Hunter told the people that what they needed to do was be rescued, and to do that they needed some way to signal passing spaceships. Of course they had only the simplest technology, no radio or anything like that, so signaling spaceships presented a problem. But John Hunter had the answer. He told them they had to build a pyramid so big it would be visible from space. He spent two years laying it all out with stakes, attracting more and more followers as he went. The base of the pyramid, as it was finally staked out, entirely covered the ancient states of Nebraska and Kansas and much of Missouri, Iowa, and South Dakota.
Wild with fervor, the masses of people set to work, quarrying and transporting stone. Millions were soon deliriously at labor. In time, engineering skills increased, bureaucracies sprang up. To feed the millions of workers agriculture expanded and intensified. The iron plow, the disk, and the harrow were introduced, and even crude threshing machines. An enormous palace and temple complex was built at each corner of the pyramid for John Hunter and his priests. When John Hunter finally died, he was succeeded by his brilliant and ruthless son Kevin Hunter, and he in turn by the weak and dissipated Wilson Hunter, and so forth until the last leader, the utterly mad Bob Hunter. By that time the labor had gone on for 110 years, and the expense of building the giant pyramid had used up most of the planet’s meager resources, while the population was increasingly ravaged by mutation and disease. The last human remnant finally perished in a snowstorm while trying to haul an enormous block of granite from Michigan. Centuries later a space-traveling species actually did land on Earth. They were amazed at the vast unfinished pyramid, and they built a large research center on Earth just to study it, but they never were able to figure out what its purpose was.
I didn’t like this story quite as much as The Nesting, maybe because there were no rats in it. I liked the generational saga, though, and the way the Hunters, their brains corrupted by power and radiation, got weaker and crazier as time went on. I liked the message. Jerry says people won’t publish his books because they are afraid of the message. But I guess that is pretty much my view of life anyway, every day a little weaker and crazier.
Chapter 12
Jerry and I had a lot of good times together. I especially loved our breakfasts, the saucer of strong coffee with milk, and reading the paper together. One day at breakfast we read a long article in the Globe about Adolf Eichmann. It showed pictures of trainloads of starving people reaching their skinny arms out through the slats of cattle cars, and piles of emaciated corpses - they had rat faces - and Jerry said it made him ashamed to be human. This was a new idea to me.
I came to really enjoy coffee, and wine too, though never wine in the morning, and not usually in the afternoon either unless it was raining. When suppertime rolled around, Jerry usually fixed things out of cans. Our favorite was Dinty Moore beef stew. Sometimes he cooked some rice to go with it, and at other times, when we were short on cash, rice and soy sauce might be the whole meal. Jerry’s mustache was really very bushy and it attracted bits of rice like a magnet when he ate - they seemed to just fly into it. Later on, when I felt secure in our relationship, I used to ferret the bits out with my paws and eat them. That always made him laugh. When he laughed it was easy to imagine that he was the happiest man in the world and not just the smartest.
He did not always go out at night, and sometimes - more and more frequently as the weeks rolled by and the weather turned cold - we spent the evenings sprawled in the old leather armchair together listening to records, lots of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday. He had a real hi-fi with speakers on both sides, and we drank the red wine that he brought home in jugs from Dawson’s Beer and Ale on Cambridge Street. I did not have my own glass, so I sipped from his. I usually sat on the chair arm, and sometimes I got so drunk I fell off and landed in his lap. He laughed, and even though I was not able to laugh I felt good and it was the same as laughing. I had always liked jazz, because of Fred Astaire, and now I grew fond of modern stuff too. We played an L.P. called No Sun in Venice over and over, it was so cool and sad, with Milt Jackson on vibes. The vibraphone sounded to me like a lonely rat walking down an empty street in a city made of glass, his paws chiming on the pavement, a clear, high lonely sound that echoed off the buildings.
Sometimes late at night, lying in my box in the dark, on the towel from the Roosevelt Hotel (invisible now beneath the cotton I had pulled out of Stanley), I could still hear the music in my head. I would let it play. I would open my eyes in the dark and think about the Lovelies. I would rub my thoughts against the velvet of their skin, root in the shadowy warmth of their crevices. The longing was so intense - it was a long, hot line running the length of my body. I was never able to fathom how Jerry could bear it, trudging alone through a womanless world, mumbling to himself, big head wagging. Had I been human I would have descended to the streets, accosted the first attractive young one I met, my black eyes glittering above a chinless smile, and I would have beguiled, bought, or ravished. But Jerry just shuffled along in arctic solitude, so lonely he would talk to a rat.
Still, during those good times, at breakfast with the paper or listening to music in the big chair at night, I sometimes experienced a new kind of happiness. It was not like the brilliant gaiety of the old days in the bookstore. It was softer and warmer and almost brown.
Sometimes we let ourselves get carried away and played Bird as loud as it would go, with Jerry doing the drums on the chair arms and me pounding the piano and the whole joint, as they say, jumping. We were so loud that twice the man who lived in the next room - his name was Cyril and he had hair growing out of his nose and sometimes at night we could hear him sobbing - came and beat on the door with the flat of his fat hand and shouted at us to turn it down. And those two times, plus the visit from the fire marshal, were the three times we ever got knocks on our door.
Jerry taught me a lot about jazz, about improvisation and playing the changes and things like that, and later on I worked these into my own music. Sometimes I played while Jerry talked. I wore a white shirt with blue stripes and a
And he told me about when he used to live in Los Angeles before the war and had a walk-on part in a movie called Canyon Riders. He talked a lot about books too, and the literary scene. He said nobody ever wrote better than Hemingway except Fitzgerald, and he only did it once. And he told me about the exciting things that were happening on ‘the Coast’ - he meant the West Coast - and he said Boston was a dying city.
I loved it when he talked about the revolution, too, about Joe Hill, Peter Kropotkin, and the Paterson strike. One of his favorite phrases was ‘after the revolution. ’ When people bought his books, he would apologize for taking their money and tell them that books were going to be free after the revolution, a public service like streetlights. He also said Jesus was a Communist, which caused some of the people to get worked up.
Jerry talked and I listened. Gradually I learned more and more about his life, while he, one can safely say, learned less and less about mine. Due to my natural reticence, he had a free hand with my personality. He could pretty much make me into whomever he wanted, and it was soon painfully clear that when he looked at me what he mainly saw was a cute animal, clownish and a little stupid, something like a very small dog with buckteeth. He had no inkling of my true character, that I was in fact grossly cynical, moderately vicious, and a melancholy genius, or that I had read more books than he had. I loved Jerry, but I feared that what he loved in return was not me but a figment of his imagination. I knew all about being in love with figments. And in my heart I always knew, though I liked to pretend otherwise, that during our evenings together, when he would drink and talk, he was really just talking to himself.
Do I detect a chuckle? You think you have found me out, I suppose. I know, I know what I said earlier - that I confessed, testified, and in my perverse way even boasted of my love of cracks, my near-pathological need to hide, my affection for masks. So why, you ask, do I complain now when presented with a new opportunity for concealment, a golden chance to cower unseen behind the impenetrable guise of cuddly pet? Well, I’ll tell you why: the difference between assuming a mask, which is always an opportunity for freedom, and having it forced upon one, is the difference between a refuge and a prison. I would have been happy to stump through life wrapped in the furry armor of my pet disguise had I been convinced that I could pop it off whenever I wanted, tear away the adorable cuddle face and leap forth as the creature I knew I was. Hi, Jerry, it’s me! I would never have done that, of course, but I liked the idea that I could.
Though I wore the disguise bravely, it always chafed, and sometimes I could not stop myself from gnawing at its edges. When the mood was on me, I liked to defecate in delicate spots, on Jerry’s plate or his pillow. He did not care for that at all, though he still failed to get it - instead of nasty little beast, I was just good old Firmin messing up. And once when he was idly scratching me between the ears I turned and gave him a really vicious bite. On his fourth digit. I am sorry about that now. A Wanderer in the Garden of Regrets.
When we left the room it was not always to peddle books on the Common. Once we went to the movies. It was early in September, a heavy, smelly, overcast afternoon. Jerry had been on the verge of going out, had the door already open. I was on the table finishing his lunch and reading yesterday’s Globe. He hesitated, turned, and shot me a look that at the time seemed to say, ‘Poor old Ernie, left alone.’ Thinking back on it now, though, it seemed more quizzical than that, so maybe it was saying something like, ‘Who is this animal anyway?’ I prefer it that way. But whichever it was, he came back into the room and scooped me up. He stuck me in his coat pocket, and off we went to the movies.
The walk to the Rialto was tremendously interesting in a depressing sort of way. I had never done it in the daytime, and now, peeking out from beneath the pocket flap as we bounced along, I was amazed at how daylight ravages, especially when it is dull and gray and not very different from the light that had leaked through the panes of my basement. And it was not just the light. The world with which I thought I was familiar - dark, mysterious, laced with shadow, romantic even, though fraught with danger - had dwindled horribly. A thick haze had starved it of color. Distant views had lost their depth, collapsing into lusterless panels of gray and brown. Neglected buildings, boarded windows, trash-clogged gutters, pinched gray faces. It was all shriveled, sad, and ugly. I couldn’t let that bother me, though - I was happy to be striding through the streets of Boston in the pocket of one of the best writers in the world. Of course, it was trudging really, but I say ‘striding’ because that captures the feeling of the thing.
I had seen every movie the Rialto owned, some of them many times, but I was always game to watch one again. When we reached the ticket window, Jerry shoved me down deep in his pocket, so I was not able to see the posters and had no idea what was showing. I stayed hunkered there while he bought a box of popcorn and a Coke, and then we walked all the way down to the front row. There were only a few people besides us in the whole theater. The movie started up almost right away and as luck would have it, it turned out to be the one movie I really hated, even though it was in Technicolor, which I normally considered a plus. It was called The Yearling, and it was a long sentimental saga about a poor boy and his pet deer. I normally don’t like stories with animals in them. Jerry, though, clearly loved it, and I realized that he had brought me along because he thought I would love it too, and that made me sad and lonely, though I put on a good face. Besides the deer and a lot of dogs, the movie features a big bear named Old Slewfoot. When he appeared on the screen, Jerry turned to see my reaction. I really hammed it up for him, opening my mouth wide, throwing my forepaws in the air, and falling over backward. I could see he was pleased with that. The movie goes on and on, one affliction after another, until one day, when the deer has eaten all the poor family’s corn for the third time, the mother whips out the family shotgun and blasts it. I was glad about that, but I could see Jerry wiping away tears.
We stayed on for the other features. We sat through Trail to San Antone and The Mad Monster, and it was getting on toward midnight. I hoped they would finish off with Ginger Rogers so Jerry could watch the death and transfiguration scene, but it was Charlie Chan instead. When at midnight the great Chinaman flickered out in midsentence, there was the usual coughing and shuffling in the dark. Then the projector rattled back to life and the angelic assumption began. This time it was Man-Crazy Kittens, one of my favorites. Two Lovelies dressed in kitten suits, with adorable little whiskers and ears, were trying to catch a man dressed as a rat, or maybe a mouse. They chased him round and round in a huge house, practically a mansion, but he was too quick for them, vaulting over furniture, climbing drapes, swinging from a chandelier. After a while the kittens tried another tactic. They pretended to give up on the chase. They yawned and stretched and pretended they were going to bed. They started climbing out of their kitten suits, first the shoulders, then one lovely breast. They were so beautiful then. Of course when the big rat sees them naked he can’t resist and goes over and mates with them both, one after another and then both together. I am usually deeply disinclined to contemplate Lovelies being mounted by anything as gross as a human mal
Chapter 13
In October Jerry started talking about moving to San Francisco. At first I thought he was just talking, until one day he came home with a Grey-hound schedule and spent the evening poring over it, deciding which cities we would visit on the way. On the list, I remember, were Buffalo, Chicago, and Billings. So I took the Elevator down to the bookstore and read everything I could find there about San Francisco, which wasn’t much anymore. Jerry was optimistic about Frisco. In fact, I think that was the only time that I ever saw him consistently optimistic about anything, he was such a sad man at heart.
I knew we had to go soon. The Elevator trips down to the store were getting more difficult every day, and I found myself thinking a lot about death. I wondered what would happen if Jerry came back home one night and found me dead, my poor little body stiff and cold. I think my mouth would be slightly open, showing my yellow teeth. (I am usually careful to keep my upper lip pulled well down over them.) What would he do then? Would he pick me up by the tail and drop me in the metal can? And what else could he do? Bury me in the Public Garden?