Firmin Read Online Free Page B

into other rats at every turn, the builders of this cavernous city, but I never did. I eventually came to think of them as ‘erstwhile.’ I never found any food either. And maybe that is why there were no more rats. Before the shop became a bookstore, perhaps it had been a grocery store or a bakery. Now there was nothing to eat but paper. Yet my patient exploration, night after night, of what seemed like miles of tunnel finally brought rewards that were to me superior to any food. You have to keep in mind that these intramural shafts were totally dark. I have excellent night vision, but there I had to feel my way by smell and touch. It was slow, tedious work, and it was several days before I stumbled upon a chute that took me directly up into the ceiling over the main room of the shop. The building, like most buildings in that part of town, was very old, without insulation in the ceiling, and the space between each pair of joists formed a long open chamber, incredibly hot and dusty. My dogged forebears had gnawed neat circular holes in the joists, and by means of these holes I was able to clamber from chamber to chamber. I was working my way in the direction of the street, exploring each chamber thoroughly with feet and nose before moving on to the next, when I came upon something so unexpected it set me back on my heels. After more than a week of nights spent groping in inky blackness, here suddenly were rays of light streaming up through the floor from the shop below. At some point long ago someone - not a rat - had cut a large round hole in the shop ceiling for a light fixture, which had then been installed slightly off center, leaving a narrow crescent-shaped opening along its rim. Peering cautiously through this crack I looked down into the room below.
     
    Directly beneath me stood a large cluttered desk and a chair with a red cushion. This desk and chair were where Norman sat, or would sit. I still did not know Norman - for some time yet he was to sit in my mind simply as the Owner of the Desk - but the clutter on the desk, the upright steel spike stacked to its tip with a ragged foliage of impaled receipts, the shiny arms of the chair, and of course the red cushion itself with its buttocks-shaped depression in the center, possessed an aura of seriousness and dignity that, considering my background, I found perfectly irresistible.
     
    This ceiling crack, shaped like a C for Confidential, became one of my favorite spots. It was a window on the human world, my first window. In that way it was like a book - you could look through it into worlds that were not your own. I called it the Balloon, because that was the feeling I got looking down, as if I were floating above the room in a balloon. A few days later I discovered a second very good place all the way at the other end of the ceiling in the direction of the alley. This one was a jagged hole in the plaster where a makeshift partition met the ceiling. I could lower myself through this hole and down onto the top of one of the tall glass-fronted cabinets where Norman kept the rare books, and from there I commanded a magnificent view of the main room of the shop, including the front door and Norman’s desk and chair. I named it the Balcony. (Today the words balcony and balloon , dactyl and iamb, have become fused end to end to form a kind of cradle, or a sad little boat. Sometimes I climb in the boat and float around. Or I lie in the cradle and rock and suck my toe.) I later learned that this room, which at the time seemed to me practically oceanic in its vastness, was in fact only one small piece of the operation. Norman had room upon room. At some point long before my time he had acquired the two shops next door to the original bookstore and had knocked holes in the connecting walls. Passing through narrow doorways, so narrow people had to take turns going through or else walk sideways and rub stomachs, you entered the rooms one after another, and they were full of