Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage

Author:Sam Savage [Savage, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781566892636
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2010-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

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.

Well, we already know how Norman let me down. The typewriter ditto. I dug up detailed descriptions and labeled drawings, and I even saw them at work in the movies. The verdict was unequivocal: too big, too heavy. When you are small, it is not enough to be a genius. Even if I could depress the keys, perhaps by jumping on them from a height, I would never be able to wind paper into the roller—rats are not good at knobs—or work the long silver lever that made the carriage rasp back into place. I had learned from the movies that a typewriter really does make a kind of music, and I knew that I was never going to hear it for myself, the bright ping of accomplishment at the end of a line or the long applauding scrape of the carriage slamming back to start another. As things have turned out, when I finish a line I hear nothing, just the silence of thoughts falling endlessly down the hole of memory.

But as I have said before, I can be very persistent when I want something badly enough, and I did not give up on the idea of conversing with humans. Only a couple of weeks after abandoning the typewriter project, I had discovered under LANGUAGES a slim yellow pamphlet called Say It Without Sound: A Pictionary, and there I found pictures of dozens of the signs used by the deaf to speak.

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