Pinball, 1973 (12 page)

The Rat gazed out at the beacon. The sky was getting light, the sea was beginning to turn gray. And by the time the crisp morning light had swept away the darkness like you’d brush off a tablecloth, the Rat had climbed into bed and fallen asleep with pains that had no place to go.

* * *

The Rat’s decision to leave town seemed to have firmed up, at least for the time being. It was a conclusion reached after long hours of looking at things from every angle. It seemed impenetrable.

He struck a match, and ignited the bridge. There went the last of anything left kicking around in his heart, though maybe something of himself would be left in town. Not that anyone would notice. And as the town changed, even that trace would vanish.

Everything would go on regardless.

Now to tell J.

The Rat couldn’t figure out why the guy’s presence should disturb him as much as it did. A quick, Hey, I’m leaving town, take care, and that would do it. It’s not like they knew a thing about each other, after all. Total strangers, just happened to be passing by, that was all. Even so, the Rat’s heart ached. Lying face up on the bed, he shook a tightly clenched fist in the air.

* * *

It was past midnight Monday when the Rat pushed up the shutters to J’s Bar. There sat J at a table in the half-darkened interior, the same as usual, doing little other than smoking a cigarette. J smiled and nodded when he saw the Rat come in. J looked ages old in the dim light. A stubble shadowed his cheeks and chin, his eyes bulged, his thin lips were cracked and dry. Veins stood out on his neck, and his fingertips were stained yellow with nicotine.

“Tired, eh?” the Rat asked.

“Kind of,” J replied, then paused. “One of those days. Everyone has ‘em.”

The Rat nodded and drew up a chair at the table, sitting himself down across from J.

“Like the song says, rainy days and Mondays always get ya down.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” said J, staring at the cigarette between his fingers.

“You ought to beat a path home and get some sleep.”

“Nah, it’s okay,” J shook his head slowly, as if shooing away bugs. “Get back home and I wouldn’t be able to sleep well anyway.”

The Rat glanced down at his watch out of sheer reflex. Twelve twenty. There in that deathly quiet dim basement, time itself seemed to have passed away. In J’s Bar with the shutters down, there was not a glimmer of the cheer he had sought here for so many years. Everything was faded, everything was tired out.

“Could you get me a cola?” J said. “And while you’re at it, grab yourself a beer.”

The Rat stood up, took a beer and a cola from the refrigerator, and brought them over to the table along with glasses.

“Music?” asked J.

“Nah, let’s keep it quiet tonight,” said the Rat.

“Like some kind of funeral.”

The Rat laughed. Then, without a word, the two of them drank. The ticking of the Rat’s wristwatch on the table began to sound unnaturally loud.

Twelve thirty-five. Yet it seemed as if an awfully long time had passed. J hardly moved. The Rat fixed his eyes on J’s filterless cigarette burning up in the glass ashtray, even the stub turning to ash.

“Why’re you so tired?” the Rat asked.

“You got me,” J said, then rearranged his legs in afterthought. “Doubt there’s any reason, really.”

The Rat sighed and drank half the beer in his glass, then returned it to the table.

“Say J, I’ve been thinking, people – I don’t care who – all get to rotting. Am I right?”

“Right enough.”

“And there are many ways to rot.” The Rat unconsciously brought the back of his hand up to his lips. “But for each person, it seems like the options are very limited. At the most say, two or three.

“I guess you could say that.”

The last of the beer, foam gone flat, left a pool at the bottom of the glass. The Rat took a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, and put the last one to his lips. “But y’know, lately I’ve begun to think, it’s all the same to me. You’re just gonna rot anyway, right?” J reserved comment, his glass of cola poised mid-sip while listening to the Rat.

“People go through changes, sure. But up to now, I never did get what those changes were supposed to mean.” The Rat bit his lip and looked down at the table pensively. “Then it came to me. Whatever step forward, whatever the change, it’s really only a stage of decay. Does that sound so off target?”

“No, not so very off.”

“That’s why I never felt the least scrap of love or goodwill toward the run of the mill people who go merrily about their way to oblivion not even in this town.”

J said nothing. The Rat said nothing. He struck a match on the table, and after letting the flame slowly burn its way down the shaft, he lit his cigarette.

“The thing is,” J said, “you yourself are thinking about making a change, correct?”

“Well, as matter of fact…”

A frightfully quiet few seconds passed between them. Maybe even ten seconds. Then J

spoke up.

“People, you gotta remember, are surprisingly hit-or-miss creatures. Far more than even you’re thinking.”

The Rat emptied the rest of the beer into his glass, and downed it in one gulp. “I’m torn, what to do.”

J nodded.

“No way to decide.”

“I kinda figured that,” said J with a tired, talked-out smile.

The Rat slowly stood up, and stuffed his cigarettes and lighter in his pocket. The clock

read past one.

“Good night,” said the Rat.

“Good night,” said J. “Oh, and one last thing. Somebody said it: Walk slowly and drink

lots of water.”

The Rat smiled at J, opened the door, and climbed the stairs. Streetlamps brightly illuminated the deserted street. The Rat sat down on a guard-rail and looked up at the sky. And thought, just how much water does a guy have to drink?

The Spanish lecturer called on a Wednesday after a holiday weekend in November. My partner had gone off to the bank before lunch, and I was eating spaghetti the office girl had made in the apartment’s dining-kitchen. The spaghetti wasn’t bad, tossed with slivered shiso leaf in place of basil. A scant two minutes overcooked perhaps. We were locked in debate over the issue of spaghetti preparation when the telephone rang. The girl picked up the phone, exchanged two or three words, and then handed it over to me with a shrug.

“About the ‘Spaceship’,” he said. “I’ve located one.”

“Where?”

“It’s a little hard to say over the phone,” he said.

And for a brief while, we both fell silent.

“You mean to say?” I puzzled.

“I mean that it’s difficult to explain over the phone.”

“One look tells all, eh?”

“No,” he said, swallowing. “I mean, even if it stood before your very eyes, it’d be difficult to explain.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I waited for him to continue.

“I’m not trying to be mysterious and I’m not just carrying on. In any case, might we get together?”

“Sure.” “Shall we say, today at five?” “Fine,” I agreed. “By the way, will I get to play?”

“Of course,” he said. I thanked him and hung up. Then I started in on seconds of spaghetti.

“Where’re you going?”

“I’m off to play pinball. I don’t know the location.” “Pinball?” “You got it, batting balls with flippers.”

“I know what pinball is. But really, why?” “There are – how do you say – things in this world our philosophy cannot account for.” She leaned on the table and propped her head up to think it over.

“You’re good at pinball, are you?” “Used to be. The one and only accomplishment I ever took pride in.” “I don’t have any.”

“Then you don’t have any to lose.” While she gave that some more thought, I polished off the rest of the spaghetti. “Little meaning is there to the things one loses. The glory of things meant to be lost is not true glory. Or so they say.”

“Who said that?”

“I forget. But, anyway, it fits.”

“Is there anything in the world that doesn’t get lost?” “I’d like to believe so. You’d do well to believe it, too.”

“I’ll try.”

“Maybe I’m too much of an optimist. But I’m not that stupid.”

“I know.”

“I’m not proud of it, but it sure beats the other way around.”

She nodded. “So you’re off to play pinball tonight?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hold up your hands.”

I raised both hands up toward the ceiling, while she carefully inspected the underarms of my sweater.

“Okay, off you go.”

* * *

I rendezvoused with the Spanish lecturer at the coffee shop where we’d first met, and we caught a taxi straight away. Head up Meiji Boulevard, he said. Once the taxi was off and running, he took out a cigarette and lit up, then offered one to me.

He was wearing a gray suit and a blue tie with three diagonal stripes. His shirt was also blue, a shade lighter than the tie. I wore a gray sweater over blue jeans, and my scuffed up desert boots. I felt like a failing student who’d been summoned to the teachers’ room.

When the taxi crossed Waseda Boulevard, the driver asked if he should go on further. To Meijiro Boulevard, said the instructor. And the taxi continued a while, then turned onto Meijiro Boulevard.

“Is it pretty far still?” I asked.

“Yes, pretty far,” he said. He searched out a second cigarette. For the time being, I watched the passing storefronts.

“I had a hell of a time finding it,” he said. “First, I went right through my list of insiders. Twenty of them, twenty fanatics. And not just in Tokyo, but nationwide. But I came up with exactly zero. Nobody knew any more than I did. Next, I tried some companies who deal in used machines. Not too many of them. But it was a lot of work going over the lists of all the machines they’ve handled. The numbers are overwhelming.”

I nodded, as I watched him light his cigarette.

“Thank goodness I had an idea of a time frame. Around February 1971, that is. So I had them look it up. Gilbert & Sands, ‘Spaceship,’ Serial No. 16509. There it was: February 3, 1971, Waste Treatment.”

“’Waste Treatment’?”

“Scrap. Like in Goldfinger, you know, the way they crush things down to a compact block to be recycled or dumped in the harbor?”

“But you said…”

“Hold on and just listen. I gave up, thanked the dealer, and headed home. But, you know, something bothered me deep down. Call it a hunch. No, not even that. The next day, I went back to the dealer. Then I went to the metal scrapyard. I watched them working for maybe thirty minutes, then went into the office and presented my card. A university lecturer’s calling card carries some weight for people who don’t have any idea what it really means.”

He spoke a tiny bit faster than he had the time before. And for some reason, I felt a little ill at ease.

“Then I told them I was writing a book, and I needed to know about the scrap business.

“The guy was very cooperative, but he didn’t know a thing about any February 1971 pinball machine. Naturally not. That was two and a half years ago, after all, and besides, they don’t check each thing out one by one. It’s just haul ‘em in, and-crunch-it’s-all-over. So I just asked one more thing. Suppose there was, say, a washing machine or a bike chassis that I wanted. Would you let it go if the price were right?’ Sure thing, he told me. And I asked, has it ever happened?”

The autumn dusk drew to a swift close, and darkness began to overtake the road. The taxi was heading into the outlying suburbs.

“If I wanted particulars, I should go ask the supervisor upstairs. So of course, I went upstairs and asked Like, had anyone taken any pinball machines off their hands around 1971? Yes, he said. And when I asked what sort of person that might have been, he gave me a telephone number. It seems they’d been requested to give a call any time a pinball machine came in. It was some kind of lead. So I asked him, about how many pinball machines had this person taken off their hands?

“Well now, he said, there were ones the client’d take on sight, and others not. Couldn’t really say, this guy. But when I asked him for just a rough estimate, he told me not less than fifty machines.”

“Fifty machines?” I exploded.

“That’s the person we are going to visit,” he said.

Chapter 21

Everything was immersed in darkness. Not just a monotone black, but smeared on butter-thick in paints of all colors.

I kept my face glued to the taxi window looking at that darkness. It looked strangely flat, like the cut surface of some unreal material sliced off with a razor-sharp blade. A queer kind of perspective prevailed in that darkness. A gigantic night bird had spread its wings to sweep right past my eyes. The further we went, the more spread out were the patches of dwellings, until finally we found ourselves amidst fields and woods that resounded with hosts of chirping insects. The low-lying clouds were as still as rocks, and out in the darkness everything hung its head in silence. Only the sound of the insects that swarmed over the ground could be heard.

Not another word passed between the Spanish lecturer and myself, and we took turns smoking cigarettes. Even the taxi driver had a smoke while he squinted at the oncoming headlights. Unconsciously, I tapped my fingers on my lap. The taxi kept up its momentum, on and on, so long that from time to time I just wanted to push open the door and escape.

Switch-panels, sandboxes, golf courses, reservoirs, darned sweaters, and now pinball: how far did I have to take things? At this rate, I was going to wind up holding a hand of odd cards that would never add up. More than anything, I just wanted to go home. Take a quick bath, have a beer, and sink into my warm bed with my cigarettes and Kant.

Why did I have to be racing on and on through the dark? Fifty pinball machines was too ridiculous. Must be dreaming. And a pretty farfetched dream at that.

Yet the three-flipper “Spaceship” still called to me.

* * *

The Spanish lecturer told the driver to stop in the middle of an open space five hundred yards off the road. The lot was flat, spread out like a sand-bank with knobs of soft grass. I got out of the car, stretched, and took a deep breath. By the smell, there were chicken farms nearby. Not a houselight as far as you could see. The lights of the road hovered a ways off. The sound of countless insects hemmed us in. I felt as if I were going to be dragged off by my feet somewhere.