Pinball, 1973 (14 page)

We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness.

You’d better be going, she said.

The chill was getting unbearable, to be sure. I shook all over as I stomped out my cigarette.

Thanks for coming to see me, she said. We may not meet again, but take care.

Thanks, I said, farewell.

I left the ranks of pinball machines, climbed the steps, and threw the switch. The electricity went out of all the pinball machines like air out of a balloon, and a sleep of perfect silence fell over the place. I walked back across the warehouse, climbed the steps, switched off the lights, and shut the doors behind me. I didn’t look back once the whole time. Not once did I look back.

* * *

It was a little before midnight when the taxi delivered me to my apartment. The twins were sitting in bed finishing up a crossword puzzle in a magazine. I looked pale, and my entire body gave off the smell of frozen chicken. I stuffed all the clothes I’d been wearing into the washing machine, and soaked in a hot bath. It took thirty minutes in the hot water before I was back to ordinary human consciousness, but I still hadn’t completely gotten rid of the chill deep inside.

The twins dragged a gas heater out of the closet and lit it. After fifteen minutes I stopped shaking, took a deep breath, and heated up a can of onion soup.

“I’m all right now,” I said.

“Really?”

“You still feel cold,” worried one twin, feeling my wrist.

“I’ll warm up quick.”

Then I sank into bed, filled in the last two items in the crossword puzzle. One was “rainbow trout,” the other “trail.” My body soon warmed up, and we fell into a deep sleep pretty much together.

I dreamed about Trotsky’s four reindeer. All four reindeer were wearing red wool socks. It was an awfully cold dream.

The Rat no longer saw the woman. He gave up looking at the lights of her room, too. Something in his being drifted a while in the dark, then vanished, like the coil of white smoke that rises from a candle when it’s blown out. Then came a dark silence.

Silence. Peeling away layer by layer until what remained? Even the Rat didn’t know. Pride? He lay on his bed looking from one hand to the other. A person probably couldn’t live without pride. But living by pride alone, the prospects were too dark.

Way too dark.

Breaking up with the woman was simple. One Friday night he just didn’t call her up. And that was that. She might have waited until midnight for his call. Thinking about this made it harder for him.

He felt his hand reaching for the telephone any number of times, but he controlled the urge. He put on headphones, and listened to records with the volume turned up. He knew she wouldn’t call, but all the same he found himself wishing the phone would ring.

She waited until twelve, then probably gave up.

She washed her face, brushed her teeth, and crawled into bed. And thought, he’s going to call tomorrow morning, for sure. Then she turned out the light, and slept.

But Saturday morning, the phone does not ring.

She opens the windows, eats breakfast, waters the potted plants. She waits until noon, then gives up once and for all. Brushing her hair in front of the mirror, she strikes a smile now and again, as if in practice. Then she thinks to herself that she knew this was going to happen.

All this time the Rat spent in his apartment with the blinds drawn tight, watching the hands of an electric clock on the wall. The air in the room was unbelievably still. A shallow sleep overcame him now and again. The hands on the clock ceased to mean anything. Everything drifted back and forth between different shades of darkness. The Rat saw his own body lose its physical presence, grow heavier, then become numb. How many hours, how many goddamn hours have I been sitting here like this, the Rat wondered. With every breath, the wall slowly pulsed before his very eyes. Space took on a density that began to permeate his body.

He had reached the point where he figured he couldn’t hold out any longer. He stood up, took a shower, and shaved in a daze. He toweled dry, and drank some orange juice from the refrigerator. He changed into a new pair of pajamas, and climbed back into bed, thinking, that’s over and done.

Then a deep sleep came over him. An awfully deep sleep.

“I’m leaving town,” the Rat announced. He was trimming his nails into an ashtray with a nail-clipper he’d borrowed from J.

Six o’clock in the evening, the bar had just opened. The counter was freshly waxed, not a single cigarette butt in any ashtray on the premises.

The liquor bottles were polished and lined up with their labels facing out, small tabletop trays decked out with brand-new paper napkins folded to a sharp point, bottles of tabasco sauce, and salt shakers. J was mixing up three kinds of dressing in little bowls, and a faint garlic odor drifted through the room. A brief moment in the routine of setting up for the night.

“Leaving where to?”

“Dunno. Some town, someplace. Not too big, probably.”

J poured the dressings into three large flasks through a funnel. He put them in the refrigerator and dried his hands on a towel.

“What you going to do there?”

“Work.” The Rat kept glancing down at the nails of his right hand while he finished the trim-job.

“Can’t do that in this town?”

“Nope,” the Rat said. “I could do with a beer, though.”

“It’s on me.”

“Much obliged.”

The Rat slowly poured the beer into a glass that had been chilling on ice, then drank half of it in one gulp. “Aren’t you going to ask me why this town won’t do?”

“No, I kinda think I know.”

The Rat smiled, then clicked his tongue. “Nice try, J, but really, if everybody went around understanding each other without asking questions or speaking their mind, they’d never get anywhere. Not that I really ought to be saying this, but it seems like I’ve stayed too long in that state already.”

“Maybe so,” said J, after a moment’s thought.

The Rat took another sip of beer, then began to trim the nails of his left hand. “I’ve given it a lot of thought. And you know, maybe it’s all the same, no matter where I end up going. Still, I

gotta go. All the same’s good enough.”

“You’re not coming back then?”

“Of course I’ll be back. Sometime. It’s not like I’m running away.”

The Rat scooped some peanuts from a small dish, tossing their wrinkled shells into an ashtray as he ate. He wiped off the hinged section of counter top where the beer’s chill had left a clouded ring on the brightly waxed surface.

“When are you thinking about making your move?”

“Tomorrow, the next day. Don’t know. Probably within three days, though.”

“Mighty quick decision.”

“Uh-huh. Given you plenty of trouble in my time, I figure.”

“Been through plenty together, haven’t we? J nodded, wiping down the row of glasses on the shelf with a dry cloth. “But when it’s all over, it’ll seem like a dream.”

“Could be, but I bet it’ll take an extra long time before I get to that point.”

J was silent a bit, then he laughed.

“Maybe so. You know, sometimes I plum forget there’s twenty years’ difference between

us.”

The Rat emptied the rest of the beer into his glass, and drank it slowly. The first time ever he’d drunk beer so slowly.

“What say to another beer?”

The Rat shook his head. “Nah, that’s okay. I meant this to be my last. The last beer I drink here, that is.”

“You’re not coming back then?”

“Don’t intend to. It’d be too hard on me.”

J laughed. “I hope our paths cross again sometime.”

“Bet you the next time our paths cross you don’t recognize me on sight.”

“I’ll catch the scent.”

The Rat gave his neatly trimmed fingers on both hands the once-over, swept the

remaining peanuts into his pocket, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, then stood up to leave.

* * *

The breeze glided noiselessly over the face of the dark, slipping down unseen, stratum by stratum. It tussled the treetops overhead, periodically shaking down a shower of leaves which fell on top of the car with a dry rustle, danced aimlessly about the roof, and slid down the slanting windshield, before piling up on the wipers.

All alone in the woods of the cemetery, the Rat sat blankly staring through the windshield. A yard in front of his car, the ground dropped away into an expanse of dark skies and sea and night streets.

The Rat leaned forward with both hands on the steering wheel, and was perfectly still, his gaze fixed on a point in the heavens. He held an unlit cigarette between his fingers, tracing a series of complex though meaningless designs in the air with its tip.

As soon as he’d finished talking to J, he was overcome by an unbearably vacuous feeling. Diverse streams of consciousness he’d barely managed to assemble into one self seemed to have suddenly gone their separate ways. The Rat had no idea how long it would take before these streams merged again. They all seemed like dark rivulets destined to flow into a vast ocean. They might not even meet up again. Twenty-five years just to come to this, and for what? the Rat asked himself. Don’t know.

Good question, but no answer. Good questions never have answers.

The breeze began to pick up. Whatever bit of warmth arose from the human world, the breeze carried it off to some distant place, leaving those countless stars to shine in icy darkness. The Rat released the wheel, and rolled the cigarette around between his lips until it occurred to him to put his lighter to it.

His head ached a little. Not an ache exactly, but a strange sensation more like cold fingertips pressing on both temples. The Rat shook his head, casting off these things he’d been thinking. It was all done with, at least.

He took a book of nationwide roadmaps out of the glove compartment, and slowly turned the pages. He began to read out the listing of towns in order. Most were small towns whose names were new to his ears. Towns strung out along the roads to who knows where. He’d read several pages when a massive sense of fatigue, built up over the last few days, broke over him like a wave. He felt a lukewarm sludge slowly circulating through his veins.

He wanted to sleep.

He felt as if sleep would wipe everything clean.

He had only to sleep.

When he closed his eyes, deep behind his ears he could hear the sound of waves. Wintry waves striking the jetty, threading between the concrete blocks along the shore.

Nothing to explain to anyone any more, thought the Rat. No doubt the bottom of the sea is warmer, more peaceful and quiet than any town. No, why think of anything now, already.

The hum of pinball had all but vanished from my life. As had the feeling that I had no place to go.

Not that I’ve gotten to the big climax, like King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. That was still far in the future. When the steeds were tired, the swords bent, and armor all rusted by time, I would lay myself down in a field of grass to peacefully listen to the wind. It will be all the same to me the bottom of a reservoir or a refrigerated warehouse on a chicken farm, I’ll take whatever route I have to.

The only thing I can claim as an epilogue to this interlude in my life is an incident hardly more momentous than a clothesline in the rain.

It’s this:

One day, the twins bought a box of cotton swabs. Three hundred swabs to the box, it was. So whenever I finished taking a bath, the twins would sit one on each side of me and simultaneously clean both my ears. The two of them were positively great at cleaning ears. I’d just shut my eyes, and sip beer while listening to the sound of two cotton swabs swishing around in my ears. One night, however, in the midst of the ear-cleaning proceedings I happened to sneeze, and in that instant, I lost almost all hearing in both ears.

“Can you hear my voice?” asked the one on the right.

“Just barely,” I said, my own voice seeming to emanate from somewhere inside my nose.

“How about this side?” asked the one on the left.

“The same.”

“You just had to sneeze then, didn’t you?”

“Of all the stupid things.”

I sighed. I felt as if I were being lectured by the two corner bowling pins of a seven-ten split.

“Do you think drinking some water might clear it up?” asked one of them.

“Come off it,” I shouted angrily.

Even so, the twins made me drink a whole bucketful of water. All it did was make my stomach feel as if it were going to burst. My ears didn’t hurt, so apparently what had happened was that sneezing had driven earwax way back into my ears. I couldn’t think of what else it could be. I pulled two flashlights out of the closet and had the twins take a look. They shone them deep into my ears, and peered for several minutes as if they were looking for cracks where the wind might get through.

“Can’t see anything.”

“Not a speck.”

“Well, then, why can’t I hear?” I shouted again.

“Expiration date’s up.”

“You’ve gone deaf.”

Without asking them anything further, I checked the telephone directory and rang up the nearest ear, nose, and throat clinic. It was next to impossible to hear anything over the phone, although maybe that made the nurse more sympathetic. If I could come right away, she said, she’d leave the front door open. We quickly climbed into some clothes, left the apartment, and walked along the bus route.

The doctor was a woman of about fifty, hair like frayed iron wire, but pleasant enough. She opened the door of the waiting room and clapped her hands to quiet down the twins, then seated me in a chair and asked me without much interest what was wrong with me.

When I finished my explanation, she said that I didn’t have to shout any more because she already understood the problem. She took out an enormous needle-less syringe, sucked up a full charge of an amber liquid, and gave me a tin contraption shaped like a megaphone to hold under my ear. She put the syringe in my ear and the amber liquid came rushing into my ear like a herd of zebras, the overflow spilling into the megaphone. After repeating the process three times, she coaxed a thin cotton swab into the depths of my ear. By the time both ears were done, my hearing had returned to normal.