Pinball, 1973 (3 page)

Pinball machines, however, won’t lead you anywhere. Just the replay light. Replay, replay, replay .... So persistently you’d swear a game of pinball aspired to perpetuity.

We ourselves will never know much of perpetuity. But we can get a faint inkling of what it’s like.

The object of pinball lies not in self-expression, but in self-revolt. Not in the expansion of the ego, but in its compression. Not in extractive analysis, but in inclusive subsumption.

So if it’s self-expression or ego-expansion or analysis you’re after, you’ll only be subjected to the merciless retaliation of the tilt lamps.

Have a nice game.

No doubt there are numerous ways to tell twin sisters apart, but I only knew of one. Not only were they alike in every respect, right down to their expressions, voices, and hair styles, but they didn’t even have the slightest distinguishing beauty mark or blemish. I was at a total loss. They were perfect copies. Their reactions to any given stimulus were identical; the things they ate and drank, the songs they sang, the hours they slept, even their periods – everything was the same.

The whole situation was beyond me; my imagination couldn’t cope with what it must be like to be a twin. I mean, I’m sure that if I had a twin brother, and we were alike in every detail, I’d be really mixed up. Because I’m mixed up enough as it is.

Still, all things being equal, the two girls went about their affairs with the utmost equanimity. As a matter of fact, the girls were shocked when they found out I couldn’t tell them apart. They were understandably furious.

“Why, we’re completely different!”

“Total opposites!”

Which shut me up. So I just shrugged.

I can’t even begin to guess how much time has gone by since they moved into my apartment. The only thing I know for certain is that ever since they’d begun living with me, my internal clock has been running perceptibly behind. It occurs to me that this must be how organisms that multiply by cell-division experience time.

* * *

A friend of mine and I leased a condominium on the slope from Shibuya to Nampeidai and opened a small translation service. My friend’s father put up the funds, which is not to say that it took any astounding sum of money – just the deposit on the place, and the money for three steel desks, some ten dictionaries, a telephone, and a half-dozen bottles of bourbon. We thought up a suitable name, and with the rest of the money had it engraved on a metal sign and hung it out front, then put an ad in the newspaper. After that we waited for customers. The two of us, with our four feet propped up on the desks, drinking whiskey. It was the spring of ‘72.

After a few months, we felt we’d struck a real gold mine. An amazing amount of business found its way to our humble office. And with our earnings we bought an air conditioner, a refrigerator, and a home bar set.

“We’ve made it, we’re a success!” my friend exclaimed.

It made me all warm inside. Because it was the first time in my life that I had heard such encouraging words.

We even got a rebate from a printer contact my friend had, whom we’d let handle all the translations that needed printing. I’d gotten a university that taught foreign languages to pool some of their better students, and farmed out to them any unmanageable volume of work for rough translation. We hired an office girl to take care of the accounts, odd chores, and messages. A bright, attentive girl fresh out of business school, with long legs and no particular shortcomings, save that (in dull moments) she would hum “Penny Lane” up to twenty times a day. “We sure did right by getting her,” my friend pronounced. So we paid her one hundred fifty percent of the normal company salary, gave her a five-month bonus, and granted ten days’ leave in the summer and winter. So each of us had every reason to be happy, and we got along famously.

The office consisted of a dining room-kitchenette plus two additional rooms; the odd thing was that the dining-kitchen was in between the other two rooms. We drew straws, with the result that I got the room in the back and my friend got the room nearest the entry. The girl sat in the dining-kitchen doing the books, fixing drinks-on-the-rocks, and assembling roach traps, all to the tune of “Penny Lane.”

I purchased a pair of file cabinets as necessary expenditures, and placed one on either side of my desk; the one on the left I piled with incoming material to be translated, the one on the right with outgoing finished translations.

And what a mixed bag of materials and clients it was. Everything from Scientific American articles on the durability of ball bearings under pressure to the 1972 All-American Cocktail Book, from William Styron essays to safety razor blurbs. Everything had a tag-affixed deadline – such and such a date – and was stacked on the left until, in due course, it was transferred to the right. Whenever I finished a translation, I’d down two fingers’ of whiskey.

One of the great points about our level of translation was that there was no extra thinking involved. You’d have a coin in your left hand, slap your right hand down on your left, slide away your left hand, and the coin would remain on your right palm.

That’s about all there was to it.

I’d check into the office at ten and leave at four. On Saturdays, the three of us would hit a nearby discotheque, and dance to some Santana clone between sips of J&B.

The income wasn’t bad. Once the office rent, incidental expenses, the girl’s salary, the part-time help’s pay, and tax percentage were squared away, we’d divvy up the remaining earnings into ten shares, one share going to the company savings, five shares to my friend, and four to me. Our method was primitive – we’d lay out ten equal piles of cash on the table – but it was a lot of fun. It always reminded me of that poker game between Steve McQueen and Edward

G. Robinson in The Cincinnati Kid.

The five-four split was pretty fair, I thought. After all, it was he who had been saddled with the actual management of the company, and he who would put up and shut up whenever I drank a bit too much whiskey. On top of which, he was struggling along with a sick wife, a three¬year-old son, and a Volkswagen that was in constant need of repair. And as if that wasn’t enough, he was forever having some new problem or other.

“What about me? I’ve got twin girls I’m supporting,” I blurted out one day. Not that it counted for much, of course – he still took his five shares and I my four.

So that’s how I passed the prime of my mid-twenties. Like so many tranquil afternoons spent basking in the sun.

“No matter who wrote it,” boasted the catchphrase on our three-color offset brochure, “there’s nothing we can’t make intelligible.” Every half-year or so, when business fell into a periodic lull, out of sheer boredom the three of us would go stand in front of Shibuya Station and hand out brochures.

How much time went by like that? There I was, trudging on and on through unending silence. When I finished work and went home, I’d drink the twin’s delicious coffee, and read the Critique of Pure Reason for the umpteenth time.

Every once in a while, things that happened just the day before would seem as far off as the year before, or things from the previous year might come to me like only yesterday. When things got really out of hand, the next year would come to me like yesterday. Either that, or I’d be translating a Kenneth Tynan article on Polanski from the September 1971 issue of Esquire, the whole time thinking about ball bearings.

For months, for years, I was sitting there all by myself in the depths of a fathomless pool. In warm water, soft, filtered light, and silence. Silence...

* * *

There was only one way I could tell the twins apart, and that was by their sweatshirts. Faded navy blue sweatshirts with white numerals emblazoned across the chest. One read “208,” the other “209.” The 2s were over the right nipple, and the 8 or 9 over the left nipple. The Os were sandwiched smack in the middle.

The very first day, I asked the twins what the numbers meant. They told me they didn’t mean anything.

“They look like manufacturer’s serial numbers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked one of them.

“Well, it makes it look as if there were a whole batch of people just like you, and you

were number 208 and number 209.”

“The ideas you get!” scoffed 209.

“Only been two of us every since we were born,” said 208. “We were given the shirts.”

“Where?” I was incredulous.

“At a supermarket opening. They were giving them away to the first customers.”

“I was the two-hundred-and-ninth customer,” said 209.

“And I was the two-hundred-and-eighth,” said 208.

“The two of us bought three boxes of tissues.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll call you 208. And you, we’ll call 209. That way I can distinguish between you,” pointing to each in turn.

“No good,” said one of them.

“Why’s that?”

Without so much as a word, they both stripped off their sweatshirts, exchanged them,

and pulled them down over their heads.

“I’m 208,” said 209.

“And I’m 209,” said 208.

I let out a sigh.

Even so, when I was desperate to distinguish the two of them, I had no recourse but to rely on the numbers. I just couldn’t come up with any other way to tell them apart.

The twins hardly had any other clothes besides those sweatshirts. It almost seemed as if they’d stepped out for a walk, happened into someone’s apartment, and simply decided to stay. Which really wasn’t so far from the truth. At the start of each week I’d always give them a little money so they could buy whatever they needed, but other than meals, in fact, they never spent money on anything but an occasional box of coffee-cream cookies.

“Doesn’t it bother you, not having clothes?” I asked.

“Not in the least,” replied 208.

“Why should we be so interested in clothes?” said 209.

Once a week, with tender loving care, the two of them would wash their sweatshirts in the bath. I’d be in bed perusing my Critique of Pure Reason only to look up and see the two of them, naked on the bathroom tiles, washing their sweatshirts in tandem. At times like that, I’d get this really far-away feeling. I don’t know why. Ever since the summer before, when I’d lost a tooth-cap under the diving board at the pool, these would come over me from time to time.

Often when I came home from work, I’d encounter the numbers 208 and 209 swaying in the window’s southern exposure. Times like that, it was enough to bring tears to my eyes.

* * *

Just why did you choose to descend on my apartment, how long do you both intend to stay, and above all, who do you girls think you are? Your age? Background? Somehow I never saw fit to ask.

And you two, for your part, never volunteered a word.

Our days were spent, the three of us, drinking coffee, walking the golf course looking for lost balls, joking around in bed. Going through the newspapers was the highlight of each day, when I’d spend one solid hour explaining what was going on in the news. The two of them were frightfully ignorant about things. They didn’t know Burma from Australia. It took three days to get them to accept that Vietnam was divided in two, and that the two halves were at war. It took another four days to explain why Nixon was bombing Hanoi.

“And which side do you support?” asked 208.

“Which side?”

“You know, North or South?” pressed 209.

“Hmm, it’s hard to say.”

“What do you mean?” returned 208.

“I mean, it’s not like I was living in Vietnam.”

Neither of them would accept that explanation.

Hell, I couldn’t even accept it.

“They’re fighting because they think different, right?” 208 pursued the question.

“You could say that.”

“So there’s two opposite ways of thinking, am I correct?” 208 continued.

“Yes, but… there’s got to be a million opposing schools of thought in the world. No, probably even more than that.”

“So hardly anybody’s friends with anybody?” puzzled 209.

“I guess not,” said I. “Almost no one’s friends with anyone else.”

Dostoyevsky had prophesied it; I lived it out.

That was my lifestyle in the 1970s.

The autumn of 1973, it seemed, deep down, held something spiteful. It was painfully clear to the Rat, plain as a pebble in his shoe.

Even after that year’s all-too-brief summer had vanished, as if sucked up into thin air along with early September uncertainties, some small reminder of summer lingered on in the Rat’s heart.

There he was, still in his old T-shirt, cut-offs, beach sandals. Back again to J’s Bar, where he’d sit at the bar facing J, downing overchilled beers. He’d begun smoking again after five years, and every fifteen minutes or so he’d glance at his wristwatch.

The Rat could almost see the passage of time cleaving away-slice-at intervals somewhere down the line. Why it had to be like that, the Rat could never understand. He couldn’t find the severed end. And so he wandered through the dimming autumn twilight holding the limp cord. He cut across grassy knolls, crossed rivers, forced open any number of doors – but the limp cord didn’t lead him anywhere. Like a fly that winter has robbed of wings, like an estuary confronted by the open sea, the Rat was powerless, alone. An ill wind had blown in from somewhere, and to the Rat it felt as if his protective blanket of air had been sent sailing clear around to the other side of the globe.

No sooner had one season slipped out the door than the next came in by another door. A person might scramble to the closing door and call out, Hey, wait a minute, there’s one last thing I forgot to tell you. But nobody would be there any more. The door shuts tight. Already another season is in the room, sitting in a chair, striking a match to light a cigarette. Anything you forgot to mention, the stranger says, you might as well go ahead and tell me, and if it works out, I’ll get the message through.

Nah, it’s okay, you say, it was nothing really. And all around, the sound of the wind. Nothing, really. A season’s died, that’s all.