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haruki murakami pinball, 1973 fan translation by j. baugher
1969-1973
I had a sick obsession with hearing about places I’d never been.
At one point, and this was ten years ago, I’d manage to get a group of random people together, and they’d take turns telling me about the places where they were born and raised. There was seemingly an extreme shortage of the type of people who would listen to others speak, so they all related their tales to me politely, enthusiastically. Sometimes, some person I didn’t know would hear about me, then come seek me out to tell me his story.
Some person would be facing me, telling me this and that, almost as if he were throwing stones in a dry well, and when each person finished his story, he’d go home, satisfied. One guy would speak warmly, while another one would get pissed off. There were times when I really got a good grasp of what someone was talking about, and there were other times when, from start to finish, I had no idea what they were talking about. Some stories were boring, some were tear-jerkers, others were half-joking bullshit. Nevertheless, I listened to their stories as earnestly as I could.
I wasn’t really sure why, but it seemed everyone was eager to share their story with someone else, maybe the entire world. It reminded me of a bunch of monkeys stuffed into a cardboard box. I’d pull them out one at a time, gingerly dust them off, smack them on the ass with a loaf of bread, and set them free into the grasslands. After that, I never found out what happened to them. In their hometowns or somewhere, they were probably all wiped out while munching on acorns. After all, that was their destiny.
It was, overall, work with great pains and very few rewards. Thinking back on it now, if they’d have held an ‘Eagerly Listening to Strangers Talking’ world championship that year, I probably would’ve gotten first place, with no complaints from me. The prize would’ve probably been a kitchen appliance or something.
Once, in one group of people I talked to, there were these two guys, one from Saturn, and one from Venus. Their stories left quite an impression on me. First, the story about Saturn:
“There, it’s…cold,” he moaned, “you think, but your think—your thinking—it gets all twisted.”
He belonged to this political group, and they were occupying the ninth building of the university. Their motto was, ‘behavior determines thought, not the other way around.’ Nobody ever offered to explain what determined the original behavior.
Incidentally, Building Number 9 had a water cooler, a phone, and hot running water. They even went so far as to set up a nice music-listening room on the second floor, complete with an Altec A5 record player and two thousand records. That place (compared to, for example, Building Number 8, which smelled like a race track toilet) was heaven. Every morning, those guys would shave their faces clean with hot water. In the afternoon, they’d make as many long distance calls as they wanted, and at the end of they day, they’d get together and listen to records. Thanks to the mood change brought about by the end of autumn, they were all crazy about classical music.
On a cheery November afternoon, when the third-rate riot police stormed Building Number 9, Vivaldi’s L’estro Armonico came blasting out from the building at full volume, or so they say. I’m not sure if it’s a true story, but it’s one of the heart-warming legends that was going around in ’69.
One time, when I was passing by the watchman’s sofa at the dangerously-built-up barricade, I could hear strains of Hadyn’s Piano Sonata in G Minor. That atmosphere, it’s a memory as fond to me as if the camellias were blossoming in uptown and I were climbing a hill to visit my girlfriend’s house. The man-on-watch, he offered me the best seat and poured me a lukewarm beer in a beaker pilfered from one of the science department’s buildings.
“There, the gravity is really, really strong,” he continued with his story about Saturn, “there’s a guy there who accidentally spit chewing gum onto his foot and crushed it. It, it’s…hellish.”
There was a pause in the conversation, and “I see,” was all I offered as a response. By that time, my mastery of listening to people had given me probably three hundred ways to give verbal nods to prod people to continue speaking.
“The suh—the Sun, I mean—is incredibly small. Above our home base, looking at the sun is like looking at a tiny orange from the outfield. ‘Cause of this, it’s always dark there,” he said with a sigh.
“Why doesn’t everybody just move somewhere else?” I asked. “There must be other planets where it’s much easier to get by, right?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s probably because we were born there. That’s…just how it is. After I finish college, I’m going back to Saturn. And when I do, I’m…I’m going to build a new country. I’m going to start a revo—a revolution.”
Anyway, I like hearing about faraway places. I’ve saved these places up like a bear preparing for hibernation. When I close my eyes, a road appears, then a row of houses is constructed, and soon I can hear the voices of people. In that distant place, a place that almost borders eternity, people’s lives are easy, and I can imagine waves of calm sweeping over me.
Naoko had told me her own story I don’t know how many times. Of everything she told me, I only remember one thing.
“I have no idea what you’d call it.”
She laughed as she said it, sitting in a college lounge with good exposure to the sun. She sat with her head in her hands, looking upset. I waited patiently for her to go on. She always took a long time to speak, searching carefully for just the right words.
We sat facing each other across a red plastic table, on top of which there was one paper cup filled with cigarette butts. From a high window, light shined onto this table, the boundary between light and dark as clearly delineated as in a Rubens painting. My hands were on the table, my right hand bathed in light, my left hand in shadow.
This is how we were in the spring of 1969, when we were twenty years old. The lounge was full of freshmen wearing new leather shoes, with new brain tissue in their heads and armfuls of lecture notes. There wasn’t even standing room. Nearby, people were constantly colliding and complaining and apologizing to each other.
“At any rate, it’s nothing like a city,” Naoko continued, “there’re train tracks and a station. On a rainy day, you might drive by without even noticing it.”
I nodded. We were silent for a full thirty seconds, aimlessly watching cigarette smoke curling in the sunbeams.
“There are always dogs walking the platform from end to end. That kind of station, you know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“When you leave the station, there’s a small traffic roundabout with a bus stop. Also, there’re a few shops—sleepy little shops. If you walk straight from there, you’ll hit a park. In the park, there’s a slide and three swings.”
“And a sandbox?”
“A sandbox?” After thinking slowly, she nodded, as if confirming it. “There is one.”
We sank into silence once again. I crushed my cigarette out politely in the paper cup. “It’s a really boring town. I can’t imagine why anyone made such a boring town.
“God works in mysterious ways,” I offered.
Naoko shook her head and laughed to herself. She laughed as if she had a row of A’s lined up neatly on her report card.
That mysterious laugh stayed in my heart for a long time. Like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, her laugh lingered long after she was gone. For some strange reason, I felt an urge to see those dogs, cutting across the platform.
Four years after that, in the May of 1973, I went to visit that train station, alone. To see the dogs. It was the reason I shaved my beard, the reason I put on a neck tie for the first time in six months, the reason I wore my new cordovans for the first time.
Even now, whenever I get off one of those sad two-car trains that go out into the countryside, those trains that look like they’re going to rust together, as soon as I get off, the familiar smell of grass wafts into my nose. It’s the smell of picnics from a very long time ago. That’s how the winds of May come blowing from the other side of time. If I lift my face and clear out all the other sounds, I can still hear nothing except the singing of the skylark.
With a long sigh, I sat down on the station bench. Feeling bored, I lit up a cigarette. The fresh feeling I had when I woke up in the early morning and left my apartment was now completely gone. It seemed like I was doing the same thing I’d always done, at least, that’s how it felt. With endless déjà vu, doing the same thing over and over gets worse every time.
Long ago, there’s these people, and they manage to get by for a time, sleeping huddled together with their friends. At dawn, somebody tramples on my head. He says sorry. After that, I can hear the sound of pissing. I relive this moment.
I loosened my necktie, my cigarette hanging crazily out of the edge of my mouth. My feet were still not used to the leather shoes, and they still kept trying to scrape them against the concrete, to soften the pain in my feet. It wasn’t an intense pain, but I continued to have that gift of being aware of each and every part of my body.
I never did get to see those dogs.
That uneasy feeling…
I was intermittently having that uneasy feeling. I felt as if I were trying to put together two puzzles whose pieces had been mixed together. Anyway, it was a chance to drink whiskey and fall asleep. Things only got worse when I woke up. I relive that moment.
When I woke up, there were twin girls, one on each side of me. Back in those days, that sort of thing had been happening to me a lot, but as you might guess, it was my first time with twins. They were sleeping, each with her nose resting snugly on one of my shoulders. It was a sunny Sunday morning.
Before long, they woke up at about the same time and started to get dressed, contorting themselves back into the shirts and blue jeans which had been flung onto the floor around my bed. Wordlessly, they slipped into the kitchen, where they started making coffee and toast, taking the butter out of the fridge and arranging everything neatly on the table. It truly seemed as if they were used to doing this sort of thing. Out of the window, perched on the wire mesh on the edge of the nearby golf course, there was a bird. I don’t know what kind of bird it was, but it was singing with reckless abandon, chirping out what sounded like machine-gun fire.
“What are your names?” I asked. Thanks to my hangover, my head felt ready to split open.
“We don’t really go by proper names,” said the girl sitting on the right.
“Truth is, names aren’t really a big deal for us,” said the girl on the left, “know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I get it,” I said.
We were sitting at the table across from each other, nibbling on toast and drinking coffee. It really was delicious coffee.
“Think he’ll get upset if we don’t have names?” one of them asked.
“Hmm…I wonder…”
They thought it over for a bit.
“If you absolutely must call us by names, feel free to give us names yourself,” the other one proposed.
“You can call us whatever you want.”
They always took turns speaking. It was exactly like an FM stereo check. Thanks to this, my head hurt even more.
“For example?” I asked.
“Right and Left,” one of them said.
“Length and Width,” said the other one.
“Up and Down.”
“Front and Back.”
“East and West.”
“Entrance and Exit,” I barely managed to add, not wanting to be upstaged. They were laughing, satisfied.
Where there’s an entrance, there’s an exit. That’s how most things are made. A mailbox, an electric vacuum cleaner, a zoo, the spout on a bottle of sauce. Of course, there are also things which are not like this. For example, a mousetrap.
I had a mousetrap set in my apartment, under the sink. For bait, I used peppermint chewing gum. After searching the room from edge to edge, if he couldn’t find anything better, he’d find that. It was gum I found in the pocket of my winter coat, along with a movie ticket stub.
On the morning of the third day, a tiny mouse got caught in the trap. He was the color of cashmere sweaters piled up in London’s duty-free shop, still a young mouse. If he were a human, he’d have probably been fifteen—no, sixteen—years old. A painful age. A tiny piece of the gum was rolled up under his foot.
When I saw that I’d caught a mouse, I had no idea what to do with him. With his hind legs still held by the wire, he died on the morning of the fourth day. His tiny little mouse body made an impression on me; it taught me this lesson:
Everything must have an entrance and an exit. I know that now.
The train tracks ran next to this hill, exactly parallel, as if someone had used a ruler to make it into a perfect, extending straight line. In the distance, the tracks ran into a grove of trees and darkened, but I could still see everything, even the crumpled up wastepaper. While the sun reflected dimly on the two rails, in the distance the rails overlapped, as if they’d managed to extinguish the space separating them. No matter how far down you go, the scenery probably continues like that into eternity. Thinking about that was enough to make you go nuts. Probably infinitely better to take the subway.
I smoked an entire cigarette, stretching out my body and gazing at the sky. I hadn’t gazed at the sky in a long time. Actually, it’d been a long time since I’d taken a long, hard look at anything.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. And yet, the entire sky was faintly covered by an opaque spring veil. From above that subtle veil, little by little, the blue of the sky was piercing through. The sunlight was soundlessly falling into the air like thin dust, accumulating on the surface of the Earth without making pretensions to anybody.
A lukewarm wind shook the sunlight. The entire group of trees seem to change into a bird, the air slowly flowing through it. The wind came from the train tracks, slipped down the hill parallel to them, crossed the tracks, and shook the leaves of the trees, without escaping the forest. A cuckoo’s song crossed the soft sunlight and went on to be extinguished in the distant mountain skyline. The hills, with their many ups and downs, they were grouped into a row, and like a sleepy, giant cat, they were lying down in this silent time of day.
The pain in my legs intensified greatly.
I’ll tell you about a well.
Naoko turned up in this area when she was 12 years old. This would make the year in question something in the neighborhood of 1961 AD. Ricky Nelson was singing Hello Mary Lou. At that time, this peaceful green valley didn’t have even a single person doing anything exceptional. A few farmhouses, some fields, a river full of crayfish, a one-track suburban train with an about-to-yawn station, that was it. It was mostly made up of farmhouses with a few persimmon trees planted in the garden, and in one corner of the yard, there would be a crumbling, rain-beaten farmhouse, looking as if it could fall over at any moment. Hammered onto the side of one of these farmhouses, facing the tracks, there would usually be a big tin billboard advertising soap or tissue or something. It was honestly that kind of place. There weren’t even any dogs there, Naoko said.
The house she moved to was a two-story western-style house built sometime around the Korean War. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call spacious, but with stout, tough pillars and thanks to useful, carefully-chosen, high-quality lumber, the house looked massive and settled-in. The exterior was divided into three shades of green, each color made to fade splendidly into the sun, rain, and snow, and it truly did seem to melt nicely into the surrounding scenery. In the spacious yard, there were a few trees and a pond. In the center of those trees, there was a studio-sized patch of space, and this area snugly housed an octagon-shaped gazebo. Hanging in its bay window was a lace curtain, the color of which I’ve completely forgotten. On the ground, the daffodils bloomed like crazy, and in the morning, small birds congregated there to bathe.
The house’s designer was also its first resident, an older guy who painted western-style pictures, but the winter before Naoko moved there, he died of complications from pneumonia. 1960 is the year Bobby Vee sang Rubber Ball. It was a terribly rainy winter. In that place, it almost didn’t snow at all. Instead, lots of very cold rain fell. The rain permeated the ground, and the soil wore this damp coldness like a hat. And so, the depths of the earth were filled up with sweet, delicious water.
Just five minutes from the station, if you walked along the tracks, was the house of a well-digger. There was a damp plain near the house, and in the summer, this damp plain would be besieged by frogs and mosquitoes. The digger, who had just turned fifty, was a moody, eccentric man, but when it came to digging wells, he was a genius. When he was asked to dig a well, he would first go to the designated site and walk around for several days, muttering complaints while, here and there, he would scoop up dirt with his hands and sniff it. After that, when he found a place he could consent to, he called his friends, other well-diggers, and dug a straight line down to investigate further.
It was because of this that the people of this place had such delicious well water that they could drink to their hearts’ content. It was transparent, from the well to the tap to the glass in your hand, clear and cool water. People touted it as water from the melted snow of Mount Fuji, but that’s definitely a lie; said water wouldn’t make it that far.
The fall when Naoko turned 17, the digger was hit and killed by a train. It was the fault of the downpouring rain, cold sake, and his deafness. The thousands of pieces of his corpse, reduced to tiny slabs of meat, were scattered across a field. The parts were collected in five buckets by seven police officers using long poles with pointed ends in a futile attempt to drive away the packs of hungry stray dogs. Maybe at least one bucketful of meat ended up in the pond and the river, becoming fish food.
The digger had two sons, but they left town without taking over the ruins of the house. So nobody had anything to do with the abandoned house, and it remained as it was for years, slowly crumbling. Henceforth, in that place, wells that produced delicious water became hard to come by.
I like wells. I go to a well and try tossing in a stone. The sound of a pebble striking the water’s surface in a deep well is something I’ll never get tired of.
In 1961, the decision for Naoko’s family to move to that place was her father’s. For one thing, he had an acquaintance who was close to the recently-deceased old painter, and, of course, he had an interest in the place itself.
It seems Naoko’s father was slightly well-known in the field of French Literature, but when Naoko was in elementary school, he suddenly resigned from the university, and after that the only thing he wanted to do was translate strange old books, continuing to live a laid-back life. Fallen angels and depraved priests, exorcisms, vampires—those kinds of books. I don’t really know all the details. One time, I saw a magazine with his picture in it.
The way Naoko would tell it, it seems that during his youth he had an adventurous disposition. That atmosphere, visible even in the picture, made it seem like he could do anything, go anywhere. He wore a hunting cap and black glasses, glaring menacingly at the camera lens from just a meter away. He looked like he’d seen many things.
When Naoko moved there, that village was a gathering point for unpredictable, cultured people, vaguely starting to take the shape of a colony. It seemed exactly like how Russia, during its imperial era, sent white-collar criminals to Siberia in exile.
Speaking of exile, I once read just a little of Trotsky’s biography. For some reason, all I can remember now are the parts about cockroaches and reindeer. With that, here’s a story about reindeer…
Trotsky, slipping into the darkness, stole a reindeer sled and escaped from exile. Across the frozen, snow-covered wasteland, four reindeer ran as fast as they could. Their exhaled breath condensing into white masses, their hooves scattered the virgin snow. Two days later, after a long struggle, they arrived at a station, collapsing with exhaustion, never to rise again. Holding his dead reindeer in his arms, through tears, he made a solemn promise: I will definitely, with righteousness and ideals, bring about a revolution in this country, is what he said. In Red Square, even now, there are four bronze statues of the deer. One facing east, one facing north, one facing west, one facing south. Not even Stalin could destroy those reindeer. For those of you planning a trip to Moscow, you should wake up early on a Saturday morning and visit Red Square. You can gaze upon the invigorating spectacle of red-cheeked middle-schoolers mopping off the reindeer, I expect.
…now, talking about the colony.
Those guys, with the convenience of the nearby station and the protection of the plains, purposely chose to build their homes on the mountainside. They went up one by one, with these extravagantly large yards, the groves of trees and lakes and hills left untouched. In the yard of one house, there were real sweetfish swimming, living only in this one small river.
They woke up early to the singing of turtledoves, in their beech tree-reality, walking around their yards while stamping time with their feet, stopping to drink in the overflowing sunlight from between the leaves.
Well, times changed. Starting at the city center, waves of houses suddenly started to spring up, and while it was a small change, change had indeed reached this land. It was around the same time the Tokyo Olympics were held.
From the mountains, looking down onto what once seemed like an entire bountiful ocean of mulberry fields, things turned black, flattened by bulldozers, and then the train station became the heart of this slab of stores and houses which was gradually building up.
Most of the new inhabitants were big-city salarymen. At five in the morning, they sprang out of bed and washed their faces, crowding restlessly onto the trains, and returned home late at night, looking dead.
Because of this, the time they had to see their town and their own homes was limited to Sunday afternoons. So, generally, as though by general agreement, they got dogs. One by one, the dogs started mating, and their puppies became strays. So I guess that’s what Naoko meant when she said that there weren’t even dogs there—in the past.
After waiting for about an hour, the dogs still didn’t show. I lit up about ten cigarettes, subsequently stomping them out. I walked to the center of the platform, where I found a faucet connected to underground water, delicious water, cold enough to sting your hands. And I drank it. Even then, the dogs still didn’t show up.
On one side of the station, there was a pond. Its shape was like a tiny, winding river blocked by a dam.
Going around a three-meter-tall thicket of water plants, I could see fish fins breaking the surface of the water. On the bank, I could see some men sitting at a distance, sitting wordless. They seemed like they’d been sitting this way for a long time, their fishing lines cast into the dark water. Their lines, like silver needles, didn’t move at all. Not suddenly, not subtly. Thrust absent-mindedly into a spring day, there was a big white dog, apparently brought by one of the fishermen, and this dog was going around, enthusiastically sniffing at the clover.
The dog was just ten meters from the fence when he became aware of my presence, at which point I leaned over the fence and called to him. He lifted his head and looked at me with his pitiful eyes, a watery brown color, and after this he shook his tail two or three times. I shook my finger at him, and he came over to the fence to thrust his nose into my hand, licking it with his long tongue.
“Here, boy,” I called to the dog, who was still hanging back. He was hesitating, waiting, shaking his tail at me, and he kept on shaking his tail at me as if he didn’t understand what I was saying.
“Come over here, I’m sick of waiting for you.”
I took some chewing gum out of my pocket and showed the wrapping paper to the dog. After staring at the gum for a bit, he decided to come to the fence. I petted him on the head a few times, rolled the gum into a ball with my fingers, and flung it from the edge of the platform without a second thought. He ran straight towards it.
I went home satisfied.
Riding the train home, I had to convince myself over and over again that it really was over. ‘Forget it already,’ I told myself. ‘Isn’t that why I went there?’ I asked myself. But I couldn’t just ‘forget it.’ It’s that I loved Naoko. And then she was dead. Because, in the end, I wasn’t over her.
Venus is a cloud-covered, hot planet. Because of the heat and the humidity, the inhabitants usually die young. Living even thirty years would make someone a legend. So, with only that short part of a life, their hearts are rich with love. Every Venusian loves every other Venusian. They don’t hate, envy, or scorn outsiders. They don’t bad-mouth each other. There are no murders or conflicts. What there is is affection and sympathy.
“Even if one of us were to die today, we wouldn’t mourn,” the quiet Venusian said.
“For the short time we’re alive, we love people in advance. That way, we don’t have any regrets later.”
“You’re saying you love people ‘in advance?’”
“I don’t really know what words you’d use to say it,” he shook his head as he said this.
“You can really do that as well as you say? Yes or no?” I asked.
“If we couldn’t,” he said, “Venus would be crushed by sadness.”
When I got back to my apartment, the twins were packed snugly into bed like sardines in a tin can, giggling to each other.
“Welcome back,” one of them said.
“Where’d you go?”
“To the station…” I said as I loosened my necktie and crawled into the space between them and shut my eyes. I was incredibly tired.
“Where? What station?”
“Why’d you go there?”
“It was a very far-away station. I went to see a dog.”
“What kind of dog?”
“You like dogs?”
“It was a big, white dog. But I don’t really like dogs all that much.”
I lit and smoked an entire cigarette, during which time the twins were silent.
“Are you sad?” one of them asked.
I nodded and said nothing.
“Get some sleep,” one of them said.
So I slept.
This is ‘my’ story, and also the story of a guy they called ‘the Rat.’ During that autumn, ‘we’ lived in a town 700 kilometers from anything.
In the September of 1973, that’s where this story begins. That’s the entrance. It would be nice if there were an exit. If there’s no exit, there’s no point in writing down any of these sentences.
Concerning the Birth of Pinball:
First off, there was this talented man named Raymond Moloney who you’ve probably never heard of.
One time, this man existed, and subsequently, he died. That’s it. Nobody knows anything about his life. We know as little about him as we do about a beetle in the bottom of a deep well.
Although we know that in 1934, the very first pinball machine was brought down from the space between the clouds of technological gold at the hands of this man, down to the lowly people on the ground, that’s the only historical fact there is. After that, on the other side of that giant puddle called the Atlantic Ocean, Adolf Hitler had the top rung of the ladder of the Weimar Republic within his grasp, so to speak; this also happened that year.
Well, this is not to say that Mr. Raymond Moloney’s life bore the same legendary hue as those of Malcolm Bell or the Wright Brothers. There was no heart-warming episode from his childhood, no dramatic epiphany. That name exists solely for the purpose of being recorded in the first page of a technical book for a curious reader. In 1934, the very first pinball machine was invented by Mr. Raymond Moloney, it says. There’s not even a picture. If there’s not even a portrait of him, there certainly isn’t a bronze statue.
You probably think this: if this Mr. Moloney didn’t exist, the history of the pinball machine would probably have become a completely different thing. No, it probably wouldn’t have come about in the same way. If it were the same, wouldn’t our prejudice against this Mr. Moloney, wouldn’t our unjust evaluation be a thankless act? I wonder. However, if you had the chance to gaze upon Ballyhoo, the first-ever pinball machine, made by Mr. Moloney, I’m fairly certain your misgivings would vanish. Because, seeing that, the stimulating factor for our imaginative powers and all that, there’s not a single doubt.
There is a feature common to the advance of both pinball machines and Hitler. They were both kind of dubious when they gained popularity in the world. Not so much the fact that they existed, more like how the speed of their progress acquired a legendary aura; this is what I’m driving at. Their progress certainly had three legs; that is: technology, capital investment, and the support of peoples’ deeply-rooted desires.
People, with frightening speed, kept on giving these mud dolls and seemingly-simple pinball machines various abilities. One person cries out, “Let there be lights!” Another person cries out, “Let there be electricity!” Another person cries out, “Let there be flippers!” And then the playing field shined out light, and electrically-powered magnets repelled the ball, then flippers, two arms, threw the balls back.
The score is a numerical value that increases in accordance with the player’s skill; strong shaking will cause the ‘tilt’ light to respond. Successive sequences are a metaphysical concept that were created; things like the bonus light, the extra ball, the replay—various schools of thought were born from this. Thus, in this time period, pinball machines took on a kind of magical nature.
This is a novel about pinball.
As it says in the preface to the pinball research manual Bonus Light:
1
Of course, I’m sure there are many methods for distinguishing twin sisters, but unfortunately, I didn’t know even one of these. Their faces, their voices, their hairstyles, almost everything was exactly the same. With no moles or birthmarks, it was completely hopeless. Perfect copies. Their impulses, reflexive reactions, and conditions were the same, the things they ate, what they drank, the songs they sang, their sleeping times, even their menstrual cycles were exactly the same.
What it would be like to have twins around was a problem my imaginative power could not remotely fathom. However, if I had twin siblings, and two of them were almost exactly the same, I’m sure I would’ve been trapped in a terrible state of confusion. Probably, for me, it would somehow or another have become a terrible problem, I think.
The twins were getting by extremely peacefully, and when they realized I couldn’t tell them apart they were terribly surprised, and a little upset.
“But aren’t we completely different?”
“We’re entirely different people!”
I shrugged my shoulders without saying anything.
From the time they first moved in, I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Since I started living with the twins, my sense of time was clouded. I have a feeling it wasn’t exactly the same thing as the rate of cell division in a sentient, living creature.
My friend and I rented an apartment in the south end of Shibuya, facing a hill. We had opened a small office, specializing in translation. My friend’s parents gave us the start-up capital, but it wasn’t a surprising amount of money. There was nothing more than key money, three steel desks, only ten dictionaries, a phone, and a half-dozen bottles of bourbon whiskey. With our extra money, we ordered an iron billboard. We thought of an appropriate name to have carved into it, hung it out front, and tossed some ads into the newspaper, with four legs propped on our desks, drinking whiskey and waiting for customers. This was the spring of 1972.
After some months, we realized we’d struck upon a rich streak. A surprising amount of commissions came into our modest office. With the money we made, we bought an air conditioner, a refrigerator, and a sitting bar.
“We’re a success,” my friend said.
I was extremely satisfied. Since I was born, it was the first time anybody had ever said anything to me as warm as those words.
My friend had an acquaintance who was a printer, so he single-handedly handled all the translation documents it was necessary to have printed, down to the last letter. I had the student affairs office of a foreign language college gather some well-performing students for me, and I had them go through all the rough translations that were too much for me to handle. We hired a female secretary, and she took care of odd jobs, accounting, and contacting people. She was a girl who had just finished business school and had long legs and knew it, and in one day she would hum Penny Lane (even then, skipping the climax) over twenty times a day. Apart from the humming, she had no faults. ‘Yeah, she’s a hit,’ my partner said. That’s why we gave her a salary of 150 percent of what an ordinary company would, gave her five months’ salary as bonus, and a ten day vacation in both summer and winter. That’s how we, the three of us, each got by happily and satisfied.
Our office was two rooms, a dining room, and a kitchen, but, strangely, the dining and kitchen areas were located in the middle of the two rooms. We drew lots made from matchsticks, and the result was that I drew the inner room, and my partner drew the room next to the entryway. The girl sat in between the dining and kitchen areas singing Penny Lane, doing our accounts and putting things in order, while also making whiskey on-the-rocks and building cockroach traps.
My necessary expenses consisted of two document shelves to put on each side of my desk, the left side for unfinished translations, and the right side for piling up my finished translated documents.
Actually, we had all sorts of documents and important requests. An article in American Science concerning the ability of ball bearings to withstand pressure, the 1973 All-American Cocktail Book, everything from a William Styron essay to an explanatory note accompanying a safety razor. Some of the documents piling up in the left shelf of my desk had a ‘before this month/date’ label attached, and when they reached the expiration date, I moved them to the right side. Thus, when one matter was completed, I drank up half a thumb’s width of whiskey.
Taking things one at a time, we were both in the same league when it came to translating things. I’d have a coin in my left hand and start clicking them up in my right hand. Take a coin from my left hand, end up with coins remaining in my right hand, that’s all it was.
I would enter the office at 10, and leave the office at 4. On Saturday, the three of us would go to a nearby discotheque and dance to a Santana cover band.
The income wasn’t bad. From the company’s income, we’d take the rent and a little for necessary expenses, the girl’s salary, the pay for the part-timers. From there we’d take out taxes, and the rest we’d divide into ten parts, with one part going toward the company’s savings, my partner taking five parts, and me taking four. It was a primitive way of doing things, but having my portion of cash lined up on my desk was a really good time. It made me think of the poker game scene in Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson.
I think him getting five parts and me getting four really was a fair allotment. He initiated a substantial amount of the administration, for one thing, and also because he never said a word, was tolerant, during those times when I drank too much whiskey. To make matters worse, my friend had a sickly wife, a three year-old son, and a Volkswagen which was constantly breaking down, which was an armful, and even then it was insufficient, as it seemed he always had some cause for worry.
“Myself, I have twins to support…” I ventured, one day, but he didn’t have any sympathy for me. As usual, he took five parts, and I took four.
That’s how I spent my mid-twenties, the seasons flowing back and forth. They were peaceful days in the afternoon sun.
“Like it was written with your own hand,” was our glorious catch phrase. It was written on our pamphlets, which were printed in three colors. “There’s nobody who won’t be able to understand you.”
Maybe just once in six months would we have a real dry spell, and then the three of us would stand in front of Shibuya station and tediously and ruthlessly distribute pamphlets.
How much time passed then, I wonder. I continued to walk endlessly in the midst of silence. When work would finish, I’d return to my apartment, and drink some of the delicious coffee the twins had ready for me, while reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason many times over.
Sometimes, I would remember things from yesterday the same way I would remember things from last year, and sometimes I would remember things from last year the same way I would remember things from yesterday. The worst time would be when I would think about next year’s things the way I would think about yesterday’s things. I would be translating Kenneth Tynan’s article on Roman Polanski, ‘The Polish Imposition,’ from the September 1971 issue of Esquire, all the while thinking about ball bearings.
Whatever the month or year, I continued to find myself sitting all alone at the bottom of a deep pool. With warm water and soft sunlight, and then silence. And then…silence.
There was only one way to tell the twins apart—the sweatshirts they wore. They were navy blue and completely faded. Over the chest, cracked, faded white numbers were printed. One said 208, the other said 209. The 2 was above the right nipple, and the 8 and the 9 were over the left nipples. The 0 was all alone in between the other two numbers.
What did the numbers mean, I asked them on the first day. They don’t mean anything, they said.
“It’s like a serial number on a machine,”
“What do you mean?” one of them asked.
“I mean, you guys are like almost the same, as if there are more just like you with numbers, like your number 208 and number 209…”
“Hmph.”
“We’ve been two different people ever since we were born.” said 208. “Besides, these shirts were a gift.”
“Where?” I asked.
“At a supermarket’s grand opening. They were giving them to people in the order they came in.”
“I was the 209th customer,” said 209.
“And I was the 208th customer,” said 208.
“We bought three boxes of tissue paper.”
“Okay, well, let’s do this,” I said, “I’ll call you 208, and I’ll call you 209. That way, I’ll be able to tell you apart.”
“It’s no good,” one of them said.
“Why not?”
They silently took off their sweatshirts and exchanged them. Their heads popped through, and then they were each wearing the other’s sweatshirt.
“I’m 208,” said 209.
“I’m 209,” said 208.
I breathed a sigh.
Nevertheless, when I absolutely had to tell them apart, I couldn’t do it without relying on the numbers. Because aside from that, there was no other method for distinguishing between them.
Apart from those sweatshirts, the twins had almost no other clothes. During our walks, visiting friends, that’s how they lived, and that was their appearance. Moreover, you might say it was probably just practical for them. I bought the essentials, and at the beginning of the week I always gave the twins just a little bit of money, but aside from necessary groceries, they only ever bought coffee cream biscuits.
“Doesn’t it bother you to not have any clothes?” I asked.
“Nope, not really.” 208 answered.
“We’re not really interested in things like clothes,” said 209.
Once a week, they preciously washed their sweatshirts in the bathroom. In bed, while reading Critique of Pure Reason, I’d lift my eyes and be able to make out the shapes of the sweatshirts of the now-naked twins hanging up above the tiles in the bathroom. At those times, I truly felt that I’d come a really long way.
Since the summer before, when I lost a tooth under the diving board in the pool, sometimes it still felt like that.
When I would come home from work, in the south-facing window, I was often greeted by the sight of the sweatshirts, with the numbers 208 and 209, hanging like depressed flags. At times like that, nothing would come out but tears.
Why did they come to live in my apartment, how long did they plan to stay, how old were they, you’re wondering. Where were they born? …I never asked a single question. And they never offered to tell.
The three of us drank coffee, searched for lost balls while walking around the golf course, and they sent me off to bed every day after a night of fooling around. The main attraction was the explanation of the newspaper, where every day I would spend an hour explaining the news to them. They knew surprisingly little about anything. They couldn’t even tell Burma from Australia. The forced separation of Vietnam into two parts took three days to explain, and to explain why Nixon bombed Hanoi took four.
“Which side do you support?” 208 asked me.
“Which side?”
“That is, north or south,” said 209.
“Hmm…I wonder. I’m not really sure.”
“Why not?” said 208.
“Because it’s not like I live in Vietnam or anything…”
They didn’t really get my reasoning. Even I didn’t really understand it.
“They’re fighting because they have two different ways of thinking, right?” 208 figured.
“You could put it that way.”
“So it’s because there are two different ways of thinking, yeah?” said 208.
“Yeah. But, it’s that, in the world, there are maybe 120,000 competing ways of thinking. No, probably even more than that.”
“So you’re saying that most people can’t just become friends?” said 209.
“Probably,” I said. “Most people can’t just become friends.”
That was my lifestyle in 1970. Dostoevsky made predictions, I became hardened.
2
In the fall of 1973, there was also some kind of latent evil hiding. Entirely like small stones inside of one’s shoe, the Rat could feel it clearly.
That year’s summer was short, seemingly blown out by the start of September’s uncertain, vibrating atmosphere, but even after this, the Rat’s heart was still lingering in the last tiny remnant of summer. An old t-shirt, cut-off jeans, and beach sandals—these aspects formed the unchanging countenance which, making its way to J’s Bar, sat the counter, and after talking to the bartender, J, for just a bit, continued to drink overly chilled beer. Smoking for the first time in five years, he kept gazing at his watch every fifteen minutes.
He looks as if the flowing of the time he has is connected to some place, where pieces of it are being irrevocably cut off. Why it had to become like that, the Rat doesn’t know. He can’t even find the end that’s being cut. With the dead rope still in his hand, he kicked about in the thin fall darkness. He crossed meadowlands, passed over rivers, and opened countless doors. However, the dead rope didn’t lead him anywhere.
Like a winter fly with its wings plucked off, or a river flowing toward the sea, the Rat was powerless, was in solitude. Where the evil wind originated, there it entirely surrounded the Rat, and he can feel it, as if all the friendly air has been sent flying off the face of the earth.
One season opens a door and passes through, one more season comes along from one more door. A person confusedly opens a door, hey, wait up, just one thing we forgot to mention, we shout. But they’re already gone. Close the door. In the middle of the room there’s already another season sitting in the chair, striking a match and lighting a cigarette. At times where someone’s forgotten to mention something, he says, I listen really hard, and if I do a good job, I can maybe hear it okay. Good or bad, people say, is not a big deal. Only the sound of wind conceals the message. It’s not a big deal. It’s just the death of a season.
Every year, as always, from fall to winter, the coldness of the season descends upon the expelled-from-college, rich, young, lonely Chinese bartender, he huddles his shoulders like an old married couple, and then it passes through him.
Fall was always an unpleasant season. During the summer, having returned to town on holiday, his few friends would, without waiting for September, leave with a few parting words, and then return to their own far-flung places. And then, in the warm sunlight of summer, it was like they could maybe cross over this unseen divide, when the hue would change faintly, and after going around for a while, the radiance of the aura that seemed to be wrapped around the Rat, would be extinguished.
And then, even the vestiges of the warm dream, like the thinning course of a river, in the sandy bottom of autumn, these traces would be absorbed.
Meanwhile, for J as well, autumn was by no means a happy season. When it would get to be halfway through September, his customers would vanish before his eyes, this was why. It was an annual occurrence; he was amazed by the decrease in customers of that particular fall. And neither J nor the Rat knew the reason for it. Even at closing time, there would still be half a bucket of potatoes for making French fries.
“It’ll get busy soon,” the Rat comforted J, “soon, it’ll be so busy you’ll be spitting out complaints again.”
“I wonder…”
Behind the counter, J had a stool, and he plopped down onto it. Behind the icepick, the butter fat in the toaster oven fell dubiously while he said it.
What happened to cause this, nobody knew.
The Rat silently turned the pages of his book, and J polished a sake bottle while smoking the plain cigarette between his scraggy fingers.
The point when the Rat’s time began to homogenously slip away a little at a time was a thing that happened only three years before. It was the spring when he quit college.
There were, of course, many reasons why the Rat left college. Those reasons were intertwined, and when they reached their boiling point, it made a sound, as if a fuse had been blown. Some things remained, some opportunities were missed, and some things died.
He never told anyone why he dropped out of college. To explain it precisely would probably take around five hours. Besides, if one person were told, everyone else would probably want to know, too. Before long, his plight would probably become explaining his story to the world, and just thinking about that was trying for the Rat, from the bottom of his soul.
“I didn’t like the way they cut the lawn in the courtyard,” was all he said during times when an explanation was required. In reality, it went back to a female college student, a girl who went to look at the lawn in the courtyard. It’s not all that bad, she said. There’s just a little wastepaper scattered around, but… It’s a matter of preference, was the Rat’s reply.
“It’s that we couldn’t like each other the same way. Me, and also college,” he said one time, when he didn’t feel so bad. That’s all he said, and then he was silent.
Three years had passed since it was decided.
The flowing of time, coupled with time passing through completely. It’s almost difficult to believe how fast it was. And at one time, inside of him, all of his many violently panting emotions were radically fading, the outlines of them becoming like some meaningless old dream.
The year the Rat entered college, he left his house, moving into a one-room apartment his father had once used as a study. His parents weren’t opposed to it. They bought it with the plan that someday they would give it to their son, and also they didn’t think it was a bad idea for him to try to suffer the hardships of living on his own.
Although, to an outside observer, it didn’t seem like any kind of a hardship at all. It was like the way a melon looks different from vegetables. His room was actually a spaciously-designed two-room, with a dining and kitchen area, with air conditioning, a phone, a 17-inch color television, a bath with a shower attached, a Triumph parked in the parking spot in the basement, and as a bonus, there was even a fashionable veranda, ideal for sunbathing. In the southeast corner of the top floor, there was a window where one could look down and see both the ocean and the city in one unbroken view. With both of the windows open, the abundant smell of trees and the chirping of wild birds would be brought in by the wind.
The calm afternoon hours, the Rat spent these sitting on a wicker chair. Absentmindedly closing his eyes, he could feel time passing as if his body was drifting loose in gently flowing water. And so, the Rat continued to spend all his hours, his days, and his weeks passing his time like that.
Sometimes, a few small emotions, like memories, would wash ashore onto the Rat’s soul. At those times, he would close his eyes, focus hard and close his spirit, and patiently wait for their passing. The moment of slight, thin darkness before twilight. After he passed this, as if exactly nothing had happened, once more he would be visited by the meager calm.
3
Aside from door-to-door newspaper salesmen, there’s almost nobody who knocks on my door. Because of that, I’ve never opened my door, and I’ve never even responded to them.
However, the visitor on that Sunday morning continued to knock upwards of 30 times. There was nothing I could do, so I rose from bed while still half-asleep to open the door, almost leaning on it. Wearing grey work clothes, a man no more than 40 years old, cradling his helmet in his arms like a puppy, had his feet planted in the corridor.
“I’m from the telephone company,” he said, “I’m here to change out the switchboard.”
I nodded. He looked like a guy who, no matter how much he shaved, it wouldn’t be enough, and his face would be pitch black. Up to right under his eyes, his beard was growing. He looked pathetic, and I felt a little sorry for him, but, in any case, I was really sleepy.
“Couldn’t you come back in the afternoon?”
“It’ll probably be a problem if we can’t do it now.”
“Why?”
He was groping around in his outside hip pocket, from it he showed me a black memo pad. “The work schedule for the rest of the day is booked. Right after I finish this district, then I have to move on to a different area—look!”
From the opposite side, I peered down onto his little book. He was right, my apartment was the only apartment left in the area.
“What kind of work do you have to do?”
“It’s a really simple thing. I take out the switchboard, cut the wires, fit in a new one, that’s it. Won’t take but ten minutes.”
I thought about it a little, then finally shook my head side-to-side. “Now’s not so convenient.”
“The thing is, the one you have now is the old type.”
“I don’t mind if it’s the old style.”
“Really? Is that okay?” he said as he thought it over for a moment. “It’s not really the problem that you think. Everyone’s really upset about it.”
“How so?”
“It’s like this, all the switchboards are connected to a big computer at the phone company headquarters. However, your household will have different signals than everybody else’s, and this is a big problem. Do you understand?”
“I get it. It’s a hardware and software interface problem.”
“Well, since you understand, won’t you let me inside, then?”
I gave in and opened the door, and he came inside.
“But why is there a switchboard in my apartment?” I tried asking. “Isn’t it something that should be in some control room somewhere?”
“Usually,” he said as he diligently checked the kitchen wall, searching for the switchboard. “However, switchboards are a real nuisance to service. We don’t ordinarily use them because they’re unwieldy.”
I nodded. Wearing socks, he stepped onto a kitchen chair and checked the ceiling. But he didn’t find anything.
“It’s really a treasure hunt. People can’t imagine the kinds of places switchboards are shoved into. It’s kind of sad, really. Nevertheless, in one room there was one in this insanely huge piano, another one was even decorating a dollhouse. It’s strange, man.”
I agreed. He gave up on the kitchen, shaking his head as he crossed the room and opened the door.
“For example, in this apartment I was in before, the switchboard was really a sad little thing. Where on earth do you think it was? As you might expect, and I—”
He spoke that far and then chocked on a gasp. In the corner of the room there was a giant bed, the twins in the middle, still lined up with only the space for me open between them, and he was shocked because their heads were sticking out from underneath the blanket. The worker was dumbstruck, breathless for an entire fifteen seconds. The twins were silent as well. There was nothing I could do, so I was the one to break the silence.
“Uh, this guy’s here to do some work on the phone line.”
“Nice to meet you,” said the right-side twin.
“We appreciate your hard work,” said the left-side twin.
“Oh…it’s nothing,” the repairman said.
“He’s replacing everyone’s switchboards,” I said.
“Switchboard?”
“What IS that?”
“It’s the machine that regulates the telephone circuits.”
They said they didn’t know what that meant. That left me to extract an explanation from the repairman.
“Yes, so…basically, it’s a place where many phone lines meet. How should I put this, it’s like the there’s one mother dog, and under her are many puppies. Are you with me so far?”
“Wha-?”
“I have no idea,”
“Well…okay, so this mother dog is raising these puppies. If that mother dog dies, the puppies die, too. Therefore, if the mother dog looks like she’s about to die, we should come along and switch in a new mother dog.”
“That’s wonderful!”
“That’s great!”
I was also impressed.
“So that’s why I came here today. I’m really sorry to bother you while you were sleeping.”
“It’s okay, we don’t mind.”
“Of course, we want to watch,”
Looking relieved, he wiped the sweat off his brow with a towel. He turned around in a circle, surveying the room.
“Well, I have to look for the switchboard.”
“You don’t really have to look for it,” said the right twin.
“It’s inside the closet. You take off the panel,” said the left twin.
I was terribly surprised. “Hey, why do you know that? I didn’t even know that!”
“Because it’s a switchboard, yeah?”
“Everybody knows that.”
“I give up,” said the repairman.
It took him only ten minutes to finish the work, but during that time the twins had their foreheads together whispering about something, giggling all the while. Thanks to this, the repairman kept making mistakes while trying to do the wiring. When the work finished, the twins shuffled around on the bed, putting on their sweatshirts and blue jeans, and then went to the kitchen to make coffee for everyone.
I tried offering the last Danish to the repairman. He took it gladly and we ate and had coffee together.
“I’m sorry, it’s just that I haven’t eaten anything all day.”
“You don’t have a wife?” asked 208.
“No, I do. But, on Sundays she won’t wake up early for me.”
“That’s terrible,” said 209.
“It’s not like I like working on Sundays or anything,”
“Won’t you have a hard-boiled egg?” I asked, also starting to feel sorry for him.
“Nah, I’m okay. It would be inexcusable for me to go that far in taking advantage of your hospitality.”
“It’s no big deal, really,” I said, “because, anyhow, we can make enough for everyone.”
“Well, okay, I’ll have some. I like mine with the yolks hard…”
He focused on his eggs, continuing to talk with us.
“In my 21 years working this job I’ve gone around to many kinds of houses, but this is my first time ever encountering someplace like this.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“That is to say, well…a guy who sleeps with twins. Isn’t it tough, taking care of both of them?”
“It’s not that bad,” I said
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Because he’s amazing,” said 208.
“He’s an animal!” said 209.
“I don’t know what to say,” said the repairman.
He really was confused, I think. The proof is that he forgot the old switchboard. Either that, or maybe he left it as thanks for breakfast. Anyway, the twins spent an entire day playing with the switchboard. One of them would be the mother dog, and the other one would be the puppy, speaking nonsense the whole time.
I didn’t join them. I spent the whole afternoon continuing to work on the translation work I’d brought home. The students who did the rough translations were busy with exams, so my work increased exponentially. I didn’t feel too bad, but at exactly 3 o’clock, my pace started to slow dramatically, as if my batteries were running out of juice, and by 4 o’clock they had died out completely. I couldn’t do even one more line.
I gave up, sprawled out with both elbows on my desk, smoking toward the ceiling. The quiet smoke, in the afternoon sunlight, swirled around like ectoplasm. Under the glass panel of the desk was a calendar I received from the bank. September, 1973…it was just like a dream. 1973, I really couldn’t even imagine such a year. Thinking something like that made me crazy.
“What happened?” asked 208.
“You look tired. Won’t you at least drink some coffee?”
I nodded and they went into the kitchen, one crunching away at grinding the beans, the other heating water in a cup. Lined up in the alcove by the window, we sat and drank coffee.
“Not going well, is it?” asked 209.
“Seems that way,” I said.
“You’re weakened,” said 208.
“What do you mean?”
“Like the switchboard.”
“The mother dog.”
I breathed a sigh from the bottom of my chest, “You really think so?”
They nodded.
“He’s dying.”
“Yes.”
“What do you think I should do?”
They shook their heads.
“No idea.”
I silently smoked a cigarette. “Shall we go for a walk around the golf course? Today’s Sunday, so there are probably lots of lost balls.”
We only played backgammon for an hour before climbing over the wire netting, and we walked around the completely deserted evening golf course. I whistled through Mildred Bailey’s It’s So Peaceful in the Country twice. It’s a nice song, they said, complimenting me. But we didn’t find even one lost ball. There are days like that. Surely there was a gathering of single players in Tokyo, I bet. Or else they’d just started using specially-trained ball-hunting beagles, perhaps. Our power drained, we went back to the apartment.
4
There’s an unmanned lighthouse, standing isolated, with a long breakwater winding back and forth. Its height just three meters, not a very big thing. From the time the ocean started getting filthy, until the shapes of fish were extinguished, countless fishing boats used this lighthouse. You couldn’t really have called it a harbor.
On the beach, from simple rail-like wooden framework, fishermen used wenches with rope to pull their fishing boats onto the beach. There were just three fishermen’s houses nearby, and inside the breakwater, in the space of a morning, the harvested tiny fish would be packed into wooden boxes and dried.
The fish were gone, the citizens of the nearby commuter town who didn’t like having a fishing village around muttered demands that they leave, and the fishermen’s houses on the beach were illegally occupying city land; these were the three reasons why they left. This was in 1962. Who knows where they went. The three small houses were easily demolished, and as for the deteriorated fishing boats, there was no way to use them and no dump to take them to, so in that state, in the thicket on the beach, they became a playground for the kids.
With the fishing boats gone, ships that used the lighthouse would maybe be wandering yachts, or some freighter lost in thick fog or a typhoon between ports. In all, it’s just a lighthouse of the quality of something built during some war or another.
The lighthouse was short, stout, and dark, its shape like a completely covered bell. It also resembled a man deep in thought, seen from behind. The sun sinking, around the time when the ocean would be flowing in its thin afterglow, in the part of the bell that would be its handle, and orange light would appear, and it would start to slowly revolve. The lighthouse always seized that accurate point of twilight. Even in the middle of a splendid sunset, even in the dark and drizzling rain, the moment seized by the lighthouse was the same as ever. Light and darkness blending together, when it seemed like the darkness was crossing over the light, that instant.
In his boyhood, the Rat, in the middle of the evening, came to that beach countless times, just to see that moment. On an afternoon of waves that weren’t tall, while counting the old stones in the breakwater, he walked all the way out to the lighthouse. In the unexpectedly clear surface of the ocean, he was able to catch a peek at schools of tiny, early autumn fish. As if searching for something, in the armpit of the breakwater, they described circles many times before passing into the open ocean.
At last, after struggling to the lighthouse, sitting on the edge of the breakwater, he would look around, slowly surveying everything. As if a paintbrush were being pulled across the sky, a number of clouds flowed across the sky, the limit of what he could see was extremely full of blue. Blue, deep without limit, and it made his young legs tremble without thinking. It was trembling that also resembled fear. The salty smell, and the color of the wind, everything was just surprisingly vivid. He took some time to blend the scene into his soul just a little at a time, and after that he would turn away from it. After that, now, in his completely separate own world, he gazed at the deep ocean. The white sandy beach and the breakwater, like a flattened green pine forest, lowered and spanned out, and behind that, the bluish-blackish mountain range, each of them distinctly lined up.
On the left, nearby, there was a giant harbor. With many cranes, floating piers, and boxlike warehouses, freighter ships, and skyscrapers, all of these things you can see. On the right side, running parallel to the crooked coastline, there was a residential area and a yacht harbor, a sake refining company’s old storehouse stretching on, attached, fixed to an industrial area with a big, spherical tank and big smokestacks lined up, and their white smoke was faintly dissipating into the sky above. That was also the extent of the world for a 10-year-old Rat.
During his boyhood, from spring until the start of fall, the Rat went to the lighthouse countless times. On days with tall waves, the spray of the water would cleanse his legs, the wind would roar overhead, the moss-grown concrete made him slip a number of times. Even with that, the path to the lighthouse was everything to him, becoming an increasingly intimate thing to him. He would sit on the end of the breakwater, the sound of the waves clear in his ears, the clouds in the sky, gazing at the flocks of little terns, he would face the ocean throwing the small stones he had packed in his pockets.
When dusk started to cover the sky, he would follow the same path to return to his own world. Then, on the way home, a subtle sadness always covered his heart. Because on his way home he would await that world, extremely spacious and powerful, just a place he could slip into, because it seemed like nowhere.
Her house was near the breakwater. At times when the Rat would pass by there thinking his vague boyhood thoughts, he could remember the smell of the evening. Driving along the coast, stopping the car, pulling out the sparse pine trees planted in the sandy soil to protect against said sand. Below one’s feet, one could hear the sound of dried sand.
The apartment was there since before the fishermen’s huts were still standing. It was the kind of place where if you dug a hole a few meters deep, reddish-brown water would come out. There were canna lilies planted in the front yard that looked completely as if they had been stomped on. Her room was on the second floor, and on days with strong wind, loose sand hit the windowpane. It was a tidy little south-facing apartment, but there was some kind of gloomy atmosphere floating about. It’s the sea’s fault, she said. It’s too close. The smell of salt, the wind, the sound of waves, the smell of fish...maybe everything.
I don’t think it smells that much like fish, the Rat said.
It does, she said. Then she pulled the string and the blinds closed with a snap. If you lived here, you’d get it.
Sand hit the window.
5
In the apartment I lived in when I was a student, nobody really had any telephones. They were suspicious people, I doubt they had a single eraser between them. In front of the manager’s room was a school student’s desk, bought cheaply from a nearby elementary school. On top of this, there was one pink phone set out. So that was the only phone that existed in the entire apartment. Because of that, nobody would give a second thought to something like a telephone switchboard. It was a peaceful time in a peaceful world.
The manager’s room was no place for a manager to be, so when the phone would ring, somebody would lift the receiver, and run off to call for whoever it was for. Of course, there were times when nobody felt like answering (especially, say, two in the morning) and nobody would answer. Guessing how many times the phone would ring was like guessing when someone would die, the phone would ring crazily (the most I ever counted was 32 rings) then it would die. When I say ‘it died,’ I literally mean that it died. The sound of the last ring would echo, piercing through the long halls of the apartments, breathing in the night’s darkness, and a sudden stillness would be left. It was a really unnerving silence. In their futons, nobody would breathe a whisper, everyone was thinking of the recently-dead phone.
Middle-of-the-night phone calls were always dark phone calls. Someone would lift the receiver, then start talking in a whisper.
“I thought we were done talking about that…no, it’s not like that…but there’s nothing I can do about it, right? …I’m not lying. Why would I lie? …no, I’m really tired…of course I think it’s terrible...yes, that’s why…you know? If you know, won’t you show me just a little consideration? …I can’t really tell you over the phone…”
It was like we all tried our hardest to carry around enormous burdens. Trouble, like rain, fell from the sky, and we gathered in a daze and shoved it into our pockets. Why we did it, even now, I have no idea. We probably mistook it for something else.
Also, telegrams came. A bike would be stopped in the entryway of the apartment at 4am, and rough footsteps would echo down the hallways. Then, the sound of a fist pounding on someone’s door. I always thought of that sound as the rudeness of the god of death. Boom, boom. Every living person’s life will be severed, it drove me crazy, the stagnation of those times would fill my soul, then aimless thoughts would burn my body, that’s how much it annoyed me. 1970, that was the year. If people really, dialectically, should lift themselves, to make themselves better, that year should certainly have served as a lesson.
I lived on the first floor, next to the manager’s office, that girl with the long hair lived on the second floor, next to the stairwell. In terms of the frequency of calls received, she was the champion of our apartment building, and gliding up and down those fifteen slippery stairs maybe thousands of times, became my plight. Really, in truth, she did get many kinds of calls. There were polite voices, businesslike voices, sad-sounding voices, and arrogant voices. So, there were many kinds of voices saying her name to me. I completely forget what her name was. It was a dreadfully common name, that much I do remember.
She was always facing the phone, talking in a low, tired voice. I almost couldn’t hear her voice, it was so subdued. There was beauty in her, but any way you looked at her, she looked like she felt melancholy. Occasionally, we would pass each other on the street, but we never spoke. It was just as if she were on a path in the deep jungle, straddling a white elephant, that was the face she wore when she walked.
She lived in the apartment building just half a year. From the start of fall until the end of winter, that period of the year. I’d answer the phone, go up the stairs, knock on the door to her room, call out, ‘you’ve got a phone call,’ and a little time would pass and then I’d hear her say, ‘thanks.’ I never heard her say anymore than that ‘thanks.’ Although, I also never said more to her than, ‘you’ve got a phone call.’
Even for me, it was a lonely season. I’d come home, and when I’d take off my clothes, the bones all through my body would feel like they were trying to pierce through my skin and fly out. The unknown power within me continued to come out misdirected, seeming as if it were trying to take me to some different world.
The phone would ring, and I’d think this: someone somewhere wants to reach somebody somewhere else to tell them something. The calls were almost never for me. There wasn’t a single person who wanted to reach me to tell me something, at least there was nobody who I thought I wanted to call and tell me something, and, as such, nobody called to tell me anything.
Many or few calls, everyone had begun to live as a slave to their own system. If I thought mine was too different from, or too similar to theirs, I would’ve been sad, that’s all.
The last call I answered for her was at the end of that winter. It was in the beginning of March, on a clear Saturday morning. I say morning, but it was just past ten, and the clear winter sunlight being cast off the sun had penetrated to every corner of my small room. While absent-mindedly hearing the sound of the bell inside my head, I was looking through the window next to my bed, down onto a cabbage patch.
The leftover water from the melting snow glistened here and there. It was the last snow from the last cold wave of the winter.
The phone stopped ringing, unanswered, after just the tenth ring. Then, it started ringing again five minutes later. Bored, wearing a cardigan over my pajamas, I opened the door and answered the phone.
“May I speak to ---, please?” said a man’s voice. With almost no accent, it was a voice I couldn’t quite get a grip on. Giving some half-hearted reply, I took my time climbing the stairs, then knocked on her door.
“You’ve got a phone call.”
“Thanks.”
I went back to my room and laid down, face up, on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I heard her coming down the stairs, and I could hear her subdued voice. For her, it was actually a really short phone call. I didn’t hear the footsteps of her going back upstairs.
After a short time, I heard footsteps outside my door, then a knock. After the second time, in the time it took to take a deep breath, I opened the door.
When I opened the door, there she was, wearing a thick sweater and blue jeans. In that instant, I felt as if I had knocked on the wrong person’s door and misdirected the phone call, but she said nothing.
Holding her arms steadily together in front of her chest, while quivering slightly, she was gazing at me. It was just like as if she were sitting on a lifeboat looking at a boat that was going to sink. Wait, no, it was probably the opposite of that.
“Can I come in? I’m freezing to death out here.”
Without knowing why, I let her inside and closed the door. She sat in front of the gas stove, looking around my room while she warmed both her hands.
“This is a terribly empty room.”
I nodded. It really was terribly empty. Just one bed by a window. A single-size bed was too big, and a semi-double bed was too small. At any rate, that bed wasn’t something I bought. An acquaintance gave it to me. We weren’t close or anything, so I can’t imagine why he gave me something like a bed. He was someone I never talked to much. He was a rich kid from the countryside, but in the courtyard, he was punched by someone from another sect, kicked in the face by someone wearing work boots, then his eyes went bad and he quit college. When I was taking him to the school’s medical examination room, he was bawling like crazy, and I got really fed up with him. A few days later, he said he was moving back to the countryside. So, he gave me his bed.
“You’d probably like something hot to drink, yeah?” she asked me. I shook my head, I don’t need anything, I said.
I had coffee, black tea, and coarse tea, everything but a kettle. There was only one tiny kettle which I used every morning to heat water for shaving. She sighed and stood up, saying wait just a second, left my room, and five minutes later she returned, carrying a cardboard box with both hands. Inside the box, there were teabags and green tea which was only a half-year old, two bags of biscuits, granulated sugar. There was also a pot and some tableware, among that there were two drinking glasses with pictures of Snoopy printed on them. She set the box on my bed with a thud, and boiled water in the pot.
“How can you live like this? It’s just like Robinson Crusoe, you know?”
“It’s not as much fun as that.”
“Yeah, probably not.”
We silently drank our hot, black tea.
“I’m giving you all that stuff.”
I choked on my tea in surprise. “Why would you do that?”
“You’ve answered the phone for me so many times. Consider it a ‘thank you’ present.”
“I think you need it for yourself.”
She shook her head a few times. “I’m moving tomorrow. So, you can have it. I don’t need any of it.”
I silently tried to ponder the reason for that, I couldn’t imagine what had happened to her.
“Was it a good conversation? Or was it a bad one?”
“It wasn’t such a good conversation. But I’m quitting college and moving back to my hometown.”
The winter sunlight that was penetrating into my room clouded a little, then became bright again.
“You probably don’t want to hear about it. If I were you, I wouldn’t listen to it. You’d have bad memories about the person who gave you the dishes and wouldn’t want to use them.”
The next day, cold rain was falling in the morning. It was fine rain, and I was wearing a raincoat, but my sweater was still wet. I carried her huge trunk, and she carried her suitcase and shoulder bag, maybe all of it soaked black. The taxi driver said, with an ill-humored voice, ‘hey, don’t put your luggage on the seat please.’ Inside the taxi, the air was thick with heat from the heater and tobacco smoke, and some old-time singer was shouting on the car’s radio. The music sounded like it was coming at us from all directions, that’s how old the song was. The leaves that had fallen off the trees looked just like the coral at the bottom of the ocean, with wet branches spread on both sides of the road.
“Since the first time I saw it, I couldn’t convince myself to like the scenery of Tokyo.”
“Yeah?”
“The ground is too black, the rivers are dirty, and there are no mountains… How about you?”
“I never really cared much for the scenery, either.”
She sighed and let out a little laugh. “You’re really good at surviving.”
When we set the luggage on the train platform, she turned to me and said thanks for everything.
“The rest of the way I’m going alone.”
“Where are you going back to?”
“Way up north.”
“Probably cold there.”
“It’s okay, I’m used to it.”
When the train started moving, she waved at me from the window. I waved back so hard my hand hit my ear, but as soon as the train was gone, my hand was red and cold, so I shoved it into the pocket of my raincoat.
It continued to rain even after the day was over. I bought two bottles of beer from my neighborhood liquor store, and drank them carefully from one of the glasses she gave me. I felt like ice had frozen to the very core of my body. On the glass was a picture of Snoopy and Woodstock on top of his doghouse, looking as if they were having fun together, above it, this was written:
“Happiness is a warm friend.”
I woke up after the twins were sound asleep. Three in the morning. I saw, through the window in the toilet, the light from an unnaturally bright autumn moon. I sat on the edge of the kitchen sink, and drank two glasses of tap water, and lit my cigarette on the hot plate. On the golf course lawn, illuminated by the moonlight, it sounded like who knows how many thousands of fall insects continuing to cry out.
Still leaning on the edge of the sink, I took the telephone switchboard in my hand, fixing my gaze upon it. No matter what angle I looked at it from, it was merely a slightly dirty, meaningless board, nothing more. I gave up on it and set it back down where it was and dusted off my hands, inhaling my cigarette smoke. Under the moonlight, anything and everything looks pale. Everything seemed as if it had no price, no meaning, no direction. Even the shadows were unclear. I thrusted my cigarette butt into the sink, and immediately lit another.
How far do I have to go to be able to find a place of my own? What kind of place would that even be? I thought long and hard about a two-seater Torpedo bomber, it was the only place I could think of. But that was ridiculous. Didn’t the first Torpedo bombers become old fashioned like thirty years ago, I wondered.
I returned to bed and climbed in between the twins. Their bodies were contorted this way and that, their faces pointing their sleeping breath away from the bed. I covered myself with a blanket and stared at the ceiling.
6
She closed the bathroom door. After that, the noise of the shower could be heard.
The Rat woke up above the sheets, and without being able to control his feelings, he put a cigarette to his lips and searched for a lighter. There wasn’t one in the pocket of the jeans on the table. Not even a single match. Nothing in her purse, either. With no other option, he switched on the light. He looked around inside a desk drawer, and there was an old matchbook with some restaurant’s name on it, so he struck a match and lit his cigarette.
On the wicker chair by the window were her stockings and underwear, piled up neatly. Her mustard-yellow dress was hanging on the back of the chair. On the bedside table was a not-exactly-new, patched La Bagagerie shoulder bag, with a small wristwatch lying next to it.
The Rat sat on the wicker chair, cigarette still in his mouth, absent-mindedly staring out the window. From his apartment, halfway up the mountain, he could look down on the people below, could clearly see the disordered, scattered people living their lives. Sometimes, he would put both his hands on his hips, and he would feel like a golfer standing on a downhill course, always concentrating his awareness on the scenery around him.
While gathering up the lights of the houses on the sparsely populated slope, he carefully descended. There was a dark forest, small hills, and here and there were white mercury lamps whose light was lighting up the surface of the water in peoples’ personal pools. The slope, at last, started to level out, and the belt of lights near the highway were completely bound to the surface of the ground like a kimono sash, and crossing that, just one kilometer to the ocean was a flat slab occupied by houses and stores. Thus, the dark ocean, the shadows of the ocean and sky were uninterrupted, just melted together, and in the middle of that shadow was the floating orange light of the lighthouse, then it went out. Then, clearly, the divided, dislocated space, the dark fairway, was pierced.
It was a river.
The first time the Rat met her, the summer brilliance hadn’t been but only slightly muted, it was the beginning of September.
In the newspaper’s local edition, in the weekly classifieds, there were things like playpens and mouth harps, and kids’ bicycles, and there the Rat found an ad for an electric typewriter. A woman answered the phone, and in a businesslike voice she said she used it for one year, there was one year left on the warranty, no she wouldn’t take monthly payments, and the buyer should come pick it up.
The negotiation completed, the Rat went by car to her apartment, he paid her, and he took the typewriter. It was almost the same sum as one might make working a little over a summer.
She was a slender, short-built woman, wearing a nice little sleeveless dress. In the entryway, there were flowerpots of various shapes and sizes lined up. Her facial features were well-ordered, her hair was bundled behind her head. He couldn’t guess her age. If she’d said she was anything between 22 and 28 years old, he’d have to nod in agreement.
Three days later, there was a phone call, she’d had a half-dozen typewriter ribbons, and if he wanted them, he was welcome to them. The Rat went to pick them up, then he invited her to J’s Bar, where he bought her a few cocktails as thanks for the ribbons. They didn’t really talk about all that much.
The third time they met was four days later, at the city’s indoor pool. The Rat took her home to his apartment, and they slept together. How it ended up like that, even the Rat had no idea. He couldn’t even remember who invited who. That’s probably just how the wind blew.
After a few days passed, their relationship was a soft wedge thrust into their everyday lives, and in that way the Rat could feel her presence expanding inside of him. Just little by little, something was piercing the Rat. Inside his body, when he would remember her clinging arms, in the core of his heart he could feel that the fondness for things he’d forgotten for a long time was expanding.
Certainly, in her own little world, it was like she’d established a kind of perfection in her ways, and that effort could be noticed. That it was no ordinary effort, even the Rat was aware. Always wearing a really unassuming one-piece of good taste, wearing nice, clean underwear, wearing perfume that made her smell like a vineyard in the morning, carefully choosing her words when she spoke, not asking too many questions, she even smiled as if she accumulated her smiles through time spent practicing in front of a mirror. All of that, little by little, made the Rat sad in his heart. After he’d met her so many times, he guessed her to be 27 years old. That wasn’t off by more than a year.
Her breasts were small, her skinny body was without excess fat, and she had a nice suntan; she didn’t really want to have a suntan, but she did have a suntan. One was made to feel her pointed cheekbones and thin lips were the result of her good upbringing and strength of character, but her face, altogether shaking just a little, was the kind that showed inside she was defenseless, and her naïveté was revealed.
I went to an arts college for architecture and worked for an architectural firm, she said. Where was I born? Not here. I came here after I graduated from college. She swam once a week at the pool, on Sunday night she rode the train to viola practice.
Once a week, on Saturday night, they met. Thus, on Sunday, after a day had passed, the Rat always had a vague feeling she was playing Mozart.
7
After just three days of not going to work, thanks to a cold, my work had piled up like a mountain. The inside of my mouth felt rough, and I felt like my own body weight in paperwork had been filed onto me. My co-manager came around, faced me, and mumbled something like you’d say when you visit a sick person in the hospital, and returned to his office. The office lady always had coffee and two bread rolls on her desk, and they soon disappeared. I forgot to buy cigarettes, so my co-manager gave me a pack of Seven Stars, and I pulled off the filters and smoked them from the opposite end. The sky was vaguely cloudy, and you couldn’t tell where the clouds started or ended. It smelled just like the damp leaves fell off the tree and forcibly burned. Or maybe that was just because of my fever.
I took a deep breath and the nearest anthill fell over. It was all rubber-stamped with ‘urgent’ and under that, with a red felt pen, the deadline was filled out. I was happy there was only one anthill stamped ‘urgent.’ I hadn’t experienced such happiness in two or three days. Everything was due in just one to two weeks, and half of it looked like the rough translation was done pretty well.
I took a book in each hand, and tried to get my procedure in order. Thanks to this, my anthill became much more unstable than before. On the front page of the newspaper, the age/gender makeup of the support rate of the Cabinet was published in a kind of a graph shape. So, even without the shape, the contents were really enough to make my heart dance.
1. Charles Rankin - book -“Science Question Box” animal editing -from page 68 “Why do Cats Clean Their Faces?” to “Bears’ Methods of Catching Fish” -the deadline is October 12th
2. American Nurses’ Association Newsletter -“Talking to Terminally Ill Patients” -all of page 16 -the deadline is October 19th
3. Frank DeCeito Jr. - book -“Authors’ Medical History” chapter 3 “Authors Dispute Pollen Sickness” -all of page 23 -the deadline is October 23rd
4. René Clair - book -“Italian Straw Cap” (English version scenario) -all of page 39 -the deadline is October 26th
It really wasn’t a terrible tragedy that the name of the person requesting these translations wasn’t written on my paperwork. Who it was that, for whatever reason, (urgently) wanted this kind of paperwork translated, I didn’t have the slightest idea. Perhaps there was a bear loitering around a river somewhere eagerly awaiting my translation, maybe. Or maybe there was a nurse continuing to wait, wordlessly, in front of a terminally ill person’s bed.
With the picture of the cat cleaning its face still out on my desk, I had coffee in one hand, and ate just one bread roll that tasted like paper clay. My head was starting to clear up somewhat, but my limbs were still numb from my fever. I pulled out the mountain-climbing knife from my desk drawer, and I spent a long time conscientiously sharpening six F pencils, then I slowly set about tackling my work.
I worked until lunchtime, all the while listening to an old Stan Getz cassette tape. Stan Getz, Al Haig, Jimmy Raney, Teddy Kotick, Tiny Kahn, they were a great band. I whistled along to the tape for the entirety of Getz’s solo in Jumping With Symphony Sid, and I felt completely better.
Just five minutes into my lunch break, I pulled out a beer and descended the hill, and at a crowded restaurant I ate fried fish, then ate a hamburger stand I drank two glasses of orange juice in a row. After that, I stopped by the pet shop, shoving my finger into the gap in the glass and playing with an Abyssinian cat for just ten minutes. My lunch break on this street was always the same.
I went back to the office, and until the clock pointed at one o’clock, I absent-mindedly gazed at the morning paper. Then, for the afternoon, I once again sharpened six pencils, took the filters off the rest of the Seven Stars, and lined them up on the desk. The office girl brought me over some hot Japanese tea.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Not too bad.”
“How’s the work coming along?”
“Great…”
The sky was still glazed over with clouds. It seemed like the gray color of the clouds had become stronger little by little since in the morning. I stuck my head out the window and the sky’s intention seemed to be to rain faintly. Some fall birds were flying across the sky. A dull rumble that sounded like boooommm (a subway train, the sound of hamburgers frying, the sound of cars on an over head road, the sound of an automatic door opening and closing, the combination of a countless number of sounds like that) covered the neighborhood.
I closed the window, and while listening to a tape of Charlie Parker’s Just Friends, I started to translate a paragraph with the title ‘When Do Migrating Birds Sleep?’
At four o’clock, work finished, and I gave the office girl that day’s manuscripts and left the office. Instead of carrying an umbrella, I decided I was going to pull out a thin raincoat I’d had set aside. I bought an evening paper at the station, then I was shaken around in a crowded train for an entire hour. Even inside the train car, it smelled like rain, but not even one drop of rain had yet fallen.
When I finished doing all my shopping for dinner at the supermarket in front of the station, that’s when the rain started to fall. It was rain so faint I couldn’t even see it in front of my face, but the pavement under my feet kept on changing into that dark gray it becomes when it’s rained on. After I checked on the bus time, I went into a nearby coffee shop and drank some coffee. The place was crowded, and there it smelled like real rain was really going to come soon. Even on the waitress’ blouse, even in the coffee, everything smelled like rain.
The streetlights surrounding the bus terminal started to light up in the middle of the evening in ones and twos, and during that time the many busses seemed to be coming and going like giant weather loaches going up and down a mountain stream. People like salarymen and housewives and students were crowding onto the buses, disappearing into the various kinds of dim light. A middle-aged woman with a deep black German shepherd on a leash was going by outside the bus window. A bunch of grade-schoolers were sticking gumballs to the ground as they walked by. I put out my fifth cigarette, and drank the last mouthful of my now-cold coffee.
Then, in the glass window, I stared fixedly at the face of my reflected self. Due to my fever, my eyes were pretty sunken in. Hey, that’s okay. My five o’clock shadow made my face slightly darker. That’s probably okay, too. However, that face didn’t look anything like mine. It was the face of some twenty four year-old guy sitting casually in the seat across from me on the commuter train. My face, my soul, as far as other people were concerned, were nothing more than a meaningless corpse. My soul and somebody else’s soul pass by each other. Hey, I say. Hey, the other soul answers. That’s it. Nobody raises a hand. Nobody looks back.
If I had gardenias growing out of my ears and webbed fingers, somebody would probably look back. But that’s all they’d do. After walking three steps, everybody would forget. Their eyes don’t really see anything. So neither do mine. My soul felt like it had become empty. I’d probably already gotten to the point where I had nothing to offer anyone.
The twins were waiting for me.
I handed over the brown supermarket bag with one hand, and went into the shower still smoking my already-lit cigarette. Then, while my unsoaped body was getting hit by the shower water, I stared absent-mindedly at the shower tiles spread across the wall. The shower walls were dark, the lights having been switched off by something, sputtering a little before they went out. I was already a shadow, unable to call forth any touching thoughts.
In that state, I got out of the bath, wiping myself dry with a towel, then I threw myself onto the bed. My coral blue shirt, freshly washed and dried, had not a single wrinkle. I faced up at the ceiling, and while smoking a cigarette, inside my head, the events of that day were floating up to the surface of my thoughts. The twins, during that time, cut vegetables, cooked meat, and made rice.
“Want a beer?” one of them asked me.
“Sure.”
The twin with the shirt reading 208 brought a beer and a glass to the bed for me.
“How about some music?”
“That’d be nice.”
She took Handel’s Recorder Sonata out from the record shelf, set it on the player, and lowered the needle. Some years before, for Valentine’s Day, my girlfriend had given that record to me as a present. In between the recorder, the violin, and the harpsichord, like a basso continuo, the sound of cooking meat could be heard. Me and my girlfriend used to have sex countless times with that record playing in the background. After the record ended, and until the noise of the needle skipping continued on and on, we embraced each other wordlessly.
Outside the window, the soundless rain fell incessantly on the dark golf course. I finished drinking my beer, and at the instant that the last note of Hans-Martin Linde’s sonata in F major rang out, that’s when the preparations for dinner were finished. That day, the three of us were unusually reticent at dinner. The record had already ended, and in the eaves of the roof, the sound of the rain and the sound us chewing our meat, these sounds had no velocity whatsoever. When dinner ended, the twins cleaned up the tableware, then made coffee. After that, the three of us drank hot coffee. One of them got up and put on a record. It was The Beatles’ Rubber Soul.
“I don’t remember buying this…” I shouted in surprise.
“We bought it,”
“We’ve been saving up the money you gave us little by little.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t like The Beatles?”
I was silent.
“That’s too bad. We thought it would make you happy.”
“We’re sorry.”
One of them stood up, stopped the record, carefully shook the dust off of it, and put it back into its jacket. We were all silent. I sighed.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I tried to explain, “I’m just a little tired and irritated, that’s all. Let’s listen to it one more time.”
They exchanged glances, then grinned and started laughing.
“You can relax here, it’s okay. This is your house.”
“Don’t worry about us.”
“Let’s hear it again.”
Eventually, we drank coffee while listening to both sides of Rubber Soul. I’d become acclimated to the feelings of countless women. The twins also seemed pleased.
When we finished our coffee, the twins measured my temperature. They stared at the thermometer over and over. Thirty seven-point-five, up just half a degree since morning. I felt light-headed.
“After you take a shower or something—”
“You should go to bed.”
That’s how it was. I took off my clothes, took Critique of Pure Reason and a pack of cigarettes and crawled into bed. The blanket smelled a little bit like sun, Kant was as elegant as ever, and the cigarettes tasted like rolled up newspaper lit on a gas burner. I closed my book, and while absent-mindedly listening to the twins, and, as if being dragged into darkness, I closed my eyes.
8
The spacious plateau, close to the mountaintop, was used as a cemetery. The walkways, gravel spread over them, went between the graves in every direction; while cut azaleas, spread about as if left behind by grazing sheep, were scattered here and there. Thus, looking down upon that vast site, winding around like springs, the mercury lamps were lined up, their unnaturally white light penetrating into every nook and corner.
The Rat parked his car in a cluster of trees in the southeast corner of the cemetery, and while holding the girl’s shoulders in an embrace, they looked down at the night panorama of the town spread out below. The town looked as if it had been poured from a mold, and the lights looked syrupy.
Or, also, they looked like the golden dust trail spread by a giant moth.
As if falling asleep, she closed her eyes and leaned on the Rat. The Rat, from his shoulders to his sides, felt her weight hanging on him heavily. It was a strange heaviness. It was the heaviness of an existence laden with loving a man, bearing his children, growing old, and dying together. The Rat, using one had, took out his pack of cigarettes and lit one. Sometimes, the ocean wind climbed the slope below and shook the needles of the pine trees. She probably really was asleep. The Rat put his hand to her cheek, and with one finger, he touched her thin lips. He could feel her damp, hot breath.
The cemetery, the graveyard, that is to say, it looked just like an abandoned town. More than half the site was vacant space. Because the people with arrangements to be buried there were still living. Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons, those people would bring their families and come around to check on their final resting places. Thus, gazing down upon the graveyard, they’d say, yes, this is a good view, it’s full of seasonal flowers, the air’s nice, the lawn is also nicely kept, even with sprinklers, and there aren’t even any stray dogs looking for offerings. This would be a bright, healthy, good thing, they thought. That made them content, sitting on a bench there, eating a boxed lunch, and then again returning to the middle of their hurried daily lives.
The manager, using a flat board attached to the end of a long stick, in the morning and evening, he would smooth the gravel paths. He’d also chase away the kids who would come to toss food to the carp in the pond in the center of the graveyard. In addition to that, each day, at three, nine, and eleven, and six o’clock, the song Old Black Joe would be played on a music box and come flowing through the speakers throughout the cemetery.
What the music pouring from the speakers meant, the Rat didn’t know. It felt natural, with evening setting on, and the six o’clock graveyard, empty of people with Old Black Joe coming from the speakers, this nighttime view, it felt a little like it was something to see.
At six o’clock, the manager returned from the nether-realm, and the graveyard wore complete silence. Then, the men and women of all stripes, who came by car, they embraced each other. In the middle of the forest, which was starting to turn to spring, all the cars of said people were lined up.
This graveyard, for the Rat, even in his adolescence, it did feel like a place of deep meaning. Being a high-schooler, at this time he couldn’t drive a car, but he did often have a girl at his back while riding a 250cc motorcycle up a hill back and forth near the riverside. Because of that, he was always gazing at the same city lights while embracing girls. Various smells drifted gently into the tip of the Rat’s nose, and then they stopped. There were various dreams, various sadnesses, and many promises. These were all eventually extinguished.
To sum it up, this site was where various deaths took root upon the earth. Occasionally, the Rat would take a girl’s hand, and they’d walk unassumingly, aimlessly along the graveyard’s gravel paths. Various names and times, and the death of burdens of previous lives, lined up like bushes in a botanical garden, these took up lots of space and continued until who knows how far. They were soundlessly shaken by the wind, without scent, facing the darkness without even sticking out tentacles to try to get anything.
They were like bushes that had lost their time. Thoughts, and words to deliver these thoughts, they had neither. They entrusted these things to those that continued to live. The two of them returned to the forest, embracing each other strongly. The sea breeze from the ocean, the smell from the leaves of all the trees, the crickets in the thickets, the world of the aforementioned things which continued to live, it was only filled to the brim with sadness.
“Did you sleep long?” she asks.
“No,” the Rat says. “I didn’t have enough time.”
9
It was the same day repeating itself again. That day was like waiting for the reply to a letter, a response that was sent without delay, but seemingly set aside somewhere by mistake.
It was a day that smelled completely like autumn. I finished work the same time I always did, and when I came home there was no sign of the twins. I threw myself onto my bed still wearing my socks, smoking absent-mindedly. I tried to think about many different things, but inside my head, not even one thought formed. I sighed and rose from bed, then stared for a while at the white wall in front of me. I didn’t even have the slightest idea about what to do.
I don’t want to glare at the wall forever, I told myself. Even that was no good. My senior thesis, my teacher said, had good things going for it. The sentences were good, my points were clear, but there was no theme, he said. In truth, that’s how I felt. It had been so long since I’d been alone, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself; I couldn’t handle it well.
It was a strange thing. I’d lived by myself for many years and months. I’d come along pretty well, hadn’t I? How I’d done it, I couldn’t remember. Twenty-four years, it was almost as if I’d completely forgotten all of it. I felt as if, in the middle of looking for something, I’d completely forgotten what I was looking for. What on earth was I looking for? A bottle opener? An old letter? A receipt? A cotton swab?
When I got tired of thinking about it, I grabbed Kant from next to my pillow, from inside the book, a note fell out. It was in the twins’ handwriting. We’re going to mess around at the golf course, it said. I got worried, because I’d warned them not to go to the golf course without me. It was difficult to know what the golf course would be like at night, so it was dangerous. Because golf balls might come flying at you at any time.
I put on my tennis shoes and my sweatshirt, left my apartment, and crossed over the yellow rope blocking the path to the golf course. I crossed the gently sloping hills, crossed over the 12th hole, walked by the gazebo for relaxing golfers, and went through the forest. From the parting between the many trees on the west edge of the golf course, I could see the sun setting over the lawn.
Near the 10th hole, there was a dumbbell-shaped bunker, and in the sand, I found an empty box of coffee cream biscuits, which looked like it had been left there by the twins. I crumpled it up and put it in my pocket, then stepped back and wiped out three sets of footprints. Then I crossed a small wooden bridge over a brook, and as I walked up a hill, I found the twins. They were on the opposite side of the hill, sitting halfway up the escalator which climbed a hill of open-air stalls, playing backgammon.
“Didn’t I tell you it was dangerous for the two of you to come here alone?”
“But the sunset was so beautiful!” one of them said as an excuse.
We walked down the escalator, we sat in the zebra grass covering one side of the hill and watched the sunset. It really was a great sight.
“Don’t throw trash in the bunker,” I said
“Sorry,” they said.
“A long time ago, I cut myself in a bunker. When I was a middle school student.” I showed them the pointer finger on my left hand. I still had a thread-shaped seven millimeter scar there. “Someone broke a cider bottle and buried the shards in the sand.”
They nodded.
“Of course, nobody will cut himself on a biscuit box. But, we can’t litter in the sand trap. The sand trap is a sacred, clean place.”
“I understand,” one of them said.
“I’ll be more careful,” said the other one. “Have you had any other injuries?”
“Of course.” I showed them the wounds covering my body. I was like a catalog of wounds. First, my left eye, which was struck by a ball during a soccer game. Even now, there’s still a scar on my retina. Then, there was the bridge of my nose, also a soccer injury. I made a head shot and my head collided with someone’s teeth. My bottom lip had also had seven stitches. I fell off my bike. There was a truck, I was hit, and my mouth…
We romped around on the cool grass, listening to the sound of the zebra grass rustling softly in the breeze.
After the sun had set completely, we returned to my apartment. We ate dinner. After I finished taking a bath and drinking a beer, we cooked and fried three trout. Alongside that, there was canned asparagus, accompanied by some large watercress. Trout is a flavor with which I have associated strong memories. It’s the taste of a summer mountain path. We took our time and cleanly ate every last bit of that trout. On our plates, all that were left were white fish bones and pencil-like, large watercress stems. They washed the dishes right away, then made coffee.
“Let’s talk about the switchboard,” I said. “It’s been on my mind a lot lately.”
They nodded.
“It seems it’s about to die.”
“It’s certainly absorbed many things.”
“It’s busted.”
I had a coffee cup in my left hand, a cigarette in my right, and I thought this over for a bit.
“What should I do?”
They looked at each other and shook their heads. “It’s already too late.”
“It will return to the earth.”
“Have you ever seen a cat with blood poisoning?”
“Nope,” I said.
“From every corner of its body, it begins to harden like a rock. It takes a long time. In the end, its heart stops.”
I sighed. “I don’t want to die.”
“Know what you mean,” said one of them. “but certainly, you’ve had too much on your shoulders.”
They said it as off-handedly as if they were telling me that because there won’t be any snow this winter I should give up on the idea of going skiing. I drank my coffee in resignation.
10
It was Wednesday. He went to bed at 9, and woke up at 11. After that, he couldn’t fall asleep no matter what he did. Like wearing a hat that was two sizes too small, something was tightly wrapped around his mind. It was a terrible feeling. The Rat, still wearing his pajamas, rose from his bed, went to the kitchen, and drank a glass of ice water in one gulp. After that, he thought about the girl. Standing near the window, watching the light from the lighthouse, following the dark breakwater with his eyes, he found her apartment and stared at it. He thought of the sound of waves hitting the dark shadows, and the sound of sand bouncing off her apartment’s windows. That thought kept going around in his mind, and he had the tedious feeling that he couldn’t advance even one centimeter.
Since he first started seeing her, his life had become the limitless repetition of the same week. It was like there were no dates. What month is it? Probably October. I don’t know… Meet the girl on Saturday, be engrossed in the memory of that for three days, from Sunday until Tuesday. Thursday and Friday, think about the plans for the upcoming half day on Saturday.
So, on Wednesday, he’d be destinationless, wandering through space. Unable to move forward, also unable to move back. Wednesday…
After a whole ten minutes of absent-mindedly smoking, he took off his pajamas, put a windbreaker on over his shirt, and went down to his parking space. Going around the town at eleven p.m., almost no one could be seen. Only the streetlights lit up the pavement. The shutter on J’s bar was already down, but the Rat lifted it just halfway and passed under, descending the stairs.
As many as a dozen of J’s towels were drying on the backs of the seats, and he was sitting at the counter smoking a cigarette.
“Is it okay if I drink just one beer?”
“Sure thing,” J said good-naturedly.
It was his first time coming to J’s bar after it was closed. Save for the light above the counter, all the others were out, and the sound of ventilators and air conditioning were also absent. Only the scent of long months and years that had penetrated into the floor and walls faintly floated in the air.
The Rat went behind the counter, took a beer from the refrigerator, and poured it into a glass. The atmosphere surrounding the customer seats, seemed to have settled into layers in the darkness. It was lukewarm, thus it was gloomy.
“I didn’t plan to come here today,” the Rat offered as an excuse, “but I woke up, and there was nothing for it, I found myself wanting to drink a beer. Then I came here.”
J folded his newspaper on top of the counter, and wiped off some cigarette ashes that had fallen onto his pants. “It’s better if you drink and relax. If you’re hungry, I’ll make you something.”
“Nah, I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine with a beer.”
The beer was terribly delicious. He drank his first glass in one gulp, then took a breath. He poured the remaining half of the bottle into the glass, staring at the foam as it dissipated.
“Would you like to have a drink with me?” the Rat asked.
J gave a kind of upset-looking smile. “Thanks. However, I can’t drink a single drop.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That’s how I came out when I was born. My body won’t take it.”
The Rat nodded a few times, silently drinking his beer. He was surprised to realize that this changed the fact that he knew next to nothing about this Chinese bartender. Nobody knew anything about J. He was a terribly quiet guy. He never said a word about himself, and even if somebody asked a question, he would just give some inoffensive answer, as if carefully choosing which words to use.
Everyone knew J was a Chinese person born in China, but it wasn’t a strange thing for foreigners to be in this town. In the Rat’s high school soccer club, there was a forward and a back, each one a Chinese person. Nobody really cared much.
“Without music, it’s lonely, isn’t it?” J said this, then threw the jukebox key to the Rat. The Rat chose five songs, then came back to the counter and continued drinking his beer. An old Wayne Newton song came streaming out of the speakers.
“Is it okay if I don’t go home right away?” the Rat faced J as he asked this.
“I don’t mind. It’s not like anyone’s waiting for me.”
“You live alone?”
“Yep.”
The Rat pulled a cigarette from his pocket, smoothing out the wrinkles and lighting it.
“I have a cat,” J offered, “he’s getting up in years, but he’s become an excellent conversationalist.”
“He can speak?”
J nodded a few times. “Yeah, we’ve been acquainted for so long that he knows my disposition. I know how he’s feeling, and he knows how I’m feeling.”
The Rat groaned, his cigarette still in his mouth. The jukebox made a clicking noise, and changed the record to MacArthur Park.
“Hey, what kinds of things do cats think about?”
“All kinds of things. Same as me and you.”
“Seems difficult,” the Rat said with a laugh.
J laughed, too. Then, after a short while, he rubbed his finger on the surface of the counter.
“It’s his paw…”
“His paw?” the Rat asked.
“My cat. He’s crippled. Four years ago, in the winter, my cat came home covered in blood. The palm of his paw was smashed, mushy like marmalade.”
The Rat took the glass he had in his hand and set it on the counter, then he looked at J’s face. “What happened?”
“I’m not sure. At first, I thought he was hit by a car. But, a car wouldn’t crush it that badly. If it were hit by a tire, it wouldn’t end up like that. It looked exactly as if it were crushed with some tool like a vice clamp. Completely flattened. Probably somebody goofing around.”
“No way,” the Rat said, shaking his head in disbelief, “why the hell would somebody do that to a cat’s paw….”
J tapped the end of his plain cigarette a few times on the counter, then put it in his mouth and lit it.
“I know what you mean. There’s no reason to crush a cat’s paw. He’s a really obedient cat, never did anything bad to anyone. It’s not like anybody got any benefit out of crushing that cat’s paw. It was a meaningless, terrible thing. However, in the world, that kind of purposeless malice exists alongside the mountains. I can’t understand it, and you can’t understand it. But it definitely exists. Could probably go so far as to say it surrounds us.”
Still looking at his glass, the Rat shook his head one more time. “Yeah, I definitely can’t understand it.”
“That’s okay. If you die without understanding it, it means you’ve never crossed over into it.”
Saying that, J turned to the patrons’ seats with a dark clank and blew out his cigarette smoke. The white cigarette smoke was completely dissolved into the air.
The two of them were silent for a long time. The Rat stared at his glass, daydreaming, and J kept on rubbing the counter with his finger. The last record started to emanate from the jukebox. It was a sweet soul ballad sung in a falsetto voice.
“Hey, J,” the Rat said while still staring at his glass, “I’ve been alive for almost 25 years, and I feel like I haven’t learned a single thing.”
Without saying anything for a while, J looked at his finger. Then, he shrugged his shoulders a little.
“I’m 40 years old, and I’ve only learned one thing, and it’s this: if you’ll only make an effort, you’ll learn something. Even if it’s doing some common, mundane thing, you’ll definitely learn something. Even in shaving your beard, there’s philosophy, I read that somewhere. Practically speaking, if we didn’t learn something, nobody would be able to survive.”
The Rat nodded, then drank dry the last three remaining centimeters of beer in his glass. The record finished, the jukebox made another clicking sound, and then the bar returned to silence.
“I think I get what you’re saying, but,” except that the Rat finished before he could say the ‘but,’ swallowing the word. The word wanted to come out, but there was nothing it could do, it wouldn’t come out. The Rat smiled, stood up, and said his thanks. “Can I give you a lift home?”
“Nah, I’m okay. My house is close, and I like the walk.”
“Well, good night, then. Give my regards to your cat.”
“Thanks.”
He went up the stairs and outside, into the chilly smell of autumn. Tapping each tree along the road lightly with his fist, he walked to his parking spot, and after staring fixedly at the meaningless parking meter, he got into his car. He was a little confused, so he drove toward the ocean, found a spot on a road running next to the ocean from which he could see the girl’s apartment, and stopped his car.
Just half the lights in the apartment were still lit. He could still see the shadows of some people crossing behind the curtains.
The girl’s room was darkened. Even her bedside lamp was out. Probably she was already asleep. It was terribly lonely.
It seemed like the sound of the waves hitting was gradually getting louder. It seemed as if the waves, even now, were crossing the breakwater, were coming from somewhere far away to wash away the Rat in his car. The Rat turned on his radio, listened to the meaningless babble of the disk jockey, put back his seat, put his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes. He felt like he was completely exhausted, thanks to his nameless, varied emotions, their whereabouts unknown. Though it seemed these were now, from somewhere, switched off. The Rat breathed a sigh of relief and laid his now-empty head down, absent-mindedly continuing to listen to the sound of the waves mixing with the disk jockey’s voice. Then, sleep finally made its way to him.
11
Thursday morning, the twins woke me up. It was ten minutes earlier than usual, but not minding this, I shaved my beard with hot water, drank coffee, and the ink seemed to stick thickly to my hands as I read the morning paper to its corners.
“We’ve got a favor to ask,” said one of the twins.
“Would it be possible for us to borrow a car on Sunday?” asked the other twin.
“Probably,” I said, “where do you want to go?”
“The reservoir.”
“The reservoir?”
They nodded.
“What are you going to do at the reservoir?”
“It’s a funeral.”
“Whose?”
“The switchboard’s.”
“Ah, I see,” I said. Then I went back to reading the newspaper.
Unfortunately, on Sunday morning, it was still raining finely. Though I have no idea what kind of weather would have been appropriate for the funeral of a switchboard. The twins didn’t say a word about the rain, and I was silent about it as well.
On Saturday evening, I borrowed my partner’s sky-blue Volkswagen. Did you get a girlfriend, he asked me. Yes, I said. The Volkswagen’s passenger seat had milk chocolate stains rubbed into it, seemingly by one of his kids, but it looked like the bloodstains from after a gunfight were soaked into the entire surface of it. There weren’t any tapes for the car’s cassette tape player, so for the entire hour-and-a-half of our one-way journey there, we didn’t listen to music, and we continued in absolute silence. As we drove, the rain systematically continued to strengthen, then weaken, then strengthen again, then weaken yet again. It was as if the rain were yawning. The continuing sound of rain was interrupted only by the whoosh of cars going by us at high speeds in the opposing lane of the expressway.
One of the twins sat in the passenger seat, and the other sat in the backseat with a shopping bag containing the switchboard, clutching a thermos. They were appropriately solemn for the day of a funeral. I also adopted this attitude. Save for when we took a break to eat corn, we were solemn during our trip. Only the sound of corn being separated from the husk disturbed the silence. After tearing every last kernel from three cobs of corn, we continued our drive.
It was a place with a great many dogs, they looked like a school of yellowtail at an aquarium, aimlessly wandering around in the rain. Thanks to this, I had to incessantly honk my car horn.
Judging from their faces, they cared about neither the rain, nor about cars. Though they did regard the sound of a horn as a frankly unpleasant thing, and they did skillfully dodge it with their bodies. However, the rain, of course, they could not avoid. The dogs were wet down to their assholes, looking like otters from one of Balzac’s short stories, or maybe like monks deep in thought.
One of the twins put a cigarette in my mouth, then lit it for me. Then she put her tiny palm on my inner thigh, moving it up and down a few times. It seemed more like an affirmation of a good deed than a caress.
The rain seemed as if it would continue forever. That’s how October rain always falls. It continues until absolutely everything has been soaked. The ground was soaked. The trees and highways and fields and cars and houses and dogs, everything thoroughly absorbed the rain, this rain not aiding the world by filling it with this coldness.
After climbing mountain roads for awhile, the deep forest spit the road out and we arrived at the reservoir. Thanks to the rain, there wasn’t even a single person in the vicinity. As far as one could see, rain was pouring into the surface of the water in the reservoir. The scene of all the rain falling into the reservoir was more pitiful than I could’ve imagined. We parked at the side of the lake, sitting in the car and drinking coffee from the thermos, eating cookies the twins had bought.
There were three kinds of cookies: coffee, butter cream, and maple syrup, but we divided them impartially, three ways, and ate them.
Even during that time, the rain continued falling unabated, pouring into the reservoir. The rain fell terribly quietly. It was only as loud as the sound of someone cheerfully dropping small, torn-up pieces of newspaper onto a carpet. The rain that falls in Claude Lelouch movies.
After we finished eating our cookies and drinking two cups of coffee, we brushed off our knees as if by mutual agreement. Nobody said a word.
“Well, let’s get this over with,” said one of the twins.
The other one nodded.
I put out my cigarette.
Without even opening our umbrellas, we walked out to the edge of a dead-end bridge facing the reservoir. It was a man-made thing created to dam up the water. The surface of the water seemed to be cleansing the mountainside, its shape unnaturally curved. Looking at the color of the surface of the water, it felt eerily deep. The falling water made small ripples in the water’s surface.
One of the twins took the switchboard out of the paper bag and handed it to me. In the middle of the rain, the switchboard seemed even shabbier than it did before.
“Please say a few words of prayer,”
“A prayer?” I shouted in surprise.
“This is a funeral, we need a prayer!”
“I didn’t realize,” I said, “I don’t have anything prepared.”
“Anything’s okay.”
“It’s just a formality.”
While being soaked from my head to the tips of my toes, I searched for the appropriate words. The twins gazed worriedly at me and the switchboard.
“It’s our philosophical duty,” I said, pulling out some Kant, “to remove illusions resulting from misunderstandings. …may this switchboard sleep peacefully at the bottom of the reservoir.”
“Throw it in,”
“What?”
“The switchboard.”
I pulled back my right arm, and with all my might, launched the switchboard powerfully into the reservoir. The switchboard, in the rain, described a splendid arc as it flew, then it hit the surface of the water. Then the ripples widened, finally coming around to our feet.
“That was a wonderful prayer.”
“Did you write it?”
“Of course,” I said.
Then the three of us, still as wet as the dogs from before, snuggled together and gazed upon the reservoir.
“How deep is it?” one of them asked.
“Terribly deep,” I answered.
“Are there fish?” asked the other one.
“Of course, every lake has fish.”
From afar, the three of us probably looked like some kind of monument.
12
On the Thursday of that week, I wore a sweater for the first time that autumn. It was a standard Shetland sweater, and the seam under the armpits was torn open just a little, but even that felt good. I shaved even more conscientiously than usual, put on my warm cotton trousers, and pulled on my charmingly-patterned combat boots.
Wearing these boots, I looked just like I had two puppies sitting obediently in front of my feet. The twins were ransacking the room, searching for my cigarettes, my lighter, my wallet, and my commuter pass, and bringing them to me once they were found.
I sat at my desk at the office, sharpening six pencils while drinking the coffee the office girl made for me. The room was filled with the scent of pencil shavings and my sweater.
During my lunch break, I went out to eat, then returned to play with the Abyssinian cats a second time. I stuck my pinky into the one-centimeter gap in the glass in the showcase, and two cats were fighting each other to jump up and bite onto my finger.
That day, one of the shop clerks brought one of the cats out for me. It felt like high-quality cashmere, pressing its cold nose against my lip.
“They’re very friendly,” the shop clerk explained.
I said my thanks and returned the cat to the showcase, then bought a box of cat food I had no use for. The clerk wrapped it up nicely for me. When I walked out of the pet shop clutching my bundle of pet food, both the cats gazed at me, their dreams shattered.
When I got back to the office, the office girl brushed the cat fur off my sweater.
“I was playing with cats,” I offered as an excuse.
“Your sweater’s got holes in the armpits.”
“I know. It’s been like this since last year. It happened when I attacked an armored car last year, I got snagged by the rearview mirror.”
“Take it off,” she said, seemingly unamused.
I took off my sweater, and she hung it on the arm of a chair, crossing her long legs and beginning to sew the armpits with a black thread. While she was sewing the sweater, I returned to my desk, sharpened my pencils for the afternoon, and set about going back to work. People could say what they like about me, but I was never one to complain about anything work-related. During work hours, I did precisely what I was told to do, as earnestly as I could. That was my method. Probably this is something they would’ve valued highly at Auschwitz. The problem, I think, is that I was born too late for the era that would’ve best suited me. There’s nothing I can do about that. Thinking about going back to Auschwitz and two-seater torpedo bombers doesn’t amount to anything at all. Nobody was wearing mini-skirts yet, and nobody was listening to Jan and Dean. Come to think of it, when was the last time I saw a girl wearing a suspender girdle?
The hour hand hit 3, and as always, the office girl brought hot Japanese tea and three cookies around to my desk. My sweater was also finished.
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure, go ahead,” I said as I ate a cookie.
“It’s about the trip in November,” she said, “how about Hokkaido?”
In November, the three of us always went on a company trip.
“Doesn’t sound bad,” I said.
“If it’s okay. There won’t be any bears, right?”
“Hmm...” I said, “I think they’re already hibernating.”
She nodded in relief. “By the way, do you want to go to dinner with me? There’s a good shrimp place near here.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
The restaurant was just five minutes from the office by taxi, right in the middle of a residential area. We sat down and a waiter clad in black strode soundlessly toward us across a synthetic carpet, bringing us two menus filled with everything up to and including kickboards used for swimming. We ordered two beers before our meal.
“The shrimp here are delicious. They’re boiled alive.”
I moaned while drinking my beer.
The girl twisted her star-shaped pendant around between her slim fingers for awhile.
“If there’s something you wanna say, you should say it before we eat,” I said. I regretted it as soon as I said it. That’s how it always is.
She smiled just a little.
Just about a quarter of a centimeter, and it was about to go back to before, but it seemed maybe she could hear the shrimp’s whiskers moving around.
“Do you like the work you’re doing now?” she asked.
“Hmm…I don’t really know. I’ve never really thought about it like that, even once. However, I’m not dissatisfied with it.”
“I’m not unhappy with it, either,” she said while taking a sip of her beer. “The pay is good, both of you guys treat me well, I can take off the days I want…”
I remained silent. It really had been a long time since I’d earnestly listened to another person.
“But I’m still just twenty years old,” she continued, “I don’t want to give it up, you know, this lifestyle.”
Our conversation was interrupted while the food was being laid out on the table.
“But you’re still young,” I said. “Next you’ll find a boyfriend, then get married. Your life’s going to change quickly, you know.”
“I won’t change,” she said in a subdued voice, skillfully using her knife and fork to remove the shells from the shrimp. “There’s nobody who’s interested in me. Making traps for those no-good cockroaches and making sweaters, that’s what I’ll do for the rest of my life.”
I sighed. I felt as if I’d suddenly aged a few years.
“You’re cute, you’re charismatic, your legs are long, and you’ve got a good face. You’ve got a knack for de-tailing shrimp. You’re gonna be fine.”
She remained silent while she ate her shrimp. I also ate shrimp. While I ate shrimp, I thought about the switchboard at the bottom of the reservoir.
“What were you doing when you were twenty?”
“I was in love with a girl.”
“What happened to you two?”
“We broke up.”
“Were you happy?”
“If you look at them from a distance,” I said while gulping down shrimp, “ordinary things look nice.”
When we finished our meal, the shop started to quiet down, just the sounds of knives and forks and chairs scraping. I ordered a coffee, and she ordered a coffee with a lemon soufflé.
“What about now? Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked.
I thought about it for a minute and decided not to mention the twins. “No,” I said.
“Aren’t you lonely?”
“I’m used to it. It’s good practice.”
“Practice for what?”
I lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke about five centimeters over her head. “I was born under a strange star. That is to say, any time I’ve ever thought I wanted anything, I somehow always ended up with it. However, whenever I got it, something else I had was always crushed. Do you know what I mean?”
“Kind of.”
“Nobody believes me, but it’s the truth. I realized it just three years ago. So my thought was this: I should stop wanting things.”
She shook her head. “So, you plan to live the rest of your life like that?”
“It’s terrible, I know. It’s that I don’t want to trouble anyone as long as I live.”
“If you really believe that,” she said, “you should live in a shoebox.”
I thought it was a great idea.
We followed each other to the station. Thanks to my now-fixed sweater, the night felt good.
“Okay, I’ll figure something out,” she said.
“I know I wasn’t so helpful. Sorry.”
“Just talking to you made me feel better.”
We stood on the same platform, waiting for trains going in opposite directions.
“You’re really not lonely?” she asked one more time. While I tried to think of a good answer for that, her train came.
13
One day, something will capture our hearts. It could be anything, some trivial thing. A rosebud, a hat we lost, a sweater we loved as a child, an old Gene Pitney record…now, with nowhere, these meager things are counted. For just two or three days, that thing wanders around our souls, then goes back down below. …darkness. In our souls, many wells are dug. And we float over the top of the wells.
That autumn, on a Sunday evening, the thing that captured my heart really and truly was pinball. The twins and I were at the golf course, on the green of the eighth hole, gazing at the sunset. The eighth hole was a par 5 long shot, no obstacles and no hills. It was like an elementary school hallway; just a straight fairway continuing on. At the seventh hole, a student from the neighborhood was practicing her flute. They were two soul-torturing octaves, scale practice, with the sun setting behind the hills, and her body about to be just half bathed in the dim light. Why it was that particular moment when the pinball machine took over my soul, I don’t know.
After that, in any spare second I had, thoughts of pinball rapidly filled my head. When I closed my eyes, I could hear the sound of the ball hitting the bumper, and the sound of the score racking up rang in my ears.
In 1970, while we were still drinking beer at J’s Bar, being a pinball player wasn’t my heart’s desire. The kind of pinball machine at J’s bar was rare in those days: it was a three-flipper model called Spaceship.
The field was divided into a top and a bottom section, the top with one flipper, and the bottom with two. It was a model from before the widespread onset of solid-state technology, from back in the good old days, days of peace. During the time when the Rat was crazy about pinball, to commemorate his best score of 92,500, there was a picture taken of the Rat and the pinball machine. The Rat was leaning on one side of the machine, smiling, with his score of 92,500 still displayed on the machine, and him, laughing and smiling. That was the most heart-warming picture I took with my Kodak Pocket Camera. The Rat looked just like an ace fighter pilot from World War II, and the pinball machine looked like an old fighter plane. One of the mechanics spins the propeller with his hand, and after the plane is in the air, the pilot closes the pattern. That kind of a fighter plane. That score of 92,500 bound him and the pinball machine together, an atmosphere of friendship engendered between them.
Once a week, a money collector-slash-pinball specialist would come around to J’s Bar. A thin, eccentric guy, he said barely a word to anyone. He would come into the shop, ignoring J, and unlock the cover underneath the pinball machine, and the change would rattle, flowing into his canvas bag. That being finished, he would dig around inside the machine, inspecting it, checking the springs in the flippers twice, three times, and looking uninterested, he would shoot the ball.
He’d shoot the ball at the bumper, inspect the condition of the magnets, send the ball through all the lanes, and knock down all the targets. The drop targets, the kick-out hole, the roto-targets…finally he would get the bonus light, and with a relieved look, send the ball to the out lane, and end his game. Then he would look over at J and nod, meaning there were no problems with the condition of the machine. The whole operation was finished in less time than it took for half my cigarette to burn out.
Forgetting to ash my cigarette, and the Rat forgetting to drink his beer, we were always dumbfounded, gazing at his splendid technique.
“It’s like a dream,” the Rat said. “If I only had his skill, I could get 150,000 easy. No, wait, maybe 200,000.”
“Well, he is a professional.” I said to comfort the Rat. But his ‘ace-pilot’ pride didn’t return.
“Compared to him, I play like a girl using her pinkies,” the Rat said before dropping into silence. He thought endlessly about his aimless dream to make the scoreboard cross the six-digit barrier.
“His method,” I continued, “It was probably really fun in the beginning, but doing nothing but playing pinball from morning ‘til night would get tedious for anybody.”
“No,” the Rat said, shaking his head, “not for me.”
14
For the first time in a long time, J’s Bar was full of customers. Mostly new faces, but customers are customers, so it didn’t seem J would get too bent out of shape about it. The sound of the ice pick crushing ice, then the ice hitting the glass, the sound of laughing, the Jackson Five on the jukebox, white smoke floating to the ceiling like in a comic book, the night made one feel like the peak of summer had come again.
And yet, somehow it seemed like something was a little off about the Rat. He sat, isolated, at the edge of the bar, his book left open as he re-read the same page over and over until he gave it up and closed it. If it were possible, he wanted to drink the last sip of his beer, go back to his room, and fall asleep. If he could only sleep.
For an entire week, the Rat had been completely abandoned by the moon. With no sleep, and beer, and tobacco, even the weather started to crumble around him. The rainwater flowed down the bare mountainside and into the river, and then the ocean was lightly tinted with brown and gray.
It was an unpleasant sight. He felt like his head was full of crumpled up old newspaper. His sleep was always shallow and short. Like sleeping in a dentist’s waiting room with the heat up too high. Every time someone would open a door, he’d wake up. He stared at his watch.
In the middle of the week, while the Rat was drinking whiskey by himself, he decided he wanted to kill all of his thoughts for a while. In the separate cracks in his consciousness, ice, thick enough it seemed polar bears could walk on it, ice was laid out, and with this, he thought he could overcome the latter half of the week, with this perspective, he slept. However, when his eyes opened, everything was the same as ever. And his head ached a little.
The Rat gazed absent-mindedly at the six empty beer bottles lined up in front of his eyes. In the space between the bottles, he could see J’s shape.
It might be a good time to call it a night, the Rat thinks. He drank his first beer there when he was 18. Thousands of bottles of beer, thousands of servings of French fries, thousands of records on the jukebox. It passed over him like a wave hitting a barge. Haven’t I drunk enough beer? Of course, turning 30, turning 40, at any age I can still drink beer. But, he thought, but the beer I drink here is different.
…25 years old, not a bad time to give it up. If I were a sensible person, this would be a good age to graduate from college and get a job as a loan officer at a bank.
The Rat added one more bottle to the row, then drank half of the almost-overflowing glass in just one gulp. As a reflex, he wiped his mouth with the back of his and. He then wiped his hand on the ass of his cotton pants.
Think! he told himself, don’t run away and think, 25 years old…it’s an age when it’s okay to think a little. Twenty year-old boys rely on their parents, is that all you’re good for? Nothing, you’ve got nothing. Not even worth as much as an ant colony stuffed into a pickle jar. …get it together, too many stupid metaphors. Good for absolutely nothing. Think, somewhere along the way, you’ve screwed up. Remember! …you should know this.
He gave it up and drank down the rest of his beer. Then he raised his hand and ordered another bottle. “You’re drinking too much today,” J said. Still, he eventually set another beer in front of the Rat.
His head hurt just a little. His body felt like it was being hit by waves, shaking it up and down many times. One could sense the languidness in his eyes. Throw up. said a voice in his head. Once you throw it all up, you’ll be able to think. Alright, stand up, go to the toilet. …it’s no good. I can’t even walk to first base… Despite that, the Rat puffed up his chest and walked to the bathroom, opened the door, chased away a young girl facing the mirror putting on eyeliner, then leaned over the toilet.
How long has it been since I last threw up? I forget how to even do it. Do I take off my pants? …what a stupid joke. Shut up and vomit. Get the stomach acid out, too.
After throwing up even his stomach acid, he sat on the toilet and smoked a cigarette. Then he washed his hands and face with soap, and with his wet hands, he fixed his beard in the mirror. You look a little gloomy, but your nose and jaw don’t look too bad. A public middle school teacher might even think you’re cute.
Leaving the bathroom, he walked over to the seat of the girl with only half her eyeliner put on and apologized politely. Then he went back to the counter and drank half a glass of beer, then drank down the water J gave him in one gulp. He shook his head twice, three times, and when as he lit his cigarette, his head started to function normally again.
There, all better, he practiced saying out loud. The night is long, think deeply.
15
The winter of 1970 was when I really entered the magical world of pinball. For that entire half-year, I felt like I was inside a dark hole. In the middle of a grassy field, I dug a hole big enough to fit me, buried myself completely inside, and then my ears were completely protected from all noise. I had no interest in anything else. When it would get to be evening, I’d wake up, put on my coat, and pass time in the corner of the game center.
I’d finally found it, that machine, the three-flippered Spaceship, exactly the same model as the one in J’s Bar. I put a coin in, hit the ‘start’ button, then the machine, as if gesturing to me, would play its opening theme, raise its ten targets, extinguish its bonus light, reset the score to all zeroes, and shoot out the first ball. After shoving a limitless number of coins into the machine, exactly one month of rain-soaked, early-winter evenings later, my score, as if the last sandbag were tossed off a balloon, my score finally crossed the six-digit mark.
My trembling flipper-finger still trembling as if it were about to fall off, I leaned back onto the wall, and while drinking an ice-cold beer, and stared at the six digits of my 105220 score displayed on the scoreboard for a long time.
That was how my brief honeymoon with the pinball machine began. Almost not showing my face at all in college, the better half of my salary from my part time job was poured into pinball. Paths, traps, stopping the ball, shooting…I mastered the ordinary techniques. Behind me, people, as if sightseeing, would appear behind me. One time, a high school girl wearing read lipstick pressed her soft breasts against my arm.
When I finally crossed the 150,000 mark, real winter had come. Completely frozen, and with few people in the game center, I’d come in wrapped in a duffle coat, my muffler pulled up to my ears, and without taking any of it off, I embraced the pinball machine.
Sometimes, I’d catch a glance at the mirror in the bathroom and see my face, thin and bony, my skin dry and cracked. After finishing three games, I’d lean on the wall to take a breather, shaking and chattering while drinking a beer. The last sip of beer was always bad, tasting like lead. Then, after dropping my cigarette butts at my feet, I’d munch on the hot dog that was shoved into my pocket.
She was lovely. My three-flipper Spaceship…I was the only one who understood her, and she was the only one who understood me. When I hit the ‘start’ button, the sound of her good feelings would ring out, the six zeroes would pop onto the scoreboard, and then she would flash a smile at me. I’d pull out the plunger, not off by even a millimeter of where I wanted it to be, and that glittering silver ball would shoot down the lane and onto the field. While the ball was running around on her field, the release my spirit felt was like one feels when smoking some good-quality hashish.
Various thoughts, random and unconnected, would float into my head and then fizzle out. The figures of various people would appear above the glass panel and then recede. The two-layered glass panel was like a mirror that would project my dreams, and then I’d hit a bumper, or the bonus light would start flashing as well.
It’s not your fault, she said. Then I shook my head a few times. You’re not a bad guy, you gave it your best shot.
No, I said. The left flipper, a tap transfer, the ninth target. That’s not it. I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t make my finger move. But I thought about moving my finger, that much I was able to do.
The things a person can do are severely limited, she said.
You’re probably right, I said, but I won’t give up, I think it’ll always be that way. The return lane, the trap, the kick-out-ball, the rebound, trapping the ball, the sixth target…the bonus light. 121150, It’s over, it’s all over, she said.
Towards the end of the winter, in February, she was gone. The game center was tidily demolished, and the next month it had become an all-night donut shop. A girl, the design on her uniform looking as if a curtain had given birth to it, would bring around dried-out donuts on plates bearing the same design, that kind of a place. In front, the bikes of high-schoolers would be lined up, they were inside with the night drivers, the now-disenfranchised hippies, the bartender girls, all of them wearing the same bored-looking faces, drinking their coffee. I ordered surprisingly bad coffee and cinnamon donuts, asking the waitress, ‘Do you know anything about what happened to the game center?’
She gazed at me suspiciously. She gave me a look as if she were gazing at donuts that had fallen on the floor.
“Game center?”
“The one that was here right before this place.”
“No idea,” she said, sleepily shaking her head. Of course, nobody can be expected to remember something from a month ago. That’s the kind of town it was.
Cradling my darkened spirit, I walked around the town. As for the three-flipper Spaceship, nobody knew its whereabouts.
So I gave up pinball. When the right time comes, everybody quits pinball. That’s all there is to it.
16
The rain, which had continued to fall for many days, suddenly lifted on Friday evening. Looking at the town from one’s window, it seemed it was almost fed up with soaking up the rain, the entirety of its body being swelled up from it. When the setting sun started to break through the clouds, a strange color resulted, and the light shining through the window into the middle of the room was dyed this same color.
The Rat put a windbreaker on over his t-shirt and went out into the town. The asphalt streets, still dark with water puddles filled to the brim, stretched out into infinity. The whole town smelled like the evening after the rain. The palm trees lining the river were all still soaking wet, water dribbling down from the tips of their green needles. Rust-colored water flowed into the river, sliding down the concrete river bottom leading to the ocean.
The evening soon to end, the damp darkness began to veil the lights. In the space of a moment, that dampness changed into fog.
With his elbow sticking out of the car window, he slowly made his way around town. The fog was flowing downhill, heading west from the house-laden hills. Eventually, it made its way down to the river running along the beachfront. He then parked his car next to the breakwater, putting his seat back and smoking a cigarette. The sand dunes and blocks that comprised the river dike and the row of trees planted as a sand guard, everything was moistened with darkness. From the blinds in the girl’s room, warm-looking yellow light was spilling out. He gazed at his watch. 7:15 p.m. People were finishing dinner, and it was time for them to melt into the warmth of their respective rooms.
The Rat put both his arms behind his head, closed his eyes, and tried to remember what the girl’s room looked like. He’d only been in it twice, so his memories were uncertain. When you open the door, the dining room/kitchen is only around six tatami mats in size…that orange tablecloth, the indoor flowerpot, four chairs, orange juice, the newspaper on the table, the stainless steel teapot…
all of it precisely arranged, and that was all there was. …beyond that, the division that divided the inside room into two rooms was removed, making it into one room. A pane of glass set up as a long and narrow desk, and on it…three ceramic beer mugs. Packed into them, various kinds of pencils and rulers and drafting pens. Inside a tray, there are erasers and paperweights, ink remover, old receipts, masking tape, clips of many colors…then a pencil sharpener, and stamps.
Next to the desk, there’s a well-used drafting table, with a long-armed lamp. The color of the lamp’s shade is…green. Then, at the end of the wall, a bed. A Northern European-style bed made of plain wood. With two people on it, it makes a creaking sound like paddleboats at a park.
As the time passed, the fog’s thickness was increasing. The milky white darkness flowed slowly over the beach. Sometimes, the yellow fog lights of cars on the road would appear in front of the Rat, and still driving slowly, they would pass by him. From the window, small droplets of water filled his car, making everything wet. The seat, the inside of the windshield, his windbreaker, the cigarettes in his pocket, everything. The freighters anchored off the coast began letting loose the sharp shrieks of their foghorns, sounding like a group of calves. The foghorns were of various keys, emitting short blasts and long blasts which passed through the darkness, flying towards the mountains.
As for the left wall, the Rat resumed his train of thought, a bookshelf and a small music center, and records. Then a western-style wardrobe. Two reproductions of Ben Shahn pictures. The books in the bookshelf are nothing special.
Most of them are technical books about architecture. There are also books about travel, guidebooks, travel journals, atlases, many bestselling novels, a Mozart biography, music scores, and how many dictionaries...? Inside of the French dictionary, there’s a folded piece of paper, some public acknowledgement printed on it. The records are mostly Bach and Haydn and Mozart. Aside from those, there are also some records from her childhood…Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, The Platters.
That was as far as the Rat could get. Something was missing. Something important. Without it, the entire room’s sense of reality was lost, and he was left floating in space. What is it? Okay, wait a second…remember. The ceiling light and…the carpet. What kind of light? And what color carpet? …no matter what he did, he couldn’t remember.
The Rat could opened his car door, his impulse was to leave the line of trees planted to keep the sand in place, run up to her door, knock, and check the light and the carpet. Stupid. The Rat once again leaned back in his seat, gazing at the ocean for the time being. Aside from the white fog on the dark sea, he could see nothing else. Then, in the midst of it, the lighthouse once again shined its orange light, like the throbbing of bowels.
While her room was still without a ceiling and a floor, he was absent-mindedly floating in darkness. Then, little by little, the image began to grow thinner from the edges, and finally, it was all gone.
The Rat looked up at the roof of his car, his eyes slowly closing. As if a switch had been flipped, all the lights inside his head went out, and his soul was enclosed in a new darkness.
17
The three-flipper Spaceship…she kept calling to me from somewhere. For many, many days, this continued.
I took care of my mountain of piled-up work with great speed. I’d already skipped lunch, and I didn’t play with the Abyssinian cats. I didn’t say a word to anyone. A few times, the office girl came to check on me, then went away, shaking her head as if amazed. Finishing my day’s work by two, I tossed Harahashi onto the girl’s desk and flew out of the office. Then I went around to the game centers in Tokyo, searching for my three-flipper Spaceship. But it was useless. Not a single person had ever even seen or heard of it.
“How about a four-flipper Journey to the Center of the Earth? Just got this machine in…” said the manager of one game center.
“I’m sorry, but that’s just not what I’m looking for.”
He seemed a little disappointed.
“Well, we’ve got a three-flipper Southpaw. With a cycle-hit, you get an extra ball.”
“I’m really sorry, but I’m only interested in Spaceship.”
Then he politely gave me the name and telephone number of his acquaintance, a pinball enthusiast.
“This guy will probably know something about the machine you’re looking for. He’s got really detailed catalogs of all these machines. He’s a little loopy, though.”
“Thank you,” I said, thanking him.
“Nah, no problem. I hope you find it.”
I went into a quiet coffee shop and rang up the number. After just five rings, a man answered. He had a quiet voice. In the background, I could hear the NHK news and a baby.
“I wanted to ask you a question about a particular pinball machine,” I then told him my name, and waited.
For a short while, it was entirely silent on his end.
“What kind of machine?” He asked. The sound of the television had lessened.
“It’s a three-flipper machine called Spaceship.”
He grunted as if thinking it over.
“The backglass has a picture with planets and a spaceship…”
“I know it well,” he said, cutting me off. Then he cleared his throat. He spoke as if he were a lecturer out of grad school. “It’s a 1968 model, made by Gilbert and Sons, based out of Chicago. It was known as a machine of fate.”
“Fate?”
“If it’s okay,” he said, “shall we meet and discuss this?”
We decided to meet the next evening.
We exchanged business cards, then ordered coffee from the waitress. To my great surprise, he really was a college lecturer. He looked as if he’d just come out of his thirties, and his hair was just starting to thin, but his body was tan and stout.
“I teach Spanish at a university,” he said, “it’s like sprinkling water on a desert.”
I nodded in admiration.
“Does your translation office deal with Spanish?”
“I do English, and another guy does French. With that, we’ve got our hands full.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, with his arms folded. Though he didn’t really seem like he thought it was all that bad. He fiddled with his tie for a moment.
“Have you ever been to Spain?” he asked.
“Unfortunately, I haven’t.”
The coffee came, our conversation about Spain ended there, and we drank our coffee in silence.
“The company, Gilbert and Sons, had a late start, so to speak, as a pinball machine manufacturer,” he suddenly began his story. “From World War II until the Korean War, their principal product was machinery for bomber planes, but the end of the Korean War gave them a chance to enter into a new field. Pinball machines, bingo machines, slot machines, jukeboxes, popcorn machines…so-called ‘peacetime industries.’ Their first pinball machine was completed in 1952. It wasn’t too bad. To tell you the truth, it was a little bulky, and it had a low price. But it wasn’t very interesting. To quote the critic from Billboard magazine, that pinball machine was ‘like a government-issued brassiere for female Soviet soldiers.’
“Most importantly, it was a successful business for them. Starting with Mexico, they exported pinball machines to various Central and South American countries. Those countries didn’t have many skilled technicians. Because of that, they were happy to get sturdy machines that didn’t break down, rather than complicated ones.”
We were silent while he drank his water. It really seemed as if he was disappointed at not having a projection screen and a pointer.
“Just so you know, the situation was this: in America, rather, in the world, the pinball business was controlled by an oligopoly of just four manufacturers. Gottlieb, Bally, Chicago Coin, Williams…the so-called ‘Big Four.’ Then the Gilberts barged onto the scene. There was violent competition for an entire five years. Then in 1957, the Gilberts got out of the pinball business.”
“They got out?”
He nodded while drinking the remainder of his seemingly less-than-delicious coffee, then wiped his mouth repeatedly with his handkerchief.
“Yes, you see, they were defeated. The company was its own undoing. With those Central and South American exports. They got out while before the wound got too big. …after all, the world of pinball is terribly complicated. You need many trained, skilled technicians, and you need leaders to manage them. You need a network covering the entire country.
“You need an agent to stock an endless supply of parts, and if a pinball machine somewhere breaks down, you need a number of repairmen who can dash there in less than five hours. Unfortunately, being a newcomer, the Gilberts lacked just that. So they swallowed their tears and got out, then, for about seven years, they made vending machines and windshield wipers for Chryslers. But they weren’t through with pinball.
He paused his story there. He pulled a cigarette out of his jacket pocket, tapped the end on the table a few times, then lit it with a lighter.
“No, they hadn’t given up on pinball. You see, they had their pride. In their secret factory, their research was advancing. They secretly assembled a project team of retired employees they’d lured away from the Big Four. They provided their research teams with vast sums of money, and ordered them to build a machine that couldn’t lose to the Big Four, within five years, even. This was 1959. Even the business side of their company had become more effective over the next five years. In selling their other products, they’d built up a complete, perfect network stretching from Vancouver to Waikiki. With this, their preparations were complete.
“The first machine of their re-entry into the field was completed as-planned in 1964. The name of that machine was Big Wave.”
He pulled a black scrapbook from his leather case, opened it to the correct page, and handed it to me. It was a picture of Big Wave that looked as if it had been taken out of a magazine, complete with a field map, also the board design, it was all pasted in there, down to the instruction card.
“This was truly a unique machine. It was full of various new features that hadn’t been seen before. For example, you could build up sequence patterns. With this Big Wave, you could choose your own techniques to suit your style. This machine was in high demand.
“Of course, many of the Gilberts’ aforementioned ideas have become typical now, but at that time they were terribly fresh. Again, this machine was made with an almost unusual level of quality. First of all, it was the sturdiest pinball machine around. A Big Four machine’s service life was roughly three years, but the Gilberts’ machines could be used for five. Secondly, the random elements of the machine were few, so the player’s technique was the focus. …after that the Gilberts released a number of similarly high-performance machines along the same lines as the first. Oriental Express, Sky Pilot, Trans-America…all of them rated very highly by pinball enthusiasts. Spaceship ended up being their last model.
“Spaceship was a complete departure from the style of the other four machines I listed before. The other machines focused on a variety of novel features, whereas Spaceship was a terribly orthodox, simple pinball machine. It didn’t use any mechanisms not already present in the Big Four’s machines.
“With just that difference, it was said that that machine was actually put out as a kind of battle cry. You see, they had a lot of confidence in it.”
He spoke deliberately, as if he were chewing the words up so I could understand them. I nodded many times while drinking my coffee, and when my coffee was gone, I drank water, and when my water was gone, I smoked cigarettes.
“Spaceship was a mysterious machine. At first glance, it didn’t seem like there was much to it. But when you tried playing it, there was something different about it. It had the same flippers, the same kind of targets, but it had something about it that was different from other machines. That something captured peoples’ minds like heroin. I don’t know why that is. …I hold Spaceship in such high esteem for just two reasons. The first reason for its greatness was that it could be perfectly understood by anyone. When people finally realized this, it was already too late; they were hooked. The second reason is because the company went bankrupt. They operated far too honestly. They were absorbed by a certain conglomerate. Their head office said a pinball division was unnecessary. That was it. In all, just 1500 Spaceship machines were produced, but because of that, it’s become a kind of mystical machine. In America, the asking price for a pinball maniac’s Spaceship is 2000 dollars, but hardly anybody ever sells one.”
“Why is that?”
“Because nobody can part with it. Nobody wants to give one up. It’s a strange machine.”
When he finished his story, he gave a customary glance at his watch, then smoked a cigarette. I ordered my second coffee.
“How many machines were imported into Japan?”
“I looked into that. There were three.”
“That’s not very many.”
He nodded. “It’s because the routes that the Gilberts dealt with didn’t cover Japan. In ’69, one of the import agents ordered it as a test. That test was those three machines. When he wanted to order more, Gilbert and Sons was already gone from existence.”
“Those three machines, do you know where they are?”
He put sugar in his coffee and stirred it around many times, then scratched his earlobe with a dry, scratching sound.
“One of the machines made its way to a small game center in Shinjuku. In the winter of the year before last, the game center was demolished. I don’t know what happened to the machine.”
“That much I know.”
“Another machine made its way to a game center in Shibuya. There was a fire there last spring. The loss was entirely covered by fire insurance, so nobody lost anything. One Spaceship machine was lost from this world. …a sadness. Thus, I can only describe it as a machine of destiny.”
“Like the Maltese Falcon,” I said.
He nodded. “Incidentally, I don’t know where the last machine ended up.”
I gave him the address and phone number of J’s Bar. “But it’s not there anymore. He got rid of it last summer.”
He preciously wrote this information down in his notebook.
“I’m interested in the machine that was in Shinjuku,” I said. “Do you know where it is?”
“There are a few possibilities. The most likely one is that it was scrapped. People go through machines pretty quickly. Machines usually lose their value after three years, and the cost of repairs quickly becomes more than the potential gains of buying a new machine. And, of course, there’s also the problem of what’s in style. If it’s not, it’ll end up scrapped. …the second possibility is that someone bought it second-hand. If it’s old, but still playable, it might end up in some snack bar. It’ll live out the rest of its life with drunks and amateurs. The third possibility, and this only in extremely rare cases, is that a pinball enthusiast bought it. However, there’s an 80 percent chance it was scrapped.”
I held the unlit cigarette between my fingers, and my spirit sank into darkness.
“I’d try, but I’m sorry to say, there’s almost no contact between the pinball enthusiasts of the world. There’s no list of names, no club bulletins. …but let’s give it a try. I myself have some interest in this Spaceship.”
“I’m very grateful.”
He sat with his back sunk deeply into the chair, smoking his cigarette.
“By the way, what’s your best Spaceship score?”
“165, 000,” I said.
“That’s pretty good,” he said, his expression unchanged. “Really good,” and then he scratched his ear again.
18
The entire week after that passed with a strange, calm serenity. The many sounds of pinball didn’t echo in my ears, but the buzzing of bees descending to the sunny, winter spots had vanished. Fall could be seen to deepen each day, and the dry leaves were piling up on the ground underneath the trees surrounding the golf course. I could see from my apartment window that here and there, from the gently sloping hills on the outskirts of the golf course, the thin smoke from piles of burning leaves ascending, as if by magic, straight into the sky like ropes.
The twins, little by little, started to grow quiet, and I became fond of them. We went for walks, drank coffee, listened to records, and fell asleep embracing each other under the blankets. On Sunday, we spent an entire hour walking to a botanical garden, and in a grove of oak trees we ate sandwiches of shiitake mushrooms and spinach. Above the oak trees, wild birds with black tail feathers kept on singing, their voices seeming transparent.
The air had started to become a little colder, so I bought two new sweatshirts for the twins, and gave them some of my old sweaters. Thanks to this, they were no longer 208 and 209, they were an olive-green, round-necked sweater and a beige cardigan, but they didn’t complain. I also bought them new socks and new sneakers. I started to feel just like Daddy-Long-Legs.
The October rain was marvelous. It was as thin as needles, and as soft as cotton, but it started to interfere with the golf course the way it poured onto the grounds. It didn’t even form puddles, it just gradually got absorbed into the earth. The smell of wet leaves hung in the forest air after the rain, and many sinews of the evening light shone in, drawing a spotted pattern on the ground. Many birds whizzed by over the path cutting through the woods, as if in a hurry.
In the office, my days were pretty much the same. I’d get past the most difficult part of my work, then listen to old jazz, musicians like Bix Biederbecke, Woody Herman, Bunny Berigan, smoking while continuing my work, and every hour I’d drink whiskey and eat cookies.
The girl was busily checking flight schedules, making airplane and hotel reservations, and as a consolation prize, she changed the metal buttons on my blazer. She changed her hairdo, switched to a faint pink lipstick, and wore a thin sweater that drew attention swelling of her chest. I dissolved into the fall atmosphere.
It seemed everything would stay the way it was forever, it was a glorious week.
19
Breaking the news to J that he was going to leave town was difficult. He didn’t know why, but it was incredibly difficult. He went to the bar every day for three days, and each day, he just couldn’t say it. When he tried to say it, his throat would get parched, then he would drink beer. Then, while drinking, he was controlled by his an almost unbearable sense of helplessness. He felt like no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get anywhere.
When the clock hand pointed to 12 o’clock, the Rat gave up, he breathed a few sighs of relief, rose up, said good night to J the same as always, and left the bar. The evening air was already completely chilled. He went back to his apartment, sat on the bed, and absent-mindedly stared at the television. He opened a can of beer, then lit a cigarette. An old Western, a commercial, a weather report, a commercial, then static…the Rat turned off the television, then took a shower. Then he opened another can of beer, and lit another cigarette.
He didn’t know if leaving town and going somewhere else would be good or not. He felt like he had nowhere to go.
For the first time in his life, fears were creeping up from the bottom of his soul. They were like bugs from the depths of the earth that emitted darkness. They had no eyes, and no pity. They wanted to drag the Rat down into the depths with them. He could feel their slime throughout his entire body. He opened a can of beer.
In just those three days, the Rat’s apartment filled up with empty beer cans and cigarette butts. He desperately wanted to see her. To feel the warmth of her skin on his entire body, to stay inside of her forever. But you can’t go back there. You, yourself burned that bridge, didn’t you? he thought. You painted the walls yourself, you closed yourself off…
The Rat stared at the lighthouse. The sky was illuminated, the ocean had become gray. Then, like pulling a tablecloth off a table, the light erased the darkness, and the Rat got into bed, sleeping together with his pain, the pain of having nowhere to go.
At one time, the Rat felt a firm, unshakeable determination to leave the town. For a long time, the considered all the angles, and he came to a conclusion. He felt he had no other options. He struck a match, and he burned the bridge. Then, everything left in his soul was extinguished. I wonder if some of my shadows will still lurk here. At any rate, nobody will care. The town will keep changing, and before long, even those shadows will probably vanish… He felt like it would be much better to move forward.
And then, J.
He didn’t know why J’s existence should trouble him so much. ‘I’m leaving town, see you later,’ and that’d be it, he thought. How could he know they’d become friends? He’d met, by chance, some foreigner he didn’t know, and they’d passed each other by, that’s all. And yet, the Rat’s soul was in pain. Looking up from his bed, he tried shaking his clenched fist a few times at the air.
It was on Monday, just after midnight, when the Rat raised the closed shutter of J’s bar.
J, as always, was sitting at a table with just half the lights off, smoking a cigarette, doing nothing in particular. When he saw the Rat enter, he gave a little smile, and nodded. Amidst the thin darkness, J seemed like he had aged. A dark beard covered his chin and jaw like a shadow, his eyes were sunken in, and his thin lips were dry and cracked. The veins in his neck were bulging, and his fingertips were stained yellow with nicotine.
“You tired?” the Rat asked.
“A little,” J said. Then he was quiet for a while. “Just one of those days. Everybody has them.”
The Rat nodded, pulled a chair from the table, and sat down across from J.
“Like the song says, on rainy days and Mondays, everybody feels down.”
“Exactly,” J said as he gazed at the cigarette between his fingers.
“You should go home and get some sleep.”
“Nah, it’s okay,” J said, shaking his head. He shook his head slowly, as if he were chasing away a bug. “Anyway, I feel like even if I go home, I won’t be able to sleep well.”
The Rat, as a reflex, glanced at his watch. It was 12:20. In the darkness of the basement, there wasn’t a single sound, and it seemed like time was dying.
In J’s Bar, with the shutter down, there wasn’t even a fragment of the sparkle he had come to hope for. It was all fading, as if it were completely exhausted.
“Will you get me a soda?” J asked. “You can drink a beer if you want.”
The Rat got up and grabbed a beer and a soda from the refrigerator, and brought them back to the table with glasses.
“How about music?” J asked.
“Nah, let’s have some quiet today,” said the Rat.
“It’s like some kinda funeral.”
The Rat laughed. The two of them drank their soda and beer without a word. The Rat’s watch, which he’d left on the table, started to produce unnaturally large sounds. 12:35, even that felt like a terribly long time had passed. J hardly moved a muscle. The Rat stared at J’s cigarette in the glass ashtray, watching it as it burned down until it was nothing but ash.
“Why are you so tired?” the Rat asked.
“I wonder…” J said, shifting the position of his legs, “probably there’s no real reason to be this tired.”
The Rat drank half the beer in his glass, sighed, then set it back down onto the table.
“Hey, J, people are getting worse and worse, don’t you think?”
“Seems that way.”
“They’re getting worse in many different ways,” the Rat said, unconsciously bringing the back of his hand to his lips. “However, as individuals, it seems that our number of options is severely limited. At most…maybe we’ve got two or three.”
“You’re probably right.”
The foam in his beer was gone, and what was left was like a puddle, stagnating at the bottom of the glass. The Rat pulled a crumpled box of cigarettes from his pockets, putting the last one to his lips. “However, I’m starting to feel like it doesn’t matter. Whichever way I end up going wrong, it’s all the same, yeah?”
Still focusing on the cola in his glass, J quietly listened to the Rat.
“Even so, people continue to change. What that change means, I’ve never had any idea,” the Rat bit his lip, staring at the table and thinking it over, “and here’s what I’ve come to think: whatever progress, whatever change occurs, eventually the decay will be too much for the process to continue. Don’t you think?”
“You’re probably right.”
“So, because of that, I’ve never had any love or affection from other people, gleeful and oblivious…even in this town.”
J was silent. The Rat was silent as well. He took a match from the tabletop, waiting until the flame burned down to the stick to light his cigarette.
“The problem,” J said, “is that you’re trying to change. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, it’s true.”
Many terribly silent seconds passed. Maybe ten whole seconds. J opened his mouth. “People—people are made to be terribly awkward. Even more than you think.”
The Rat poured what was left from his bottle into his glass, then drank it down in one gulp. “I’m confused.”
J nodded a few times.
“I can’t make up my mind.”
“That’s what I thought,” saying this, J smiled as if he were tired from talking.
The Rat stood up slowly, putting his cigarette pack and his lighter into his pocket. An hour hand already passed on his watch.
“Good night,” the Rat said.
“Good night,” J said, “hey, somebody told me this once: ‘walk slowly and drink lots of water.’”
The Rat faced J and smiled, opened the door, and went up the stairs. The streetlights lit up the deserted streets.
The Rat sat on a guard rail, looking up at the sky. So just how much water does one need to get by? he wondered.
20
The call from the Spanish lecturer came on a Wednesday, right at the start of my November vacation. It was just after my partner stepped out to go to the bank before his lunch break, when I was in the office’s dining/kitchen area eating spaghetti the office girl made for me. It was boiled for just two minutes, with thinly diced shiso substituted for basil, but it didn’t taste bad. We were in the midst of a debate about how to make spaghetti, and the phone rang. The girl answered the phone, said a few words, then, as if shrugging her shoulders, handed the receiver over to me.
“It’s about Spaceship,” he said, “I know where it is.”
“Where is it?”
“I can’t tell you over the phone.” We were both silent for a little while.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“It means it would be difficult to try to explain over the phone.”
“Because I’d have to see it to believe it?”
“No,” he mumbled, “even if we were right in front of it, I still wouldn’t be able to explain, is what I mean.”
There was nothing I could say to that, so I waited for him to continue.
“I’m not exaggerating, and I’m not mocking you. In any case, I’d like to meet up.”
“Alright, I get it.”
“How about today at 5 p.m.?”
“Sounds good,” I said, “anyway, can I play it?”
“Of course,” he said. I thanked him and hung up. I went back to eating my spaghetti.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to play pinball. I don’t know where.”
“Pinball?”
“Yeah, you hit a ball with these flippers, and…”
“I know what it is. What I mean is, why pinball?”
“Hmm…how can I put it? In this world, there are many things even philosophy can’t articulate.”
She sat at the table, resting her cheeks on her hands, thinking it over.
“Are you good at pinball?”
“I was. It’s the only thing I was ever really good at.”
“I’m not good at it all.”
“You can live without it.”
While she was still thinking it over, I ate the rest of my spaghetti. I took some ginger ale out of the refrigerator and drank it.
“Sometimes, the things you lose don’t mean anything. The glory of things you should lose isn’t real glory, they say.”
“Who said that?”
“I forget who said it. But it’s something along those lines.”
“Is there anything in the world that isn’t lost?”
“I believe there is. You should believe it, too.”
“I’ll try.”
“I might be overly optimistic. But I don’t think that’s a foolish way to be.”
“I know.”
“I’m not bragging or anything, but I think it’s better than the alternative.”
She nodded. “So, because of that, you’re going out this evening to play pinball.”
“Yes.”
“Hold up both your arms.”
I faced the ceiling and stretched out my arms. She thoroughly inspected the armpits of my sweater.
“Alright, have fun.”
I met the Spanish lecturer at the same coffee shop we met at the first time, and we got into a taxi right away. Go straight on the Meiji Highway, he said. As soon as the cab started moving, he pulled out a cigarette and lit up, also offering one to me. He was wearing a gray suit, and a blue necktie with three oblique lines. His shirt was also blue, a somewhat thinner blue than the tie. I was wearing my sweater, blue jeans, and my dirty combat boots. I felt just like a poorly-performing student being called to the front of the class.
When we crossed over the Waseda Highway, the driver asked, ‘will it be much further?’ ‘To the Mejiro Highway,’ the lecturer replied. After a short time, we hit the Mejiro Highway.
“Is it very far?” I asked.
“It’s very far,” he said, pulling out his second cigarette. I looked out the window, following with my eyes the scenery of the storefronts as they passed by.
“I had a lot of trouble finding it,” he said.
“I started from the top of my list of enthusiasts, hoping to find something. Twenty people in all, not just in Tokyo, I tried everywhere in the country. But I found out nothing. Nobody knew any more than we did. Then I tried the used-machine dealers. They didn’t know anything, either. Nevertheless, I had them pore over their lists, because they’ve got a lot of machines.”
I nodded, watching him put a light to a cigarette.
“However, knowing the time period in question helped. Because it was around February, 1971, I mean. I had them check for me. Gilbert and Sons Spacheship, serial number 165029, and there it was. February third, 1971, it had been dealt with.”
“Dealt with?”
“Scrapped. Like something out of Goldfinger.
“To be crushed into a cube and sunk into the harbor.”
“But you’re saying…”
“Hey, listen. I gave up, said thanks to the dealer, and went home. However, something was pulling at me from the bottom of my soul. Like a sixth sense. No, that’s not what happened, it said. The next day, I went back to the dealer’s place one more time. Then I went to the scrap yard. Then, after looking around the place for an entire thirty minutes, I went into the office and whipped out my business card. The business card of a college lecturer tends to have a bit of an effect on people who don’t know much about things.”
He was speaking a little faster this time than when I’d met him the last time. I didn’t know why, but it made me feel somewhat uneasy.
“Then I said this: I’m working on a book. The subject is scrap dealers, so I’d like to learn about the scrap business.
He cooperated with me. But he didn’t know anything about a pinball machine from February, 1971. Naturally. It was two and a half years ago, and they don’t look things over one by one. Just smash it all together with a loud crash, and that’s the end of it. I asked one more thing: ‘If I wanted, for example, a washing machine, or motorcycle frame, or something else, and I were willing to pay the right amount for it, could you help me out?’ I asked. ‘That could be arranged,’ he said. ‘Might there be other things besides what I just asked about?’ I asked.”
The fall evening soon to end, darkness covered the road. The car was about to approach the outskirts.
“‘If you want to see detailed information, you’ve got to go to the second floor and ask the manager,’ he told me. Of course, I went to the second floor and asked. ‘Didn’t somebody come here around 1971 to get some pinball machines?’ ‘There was someone,’ he said. ‘What kind of person was it?’ I asked, and he gave me the phone number. It seemed like he had a deal where he called someone when pinball machines came in. He got a lot of them. So I asked, ‘about how many pinball machines are we talking?’ ‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘sometimes he sees some he likes and takes them, sometimes he looks them over and doesn’t take them. I don’t know,’ he said. ‘How about just a rough estimate?’ I asked. And he told me. ‘Fifty machines wouldn’t be too far off,’ he said.”
“Fifty machines?!” I shouted.
“And now,” he said, “that is who we’re going to pay a visit to.”
21
The vicinity had become completely dark. But it wasn’t monochromatic darkness, it was a darkness that seemed to consist of many colors painted on heavily.
I was looking at that darkness with my face stuck to the taxi window. The darkness had a strange flatness to it. It seemed as if some formless substance were sliced open with some sharp edge. There was a strange kind of depth perception that controlled the darkness. A giant nighttime bird spread its wings, boldly blocking the path in front of me.
As we approached his house, things got more sparse, and suddenly the rumbling of what sounded like tens of thousands of bugs arose, and it was just forests and fields. The clouds were hanging low like giant mountains, and as if everything above the earth were shrugging its shoulders, the darkness became silent. And then only bugs covered the earth.
The Spanish lecturer and I didn’t speak a word, only taking turns continuing to smoke cigarettes. The taxi driver was also smoking, staring at his headlights on the road ahead. Unconsciously, I found myself tapping on my knee with my fingertip. I occasionally felt a strong urge to throw the taxi door open and flee.
The switchboard, the sand trap, the reservoir, the golf course, the unraveled sweater, then pinball…how far should I go? I wondered. With no logic, the scattered pieces still not falling into place, I was coming to the end of it. I felt an overpowering desire to go back to my apartment. I’d jump right into the bath, drink a beer, and snuggle into bed with Kant and a cigarette.
Why do I continue to run into the middle of darkness? Fifty pinball machines, that’s completely ridiculous. It’s a dream. Still, it’s an immaterial dream.
Even then, my three-flipper Spaceship was calling out to me
The Spanish lecturer had the driver stop the car five hundred meters from the road, in the middle of a swath of empty land. The land was flat, and the soft grass climbing up to our ankles spread out like a river ford. I got out of the taxi, stretched my back, and took a deep breath. It smelled like a chicken farm. There wasn’t a light for as far as I could see. The lights of the road, the vicinity’s scenery, were bobbing up and down absent-mindedly. The buzzing of countless bugs surrounded us. I felt as if I were being dragged somewhere by my feet.
We were silent for a moment while our eyes adjusted to the darkness.
“Is this still Tokyo?” I asked.
“Of course. Does it look like it isn’t?”
“It looks like the edge of the world.”
The Spanish lecturer nodded as if this were entirely plausible, saying nothing. While breathing in the scent of grass and chicken droppings, we smoked. The cigarette smoke rising resembled the smoke from a signal fire.
“There’s wire mesh over there,” he said, extending his arm straight out as if he were doing some target practice, pointing into the darkness. Straining my eyes, I was able to discern something like wire netting.
“Walk along the wire netting for about 300 meters. You’ll come across a warehouse.”
“A warehouse?”
He nodded without looking at me. “Yeah. It’s a big warehouse, so you’ll know it when you see it. It used to be a refrigerated warehouse for a poultry farm. But it’s no longer in use. The poultry farm was torn down.”
“But it still smells like chickens.”
“The smell…? Ah, it’s seeped into the ground. Rainy days are the worst. It’s like you can almost still hear the feathers flapping.”
I could see almost nothing beyond the wire netting. The darkness was thoroughly frightening. Even the sound of the insects was oppressive.
“The warehouse’s door has been left open. The owner left it open for you. The machine you’re looking for is inside.”
“Have you been inside?”
“Just once…I was allowed inside,” his cigarette still in his mouth, he nodded. The orange fire shook in the darkness. “After you open the door, there’s a light switch on your left-hand side. Be careful on the stairs.”
“You’re not coming?”
“You have to go alone, it’s part of the deal.”
“The deal?”
The dropped his cigarette onto the ground and politely stomped it out. “Yes. Stay there as long as you like. Please turn the lights off when you leave.”
“Have you met the owner?”
“I’ve met him,” he replied, after a slight pause.
“What’s he like?”
He shrugged his shoulders, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and blew his nose. “There’s not really much to him. At least, nothing you can tell just from looking.”
“Why does he have fifty pinball machines?”
“Well, there are many kinds of people in the world. That’s all there is to it.”
I didn’t think that’s all there was to it. But I thanked the Spanish lecturer, we parted ways, and I walked along the wire mesh of the chicken farm. That’s not ‘all there is to it.’ Collecting fifty pinball machines, it’s not like collecting, say, fifty labels from wine bottles.
The warehouse looked like a crouching animal. Around it, the grass was entirely overgrown, and the perpendicularly rising walls didn’t have a single window. It was a gloomy building. Above the iron double doors, something resembling the name of a chicken farm was thickly painted over with white paint.
Just ten paces away from the building, I looked up at it. For I don’t know how long, no useful thoughts popped into my mind. I gave up and walked to the iron door, it was as cold as ice, and I pushed it open. The door opened without a sound, and an entirely different darkness was spread out before me.
22
In the middle of the darkness, I flipped the switch on the wall and, after a few seconds, the fluorescent overhead lights flickered on, that white light filling the whole interior of the warehouse. In all, there were probably one hundred lights. The interior of the warehouse felt just as big inside as it looked from the outside, but even so, the sheer amount of light was overwhelming. Dazzled, I shut my eyes. When I opened them a short time later, the darkness was gone, and all that remained was coldness and silence.
The warehouse looked like a giant refrigerator on the inside, but if you think about the nature of the building, you might say it was natural. Windowless walls, a ceiling glazed with white paint, but yellows, blacks, and other colors I can’t even remember stained the whole surface. You could tell at first glance that the walls were built to be terribly thick. I felt just like I’d been packed into a lead box. You’ll be trapped here forever, said the fear that seized me, and I kept looking back at the door. I’d never before been in a building that made me feel so uncomfortable.
To put it nicely, it looked like an elephant graveyard. Instead of the contorted skeletons of elephants, there were pinball machines lined up on the concrete floor as far as the eye could see.
Standing at the top of the staircase, I stared down upon that bizarre scene. My hands unconsciously crept to my mouth, then returned to my pockets.
There was a terrible number of pinball machines. Seventy-eight, to be exact. I took my time, counting them over and over. Seventy-eight, no mistake. Facing the same direction in an eight row formation, lined up to the edges of the walls of the warehouse. As if someone had drawn lines on the floor with chalk and lined them up, none of them were even one centimeter out of place. They were all of them stuck as still as flies stuck to acrylic resin. None of them were going anywhere. Seventy-eight deaths, and seventy-eight silences. As a reflex, I forced my body to move. I felt that if I didn’t, I’d also become a part of that flock of stone gargoyles.
Cold. And then, also the smell of dead chickens.
I slowly descended the narrow steps, only five of them, that made up the staircase. It was colder at the bottom of the stairs. Still, I was sweating. An uncomfortable sweat. I took my handkerchief from my pocket and wiped off the sweat. Only there was nothing I could do about the sweat that had built up under my armpits. I sat down on the bottom step, smoking a cigarette with my shaking hands. …my three-flipper Spaceship, I didn’t want to see her this badly. Even when I first found her…I think.
After shutting the door, I couldn’t hear even a single insect. Perfect silence stagnated on the ground like a thick fog.
Seventy-eight pinball machines, three hundred and twelve legs plunging down to the floor, the floor gallantly enduring the unmoving weight. It was a sad sight.
Still sitting, I tried whistling the first four bars of Jumping with Symphony Sid. Stan Getz and his head-shaking, foot-tapping rhythm section… In the deserted refrigerated warehouse There wasn’t a single thing to interrupt me, and my whistling reverberated prettily. Feeling a little better, I whistled the next four bars. Then the next four bars. I felt like everything was straining its ears to hear more. Of course, there weren’t any people shaking their heads or tapping their feet. After that, the sound was extinguished, having penetrated into every corner of the warehouse.
“It’s really cold,” my mouth muttered, just after when I stopped whistling. The echoing voice didn’t sound anything like my voice. The echo hit the ceiling, then, like fog, it swooped back down to the basement. My cigarette still in my mouth, I sighed. You can’t keep sitting here, continuing this one-man show forever. It felt like the cold and the smell of chickens had both permeated into my soul. I stood up, brushing the cold dirt off my pants with my hands. I stomped out my cigarette with my shoe, throwing it into a nearby tin can.
Pinball…pinball. Isn’t that what you came here for? It felt like the cold was even affecting the way my head worked.
Think! Pinball. Seventy-eight pinball machines. …okay, a switch. Somewhere in this building, there must be a switch to turn on these seventy-eight pinball machines. …we’re looking for a switch.
With both hands still in my pockets, I walked along the walls. There were still wires and lead pipes hanging down from when the flat, concrete walls of the refrigerated warehouse were erected. There were many kinds of machines, meters, junction boxes, all of these were seemingly forcibly removed with a great deal of effort, the holes in the walls gaping. The walls were even more slippery than they seemed from far away. Like the after-trail of giant slugs crawling along them. Trying to walk through the building reinforced just how terribly big it really was. Even for a poultry farm’s refrigerated warehouse, it was strangely spacious.
Directly across from the stairs I used when I entered, there was another similar set of stairs. When I climbed these, there was a similar iron door. It was so similar to the other one, I felt like I was hallucinating. As a test, I tried pushing it open, but it didn’t budge at all. Not bolted, not locked, but it didn’t even shake a bit, as if it were painted over with something. I took my hand away from the door, unconsciously wiping the sweat off my forehead with my palm. It smelled like chickens.
The switch was next to that door. It was a big, lever-style switch. When I pushed it in, there was a dull rumbling from the floor, coming from everywhere, all at once. The kind of sound that makes your hair stand up. Then the pitter-pattering sound of something like tens of thousands of birds were spreading their wings continued. I turned around and gazed down into the refrigerated warehouse. The seventy-eight pinball machines were drinking in electricity, and it was the sound of thousands of scoreboards flipping to all zeroes. When that sound settled down, what was left was the thick, electric rumbling of something like a swarm of bees buzzing. Then, in the space of a moment, warehouse’s seventy-eight pinball machines were full of life. The multi-colored lights in the field of each machine flashed, the boards trying their hardest to produce peoples’ dreams.
I descended down the staircase, walking in the space between what seemed like a parade of seventy-eight pinball machines. Some of them were machines I’d only seen in pictures, others were familiar models I’d seen in game centers. There were also machines that had faded out of popularity. Williams’ Friendship 7, an astronaut drawn onto the board, who was he? Glenn…? It came out in 1960. Bally’s Grand Tour, a blue sky, the Eiffel Tower, happy American travelers… Gottlieb’s Kings and Queens, the model with eight roll-over lanes. A gambler from a Western, his moustache neatly trimmed, wearing a nonchalant look, with an ace of spades hidden in the garter holding up his socks…
A super hero, a monster, a college girl, football, rockets, then another girl…all of them the customary faded, filthy, extinguished dreams of the inside of a game center. A variety of heroes and girls smiling down at me from their boards. Blondes, platinum blondes, brunettes, redheads, dark-haired Mexican senoritas, girls with ponytails, Hawaiian girls with hair down to their backs, Ann-Margret, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe…they were all proudly sticking out their fabulous breasts. From a blouse down to her hips, from a one-piece swimsuit, from a pointed brassiere… Their breasts looking as if they would maintain their shape for all eternity, they had certainly faded. Their lamps flickered as if their heartbeats were growing faint. Those seventy-eight pinball machines, they were old, it was a graveyard of forgotten dreams. I walked carefully between the machines.
My three-flipper Spaceship was waiting for me far in the back of the formation. Wedged between her showy, make-up laden friends, she seemed terribly peaceful. It was like she was sitting on a flat stone slab in the middle of a forest, waiting for me. I stood in front of her, gazing fondly at her board. The deep dark blue of space, as if someone spilled a bottle of ink. And tiny white stars. Saturn, Mars, Venus…a pure white space ship floated in front of me, just an arm’s length away. A light shined from the window of the space ship, as if inside they were having a happy family get-together. In the darkness, there were the tails of shooting stars.
The field was the same as before. The same dark blue. The targets were like snow-white teeth flashing from a smile. The column of ten lemon-yellow bonus lights forming a constellation slowly flashed up and down. The two kick-out balls were Saturn and Mars, the roto-target was Venus…all of it looked completely peaceful.
Hey! I said…no, wait, I probably didn’t say that. In any case, I placed my hands on the glass panel covering her field. The glass was as cold as ice, and the warmth of my hands left ten cloudy fingerprints. She smiled at me as if she were waking up. It was a familiar smile. I smiled, too.
I feel like we haven’t met in such a long time, she said. I scratched my head as if thinking it over. Just three years. Goes by in a flash.
We both nodded for a little while, then we were silent. We were in a coffee house sipping coffee, twisting the lace curtains between our fingers.
I think about you a lot, I said. Then I start to feel terribly miserable.
Nights when you can’t sleep?
Yeah, nights when I can’t sleep, I said it back. She maintained her smile.
Aren’t you cold? she asked.
Yeah, it’s really cold.
You probably shouldn’t stay too long, then. It’s much too cold for you.
You may be right about that, I replied. Then, with my shaking hands, I pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and breathed in the smoke.
Are you going to play? she asked.
Nope, I answered.
Why not?
165,000. That was my best score. Do you remember?
I remember. That was my best score, too.
I don’t want to ruin that, I said.
She was silent. Her ten bonus lights continued to flash up and down. I smoked, staring down at my feet.
Why’d you come here?
You called out to me.
Called out? She seemed a little confused, then she smiled bashfully. Did I? Maybe I did…yeah, I might’ve.
You weren’t easy to find.
Thank you for coming, she said. Let’s talk, then.
Many things have changed a lot, I said. The game center you were in became an all-night donut shop. They serve really terrible coffee.
Is it really that bad?
Like in that old Disney movie where the dying zebra drinks the muddy water, that’s the color it was.
She giggled. She had a wonderful smile. I didn’t like that town, anyway, she said with a serious look. Everything’s crummy and dirty…
That’s how it was in those days.
She nodded a few times. What are you doing these days?
Office work. Translation.
Novels?
Nah, I say, everyday stuff, fluff, most of it. Scooping up water from one ditch and dumping it into another one. That’s all.
You don’t like it?
I don’t know. Haven’t really thought much about it.
Any girls?
You probably won’t believe it, but now I’m living with twin girls. The coffee they make is out-of-this-world.
Still smiling, she looked out into space. I don’t know what it is, it’s strange, but it feels like it was all just a dream.
It wasn’t! It really happened. And then it was over.
Do you regret it?
No, I said, shaking my head. Something came from nothing, then it went back, that’s all it is.
We were silent once again. What we had before, it was shattered long ago, and the pieces couldn’t go back together. However, we have lots of warm memories, and these continue to shine on my soul, like a light from long ago. But until death takes me, until I’m tossed back into that melting pot of nothingness, I will wander in that light.
I think you’d best be going, she said.
It was true, the cold had become unbearable. My body shaking, I stomped out my cigarette. Thank you for coming to see me, she said, we probably won’t meet again, but please take care.
Thank you, I said. Goodbye.
I walked between the rows of pinball machines, climbed the stairs, and hit the power switch. As if all the air were sucked out of them, the pinball machines went dead, perfect silence, perfect sleep covering them. I made my way back across the warehouse, climbed the stairs, switched off the lights, and shut the door carefully behind me, not looking back. Not looking back once.
I hailed a taxi, and I got back to my apartment just a little before midnight. The twins were in bed, just getting ready to complete the Sunday crossword puzzle. My face was terribly pale, the coldness and smell of chickens emanating from the core of my body. I stuffed all the clothes I was wearing into the washing machine and got into a hot bath. To get back to feeling like a normal person again, I stayed in the bath for an entire thirty minutes, but even then the coldness still wasn’t gone from my body.
The twins got the gas stove out of the closet and turned it on for me. After another fifteen minutes, the shaking stopped, and I took a deep breath, heated up a can of onion soup, and drank it down.
“Ah, I feel much better,” I said.
“Really?”
“You’re still cold,” said one of the twins grabbing my shoulder, looking concerned.
“I’ll warm up pretty quick.”
Then we climbed into bed and finished the last two words in the crossword puzzle. One was ‘rainbow’ trout, the second was ‘promenade.’ I warmed up, and then we all fell into a deep sleep.
I had a dream about Trotsky and his four reindeer. All four of them were wearing knit socks. It was a terribly cold dream.
23
He hadn’t seen her again. He’d given up on gazing at the light in her window. He’d given up even going near his window. Like the strand of white smoke rising from a blown-out candle, something inside of his soul floated in the darkness and then went out. After that, a dark silence came around. Silence.
The layers were torn off one by one, leaving something even the Rat didn’t recognize. Pride? …atop his bed, he kept looking at his hands. Perhaps people had to live without pride. But even that was too gloomy. Altogether too gloomy.
It had been easy to break up with her. One Friday evening, he didn’t call her. That was it. She probably waited until midnight for the phone to ring. Thinking about that was painful. There were many times he had to keep himself from reaching for the phone. He put on headphones, turned up the volume, and listened to records. He knew she wouldn’t call, but still, he didn’t want to hear the phone ring.
After waiting until midnight, she probably gave up. Then she probably washed her face and brushed her teeth and climbed into bed. He’ll probably call tomorrow morning, she might’ve thought. Then she turned out the lights and went to sleep. Saturday morning, the phone didn’t ring. She’d have opened her window, made breakfast, and watered her plants. Then she waited until after noon, and at that point, she probably really gave up on it. While facing her mirror and brushing her hair, she was probably practicing her smiles over and over. It would have come to this eventually, she thinks.
During that time and that time only, in his room with the blinds tightly drawn, the Rat continued to stare at the hands of the clock mounted on his wall. Inside his room, not even the air moved. Shallow sleep passed through his body many times. The clock hands no longer had any meaning for him. The darkness cycled through its many shades. The Rat’s body was losing its substance little by little, and he endured the coming loss of sensation. How many hours, how many damn hours have I been keeping this up? he thought. In front of his eyes, the white walls seemed to shake slowly in time with his breathing. The emptiness, looking for density, started to invade his body. When he finally didn’t think he could take it anymore, he stood up, got into the shower, and somewhere in his dimmed consciousness, he shaved his face. He toweled himself dry, and drank orange juice from the refrigerator. Changing into clean pajamas, he got into bed, this is the end of it, he thought. Then a deep sleep came. It was a terribly deep sleep.
24
“I’ve decided to leave town,” the Rat said to J.
Six in the evening, the bar had only just opened. The counters were waxed, the ashtrays throughout the bar didn’t contain a single cigarette butt. The liquor bottles, polished neatly, were lined up with their labels all facing out, the new paper napkins were all folded nicely to the edges, and the bottles of salt and Tabasco sauce were arranged precisely in their trays.
J was stirring, mixing three kinds of dressing in a small bowl. The smell of garlic, like a thin fog, was hovering in the vicinity. It was just that kind of time.
The Rat was cutting his fingernails with clippers he’d borrowed from J, and he said this as his nails fell into his ashtray.
“Leaving town? Where are you going?”
“Some random place. Somewhere I don’t know. Somewhere not too big would be best, I think.”
J, using a funnel, he poured the dressing into various large flasks. Then, he took the flasks and put them into the refrigerator, closing the door and wiping his hand with a towel.
“What are you going to do there?”
“Work, I guess,” the Rat had finished trimming the nails of his left hand, and he looked his fingers over a few times.
“This town’s no good?”
“No good,” said the Rat. “I want a beer.”
“It’s my treat.”
“Thanks a lot.”
The Rat carefully poured his beer into his frosted glass, drinking half of it in one sip. “Aren’t you going to ask me what it is that’s wrong with this town?”
“I have a feeling I already know.”
The Rat laughed and clicked his tongue, “Hey, J, it’s just no good. Regardless of what anybody says they think they know about me, I have to get out of here. I hate to say it, but…I feel like I’ve been in this place too long.”
“You might be right about that,” J said after thinking for a moment.
After taking another sip of his beer, the Rat started to cut the nails on his right hand. “I’ve really thought this through. Anywhere I go, it’ll probably be the same thing. But I’m still going. It’s okay if it’s the same thing.”
“You won’t come back?”
“I’m sure I’ll come back at some point. I don’t know when. I’m not running away or anything.”
The Rat took peanuts from a small bowl, cracking open the wrinkled shells and throwing them into his ashtray. The moisture from his beer accumulated on the wood-paneled, freshly-polished counter, and the Rat wiped this off with a paper napkin.
“When’re you leaving?”
“Maybe tomorrow or the day after, I don’t know. Probably sometime in the next three days. I’m already finished packing.”
“That’s really soon.”
“Yeah…I’m sorry I’ve caused you so much trouble.”
“Yeah, there were a few times,” J was wiping the glasses lined up in the cupboard with a dry cloth, and he nodded. “But everyone dreams of going somewhere else.”
“They probably do. But I feel like it’s taken me a really long time to reach this point.”
After a little while, J laughed.
“Yeah. Sometimes I forget that you’re twenty years younger than me.”
The Rat poured the rest of his beer into his glass, drinking it slowly. It was the first time he’d ever drunk a beer so slowly.
“You want one more?”
The Rat shook his head. “Nah, I’m okay. I only planned to drink one last beer. The beer here…”
“You won’t come again before you go?”
“That’s the plan. It’d be too painful.”
J laughed, “See you again, sometime.”
“Next time you see me, you won’t even recognize me.”
“I’ll know you by your smell.”
Looking one more time at the freshly-cut nails on both his hands, he put the rest of his peanuts into his pocket, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and stood up from his seat.
The wind felt slippery, soundlessly blowing through the transparent dislocations in the darkness. The wind faintly shook the branches of the trees overhead, the leaves systematically falling to the ground. When they hit the roof of his car, they made a small, dry sound, and after twisting around on the roof for awhile, they slid down his windshield and piled up on his fender.
The Rat was alone in the forest of the cemetery, with nothing to say as he looked through his windshield. A few meters in front of his car, the ground dropped off sharply, past the edge, the sky, the ocean, and the nighttime panoramic of the town was spread out below. He looked at his rearview mirror, both hands on the steering wheel, holding completely still, he stared focusedly at one point. In his fingertips, he held an unlit cigarette, continuing to draw endlessly complicated, meaningless diagrams in the air with the tip of it.
After he finished talking to J, an unbearable despondency came over him. A swarm of various thoughts, managing to mass together, streamed through his mind, but it was like they suddenly all went off in different directions. Where they’d gone or when he’d encounter them again, the Rat didn’t know.
Eventually, all the dark rivers have to empty into the boundless sea. I probably won’t run into them again. It seems they only come to me now that I’m twenty-five. I wonder why? the Rat asked himself. I don’t know. It’s a good question, but I don’t have the answer. Good questions never have any answers.
The wind picked up a bit. That wind rose up and took just a little warmth from peoples’ lives, spiriting it off to some distant place, then, in the chilled darkness that remained countless stars were allowed to shine. The Rat took his hands off the steering wheel, moved his cigarette to his lips, and, as if almost forgetting to, he lit it with his lighter.
His head hurt. Well, not so much hurt, it felt more like cold fingers were pressing against both his temples. The Rat shook his head, driving out a few thoughts. Anyway, it’s over.
He opened the glovebox and pulled out a road atlas detailing the entire country, then he carefully flipped through the pages. He started reading the names of all the towns out loud, in order. They were mostly small towns he’d never heard of. From his town, the roads stretched out in all directions. After reading so many pages, the tiredness of many days suddenly came over the Rat. Then all the lukewarm shapes in his blood started circulating.
He wanted to sleep.
He felt like sleep would wipe everything clean. If he could only sleep…
When he closed his eyes, he heard the sound of waves in his ears. Winter waves, hitting the breakwater, the water wove through the concrete blocks of the river dike like threads.
From this point on, I don’t have to explain anything to anyone, the Rat thinks. The bottom of the sea is warmer than any city, probably filled with peace and tranquility, he thinks. No! I don’t want to think about anything anymore. I don’t…
25
The noise of the pinball machines was completely gone from my life. As were my feelings of having nowhere to go. Of course, it wasn’t like the ending of the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table or anything. That was a long, long time ago. With my horse was exhausted, my sword was bent, and my armor was rusted, I’ll go to lie down in a field thick with green foxtails, quietly listening to the sound of the wind. After that, at the bottom of the reservoir, in the refrigerated warehouse at the chicken farm, anywhere I have to go, I’ll go.
In the way of an epilogue, I only have this one very meager experience to share, like trying to dry one’s clothes in the rain.
And here it is.
One day, the twins bought a box of cotton swabs at the supermarket. There were three hundred cotton swabs packed into it. After I would get out of the bath, the twins would sit on both sides of me, cleaning out my ears. They were very good at cleaning out ears. Closing my eyes, drinking beer, I could listen to the swishing of the two cotton swabs. One evening, in the midst of my ear-cleaning, I sneezed. In that instant, I lost almost all the hearing in both my ears.
“Can you hear my voice?” said the right twin.
“Just barely,” I said. I could hear my own voice from through my nose.
“How about me?” said the left twin.
“It’s the same.”
“It’s because you sneezed.”
“What a silly thing to do.”
I sighed. It was like talking sitting in the gutter of a bowling lane talking to the seventh pin and the tenth pin of a seven-ten split.
“Do you think drinking water will fix it?”
“Are you serious?” I shouted, getting angry.
Then the twins made me drink half a bucket of water. All it did was make my stomach hurt. Because my ears began hurting, I thought that when I sneezed, some earwax got pushed inside my ears. That was all I could think of. I pulled two pocket flashlights out of the closet and had the twins check it out. Shining light side both my ear canals, they peeked around inside for a few minutes.
“There’s nothing.”
“Not a speck.”
“Then why can’t I hear anything!?” I shouted.
“Your life is over.”
“You’re deaf now.”
Sitting between them, looking through phone book, I called the nearest ear, nose, and throat clinic. It was difficult to hear the voice on the other end, and partially because of that, it sounded like the nurse sympathized with me a little. We’ll open up the front doors, please come as soon as you can, she said. We hurriedly got dressed, left the apartment, and walked to the bus lane.
The doctor was a fifty year-old female doctor with a tangled hairdo that looked like coiled barbed wire, but she seemed like a nice person. She opened the door from the waiting room, smacked the twins to shush them, then had me sit in a chair and casually asked me what had happened.
When I finished explaining, she said she understood and told me to stop shouting at her. Then she took out a huge syringe-shaped object with no needle and filled completely with yellow liquid, gave me a tin megaphone-shaped object, and moved it under my ear. She jammed the syringe-thing into my ear. After the yellow liquid hit the inside of my ear canal like a herd of zebras, it poured from my ear into the megaphone. After she repeated the process three times, she poked a thin cotton swab into my ear. When she completed the operation on both ears, ears were completely back to normal.
“I can hear,” I said.
“Earwax,” was all she said. It was like one of those word-association games.
“They’re curved.”
“What?”
“Your ear canals are curved way more than other peoples’ are.”
She drew a picture of my ear canals on the bottom of a matchbox. They were the shape of those metal bumpers fitted to the corners of desks in case people run into them.
“Because of this, if your earwax goes around this curve, even if somebody calls for you, you won’t come.”
I groaned. “What should I do?”
“What should you do? Just be more careful when you’re swabbing your ears. Be careful.”
“With my ears being different from other peoples’ ears, will this have any other negative effects on me?”
“Negative effects?”
“For example, say…mental problems?”
“None.”
We went back to the apartment, walking for fifteen minutes and crossing the golf course. The dogleg on the eleventh hole reminded me of my ear canal, and the flag made me think of a cotton swab. And there’s more. The cloud formation over the moon looked like a formation of B-52 bombers, the dense forest on the west edge reminded me of a fish-shaped paperweight, the stars in the sky resembled flakes of moldy parsley…that’s enough. Anyway, my ears could wonderfully, sharply discern the sounds of the world. It was like a veil had been ripped from the world. The birds were singing many kilometers away, people many kilometers away were closing their windows, people many kilometers away were proclaiming their love.
“It’s great,” said one.
“It really is,” said another.
Tennessee Williams wrote this: The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.
However, when we look back at the darkness we’ve walked through, the things there are uncertain as well, and it feels like there’s nothing but ‘perhaps.’ The gains we clearly perceive in the present only last for a moment, and they really just brush off of us.
When I went to see the twins off, it was pretty much like that. While leaving the golf course and walking to the bus stop two stops away, I was completely silent. It was seven o’ clock on a Sunday morning, and the sky seemed piercingly blue. I was filled with the premonition grass under my feet would soon be dead until spring. Probably snow would soon be piled over the frost. Then it would glisten in the transparent morning sunlight. The grass, tinged with white, continued to crackle under our feet.
“What are you thinking about?” one of the twins asked me.
“Nothing,” I said.
They were wearing the sweaters I gave them, and at their sides they carried paper bags containing their sweatshirts and a few other changes of clothes.
“Where will you go?” I asked.
“Where we belong.”
“Just going back.”
We crossed the bunker, we crossed over the straight fairway of the eighth hole, and we walked down the open-air escalator. There were a terrible number of birds staring at us from the lawn and from atop the wire netting.
“I can’t put it very well, but,” I said, “after you guys are gone I’ll be really lonely.”
“Us, too.”
“Very lonely.”
“But you’re still leaving?”
They nodded.
“Do you really have somewhere to go back to?”
“Of course,” one of them said.
“We have to go back,” said the other one.
We came out of the forest that crossed the golf course’s wire netting, then we sat on a bus stop bench and waited for the bus. The Sunday morning bus stop was wonderfully quiet, full of gentle sunlight. In that sunlight, we continued our word-association game. After just five minutes, the bus came, and I gave them money for the bus fare.
“See you around,” I said.
“See you later,” said one of them.
“See you again,” said the other.
It was like their words echoed through my soul for awhile.
The bus door closed with a thud, and the twins waved at me from the window. I relive it all over again… I went home the same way we came, and in my room, filled with autumn sunlight, I listened to Rubber Ball, which the twins had left behind, and I made coffee. Then I spent all day looking at the November Sunday coming in through my window. It was a November Sunday where everything almost seemed like it was about to become transparent. |
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