Pinball, 1973 (15 page)

“I can hear,” I marveled.

“Earwax,” she said succinctly. It sounded like the tail-end of a round of password.

“But I didn’t see a thing.”

“It’s bent.”

“Huh?”

“Your ear passage is much more curved than most.”

She sketched the inside of my ear on the back of a matchbook. In diagram, it looked like one of those brackets for reinforcing table corners.

“So you see, if a plug of wax rounds the bend, it’s beyond recall.”

I cleared my throat. “What should I do then?”

“What should you do? Just take care when you clean your ears. C-A-R-E.”

“This having abnormally curved ear passages and all, could it have adverse effects on

anything?”

“Adverse effects?”

“For example mentally?”

“None,” she said.

We took a fifteen-minute detour through the golf course on the way back to the apartment. The dogleg on the eleventh hole reminded me of the insides of my ear, the flag, a cotton swab. And that’s not all: clouds ranged across the moon like a squadron of B-52s, dense woods held down the terrain to the west like a fish-shaped paperweight, stars spilled out across the sky like moldy parsley flakes; but enough. My ears were keen in picking out every sound there was to hear I felt as if a veil had been lifted from the world. Miles away night birds were calling, miles away people were shutting windows, miles away lovers whispered sweet nothings.

“Glad that worked out,” said one twin.

“Real glad,” said the other.

* * *

It’s like Tennessee Williams said. The past and the present, we might say, “go like this.” The future is a “maybe.”

Yet when we look back on the darkness that obscures the path that brought us this far, we only come up with another indefinite “maybe.” The only thing we perceive with any clarity is the present moment, and even that just passes by.

That’s pretty much what I was thinking as I accompanied the twins to see them off. We cut across the golf course to the bus stop two stops ahead of ours. I kept silent the whole time Seven o’clock Sunday morning, the sky a piercing blue. The turf underfoot showed a hint of the temporary death that awaited it until spring. Here, in time, would come the frosts and blankets of snow. Then would gleam a crystal clear morning light. We walked on, the sere bleached turf crunching beneath our feet with each step.

“What are you thinking about?” asked one of the twins.

“Nothing,” I said.

The twins wore the sweaters I’d given them, and carried their own sweatshirts as their only change of clothes under their arms in paper bags.

“Where you heading?” I asked.

“Back to where we came from.”

We crossed the sand trap, crossed the straight eighth-hole fairway, walked down the outdoor escalator. An impressive number of birds watched us from the grass and the chainlink fence.

“I don’t really know how to put it,” I said, “but I’m going to be really lonesome without you.”

“Us too.”

“We’ll be lonesome.”

“But you’re set on leaving.”

The two of them nodded.

“You honestly have someplace to go?”

“Of course,” said one.

“We wouldn’t go if we didn’t,” said the other.

We climbed over the chainlink fence from the golf course, made our way through the woods, and sat down on the bus stop bench to wait for the bus.

That Sunday morning, the bus stop was amazingly still, bathed in soft sunlight. We played a few last rounds of password in that light. For five minutes, until the bus came. And I paid the fares.

“We’ll meet again somewhere,” I said.

“Let’s, somewhere,” said one.

“Yes, somewhere,” said the other.

The words echoed in my mind a moment.

The bus door banged shut, the twins waved from the window. Everything was repeating itself. I retraced my steps by the exact same route, and sat in the apartment awash with autumn light listening to the copy of “Rubber Soul” the twins had left me. I brewed coffee. And the whole day through I watched that Sunday pass by my window. A tranquil November Sunday of rare clarity shining through each and every thing.