Pinball, 1973 (4 page)

* * *

Every year it was the same: came that chill time of autumn-going-on-winter, this university-dropout-rich-kid and that lonesome Chinese bartender would be huddled together, just like an elderly couple.

Autumn always hit hard. Those few friends who had been in town for the summer holidays would not even wait for September to roll around before they’d bid brief farewells and be off again to their distant haunts. Ever so subtly the colors changed, as if the summer light had crossed over some unseen divide, and the Rat would note that aura-like brilliance fading away around him. Soon the last breath of the warm dream has seeped away like a stream vanishing into the autumn sands, leaving no trace.

Even for J, autumn was by no means a happy season. From the middle of September on, the number of customers would noticeably dwindle. It was a yearly thing, but that autumn’s decline was something to see. Neither J nor the Rat knew what to make of it. At closing time, there’d still be half a bucket of potatoes for fries left peeled and waiting.

“It’ll start jumping, just you wait,” the Rat consoled J. “You’ll be so busy you’ll curse your luck.”

“Think so, eh?” J voiced dubiously as he plopped down on a barstool he’d commandeered behind the counter and began scraping away with an ice pick at the butter that had dropped on the toaster.

Nobody knew what to expect from there on in.

So the Rat went on thumbing through the pages of his book, while J, between polishing the liquor bottles, would take puffs on the filterless cigarette protruding from his stubby fingers.

* * *

For the Rat, some three years before, the passage of time had begun little by little to lose its evenness. In the spring he quit the university.

Of course, the Rat had any number of reasons for dropping out. The wiring to those reasons had gotten impossibly tangled up, and when things heated up past a critical point, the fuse blew with a bang. Some stayed with him, some were blown clear away, some things bit the dust.

He never explained to anyone why he quit school. It would have taken him five hours to put the pieces in place. And if he told one person, then everyone else would want to hear. Pretty soon he’d be in a real fix, and have to explain it to the whole world. The very prospect was enough to plunge the Rat into a state of depression.

“They didn’t like the way I mowed the grass in the courtyard,” he’d say whenever further explanation became unavoidable. One coed actually went so far as to go check out the courtyard lawn. “You didn’t do such a bad job,” she told him when she came back. “Maybe some bits of paper here and there, but...” “A matter of taste,” was all the Rat said.

Or when he was in a fairly good mood, he might say, “We just couldn’t get along, the university and me,” and leave it at that.

But that’s three whole years ago now.

Everything passed unbelievably quickly. Until at some point, the entire palette of built-up emotions lost all its color, fading to the meaninglessness of old dreams.

* * *

The Rat left home the year he entered university and moved into a penthouse apartment his father had once used as a study. His parents didn’t oppose the move. After all, they’d bought the place figuring to hand it over to their son by and by. Plus they had no real objection to him struggling along on his own for a while.

Nevertheless, no one would have ever said he was struggling, no matter how they looked at it. A melon just doesn’t look like a rutabaga. The place, you see, was a truly spacious two-room, living-dining-kitchen layout, complete with air-conditioning, telephone, a 17-inch color TV, bath-and-shower unit, an underground parking space set up with a Triumph, and to top it off, the ideal veranda for sunbathing in style. From his top-floor southeast corner window, he could gaze down on a magnificent view of the city and sea. Open the side windows and the rich scent of trees and the sound of birds chirping wafted in.

The Rat spent leisurely afternoons in the comfort of a rattan chaise lounge. Lazily closing his eyes, he’d feel the gentle current of time flow through his body like a stream of water. Hours, days, weeks, the Rat spent like that.

Occasionally, though, tiny ripples of emotion would be set off, as if to remind him. At times like that, the Rat simply closed his eyes, sealed off his mind, and sat tight until the ripples subsided. By then it would already be getting a little dark, toward early evening. The ripples gone, that same hushed tranquillity would come over him again, as if nothing had happened.

Except for newspaper salesmen, no one ever knocked at my door. So if there was a knock, I never opened the door, never even acknowledged them.

But that Sunday morning the caller kept right on knocking, thirty-five times. Eventually I gave in, dragged myself out of bed with eyes still half-closed, stumbled to the door, and opened it a crack. Standing in the hall was a fortyish man in a gray work outfit, helmet tucked in the hollow of his arm like you’d cuddle a puppy.

“I’m from the telephone company,” the man said. “I’ve come to change the switch-panel.”

I nodded. The guy had a permanent five-o’clock shadow, the sort of face you could shave and shave and never get clean-shaven. His whole face was beard, right up to his eyes. I felt sorry for him, but more than that, I felt just plain sleepy. I’d been up until four in the morning playing backgammon with the twins.

“Could you possibly come back in the afternoon?”

“No, I’m afraid it’s got to be now.”

“How come?”

The man searched through his pants pocket, and brought out a black notebook. “I’ve got a set number of jobs to do in a single day. As soon as I’m through here, it’s off to another area, see?”

I glanced at the addresses in the book, and even though it was upside down I could see that, as he’d said, mine was the only apartment left in the area.

“Just what kind of repair work is it?”

“Real simple. Take out the switch-panel, cut the wires, hook up a new panel, that’s it. Be done in ten minutes.”

I thought about it a moment, then shook my head.

“There’s nothing wrong with the present one,” I said.

“The present one’s the old type.”

“Doesn’t bother me any.”

“Now, listen,” he began, then reconsidered. “That’s not the point. That’d only make problems for everyone.”

“How?”

“Look, all the switch-panels are linked by a big computer back at the main office. But your switch panel, it sends out different signals from everybody else’s, so it fouls up the whole works. Got it?”

“Got it. It’s a matter of matching up hardware to software.”

“Now that we’ve got that straight, how about letting me in?”

At which point I decided I might as well open the door and let him in.

Then it occurred to me to ask, “But what makes you so sure the switch-panel’s inside my apartment? Shouldn’t it be in the superintendent’s room or some place like that?”

“Ordinarily, yes,” said the man, scanning the walls of the kitchen for any sign of the switch-panel. “You see, most people seem to find switch-panels a real nuisance. They’re nothing you’d generally have much use for. They just get in the way.”

I nodded. The man got up on the kitchen stool in his socks and checked around the ceiling. Nothing there.

“A regular treasure hunt. Switch-panels get stashed away in the most unbelievable places. It’s a crime. And then what do people do? They turn around and fill their apartments with mammoth pianos and dolls in glass cases and what have you. It just doesn’t make sense.”

I sympathized. The man gave up on the kitchen, and proceeded to stalk through the other room, craning his head into this corner and that, and before I knew it he was opening the door to the next room.

“For instance, take the switch-panel in the last condo I visited. Let me tell you, that was a case! Where do you think they’d shoved the thing? I mean, even I–”

The man’s words trailed off into a slight gasp. There in the corner of the room, in that enormous bed, the twins’ heads were poking out from under the covers where they lay on either side of the depression I’d left. Dumbstruck, the repairman just stood there with his mouth open for fifteen seconds. For that matter, the twins weren’t exactly bubbling with conversation either. I figured it was up to me to break the ice.

“Uh, this gentleman does telephone repairs.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said the one on the right.

“Much obliged,” said the one on the left.

“Well, yes ... likewise, I’m sure,” the repairmen said.

“He’s come to change the switch-panel.”

“The switch-panel?”

“The what?”

“The device that connects our telephone circuits.”

Which meant even less to them, so I handed over the rest of the explaining to the repairman.

“Um... it’s like this. A whole bunch of telephone lines come together here, okay? Say here’s a mother dog and down here are all her puppies. See, you understand, right?”

“?”

“Not a bit.”

“Well, uh... so the mother dog looks after her puppies, but if the mother dog dies, then the puppies die, too. That’s where I come in, and sort of exchange a new mother when it looks like the mother’s going to die.”

“That’s great!”

“Wow!”

Even I was impressed.

“And so that’s why I’m here today. Sorry to have to disturb you.”

“Oh, don’t mind us.”

“No, really, I’d like to watch!”

The man wiped his brow in relief with a towel, and gave the room the once-over.

“Well, now, to find that old switch-panel…”

“No need to make a search,” said the right.

“It’s in the back of the bedding closet. Just pry up the boards.”

I was floored. “Hey, how is it you know stuff like that? I didn’t even know that.”

“The switch-panel?”

“Common knowledge!”

“That does it,” said the repairman.

* * *

Sure enough, the job was over in ten minutes. Meanwhile the twins shared some whispered secret, giggling away, foreheads huddled together. Thanks to which the man bungled the wiring repeatedly. When the work was completed, the twins wormed into their sweatshirts and jeans under the covers, made their way to the kitchen, and made coffee for everyone.

I offered the repairman a leftover Danish, which he accepted with great pleasure, and ate with his coffee.

“Really appreciate it. Haven’t eaten a thing today.”

“Aren’t you married?” queried 208.

“Oh sure, but my wife never feels like getting up Sunday mornings.”

“That’s terrible,” said 209.

“Well, look at me. You know, I don’t work on Sundays because I like to.”

“How about a hard-boiled egg?” I suggested by way of consolation.

“Oh, no, no, no... that’d be too much to ask.”

“No trouble at all,” I said. “I was going to make enough for us all anyway.”

“Well, in that case, medium hard-set, if it’s, uh, at all…”

The man resumed talking as he peeled his hard-boiled egg. “I’ve been doing the rounds of people’s homes for twenty-one years now, but this was a first.”

“What was?” I asked.

“I mean, uh... a guy who’s sleeping with twin girls. Bet that must take some doing, eh?”

“Not especially,” I said, sipping my second cup of coffee.

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

“That’s ‘cause he’s really something,” said 208.

“An animal,” said 209.

“That does it,” said the man.

* * *

I really think that did do it for him. He was so flustered he left behind the old switch-panel. Either that or it was a thank-you gift in return for breakfast. Whatever, the twins spent the rest of day playing with the switch-panel. One would play the mother dog, the other a puppy, chattering some nonsense back and forth incessantly.

I left the two of them to their own devices, while I spent the afternoon finishing up some translation work I’d brought home with me. All the part-time student help was busy with exams and there was no one to do the rough translations, so I had a whole stack of work. It wasn’t going badly until after three o’clock or so, when my pace began to drop off as if my batteries were running down. By four, they’d given up the ghost. I couldn’t make headway with a single line.

So I just quit. I planted my elbows on the glass desk top, and blew smoke up at the ceiling. The smoke drifted lazily through the tranquil afternoon light like some ectoplasmic form. A small calendar I’d gotten at the bank lay on the desk under the glass top. September 1973 . . . it was more like a dream… 1973; who’d have thought such a year would really exist? And for some reason, there was nothing particularly wrong with thinking it didn’t.

“What’s wrong?” 208 came over to ask.

“You look tired. How about some coffee?”

The two of them nodded in consensus, then headed back to the kitchen, one to grind the coffee beans, the other to boil water and heat the cups. Then we all plopped down in a row on the floor by the window, and drank the fresh coffee.

“Not going well?” asked 209.

“It doesn’t seem to be,” said I.

“It’s run down.”

“What has?”

“Your switch-panel.”

“The mother dog.”

I heaved a sigh from the bottom of my gut. “You really think so?”

The two of them nodded in unison.

“On its last legs.”

“Exactly.”

“So what do you think we should do?”

They just shook their heads.

“Don’t know.”

I took a silent puff at my cigarette. “What say we go for a walk on the golf course? Today’s Sunday, so there ought to be a lot of lost balls.”

After an hour’s worth of backgammon, we climbed over the chainlink fence, and in the twilight strolled on the deserted golf course. I whistled Mildred Bailey’s “It’s So Peaceful in the Country” twice, and the twins complimented me on the tune. As nice as this was, we didn’t find a single ball. There are days like that. Probably all the players in Tokyo with low handicaps had gotten together. Either that, or they’d begun raising specially trained beagles as golf ball retrievers. We gave up and returned to the apartment.