“The lobster here is delicious. They boil them alive.”
I grunted and sipped my beer.
Her slender fingers were fiddling with the star-shaped pendant around her neck.
“If you’ve got something to say, you’d better say it before the food comes,” I said, then regretted it right away. It’s always like that.
She smiled a very small smile. Her lips had shifted maybe a tenth of an inch and stopped, as if returning to their original position were too big a hassle. The empty restaurant was so quiet we could almost hear the lobsters’ antennae moving.
“Do you like your work?” she asked.
“Like? I’ve never thought about my work that way, not once. No complaints, though.”
“I’ve got no complaints either,” she said, taking a swallow of beer. “The pay is good, the two of you are nice, I get regular vacations…”
I was all ears. I hadn’t listened this closely to someone for ages.
“But I’m only twenty,” she went on. “I don’t want to end up this way.”
We were quiet as the waiter laid out the food.
“You’re still young,” I said after he had left. “You’ll fall in love, get married. Things will change one after another.”
“No, nothing will change,” she whispered, deftly removing her lobster’s shell with her knife and fork. “No one will fall in love with me. I’ll be darning sweaters and setting out crummy cockroach traps until I die.”
I sighed. I felt, all of a sudden, that I’d aged several years.
“Look, you’re cute and charming, and you’ve got long legs and a sharp mind. You can even shell lobsters. Things will go fine.”
She fell silent and went on eating her lobster. So did I. As I ate I pictured the switch panel sitting at the bottom of the reservoir.
“What were you doing when you were twenty?”
“I was stuck on a girl.” Nineteen sixty-nine—the time of our life.
“What happened?”
“We split up.”
“Were you happy?”
“Looking back, I guess I was,” I said, swallowing another mouthful. “Just about anything looks better from a distance.”
The restaurant had filled up by the time we finished our lobster, the clatter of forks and knives and the squeak of chairs making a lively racket. I ordered coffee, while she ordered coffee and lemon soufflé.
“How about now?” she asked. “Is there anyone special?”
I thought for a moment before deciding to leave out the twins. “No,” I answered.
“Aren’t you lonely?”
“I’m used to it. I trained myself.”
“Training? What sort?”
I lit a cigarette and aimed the smoke at a spot two feet above her head. “I was born under a strange star. Like I’ve always been able to get whatever I want. But each time something new comes into my hands, I trample something else. Follow me?”
“A little.”
“No one believes me, but it’s the truth. It hit me about three years ago. So I decided. Not to want anything anymore.”
She shook her head. “And do you plan to live like that forever?”
“Probably. Then I won’t hurt anyone.”
“In that case,” she said, “you ought to live in a shoe box.”
A pretty cool way to look at it, if you ask me.
—
We walked to the station side by side. My sweater was perfect for the evening air.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll try to figure things out.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”
“Just talking about it takes a load off my mind.”
Our trains were leaving from the same platform, heading in opposite directions.
“Sure you’re not lonely?” she asked one more time. I was still trying to come up with a good answer when the train arrived.
13
On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.
—
What grabbed me that Sunday evening in October was pinball. The twins and I were sitting on the eighth green of the golf course, watching the sunset. The eighth hole is a par five, with no obstacles to speak of. Just a long fairway straight as an elementary school hallway. We were watching the evening sun sink behind the hills, while in the background a student who lived nearby was practicing scales on his flute, a heartrending sound. Why did pinball snatch my heart at that particular moment? I have no idea.
As time went on, my mental image of pinball grew and grew. If I closed my eyes I could hear the sounds of balls striking bumpers, scoreboards churning out numbers.
I wasn’t that into pinball back in 1970, when the Rat and I were spending all our time drinking beer in J’s Bar. The bar had one machine, a model called Spaceship, unusual for its time in that it had three flippers. The lower cabinet was divided into two playfields, with one flipper on the upper half and two below. It was a model from a peaceful era, before the world of pinball was inflated by solid-state technology. The Rat, however, was a true fanatic; he got me to snap a commemorative photo of him and the pinball machine on the day he reached his all-time high score of 92,500. It shows him leaning against the machine, grinning from ear to ear, while beside him the machine is grinning too, proud of the score on its display. The one and only heartwarming snapshot I took with my Kodak pocket camera. The Rat looks like a Second World War flying ace, the pinball machine like an old fighter plane. The sort of plane that started when a mechanic spun its propeller, and whose windscreen was snapped down by the pilot after takeoff. The number 92,500 linked the Rat and the machine, making them look almost like blood brothers.
The pinball company sent someone to J’s Bar once a week to collect the money and service the machine. He was about thirty, a gaunt man of few words. Avoiding J’s eyes, he would move straight to the Spaceship, remove the panel underneath with his key, and direct the jangling stream of coins into a canvas utility bag. Having completed that task, he would insert one of the coins to start the machine, snap the plunger a few times, and then shoot a ball out onto the playfield in a bored sort of way. With that single ball he checked the magnets on all the bumpers, tested all the lanes, and knocked down the targets one by one. The drop target, the kick-out hole, the rotating target. Next, he set off all the bonus lights and then wrapped up the job by dispatching the ball into the exit drain with a look of complete disinterest. Then he left, nodding at J on his way out the door to let him know everything was in order. All in less time than it takes to smoke half a cigarette.
It was a dazzling display that left the Rat and me gaping: ash was hanging from the tip of my cigarette, while the Rat’s beer was entirely forgotten.
“It’s like a dream,” said the Rat. “If I had technique like that I could hit 150,000 easy. No, 200,000 is more like it.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” I consoled him. “He’s a pro.” But the pride of the ace pilot was gone, never to return.
“Compared to him I’ve gotten about as far as holding a woman’s pinky,” the Rat said, before clamming up. Yet I could see he was still lost in pointless dreams of six-digit scores.
“That’s his job,” I tried to persuade him. “It might be fun at first. But try doing it from morning till night, day after day. Anybody would get sick of it.”
“No,” said the Rat, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t.”
14
J’s Bar was packed for the first time in ages. Most were new faces, but J had no problem with that—a customer was a customer. It felt as if the summer rush had come round again: the sound of the ice pick, the tinkle of ice against glass, the laughter, the Jackson 5 on the jukebox, clouds of white smoke
billowing against the ceiling like comic-strip balloons.
For the Rat, though, something had changed. He sat alone at the corner of the bar with an open book in front of him, reading the same page over and over again until he gave up and closed the cover. What he really wanted to do was gulp down the rest of his beer and head back to his apartment to sleep. That is, if true sleep was in the cards.
For a week, the Rat had felt forsaken, abandoned by everything, including luck itself. He was living on beer, cigarettes, and catnaps. Even the weather was crappy. Rain had washed soil from the mountainside into the river, turning the ocean into a patchwork of brown and gray. A depressing sight. He felt as if his head were stuffed with balled-up old newspapers. Sleep, when it came, was brief and shallow. It was like being in an overheated dentist’s waiting room: every time the door opened, he woke up and looked at the clock.
Midway through the week, during a bout of solitary whiskey drinking, the Rat decided to shut down his thought processes for a while. One by one, he packed each rift in his consciousness with ice thick enough to hold the weight of a polar bear. Convinced that would get him through the rest of the week, he rolled over and went to sleep. When he woke up, though, everything was the same. Except that now his head hurt a little.
The Rat stared at the six empty bottles lined up before him with bleary eyes. J’s back was visible between the cracks.
Maybe it’s time to retire, the Rat thought. I was eighteen when I had my first beer in this bar. Since then there have been thousands of beers, thousands of orders of French fries, thousands of records on the jukebox. Like waves lapping the sides of a barge, they’ve all come and gone. Haven’t I already drunk enough beer? Of course, I can drink buckets’ worth in my thirties and forties too. But still, he continued, the beer I drink here is different…Twenty-five, not a bad age to call it quits. A sensible person would have finished college and be employed as a loan officer in a bank.
The Rat added another empty bottle to the lineup and drained half of his too-full glass in a single swallow. By reflex, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he wiped his wet hand on the seat of his cotton pants.
Okay, he said to himself, let’s go through this again, no copping out halfway this time. Twenty-five…a time to crack down and do some serious thinking. Add two twelve-year-old kids together and you get the same age. Are you worth as much as they are? Hell, one of them counts more than you. A pickle jar full of ants counts more than you…Screw these stupid metaphors! They don’t help a damn bit. Think: you slipped up somewhere. Where? Try to remember…How the hell can I?
The Rat gave up and drained his glass. He signaled for a new bottle.
“You’re hitting it too hard,” J said. But bottle number eight showed up anyway.
His head was sore. His body was rising and falling like a boat on the waves. He could feel a weight behind his eyes. Time to throw up, said a voice inside his head. Puke first, then you can think. Okay, then, let’s head to the restroom…Shit! I can’t even make it to first base…Nevertheless, the Rat pulled himself together enough to walk to the restroom, kick out the girl who was reapplying her eyeliner in the mirror, and crouch over the toilet.
How many years since I last threw up? How do I do it? Do I take off my pants?…Enough with the crummy jokes. Shut up and puke. Puke your guts out.
The Rat puked his guts out, sat down on the toilet, and lit up a smoke. When he finished, he washed his face and hands with soap and straightened his hair in the mirror with his wet hands. His face was a little morose, but his features weren’t all that bad. Probably good enough to catch the eye of a junior high school teacher.
When he left the restroom, the Rat made a beeline for the girl with the half-penciled-in eyebrows and apologized. Back in his seat at the counter, he drank half a glass of beer and drained the ice water J set before him in a single gulp. Then he shook his head two or three times and lit a cigarette, at which point his mind began to work again.
Okay, let’s get it in gear, he said aloud. The night is long—enough time to figure it all out.
15
I entered the occult world of pinball for real in the winter of 1970. Looking back, it was as if I spent the next six months living at the bottom of a dark hole. I dug a hole just my size in the middle of a meadow, squeezed myself in, and blocked my ears to all sound. Nothing outside held the slightest appeal. When evening rolled around I woke up, slipped on my coat, and headed for the game arcade.
It took a while, but I finally located a three-flipper Spaceship identical to the one at J’s Bar. When I slipped in my coins and pushed Play, a string of notes sounded, as if the machine were quivering with anticipation. Ten targets popped up, the bonus light went off, the score flipped back to six zeroes, and the first ball hopped into the chute. For exactly one month, I poured buckets of coins into the slot. Then one cold and rainy early-winter evening, like a hot air balloon jettisoning its last sandbag, I cracked the six-figure barrier.
Tearing my trembling fingers from the flipper buttons, I leaned against the wall, sipped my freezing can of beer, and stared for a long time at the six numbers on the scoreboard—105,220.
That moment marked the beginning of my brief love affair. I more or less gave up on school and spent the bulk of the money from my part-time job on pinball. I mastered the techniques—hugging, passing, trapping, the stop shot—so well that before long spectators gathered when I played. At times high school girls in bright red lipstick would rub their soft breasts against my arm as I pressed the buttons.
The worst of winter had just arrived when I passed the 150,000-point mark. Almost no one was left in the freezing game arcade, but I continued to soldier on in a heavy duffel coat with a scarf hiked up to my ears. I was glued to the machine. The face I saw in the restroom mirror every so often was skeletal, the skin dry and flaky. I would take a break every three games to lean my shivering body against the wall and drink a beer. The last swallow always tasted like lead. Cigarette butts scattered around my feet, I would pull a hot dog from my pocket and gnaw on it.
But she was marvelous. The three-flipper Spaceship…only I understood her, and only she truly understood me. Each time I pressed Play, she sang that gratifying melody, flipped her board to six zeroes, and smiled at me. I coolly pulled the plunger back to the perfect spot, not a millimeter off, and launched the gleaming silver ball up the chute and out into her playfield. Watching it bounce around, I felt as free as if I had smoked a pipe of the finest hashish.
Many thoughts flitted in and out of my head, like disconnected fragments. People appeared in the glass atop her field, then disappeared. Like a magic mirror of dreams, the glass reflected my mind, growing brighter and darker in tandem with the flashing bumpers and bonus lights.
It’s not your fault, she said to me. She shook her head several times. Not your fault at all. You did what you could.
You’re wrong, I said. Left flipper, tap transfer, Target 9. All wrong. I didn’t do a damn thing. Didn’t lift a finger. I could have done something if I’d set my mind to it.
You humans can only do so much, she said.
Maybe so, I said. But it’s not over. It’ll be like this forever. Return channel, trap, kick-out ball, rebound, hugging, Target 6…bonus light. 121,150. It is over, she said. Over and done with.
She disappeared in February. The game arcade was razed, and by the following month an all-night doughnut shop stood in its place. The kind of joint where girls in gingham uniforms serve dry doughnuts on plates with a similar pattern, and patrons—the high school kids whose motorbikes are lined up outside, the night cabbies, the die-hard hippies, the bar girls—all look bored as they drink their tasteless coffee. I ordered a cup of that hideous concoction and a cinnamon doughnut and tried to find out if my waitress knew anything about the game arcade.
She looked at me with suspicious eyes. The way she would regard a doughnut that had fallen on the floor.
“Game arcade?”
“Yeah, the
one that was here until a little while ago.”
“No idea,” she said with a sleepy shake of her head. Whose memory went back a month? It was that kind of neighborhood.
I walked the streets, my mood black. No one knew what had become of the three-flipper Spaceship.
So I gave up pinball. Everybody does when the time comes. That’s all there is to it.
16
On Friday evening the rain that had been falling for days lifted without warning. The town had absorbed so much water that, from the Rat’s balcony window, it appeared bloated. The setting sun had broken through the clouds, turning them a strange color and dyeing the inside of his apartment.
The Rat slipped a windbreaker over his T-shirt and headed down the slope. The black pavement was dotted with puddles as far as the eye could see, the air heavy with the odor that follows an evening rain. Droplets showered from the green needles of the waterlogged pines that lined the river. Brown runoff poured down the river’s banks and slid along its concrete bottom toward the sea.
The evening glow soon gave way to a spreading, sodden cloak of darkness. Then, in an instant, the moisture turned to fog.
With his elbow hanging from his car window, the Rat slowly cruised through town. The white fog was moving west, through the hilly residential district. In the end he turned down the river road to the ocean. He pulled in beside the breakwater and lit a cigarette. Everything was black and wet: the beach, the massive concrete blocks protecting the shore, the trees that blocked the sand. An inviting yellow light was filtering through the blinds of the woman’s apartment. The Rat checked his watch. Seven fifteen. A time when people were finishing their meals and melting into the snug warmth of their homes.
The Rat put his hands behind his head, closed his eyes, and tried to picture the woman’s apartment. He had been there just twice, so his memory was shaky. When you first came in the door there was a kitchen, about ten feet square…an orange tablecloth, pots of leafy plants, four chairs, orange juice, a newspaper on the table, a stainless steel teapot—all in its place, all spotless…Farther in was a room that had once been two small rooms, the divider having been removed. It contained a long, narrow desk with a glass top, and on that…three ceramic beer mugs. They were stuffed with all sorts of things—pencils, rulers, drafting pens. On a tray were erasers, a paperweight, ink remover, old receipts, adhesive tape, paper clips of many colors…a pencil sharpener and postage stamps.