I went home satisfied.
It’s all over, I kept telling myself on the train. You can forget her now. That’s why you made this trip. But I couldn’t forget. That I loved Naoko. That she was dead and gone. That not a single damn thing was over and done with.
The clouds that cover Venus turn its surface into a furnace. That and the humidity mean that most Venusians die young—reaching thirty brings one almost legendary status. It also means that everyone’s heart is overflowing with love. Venusians all love each other; there are no exceptions. Nor is there any hatred, envy, or contempt. No one badmouths anyone else. There are no murders or fights. Love and caring reign.
“Suppose someone were to die today—we wouldn’t feel sad,” the quiet young Venusian said. “We loved them with all our hearts while they were alive, so there’s no need for regrets.”
“So you love in anticipation of death?”
“Earthling words like that escape me,” he said, shaking his head.
“Do things really work out that way?” I asked.
“If they didn’t,” he replied, “Venus would be buried in sadness.”
When I got back to my apartment, the twins were squeezed together in bed like sardines in a can.
“Welcome home,” one of them said, giggling.
“Where have you been?” said the other, giggling too.
“At the station,” I said, loosening my tie and squeezing in between them. I closed my eyes. I was dead tired.
“Which station?”
“Why did you go there?”
“A station far from here. To see a dog.”
“What sort of dog?”
“You like dogs?”
“A big white dog. But no, I’m not crazy about dogs.” The two kept quiet while I smoked a cigarette.
“Sad?” one of them asked.
I nodded.
“Then sleep,” said the other.
So I slept.
This story is about “me,” but it’s also about a guy they call “Rat.” That autumn the two of us were living four hundred miles apart.
My novel begins in September 1973. That’s the entrance. Sure hope there’s an exit. Not much point in writing all this if there isn’t.
ON THE BIRTH OF PINBALL
No one has a clue who Raymond Moloney was.
All we can say for sure is that a man by that name once lived and died—that’s about it. Our knowledge ends there. He is as much a mystery as a water bug at the bottom of a deep well.
Yet it is a historical fact that in 1934, thanks to him, the very first pinball machine steered its way though the golden clouds of technology to safely touch down on the corrupt world below. That same year, on the other side of the big puddle of the Atlantic Ocean, Adolf Hitler grabbed the first rung of the ladder of the Weimar Republic.
Raymond Moloney’s life has none of the mythical aura surrounding the lives of figures like the Wright brothers or Alexander Graham Bell. There are no heartwarming stories of childhood exploits, no dramatic eureka moments. Just one slight mention on the first page of a book written for trivia geeks: 1934—the first pinball machine, invented by Raymond Moloney. No photograph appears in the book. Needless to say, no portraits or statues were made in his honor.
I know what you’re thinking. If this guy Moloney hadn’t been around, the pinball machine as we know it would be totally different. Perhaps it wouldn’t even exist. Therefore our failure to appreciate him and his work smacks of ingratitude. If you could see what his invention, the Ballyhoo, looked like, however, those doubts would disappear in a flash. Nothing about it could be said to stimulate the imagination.
The pinball machine and Hitler’s rise share one common trait. Greeted warily when they surfaced at that particular moment in history, their mythic aura stemmed more from the rapid pace of evolution than from any inherent quality. Evolution of the sort that moves forward on three wheels, namely Technology, Capital Investment, and Human Desire.
With terrifying speed, people seized on the crude clay doll Moloney had created and added a whole string of innovations. “Let there be light!” “Let there be electricity!” “Let there be flippers!” they cried, one after another. And so the field was illuminated, and the balls were propelled with electrically induced magnetism and directed by two armlike flippers.
A player’s skill was translated into numbers and decimals, and a tilt light added to penalize anyone who nudged the table with too much enthusiasm. The metaphysical concept of “sequence” was born, which in turn spawned a host of schools: the bonus light, the extra ball, and the replay. By that time, the pinball machine had acquired an occult-like power.
This is a novel about pinball.
Bonus Light, a book-length study of pinball, says the following in its introduction:
Almost nothing can be gained from pinball. The only payoff is a numerical substitution for pride. The losses, however, are considerable. You could probably erect bronze statues of every American president (assuming you are willing to include Richard Nixon) with the coins you will lose, while your lost time is irreplaceable.
When you are standing before the machine engaged in your solitary act of consumption, another guy is plowing through Proust, while still another guy is doing some heavy petting with his girlfriend while watching True Grit at the local drive-in. They’re the ones who may wind up becoming groundbreaking novelists or happily married men.
No, pinball leads nowhere. The only result is a glowing replay light. Replay, replay, replay—it makes you think the whole aim of the game is to achieve a form of eternity.
We know very little about eternity, although we can infer its existence.
The goal of pinball is self-transformation, not self-expression. It involves not the expansion of the ego but its diminution. Not analysis but all-embracing acceptance.
If it’s self-expression, ego expansion, or analysis you’re after, the tilt light will exact its unsparing revenge.
Have a nice game!
1
There must have been ways to tell the twin sisters apart, but I’m sad to say I never found any. Not only were their faces, voices, and hairstyles identical, they had no moles or birthmarks that might have helped me out. They were perfect copies—all I could do was throw up my hands in defeat. They responded to stimuli in precisely the same way, ate and drank the same things, sang the same songs, slept the same number of hours, had their periods at the same time.
Now, I don’t know what it’s like to be a twin—my powers of imagination don’t extend that far. But I bet if I had a twin identical to me in every respect, it would drive me nuts. Maybe I’m a little weird that way.
The two girls, however, lived a happy and tranquil life together. They were shocked, even angry, whenever they discovered that I couldn’t tell them apart.
“But we’re totally different!”
“Not alike at all!”
I just shrugged.
How long had it been since they moved in? My internal clock had been off-kilter since the day we started living together. Looking back, it strikes me that my sense of time during that period had regressed to that of an organism that reproduced by cellular division.
My friend and I rented a modest apartment on the street that runs up the slope from Shibuya to Nampeidai, where we opened a small translation company. We used the start-up money he got from his father, far from a princely sum, to pay the security deposit, hook up the telephone, and buy three steel desks, ten dictionaries, and half a dozen bottles of bourbon. With what was left over, we ordered a metallic signboard engraved with the company name we’d concocted, hoisted the sign out front, and placed an ad in the papers. Then we cracked open a bottle of bourbon, put our feet up on one of the desks, and waited for the customers to show up. It was the spring of 1972.
It took only a few months to realize that we had struck the mother lode. Requests poured into our humble office at an amazing clip. With the profits we bought an air conditioner, a refrigerator, and a home bar set.
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“We pulled it off,” said my friend. “We’re successes, you and I.”
That just blew me away. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.
For jobs that needed printed copies, my friend worked out an agreement with a printer he knew, even scoring a kickback on the deal. I contacted the Student Office of the University of Foreign Languages to recruit a number of bright kids to turn out rough drafts of translations, so I wouldn’t get swamped. We hired a young woman to look after the books, handle the correspondence, and cover any other odd jobs that popped up. Just out of business school, she had long legs and a sharp mind. Apart from her habit of humming the melody to “Penny Lane” (minus the chorus) twenty times a day, she was perfect. We sure hit the jackpot with her, my friend said. We paid her fifty percent above the usual rate, an annual bonus equal to five months’ salary, and offered a ten-day holiday in summer and then again in winter. As a result, ours was a satisfied and harmonious workplace.
Our office consisted of two rooms and an eat-in kitchen that—unusual for Tokyo—sat between the two rooms. We drew straws: I ended up with the inner room, my friend got the room next to the entranceway, and the girl sat in the kitchen, taking care of the books, fixing bourbon on the rocks, and setting out traps for the cockroaches, all to the unrelenting accompaniment of “Penny Lane.”
I tapped into our expense account and bought two filing cabinets that I placed on either side of my desk, the one on the left for unfinished translations, the one on the right for those I had completed.
The manuscripts our customers brought us were a mixed bag. From an American Science article on ball bearings’ resistance to pressure, the 1972 edition of the All-American Book of Cocktails, and an essay by William Styron, to a manual on the proper use and maintenance of safety razors, every item was marked “by such-and-such date” and stacked on the tray to the left, then, in due course, moved to the tray on the right. When a job was done we each drained a finger (well, a thumb, actually) of whiskey.
The great thing about doing translations at our level was that it didn’t require any extra thought. You simply took a coin (the original text) in your left hand, plunked it on your right palm, whisked your left hand away, and there it was. Simple.
We arrived at the office at ten and left at four. On Saturdays the three of us went to a nearby disco, where we drank J&B and danced to a Santana cover band.
The money wasn’t bad. From our monthly earnings we subtracted the rent, a small amount for office expenses, pay for our secretary and the part-timers, and taxes, then divided the remainder into ten parts, of which one part went to our business savings account, five parts to him, and four parts to me. To divvy up the money we piled it all on the table in cash and worked from there, like the poker scene between Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson in The Cincinnati Kid. Primitive, for sure, but a heck of a lot of fun.
I think it made sense that my friend got five parts to my four. Not only did I foist the entire business side of our operation onto him, he endured the times I overdid the whiskey without complaint. On top of that, he had a sick wife, a three-year-old son, a Volkswagen Beetle with a wonky radiator, and, as if all that weren’t enough, a compulsion to take on even more headaches.
“I’m looking after twin girls myself,” I told him once, but of course he didn’t buy it. So he kept on getting five to my four.
I spent my mid-twenties like this. Days as peaceful as a pool of afternoon sunlight.
The company slogan we stuck on our tri-colored promotional brochure read, “What the human hand can write, we can translate.”
When, every six months or so, our business went into a rare slump, the three of us killed time handing those brochures out in front of Shibuya Station.
—
How long did things go on like that? I walked on and on through a boundless silence. I went home every day after work to read the Critique of Pure Reason yet again and drink the twins’ delicious coffee.
Sometimes things that happened the day before felt like they had occurred a year earlier; at other times last year’s events seemed to have happened yesterday. When it got really bad, next year’s events seemed to have taken place the previous day. Sometimes I found myself ruminating on ball bearings while translating Kenneth Tynan’s article on Roman Polanski from the September 1971 issue of Esquire.
Month after month, year after year, I sat alone at the bottom of a deep swimming pool. Warm water, gentle light, and silence. Then, more silence…
There was just one way for me to tell the twins apart. That was by their sweatshirts. Each wore a faded navy-blue sweatshirt with white numerals printed on the chest. One read “208,” the other “209.” The “2” fit squarely on top of the right nipple, the “8” (or “9”) atop the left nipple. The “0” was plunked smack in the middle.
The very first day I had asked them what the numbers meant. Nothing at all, came the response.
“They look like serial numbers,” I said, using the English word.
“What are those?” one asked.
“Like if a whole bunch of you were manufactured at the same time, and you were each given a number.”
“No way,” said 208.
“Yeah,” said 209. “There’ve been just the two of us from the start. And somebody gave us these shirts, anyway.”
“Who?”
“We got them at the supermarket. It was their opening day, and a whole bunch of us got them for free.”
“I was the 209th customer,” said 209.
“And I was the 208th,” said 208.
“We bought three boxes of tissues.”
“Okay, so let’s do it this way: I’ll call you 208. And you 209,” I said, pointing to each of them in turn. “That way I can tell you apart.”
“Won’t work,” said one.
“Why not?”
They pulled off their sweatshirts, exchanged them, and pulled them on again.
“Now I’m 208,” said 209.
“And I’m 209,” said 208.
I let out a sigh.
Still, whenever I had to distinguish between the two of them, I relied on the numbers on their sweatshirts. There was just no other way to tell who was who.
They had arrived with only the clothes on their backs. It was as if they had been taking a stroll, seen a promising place, and moved in. Well, I guess that’s about how it happened. I gave them some money at the beginning of each week to buy what they needed, but apart from food for our meals, the only thing they ever purchased was an occasional box of coffee cream cookies.
“Isn’t it a problem, not having more clothes?” I asked.
“No problem at all,” replied 208.
“We don’t care about clothes,” answered 209.
They tenderly laundered their sweatshirts once a week in the bath. Lying in bed reading the Critique of Pure Reason, I would glance up and see them kneeling side by side, naked on the tile floor, scrubbing away. Times like that made me feel as if I’d arrived at some faraway place. Why, I don’t know. I’d been experiencing the same feeling from time to time since the previous summer, when I had lost the crown from my front tooth under the diving board at the pool.
Many times I came home after work to see the sweatshirts with the numbers 208 and 209 fluttering in my south-facing window. Occasionally it brought tears to my eyes.
There were so many questions I could have asked. Why did you choose my place? How long will you stay? Most of all, what are you? How old are you? Where were you born? But I never asked, and they never said.
We spent our mornings drinking coffee, our evenings trolling the golf course for lost balls, and our nights fooling around in bed. The highlight was the hour or so I spent each day explaining items in the newspaper. They knew so little about the world. I mean, they couldn’t tell the difference between Burma and Australia. It took three days to get across the fact that Vietnam had been divided into two sides that were now at war, and four to explain why Nixon had decided to
bomb Hanoi.
“So which are you rooting for?” asked 208.
“Which?”
“The north or the south?” said 209.
“I don’t know. That’s a hard one.”
“Why is it so hard?” That was 208.
“Because I don’t live in Vietnam.”
That didn’t convince them. It didn’t convince me either.
“So why are they fighting? Political differences, right?” 208 grilled me.
“I guess you could say that.”
“So their ideas are in conflict?” continued 208.
“Yes. But then you could say that there are 1.2 million conflicting ideas in the world. Probably more.”
“So then it’s almost impossible to be friends with anyone?” That was 209.
“That’s true,” I said. “It’s just about impossible to be friends.”
This was my lifestyle in the 1970s. Prophesied by Dostoevsky, consolidated by yours truly.
2
In the autumn of 1973, we could sense something nasty lurking just out of sight. The Rat felt it like a pebble in his shoe.
The brief summer had been sent on its way by the shifting winds of early September; yet the Rat seemed lost in what few traces remained. Still wearing his old T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and sandals, he made the daily commute to J’s Bar, where he sat at the counter talking to J the bartender and drinking over-chilled beer. He had quit cigarettes five years before, but now he was smoking again and checking his watch every fifteen minutes.
It appeared as though time had stopped for the Rat, as if all of a sudden its flow had been severed. The Rat had no idea why things had changed. Nor did he know how to search for the severed end. He could only wander through the autumn gloom with a limp piece of rope in his hand. He crossed meadows, forded rivers, pushed open doors. But the rope led him nowhere. He was as powerless and lonely as a winter fly stripped of its wings, or a river confronting the sea. An ill wind had arisen somewhere, and it was blowing the warm, familiar air that had embraced him to the other side of the planet.