Pinball, 1973

7

Down with a cold for three days, a backlog of work awaited me on my return to the office. My mouth was all raspy and dry; I felt as if someone had gone over my whole body with sandpaper. Pamphlets and papers and booklets and magazines had piled up around my desk like anthills. My partner came in, mumbled some inquiry after my health, then went back to his own room. The office girl brought in a cup of hot coffee and two rolls as usual, set them on the desk, and vanished. I found I'd forgotten to buy cigarettes, so I bummed a pack of Seven Stars off my partner, pinched the filter off one and lit the other end. The sky was overcast just to the point where you couldn't tell where the air ended and the clouds began. Everything smelled as though someone had been trying to burn damp leaves. Or else it only seemed that way because of my fever.

I took a deep breath, and broke up the anthill closest at hand. Every item was stamped RUSH across the top and marked underneath with a deadline in red felt-tip pen. Luckily, that was the only RUSH anthill. And even luckier, there was still a couple of days left to go on them. The rest had deadlines from one to two weeks later, no problem if I farmed out half of it for rough translation. So one by one I started in on the booklets and brochures, restacking them in the order I finished them. A process that left an anthill of far less stable configuration than before. It looked like a newspaper graph by sex and age of constituent support for the cabinet. And it wasn't just the shape that was strange, I might add; its contents were as thrilling as a crosssection of random topics.

1. Charles Rankin, Scientific Puzzle Box: Animals.

From p. 68, "Why Cats Wash Their Faces" to p. 89,

"How Bears Catch Fish."

Finish by Oct. 12.

2. American Nursing Association, ed., Talking with the Terminally Ill.

All 16 pp.

Finish by Oct. 19.

3. Frank de Seto, Jr., Tracing Authors' Illnesses.

Chapter 3, "Authors and Hay Fever." All 23 pp.

Finish by Oct. 23.

4. Rend Claire, Le Chapeau de Paille d'Italie,

English trans. scenario.

All 39 pp.

Finish by Oct. 26.

The real shame was that the clients' names were never written anywhere. I could scarcely imagine who, for any reason, would want to get these things translated (and as RUSH jobs, no less). Perhaps some bear had stopped in its tracks before a stream in expectation of my translation. Or maybe a nurse was waiting wordlessly in her vigil over a terminally ill patient.

Photos of a cat washing its face with its paw lay before me on the desk as I drank my coffee and chewed one of the rolls to a pulp. It tasted like papier-mâché. My head had begun to clear a bit, but my extremities still tingled with fever. I took my camping knife out of the desk drawer, spent forever carefully sharpening six F pencils, then slowly got down to business.

I put on some old Stan Getz, and was at it until noon. The band was top notch – Stan Getz, Al Haig, Jimmy Rainey, Teddy Kotick, and Tiny Kahn. I whistled along with the tape through the whole Getz solo on "Jumping with Symphony Sid" and felt worlds better.

During lunch break I headed out to a crowded little eating spot five minutes down the hill from the office for some fried fish, then stood outside a hamburger stand while I drank two orange juices. Next I stopped by a pet shop, and played with some Abyssinians for maybe ten minutes, sticking my finger through a gap in the glass. Your regular lunch break.

Back at the office, I lazily glanced over the morning paper until the clock struck one. Then I sharpened my six pencils again for the afternoon, pinched the filters off the rest of the Seven Stars, and laid the cigarettes out on the desk. At which point, the office girl brought in a cup of hot green tea.

"How d'you feel?"

"Not bad."

"And work?"

"Getting there."

The sky was still relentlessly overcast. If anything, the gray had grown a shade deeper than in the morning. When I stuck my head out the window I got the distinct impression it was about to rain. Autumn birds were in flight across the sky, and everything hung heavy with that dull metropolitan drone (a combination of the rumble of the subway, the sizzle of hamburgers, the roar of traffic on the elevated expressways, car doors slammed shut or flung open, countless assorted noises like that).

I closed the window, put on a cassette of Charlie Parker playing "Just Friends," and resumed translating from the section "When Do Migratory Birds Sleep?"

When four o'clock rolled around I wrapped things up, handed over my day's worth of translations to the girl, and left the office. I decided to wear the lightweight raincoat I made a habit of keeping at the office so as not to carry around an umbrella. At the station I bought an evening paper, and was jostled about the better part of an hour in a crowded train. Even the inside of the train smelled like rain, but so far not a single drop had fallen.

It wasn't until I'd finished shopping for dinner at the supermarket by the station that it finally began to rain. Little by little, misty fine droplets you could hardly see turned the pavement at my feet rain-gray. After checking the bus schedule, I dodged into a nearby coffee shop and ordered a coffee. The place was crowded, and everything smelled once and for all like real rain. The blouse the waitress was wearing, the coffee, everything.

As the streetlamps around the bus terminal began to flicker on in the twilight, buses slid back and forth between the lights like giant trout navigating a current. Each bus filled with commuter types and students and housewives; each disappeared into the gloom. A middle-aged woman dragged the dark shape of a German shepherd past the window. School kids went by bouncing a rubber ball. I put out my fifth cigarette, and took one last sip of cold coffee.

Then I took a good, hard look at my reflection in the glass. Maybe it was the fever, but my eyes looked shot. Well okay, we'll disregard that. A five-thirty shadow darkened my face. What say we let that pass, too. The point is, it didn't even look like my face. It was the face of any twenty-four-year-old guy who might have been sitting across the way on the commuter train. My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other's self on the street – what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya! That's about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.

Maybe if I put gardenias in both ears, or wore flippers over both hands, somebody might take a second look. But that'd be it. They'd put it all behind them after three steps. Their eyes not looking at anything. Nor my eyes. I felt emptied out, a blank. Would I ever again have anything to give to anyone?

* * *

The twins were waiting for me.

I handed over the brown-paper supermarket bag to one or the other of them, then went and took a shower, a lit cigarette still in my mouth. I didn't even soap up; I just let the stream of water beat down on me while I gazed absently at the tiles. Some flickering movement passed over the wall before my eyes, and was gone. The shadow of something I could neither touch nor bring back.

I stepped from the bathroom right into the bedroom and toweled myself dry before tumbling into bed. The sheets were freshly washed, coral blue, not a wrinkle on them. As I lay there looking up at the ceiling, the events of the day played back in my head. The whole while the twins were busy slicing vegetables, sauteing meat, and cooking rice.

"How about a beer?" one of them asked me.

"Guh."

And the twin wearing the 208 sweatshirt brought a beer and a glass.

"Some music?"

"Would be nice."

She pulled Handel's Recorder Sonatas out of the record rack, put it on the player, and lowered the needle. A Valentine's Day present from a girlfriend a good many years before. The sound of sauteing meat came through the recorder, violin, and cello like a continuous undertone. My girlfriend and I had often had sex to this record. Even after the record ended, what did we care that the needle was scratching on and on, revolution after revolution? We would still be going at it.

Outside the window, rain was falling noiselessly over the dark golf course. I finished my beer, and by the time Hans-Martin Linde played the last note of the Sonata in F Major, dinner was ready. The three of us were unusually quiet over the meal that night. By then the record had ended, so other than the patter of rain on the eaves, and the sound of three sets of jaws chewing meat, the room was silent. When we were through, the twins cleared the table, and the two of them stood around in the kitchen brewing coffee. Then the three of us drank our hot coffee. Brimming with the aroma of life, that coffee was. One of them got up to put on a record. It was the Beatles' "Rubber Soul."

"Hey, I don't remember buying that record," I blurted out in surprise.

"We bought it."

"Little by little we saved up the money you gave us.

I just shook my head.

"You don't like the Beatles?"

Silence.

"What a shame. And we thought you'd be pleased."

"Sorry."

One of them got up, took the record off, and lovingly brushed off the least speck of dust before slipping it back into its jacket. All the while, none of us spoke a word. Then I let out a sigh.

"I didn't mean it that way," I explained. "I'm just a little tired and irritable. Let's give it another listen."

The two of them looked at each other and broke into a chuckle.

"Don't put yourself out now. It's your house after all."

"No, really, you don't have to put up with it on our account."

"Let's give it another listen."

So we ended up listening to both sides of "Rubber Soul" over coffee. And I managed to loosen up a bit. The twins seemed in particularly good spirits.

After we finished our coffee, the twins took my temperature. Back and forth, the two of them grimaced at the thermometer. One hundred one degrees. Up a degree since morning. I felt light-headed.

"Taking showers like that, worst thing for you."

"You ought to get some sleep."

They were perfectly right, of course. I got undressed and climbed into bed with the Critique of Pure Reason and a pack of cigarettes. The blanket somehow smelled of the sunny outdoors. Kant was as brilliant as ever, but the cigarettes tasted like damp newspaper lit from a gas burner. I closed the book, and was half-listening to the twins' voices, with eyes closed, when the darkness dragged me under.