While you're playing yourself out in lonesome dissipation in front of a pinball machine, someone else might be reading through Proust. Still another might be engaged in heavy petting with a girlfriend at a drive-in theater showing of Paths of Courage. The one could well become a writer, witness to the age; the others, a happily married couple.
Pinball machines, however, won't lead you anywhere. Just the replay light. Replay, replay, replay .... So persistently you'd swear a game of pinball aspired to perpetuity.
We ourselves will never know much of perpetuity. But we can get a faint inkling of what it's like.
The object of pinball lies not in self-expression, but in self-revolt. Not in the expansion of the ego, but in its compression. Not in extractive analysis, but in inclusive subsumption.
So if it's self-expression or ego-expansion or analysis you're after, you'll only be subjected to the merciless retaliation of the tilt lamps.
Have a nice game.
1
No doubt there are numerous ways to tell twin sisters apart, but I only knew of one. Not only were they alike in every respect, right down to their expressions, voices, and hair styles, but they didn't even have the slightest distinguishing beauty mark or blemish. I was at a total loss. They were perfect copies. Their reactions to any given stimulus were identical; the things they ate and drank, the songs they sang, the hours they slept, even their periods – everything was the same.
The whole situation was beyond me; my imagination couldn't cope with what it must be like to be a twin. I mean, I'm sure that if I had a twin brother, and we were alike in every detail, I'd be really mixed up. Because I'm mixed up enough as it is.
Still, all things being equal, the two girls went about their affairs with the utmost equanimity. As a matter of fact, the girls were shocked when they found out I couldn't tell them apart. They were understandably furious.
"Why, we're completely different!"
"Total opposites!"
Which shut me up. So I just shrugged.
I can't even begin to guess how much time has gone by since they moved into my apartment. The only thing I know for certain is that ever since they'd begun living with me, my internal clock has been running perceptibly behind. It occurs to me that this must be how organisms that multiply by cell-division experience time.
* * *
A friend of mine and I leased a condominium on the slope from Shibuya to Nampeidai and opened a small translation service. My friend's father put up the funds, which is not to say that it took any astounding sum of money – just the deposit on the place, and the money for three steel desks, some ten dictionaries, a telephone, and a half-dozen bottles of bourbon. We thought up a suitable name, and with the rest of the money had it engraved on a metal sign and hung it out front, then put an ad in the newspaper. After that we waited for customers. The two of us, with our four feet propped up on the desks, drinking whiskey. It was the spring of '72.
After a few months, we felt we'd struck a real gold mine. An amazing amount of business found its way to our humble office. And with our earnings we bought an air conditioner, a refrigerator, and a home bar set.
"We've made it, we're a success!" my friend exclaimed.
It made me all warm inside. Because it was the first time in my life that I had heard such encouraging words.
We even got a rebate from a printer contact my friend had, whom we'd let handle all the translations that needed printing. I'd gotten a university that taught foreign languages to pool some of their better students, and farmed out to them any unmanageable volume of work for rough translation. We hired an office girl to take care of the accounts, odd chores, and messages. A bright, attentive girl fresh out of business school, with long legs and no particular shortcomings, save that (in dull moments) she would hum "Penny Lane" up to twenty times a day. "We sure did right by getting her," my friend pronounced. So we paid her one hundred fifty percent of the normal company salary, gave her a five-month bonus, and granted ten days' leave in the summer and winter. So each of us had every reason to be happy, and we got along famously.
The office consisted of a dining room-kitchenette plus two additional rooms; the odd thing was that the dining-kitchen was in between the other two rooms. We drew straws, with the result that I got the room in the back and my friend got the room nearest the entry. The girl sat in the dining-kitchen doing the books, fixing drinks-on-the-rocks, and assembling roach traps, all to the tune of "Penny Lane."
I purchased a pair of file cabinets as necessary expenditures, and placed one on either side of my desk; the one on the left I piled with incoming material to be translated, the one on the right with outgoing finished translations.
And what a mixed bag of materials and clients it was. Everything from Scientific American articles on the durability of ball bearings under pressure to the 1972 All-American Cocktail Book, from William Styron essays to safety razor blurbs. Everything had a tag-affixed deadline – such and such a date – and was stacked on the left until, in due course, it was transferred to the right. Whenever I finished a translation, I'd down two fingers' of whiskey.
One of the great points about our level of translation was that there was no extra thinking involved. You'd have a coin in your left hand, slap your right hand down on your left, slide away your left hand, and the coin would remain on your right palm.
That's about all there was to it.
I'd check into the office at ten and leave at four. On Saturdays, the three of us would hit a nearby discotheque, and dance to some Santana clone between sips of J&B.
The income wasn't bad. Once the office rent, incidental expenses, the girl's salary, the part-time help's pay, and tax percentage were squared away, we'd divvy up the remaining earnings into ten shares, one share going to the company savings, five shares to my friend, and four to me. Our method was primitive – we'd lay out ten equal piles of cash on the table – but it was a lot of fun. It always reminded me of that poker game between Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson in The Cincinnati Kid.
The five-four split was pretty fair, I thought. After all, it was he who had been saddled with the actual management of the company, and he who would put up and shut up whenever I drank a bit too much whiskey. On top of which, he was struggling along with a sick wife, a threeyear-old son, and a Volkswagen that was in constant need of repair. And as if that wasn't enough, he was forever having some new problem or other.
"What about me? I've got twin girls I'm supporting," I blurted out one day. Not that it counted for much, of course – he still took his five shares and I my four.
So that's how I passed the prime of my mid-twenties. Like so many tranquil afternoons spent basking in the sun.
"No matter who wrote it," boasted the catchphrase on our three-color offset brochure, "there's nothing we can't make intelligible." Every half-year or so, when business fell into a periodic lull, out of sheer boredom the three of us would go stand in front of Shibuya Station and hand out brochures.