A mean pinball

I awoke — perhaps I had never slept — beside a machine whose language I alone could feel. I cannot see the machine, nor hear its voice, nor speak of it to anyone. Yet each day they bring me to it, the disciples, and I know what must be done.

see me

There are people, I am told, though I have no evidence of them beyond the movement of the air near my hands, the press of their presence. They whisper about me, I think. I feel it like a draft under a locked door.

feel me

They call me a wizard.

That word means nothing to me. I do not speak. I do not hear. I do not see.

Still, I am summoned.

touch me

Each morning — perhaps night, for I know no difference — they lead me through corridors that smell of rust and something sweetly rotten. The electric breath of the machine. I am placed before the table.

heal me

You don’t learn this. You don’t practice it. You are one with the machine.

pinball

A trivial game, they say. A distraction. A test of reflexes. But they do not feel what I feel when the ball is released — how it shudders down the plane of the world like a tiny iron verdict. It is not a game. It is a trial.

I get the music

The machine is alive. Not in the way animals are, or even men, but in the way of things that remember their own making. It breathes through wires. It dreams through the scores. It knows I am there. I hear it with my skin.

I get the heat

They say I’ve got a “such a supple wrist,” like it’s a trick of anatomy. There is no trick.

I climb the mountain

My hands find the flipper buttons, my feet know the stance. I lock in.

I get excitement at your feet

There is a man who called himself the Bally Table king. He stood beside me while I played.

I could smell the panic on him after ball two. Ball three? He was already a memory.

see me, feel me

I did not play to defeat him.

can’t hear those buzzers and bells

I played because the machine asked me to.

When it is before me, I lose all boundary between flesh and function. My arms are levers. My hands, fulcrums. The machine and I become one palpitating, calculating organism. The plunger releases. The ball flies. The bumpers shout their mechanical confessions. The digits fall.

I have never fallen.

I suppose this should comfort me. It does not.

They all want to know how. “How do you think he does it?”

I do not want to win. I do not choose to play.

I am compelled.

The machine demands. The silver ball falls. Every table’s a sermon. Every tilt a temptation.

right leg right arm push pull crazy flipper fingers

Perhaps there was a time before the pinball table. Perhaps I was a child once. Perhaps I had a mother. Perhaps there is a name, somewhere, written in a ledger or spoken softly by an old man in a quiet house, that belongs to me. That name is not mine anymore.

Now I am only what they call me.

The blind one.

The mute.

The deaf.

The wizard.

The game is endless. The replay comes.

I see the glory