Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [26]
There was already a customer standing at my machine. Under his faded dark-blue work clothes he wore a gaudy muffler, into which was knitted a design. He wore no overcoat. He was well built and thick-set. Black oil had collected underneath the nails of the hand holding the paper cup; perhaps he was a boilerman from a nearby building. Most of the eight-o’clock customers were white-collar workers, but after that hour, the type abruptly changed. As the fellow made place for me, he looked over his shoulder and remarked: “Hey! If we pissed in dribbles like that, we’d be diabetics.” He put the tip of his tongue between his gaping front teeth. He seemed to be drunk already, and as he swayed, his center of gravity shifted back and forth between his heels and his toes, but unfortunately there were no chairs in the place. Noisily sipping at his paper cup, he kept steadily observing my hands. “Hey, you like this saké too. What about that!” Then lowering his voice: “Come on, lend me ten yen. I’m a regular customer here. I’m not trying to get away with anything. If you think I’m lying I’ll sign an I.O.U. Just ten yen. You can’t be crooked here.”
The advantage of the place was that no one usually talked to you very much. I began to feel the effects of the saké. Good-naturedly, I took out a ten-yen piece and gave it to him. Snatching the coin, he thrust it into his ear and without a word of thanks went off toward the window where they sold specially boiled vegetables, there being no automatic machine for that.
On the tables, side by side, stood smaller vending machines, which carried over thirty kinds of peanuts, salted beans, pine seeds, dried shellfish, and even fortune slips. Besides these, there was a contrivance like a toy robot whose arms and legs had been severed that sold boiled bean curd; it was the only one in the whole country. There was usually a humming like that of a vacuum cleaner as the queue of customers was being served, but this evening, because the machine was all sold out, it was hushed and motionless. First, ten yen for pine seeds. I caught them in the palm of my hand and popped them into my mouth in a single gesture—there were only twenty or so. As I finished half of my second cup of saké, my nose suddenly began to run. Then I bought boiled whale bits that came in a three-cornered bag. I began to feel the effect of my drinking this night in the region of my forehead, and it seemed gradually to be descending, making a noise quite like that of a cat on a tin roof. When I had drunk my third cup and returned to my place, I felt somehow weightless.
A fortune machine happened to be at the place I went back to. Perhaps it was because the easing of my tension was too sudden or again it might have been that there was no need to protect my paper cup by extending my elbows as I always had to in the rush hours—anyway, I gave myself up to the whirlpool of my tipsiness that was revolving faster and faster. Suddenly I noticed that the top of the table was a synthetic contact paper printed to represent knotted wood; furthermore, I saw that the whole surface was in reality pockmarked by cigarette burns. Among the pockmarks a number seemed to be moving, and I discovered that they contained cockroaches. I was overcome by an impulse to stop time right there and limit the world to what I saw before me.
There were aluminum ashtrays here and there on the tables big enough to be bothersome. Between the tables were unsightly wastebaskets covered with galvanized iron.