“Tilt?” Bland scratching his head. “You didn’t even—”

“They’re all like that,” Tracy watering with frustration. “You try it.”

The second ball isn’t even out of the chute before Bland gets another TILT, again without having applied any English. Third ball gets stuck somehow against a solenoid and (helphelp, it’s hollering, wounded high little voice, oh I’m being electrocuted…) dingdingding, gongs and racing numbers up on the board, 400,000, 675,000 bong a million! greatest Folies-Bergères score in history and climbing, the poor spherical soul against the solenoid thrashing, clonic, horrible (yes they’re sentient all right, beings from the planetoid Katspiel, of veryvery elliptical orbit—which is to say it passed by Earth only once, a long time ago, nearly back at the grainy crepuscular Edge, and nobody knows where Katspiel is now or when, or if, it’ll be back. It’s that familiar division between return and one-shot visitation. If Katspiel had enough energy to leave the sun’s field forever, then it has left these kind round beings in eternal exile, with no chance of ever being gathered back home, doomed to masquerade as ball bearings, as steelies in a thousand marble games—to know the great thumbs of Keokuk and Puyallup, Oyster Bay, Inglewood—Danny D’Allesandro and Elmer Ferguson, Peewee Brennan and Flash Womack… where are they now? where do you think? they all got drafted, some are dead on Iwo, some gangrenous in the snow in the forest of Arden, and their thumbs, first rifle inspection in Basic, GI’d, driven deep back into childhood as little finger sweat-cams off M-1 operating handle, thumb pushing down follower still deep in breech, bolt sshhOCK! whacks thumb oh shit yes it hurts and good-by to another unbeatable and legendary thumb, gone for good back to the summer dust, bags of chuckling glass, bigfooted basset hounds, smell of steel playground slides heating in the sun), well here come these cancan girls now, Folies-Bergères maenads, moving in for the kill, big lipstick smiles around blazing choppers, some Offenbach galop come jigging in now out of the loudspeakers that are implicit in this machine’s design, long gartered legs kicking out over the agony of this sad spherical permanent AWOL, all his companions in the chute vibrating their concern and love, feeling his pain but helpless, inert without the spring, the hustler’s hand, the drunk’s masculinity problems, the vacuum hours of a gray cap and an empty lunchbox, needing these to run their own patterns down the towering coils, the deep holes with their promises of rest that only kick you wobbling out again, always at the mercy of gravity, finding now and then the infinitesimally shallow grooves of other runs, great runs (twelve heroic minutes in Virginia Beach, Fourth of July, 1927, a drunken sailor whose ship went down at Leyte Gulf… flipped up off the board, your first three-dimensional trip is always your best, when you came down again it wasn’t the same, and every time you’d pass anywhere near the micro-dimple you made when you fell, you’d get a rush… sobered, a few, having looked into the heart of the solenoid, seen the magnetic serpent and energy in its nakedness, long enough to be changed, to bring back from the writhing lines of force down in that pit an intimacy with power, with glazed badlands of soul, that set them apart forever— check out the portrait of Michael Faraday in the Tate Gallery in London, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick did once, to fill up a womanless and dreary afternoon, and wondered then how eyes of men could grow so lambent, sinister, so educated among the halls of dread and the invisible…) but now the voices of the murder-witness coquettes grow shrill, with more of a blade’s edge, the music changes key, pitching higher and higher, the ruffled buttocks bumping backward more violently, the skirts flipping redder and deeper each time, covering more of the field, eddying to blood, to furnace finale, and how’s the Katspiel Kid gonna get out of this one?