Closing Time (45 page)

"What football?"

"Newspapermen like to call it the Football. It's the unit that will launch all our planes and defensive-offensive weapons as soon as there's word of the big attack or we decide to launch our own war. That will have to happen, sooner or later."

"I know that. What happens then?"

"We go down below, the little prick and I, until the embers cool and the radiation blows away. Along with the rest who've been picked to survive."

"Who does the picking?"

"The National Bipartisan Triage Committee. They've picked themselves, of course, and their best friends."

"Who's on it?"

"Nobody's sure."

"What happens to me and my best friends?"

"You're all disposable, of course."

"That sounds fair," said Yossarian.

"It's a pity we don't have time for a game now," said Noodles. "It's something to watch when we're fighting each other for purified water. Would you like to begin one?"

"I'm meeting a lady friend in the aeronautical museum of the Smithsonian."

"'And I have a history lesson to give when he gets back from his golf. That part isn't easy."

"Do you learn a lot?" Yossarian teased.

"We both learn a lot," said Noodles, offended. "Well, Yossarian, it will soon be Thanksgiving, and we ought to talk turkey. How much will you want?"

"For what?"

"For getting me that speaking engagement. You're in for a piece, naturally. Name your price."

"Noodles," said Yossarian in censure, "I couldn't take anything. That would be a kickback. I don't want a penny."

"That sounds fair," said Noodles, and grinned. "You see what a bigger shit I am? That's one more I owe you."

"There's that one I do want," Yossarian remembered later he had requested earnestly. "I want the chaplain set free."

And at that point Noodles had turned grave. "I've tried. There are complications. They don't know what to do with him and are sorry now they ever found him. If they could dispose of him safely as radioactive waste, I think they would do it."

After the tritium, they had to see what came out of the chaplain next. Plutonium would be dreadful. And worse, lithium, that medication of choice he'd been receiving for his depression, bonded with heavy water into the lithium deuteride of the hydrogen bomb, and that could be a catastrophe.

26

Yossarian

Noodles Cook had his history lesson to prepare and Yossarian had his date at the museum. Yossarian was remembering Noodles a week later when he drew near PABT and heard the tiny steam whistles of the nearby vendors of hot peanuts. These brought back to mind the tuneful phrases of the "Forest Murmurs" in
Siegfried
, and the struggle for that magic ring of stolen gold that supposedly conferred world power on anyone who owned it-and brought doleful misery and ruin to all those who did. As he pushed through the doors to enter the bus terminal, he envisioned that Germanic hero, who was only Icelandic, at the lair of the dormant dragon that was lying there minding its own business. "Let me sleep," was the growling thanks to wretched king-god Wotan, who, in mournful, frustrated hopes of getting back that ring in gratitude, had come sneaking up to warn him of the fearless hero approaching.

Young Siegfried had his dragon to face, and Yossarian had those savage dogs below at the entrance to that mysterious underworld of basements that McBride now had license to inspect.

Yossarian, looking back, could recall no intimations then of what he came to know later in the hospital when contemplating his Rhine Journey as narrative jest, that he would start seeing double that same day and end in the hospital with his predicament with Melissa and his half-million dollars, and with the sale of a shoe.

With Germany unified and bristling with neo-Nazi violence again, he thought
The New Yorker
might jump at this mordant spoof of a Rhine Journey by a contemporary American middle-class Assyrian Siegfried of ambiguous Semitic extraction, surely a contradiction. But, inevitably, distracting visitors and doctors soon depleted him of time and that optimistic verve essential for the renewal and consummation of serious literary ambition.

Yossarian was forced to admire the veteran poise with which Melissa and even Angela could turn nondescript in the presence of his children or Frances and Patrick Beach, blending innocuously into the background or slipping noiselessly from the room. And then popping up out of nowhere entirely by coincidence, even old Sam Singer the tail gunner was there too, as a visitor to his big-boned friend with cancer, and their curious, fey friend from California, with the plump face and pinched eyes, who came seeking Yossarian out for his access to Milo. There was even a phantasmagorical brush with a gruesome war casualty in plaster and bandages called the Soldier in White, in mystical flashback to another warped delusion.

Siegfried, he contrived in analogy, had gone zipping off on foot to awaken Brunnhilde with a kiss after lifting the ring the slain dragon had earned by working like a giant to build eternal Valhalla for the immortal gods, who already knew it was twilight time or them too.

Whereas Yossarian went by taxi and had more than a kiss in mind for Melissa when he came upon her practically alone in the semidarkness of the cinema in the museum with the continuously running film of the record of aviation. But so swiftly was he swept up by the flickering ancient movies of the first aviators that he forgot entirely to interfere with her. The Lindbergh airplane on view was more astonishing to him than any space capsule. Melissa was reverent too. The Lindbergh kid of twenty-four had flown by perisrope, his view in front obstructed by an auxiliary fuel tank.

At night after dinner he felt dead from his trip and already too well acquainted with their agendas of eros to be avid for sex. If she was offended, she gave no sign. To his mild disbelief, she was asleep before he was.

Meditating in solitude on his back, he made spontaneously the gratifying decision to surprise her with a fifth of the half-million-dollar gold hoard he had picked up that day, absorbing taxes himself. He thought a gift of a hundred thousand dollars to be conserved for the future by a hardworking woman with a net worth of less than six thousand might affect her as favorably as the replacement of the two silver fillings, the eight dozen roses in a two-day period, and the silken, frilly upper-body lingerie from Saks Fifth Avenue, Victoria's Secret, and Frederick's of Hollywood. To someone like her, a windfall of a hundred thousand dollars might seem a lot.

She wore a skirt on the plane, but he had lost his desire to fool with her there. He talked more about the wedding at the bus terminal. She wanted to go, although he had not yet asked her. What he had most in mind was a few evenings apart.

For Yossarian, the prurient anticipation of unexpected lascivious treats and discoveries with Melissa was already beginning to lessen with the likelihood of their occurrence. They had grown familiar with each other too quickly-that had happened before: it happened every time-and he'd decided already they ought to start seeing less of each other. When not getting ready for bed or planning what to eat, they often had not much to do. That had happened before also; it happened every time. And doing nothing was often more bracing when done alone. He would not for anything ever take her dancing again, and he would sooner die than go to the theater. After the hundred grand, it might be wiser to separate as friends. He'd said nothing to her yet about that altruistic impulse. He'd had quixotic notions before.

And then he was stricken.

Here again was a Rhine Journey contrast.

Siegfried went out hunting and was stabbed in the back.

Yossarian set out for the bus terminal and was saved in the hospital.

He'd had his aura and his TIA, and for the next ten days he and his nurse Melissa, whom he'd thought he might see less of, were together every morning and most of every afternoon, and much of all evenings too until she left for the sleep she needed to report for work the next morning and help keep him alive by making sure that none on the medical staff did anything wrong. Not till the next-to-last day did she find out she was with child. He did not doubt the child was his.

BOOK NINE

27

PABT

The dogs were a recording, of course. McBride skipped down to the steps that set them stirring and charging, then to the next, that closed them back into silence. The fierce charge came from three, said (the official audiologists. Or from one-Yossarian reasoned- with three heads.

"Michael not here?" McBride asked at the beginning.

"Joan not coming?"

Joan, a lawyer with the Port Authority, was McBride's new lady friend. It would be funny, Yossarian had already conjectured, if
their
wedding too took place in the bus terminal. He could picture the
Lohengrin
"Wedding March" in the police station and the nuplial procession past the wall chains to the makeshift altar in a prison cell in back modified to a chapel. McBride's obstetrical cell was now a resting place for McMahon. The play cell for children was a recreation room utilized by officers on their breaks and was a hangout for those in no hurry to go home. There were checkerboards and jigsaw puzzles too, girlie magazines, a television set, and a video player on which to rerun the XXX-rated movies confiscated from pornographers, while smoking dope extorted from drug dealers, whom they also despised. McMahon had to look the other way. McBride was disillusioned again.

"Where's your friend?" timidly asked McBride.

"She has to work, Larry. She's still a nurse."

"Aren't you jealous," McBride wished to know, "of men patients and doctors?"

"All the time," admitted Yossarian, remembering adventurers like himself, and his fingers on the lace of her slip. "What do you know about those agents?"

"They're downstairs. They think I'm CIA. I'm not sure I trust them. I guess that other noise is phony too."

"What other noise? The carousel?"

"What carousel? I mean the roller-coaster."

"What roller-coaster? Larry, that train is not a roller-coaster. Are we waiting for Tommy?"

"He says it's none of his business, because it's not on his chart. He's resting again."

Yossarian found McMahon where he expected to find him, in bed in the cell in back, the television on. Captain Thomas McMahon had more or less moved all his office work and his telephone into the cell with the bed and now spent much of each working day resting. He came in on days off too. His wife had died of emphysema that year, and living alone, he would relate while smoking cigarettes, with a glass ashtray on the arm of the rocker he had found, was not much fun. He had found the rocker in a thrift shop that raised money for cancer relief. His eyes had grown sizable in his narrow face, and the bones seemed gaunt and crude, for he had been losing weight. A year or so earlier, he had lost his breath chasing a youth who had murdered someone in another part of the terminal, and he had not yet got it all back. McMahon now disliked his work but would not retire, for keeping this occupation he loathed, now that he was a widower, was all the fun he had.

"There are more of them now than there are of us," McMahon would reiterate moodily about his criminals. "And that's something you educated wise guys never thought of with that Constitution of yours. What's out there now?" he asked wearily, folding away a tabloid newspaper. He enjoyed following grotesque new crimes. He was bored working on them.

"A drunk on the floor, three druggies in chairs. Two brown, one white."

"I guess I'll have to go look." McMahon uncoiled himself and rose, panting in the effort from what could have been lassitude. He seemed now to Yossarian another good candidate for late-life depression. "You know, we don't arrest every crook we can catch," he repeated, in a repetitious lament. "We don't have the men to process them, we don't have the cells to put them in, we don't have the courts to find them guilty, and we don't have the prisons to keep them in. And that's something a lot of you people complaining all the time about cops and courts don't want to understand, not even that man from
Time
magazine who had his pocket picked and raised such a racket." McMahon paused for a chuckle. "We had to lock him up, while those thieves who'd robbed him looked on at all of us with smiles."

McMahon smiled too and told about the retired advertising executive from
Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine
who'd been left without a penny because he had given his change to some panhandlers and had then had his wallet stolen. He had his Social Security number but could not prove it was his. He went out of control when the policemen made no move to arrest any in the slick band of pickpockets. The wallet was already miles away; there would be no evidence. "We're stuck with this lousy legal system of yours that says a person is innocent until we can prove him guilty," said McMahon. "Since when, is what
we
would like to know! That's what drove him crazy, I think. There were the crooks. Here were the cops. And here was the cold fact that he couldn't do a thing about it. And he had no identification. He couldn't even prove he was him. That's when he panicked and made such a fuss we had to chain him in a wall cuff before he showed some sense and shut up. He saw what we had waiting for him in the cells, where he wouldn't have a chance of competing. Neither would we, or you. Then he could not establish his identity. That's always fun to watch. That always terrifies them. Nobody we telephoned was home. He couldn't even prove his own name. Finally"-McMahon was chuckling now-"he had to give us the name of this friend up in Orange Valley somewhere who turned out to be a big war hero in World War II. A big shot now in the army reserves. A big man in the construction industry too, he told us, and a big contributor to the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. He had a name like Berkowitz or Rabinowitz, and he talked strong on the telephone, the way you did the first time you called, Yossarian, except this guy was telling the truth and wasn't sort of full of shit, the way you were. Then this guy Singer had no money to get home. So Larry here gave him a twenty-dollar bill for a taxi, remember? And guess what. The guy paid him back. Right, Larry?"