Closing Time

7 ACACAMMA

Yossarian went crosstown by taxi to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the monthly meeting of ACACAMMA, arriving in time for the reading of an anonymous proposal for the creation of a deconstruction fund to reduce the museum from the farcical dimensions to which it had now grown preposterously. He heard the motion ruled out of order, seeing Olivia Maxon turn to fix her glowing black eyes upon him severely while he was turning to gaze with a suppressed smile at Frances Beach, who raised her eyebrows with admiring inquiry at Patrick Beach, who was looking down at his fingernails and paying no attention to Christopher Maxon, who, all jowls and chortles beside him, rolled an imaginary cigar between his fingers, wet its imaginary tip, relished the imagined fragrance he inhaled, inserted the imaginary cigar into a mouth that was real, and puffed himself deeply into a soporific delirium.

ACACAMMA, the select Adjunct Committee for the Advancement of Cultural Activities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was an exclusive body of which only thirty or forty of the seventy or eighty members had come that day to deal with the same thorny question: if and how to increase revenues from the utilization of the premises for social events like weddings, bridal showers, bridge classes, fashion shows, and birthday parties, or whether to discontinue those incongruous ceremonies altogether as crass.

The potent need as always was for money.

Introduced and tabled for more comprehensive discussion at future meetings were such topics as the art of fund-raising, the art of the deal, the artistry of publicity, the art of social climbing, the art of fashion designing, the art of the costume, the art of catering, and the art of conducting without dissension and bringing to a close on time a meeting lasting two hours that was pleasant, uneventful, unsurprising, and unnecessary.

What dissonance appeared was managed neatly.

A final anonymous proposal that all anonymous proposals no longer be given even perfunctory consideration was referred to the executive committee for consideration.

At the bar of the hotel nearby to which Yossarian escaped afterward with Patrick and Frances Beach, Frances began a gin and tonic and Patrick Beach looked bored.

"Of course I'm bored," he informed his wife with ill-tempered pride. "By now I hate the paintings as much as I hate hearing them talked about. Oh, Frances "-his sigh was the whimsical plea of a martyr-"why must you keep putting us both into settings like that one?"

"Have we anything better to do?" Frances Beach said sweetly to her husband. "It gets us invited to so many other things that are even worse, doesn't it? And it helps keep our name in the newspapers, so that people know who we are."

"It's so we know who we are."

"I think that's divine."

"I have promised to kill her if she uses that word."

"Let's get to the point," said Frances seriously.

"He could not possibly have meant it."

"Yes, he could. Did you mean it, John, when you suggested a wedding in that bus terminal?"

"Of course," lied Yossarian.

"And you think it could be done? A big one?"

"I have no doubt," he lied again.

"Olivia Maxon." Frances made a wry face. "She's giving a wedding for a stepniece or someone and wants fresh ideas for an original venue. That word is her own. The museum isn't good enough since those two Jews had their reception there and those two other Jews were named trustees. Those words are also hers. Poor Olivia just isn't able to remember when talking to me that I might be Jewish."

"Why don't you remind her?" Yossarian said.

"I don't want her to know."

All three chuckled.

"You certainly wanted me to know," chidled Patrick affectionately. "And everyone in my family."

"I was poor then," said Frances, "and an angry actress who thrived on dramatic conflict. Now that I'm married to a man of wealth, I'm loyal to his class."

"With a gift for stilted repartee," said Patrick. "Frances and I are happiest together when I'm away sailing."

"What I never could trust about high comedy," Yossarian mused, "is that people say funny things and the others don't laugh. They don't even know they are part of a comedy."

"Like us," said Patrick.

"Let's get back to our agenda," ruled Frances. "I'd like to see that wedding at your bus terminal, for Olivia's sake. For mine, I'd like it to be the disaster of the century."

"I might help with the venue," said Yossarian. "I don't guarantee the disaster."

"Olivia will pitch in. She's sure she can attract our newest President. Christopher gives plenty since he received a suspended sentence and escaped community service."

"That's a good start."

"The mayor would come."

"That would help too."

"And the cardinal will insist."

"We're holding all the cards," said Yossarian. "I'll start casing the joint if you really want me to."

"Who do you know there?" Frances was eager to learn.

"McMahon and McBride, the cop and a supervisor. McBride was a detective at the police station there-"

"They have a police station there?" Patrick exclaimed.

"That should be novel," Frances remarked. "We've got our protection on hand."

"And convenient too," said Yossarian. "They can fingerprint the guests as we all arrive. McBride should know if it can be done. We've all gotten pretty close since my son Michael was arrested there."

"For what?" Patrick demanded.

"For coming out of the subway and stepping back in when he realized he had mistaken the stop he wanted. They shackled him to a wall."

"Good God!" Patrick reacted with a look of wrath. "That must have been horrifying."

"It almost killed both of us," Yossarian said, with a nervous, depressed laugh. "Come there with me, Patrick. I'll be going to look at something new. You'll see more of what modern life is really like. It's not all just the museum."

"I'd rather be sailing."

Patrick Beach, four years older than both, had been born rich and intelligent and was early made indolent by the perception of his own intrinsic uselessness. In Britain, he had remarked to Yossarian, or in Italy or one of the few remaining republican societies with a truly aristocratic tradition, he might have sought to distinguish himself academically as a scholar in some field. But here, where intellectual endeavors generally were rated menial, he was sentenced from birth to be a dilettante or a career diplomat, which he felt was almost always the same thing. After three quick superficial marriages to three superficial women, he had finally settled permanently on Frances Rosenbaum, whose stage name was Frances Rolphe, and who understood easily his recurring attraction for solitude and study. "I inherited my money," he was fond of repeating with overdone amiability to new acquaintances to whom he felt obliged to be civil. "I did not have to work hard to be here with you."

He was not disturbed that many did not like him. But that patrician face of his could freeze and his fine lips quiver in powerless frustration with people too obtuse to discern the insult in his condescension, or too brutal to care.

"Olivia Maxon," said Frances in summation, "will agree to anything I want her to, provided I let her think the initiative was hers."

"And Christopher Maxon is always agreeable," Patrick guaranteed, "as long as you give him something to agree with. I have lunch with him frequently when I feel like eating alone."

When he felt like eating with someone, he thought often of Yossarian, who was content to chat disparagingly with him about almost everything current and to reminisce about their respective experiences in World War II, Yossarian as a decorated bombardier on an island near Italy, Patrick with the Office of War Information in Washington. Patrick was still always respectfully enchanted to be talking to a man he liked who knew how to read a newspaper as skeptically as he did and had been wounded in combat once and stabbed in the side by a native prostitute, and who had defied his immediate superiors and compelled them at the last to send him home.

Frances went on with good cheer. "Olivia will be delighted to know you're assisting. She's curious about you, John," she volunteered archly. "Here you've been separated now a whole year, and you're still not attached to another woman. I wonder about that too. You say you're afraid of living alone."

"I'm more afraid of living with someone. I just know the next one too will like movies and television news! And I'm not sure I can ever fall in love again," he observed, pining. "I'm afraid those miracles may be past."

"And how do you think a woman my age feels?"

"But what would you say," Yossarian teased, "if I said I was in love now with a nurse named Melissa MacIntosh?"

Frances welcomed this game. "I would remind you that at our age, love seldom makes it through the second weekend."

"And I'm also attracted to a shapely Australian blonde who shares her apartment, a friend named Angela Moorecock."

"I might fall in love with that one myself," ventured Patrick. "That's really her name? Moorecock?"

" Moore."

"I thought you said Moorecock."

"I said Moore, Peter."

"He did say Moorecock," said Frances, reproachfully. "And I would also accuse you of ruthlessly exploiting innocent young working girls for degenerate sexual purposes."

"She isn't innocent and she isn't so young."

"Then you might as well take up with one of our widows or divorcees. They can be manipulated but never exploited. They have lawyers and financial advisers who won't allow them to be misused by anyone but themselves."

Patrick made a face. "John, how did she talk before she went on the stage?"

"Like I do now. Some people would say you were lucky, Patrick, to be married to a woman who speaks always in epigrams."

"And gets us talking that way too."

"I find that divine."

"Oh, shit, darling," said Patrick.

"That's an obscenity, my sweet, that John would never use with both of us."

"He speaks dirty to me."

"To me too. But never to both of us."

He glanced with surprise at Yossarian. "Is that true?"

"You can bet your sweet ass," said Yossarian, laughing.

"You'll find out what you can? About our wedding at the bus terminal?"

"I'm on my way."

There were no cabs outside the hotel. Down the block was the Frank Campbell Funeral Home, a redoubtable mortuary catering to many of the city's perished notables. Two men out front, one in the sober attire of an employee, the other plebeian in appearance with a knapsack and a hiking pole, were rasping at each other in muted disagreement, but neither gave him a look as he lifted an arm and caught his taxi there.

8 Time

The structure housing the M amp; M offices, to which Yossarian would be going later that same day, was an edifice of secondary size in the Japanese real estate complex now known as Rockefeller Center. Formerly, it was the old Time-Life Building and the headquarters of the publishing company Time Incorporated, the company for which, in that same building long before, Sammy Singer had gone to work as an advertising-promotion writer shortly after giving up a teaching position in Pennsylvania rather than sign a state loyalty oath to keep a job paying just thirty-two hundred dollars a year, and where he met the woman who five years later would become his wife. Glenda was a year older than Sammy, which would have disqualified her with his mother, had his mother been still alive, and was not Jewish, which might have unsettled her even more.

And she was divorced. Glenda had three young children, one of whom, sadly, was fated to evolve into a borderline schizophrenic of weak will with an attraction to drugs and an incipient bent toward suicide, the other two surviving, it developed eventually, with potential traits marking them especially high risks for neo-plastic disorders. Sammy's only regret about the long marriage was its tragic and unexpected termination. Sammy had no strong opinions about loyalty oaths but a passionate dislike for the people advocating them. It was much the same with the Korean War and the Vietnam War: he had no profound convictions either way but developed a hostile revulsion for demagogues in both political parties who demanded threateningly that he believe as they did. He disliked Harry Truman after reveling in his victorious campaign in 1948 and did not care afterward for Eisenhower and Nixon. He cared no more for Kennedy than he had for Eisenhower and ceased voting in presidential elections. Soon he stopped voting altogether and felt smug on election days. Glenda had stopped voting years before he met her and found all campaigning candidates for public office vulgar, boring, and loathsome.

At Time magazine his starting salary was nine thousand dollars annually, just about three times more than he would have earned as a college instructor, and he had a four-week summer vacation. And at the end of his third year there he felt blessed to discover himself with a vested interest in a magnanimous company pension and profit-sharing plan. With a university education, paid for and made possible by the federal government under the GI Bill of Rights, and a position with an illustrious, nationally known firm, he was judged already at twenty-five a fabulous success by all his childhood friends from Coney Island. When he moved into Manhattan to a small apartment of his own, he ascended with charisma into the empyrean realm of the elite, and even Lew Rabinowitz eyed him with a kind of savoring envy. Sammy liked his surroundings, he liked his life. After he married, he loved his wife, he loved his stepchildren, and, though Lew refused to believe it, he did not go to bed with another woman for as long as he and Glenda were together.

In his work in the city Sammy found himself among Republicans for the first time in his life. Nothing in his background or higher education had conditioned him to expect that anyone but a bandit, sociopath, or ignoramus would ever want to be a Republican. But these coworkers weren't ignorant, and they were not bandits or sociopaths. He drank martinis at long lunches with other men and women in the company, smoked pot frequently at night for a few years with old friends and new ones, lamented the acquaintances back in Brooklyn now addicted to heroin. It seemed incredible to the Gentile men and women with whom he drank whiskey and smoked marijuana that Jewish youths in Brooklyn, New York, should be drug addicts. He brought friends from Manhattan to Brooklyn to meet them, to eat clams at Sheepshead Bay and hot dogs in Coney Island, to ride on the Parachute Jump and the Wonder Wheel and watch others brave the frightening roller-coasters. He took them to George C. Tilyou's Steeplechase Park. In daylight and darkness he went to bed with young women who used diaphragms and contraceptive vaginal foam, and he had still not gotten over that. Unlike the friends with whom he had grown up, he did not marry immediately upon returning alive from the war, but not until he was almost thirty. He was often lonely in this single life and hardly ever unhappy.

His boss was an articulate man of elegant mannerisms who had contempt for the editors, principally because he was not one of them and because he was better read than all, and he would contend eloquently at meetings that the business and promotion writers in his department were better writers than those on the editorial staff and knew much more. At that time every copywriter there, Sammy too, was writing, or talking about writing, books and articles and stories and scripts; the men and women in the art department did painting and sculpture on weekends and dreamed of exhibitions. The gadfly supervisor, of whom they all were proud, was eventually jostled into early retirement. Not long afterward he died of cancer. Right after he left the company, Sammy, a Coney Island Jew in a Protestant organization dominated by Class A suburbanites, found himself a manager of one of the smaller departments and the stepfather of three children of a Protestant woman from the Midwest of decisive emotional poise, who'd gone off one morning to have her tubes tied to avert bearing more children in a troubled marriage to a philandering husband she saw was certain to break up. She could adjust to the philandering, she'd said-and Sammy had not believed her-but detested his absence of tact. Shortly after the divorce he was stricken with melanoma. He was living still when Sammy moved in with Glenda and was alive when they married.

Sammy stayed on at Time contentedly, writing promotion copy to increase the advertising business of a magazine he appreciated only as a superior consumer product and thought little of otherwise. He liked the work, he liked the people he worked with, he enjoyed the increasingly good salary and the comfortable knowledge that he was economically secure. His involvement with the international editions of the magazines Time and Life gave him opportunities to travel and brought him into lasting friendships with people in other countries. Like others of his generation, he was brought up with the practical ideal that the best work to do was the best work to be found.

He stayed on until he too was nudged into early retirement, at the age of sixty-three, by a thriving company electing to thrive more abundantly by reducing staff and eliminating aging dead-wood like himself, and he departed serendipitously with a guaranteed good income for the rest of his life from the organization's liberal pension and profit-sharing plan, plus three thousand shares of company stock valued at more than a hundred dollars each, and with generous hospitalization and medical insurance benefits that took care of just about all the bills incurred by Glenda in her last illness and that would cover him for his lifetime and, had they still been young enough to qualify, the two surviving stepchildren until they reached nineteen or had completed college.

9 PABT

The luggage hustlers at curbside stared through him icily when he alighted without any. Inside the bus terminal things looked normal. Travelers streamed toward goals, those departing descending to buses below that carried them everywhere, or upward to the second, third, and fourth levels to buses that carried them away everywhere else.

"I'll do you for a nickel, mister," a thin boy of about fourteen spoke up to him bashfully.

A nickel was five dollars, and Yossarian did not have the heart to tell the lad that he did not think he was worth it. "I'll do you for a nickel, mister," said a flat-chested girl immediately beyond, a few years older but lacking the ballooning contours of budding female maturity, while a stout woman with painted lids and rouged cheeks and dimpled faces of fat around the chubby knees exposed by her tight skirt looked on from ahead, laughing to herself.

"I'll lick your balls," the woman proposed while Yossarian walked by, and rolled her eyes coquettishly. "We can do it in the emergency stairwell."

Now he tensed with outrage. I am sixty-eight, he said to himself. What was there about him that gave these people the notion he had come to the terminal to be done or have his balls licked? Where the fuck was McMahon?

Police Captain Thomas McMahon of the Port Authority police force was inside the police station with civilian deputy director Lawrence McBride, watching Michael Yossarian draw with a pencil on the back of a broad sheet of paper, looking on with that special reverence some people of inexperience bestow upon the ordinary skills of the artistic performer which they themselves lack. Yossarian could have told them that Michael probably would stop before finishing his sketch and leave it behind. Michael tended not to finish things and prudently did not start many.

He was busy executing a horrified picture of himself in the wall cuff to which he had still been chained when Yossarian had come charging into the police station the day he was arrested. With looping strokes he had transformed the rectangular modes of the prison cells into a vertical pit of sludge with spinning sides into which one peered slantwise, and in which the stiff human stick figure of himself he had just outlined stood engulfed and forlorn.

"You leave him right where he is!" Yossarian had thundered on the telephone half an hour before to the officer who had called to establish identification because the receptionist at the architectural firm for which Michael was doing elevations did not know he'd been taken on for a freelance assignment. "Don't you dare put him in a cell!"

"One minute, sir, one minute, sir!" broke in the offended cop, in a high-pitched outcry of objection. "I'm calling to establish identity. We have our procedures."

"You go fuck your procedures!" Yossarian commanded. "Do you understand me?" He was mad enough and scared enough and felt helpless enough to kill. "You do what I say or I'll have your ass!" he bellowed roughly, with the belief that he meant it.

"Hey, hey, hey, one minute, buddy, hey, one minute, buddy!" The young cop was screaming now in a frenzy almost hysterical. "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

"I am Major John Yossarian of the M amp; M Pentagon Air Force Project," Yossarian replied in crisp, stern tones. "You insolent cocksucker. Where's your superior?"

"Captain McMahon here," said an older man, with emotionless surprise. "What's your trouble, sir?"

"This is Major John Yossarian of the M amp; M Pentagon Air Force Project, Captain. You've got my son there. I don't want him touched, I don't want him moved, I don't want him put near anyone who might harm him. And that includes your cops. Do we understand each other?"

"I understand you," McMahon came back coolly. "But I don't think you understand me. Who did you say this is?"

"John Yossarian, Major John Yossarian. And if you tie me up on this any longer it will be your ass too. I'll be there in six minutes."

To the taxi driver he gave a hundred-dollar bill and said respectfully, hearing his heart pound: "Please pass every traffic light you can pass safely. If you're stopped by a cop I'll give you another hundred and go the rest of the way on foot. I've got a child in trouble."

That the child was past thirty-seven did not matter. That he was defenseless did.

But Michael was still safe, handcuffed to the wall on a chain as though he would founder to the floor if he did not have that chain for support, and he was white as a ghost.

The station was in an uproar. People were moving and shouting everywhere. The cages were swarming with arms and sweaty faces and with gleaming eyes and mouths, the hallway too, the air stank of everything, and the officers and prison guards, sweating and swarming all over too, labored powerfully in picking, pulling, shoving, and heaving prisoners to be steered outside into vans and trucked downtown for delivery into other hands. Of all who were there, only Michael and Yossarian showed awareness of anything uncommon. Even the prisoners seemed ideally acclimated to the turbulent environment and vigorous procedures. Many were bored, others were amused and contemptuous, some ranted crazily. Several young women were hooting with laughter and shrieking obscenities brazenly in taunting debauchery, baiting and incensing the frustrated guards, who had to endure and cope with them without retaliating.

McMahon and the desk sergeant were awaiting him with stony faces.

"Captain-you him?" Yossarian began, talking directly into McMahon's light-blue, steely eyes with a hard-boiled stare of his own. "Get used to the idea! You're not going to put him into one of those cells. And I don't want him in a van with those others either. A squad car is all right, but I'll want to go with him. If you like, I'll hire a private car, and you can put some officers in with us."

McMahon listened with folded arms. "Is that right?" he said quietly. He was slim, straight, and more than six feet tall, with a bony face with tiny features, and the crests of his high cheekbones were spotted pink with a faint efflorescence, as though in savoring anticipation of the conflict at hand. "Tell me again, sir. Who did you say you were?"

"Major John Yossarian. I'm at work on the M amp; M Pentagon Air Force Project."

"And you think that makes your son an exception?"

"He is an exception."

"Is he?"

"Are you blind?" Yossarian exploded. "Take a good look, for Christ sakes. He's the only one here with a dry crotch and a dry nose. He's the only one here who's white."

"No, he's not, Captain," meekly corrected the sergeant. "We've got two other Caucasians we're holding in back who beat up a cop by mistake. They were looking for money."

Everyone around was contemplating Yossarian now as though he were something bizarre. And when he finally appreciated why, that he was poised before them with his arms raised in an asinine prizefighter's stance, as though ready to punch, he wanted to whimper in ironic woe. He had forgotten his age. Michael too had been regarding him with astonishment.

And at just that point of unnerving self-discovery, McBride wandered up and, in a gentle manner both firm and conciliatory, asked: "What's up, guys?"

Yossarian saw a sturdy man of middle height with a flushed face and a polyester suit of vapid light gray, with a broad chest that bellied outward and down so that from his neck to his waist he seemed a bulwark.

"Who the fuck are you?" sighed Yossarian in despair.

McBride replied softly, with the fearless confidence of a man competent at riot control. "Hello. I'm Deputy Supervisor Lawrence McBride of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Hello, Tommy. Something going on?"

"He thinks he's big," said McMahon. "He says he's a major. And he thinks he can tell us what to do."

"Major Yossarian," Yossarian introduced himself. "He's got my son here, Mr. McBride, chained to that wall."

"He's been arrested," said McBride pleasantly. "What would you want them to do with him?"

"I want them to leave him where he is until we decide what we will do. That's all. He has no criminal record." To the police guard nearest Michael, Yossarian barked an order. "Unlock him now. Please do that right now."

McMahon pondered a moment and signaled permission.

Yossarian resumed amicably. "Tell us where you want him to be. We're not running away. I don't want trouble. Should I hire that car? Am I talking too much?"

Michael was aggrieved. "They never even read me my right to be silent."

"They probably didn't ask you to say anything," McBride explained. "Did they?"

"And the handcuffs hurt like hell! Not that one. The real handcuffs, God damn it. That's brutality."

"Tommy, what's he charged with?" asked McBride.

McMahon hung his head. "Beating the subway fare."

"Oh, shit, Tommy," said McBride, entreating.

"Where's Gonzales?" McMahon asked the sergeant.

"That's the guy who grabbed me," Michael called out.

The sergeant blushed. "Back at the subway exit, Captain, making his quota."

"I thought they had a fucking quota!" Michael shouted.

"Major, can't you keep your son quiet while we settle this?" asked McMahon, begging a favor.

"Tommy," said McBride, "couldn't you just give him a summons and release him on a DTA? We know he'll appear."

"What did you think we were going to do, Larry?" McMahon replied. He appealed to Yossarian as though they were allies. "You hear that, Major? I'm a captain, he was a sergeant, and now he's telling me how to handle my business. Sir, are you really a major?"

"Retired," admitted Yossarian. He found the business card he wanted of the several he carried. "My card, Captain. And one for you, Mr. McBride-McBride, is it?-in case I can return the favor. You've been a godsend."

"Here's mine, Major," said McBride, and gave a second one to Michael. "And one for you too, in case you're ever in trouble here again."

Michael was moping as they walked out with McBride. "It's a good thing I've still got you to look after me, isn't it?" he accused sullenly. Yossarian shrugged. "I feel like such a fucking weakling now."

McBride intervened. "Hey, you did the right thing, kiddo." He paused for a chuckle, laughed louder. "How could you convince us you'd break our backs and legs, when we had you in handcuffs?"

"Is that what I did?" said Yossarian with fright.

McBride laughed again. "Where's the credibility? That right, Major Yossarian?"

"Call me Yo-Yo, for God's sake," said Yossarian jovially. "I must have been forgetting my age."

"You sure were," charged Michael. "I was scared, damn it. And you guys are laughing. You were a champ, Pop," he continued sardonically. "Me, I don't even have a loud voice. Before when I was stopped by that cop, my hands shook so much he was afraid I was having a heart attack and almost let me go."

"It's the way we are, Michael, when we're angry or scared. I get crazy and talk too much."

"I couldn't even give them my right name so they'd believe me. And when the hell were you really ever a major?"

"Want a business card?" Yossarian snickered slyly and turned to McBride. "For about a minute and a half," he explained. "They gave me a temporary boost near the end because they didn't know what else to do with me. Then they shipped me home, brought me back to my permanent grade, and gave me my honorable discharge. I had the medals, I had the points, I even had my Purple Heart."

"You were wounded?" cried McBride.

"Yeah, and crazy too," replied Michael, proudly. "Another time he went walking around naked."

"You walked around naked?" cried McBride.

"And they gave him a medal," boasted Michael, completely at ease now. "A medal for bravery."

"You got a medal for bravery?" cried McBride.

"And couldn't pin it on."

"Because he was naked?"

"Still naked."

"Weren't you embarrassed? Didn't they do anything?"

"He was crazy."

"What'd you get the medal for, Major? How'd you get the Purple Heart? Why'd you walk around naked?"

"Stop calling me Major, Mr. McBride," said Yossarian, who had no wish to talk now about the waist gunner from the South who'd been killed over Avignon and the small tail gunner Sam Singer from Coney Island who kept fainting away each time he came to and saw the waist gunner dying and Yossarian throwing up all over himself as he worked with bandages and tried vainly to save the dying man. It was sometimes funny to him since in just those gruesome anecdotal aspects. The wounded waist gunner was cold and in pain, and Yossarian could find nothing to do that would warm him up. Every time Singer revived, he opened his eyes on something else Yossarian was busy with that made him faint away again: retching, wrapping up dead flesh, wielding scissors. The dying gunner was freezing to death on the floor in a patch of Mediterranean sunlight, Sam Singer kept fainting, and Yossarian had taken off all his clothes because the sight of the vomit and blood on his flight uniform made him want to vomit some more and to feel with nauseated certitude that he would never want to have to wear any kind of uniform ever again, not ever, and by the time they landed, the medics were not sure which one of the three to take into the ambulance first. "Let's talk about you."

Yossarian now knew that McBride's wife had left him-transformed almost overnight into a wrathful figure of pure fury by an inner rage he had never guessed existed-and that he had been living alone since his daughter had moved to California with a boyfriend to work as a physical therapist. To McBride, the unexpected breakup of his marriage was one more heartrending cruelty he could not puzzle out in a world he saw seething barbarously with multitudes of others. Former detective sergeant Larry McBride of the Port Authority police force was fifty and had the boyish, chubby face of an introspective seraph in hard times. As a cop he had never been able to outgrow the sympathy he suffered for every type of victim he encountered-even now his knowledge of the one-legged woman living in the terminal tormented him- and always after wrapping up a case, to his racking emotional detriment, he would begin suffering compassion for the criminals too, no matter how hardened, bestial, or obtuse, no matter how vicious the crime. He would. see them all pityingly, as they'd been as children. When the opportunity arose to retire on a full pension and take the executive position at good salary at the bus terminal -in which, in fact, as one kind of guardian or another, he had by now spent his entire working life-he seized it joyfully.

The end of a marriage he had thought satisfactory was a blow from which it seemed at first he did not think he would recover.

Now, while Michael prepared to wait, Yossarian wondered what new thing McBride wanted to show him.

"You tell me," McBride answered mysteriously.

The time before, he had unveiled his plans for a maternity cell, for converting one of the two auxiliary prison cages in the rear, for which there never had been need, into a room for mothers of unwanted babies who most generally disposed of the newborn infants in alleys and hallways or threw them away into wastebas-kets, garbage cans, and Dumpsters. He had already moved in at his own expense some pieces of furniture from his apartment for which he no longer had need. Yossarian nodded as he listened, sucking his cheeks inward a bit, and then he nodded some more. Nobody wanted those babies, he could have told him, and nobody cared for those mothers, who were rendering a service to the community by throwing them away.

For the other jail cell, McBride resumed, he had in mind a sort of pediatric day care center for the several little kids always living in the bus terminal, to afford their mothers a clean, safe place in which to place their offspring while they journeyed outside to panhandle and hustle for drugs and booze and food, and also for the runaway kids who kept showing up in this heart of the city until they made their good connections with a satisfactory drug dealer or pimp.

Yossarian broke in regretfully.

"McBride?"

"You think I'm nuts?" McBride rushed on defensively. "I know Tommy thinks I'm nuts. But we could have mobiles and stuffed toys and coloring books for the little ones. And for the older ones television sets and video games, maybe computers, sure, even word processors, couldn't they learn that?"

"McBride?" repeated Yossarian.

"Yossarian?" McBride had adopted unconsciously a number of Yossarian's speaking traits.

"Mobiles and word processors for kids who want drugs and sex?"

"Just while they're hanging around making their contacts. They'd be safer here than anywhere else, wouldn't they? What's wrong? Yossarian, what's wrong?"

Yossarian sighed wearily, feeling undone. "You're talking about a facility in a police station for aspiring child prostitutes? Larry, the public would scream bloody murder. So would I."

"What would you do that's better? They come here anyway, don't they?"

From the fact that McBride had been silent since on the subject of these humanitarian undertakings, Yossarian surmised they'd been stalled or forbidden.

Today he had some new surprise in store, and Yossarian went outside with him into the capacious structure of the bus terminal, where activities of all varieties had picked up bullishly. People were moving more quickly, and there were many more of them, traveling automatically like spirits who would have chosen a different course than the ones they were following had they found themselves free to decide. So many were eating as they walked, dripping crumbs and wrappers-candy bars, apples, hot dogs, pizzas, sandwiches, potato chips. The hustlers were at work at their assorted specialties, the best of them animated, with sharp eyes fishing around shrewdly for targets of opportunity, others blundering about crudely in search of just about anything, and still others, male and female, white and black, floating in blank-eyed, wistful stupors and looking less like predators than crippled prey.

"Pickpockets," McBride said, with a signal of his chin toward a group of three men and two girls, all of good appearance, and of Latin American countenance. "They're better trained than we are. They even know more law. Look."

A jolly group of transvestites moved up by escalator to the floor above, the faces glistening with a cosmetic sheen, all androgynous and vain in face and attire, the entire bunch as frisky and flirtatious as pubescent girl scouts high on hormones.

With McBride steering him, they passed the empty space below the pillars supporting the mezzanine floor of the observation bubble overhead with its staff of several employees doing drugs while monitoring the five dozen video screens in the Communications Control Center of the terminal. The hundreds of azure-eyed, dumb video cameras poked their flat snouts into every cranny on every level of the rambling, seven-story complex bestriding two city blocks, poking without blushing even into the men's toilets and the notorious emergency stairwells into which most of those living in the terminal crept at night for sleep and friendship and apathetic intercourse. Milo and Wintergreen were already thinking of the Communications Control Center converted into a lucrative enterprise by increasing the number of screens and selling units of time to eager spectators and players, who would replace the Port Authority employees and their salaries and their costly medical plans and vacation and retirement plans. People would flock to watch, to play cop and Peeping Tom. They could call it "The Real Thing." When crime slackened, they would present fakes and that way guarantee enough sex and violence to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty paying crowds.

They could book in Japanese tour groups. Sooner or later they could spin the whole thing off to a Japanese motion picture company.

McBride moved past a newsstand run by Indians, with newspapers and colorful periodicals like Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine headlining the collapse of Russian socialism, the grandeur of American capitalism, and the latest business bankruptcy, unemployment figures, and sale of another national mercantile landmark to foreigners, and they came to the entrance of one of the emergency stairwells. Yossarian did not want to take that tour again.

"Just one floor," promised McBride.

"Something awful?"

"I wouldn't do that."

Loafing voices echoed mellifluously from above. The stairway was practically empty, the floor almost tidy. But the odors in this civilization were strong, the air reeking of smoke and unwashed bodies and their waste, a stench of rot and degradation that was violently disgusting and vilely intolerable to all but the mass producing it daily. By midnight there was scarcely a charmed body with enough living space to be free of another body more dissipated and fetid tumbled against it. People squabbled. There were shouts, quarrels, stabbings, burns, sex, drugs, drinking, and breaking glass; by morning there were casualties and an accumulation of filth of all sorts save industrial waste. There was no water or toilet. Garbage was not collected until morning, when the locals roused and took themselves to the sinks and the toilets in the rest rooms in sanitary preparation for the day's work ahead and, despite posted bans, to bathe and do laundry in the washbasins.

By this hour, the maintenance men had been through with their hoses and face masks to clean away the messes of excrement, trash, and garbage left the night before, the charred matchsticks and empty vials from dope, the soda cans, needles, wine bottles, and used condoms and old Band-Aids. The astringent smell of caustic disinfectant hung ineradicably in the air like the carbolic harbinger of a remorseless decay.

McBride took the staircase down past two raffish men of insolent and bored demeanor who were smoking marijuana and drinking wine and fell silent in tacit approbation after sizing him up and acknowledging with a kind of objective acceptance the latent authority and prowess he exuded. Near the bottom of the steps a solitary man slept with his back to the banister.

They passed to the concrete landing without disturbing him and tiptoed carefully around the one-legged woman being raped by a man with scrawny blanched buttocks and a livid scrotum not many yards from a large, brown-skinned woman who had taken off her bloomers and her skirt and was swabbing her backside and her armpits with a few damp towels she had laid out on newspapers with some folded dry ones near two brown shopping bags. She had splotchy freckles about her puffy eyes and bore scarred, tar-colored moles on her neck and back that made him think of melanoma. She stared at each in turn with a separate nod of matter-of-fact amity. Her pendulous breasts in a pink chemise were huge and her armpits were dark and bushy. Yossanan did not want to look down at her exposed vaginal area. He did not know who she was, but he knew he had not one thing he wanted to talk to her about.

On the last flight down to the sub-level outside, there sat only a skinny blonde woman with a bruised eye and a tattered red sweater, dreamily engaged in sewing a rip in a dirty white blouse. At the bottom, where the staircase came to an end facing an exit door to the street, someone had already shit in a corner. They looked away and walked looking down, as though in dire misgiving of a step into something sinful. Instead of heading outside, McBride turned beneath the staircase and proceeded into heavy shadows almost to the end of this lowest landing, until he came to a colorless door that Yossarian would have supposed invisible.

He switched on a light that was weak and yellow. The small room into which they stepped held only a metal closet with rusting doors on broken hinges that stood against a wall. McBride forced these doors apart and stepped inside the wasted relic. It had no back. He located a latch and pushed open an entranceway built into the wall itself.

"An addict found it," he mumbled rapidly. "I let him believe he was imagining it. Go on in."

Yossarian gasped with surprise in a cramped vestibule blocked by a wide fire door a few feet in front of his face. The slick surface was military green and painted at eye level with a warning in bold letters that could not be overlooked by anyone able to read.

EMERGENCY ENTRANCE

KEEP OUT

VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT

The sturdy door seemed new, the letters fresh on the unmarred surface.

"Go on in. It's what I want to show you."

"I'm not allowed."

"Neither am I."

"Where's the key?"

"Where's the lock?" McBride grmned victoriously, his head cocked. "Go on."

The handle turned and the massive door slid open as though leveraged by counterweights and pivoting on noiseless bearings.

"They make it easy for people to get in, don't they?" said Yossarian softly.

McBride hung back, forcing Yossarian through first. Yossarian recoiled as he discovered himself on a tiny landing of wrought iron near the roof of a tunnel that seemed greatly higher than it was because of the dizzying angle downward of the staircase on which he was standing. Instinctively, he grasped the handrail. Here the flights of steps were small and reversed direction abruptly around an elliptical tiny platform of metal grillwork, where the next flight turned sharply back beneath him and dropped away out of sight at that same precipitous angle of descent. He could not see where the staircase came to an end in that abyss of a basement, whose dark floor seemed newly paved with some kind of rubberized compound. Looking down through the wrought-iron pattern of winding vine leaves that seemed to mock its own heavy composition, he was all at once reminded ridiculously of one of those vertical slides at an old-fashioned amusement park in which one embarked supine into darkness inside a cylindrical pillar with arms folded and went spiraling down with increasing momentum, to be expelled at last into a flat round arena of polished wood with disks rotating in contrary directions that bore him this way and that way for the pleasure of idle watchers until ultimately spilling him aside onto the stationary embankment that ringed the circular area of that particular attraction. The one he remembered best was named the Human Pool Table in the old George C. Tilyou Steeplechase Park in Coney Island. There, an iron handrail circling the viewing enclosure had been rigged electrically to administer stinging shocks of harmless voltage to unwary patrons whenever one of the red-suited attendants in green jockey caps thought the timing appropriate. That sudden onrush of tiny prickling needles bursting into the hands and arms was intolerable and memorable, and all who observed that half second of fright and panicked embarrassment of others laughed; the victims laughed too, afterward. There was laughter bursting from loudspeakers as well. Not many blocks away were freak shows featuring people with small heads.

Yossarian was standing now near the top of something nearly two stories high, a strange subterranean thoroughfare of impressive breadth and no discernible use, with a vaulted ceiling insulated with scored and pitted peach-colored acoustical tiles and outlined with slender borders of apple green. The high, flat walls of stone were of dark-reddish hue. These were tiled in white at the base like those of the underground stations of the subway system. The strange passageway was as wide as a city avenue, without curbs or sidewalks. It could have served as a train station too, except that he saw no rails or platforms. Then he spied near the bottom on the other side a long reflecting arrow in reel that reminded him one moment of a fiery penis and the next of a flaming missile that shot vividly to the left and then dipped downward perpendicularly toward words in black that proclaimed: Sub-Basements A-Z Above the arrow, where the white tiling ended, and perhaps thirty feet to the right, he recognized a large stenciled letter S of luminescent amber on a square of glossy black. Obviously, they were inside an old bomb shelter, he knew, until he spotted near the ground a door of metal of the same olive-drab shade as on the one behind him, with writing on it in white he could not believe, even after he had donned his trifocals to see into the distance more clearly.

DANGER NO EXPLOSIVES

"That could mean at least two different things, couldn't it?" he said.

McBride nodded grimly. "That's what I thought too." Unexpectedly, he let out a laugh, as though proud of himself. "Now look at that plaque."

"What plaque?"

"In dark letters. It's set into the wall near the doorway and says that a man named Kilroy was here."

Yossarian gave McBride a searching look. "Kilroy? It says that? Kilroy was here?"

"You know Kilroy?"

"I was in the army with Kilroy," said Yossarian.

"Maybe it's not the same Kilroy."

"He's the one."

"Overseas?"

"Everywhere. Shit, I ought to know him by now. Everywhere I was stationed, he was there too. You always saw it written on a wall. When I was arrested and put in the stockade for a week, he'd been locked up there also. In college after the war, when I went into the library stacks, he'd already been there."

"Could you find him for me?"

"I never met him. I never met anyone who saw him."

"I could find him," said McBride. "Through the Freedom of Information Act. Once I get his Social Security number I can nail him cold. Will you come talk to him with me?"

"Is he still alive?"

"Why wouldn't he be alive?" asked McBride, who was only fifty. "I want to know more about this, I want to know what he was doing here. I want to know what the hell this is."

"How far down does all this go?"

"I don't know. It's not on the plans."

"Why does it bother you?"

"I'm still a detective, I guess. Go down a few steps," McBride instructed next. "Try one more."

Yossarian froze when he heard the noise begin. It was an animal, the heaving ire of something live, the ominous burring of some dangerous beast disturbed, a rumble welling in smoldering stages into an elongated snarling. Next came growling, guttural and deadly, and an agitated shudder of awakened power, and the movement of veering limbs striding about underneath where he could not see. Then a second animal joined in; perhaps there were three.

"Go down," whispered McBride, "one more step." Yossarian shook his head. McBride nudged. On tiptoe Yossarian touched his foot down one more step and heard the jangling commence, as though of metal scraping on stone and of metal jingling against metal, and those noises were building swiftly toward a demonic climax of some calamitous sort, and all at once, as though without warning, although the warnings had been cumulative and unremitting, there was the blowout, the explosion, the ferocious and petrifying bedlam of piercing barks and deafening roars and a tumultuous charge of forceful paws pounding forward with unleashed savagery and then mercifully brought to a halt in a quaking crash of chains that made him jump with fright and afterward went reverberating like a substance of great ballistic bulk deep into the contracting gloom at both ends of the underground chamber in which they were standing. The fierce rumpus below turned more savage still with the incensed raging of the beasts at the rugged restraints against which they were now tearing and snapping with all their supernatural might. They growled and they roared and they snarled and they howled. And Yossarian kept straining his ears in a frantic irrational desire to hear more. He knew he would never be able to move again. The instant he could move, he stepped up backward in noiseless motion, hardly breathing, until he stood on the landing alongside McBride, where he took McBride's arm and held on. He was icy and he knew he was sweating. He had the giddy fear his heart was going to convulse and stop, that an artery in his head would split. He knew he could think of eight other ways he might die on the spot, if he did not die before he could list them. The raw fury in the fierce passions below seemed gradually to flag. The untamed monsters understood they had missed him, and he listened with relief to the invisible dangers subsiding and to whatever carnivorous forms that drew breath below receding with chains dragging to the dark lairs from which they had sprung. At last there was silence, the last tinkling noises melting away into a tone as delicate as a chime and dissolving into a fading resonance that seemed incongruously to be the pumped, haunting carnival music of some outlying, solitary carousel, and this receded into silence too.

He thought he knew now how it felt to be torn to pieces. He trembled.

"What do you make of it?" McBride asked, in an undertone. His lips were white. "They're always there; that happens every time you touch that step."

"It's recorded," said Yossarian.

For the moment, McBride was speechless. "Are you sure?"

"No," said Yossarian, surprised himself by the spontaneous insight he had just expressed. "But it's just too perfect. Isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

Yossarian did not want to talk now about Dante, Cerberus, Virgil, or Charon, or the rivers Acheron and Styx. "It might be there just to scare us away."

"It sure scared hell out of that drug addict, I can tell you," said McBride. "He was sure he was hallucinating. I let everyone but Tommy think that he was."

Then they heard the new noise.

"You hear that?" said McBride.

Yossarian heard the wheels turning and looked to the base of the wall opposite. Somewhere beyond it was the muffled rolling of wheels on rails, muted by distance and barriers.

"The subway?"

McBride shook his head. "That's too far. What would you say," he continued speculatively, "to a roller-coaster?"

"Are you crazy?"

"It could be a recording too, couldn't it?" insisted McBride. "Why is that crazy?"

"Because it's not a roller-coaster."

"How do you know?"

"I think I can tell. Stop playing detective."

"When's the last time you rode on one?"

"A million years ago. But it's too steady. There's no acceleration. What more do you want? I'm going to laugh. Let's call it a train," continued Yossarian, as the vehicle came abreast and rolled away to the left. It might have been the Metroliner going down from Boston to Washington, but McBride would know that. And when he considered a roller-coaster, he did start to laugh, for he remembered that he had already lived much longer than he ever thought he would.

He stopped laughing when he saw the catwalk and railing running along the wall about three feet from the bottom and disappearing into the white-misted, golden obscurity of the enclosures on both sides.

"Was that down there all the time?" He was puzzled. "I thought I was hallucinating when I noticed it just now."

"It's been there," said McBride.

"Then I must have been hallucinating when I imagined it wasn't. Let's get the hell out."

"I want to go down there," said McBride.

"I won't go with you," Yossarian told him. He had never liked surprises.

"Aren't you curious?"

"I'm afraid of the dogs."

"You said," said McBride, "it was only a recording."

"That might scare me more. Go with Tom. That's his business."

"It's not on Tommy's beat. I'm not even supposed to be here," McBride admitted. "I'm supposed to enforce these restrictions, not violate them. Notice anything now?" he added, as they turned back up the stairs.

On the inside of the metal door Yossarian now saw two solid locks, one spring loaded, the other dead bolt. And above the locks, under a rectangle of lacquer, he saw a block of white printing on a scarlet background framed in a thin margin of silver, that read: EMERGENCY EXIT NO ADMITTANCE THIS DOOR MUST BE LOCKED AND BOLTED WHEN IN USE Yossarian scratched his head. "From this side it looks like they want to keep people out, don't they?"

"Or in?"

He would guess, he guessed, as they proceeded outside, that it was an old bomb shelter that was not on the old plans. He could not explain the signs, he admitted, as McBride closed the fire door quietly and conscientiously switched off the electric light to leave everything the same as when they had come. The dogs, the sound of the killer guard dogs? "To scare people out, I guess, like that addict, and you and me. Why did you want me to see it?"

"To let you know. You seem to know everything."

"I don't know this one."

"And you're someone I trust."

They could tell from voices higher up that the stairwell had crowded considerably. They heard clearly the bawdy laughter, the languorous salutes of greeting and recognition, the obscenities, they could smell the smoke of matches and dope and scorched newspapers, they heard a glass bottle break, they heard the splash one floor up of a man or a woman urinating, and they smelled that too. At the top of the lowest flight, they saw the one-legged woman, who was white, drinking wine with a man and two women who were black. Her expression was blank and she talked in a daze, crushing pink underwear in a hand that lay restfully in her lap. Her wooden crutches, which were old and chipped and splintered and spotted, were lying on the staircase at her hip.

"She gets a wheelchair," McBride had already explained, "and someone steals it. Then friends steal one from someone else. Then someone steals that one."

This time McBride took the exit door, and Yossarian found himself on the sidewalk passing buses on the sub-level driving ramps, where the exploding exhausts and grinding engines were noisier and the air was stinking with diesel fumes and the smell of hot rubber, and they walked past boarding stations with longdistance buses for El Paso and Saint Paul, with connections continuing far up into Canada and down all the way through Mexico into Central America.

McBride took an entrepreneur's gratification in the operational efficiency of the bus terminal: the figures of almost five hundred boarding gates, sixty-eight hundred buses, and nearly two hundred thousand passengers in and out every normal working day tripped from his tongue fluently. The work still went on, he was speedy to assert, the terminal functioned, and that was the point, wasn't it?

Yossarian wasn't sure.

Now they rode by escalator back to the main floor. Passing the Communications Control Center, they glanced uneasily at the flocks of male and female hookers already congregating in the central areas of prostitution, where more and more would continue crowding in crafty and pathetic legions like molecules of matter in human form drawn insensibly to a central mass from which they could not want to free themselves. They strode past a shrunken black woman who stood near a post between state-authorized Lottery and Lotto stands in unlaced sneakers and held out a soiled paper cup while chanting tunelessly, "Fifteen cents? Gimrne fifteen cents? Any food? Used food?" A gray-haired bloated woman in a green tam-o'-shanter and green sweater and skirt, with sores on her splotched legs, was singing an Irish song off-key blissfully in a cracked voice near a filthy, sleeping teenager on the floor and a wild-eyed, slender, chocolate-colored tall man who was spotlessly clean and seemed all bones, preaching Christian salvation in a Caribbean accent to a stout black woman who nodded and a skinny white Southerner with closed eyes who kept breaking in with calls of thrilled affirmation. As they drew near the police station, Yossarian remembered with malicious caprice his wish to find out something special from his capable guide.

"McBride?"

"Yossarian?"

"I was talking to some friends. They're thinking of holding a wedding here in the terminal."

McBride flushed generously. "Sure, hey, that's a good idea. Yeah, Yo-Yo. I could pitch in and help. We could make them a nice wedding, I think we could. I've still got that empty cell there for the kids. We could turn that into the chapel. And of course, right next door, ahem, I've still got the bed, for the honeymoon night. We could give them a big wedding breakfast in one of the food shops and maybe buy them some lottery tickets as a good-luck present. What's funny? Why couldn't they use it?"

It took Yossarian a minute to stop laughing. "No, Larry, no," he explained. "I'm talking about a big wedding, gigantic, high society, hundreds of guests, limousines at the bus ramps, newspapermen and cameras, a dance floor with a big band, maybe two dance floors and two bands."

"Are you crazy, Yo-Yo?" Now McBride was the one who was chuckling. "The commissioners would never allow it!"

"These people know the commissioners. They'd be there as guests. And the mayor and the cardinal, maybe even the new President. Secret Service men and a hundred police."

"If you had the President we'd be allowed to go all the way down there to look. The Secret Service would want that."

"Sure, you would like that too. It would be the wedding of the year. Your terminal would be famous."

"You'd have to clear out the people! Stop all the buses!"

"Nah." Yossarian shook his head. "The buses and crowds could be part of the entertainment. It would get in the newspapers. Maybe a picture inside with you and McMahon, if I pose you right."

"Hundreds of guests?" McBride restated shrilly. "A band and a dance floor? Limousines too?"

"Maybe fifteen hundred! They could use your bus ramps and park upstairs in your garages. And caterers and florists, waiters and bartenders. They could go riding on the escalators, in time to the music. I could talk to the orchestras."

"That could not be done!" McBride declared. "Everything would go wrong. It would be a catastrophe."

"Fine," said Yossarian. "Then I'll want to go ahead. Check it out for me, will you, please? Get out of my way!"

He snapped this last out at an oily Hispanic man just ahead who was flashing a stolen American Express credit card at him seductively with a smile of insinuating and insulting familiarity and caroling happily, "Just stolen, just stolen. Don't leave home without it. You can check it out, check it out."

Inside the police station, there were no reports of any new dead babies, the officer at the desk volunteered to McBride with a jocular impertinence.

"And no live ones either."

"I hate that guy," McBride muttered, coloring uncomfortably. "He thinks I'm crazy too."

McMahon was out on an emergency call, and Michael, who was finished with his unfinished drawing, inquired casually: "Where've you been?"

" Coney Island," Yossarian said jauntily. "And guess what. Kilroy was there."

"Kilroy?"

"Flight, Larry?"

"Who's Kilroy?" asked Michael.

"McBride?"

"Yossarian?"

"In Washington once, I went to look for a name on the Vietnam Memorial, with the names of all who'd been killed there. Kilroy was there, one Kilroy."

"The same one?"

"How the fuck should I know?"

"I'll check him out," promised McBride. "And let's talk more about that wedding. Maybe we could do it, I believe we could. I'll check that out too."

"What's this about a wedding?" Michael demanded with truculence, when they were out of the police station and walking away through the terminal.

"Not mine." Yossarian laughed. "I'm too old to marry again."

"You're too old to get married again."

"That's what I said. And are you still too young? Marriage may not be good, but it's not always all bad."

"Now you're talking too much."

Yossarian had his routine for moving through panhandlers, handing one-dollar bills from the folded daily allotment in his pocket to those who were timid and to those who looked threatening. A hulking man with inflamed eyes and a scrap of cloth offered to wipe his eyeglasses for a dollar or smash them to pieces if he declined. Yossarian gave him two dollars and put his eyeglasses away. Nothing surprising seemed unusual anymore in this deregulated era of free enterprise. He was under a death sentence, he knew, but he tried imparting that news to Michael euphemistically. "Michael, I want you to stay in law school," he decided seriously.

Michael stepped away. "Oh, shit, Dad. I don't want that. It's expensive too. Someday," he went on, with a dejected pause, "I'd like to work at something worthwhile."

"Know anything? I'll pay for the law school."

"You won't know what I mean, but I don't want to feel like a parasite."

"Yes, I would. It's why I gave up commodities, currency trading, stock trading, arbitrage, and investment banking. Michael, I'll give you seven more years of good health. That's the most I can promise you."

"What happens then?"

"Ask Arlene."

"Who's Arlene?

"That woman you're living with. Isn't that her name? The one with the crystals and the tarot cards."

"That's Marlene, and she moved out. What happens to me in seven years?"

"To me, you damned fool. I'll be seventy-five. Michael, I'm already sixty-eight. I'll guarantee you seven more years of my good health in which to learn how to live without me. If you don't, you'll drown. After that I can't promise you anything. You can't live without money. It's addictive once you've tried it. People steal to get it. The most I'll be able to leave each of you, after taxes, will be about half a million."

"Dollars?" Michael brightened brilliantly. "That sounds like a fortune!"

"At eight percent," Yossarian told him flatly, "you'd get forty thousand a year. At least a third will go to taxes, leaving you twenty-seven."

"Hey, that's nothing! I can't live on that!"

"I know that too. That's why I am talking too much to you. Where's your future? Can you see one? Move this way."

They stepped out of the path of a young man in sneakers running for his life from a half-dozen policemen running just as fast and closing in on him from different sides because he had just murdered with a knife someone in another part of the terminal. Pounding among them in heavy black shoes was Tom McMahon, who looked ill from the strain. Cut off in front, the nimble youth left them all in the lurch by swerving sharply and ducking down into the same emergency stairwell Yossarian had taken with McBride and probably, Yossarian mused fancifully, would never be heard of again-or better still, was already back on their level, walking behind them in his sneakers, looking blameless. They passed a man sitting asleep on the floor in a puddle of his own making, and another teenager, out cold, and then found their way blocked by a skinny woman somewhere near forty with stringy blonde hair and a lurid blister on her mouth.

"I'll do you for a nickel, mister," she offered.

"Please," said Yossarian, stepping around her.

"I'll do you both for a nickel each. I'll do you both at the same time for a nickel each. Pop, I'll do you both for the same nickel."

Michael, with a strained smile., skittered around her. She plucked at Yossarian's sleeve and held on.

"I'll lick your balls."

Yossarian stumbled free, mortified. His face burned. And Michael was aghast to see his father so shaken.

10 George G. Tilyou

At a rolltop desk many levels below, Mr. George C. Tilyou, the Coney Island entrepreneur, who'd been dead almost eighty years, counted his money and felt himself sitting on top of the world. His total never decreased. Before his eyes were the starting and finishing stations of the roller-coaster he'd had brought down after him from his Steeplechase amusement park. The tracks had never looked newer as they rose toward the crest of the highest gravity drop at the beginning and climbed out of sight into the cavernous tunnel he occupied. He filled with pride when he gazed at his redoubtable carousel, his El Dorado. Constructed originally in Leipzig for William II, the emperor of Germany, it still was possibly the most magnificent merry-go-round anywhere. Three platforms carrying horses, gondolas, and carved ducks and pigs revolved at individual speeds. Often he would send his El Dorado carousel spinning with no riders aboard, merely to study the reflections of the silver mirrors at the glittering hub and to revel in the stout voice of the calliope, which was, he liked to joke, music to his ears.

He had renamed his roller-coaster the Dragon's Gorge. Elsewhere he had his Cave of the Winds, and at the entrance churned his Barrel of Fun, which brought the unpracticed to their knees right off on the circling bottom and kept them tumbling against each other in tilted disarray until they crawled out the farther end and regained their feet or were assisted by attendants or other customers more experienced. One who knew how could pass through without fuss merely by walking on a mild diagonal contrary to the direction of rotation, but that wasn't fun. Or stride and stride uphill upon the descending floor without getting anywhere and remain forever in the same place, but that was not much fun either. Onlookers of both sexes took special delight in witnessing the unbalanced distress of attractive ladies clutching to hold down their skirts in the days before slacks attained respectability as a befitting mode of female attire.

"If Paris is France," he could remember stating as the playground's foremost spokesman and impresario, "then Coney Island, between June and September, is the world."

The money he sat counting every day would never deteriorate or grow old. His cash was indestructible and would always have value. At his back rose a cast-iron safe that was taller than he was. He had guards and attendants from the old days, costumed in red coats and green jockey caps from the old days. Many were friends from the beginning and had been with him an eternity.

With a genius uncanny and persistent, he had defied and disproved the experts, his lawyers and his bankers, and had succeeded in time in taking it all with him, in holding on to everything he valued particularly and was intent on retaining. His will made adequate provision for his widow and his children. Deeds of ownership, cash instruments, and currency in a large amount were sealed, as directed, in a moistureproof box resistant to decay and interred with him in his sepulcher in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, and his tombstone bore the inscription: MANY HOPES LIE BURIED HERE.

While heirs and executors disputed with each other and with government tax officials, Steeplechase (the " Funny Place ") relentlessly disappeared part by part from the face of the earth, except for the phallic, steel-beam, bankrupt skeleton of the Parachute Jump, which came in long after he was gone and was an attraction he would have rejected. It was tame and orderly, and did not frighten or tickle the customers or spectators. Mr. Tilyou relished things that surprised, threw people into confusion, annihilated dignity, blew boy and girl clumsily into each other's arms, and, with luck, flashed a glimpse of calf and petticoat, sometimes even feminine underpants, to a delighted audience just like them who viewed the comedy of their utter, ludicrous helplessness with gaiety and laughter.

Mr. Tilyou always smiled when he recalled the inscription on his tombstone.

He could not now think of anything he lacked. He had a second roller-coaster now, called the Tornado. Overhead he heard continually the stops and starts of the subway trains that had brought crowds in the hundreds of thousands to the beach on summer Sundays, and the sputtering exhausts of automobiles and larger vehicles of transportation traveling to and fro. Hearing the rippling and lapping of a canal of flowing water on a level above, he had brought down his flat-bottomed boats and reinstituted his Tunnel of Love. He had the Whip and the Whirlpool, with which he could lash patrons about and fling them aside, and the Human Pool Table with its vertical slide inside a chamber and spinning disks at the bottom to spin them supine in one direction or another while they screeched with hapless pleasure and prayed all the while it would soon come to an end. He had electric shocks on the railings for the unwary and mirrors for the normal that deformed them into merry and ridiculous monstrosities. And he had his grinning, pink-cheeked trademark, that demonic flat face with a flat head and parted hair and a wide mouth filled with cubes of teeth like white tiles, which people shrank from disbelievingly on first encounter and next time accepted good-humoredly as natural. From some unknown level below he heard repeatedly the passage of smooth-running railroad cars whose turning wheels rolled by day and night, but he was not curious. He was interested only in what he was able to own, and he wished to own only what he was able to see and watch and could control with the simplest action of a switch or a lever. He loved the smell of electricity and the crisp crackle of electrical sparks.

He had more money than he ever could spend. He'd never trusted trusts or seen much foundation to foundations. John D. Rockefeller came to him regularly now to beg for dimes and to cadge free rides, and J. P. Morgan, who'd commended his soul to God with no doubt it would be embraced, sought favors. With little to live on, they had not much to live for. Their children sent nothing. Mr. Tilyou could have told them, he told them often. Without money life could be hell. Mr. Tilyou had an inkling there would always be business as usual everywhere, and he could have told them, he told them.

He was spruce, dapper, alert, and tidy. His bowler hat, his derby of which he was proud, hung spotless on a hook on his coatrack. He dressed daily now in a white shirt with a wing collar, with a dark ascot tied perfectly and tucked neatly into the vest of his suit, and the points of his thin brown mustache were inevitably waxed.

His first major success was a Ferris wheel half the size of the one that had caught his fancy in Chicago, and he boldly proclaimed his own, even in advance of completion, as the largest in the world. He decked it out with dazzling streamers of hundreds of Mr. Edison's new incandescent lightbulbs, and enchanted patrons were diverted and thrilled.

"I have never cheated a soul in anything," he was wont to declare, "and I've never given a sucker an even break."

He liked rides that went round and brought the participants back to the place they had started from. Almost everything in nature, from the smallest to the grandest, seemed to him to move in circles and to return to the point at which it had originated, to perhaps set out again. He found people more fun than a barrel of monkeys, and he liked to manipulate them in this guise with tricks of harmless public embarrassment that would give pleasure to everyone and for which all would pay: the hat whisked away by a jet of air or the skirts gusting upward over the shoulders, the moving floors and collapsing staircases, the lipstick-smeared couple floated back into light from the concealing darkness inside the Tunnel of Love, baffled to know why the onlookers were shaking in laughter at the spectacle they made until ribald jokesters cried out to tell them.

And he still owned his home. On Surf Avenue, across from his Steeplechase amusement park, Mr. Tilyou had lived in a good-sized wooden-frame house with a narrow walk and shallow steps built of masonry, and all seemed to begin sinking into the ground shortly after his burial. On the vertical face of the step at the bottom, the one joined to the sidewalk, he'd paid a stonecutter to chisel the family name, TILYOU. Year-round residents walking by on the way to the movie house or subway station were the first to note from the position of the letters in the name that the step seemed to be settling into the pavement. By the time the whole house was gone, there was not much attention paid to one more empty lot in a dilapidated neighborhood that had passed its prime.

On the north side of the narrow strip of land that made up Coney Island, which was not a true island but a protruding spit about five miles long and half a mile wide, lay a body of water called Gravesend Bay. A dye factory there consumed much sulfur. Boys nearing puberty touched lighted matches to the yellow clumps they found lying on the ground near the building and were intrigued and gratified that they ignited easily and burned with a bluish glare and an odor that was sulfurous. Nearby stood a factory that manufactured ice and once was the scene of a spectacular armed robbery by perpetrators who made good their getaway in a speedboat that raced out to escape into the waters of Gravesend Bay. Thus, there was fire and there was ice before home refrigeration grew practical.

Fire was an ever-present danger, and great Coney Island fires blazed periodically. Within hours after Mr. Tilyou saw his first amusement park destroyed by flames, he posted signs selling his newest attraction, his Coney Island fire, and he kept his ticket takers busy collecting the ten cents admission charge he took from customers eager to enter the devastated area to cast their eyes upon his smoking ruins. Why hadn't he thought of that, mused the Devil. Even Satan called him Mr. Tilyou.