Closing Time

17 Sammy

Knee-action wheels.

I doubt I know more than a dozen people from the old days who might remember those automobile ads with the knee-action wheels, because I don't think there's more than a dozen of us left I could find. None live in Coney Island now, or even in Brooklyn. All that is gone, closed, except for the boardwalk and the beach and the ocean. We live in high-rise apartment houses like the one I'm in now, or in suburbs in traveling distance of Manhattan, like Lew and Claire, or in retirement villages in condominiums in West Palm Beach, Florida, like my brother and sister, or, if they have more money, in Boca Raton or Scottsdale, Arizona. Most of us have done much better than we ever thought we would or our parents dreamed we could.

Lifebuoy soap. Halitosis.

Fleischmann's Yeast, for acne. Ipana toothpaste for the smile of beauty, and Sal Hepatica for the smile of health.

When nature forgets, remember Ex-Lax.

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot

(When I drink it, how I fot).

Twice as much for a nickel too.

Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

None of us wise guys in Coney Island then believed this new drink Pepsi-Cola, notwithstanding the "Twelve full ounces, that's a lot" in the original ditty of that musical radio commercial, stood a chance in competition against the Coca-Cola drink we knew and loved, in the icy, smaller, sweating, somewhat greenish glass bottle with the willowy ripples on the surface that fit like balm into hands of every size and was by far the prevailing favorite. Today they taste to me identically the same. Both companies have grown mightier than any business enterprise ever ought to be allowed to do, and the six-ounce bottle is just about another extinct delight of the past. Nobody wants to sell a popular soft drink of just six ounces for only a nickel today, and nobody but me, perhaps, wants to buy one.

There was a two-cent "deposit" charged on every small soda bottle, a nickel on sodas of larger size that sold for ten cents, and none of the members in all of the families on that West Thirty-first Street block in Coney Island were inattentive to the value of those empty soda bottles. You could buy things of value for two pennies then. Sometimes as kids we'd go treasure hunting for deposit bottles in likely places on the beach. We would turn them in for cash at the Steinberg candy store right on my street at the corner of Surf Avenue and use the coins to play poker or twenty-one for pennies once we knew how, or spend them at once on things to eat. For two cents you could buy a nice-sized block of Nestle's or Hershey's chocolate, a couple of pretzels or frozen twists, or, in the fall, a good piece of the halvah we all went crazy about for a while. For a nickel you could get a Milky Way or Coca-Cola, a Melorol or Eskimo Pie, a hot dog in Rosenberg 's delicatessen store on Mermaid Avenue or at Nathan's about a mile down in the amusement area, or a ride on the carousel. For two cents you could buy a newspaper. When Robby Kleinline's father worked at Tilyou's Steeplechase we got free passes and with a few cents could usually win a coconut at the penny pitch game there. We learned how. Prices were lower then and so was income. Girls skipped rope and played jacks and potsy. We played punch-ball, stoopball, stickball, and harmonicas and kazoos. In the early evening after dinner-we called it supper-we might play blind-man's bluff on the sidewalk with our parents looking on, and all of us knew, and the parents saw, that we not-so-blind boys were using the game mainly as a chance to fumble with the titties of the girls for a few seconds every time we caught one and felt around pretending we were not yet set to identify her. That was before we boys began to masturbate and before they began to menstruate.

Early every weekday morning, all of the fathers on the block, and all of the brothers and sisters already out of school, would begin materializing soundlessly from their buildings and turn toward the stop of the Norton's Point trolley cars on Railroad Avenue that would take them to the elevated Stillwell Avenue terminus of the four separate subway lines, following different routes, that ended in Coney Island, to the subway cars that would then transport them into the city to their various places of work or, as with me when I was just seventeen and a half with my high school diploma, to the succession of employment agencies in Manhattan in timorous search of a job. Several would walk the mile to the train station for the exercise or the nickel saved. At night, in the rush hour, they would plod back home. In winter it would already be dark. And on most evenings from late spring into early fall, my father would walk by himself to the beach with his ever-present smile, in a fluffy bathrobe with a towel draped over his shoulders, to go for his relaxing dip or swim, sometimes staying until darkness was falling and the rest of us were contracting the fear from my mother that this time he would really drown if someone did not fetch him in a hurry.

"Go get him," she would instruct the one of us nearest her "Tell him to come eat."

It probably was the one hour in the day he could enjoy being alone and contemplate whatever hopeful thoughts gave to him that pleasant demeanor and brought that tranquil smile to his tan face. We were all in excellent health then, and that good fact was certainly one of them. He had his job. He had his Jewish newspaper, and both parents had the music they loved from the radio: Puccini especially; The Bell Telephone Hour; the NBC Symphony of the Air; WQXR, the radio station of the New York Times; and WNYC, the radio station, said the announcer, "of the City of New York, where seven million people live in peace and harmony ancj enjoy the benefits of democracy."

I went beyond them in music, from Count Basic, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman into Beethoven and Bach, chamber music and piano sonatas, and now Wagner and Mahler again.

And Hitler and his brave legionnaires would have murdered us all.

The forty-hour workweek was a watershed in social reform I was just barely in time to appreciate and a step into a better way of life that my children and grandchildren take for granted. They are stepchildren, for Glenda had already had her tubes tied by the time I met her. Suddenly we all had jobs in places that closed Saturdays. We could stay up late Friday nights. Whole families could have whole weekends off. The minimum wage and the child labor laws were other blessings flowing from FDR and his New Deal, although the latter seemed obscure. Not until college did I learn that children twelve and under everywhere in the industrialized Western world had always been putting in workdays twelve hours and longer in coal mines and factories; and not until I got into the army and began associating with people from outside Coney Island did I find out that a Coney Island "fot" was really a fart.

The minimum wage then was twenty-five cents an hour. When Joey Heller in the apartment house across the street turned old enough to get his working papers at age sixteen and found a job with Western Union delivering telegrams in the city four hours a day after high school, he brought home five dollars a week every Friday. And out of that, he almost never failed to buy a new secondhand phonograph record for the social club on Surf Avenue we already had in which we learned to dance the lindy hop, smoke cigarettes, and muzzle girls in the back room if we were lucky enough to trick or induce any into going back there with us. While my friend Lew Rabinowitz and his other friend Leo Weiner and a couple of the other bolder guys were already screwing them on the couches and in other places too. Joey Heller's father was dead and his older brother and sister worked too whenever they could, mainly part time in Woolworth's or in summer on the boardwalk at the frozen custard and hot dog stands. His mother, a seamstress when a girl, now did work for my mother, taking in and letting out dresses, and raising and lowering hems, and turning the frayed collars on shirts for the local laundry, for two or three cents apiece, I think, maybe a nickel.

They got by. Joey wanted to be a writer too. It was from Joey I first heard that variation on the Pepsi-Cola radio commercial. I remember the first verse of another parody he did on a popular song that was up near the top of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, one you can still hear today on records by some of the better singers we had at the time: If there's a gleam in her eye Each time she unzips your fly, You know the lady's in love with you.

I wish I could remember the rest. He wanted to write comedy sketches for the radio, movies, and theater. I wanted to do these with him and also to write short stories someday good enough to be published in The New Yorker magazine, or anywhere else. Together we collaborated on skits for our Boy Scout troop, Troop 148, and later, older, for dance-night entertainments at our social club, when we charged ten cents or a quarter admission for people from a dozen of the other social clubs in Coney Island and Brighton Beach, girls free. One of our longer Boy Scout skits, "The Trials and Tribulations of Toby Tenderfoot," was so comical, I remember, that we were asked to put it on again at one of the regular assemblies that were conducted every Friday at our elementary public school, P.S.188. Joey went into the air corps too and became an officer and a bombardier, and he also taught college in Pennsylvania. By then he was no longer "Joey" and I was no longer "Sammy." He was Joe and I was Sam. We were younger than we thought we were, but we were no longer kids. But Marvin Winkler still talks of him as Joey when he looks back, and thinks of me as Sammy.

"They laughed when I sat down at the piano."

That ad became the most successful direct-mail advertising campaign ever run, and possibly it still is. You filled out a coupon and received a packet of instructions that taught you, they said, to play the piano in ten or so easy lessons. It helped, of course, if, like Winkler, you had a piano, although he never cared to study it.

We had a Ford in our future, the manufacturer told us, and there was no-knock gasoline at Gulf or at the sign of the flying red horse at the filling stations for the automobiles with knee-action wheels we could not yet afford to buy. Lucky Strike meant fine tobacco in those days of the knee-action wheels, and people called for Philip Morris and would walk a mile for a Camel and for the other cigarettes and cigars that gave my father the lung cancer that spread to his liver and his brain and then very quickly killed him. He was on in years when he passed away, but Glenda was not old when stricken with her ovarian cancer and died exactly thirty days after the diagnosis. She began feeling ill with different things after Michael did away with himself and today we might guess her affliction resulted from stress. She was the one who found him. There was one stunted tree in the backyard of the house we'd rented for the summer on Fire Island, and he'd managed to hang himself from that. I cut him down, aware I ought not to, rather than leave him dangling to be stared at by us and the women and children from neighboring houses for the two hours it might take for the police and the medical examiner to come in their beach buggies.

A dollar an hour amp; a mile a minute amp; a hundred a week amp; a hundred miles an hour, wow!

These were all possible. We knew there were cars that sped that fast, and all of us there in Coney Island had relatives living elsewhere who were better off than we were and had those cars that might go a mile a minute or more. Ours lived for the most part in New Jersey, in Paterson and Newark, and came in their automobiles on summer Sundays, to walk the boardwalk to the carousel or as far as Steeplechase, to use the beach or wade in the ocean. They would stay for the dinner that my mother liked to cook, my sister helping, to serve them the breaded veal cutlets with roasted fried potatoes she made deliciously, to "give them good eat." Civil service jobs were coveted, for the pay, the steady, white-collar work, and the vacation and pension benefits, and because they went to Jews too, and those who obtained them were looked up to as professionals. You could start as an apprentice in the U.S. Government Printing Office, my older brother read to me from a civil service newspaper, and then work as a printer at a starting salary of sixty dollars a week-there was that dollar an hour, almost in reach, and more-once the apprenticeship was over. But I would have to live and work in Washington, and none of us was sure I ought to leave home for that. A shorter stint at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, as a blacksmith's helper, with a bunch of the other guys from Coney Island working in the navy yard too, seemed a more inspiring idea, while we waited to see if the war would be over before I reached nineteen and whether or not I was going to be drafted into the army or navy. At 30 Bank Street in the city of Norfolk, we'd been told, a ferry ride across from Portsmouth, was a cathouse, a brothel, but I never had nerve enough to go, and lacked the time. I lasted at hard physical labor there close to two months, working fifty-six consecutive days for the time and a half on Saturdays and Sundays, before I gave up in total exhaustion and came back home, and finally found a job as a file clerk with an automobile casualty insurance company for much less money, in the same building in Manhattan, coincidentally, the old General Motors building at 1775 Broadway, in which Joey Heller had worked in his uniform as a Western Union messenger, delivering and picking up telegram messages.

Where were you?

When you heard about Pearl Harbor. When the atom bomb went off. When Kennedy was killed.

I know where I was when the radio gunner Snowden was killed on the second mission to Avignon, and that meant more to me then than the Kennedy assassination did later, and still does. I was in the tail section of my B-25 medium bomber in a dead faint, after coming around from the crack on the head that knocked me out for a while when the copilot lost control of himself and put the plane into a sheer drop and then wailed on the intercom for everyone in the plane to help everyone else in the plane who wasn't answering him. Each time I came to and heard Snowden moaning and saw Yossarian doing something else in his vain struggle to help him, I fainted again.

Before that mission, I had crash-landed once with a pilot we all called Hungry Joe, who had loud nightmares when he was not on combat duty, and I had ditched once with a pilot named Orr, who they said later wound up safe in Sweden somehow; but I was not injured either time, and I still could not make myself believe it was not honestly only like the movies. But then I saw Snowden with his insides out, and after that saw a skinny man frolicking on a raft at the beach cut in half by a propeller, and I believe now that if I'd thought earlier that either one of those things could occur in my presence, I might not have been able to make myself want to go. My mother and father both knew that war was a more dreadful thing than any of us kids in the neighborhood could picture. They were appalled later when I told them I had been accepted for flying duty as an aerial gunner. Neither had ever been up in a plane. Nor had I, or anyone else I knew.

Both walked with me to the trolley stop on Railroad Avenue, near the second candy store we had on our street. From there I would ride to Stillwell Avenue and, with the three others, take the Sea Beach subway line into Manhattan to Pennsylvania Station to report for duty on my first day in. I learned years later that after my mother hugged me good-bye with a gentle smile and a straight face and I'd gone away on the trolley, she collapsed in tears right there and wept inconsolably, and it was nearly a half hour before my father and my sister could get her back down the street into our apartment.

The day I went into the army my standard of living practically doubled. I was making sixty dollars a month as a file clerk in the insurance company and had to pay my carfare and buy my lunches, or bring them. In the army I was paid seventy-five dollars a month as a buck private from day one, and food and clothes and rent and doctors and dentists were all free. And before I was out, as a sergeant with flight pay, overseas pay, and combat pay, I was making more a month than a government printer and was already closer as a young man to that hundred dollars a week than I'd believed I ever would be able to get.

Where did all that money come from?

As my mother might say, in Yiddish: On Monday one third of the nation was ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. And on Thursday there were ten million people in the military making more than most had been able to earn before, and two million civilian employees, and tanks, airplanes, ships, aircraft carriers, and hundreds of thousands of jeeps and trucks and other vehicles pouring out of the factories almost too rapidly to count. Suddenly there was enough for everything. Does all the credit belong to Hitler? Capitalism, my father probably would answer with a smile of resignation, as though for this humane socialist all of the evils of inequality could be clarified in that sinful single word. "For war there is always enough. It's peace that's too expensive."

From that first train ride out from Pennsylvania Station to the reception center on Long Island, I experienced in the army a loss of personal importance and individual identity that I found, to my amazement, I welcomed. I was part of a directed herd, and I found myself relieved to have everything mapped out for me, to be told what to do, and to be doing the same things as the rest. I felt unburdened, more free than as a civilian. I had more free time too, a sense of greater liberty, once the orientation phases were over.

The four of us who'd enlisted together came back unharmed, although I had a pretty bad time of it on both missions to Avignon, and Lew was taken prisoner and kept in a prison camp in Germany for half a year before he was set free by the Russians. He knows what a long shot it was that he survived at all after Dresden was bombed while he was there. But Irving Kaiser, who had been our Toby Tenderfoot in the skit by Joey Heller and me, was blown apart in Italy by artillery fire and I never saw him again, and Sonny Ball was killed there too.

By the time of Vietnam I did know what war was like, and White House wickedness, and I swore to Glenda I would do everything conceivable, legal and illegal, to keep the boy Michael from going if he came even close to passing his physical and being called up. I had doubts that could happen. Even before he was old enough to be on drugs or medication he showed signs of behaving like someone who was. He was good at facts and figures but was lost with things like maps and floor plans. His memory for things statistical was phenomenal. But he was not much good at algebra or geometry, at anything abstract. I let Glenda continue to think he'd been affected that way by the divorce. I outlined heroic plans to move to Canada if the draft board called him. I would even go to Sweden with him if that looked safer. I gave her my word but did not have to keep it.

Lew wanted the paratroops or a tank with a cannon in front to roll over Germans who were persecuting Jews, but wound up in the infantry after training in the field artillery. Overseas, he made it to sergeant when his own sergeant was killed. Even earlier, in Holland, he had taken that position of command when his sergeant grew unsure of himself and began relying on Lew for orders to give. I wanted to be a fighter pilot and fly the P-38, because it looked so fast and flashy. But I had no depth perception, so I became an aerial gunner instead. I saw the posters stressing the need for gunners and volunteered. It was the most dangerous game of all, rumor had it, and it was going to be a cinch. And for me, as it turned out, it pretty much was.

I was small enough to be a ball-turret gunner on a Flying Fortress in England, but luckily nobody noticed, and I wound up as a tail gunner in the sunnier Mediterranean on the easier, safer B-25 instead.

In training, I always liked very much the feel of the grip on the.50 caliber machine gun. I liked being aloft and firing away with real live bullets at tow targets in the air and at stationary targets on the ground, walking the tracer bullets with their white streamers up to them from in front. I learned quickly about inertia and relative movement, that a bomb or bullet from a plane going three hundred miles an hour starts out moving in that same direction at that identical speed, and that gravity is at work from the first instant, and I was put to work at a blackboard occasionally by our first gunnery officer, helping some with difficulties try to understand. I learned electrifying things about Isaac Newton's laws of motion: if you were in motion or the target was, you would never hit it by aiming right at it. I have one that still surprises me: if a bullet is fired from a horizontal weapon at the same moment an identical bullet is dropped at the spot from the same height, they will strike the ground at the same time, even though the first one may land half a mile away. I liked the combat-simulation trainers less, because the guns were not real, although they were almost as diverting as the gun games in the boardwalk penny arcades. You sat in an enclosed contraption and fighter planes of different makes flew at you on a screen from different directions and heights for a fraction of a second, and it was realistically impossible to distinguish friend from foe that quickly and bring your sights to bear and depress the trigger. No one scored impressively on these; on the other hand, no one washed out. Two guys I knew of were reassigned because of fear. From these trainers I grew skeptical: if that was the way it was going to be, the only thing to do was to let go in a general direction as quickly as possible with as many rounds as you could in the few seconds you had. And that is the way it turned out to be, just about everywhere. The side that could bring the most firepower into play was the side that always won.

People don't want to know that the ancient battle of Thermopylae and the heroic Spartan stand to the last man there was not a Greek triumph but a crushing defeat. All that valor was wasted. It's the kind of fact I like to throw out at people to shake them up a little and get them going.

I had faith in my machine gun, but it never crossed my mind that I would always be firing away at someone who would be flying in to fire at me.

I liked the horsing around and I found myself friendly with more people I enjoyed than I'd had even in Coney Island. In the army I had personality advantages. I had read more and knew more. I found it practical to let people learn right off that I indeed was as Jewish as they might have guessed, and I would find some way of working that in and adding as well that I was from Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. I had uncomplicated and close relationships with people with names like Bruce Suggs from High Point, North Carolina, and Hall A. Moody from Mississippi, with Jay Matthews and Bruce J. Palmer from different places in Georgia, who did not exactly like each other, with Art Schroeder, and with Tom Sloane from Philadelphia. In a barracks at Lowry Field, Colorado, where I was shipped for power-turret training, I saw hostility and threat from Bob Bowers, who also was from Brooklyn, from a rougher neighborhood of Norwegians and Irishmen that was known to us for its anti-Semites, and John Rupini, from somewhere upstate, and we were notably careful to keep out of each other's way. I knew how they felt and they knew that I knew, and they were almost equally unfriendly with just about everyone else. Lew would have had it out with them right off the bat, I suppose. In a poker game the second or third day on the troop train carrying me from Arizona to Colorado, I thought I heard one of the other players say something about a Jew, but wasn't sure. Then the one opposite me, who had already said he was from a small place down south, smirked and remarked, "We've got some too, that own a clothing store. You ought to see how they look." Now I was sure and knew I had to speak up.

"Just one moment, please, if you don't mind," I told him abruptly and somewhat pompously. Inwardly, I was rattled. It was not my voice. "But I happen to be Jewish and don't like to hear you talking that way. I'll leave the game right now if you want me to. But if you want me to keep playing, you have to stop saying things that hurt my feelings and make me feel bad. I don't know why you want to do that to me anyway."

The game had come to a stop, and we swayed and listened to the sound of the train. If I left the game, Lesko would leave with me, and if it came near anything violent, they knew that Lesko would be on my side. But the one I'd spoken to, Cooper, was stricken with guilt and mumbled his apology. "I'm sorry, Singer. I didn't know you were."

Lew would have broken his back, I guess, and gone to jail. I had made a temporary friend of someone who always wanted to atone. Lew is Lew, and I am not.

My name is Samuel Singer, no middle initial-Sammy NMI Singer-and I was born short and grew up smaller than most and physically unimpressive. Not like another good neighborhood friend, Ike Solomon, who was no taller but had burly biceps and a deeper chest and could lift weights and enjoy himself on a chinning bar. All my life I've been wary of fistfights, so I've done what I could not to get into any. I could be witty and sympathetic, and I have always managed to make friends. I've always been good at getting things going with needling questions and keeping a conversation lively with the clever revelations of iconoclasm.

"Do you think the country would have been better off if we'd lost the Revolutionary War against the British?" I would inquire searchingly, as though really mystified, and was ready with critical questions for whatever answer came.

"If Lincoln was so smart, why didn't he let the South secede? How would it hurt as much as the war did?"

"Is the Constitution constitutional?"

"Can democracy ever be created democratically?"

"Wasn't the Virgin Mary Jewish?"

I knew things other people didn't. I knew that if we walked into a floor of any barracks with no fewer than forty people, there would almost always be two with the same birthday, and half the time another two who shared a different birthday. I could make bets even with people from Nevada and California that Reno, Nevada, was farther west than Los Angeles, and almost make bets with them a second time after we'd looked it up, so determined were they to cling to an old concept. I've got one ready for the cardinal should I ever find myself sitting next to him and feel like fooling around.

"Whose genes did Jesus have?" And with a look of innocence I would remind, when given whatever response the poor figure could find, that he was born as a baby and grew to a man, and was circumcised on the eighth day.

In class in gunnery school I did come close to trouble with the decorated warrant officer instructing us when he remarked that the average life of an aerial gunner in combat was three minutes and later invited questions. He had completed his tour of duty in a B-17 with the battered Eighth Air Force in England, and I wasn't baiting him-I was curious.

"How could they tell, sir?" I asked, and I've never trusted surveys and estimates since.

"What do you mean?"

"How could they measure something like that? Sir, you must have been in combat for at least an hour."

"Much more than one hour."

"Then for every hour you lasted, nineteen others had to die in even less than the first second to average out to three minutes. And why is it more dangerous for gunners than for pilots and bombardiers? Sir, they're shooting at the whole plane, aren't they?"

"Singer, you're a wiseass, aren't you? You hang on a bit when the others go."

He let me know that I must never contradict him in the classroom again and introduced me to what I later came, with Yossarian, to call the Korn Laws, after Lieutenant Colonel Korn in Pianosa: under Korn's laws, the only ones ever permitted to question ainything were those who never did. But he put me to work tutoring others with simple examples from algebra and geometry in the reasons one must always shoot well ahead of a target moving in relation to you-and in order to shoot ahead of a plane you had to shoot behind. If a plane is so many yards away and a cartridge travels at so many yards a second, how many seconds will it take for your cartridge to reach it? If the plane is traveling at so many feet per second, how many feet will it travel by the time the bullet reaches it? They saw it in practice in the hours we spent skeet shooting and firing on the gunnery range from a moving truck. But though I taught it and knew it, even I had trouble with the principle that you fired ahead of a plane coming in on attack by always aiming behind it, between the target and your tail, because of the forward airspeed of the bullets from your own plane land the swerving path that plane would have to follow to fire in front of you.

The friends I've made have always been of a generous nature. And somehow or other, a bigger, tougher guy was always around as a buddy in case things went wrong, like Lew Rabinowitz and Sonny Bartolini, one of the bolder Italians in a family in Coney Island. And Lesko, the young coal miner from Pennsylvania, whom I'd met in gunnery school. And Yossarian in operational training in Carolina and later in Pianosa in combat, after the five of us, Yossarian, Appleby, Kraft, Schroeder, and I, had flown overseas as a crew.

The fear of being beaten up had always been with me, looming larger in my meditations than the fear of being shot down. In South Carolina one night, it began to come to pass. This was after another training flight into darkness in which Yossarian could not find his way around to places like Athens, Georgia, and Raleigh, North Carolina, and Appleby from Texas again had to bring us back with his radio compass. We had gone to our enlisted men's mess hall for a midnight meal, Schroeder and I and Yossarian. The officers' club was closed. Yossarian was always hungry. He had taken off his insignia to pose as an enlisted man, with a right to be there. People were always milling around outside at night. As we moved through them, I was jostled suddenly by a big, drunken lout, a private, bumped so hard as to leave no doubt the act had been deliberate. I whirled around with instinctive surprise. Before I could speak, he was at me, he shoved me furiously backward into a group of soldiers who had already turned to watch. It was happening almost too fast to understand. While I was still dumbfounded, staggering, he came charging after me with his arms raised and a fist cocked back to punch. He was taller than I and broad and heavier too, and there was no way I could fend him off. It was like that time I had tried to teach Lew how to box. I could not even run. I don't know why he picked me out and can only guess. But then, before he could strike, Yossarian was there between us to break it up, with his arms extended and his palms open, urging him to hold it, attempting to cajole him into calming down. And before he could even complete his first sentence, the man let go and hit him squarely on the side of the head and then hit him hard again with a punch from his other fist, and Yossarian went falling back in a helpless daze as the man followed up, hitting him about the head with both hands while Yossarian reeled with each blow, and before I knew what I was doing, I had flung myself forward to grab one of the man's thick arms and hang on. When that didn't work, I slid down to grasp him about the waist and dug my feet into the ground to strain with all my might to shove him off balance if I could. By that time Schroeder had also pounced on him, from the other side, and I heard Schroeder talking away. "You dumb fuck, he's an officer, you dumb fuck!" I could hear him rasping into the man's ear. "He's an officer!" Then Yossarian, who was pretty strong himself, was at him from in front and managed to tie up both his arms and propel him backward until he lost his footing and had to hold on. I felt all the fight go out of him as Schroeder's words sank in. He looked sick by the time we turned him loose.

"Better put your bars back on, Lieutenant," I reminded Yossarian softly, panting, and added as I saw him feeling his face: "There's no blood. You'd better get away and put your bars back on, before somebody comes. We can pass up the meal."

From then on I was always on Yossarian's side in his frictions with Appleby, even at the time of what we both came to call the Splendid Atabrine Insurrection, although I would conscientiously take the antimalarial tablets as we flew through the equatorial climates when we traveled overseas, and he would not. The Atabrine would temper the effects of malaria, we'd been briefed before our first stop in Puerto Rico, while having no effect upon the disease itself. Regulations or not, Yossarian saw no sensible need for treating the symptoms before he suffered any. The disagreement between them crystallized into a controversy to save face. Kraft, the copilot, was as usual neutral. Kraft spoke little, smiled a lot, seemed unaware often of much that was going on. When he was killed in action over Ferrara not long afterward, I still thought of him as neutral.

"I'm the captain of this ship," Appleby made the mistake of telling Yossarian in front of us in Puerto Rico, our first stop after jumping off from Florida for the fourteen-day flight overseas. "And you'll have to follow my orders."

"Shit," said Yossarian. "It's a plane, Appleby, not a boat." They were of equal height and equal rank, second lieutenant then. "And we're on the ground, not at sea."

"I'm still the captain." Appleby spoke slowly. "As soon as we start flying again, I'm going to order you to take them."

"And I'm going to refuse."

"Then I'm going to report you," said Appleby. "I won't like doing it, but I'm going to report you to our commanding officer, as soon as we have one."

"Go ahead," Yossarian resisted stubbornly. "It's my body and my health, and I can do what I want with it."

"Not according to regulations."

"They're unconstitutional."

We were introduced to the aerosol bomb, the first time I saw one, now the spray can, and instructed to use it in the interior of the plane as soon as we climbed in, as a defense against mosquitoes and the diseases they might transmit as we headed down through the Caribbean into South America. On each leg of the trip to Natal in Brazil, we were asked to keep our eyes peeled for signs of the wreckage of a plane or two that had disappeared from the skies into the seas or jungle a day or so before. This should have been more sobering than it was. The same was true on the eight-hour nights over ocean from Brazil to Ascension Island in a plane designed to go no more than four, and from there, two days later, into Liberia in Africa and then up to Dakar in Senegal. All through these boring long flights over water we kept our eyes peeled for debris and yellow rafts, when we remembered to. In Florida we had time and evenings free, and there were dance floors there in saloons and cafes.

I wanted to start getting laid. Older guys from Coney Island like Chicky Ehrenman and Mel Mandlebaum, who had gone into the army sooner, would come back on leave from far-off places like Kansas and Alabama with similar reports of women who were all too willing to lie down for our brave boys in the service, and now that I was a boy in the service, I wanted to get laid too.

But I still didn't know how. I was shy. I could make jokes, but I was bashful. I was too easily entranced by some quality in a face or figure I found pretty. I was too quickly aroused, and inhibited by the concern it might show. I could be premature, I knew, but that was better than nothing for most of us then. When I danced close with a girl, just about any girl, I always grew an erection almost immediately and, with great embarrassment, would back myself away. Now I know I should have pressed it in against them harder to leave no doubt it was there and begin making suggestive jokes about what I wanted and was going to get, and I would have made out better. When I moved into the back room with a girl to begin muzzling her or joined them in some apartment when they were baby-sitting, I usually got what I wanted quickly enough and felt pretty good about myself until I was forced to remember there was a lot more. I was short, I knew, and always thought I had a little cock and that most of the others had pretty big ones, until one summer day in the locker room of the Steeplechase swimming pool, I looked in the mirror intrepidly while standing alongside Lew as we were washing up and saw that mine was just as good.

But he was using his. And I was always coming too quickly, or not at all. The first time that Lew and his other friend Leo Weiner set me up with a girl they'd found who had come to the Island for the summer to work in a soda fountain and was not unwilling to put out for anyone who asked her to-they were both very good at talking that way to girls-I came in the rubber before I even got in. The first time I fixed myself up, with a girl in the clubroom who'd let me know while I was still using my hand that she wanted to go all the way, I lost my erection as soon as we bared ourselves, although I'd certainly been hard enough and ready before we both took down our pants. Glenda loved those stories.

I can't be positive, but I don't think I finally did get laid until I was already overseas. There, it was effortless, as one in a body of guys all doing the same things with youthful self-assurance and a general taste for rowdy good times, near bunches of local girls in the main city of Bastia close by who did not speak our language and then especially in Rome, where the women we met on the streets smiled to let us know what they were doing there and expected us to approach with solicitations and cash and cigarettes and chocolate bars and with careless gaiety and our flies already half open. We could not think of them as prostitutes or whores, only as streetwalkers. I can't be positive I'd not really done it before because of that incident with a sweet southern girl in the dance hall in West Palm Beach, Florida, where we'd been flown to check out the plane given us for the flight overseas and to calibrate the various instruments for faults and deviations.

I still don't know if that one counted or not. She was perky as could be, with very black hair and eyes almost lavender, an inch shorter than I, with dimples too, and very much dazzled by my sharp New York lindy hop routines, which she had never beheld and wanted to learn. Schroeder had not seen them either, or Lieutenant Kraft, who had requisitioned from the motor pool the jeep in which we had gone there. After a while we went outside for some air. I walked with my arm still around her waist and we drifted without talking about it to one of the darker areas of the parking lot. We passed couples embracing in different sheltered places. I gave her a helping hand up to a seat on the fender of a low sports car.

"Oh, no, Sammy honey, we are not going to do that thing tonight, not here, not now," she let me know very strictly, holding me off with her hands on my chest, and placed a quick friendly kiss on my nose.

I had eased myself in between her legs, close enough to keep kissing, and I had just slid my hands up under her dress along her thighs to the elastic band of her panties, with my thumbs rubbing on the insides. Until she spoke, that was almost as far as I hoped to get in that parking lot.

Staring into her eyes, I confessed with a smile, "I wouldn't even know how, I think. I've never done it before." We were leaving the following day for the hop to Puerto Rico, and I could risk being truthful.

She laughed at that one as though I were still making wisecracks. She could hardly believe that a sharpie like me was still a virgin.

"Oh, you poor boy," she commiserated with me mellifluously. "You've been greatly deprived, haven't you?"

"I taught you to dance," I hinted.

"Then I'll show you how we do it," she agreed. "But you mustn't put it in. You must promise me that. Now stand back a minute and let me twist myself a little. That's better. See? Oh, that's a very nice one you have, isn't it? And all ready to go like the best little boy, ain't he?"

"I was circumcised by a sculptor."

"Now, not so fast, Sammy honey. And not so quick. Not there, baby, not there. That's almost my belly button. You've got to learn to give me a chance to put my thing up there where you can get at it. That's why we call it putting out, honey, see? Now, I'm not going to do that for you tonight. Understood? Come back a little closer. That's more like it, right? But you mustn't put it in! Don't put it in! You're putting it in!"

This last was a cry that could have shaken the neighborhood. She bounced about under me wildly for about fifteen seconds or so, trying frantically to wriggle free, and all I was trying to do was raise my weight to help, and then the next thing I knew I was up and watching myself shoot in midair across the hood of the car. The stuff spurted a mile. Shoot is just the right word for a boy of nineteen or twenty. When a man is past sixty-eight, he comes. When he can. If he wants to.

I never thought I'd be this old, wake with stiff joints, and have nothing really to occupy myself with most days but my volunteer fund-raising work for cancer relief. I read late at night, as the poet said, and many mornings too, and go south in the winter with a lady friend with a house in Naples, Florida, to be near the ocean, and sometimes to a daughter who lives in Atlanta and sometimes to Houston, Texas, to visit my other daughter, who lives there with her husband. I play bridge and meet people that way. I have a small summer house in East Hampton, near the ocean, with one guest room with a private bathroom. Each time Lew goes back into treatment, I travel to see him at least once a week by bus from the bus terminal. It takes all day. I never thought I'd live longer than he would, and maybe I won't, because in the long remissions he's enjoyed in the more than twenty years I've known about his Hodgkin's disease, he is hardier than I am and does much more. This time, though, he seems thinner longer, downhearted, fatalistic, but Claire, who talks to Teemer, is more concerned about his mental attitude than his illness.

"I'm sick of feeling nauseous," he told me last time, when we were talking alone, as though getting ready to give up, and I could not tell if he was intending a joke.

So I tried one of my own. "The word is nauseated."

"What?"

"The correct word is nauseated, Lew. Not nauseous."

"Sammy, don't be a prick again. Not now."

He made me feel foolish.

It's not in the cards for me to live with my children when old. so I've put money away for my nursing home. I am waiting for my prostate cancer. I might marry again soon if my well-off widowed lady friend ever overcomes her pecuniary mistrusts and tells me we ought to. But for how long? Seven more years? I do miss family life.

Glenda decided the one outside the dance hall didn't count "Cheese!" she said with a laugh, shaking her head in disbelief whenever we recalled that experience. "You didn't know anything, did you?"

"No, I didn't."

"And don't try that come-help-me act now."

It was not always solely an act. Just about all the women I've ever been with seemed always to have had more experience than I did. There are two kinds of men, I think, and I belong to the second kind.

She herself had done it: first in college her first time away from home, with the man she married soon after graduation, who came down with cancer before she did, with his melanoma, and then married two more times, and even fathered another child. I didnw get my chance to go to college until after the war, and by then it was hardly much trouble getting a girl to go to bed, because I was less inexperienced, and most girls were doing it too.

Appleby made it to Ascension Island from Natal in Brazil navigating all the way by radio compass, with an auxiliary fue tank installed in the bomb bay for the extended journey. He had no, faith left in Yossarian's compass directions. Yossarian had none either and was offended only slightly. Appleby was the one with the growing grudge. The gamble in relying only on the radio compass, I found out from Yossarian, who'd learned at least that much, was that we approached the island eight hours away on a circular path instead of straight on and consumed more gasoline.

I learned more about war and capitalism and Western society in Marrakech in Morocco when I saw affluent Frenchmen drinking aperitifs on the terraces of luxurious hotels with their children and well-turned-out wives while they bided their time complacently until others invaded at Normandy and later in southern France to recapture their country and enable them to return and regain their estates. At the immense American replacement center in Constantine in Algeria, where we waited two weeks for our final assignment to a bomber group, I first learned a little bit specific about Sigmund Freud. There, I shared a tent with a medical assistant, older than I, also waiting assignment, who also wished to write short stories like William Saroyan and was also positive he could. Neither of us understood that there was no need for more than one Saroyan. Today we might conclude from the insignificance of Saroyan that there had not been great need for even one. We exchanged books we had finished.

"Do you ever have dreams your teeth are falling out?" he inquired of me slyly one day apropos of nothing else we were discussing. We had nothing to do while we sat around waiting. We could play softball or volleyball if we chose. We'd been cautioned against going into Constantine to roam about carelessly for whiskey or women, cautioned by the tale of a murdered GI who'd been found castrated, with his scrotum sewn into his mouth, which we thought probably apocryphal. We ate from mess kits.

His question hit home. I reacted with a start, as though discovering myself with some magical mind reader. "Yeah, I do dream that!" I admitted gullibly. "I had one last night."

He nodded smugly. "You jerked off yesterday," he alleged, with no hesitation.

"You're full of shit!" I answered right back heatedly, and wondered guiltily how he had found out.

"It's no crime," he defended himself reassuringly. "It isn't even a sin. Women do it too."

I put no trust in that last part then. I would be surprised, he guaranteed.

After landing at Pianosa we looked around with enchantment at the mountains and woods so near to the sea as we waited for the vehicles that would drive us with our bags to the orderly room of our squadron to report with our orders and receive our tent assignments. It was May and sunny, and in all ways beautiful. Not much was stirring. We were relieved to find ourselves safely there.

"Good job, Appleby." Yossarian commended him humbly speaking for all of us. "We would never have made it if you'd had to rely on me."

"I don't much care about that part," Appleby told him unforgivingly, in his moderate Texas accent. "You broke regulations and I said I would report you."

In the orderly room, where we were welcomed by the obliging first sergeant, Sergeant Towser, Appleby could hardly restrain himself until the formalities were completed. Then, through tightened lips in a face just about quivering with insulted fury, he asked, demanded, to see the squadron commander about the daily insubordination of a crew member who'd refused to take his Atabrine tablets and had disobeyed direct orders to do so. Towser repressed his surprise.

"Is he in?"

"Yes, sir. But you will have to wait a bit."

"And I would like to speak with him while all of us are still here together, so the others can bear witness."

"Yes, I understand. You can all sit down if you wish."

The commanding officer of the squadron was a major, and his surname was Major too, I saw, and was amused by the oddity.

"Yes, I think I will sit down," said Appleby. The rest of us kept silent. "Sergeant, about how long will I have to wait? I've still got a lot to get done today so that I can be fully prepared bright and early tomorrow morning to go into combat the minute they want me to."

To me it peemed that Towser could not believe his ears.

"Sir?"

"What's that, Sergeant?"

"What was your question?"

"I About how long will I have to wait before I can go in to see the major?"

"Just until he goes out to lunch," Sergeant Towser replied. "Then you can go right in."'

"But he won't be there then. Will he?"

"No, sir. Major Major won't be back in his office until after lunch."

"I see," Appleby decided uncertainly. "I think I'd better come back after lunch, then."

Schroeder and I stood mute, as we always did when the officers were settling things. Yossarian was listening with an appearance of incisive inquiry.

Appleby walked first out the door. He stopped abruptly as soon as I stepped out behind him and drew back against me with a gasp. My gaze followed his, and I was sure I saw a tall, dark officer wearing the gold leaf of a major come jumping out the window of the orderly room and go scooting out of sight around the corner. Appleby was squeezing his eyes closed and shaking his head as though in fear he was ill.

"Did you-" he began, and then Sergeant Towser was tapping him on the shoulder and telling him he could now go in to see Major Major if he still wished to do that, since Major Major had just gone out. Appleby regained his good military posture.

"Thank you, Sergeant," he replied very formally. "Will he be back soon?"

"He'll be back after lunch. Then you'll have to go right out and wait for him in front till he leaves for dinner. Major Major never sees anyone in his office when he's in his office."

"Sergeant, what did you just say?"

"I said that Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office."

Appleby stared at Sergeant Towser intently a few moments and then adopted a stern tone of rebuking formality. "Sergeant," he said, and paused, as though waiting until certain he was commanding his undivided attention, "are you trying to make a fool out of me just because I'm new in the squadron and you've been overseas a long time?"

"Oh, no, sir," answered Towser. "Those are my orders. You can ask Major Major when you see him."

"That's just what I intend to do, Sergeant. When can I see him?"

"Never."

But Appleby could make his report in writing, if he chose. In two or three weeks we were practically veterans, and the matter was no longer of consequence even to Appleby.

Appleby was soon a lead pilot and was paired with a bombardier of longer experience named Havermeyer. Yossarian was good enough at first to be lead bombardier and was matched with a sweet-tempered pilot named McWatt. Later I preferred Yossarian for his quicker bomb runs.

We had everything, it seemed to me. The tents were comfortable and there was no hostility that I could see toward anyone. We were at peace with each other in a way we would not find feasible; anywhere else. Where Lew was, with the infantry in Europe, there was death, terror, blame. We were all of us fun-loving for the most part and did not grieve deeply over our occasional losses. The officer in charge of both our mess halls then was Milo Minderbinder, the industrialist and big export-import man now, and he did an excellent job, the best in the whole Mediterranean Theater of Operations, everyone knew. We had fresh eggs every morning. The workers in the kitchen under Corporal Snark were Italian laborers recruited by Milo Minderbinder, and he found local families nearby who were pleased to do our laundry for practically nothing. All we had to do to eat was follow orders. We had ice cream sodas every weekend, the officers had them every day. Only after I ditched off France with Orr did we find out that the carbonation for the ice cream sodas from Milo was coming from the carbon dioxide cylinders that were supposed to be in our Mae West life jackets to inflate them. When Snowden died, we found out Milo had taken the Syrettes of morphine from the first-aid kits too.

As I was moving into my tent that first day, I stopped at the sound of many planes and, looking up, watched three flights of six returning from a mission in perfect formation against the clear blue backdrop of the windless sky. They had gone that morning to bomb a railroad bridge on the near side of Italy outside a town called Pietrasanta, and they were back in time for lunch. There had been no flak. There were no enemy planes. There were never enemy planes in all the time I was there. This war looked just right to me, dangerous and safe, exactly as I'd hoped. I had an occupation I enjoyed that was respectable too.

Two days later I flew my first mission, to a bridge at a place called Piambino. I regretted there was no flak.

Not until I saw a kid my own age, Snowden, bleed and die just a few yards away from me in the back of a plane did the truth finally dawn that they were trying to kill me too, really trying to kill me. People I did not know were shooting cannons at me almost every time I went up on a mission to drop bombs on them, and it was not funny anymore. After that I wanted to go home. There were other things that weren't funny either, because the number of missions I had to complete had gone up first from fifty to fifty-five and then to sixty and sixty-five, and might go up even further before I could get there, with the ghastly chance I might not survive that far. I had thirty-seven missions then, and twenty-three more to fly, then twenty-eight. They had gotten rougher too, and after Snowden, I prayed on every one as soon as we were aloft and I had taken my place on my bicycle seat in the tail, facing backward, before I prepared to load and test-fire my machine gun when we were in formation and setting out over the water. I remember my prayer: "Dear God, please get me home safe, and I swear I will never go into an airplane again." Later on I broke that promise for a sales conference without a second thought. I never told Glenda or anyone else I ever prayed.

My second week there I found myself riding to Bastia in a jeep with a lieutenant named Pinkard I'd already made friends with on a mission, who had the car from the motor pool and invited me along to see the place. When we weren't on missions our time was our own. Not long after that, Pinkard went down over Ferrara in the plane with Kraft and was presumed dead with the rest. Along the straight road heading north on the level terrain near the beaches we came upon two grinning girls hitchhiking, and he screeched to a stop to take them aboard. A few minutes later he turned off the road into a flat patch of ground shielded by bushes, where he brought the car to another skidding stop, pointing out and downward and talking gibberish.

"Ficky-fick?" the elder of the two inquired, when she guessed she understood.

"Ficky-fick," Pinkard answered.

The girls glanced at each other and agreed, and we dismounted and paired off in different directions. I had the older one and we walked with our arms around each other. Mine went to the ground near the rusting pair of railroad tracks that ran down that coast of the island and were no longer in use. Between the tracks lay the metal pipeline that brought us our gasoline from the docks in Bastia. She knew what to do. She prepared herself quickly and put me inside. I did not feel as much contact as I had expected would be there, but I had no doubt I was at last doing it. I even reared up once and enjoyed looking down to make sure. I finished before Pinkard did, but I was ready for a second one sooner. By then we were back in the jeep and none of the others wanted to stop again.

A week or so after that the Germans pulled out of Rome and the Americans came in, by coincidence on D day in France. Within hours, it seemed, the executive officer in our squadron-I still don't know what an executive officer is, but ours was a major named de Coverley-rented two apartments there for us to use on short leaves, the one for the officers an elegant establishment of four bedrooms for four men, appointed with marble, mirrors, curtains, and sparkling bathroom fixtures on a broad thoroughfare called Via Nomentana, which was out of the way and a fairly long walk. Ours lay on two entire floors at the top of a building with a creeping elevator just off the Via Veneto in the center of; the city, and because of the convenience of location, the officers on leave at the same time were there a lot, even to eat and occasionally to make time with the girls who were always around. We came in larger groups with supplies of food rations, and thanks to Milo and Major de Coverley, there were women to cook for us all day long. We had maids to clean who had a good time working there and being with us, and friends of theirs would come to visit and stay the evening, often the night, for the food and the fun. Any unplanned urge could be appeased simply. Once I walked into Snowden's room and came upon Yossarian in bed on top of a maid still holding her broom, whose green panties were on the mattress beside them.

I'd never had so good a time as those I had in that apartment; I doubt I've had many better ones since.

On the second day of my first leave there I returned from a short stroll alone and came back just as the pilot called Hungry Joe was getting down from a horse-drawn cab with two girls who looked lively and lighthearted. He had a camera.

"Hey, Singer, Singer, come along," he yelled out at me in the excited, high-pitched voice with which he always seemed to say everything. "We'll need two rooms up there. I'll pay, I'll treat you. They said they'd pose."

He let me start out with the pretty one-black hair, plump, round face with dimples, good-sized breasts-and it was very good, as Hemingway might say, thrilling, relaxing, fulfilling. We liked each other. When we switched and I was with the wiry one, it was even better. I saw it was true that women could enjoy doing it too. And after that it has always been pretty easy for me, especially after I'd moved into New York in my own small apartment and was cheerily at work in the promotion department at Time magazine. I could talk, I could flirt, I could spend, I could seduce women into deciding to seduce me, which is how I lured Glenda into luring me into moving in with her after many weekends away together and then marrying.

Back at the squadron after that, I felt secure and adventurous, a ladies' man, almost a swashbuckler. I had a decent role in a pretty good film. We called them movies then. Everything ran very well, it seemed to me, with no effort on my part. We had our fresh eggs every morning, the bombs had already been loaded each time we came to our plane. Everything necessary was seen to by others, and none of the logistical work that went into it was mine. I was living with Gentiles and getting along.

Among us when I arrived were a number of aerial gunners and officers who had already completed their combat tours. They had flown their fifty missions and many had been wheedled into going on one or two more when personnel for some reason or another was short for a day or so, and they were waiting for the orders to come that would ship them back to the States. Before the transfer of the bomb group from the mainland to the island, they had been on missions to Monte Cassino and Anzio while the Germans still had fighter planes in the region to attack them, and more recently, with most of the others there before me, to hot targets they talked about like Perugia and Arezzo. Ferrara, Bologna, and Avignon still lay ahead, in my future. When the number of missions constituting a tour of duty was raised from fifty to fifty-five, those who'd not yet shipped out to Naples for the trip home to the States were ordered back to combat duty to fly the additional missions now designated. And they went, I noted, these veteran combat fliers with more knowledge than I had, without dread or outrage, with some irritation at inconvenience, but with no panic or protest. I found that encouraging. They survived without harm and in time went home. Most were not much older than I was. They had come through untouched. I would too. I felt my life as a grown-up was about to begin. I stopped masturbating.

18 Dante

"In what language?"

"In translation, of course. I know you don't read Italian."

"Three or four times," Yossarian remembered about Dante's Divine Comedy, as they waited for the elevator after Michael had dropped off the finished artwork. "Once as a kid-I used to read more than you ever wanted to. One time in a course in Renaissance literature, with Noodles Cook. Maybe a couple of times since, just the Inferno part. I never did get as much satisfaction out of it as I should have. Why?"

"It reminds me of it," said Michael, alluding to the PABT building, to which they both now were scheduled separately to go, Michael with M2 to clock the actions on the video monitors, Yossarian with McBride, with cops in flak jackets, if needed, arme with tranquilizer guns for the dogs at the bottom of the first stair case. "Even that name. Port, authority, terminal. I know what terminal means. I never tried," he went on in a tone of truculent braggadocio. "But each time I think of that bus terminal, I imagine it's what Dante's Inferno might represent."

"That's a fresh concept," Yossarian observed wryly. They were the sole passengers.

"Except," amended Michael, as they descended, "the PABT building is out in the open. Like something normal."

"That makes it worse, doesn't it?" said Yossarian.

"Than hell?" Michael shook his head.

"Sartre says hell is other people. You should read him."

"I don't want to read him. That's silly, if he was serious. It sounds like something said just for people like you to quote him."

"You're smart."

"We get used to this one," said Michael.

"Doesn't that make it worse? Do you think in hell they don't get used to it?" Yossarian added with a laugh. "In Dante they answer questions, pause in their tortures to tell long stories about themselves. Nothing God did ever came out right, did it? Not hell. Not even evolution."

Michael was an educated man who had not found magic in The Magic Mountain. He had not read Schweik, although he harbored favorable notions about him. He'd found Kafka and Joseph K. amusing but clumsy and unexciting, Faulkner passe, and Ulysses a novelty that had seen its time, but Yossarian had elected to like him anyway.

Starting out as a young father, with children amounting in time to four, Yossarian had never considered, not once, that in his declining years he might still be related to them.

"And I'm beginning to feel the same way about this office building of yours," said Michael, when they were out of the elevator and leaving the lobby.

"Ours," corrected Yossarian.

Michael had a spring in his step and an M amp; M paycheck in his pocket, and his animated spirit was in striking disharmony with his sulky observations.

"And all the rest of the buildings here in Rockefeller Center. They used to be taller, like real skyscrapers. Now they seem to be going to hell too, shrinking."

Michael might indeed be on to something, Yossarian reflected, as they came out on a sunlit street clogged with vehicles and astir with pedestrians. In fact, the slender edifices of rigid line and uniform silver stone constituting the original, true Rockefeller Center were overshadowed throughout the city now by taller structures of more extravagant style and more daring design. Old buildings had made way for new ones. These no longer meant much. The rooftops did indeed look lower, and Yossarian wondered impractically if all could indeed be sinking slowly into the mysterious muddy depths of some unreal sea of obsolescence somewhere.

Down the block toward Sixth Avenue, their job interviews for executive positions over, the line of well-dressed beggars in three-piece business suits had already taken up station, some soliciting alms with outstretched paper drinking cups from McDonald's, others looking almost too insensible to beg, their staring faces sunk to the neck into their bodies below. Across the street was the skating rink, reflecting the brilliant space of its own presence with a marvelous clarity. The rising, boxed structures of the office buildings around it climbed in slabs of windowed stone like flat, dull monoliths carved by a single mason. One pausing to listen could easily distinguish the resonance of trains traveling beneath the ground and feel the vibrations issued by their frictions. On street level, in letters cut in stone or in mosaics on small round escutcheons of gold and blue, appeared the epigraph of the principal corporate tenant in each of the buildings. Soon, when the existing lease was renegotiated, the old Time-Life headquarters would be renamed as the new M amp; M Building.

On the loftiest construction of all in that complex architectural exploit, at number 30 Rockefeller Center, a transformation of notable significance had already taken place. The institutional name of the original corporate tenant, the Radio Corporation of America, a famed organization pioneering in radio and television broadcasting and the production of popular, vulgar entertainments for grateful international multitudes, had been expunged without trace and replaced by the epigraph of the grander business entity that had bought it, the General Electric Company, a leading producer of military wares, locomotives, jet airplane engines, river pollutants, and electric toasters, blankets, and lightbulbs suitable for home use.

The synthetic gold used in the lettering of the newer name was of a longer-lasting glisten than real gold and, though poorer, of better value. Overlooking the skating rink was an airy metal sculpture of a male figure in polished lemon-yellow gilt, alleged to be a representation of the mythical Prometheus, an incongruous choice overlooking ice for the demigod who had brought fire to man.

"Come cross," said Yossarian prudently, to get out of the way of youths in sneakers and high spirits bearing down toward them fearlessly through black and white pedestrians hastily clearing an opening.

At the rink itself, on the oval of ice below street level, a cleansing intermission between sessions was in progress, performed by grinning Japanese attendants on ice skates with red jackets and green jockey caps and conspicuous button badges on lapels, with a cartoon drawing of a grinning pink face with too many teeth on a glossy white background. Moisture sparkled in drops like frozen tears atop the prominent cheekbones of the Asiatic workers in red and green. In gentle coordination these uniformed attendants of subservient mien now sporting the Tilyou Steeplechase insignia on snow-white buttons glided their machines smoothly over the blade-scarred surface of the ice, applying a fresh coat of water for a new frigid glaze for the next bunch of newcomers. The earliest among them were already on line; almost all were eating something, raw fish and rice, salt-covered bagels, or a southern pork barbecue sandwich, with nothing more to do until the hour struck.

Recalling Dante, Yossarian was unable to name what lay beneath that lake of ice in hell, if not the domain of shaggy, hideous Satan himself. He knew what underlay the skating rink and the buildings around it: refrigeration tubes for the ice, water mains, electric cables, telephone lines, pipes of steam to bring heat in winter to the offices. And also below street level were the pedestrian passageways fanning out on different courses with shops that were no longer smart, and at least one subway line from another borough with transfer points to other lines in other directions. It took ages, perhaps, but a rider with time could make connections to just about anywhere he had to go.

"Cross back," said Yossarian again, rather than brush by the middle-class mendicants, whose stupefied faces always discombobulated him. He had not thought American free-market capitalism had undone so many of its disciples.

A chorus of chittering laughter behind him caused him to look back toward one of the liver-spotted marble planters on the observation level. He saw a redheaded man with a walking stick and a loose green rucksack obligingly taking snapshots of a merry pack of subdued, dark-haired, Oriental tourists. Yossarian had the idea he had seen him before. The man had thin lips, orange lashes, a straight, sharp nose, and his face was of the fragile, milk-white complexion not uncommon among people with hair that color. As he gave back the camera, he turned Yossarian's way with an arrogant air that implied he knew perfectly well precisely the person he was going to find. Their eyes locked, and all at once Yossarian thought he had met him before, at the North Cemetery in Munich at the entrance to the mortuary chapel at the start of the famous Mann novella, the mysterious red-haired man whose presence and swift disappearance had been unsettling to Gustav Aschenbach- one glimpse and he was out of sight, gone from the story. This man flaunted a fuming cigarette recklessly, as though equally contemptuous of him and cancer. And while Yossarian stared back at him in defiant and indignant scrutiny, the man grinned brazenly, and Yossarian suffered an inner shudder just as a long, pearl-white limousine with smoked windows eased to a stop between them, although there were no cars in front. The car was longer than a hearse, with a swarthy driver. When the limousine drove forward again, he saw wide streaks of red on the ground disfigured by tire treads, like blood dripping from the wheels, and the man with red hair and green rucksack was gone. The Asians remained with faces turned upward, as though straining to read some inscrutable message in the blank walls and vitreous mirrors of the windows.

Walking westward to Eighth Avenue, he knew, would bring them to the sex parlors and cramped adult theaters on the asphalt boulevard linking the PABT building on the left to his high-rise luxury apartment building to the right, which was already in bankruptcy but functioning no less well than before.

The days were growing shorter again, and he did not want Michael to know that he would be dating Melissa MacIntosh a third time and taking her to dinner and another movie, where he would tease with his fingertips her neck and ear again, which had caused her to stiffen and smile grimly to herself the first time, blushing up to her eyes, which were small and blue, and fondle her knees, which she'd kept pressed together all through the film and in the taxi to her apartment, where, she had already made clear, she did not want him to enter that night, and where he did not truly want to go, and had not, even by indirection, asked to be admitted. She liked movies more than he did. Two of the men following him did not seem to like movies at all but had followed him in anyway, and a woman in a red Toyota went distraught finding a parking space in which to wait and was getting fat from bags of candies and pastries she ate from gluttonously. His second time with Melissa, she had relaxed her knees as though accustomed to his touch and sat: enjoying the film thoroughly, but with her back straight and her hands clasped firmly across her lower thighs, the forearms determined. He prized the resistance. He'd learned enough from her now, and even more from Angela, to know that Melissa, when younger, thinner, lighter, swifter, and more nimble, had found sex bawdy fun in dexterous ways.

"I had to tell her how," laughed Angela. "Most men are stupid and don't know anything. Do you?"

"I get complaints," he answered.

"You're tricky." Angela eyed him doubtfully. "Ain't you?" she added with a smirk.

Yossarian shrugged. Melissa herself refused to speak of specifics and would put on airs of staunch decorum when he hinted of past and prospective licentious escapades.

Looking ahead in pleasurable inventions, Yossarian had to bring into solemn contemplation the handicaps of his own weight, years, joints, agility, and virility. What he did not doubt was his eventual success in seducing her back into that same playful state of salacious enthusiasm and ready acquiescence that reputedly was hers formerly. She was not buxom above the waist, and that helped keep his ardor temperate. He calculated the risks and cost: he might even have to take her dancing once or twice and perhaps go to rock concerts and musical comedies, maybe even watch television together, news broadcasts. He was confident he could overwhelm her fear of germs with reel roses by the dozens and his evocative promises of lingerie in Paris, Florence, and Munich, and that he could win her heart with the magical romantic vow in his inventory of bantering tricks, uttered tenderly at exactly the correct moment: "If you were my girl, Melissa, I know I would want to fuck you every day."

He also knew it would be a lie.

But he could think of few pleasures more satisfying than the silly bliss of new sexual triumph shared by parties who knew, liked, and laughed with each other. And at least he had a goal now more enticing than most.

He lied a little more and swore his divorce was final.

On the corner ahead a crowd was collecting before a policeman on a horse. Yossarian gave a dollar to a black man with a hand with cracked skin and a dollar to a white one with a hand like a skeleton's. He was amazed it was alive.

"This must be," despaired Michael, "the worst fucking city in the world."

Yossarian withheld agreement dubiously. "It's the only city we have," he decided finally, "and one of the few real cities in the world. It's as bad as the worst and better than the rest."

Michael looked wan as they wove their way with others of reputable pursuit through more idle bums, beggars, and prostitutes counting abstractly on windfalls. Many of the women and girls wore nothing down below beneath their black, pink, and white vinyl raincoats, and several of the enticing harpies were fleet to flash themselves hairy and bare, with shaving rashes at the joints, when police were not observing alertly.

"I would hate to be poor," Michael murmured. "I wouldn't know how."

"And we wouldn't be smart enough to learn," said Yossarian. He was sardonically glad he'd soon be out of it all. It was another consolation of age. "Come this way, cross back now-that one looks mad enough to stab, Let him get someone else. What is that on the corner? Have we seen it before?"

They had seen it before. Hardened onlookers were watching with smiles a spindly, shabby man at work with a razor blade, cutting away the rear trouser pocket of a drunk on the sidewalk to gain nonviolent possession of the wallet inside, while two neatly uniformed policemen stood waiting patiently for him to finish before taking him into custody, with the ill-gotten fruits of his labor already on his person. Contemplating the scene was a third policeman, the one on a large chestnut horse, supervising like a doge or a demi-deity. He was armed with a revolver in a leather holster and looking, with his glistening belt of cartridges, as though armed with arrows too. The man with the razor glanced up every few seconds to stick his tongue out at him. Everything was in order, no peace was disturbed. All played their roles out jointly, like conspirators in a tapestry of symbolic collaboration overripe with meaning that defied explanation. It was as peaceful as heaven and as disciplined as hell.

Yossarian and Michael turned away uptown, stepping around an elderly lady snoozing soundly on the sidewalk against a wall, more soundly than Yossarian was accustomed to sleeping since the breakup-and the beginning, and the middle-of his second marriage. She was snoring contentedly and had no pocketbook, Yossarian noted as he was seized by a brown man in a gray military doublet with black stitching and a maroon turban who jabbered unintelligibly while steering each into the revolving door of the uncrowded Indian restaurant in which Yossarian had made a reservation for lunch that now proved unnecessary. In a roomy booth, Yossarian ordered Indian beer for both and knew he would drink Michael's too.

"How can you eat all this now?" Michael inquired.

"With relish," said Yossarian, and spooned more of the tangy condiments onto his plate. For Michael, Yossarian ordered a salad and tandoori chicken, for himself a lamb vindaloo, after a spicy soup. Michael feigned disgust.

"If I ate that I'd be nauseous."

"Nauseated."

"Don't be a pedant."

"That's what I said the first time I was corrected."

"In school?"

"In Columbia, South Carolina," said Yossarian. "By that smart little wiseass tail gunner I've told you about, Sam Singer, from Coney Island. He was Jewish."

Michael smiled in a patronizing way. "Why do you point that out?"

"At that time it was important. And I'm going back to that time. What about me, with this name Yossarian? It wasn't always that easy, with rednecked Southerners and bigots from Chicago who hated Roosevelt, Jews, blacks, and everyone else except bigots from Chicago. You'd think with the war over, everything ugly would change for the better. Not much did. In the army everyone asked me, sooner or later, about the name Yossarian, and everyone was satisfied when I told them I was Assyrian. Sam Singer knew I was extinct. He'd read a short story by a writer named Saroyan that's probably no longer in print anywhere. That's extinct too, like Saroyan. And me."

"We're not Assyrian," Michael reminded. "We're Armenian. I'm only half Armenian."

"I said Assyrian to be funny, jerk. They took it as fact." Yossarian looked fondly at him, "Only Sam Singer caught on why. wI bet I could be Assyrian too,' he said to me once, and I knew just what he meant. I think I was an inspiration to him. When the showdown came, he and I were the only ones who declined to fly any more than the seventy missions we had. Shit, the war was practically over. wFuck my superiors,' I decided, when I saw that most of my superiors were not superior. Years later I read where Camus said that the only freedom we have is the freedom to say no. You ever read Camus?"

"I don't want to read Camus."

"You don't want to read anything?"

"Only when I'm really bored. It takes time. Or when I feel all alone."

"That's a good time. In the army I never felt all alone. Singer was a bookish little prick and began to act like a comic smartass with me once he saw I would let him. wWouldn't it be better if the country had lost the Revolutionary War?' he asked me once. That was before I'd found out they were slamming people into prison for criticizing the new political party. Michael, which is farther west-Reno, Nevada, or Los Angeles?"

" Los Angeles, of course. Why?"

"Wrong. That's another thing I learned from him. In South Carolina one night a big drunken bully from somewhere began to knock him around for no reason. It was no contest. I was the; officer, although I had taken my bars off to get a midnight meal in the enlisted men's mess hall. I felt I had to protect him, and as soon as I stepped between them to try to break it up, the guy began beating the shit out of me." Yossarian broke into hearty laughter.

"Oh, God," moaned Michael.

Yossarian laughed again, softly, when he saw Michael's dismay. "The funny part is-and it was funny: I almost laughed even when he was hitting me, I was filled with such surprise-that none of it hurt. He was punching me in the head and face, and I didn't feel pain. In a little while I tied up his arms, and then people pulled us apart. Sam Singer had jumped on him from the side and this other gunner with us, Art Schroeder, had jumped on his back. When they quieted him down and told him I was an officer, he sobered up fast and nearly died. The next morning, even before breakfast, he showed up at my room in the officers' barracks to beg forgiveness and got down on his knees. I mean that. I never saw anyone cringe like that. And he just about started to pray to me. I mean that too. And he wouldn't stop, even after I told him to go away and forget it. I think I might have gotten into trouble too for taking off my lieutenant's bars just to eat in the enlisted men's mess hall, but he didn't think of that. I didn't tell him howl much it disgusted me to see him cowering that way. That's when I hated him, that's when I got angry and ordered him away, never want to see anybody so abject again, I like to tell myself." Michael was through eating after that story. Yossarian changed plates with him and finished his chicken and mopped up the leftover rice and bread. "My digestion is still good too, thank God."

"What isn't good?" said Michael.

"My sex drive."

"Oh, fuck that. What else?"

"My memory, for names and telephone numbers, I can't always find the words I know I know, I can't always remember what I meant to remember. I talk a lot and say things twice. I talk a lot and say things twice. My bladder a little, and my hair," added Yossarian. "It's white now, and Adrian tells me I shouldn't be satisfied with that. He's still trying to find a dye to turn it gray. When he finds it I won't use it. I'm going to tell him to try genes."

"What's in a gene? It's in your talk a lot."

"That's because of my genes, I guess. Blame that on Teemer. My God, that fistfight was forty years ago and seems like only yesterday. Everybody I meet now from way back then has back problems or prostate cancer. Little Sammy Singer, they called him. I wonder now what ever became of him."

"After forty years?"

"Almost fifty, Michael."

"You just said forty."

"See how fast a decade passes? That's true, Michael. You were born a week ago-I remember it like it was only yesterday-and I was born a week before that. You've no idea, Michael, you can't imagine-yet-how laughable it is, how disorienting, to walk into a room for something and forget what you came for, to look into a refrigerator and not remember what you wanted, and to be talking to so many people like you who have never even heard of Kilroy."

"I've heard of him now," Michael argued. "But I still don't know a thing about him."

"Except that he was probably here in this restaurant too," said Yossarian. "Kilroy was everywhere you went in World War II- you saw it written on a wall. We don't know anything about him either. That's the only reason we still like him. The more you find out about anyone, the less you're able to respect him. After that fight, Sam Singer thought I was the best person in the world. And after that, I wasn't ever afraid to get into a real fistfight again. Today I would be."

"Were there others?"

"No, almost one, with a pilot named Appleby, the one I flew overseas with. We never got along. I couldn't navigate and I don't know why they expected me to. One time I got lost on a training mission and gave him a compass heading that would have taken us out over the Atlantic Ocean toward Africa. We would have died right then if he hadn't been better at his job than I was at mine. What a schmuck I was, as a navigator. No wonder he was sore. Am I talking too much? I know I talk a lot now, don't I?"

"You're not talking too much."

"Sometimes I do talk too much, because I find I'm more interesting than the people I'm talking to, and even they know that. You can talk too. No, I never had to actually get in a fistfight again. I used to look pretty strong."

"I wouldn't do it," Michael said, almost proudly.

"I wouldn't do it either, now. Today people kill. I think you might anyway, if you saw brutality and you didn't take time to think about it. The way that little Sammy Singer jumped at that big guy when he saw him beating me up. If we took the time, we'd think of calling 911 or look the other way. Your big brother Julian sneers at me because I won't get into an argument with anyone over a parking space and because I'll always give the right of way to any driver that wants to take it from me."

"I wouldn't fight over that either."

"You won't even learn to drive."

"I'd be afraid."

"I'd take that chance. What else are you afraid of?"

"You don't want to know."

"One thing I can guess," said Yossarian, ruthlessly. "You're afraid for me. You're afraid I will die. You're afraid I'll get sick. And it's a fucking good thing you are, Michael. Because it's all going to happen, even though I pretend it won't. I've promised you seven more years of my good health, and now it's more like six. When I reach seventy-five, kiddo, you're on your own. And I'm not going to live forever, you know, even though I'm going to die trying."

"Do you want to?"

"Why not? Even when sad. What else is there?"

"When are you sad?"

"When I remember I'm not going to live forever," Yossarian joked. "And in the mornings, if I wake up alone. That happens to people, especially those people like me with a predisposition to late-life depression."

"Late-life depression?"

"You'll find that out too, if you're lucky enough to last. You'll find it in the Bible. You'll see it in Freud. I'm pretty much out of interests. I wish I knew what to wish. There's this girl I'm after."

"I don't want to hear about it."

"But I'm not sure I can ever really fall in love again," Yossarian went on, despite him, knowing he was talking too much. "I'm afraid that might be gone too. There's this vile habit I've gotten into lately. No, I'm going to tell you anyway. I think of women I've known far back and try to picture what they look like now. Then I wonder why I ever went crazy over them. I've got another one I can't control, one that's even worse. When a woman turns, I always, every time now, have to look down at her backside before I can decide if she's attractive or not. I never used to do that. I don't know why I have to do it now. And they all of them almost always get too broad there. I don't think I'd ever want my friend Frances Beach to know I do that. Desire is starting to fail me, and that joy that cometh in the morning, as you'll read in the Bible-"

"I don't like the Bible," Michael interrupted.

"Nobody does. Try King Lear instead. But you don't like to read anything."

"It's why I decided to become an artist."

"You never really tried, did you?"

"I never really wanted to. It's much easier to want to succeed at nothing at all, isn't it?"

"No. It's good to want something. I'm finding that out. I used to wake up each day with a brain full of plans I couldn't wait to get started on. Now I wake up listless and wonder what I can find to keep me entertained. It happened overnight. One day I was old, just like that. I've run out of youth, and I'm barely sixty-nine."

Michael gazed at him with love. "Dye your hair. Dye it black if you can't get it gray. Don't wait for Adrian."

"Like Aschenbach?"

"Aschenbach?"

"Gustav Aschenbach."

"From Death in Venice again? I never liked that story much and can't see why you do. I bet I can tell you a few things wrong with it."

"So can I. But it remains unforgettable."

"To you."

"To you too someday, maybe."

Aschenbach too had run out of interests, although he distracted himself with his ridiculous obsession and the conceit that there was still much left for him to do. He was an artist of the intellect, who had tired of working on projects that would no longer yield to even his most patient effort, and knew he now was faking it. But he did not know that his true creative life was over and that he and his era were coming to a close, whether he liked it or not. And he was only just past fifty. Yossarian had the advantage over him there. He had never had much that he had allowed himself to enjoy. A strange nature for Yossarian to empathize with now, this man who lived like a tightened fist and began each day with the same cold shower, who worked in the morning and wished nothing more than to be able to continue his work in the evening.

"He dyed his hair black," Yossarian related, like a lecturer, "easily allowed a barber to persuade him to do that, to put makeup around his eyes for the illusion of a glisten, to color his cheeks with a touch of red, to plump up his eyebrows, to erase the age from his skin with a face cream and round out his lips with tints and with shadows, and he gave up the ghost anyway, right on the dot. And got nothing in return for his trouble but the tormenting delusion that he had fallen in love with a boy with crooked teeth and a sandy nose. Our Aschenbach could not even bring himself to die dramatically, not even of the plague. He simply bowed his head and gave up the ghost."

"I think," said Michael, "you might be trying to make it sound better than it really is."

"Maybe," said Yossarian, who felt qualms it might be so, "but that's where I stand. Here's what Mann wrote then: that a menace had hung over Europe for months."

"World War II?" Michael guessed, indulging him.

"World War I!" Yossarian corrected emphatically. "Even back then, Mann could see where this ungovernable machine we call our civilization was heading. And here's what's been my fate in this latter half of my life. I make money from Milo, whom I don't care for and condemn. And I find myself identifying in self-pity with a fictional German with no humor or any other likable trait. Soon I'll be going down deeper into PABT with McBride to fine out what's there. Is that my Venice? I met a man in Paris once, cultured book publisher, who could not bring himself ever to go to Venice, because of that story. I met another man who could not vacation for as long as a week at any resort in the mountain because of The Magic Mountain. He'd have the hideous dream that he was dying there and would never get away alive if he stayed, and he'd get the hell out the next day."

"Is a Minderbinder going to marry a Maxon?"

"They both have brides to offer. I've suggested M2."

"When are you going back there with McBride?"

"Soon as the President says he might come and we get permission to examine the place. When are you going with M2?"

"As soon as he's hot to look at dirty pictures again. I draw my pay from M amp; M too."

"If you want to live under water, Michael, you must learn to breathe like a fish."

"How do you feel about that?"

"That we never had a choice. I don't feel good about it, but I won't feel bad. It's our natural destiny, as Teemer might say. Biologically, we are a new species and haven't learned to fit into nature yet. He thinks we're cancers."

"Cancers?"

"But he likes us anyway, and he doesn't like cancer."

"I think he's crazy," Michael protested.

"He thinks so too," Yossarian replied, "and has moved into the psychiatric ward of the hospital for treatment while he continues work as an oncologist. Does that seem crazy?"

"It doesn't seem sane."

"That doesn't mean he's mistaken. We can see the social pathology. What else worries you, Michael?"

"I'm pretty much alone, I told you," said Michael. "And I'm starting to get scared. About money too. You've managed to get me worried about that."

"I'm glad I've been useful."

"I wouldn't know where to get it if I didn't have any. I couldn't even mug anybody. I don't know how."

"And would probably get mugged trying to learn."

"I can't even learn how to drive a car."

"You would do what I would do if I had no money."

"What's that, Dad?"

"Kill myself, son."

"You're a barrel of laughs, Dad."

"It's what I would do. It's no worse than dying. I couldn't learn to be poor either, and I'd sooner give up."

"What will happen to those drawings I did?"

"They'll be printed in brochures and taken to Washington for the next meeting on the plane. I may have to go there too. You made money on that one, that flying wing."

"Finishing something I never even wanted to start."

"If you want to live like a fish amp; Michael, there are things you and I won't do for money, but there are some things we have to, or we won't have any. You've got those few more years to find out how to take care of yourself. For Christ sakes, learn how to drive! You can't live anywhere else if you can't do that."

"Where would I go?"

"To whoever you want to see."

"There's no one I want to see."

"To drive away from people you don't want to be with."

"I just know I'll kill somebody."

"Let's take that chance."

"You said that before. Is there really going to be a wedding at the bus terminal? I'd like to go."

"I'll get you an invitation."

"Make it two?" Michael moved his eyes away sheepishly. "Marlene is back in the city and needed a place for a while. She'll probably like that."

"Arlene?"

"Marlene, the one who just left. Maybe this time she'll stay. She says she doesn't think she'd mind if I have to work as a lawyer. My God, a wedding in that bus terminal. What kind of people would hold a wedding in a place like that just to get their name in the newspapers?"

"Their kind."

"And what kind of asshole came up with a crazy notion like that one?"

"My kind," said Yossarian, roaring. "It was your dad's idea."

19 MASSPOB

"And what does a flying wing look like?"

"Other flying wings," Wintergreen interposed adroitly, with Milo struck dumb by a query he had not anticipated.

"And what do other flying wings look like?"

"Our flying wing," answered Milo, his composure restored.

"Will it look," asked a major, "like the old Stealth?"

"No. Only in appearance."

"Absolutely, Colonel Pickering?"

"Positively, Major Bowes."

Since the first session on the M amp; M defensive second-strike offensive attack bomber, Colonel Pickering had elected early retirement with full pension benefits to capitalize on the opportunity for a more remunerative, if less showy, position with the Airborne Division of M amp; M Enterprises amp; Associates, where his opening yearly income was precisely half a hundred times richer than his earnings in federal employ. General Bernard Bingam, at Milo 's request, was delaying a similar move in hopes of promotion and eventual elevation to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and after that, given half a break with a good war, perhaps the White House itself.

It was fortunate Pickering was there to help, for this newest session on the Minderbinder bomber was proving more prickly than the others. A hint of difficulties in store had come with the unexpected attendance of the fat man from the State Department and the skinny one from the National Security Council. It was now no secret they were partisans of the competitive Strangelove entry, and they had placed themselves on opposite ends of the curved table to project the impression they were speaking separately with independent voices.

Both were career diplomats who regularly spent time away as Strangelove Associates, replenishing with newly acquired supplies the secondhand influence and fine contacts that, with bombast, were the stock-in-trade of the Strangelove empire. Another cause of consternation for Milo was the absence of an ally he'd counted on, C. Porter Lovejoy, who was otherwise occupied, perhaps, Milo feared, at a similar meeting in MASSPOB on the Strangelove B-Ware, as an ally of that one.

General Bingam was obviously delighted to be parading his aptitudes before officers from other branches who outranked him and masters in atomic matters and related abstruse scientific areas. Bingam knew a feather in his cap when he had one. There were thirty-two others in this elite enclave, and all were eager to speak, even though there were no television cameras.

"Tell them about the technology, Milo," General Bingam suggested, to move things along advantageously.

"Let me distribute these pictures first," answered Milo, as rehearsed, "so we can see what our planes look like."

"These are lovely," said a bespectacled lieutenant colonel with experience in design. "Who drew them?"

"An artist named Yossarian."

"Yossarian?"

"Michael Yossarian, He is a specialist in military art and works exclusively for us."

Coming down as instructed from the MASSPOB basement through the door to Sub-Basement A, Milo and Wintergreen had been met by three armed MASSPOB guards in uniforms they had not seen before: red battle jackets, green pants, and black leather combat boots, with name tags in cerise letters against a lustrous fabric of silken mother-of-pearl. They were checked against a roster and replied correctly when asked the password: Bingam's Baby. They were handed round pasteboard passes with numbers in a border of blue, to be worn around the neck on a skimpy whit string, and instructed to proceed directly to the Bingam's Baby conference room in Sub-Basement A, the circular chamber in which Michael's pictures were now making so auspicious an impression.

All present were reminded that the plane was a second-strike weapon designed to slip through remaining defenses and destroy weapons and command posts surviving the first strike.

"Now, everything you see in these pictures is absolutely right," continued Milo, "except those that are wrong. We don't want to show anything that will allow others to counter the technology or copy it. That make sense, General Bingam?"

"Absolutely, Milo."

"But how will any of us here know," objected the fat man from the State Department, "what it will really look like?"

"Why the fuck must you know?" countered Wintergreen.

"It's invisible," added Milo. "Why must you see it?"

"I guess we don't have to know, do we?" conceded a lieutenant general, and looked toward an admiral.

"Why do we have to know?" wondered the other.

"Sooner or later," fumed the skinny Strangelove partisan, "the press will want to know."

"Fuck the press," said Wintergreen. "Show them these."

"Are they true?"

"What the fuck difference does it fucking make if they're fucking true or not?" asked Wintergreen. "It gives them another fucking story when they find out we lied."

"Now you're talking my fucking language, sir," said the adjutant to the commandant of marines.

"And I applaud your fucking honesty," admitted a colonel. "Admiral?"

"I can live with that. Where's the fucking cockpit?"

"Inside the fucking wing, sir, with everything else."

"Will a crew of two," asked someone, "be as effective as a fucking crew of four?"

"More," said Milo.

"And what the fuck fucking difference does it fucking make if they're fucking effective or not?" asked Wintergreen.

"I get your fucking point, sir," said Major Bowes.

"I don't."

"I can live with that fucking point."

"I'm not sure I get that fucking point."

" Milo, what's your angle?"

There were no angles. The flying wing allowed the aircraft to be fabricated with rounded edges in material deflecting radar. What was being fucking offered, explained Wintergreen, was a fucking long-range airplane to roam over fucking enemy territory with only two fucking fliers. Even without midair refueling, the plane could go from there to San Francisco with a full load of bombs.

"Does this mean we could bomb San Francisco from here and get back without more gas?"

"We could bomb New York too on the way back."

"Guys, get serious," commanded the major general there. "This is war, not social planning. How many refuelings to China or the Soviet Union?"

"Two or three on the way in, maybe none coming back, if you don't get sentimental."

And just one M amp; M bomber could carry the same bomb load as all thirteen fighter-bombers used in the Ronald Reagan air raid in Libya in-in-April 1986.

"It seems like only yesterday," mused an elderly air force man drearily.

"We can give you a plane," promised Wintergreen, "that will do it yesterday."

"Shhhhh!" Milo said.

"The Shhhhh!?" said the expert on military nomenclature. "That's a perfect name for a noiseless bomber."

"Then the Shhhhh! is the name of our plane. It goes faster than sound."

"It goes faster than light."

"You can bomb someone before you even decide to do it. Decide it today, it's done-yesterday!"

"I don't really think," said someone, "we have need for a plane can bomb someone yesterday."

"But think of the potential," argued Wintergreen. "They attack Pearl Harbor. You shoot them down the day before."

"I could live with that one. How much more-"

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," begged someone else among several now stirring rebelliously. "How can that be? Artie, can anything go faster than light?"

"Sure, Marty. Light can go faster than light."

"Read your fucking Einstein!" yelled Wintergreen.

"And our first operational plane can go on alert in the year and give you something really to celebrate."

"What happens if we get in a nuclear war before then?"

"You won't have our product. You have to wait."

"Your bomber, then, is an instrument for peace?"

"Yes. And we also have a man we'll throw in," confided Milo, "who can produce heavy water for you internally."

"I want that man! At any price!"

"Absolutely, Dr. Teller?"

"Positively, Admiral Rickover."

"And our instrument for peace can be used to dump heavy bomb loads on cities too."

"We don't like to bomb civilians."

"Yes, we do. It's cost-effective. You can also arm our Shhhhh! with conventional bombs, for surprise attacks too. The big surprise will come when there's no nuclear explosion. You can use these against friendly nations, with no lasting radiation aftereffects. Will Strangelove do that?"

"What does Porter Lovejoy say?"

"Not guilty."

"I mean before his indictment."

"Buy both planes."

"Is there money for both?"

"It doesn't matter."

"I wouldn't want to tell the President that."

"We have a man who will talk to the President," volunteered Milo. "His name is Yossarian."

"Yossarian? I've heard that name."

"He's a very famous artist, Bernie."

"Sure, I know his work," said General Bingam.

"This is a different Yossarian."

"Isn't it time for another recess?"

"I may need Yossarian," muttered Milo, with his palm sheltering his mouth, "to talk to Noodles Cook. And where the fuck is that chaplain?"

"They keep moving him around, sir," whispered Colonel Pickering. "We don't know where the fuck he is."

This ten-minute recess turned out to be a five-minute recess in which six MASSPOB guards paraded in with a mulberry birthday cake for General Bernard Bingam and the papers promoting him from a brigadier general to a major general. Bingam blew out the candles on his first try and asked jovially: "Is there anything more?"

"Yes! Definitely yes!" cried the stout man from the State Department.

"I'll say there is!" cried just as loudly the slim one from National Security.

Fat and Skinny had a race to make the most of the fact that a number of features in the M amp; M Shhhhh! were identical to those of the old Stealth.

"Sir, your fucking ejection seats were originally in plans for the fucking old Stealth. Our reports show these fucking seats were shredding dummies in tests."

"We can supply you," said Milo, "with all the replacement dummies you need."

Fat fell down and broke his face.

"He was concerned, I believe," interposed the Dean of Humanities and Social Work at the War College, "about the men, not the fucking dummies."

"We can supply as many men as you need too."

Skinny was muddled, and Fat was struck dumb.

"We are inquiring as to their safety, sir. Your machines, you say, can stay aloft for long periods, even years. Our machines with men aboard must be able to come back."

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Yeah, what for?"

"Why the fuck do they have to come back?"

"What the fuck is wrong with all you fucking idiots anyway?" demanded Wintergreen, with a disbelieving shake of his head. "Our plane is a second-strike weapon. Colonel Pickering, will you talk to these fucking shitheads and explain?"

"Certainly, Mr. Wintergreen. Gentlemen, what the fuck difference does it make if the fucking planes come back or not?"

"None, Colonel Pickering."

"Thank you, Major Bowes, you fuck."

"Not at all, you bastard."

"Gentlemen," said Skinny, "I want the record to show I have never in my life been called a shithead, not since I was a young boy."

"We're not keeping a record."

"Shithead."

"Asshole."

"Prick, where would they escape to?" asked Wintergreen. "Most of everything here is gone then too."

"Permit me," snarled Skinny, leaving no doubt he was bitter. "Your fucking bombers, you say, carry nuclear bombs that will penetrate the fucking earth before exploding?"

"Your fucking missiles can't do that."

"Please tell us why the fuck we would want them to."

"Well, you fucking people, in your fucking assessments, always emphasize enemy underground bunkers for their fucking political and military leaders."

"Do we fucking emphasize that?"

"Does the President play Triage?"

"You should read what you write."

"We don't like to read."

"We hate to read."

"We can't read what we write."

"We have bombs that will go down a hundred miles before they explode. Your present depth of planning is to live forty-two miles underground. We can fuse our bombs to detonate so far past forty-two that they won't damage anybody on our side or theirs. You can wage a nuclear war that causes no damage to life or property on earth. That's humane, isn't it? That's fucking humane, I'd say."

"I'd call that fucking humane."

"Let me get one fucking thing straight. Please, Skinny, let me get a word in. These fucking units are for a second strike by us?"

"They will go after surviving enemy units that have not been used in their first strike."

"Why would they not use them in their first strike?"

"How the fuck should I know?"

"You guarantee your planes will work?"

"They've been working more than two years now. We've had models flying back and forth that long. You must tell us now if you want to go ahead. Otherwise we'll take our fucking Shhhhh! somewhere else."

"You could not do that," said Fat. "Excuse me, Skinny, let me continue."

"It's my turn, Fat. That would be against the law."

Milo 's laugh was benign. "How would you know? The planes are invisible and make no noise."

"Oh, shit, I can't believe these questions," said Wintergreen. "What the fuck difference does it make if it works or not? Its chief value is to deter. By the time it goes into action it has already failed."

"I still have a question. Let me proceed, Fat."

"It's my turn, you skinny prick."

"No, it isn't, you fat fuck."

"Don't listen to that shithead," persisted Fat. "If it's invisible and noiseless, what's to stop you from selling it to the enemy anyway?"

"Our patriotism."

And after that one, Bingam called a final recess.

"Wintergreen," whispered Milo, in the pause before they concluded, "do we really have a bomb that will go down a hundred miles before exploding?"

"We'll have to look. What about the old Stealth? Do you think they'll catch on?"

"They're not really the same. The Stealth was never built. So our Shhhhh! is newer."

"I'd say so too."

There were those on the panel who wanted more time, and others like Fat and Skinny who were insisting on a comparison check with the Strangelove B-Ware. They would need Yossarian, Milo grunted dejectedly, while the three senior military officers conferred in whispers. Bingam waited tensely. Wintergreen fumed visibly. Milo advised him to stop, since no one was watching. Finally, the rear admiral looked up.

"Gentlemen." His manner of speaking was unhurried. "We are after a weapon for the new century that will render all other armaments subsidiary and inconsequential."

"You need look no further," Milo advised hopefully.

"I myself," continued the admiral, as though he had heard nothing, "am inclined to put myself in the camp of General Bingam. Bernie, that's another feather in your cap. I want to recommend your Shhhhh! But before I put myself on record, there's a question of substance." He bent closer toward them, with his elbows on the table and his chin on clasped hands. "Your plane, Mr. Minderbinder. You must tell me honestly. If deployed in sufficient numbers, can it destroy the world?"

Milo exchanged a frantic look with Wintergreen. They chose to come clean. Wintergreen lowered his eyes while Milo responded sheepishly.

"I'm afraid not, sir," confessed Milo, with a blush. "We can make it uninhabitable, but we can't destroy it."

"I can live with that!"

"Absotively, Admiral Dewey?"

"Posilutely, General Grant."

"I'm sorry I called you a skinny prick," humbly apologized the diplomat from the Department of State.

"That's okay, you fat fuck."