Closing Time

20 Chaplain

Each time Chaplain Albert Taylor Tappman was transferred to a new location, he felt himself still in the same place, and with good reason. The lead-lined living space to which he was confined was; a railroad car, and neither before nor after each journey was he permitted to leave at will. His surroundings were no different.

The several laboratories, equipment cars, and medical examination rooms were also on wheels, as were, just past his kitchen, the carriages containing the offices and domiciles of the executive officers currently in charge of what by now had come to be called, in official parlance, the Wisconsin Project. His doors were locked and guarded by men in uniform bearing automatic assault weapons with short barrels and large ammunition clips. He had learned this about his train: there generally was no place to go but to another part of the train.

He was not permitted to dismount, except for infrequent invitations for restricted forms of recreation, which he now invariably declined. He was free to say no to that. He had never enjoyed exercise particularly and was not tempted now. While he sat in his leather easy chair, his muscle tone was improved through painless procedures of electrical stimulation. The advantages of vigorous aerobic exertions were as well obtained without effort from specialized machinery boosting his pulse beat and respiration and enlarging his blood flow. He was in hardier physical condition than before and, he noticed each morning when he shaved, looked better too.

Sometimes the travel from one place to another used up several days, and he quickly understood he was on a train with smoothly turning, quiet, tranquilizing wheels, a noiseless engine, and rails and a roadbed that were as close to perfection as anything conceived and engineered in this world could ever hope to come. He had all conveniences. His car was a pullman apartment with a walk-through bedroom and living room with gray wall-to-wall carpeting. He had a combination study-recreation room with a dark Mexican rug patterned in pink rose blossoms and white and yellow meadow flowers, on a knotty-pine floor bleached to a cream color with a patina of polyurethane. At the far end was a pullman kitchen with enough space for a table and two chairs, and there he took his meals and supplementary nourishment, always scrutinized intently as he chewed and swallowed by at least one sullen observer in a white laboratory coat, always making notes. He knew of nothing that was kept hidden from him. Everything he ate and drank was measured, sampled, analyzed, and inspected beforehand for radiation and mineral content. Somewhere nearby, he'd been informed, perhaps in another railroad car for the convenience of proximity, was at least one control group comprising individuals who consumed just what he did at the very same time, in the same portions and combinations, who did exactly as he did from morning to night. As yet there were no signs of an abnormality like his own. There were built-in Geiger counters in all his rooms, for his protection too, and these were tested twice daily. All the people who came near him-the chemists, physicists, medical doctors, technicians, and military officials, even the guards with their guns and the waiters who served him and cleared his table and the women who showed up to clean and help cook-wore name tags of mother-of-pearl and badges to register the stigmata of radioactivity immediately. He was still safe. They gave him everything he could ask for except the freedom to go home.

"Although?"

Although life at home, he admitted, had ceased being as pleasing as in the past, and he and his wife, overfull with television dramas, newscasts, and situation comedies, had speculated often about ways to bring back into the untroubled lives of their long marriage a greater amount of voluntary activities and pleasurable surprises. Trips abroad with tour groups had lost their flavor. They had fewer friends than before, a scarcity of energy and motivation, and their excitements and diversions resided almost wholly now in watching television and in contacts with their children and grandchildren, all of whom-they gave thanks daily for this-continued to reside in easy traveling distance of their home in Kenosha.

The malady of mind he outlined was not uncommon among Americans of his generation, said the understanding psychiatrist in uniform sent every other day to do what he could to ameliorate the stress of the chaplain's imprisonment and at the same time, as he admitted, pry out any knowledge germane to his remarkable condition that he was not yet consciously willing to bare.

"And at age seventy-two, Chaplain, you are probably a very likely candidate for what we label late-life depression," said the qualified medical man. "Shall I tell you what I mean?"

"I've been told that before," said the chaplain.

"I'm half your age, and I'm a good candidate too, if that brings you any solace."

He missed his wife, he confided, and knew that she missed him. She was well, he was assured at least three times weekly. They were not permitted to communicate directly, not even in writing. The youngest of his three children, a mere toddler when he was overseas, was now near fifty. The children were fine, the grandchildren too.

Nevertheless, the chaplain worried about all in his family inordinately ("Pathologically?" guessed the psychiatrist discreetly. "But of course, that would be normal too") and reverted in torment obsessively to other dreads he sensed were imminent yet could not name.

That was normal too.

In spite of himself, he regressed habitually to the same insistent fantasies of disaster with which he had tortured himself in the past in the desolating shock of loneliness and loss attending his first separation from his wife and children, during his tour of duty in the army.

There were accidents again to worry about and diseases like Ewing 's tumor, leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, and other cancers. He saw himself young again on Pianosa and he saw his smallest son, an infant again, die two or three times every week because his wife still had not been taught how to stop arterial bleeding; watched again in tearful, paralyzed silence his whole family electrocuted, one after the other, at a baseboard socket because he had never told her that a human body would conduct electricity; all four still went up in flames almost every night when the water heater exploded and set the two-story wooden house afire; in ghastly, heartless, revolting detail he saw his poor wife's trim and fragile younger body again crushed to a viscous pulp against the brick wall of a market building by a half-witted drunken automobile driver and watched his hysterical daughter, now again about five, six, seven, ten, or eleven, being led away from the grisly scene by a kindly middle-aged gentleman with snow-white hair who raped and murdered her time and time again as soon as he had driven her off to a deserted sandpit, while his two younger children starved to death slowly in the house after his wife's mother, who had been baby-sitting then and had long since passed away peacefully in old age from natural causes, dropped dead from a heart attack when news of his dear wife's accident was given her over the telephone.

His memories of these illusions were merciless. Nostalgic and abject, he regressed repetitiously and helplessly with a certain disappointed yearning to these earlier times of young fatherhood nearly half a century back, when he was never without misery, and never without hope.

"That's another commonplace feature of late-life depression," advised the psychiatrist, with tender appreciation. "When you get older, you might find yourself regressing to times when you were even younger. I do that already."

He wondered where his memory would end. He did not want to speak about his extraordinary vision, perhaps a miracle, of that naked man in a tree, just outside the military cemetery in Pianosa at the sad burial of a young boy named Snowden, who'd been killed in his airplane on a mission bombing bridges over Avignon in southern France. Standing at the open grave with Major Danby to the left of him and Major Major to the right, across the gaping hole in the red earth from a short enlisted man named Samuel Singer, who had been on the mission in the same plane with the deceased, he could recall again with mortifying clarity how he had faltered with a shiver in his eulogy when he lifted his eyes toward tile heavens and they fell instead on the figure in the tree, halted in midsentence as though stricken speechless for the moment with all breath sucked out of him. The possibility that there really had been a naked man in a tree had still never entered his mind. He kept this memory to himself. He would not want the sensitive psychiatrist with whom he was on fine terms to conclude he was crazy.

No sign of similar divine immanence had been granted him since, although he begged for one now. Secretly, in shame, he prayed. He was not ashamed that he prayed but ashamed that someone should find out he prayed and challenge him about it. He prayed also for Yossarian to come swooping into the scene like a superman in another miracle-he could think of no one else to wish for-and set him free from the unfathomable crisis in which he was now helplessly enmeshed, so that he could go back home. Always in his lifetime he had wanted only to be home.

It was not his fault that he was passing heavy water.

At various times when not in transit he was led down the few steps from his carriage to walk briskly around it for twenty, thirty, then forty minutes, observed by armed guards positioned some distance away. Always someone paced alongside-a medical specialist, a scientist, an intelligence agent, an officer, or the general himself-and periodically there was a medical cuff on his arm to record his pressure and his pulse, and a mask with a canister covering his nose and his mouth in which his exhalations were recovered. From these sessions of exercise and exertion he perceived that he was underground at least much of the time.

Indoors in his quarters he could approach any of the windows on either side in all his rooms and see Paris, if he chose, Montmartre from the prominent rampart of the Arc de Triomphe, or a view from Montmartre enveloping the Louvre, the same triumphal arch, the Eiffel Tower, and the serpentine Seine. The receding spectacle of the rooftops was monumental too. Or he could look out a window and see, if he preferred, the Spanish city of Toledo from a choice of perspectives, the university city of Salamanca, the Alhambra, or move to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, or Saint Catherine's College at Oxford University. The controls on the consoles at each of the windows were simple to master. Each window was a video screen offering a virtually unlimited selection of locations.

In New York the default perspective was from a picture window on an upper floor of a high-rise apartment building. He could move about the city as expeditiously as he could move about the world. Across the avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal one day soon after he was taken into custody he was so positive he saw Yossarian dismounting from a taxicab that he nearly cried out his name. In Washington, D. C., he was enabled to pass indoors and window-shop in leisure in the lobby of MASSPOB and at any of the fabulous displays on the retail mezzanines. In all of his places the lighting and various colorations altered with the hours to match his own time of day. His favorite views in darkness were of the casinos in Las Vegas and of the city of Los Angeles at night from the Sunset Strip. He was free to look outside at almost any place he wanted from his windows except at what really was there. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, he had the sight of his city from the covered veranda at the front of his house and the equally reassuring picture at the back from the small patio bordering his small garden, where he was wont to sit with his wife on the swing at dusk on temperate moonlit nights and, while watching fireflies, wonder together in tristful reminiscence where all the time had gone, how fast the century had passed. His green thumb had lost its expert touch. He still loved weeding but tired quickly and was frequently discouraged by the aches in his legs and lower back from what his doctor called lumbago. Looking out the window of his train from the front of his house one time, he saw a neighbor across the street he was certain had passed away a few years before, and he was momentarily disoriented. He was stunned to think that beneath the surface of his familiar city, in which he had spent nearly his whole life, there might be this hidden, subterranean railway on which he was now an unwilling passenger.

By this time, everything and, though most did not know it, everyone in a broad vicinity surrounding the chaplain's home in Kenosha had been looked at, inspected, examined, and investigated by the most discerning and discriminating of advanced instruments and techniques: the food, the drinking water from wells and the reservoir, the air they breathed, the sewage, the garbage. Every flush of a toilet was logged for analysis, and every disposal by a home garbage disposal unit. There was no evidence yet of a contamination related however remotely to the one of which he himself was still uniquely the possessor. Nowhere in Kenosha was a molecule to be found of deuterium oxide, or, in plainer language, heavy water.

"It began as a urinary problem," Chaplain Albert Taylor Tappman repeated still one more time.

"I've had those too," revealed the psychiatrist, and emitted a sigh. "But not, of course, like yours. If I had, I suppose I would be in quarantine here with you. You really don't know how you do it, or what you did to start it?"

The chaplain said so again with an apologetic stammer. He sat with his soft fists resting on his thighs, and this doctor seemed to believe him. His doctor at home had sensed something not normal right away and had taken a second specimen.

"I don't know, Albert. It still feels funny to me, sort of heavy."

"What's it mean, Hector?"

"I'm not sure, but I don't think you're allowed to do what you're doing without a government license. Let's see what the laboratory says. They might have to report it."

In no time at all the government agents moved into his house and swarmed all through it; then came the chemists, the physicists, the radiologists and urologists, the endocrinologists and gastroenterologists. In short order he was plumbed medically by every conceivable kind of specialist and environmentalist in a determined and comprehensive effort to find out where that extra hydrogen neutron was coming from in every molecule of water he passed. It was not in his perspiration. That was clean, as were the fluids everywhere else inside him.

Then came the interrogations, mannerly at first, then abusive and filled with connotations of brutality. Had he been drinking liquid hydrogen? Not to his knowledge. Oh, he would know it if he had been. He'd be dead.

"Then why are you asking me?"

It was a trick question, they crowed, cackling. They all smoked cigarettes and their hands were yellow. Liquid oxygen? He wouldn't even know where to get it.

He would have to know in order to drink it.

He didn't even know what it was.

Then how could he be sure he had not been drinking it?

They put that one down for the record too. It was another trick question.

"And you fell for it, Chaplain. That was good, Ace. Right, Butch?"

"You said it, Slugger."

There were three, and they insisted on knowing whether he had friends, wives, or children in any of the countries formerly behind the iron curtain or had any now in the CIA.

"I don't have any in the CIA either," said the psychiatrist. "I don't know how I'd defend myself if I did."

Right off, they had confiscated his passport and tapped his telephone. His mail was intercepted, his bank accounts were frozen. His safe-deposit box was padlocked. Worst of all, they had taken away his Social Security number.

"No checks?" exclaimed the psychiatrist in horror.

The checks were continuing, but the Social Security number was gone. Without it, he had no identity.

The psychiatrist went ashen and trembled. "I can guess how you must feel," he commiserated. w"I couldn't live without mine. And you really can't tell them how you do it?"

The chemical physicists and physical chemists ruled out an insect bite. The entomologists agreed.

At the beginning, people on the whole tended to be kind and patronizing and to handle him considerately. The medical men approached him amiably as both a curiosity and opportunity. In short order, however, the sociability of all but the psychiatrist and the general grew strained and thinner. Accumulating frustration shortened tolerance. Tempers turned raw and the consultations turned adversarial. This was especially true with the intelligence agents. They were not from the FEU and not from the CIA but from someplace deeper under cover. His inability to illuminate insulted, and he was censured for an obstinate refusal to yield explanations that he did not possess.

"You are being willful," said the biggest of the bullying interrogators.

"The reports all agree," said the thin, mean-looking, swarthy one with a sharp, crooked nose, manic eyes that seemed ignited by hilarity, small, irregular teeth stained brown with nicotine, and almost no lips.

"Chaplain," said the chubby one, who smiled and winked a lot with no hint of merriment and always smelled sourly of beer. "About radiation. Have you been, before we brought you here- and we want the truth, buddy boy, we'd rather have nothing if we can't have the truth, got that?-had you been absorbing radiation illegally?"

"How would I know, sir? What is illegal radiation?"

"Radiation that you don't know about and we do."

"As opposed to what?"

"Radiation that you don't know about and we do."

"I'm confused. I don't hear a difference."

"It's implied, in the way we say it."

"And you missed it. Add that one to the list."

"You got him on that one. By the balls, I'd say."

"That's enough, Ace. We'll continue tomorrow."

"Sure, General."

There was palpable insolence in the manner in which Ace spoke to the general, and the chaplain was embarrassed.

The officer in overall charge of the Wisconsin Project was General Leslie R. Groves, of the earlier Manhattan Project, which had developed the first atom bombs in 1945, and he gave every indication of being genuinely solicitous, warmhearted, and shielding. By now the chaplain was comfortable with him. He had learned much from General Groves about the rationale warranting his despotic incarceration and ceaseless surveillance, as well as the differences between fission and fusion and the three states of hydrogen with which he appeared to be meddling, or which were meddling with him. After hydrogen 1, there was deuterium, with an extra neutron in each atom, which combined with oxygen to form heavy water. And then came tritium, the radioactive gas with two extra neutrons, which was used as paint in self-illuminating gauges and clock faces, including those of the new line of novelty pornographic bedroom clocks that overnight had captured the lustful fancy of the nation, and to boost the detonating process in thermonuclear devices like hydrogen bombs containing lithium deuteride, a deuterium compound. The earliest of these bombs, set off in 1952, had produced a destructive force one thousand times greater-one thousand times greater, emphasized General Groves -than the bombs dropped on Japan. And where did that deuterium come from? Heavy water.

And he'd been flushing his away.

"What have you been doing with mine?"

"Sending it out to be turned into tritium," answered General Groves.

"See what you've been pissing away, Chaplain?"

"That will do now, Ace."

With General Groves at his side, the chaplain had stepped down once from his pullman apartment onto a small playground with squares of white concrete in back of a blank-faced pebblestone building with a cross on top that looked like an ancient Italian church. There was a basketball hoop and backboard raised on a wooden beam whose dark varnish looked recent and the pattern of a shuffleboard court on the ground in paint of flat green. A soccer ball in black and white stitched sections that gave it the look of a large molecular model primed to explode lay in the center as though waiting to be kicked. In a corner was a sun-browned vendor at a souvenir stand featuring picture postcards, newspapers, and sailors' hats of ocean blue with white piping and white letters spelling the word VENEZIA, and the chaplain wondered aloud if they really were in Venice. The general said they were not but that it made a nice change to think so. Despite the illusion of sky and fresh air, they were still indoors, underground.

The chaplain did not want to play basketball or shuffleboard or to kick the soccer ball and wanted no souvenirs. The two walked around the railroad car for forty minutes, with General Groves setting a fairly energetic pace.

Another time, after they had dismounted near a small underpass going off on a course perpendicular to their tracks, he heard dim, tiny gunpowder reports, like those of small firecrackers, sounding somewhere from a hollow distance inside. It was a shooting gallery. The chaplain did not choose to try his luck and perhaps win a stuffed teddy bear. He did not want to pitch pennies on the chance of winning a coconut. He heard also from inside that space the music of a carousel and then the alternating roaring rise and fall of the squealing steel wheels and wrenching cars of a roller-coaster in motion. No, the chaplain had never been to Coney Island or heard of George C. Tilyou's Steeplechase Amusement Park, and he had no wish to go there now. He had no desire either to meet Mr. Tilyou himself or to visit his resplendent carousel.

General Groves shrugged. "You seem sunk in apathy," he offered with some pity. "Nothing seems to interest you, not television comedy, news, or sports events."

"I know."

"Me neither," said the psychiatrist.

It was on the third trip back to his home in Kenosha that the first of the food packages from Milo Minderbinder was delivered to him. After that these parcels came every week on the same day. The gift card never changed: WHAT'S GOOD FOR MILO MINDERBINDER IS GOOD FOR THE COUNTRY.

The contents did not alter either. Neatly placed in a bed of excelsior were a new Zippo cigarette lighter, a packet of sterile swabs on sticks of pure Egyptian cotton, a fancy candy box containing one pound of M amp; M's premium chocolate-covered Egyptian cotton candy, a dozen eggs from Malta, a bottle of Scotch whisky from a distiller in Sicily, all made in Japan, and souvenir quantities of pork from York, ham from Siam, and tangerines from New Orleans, which also originated in the Orient. The chaplain gave consent when General Groves suggested he donate the package to people above who still had nowhere to live. The chaplain was surprised the first time.

"Are there homeless in Kenosha now?"

"We are not in Kenosha now," answered General Groves, and moved to the window to press the location button.

They were in New York again, looking out past the bootblacks and the sidewalk carts of the food vendors with their smoking charcoal fires lining the streets near the front entrance to the bus terminal, looking past the PABT building to the two barren architectural towers of the World Trade Center, still possibly the tallest commercial structures in the universe.

Another time, while certain he was in MASSPOB in Washington, the chaplain saw by default mode that he was inside PABT, parked somewhere below while they switched engines and laboratory cars. He was able to gaze out through his window even into the Operations Control Center of the terminal and tie into any of the video screens there, to watch the buses arrive and depart, the diurnal tides of people, the undercover policemen who dressed like drug dealers and drug dealers who dressed like undercover policemen, the prostitutes, addicts, and runaways, the sordid, torpid couplings and other squalid acts of community life in the emergency stairwells, and even to peek inside the different washrooms to see humans peeing and doing laundry and, if he wanted to, inside the toilet cubicles themselves to observe the narcotic injections, oral sex, and defecations. He did not want to. He had television sets that could bring in programs with excellent reception on three hundred and twenty-two channels, but he found it was not fun to watch anything without his wife watching with him. Television was not much fun when they were together either, but they could at least fix their faces on the common point of the set while they fished around for something new to talk about that might lighten the lethargy. This was old age. He was still merely just past seventy-two.

Another time in New York he looked through his window at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at an hour when a meeting of ACACAMMA was disbanding, and he was certain again that he saw Yossarian leaving in the company of an elderly woman in fashionable dress and a man taller than both, and he wanted to cry out again, for this time he observed a man with red hair and a green rucksack eyeing the three craftily and falling in behind them, and then two other men, with brighter orange hair, following also, and behind them came still another man, who unmistakably was following them all. He distrusted his eyes. He felt he must be seeing things again, like that time of the vision of the man in the tree.

"And what is that other noise I continue to hear?" the chaplain finally inquired of General Groves, when they were rolling again and moving out of the city.

"You mean of water? That stream or river?"

"I hear it often. Maybe all the time "

"I can't say." I "You don't know?"

"My orders are to tell you everything I do know. That one is out of my jurisdiction. It's more secret and lower down. We know from our sonar that it's a fairly narrow, slow-moving body of water and that small boats without power, maybe rowboats, come by on it regularly, moving always in one direction. There's music too. The pieces have been identified as the prelude and wedding march from the third act of the opera Lohengrin." And faintly underlying that music, from someplace deeper, was an unrelated children's chorus of anguish that the government musicologists had not yet been able to identify. Germany was consulted and was in anguish also over the existence in performance of a choral piece of advanced musical complexity, perhaps genius, of which they knew nothing. "The water is on my papers as the river Rhine. That's all I know."

"The Rhine River?" The chaplain was awed.

"No. The river Rhine. We are not in Germany now."

They were back in the nation's capital.

There was no good reason to doubt General Groves, who made a noticeable point of being present at all the sessions with Ace, Butch, and Slugger. The chaplain understood that even the general's friendship might be no more than a calculated tactic in a larger strategy involving a clandestine plot with the three intelligence men, of whom he was most in fear. There was no way of knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of knowing anything.

"'I often feel that same way," the general was quick to agree, when he voiced his misgivings.

"Me too," admitted the psychiatrist.

Was the sympathizing psychiatrist also a trick?

"You've no right to do this to me," the chaplain protested to General Groves when they were again alone. "I think I know that much."

"You're mistaken, I'm afraid," answered the general. "I think you'll find that we have a right to do to you anything you can't stop us from doing. In this case, it's both legal and regular. You were a member of the army reserves. They've simply called you back into service."

"But I was discharged from the reserves," responded the chaplain with triumph. "I have the letter to prove it."

"I don't think you do anymore, Chaplain. And it doesn't show in our records."

"Oh, yes it does," said the chaplain, gloating. "You can find it in my Freedom of Information file. I saw it there with my own eyes."

"Chaplain, when you look again, you'll find it's been blacked out. You're not completely innocent, you know."

"Of what am I guilty?"

"Of offenses the intelligence agents don't know about yet. Why won't you say that you're guilty?"

"How can I say if they won't tell me what they are?"

"How can they tell you if they don't know? To begin with."

General Groves went on, in a more instructive tone, "there's this thing with the heavy water you're producing naturally and won't say how."

"I don't know how," protested the chaplain.

"It's not I who don't believe you. Then there's this second thing, with a man named Yossarian, John Yossarian. You paid him a mysterious visit in New York as soon as we found out about this. That's one of the reasons they picked you up."

"There was nothing mysterious about it. I went to see him when all of this started to happen. He was in a hospital."

"What was wrong with him?"

"Nothing. He wasn't sick."

"Yet in a hospital? Try to imagine, Albert, how most of this sounds. He was in that hospital at the same time a Belgian agent with throat cancer was there. That man is from Brussels, and Brussels is the center of the EEC. Is that coincidence too? He has cancer of the throat but doesn't get better and doesn't die. How come? In addition, there are these coded messages about him to your friend Yossarian. They go out to him four or five times a day from this woman who pretends she just likes to talk to him on the telephone. I've not met a woman like that. Have you? Now his kidney is failing again, she says, just yesterday. Why should his kidney be failing and not yours? You're the one with the heavy water. I have no opinion. I don't know any more about these things than I do about the prelude to Act III of Lohengrin or a chorus of children singing in anguish. I'm giving you the questions raised by others. There's even a deep suspicion the Belgian is with the CIA. There's even some belief that you're CIA."

"I'm not! I swear I've never been with the CIA!"

"I'm not the one you have to convince. These messages go out from the hospital through Yossarian's nurse."

"Nurse?" cried the chaplain. "Is Yossarian ill?"

"He is fit as a fiddle, Albert, and in better shape than you or I."

"Then why does he have a nurse?"

"For carnal gratification. They have been indulging themselves in sexual congress one way or another now four or five times a week"-the general looked down punctiliously at a line graph on his lap to make absolutely sure-"in his office, in her apartment, and in his apartment, often on the floor of the kitchen with the water running or on the floor of one of the other rooms, beneath the air conditioner. Although I see on this chart that the frequency of libidinous contact is diminishing sharply. The honeymoon may be ending. He no longer sends her long-stemmed red roses often or talks as much about lingerie, according to this latest Gaffney Report."

The chaplain was squirming beneath these accumulating personal details. "Please."

"I'm merely trying to fill you in." The general turned to another page. "And then there's this secret arrangement you seem to have with Mr. Milo Minderbinder that you have not seen fit to mention."

" Milo Minderbinder?" The chaplain's reaction was one of incredulity. "I know him, of course. He sends these packages. I don't know why. I was in the war with him, but I haven't seen or spoken to him in almost fifty years."

"Come, Chaplain, come." Now the general feigned a look of exaggerated disappointment. "Albert, Milo Minderbinder claims ownership of you, has a patent pending on you, has registered a trademark for your brand of heavy water, with a halo, no less. He has offered you to the government in conjunction with a contract for a military airplane for which he is vying, and he receives weekly a very, very hefty payment for every pint of heavy water we extract from you. You're amazed?"

"I've never heard any of this before!"

"Albert, he'd have no right to do that on his own."

"Leslie, now I'm sure I've got you." The chaplain came near to smiling. "You said just a while ago that people have a right to do whatever we can't stop them from doing."

"That's true, Albert. But in practice, it's an argument we can use and you cannot. We can go through all of this again at the weekly review tomorrow afternoon."

At the weekly assembly conducted every Friday, it was the general himself who got wind first of the newest development.

"Who farted?" he asked.

"Yeah, what is that smell?"

"I know it," said the chemical physicist on duty that week, "it's tritium."

"Tritium?"

The Geiger counters in the room were clicking. The chaplain dropped his eyes. An appalling transformation had just come to pass. There was tritium in his flatulence.

"That changes the game, Chaplain," the general reproved him gravely. Every test and procedure would have to be repeated and new ones initiated. "And immediately check everyone in all the other groups."

None of the people in any of the control groups were blowing anything out their asses but the usual methane and hydrogen sulfide.

"I almost hate to send this news on," said the general with gloom. "From now on, Chaplain, no more farting around."

"And no more pissing against the wall."

"That will do, Ace. Does it not strike you as odd," General Groves inquired philosophically one week later at the freewheeling brainstorming symposium, "that it should be a man of God who might be developing within himself the thermonuclear capability for the destruction of life on this planet?"

"No, of course not."

"Why should it?"

"Are you crazy?"

"What's wrong with you?"

"Who else would it be?"

"They molest altar boys, don't they?"

"Shouldn't the force that created the world be the one to end it?"

"It would be even odder," concurred the general, after weighing these contemplations, "if it were anyone else."

21 Lew

It's this feeling nauseous I don't like anymore. By now I can tell the difference. If I think it's nothing, it goes away. If I think it's something, the remission is over and the relapse is back. I'll soon be scratching myself in different places and sweating at night and running a fever. I can tell before anyone if I'm losing weight. The wedding ring gets loose on my finger. I like a few drinks every night before dinner, that same old kid's blend people laugh at now of Carstairs whiskey and Coke, a C amp; C. If I feel pain after drinking alcohol, in my neck again or shoulders or in my abdomen now, I know it's time to phone the doctor and start hoping it's not into the city again for another round with Teemer and maybe into his hospital for another session with one of his radiation sharpshooters. I always let Claire know when I feel something is up. I don't give her false scares. Heartburn is easy. That comes from eating too much. The nausea I'm tired of comes with the sickness and comes with the cure. There's no mistaking it. When I think of the nausea I think of my mother and her green apples. To my mind they taste like what I taste when I'm nauseous. One time as a kid I had an abscessed ear that was lanced at home by a specialist who came to the house with Dr. Abe Levine, and she told us, me and the doctors and anyone else around, that I must have been eating her green apples again. Because that's what you got when you ate green apples. I have to smile when I think of the old girl. She was cute, even toward the end, when she was not always all there. She would remember my name. She had trouble recognizing the others, even the old man, with his watery eyes, but not me. "Louie," she would call quietly. "Boychik. Loualeh. Kim aher to der momma."

By now I've grown sick of feeling sick.

Sammy gets a kick out of hearing me put it that way, so I always make sure to say it every time I see him, just to give him a laugh, when he's up here on another visit or in the city sometimes when we come in to go out. We go into the city for an evening now and then just to prove we still can. We don't know anyone who lives there anymore but him and one of my daughters. I'll go to plays with Claire and try hard not to sleep while I pretend to keep interested in what's happening on the stage. Or I'll sit with Sammy and eat or drink while she goes to museums or art galleries with my daughter Linda or alone. Sometimes Sammy brings along a nice woman with a good personality, but it's easy to see there's nothing hot going on. Winkler calls from California every few weeks just to see how things are and to tell me who died out there we know and to get the latest on people we're still in touch with here. He's selling shoes now, real leather shoes, he tells me, to stores in big chains with shoe departments, and using the cash flow from the shoes to tide him over the slow seasons with his chocolate eggs and Easter bunnies. He's doing something else I don't want to know more about, with overstocks of frozen foods, mainly meats. Sammy still gets a smile out of Marvelous Marvin's business enterprises too. Sammy doesn't seem to have much to enjoy himself with since he's been living alone in that new high-rise apartment building of his. He still doesn't know what to do with his time, except for that work raising money for cancer relief. He's got a good pension from his Time magazine, he says, and had money put away, so that's not a problem. I give him ideas. He doesn't move.

"Go to Las Vegas and play with some hookers awhile."

Claire even approves of that one. I'm still crazy about her. Her breasts are still big and look as good as new since she had them prettied up again. Or he could go to Bermuda or the Caribbean and find a nice secretary on vacation to treat like a princess. Or to Boca Raton for a nifty middle-aged widow or divorced woman past fifty who really wants to remarry.

"Sammy, you really ought to think about getting married again. You're not the kind who can live alone."

"I used to."

"Now you're too old," Claire tells him. "You really can't cook a thing, can you?"

We forget that Sammy is still shy with women until the ice is broken and doesn't know how to pick up a girl. I tell him I'll go with him when I'm better and help him find some we like.

"I'll come too," says Claire, who's always ready to go off anywhere. "I can sound them out and spot the cuckoos."

"Sammy," I press him, "get up off your ass and take a trip around the world. We ain't kids anymore, you and me, and the time might be short to start doing things we always thought we wanted to. Don't you want to go to Australia again and see that friend of yours there?"

Sammy got to go everywhere when he was moved into the international division of that Time Incorporated job he used to have and still knows people in different places.

I'm even thinking myself I might be willing to take a trip around the world once I get my weight back this time, because Claire would like that. Lately, I enjoy seeing all of them get the things they want.

Maybe it's my age too, along with the Hodgkin's, but I feel better knowing they'll all be left okay when I'm gone. At least for a start. Now that Michael is a CPA in a place he likes, they all seem set. Claire still has her face and her figure, thanks to the trips to the health farms and the secret nips and tucks she sneaks away for every now and then. Along with all else, I've got a good piece of beach property in Saint Maarten just right for development that's in her name too, and another piece in California she doesn't know about yet, even though that's in her name also. I've got more than one safe-deposit box, with things inside she's not been taught to handle yet. I wish she were better at arithmetic, but Michael's there now to help her with that part, and Andy in Arizona has got some business sense too. Michael seems to know his stuff, along with a number of things he learned from me I know they didn't teach him in accounting school. I trust my lawyer and my other people as long as I'm around to make sure they know what I want and see they do it right away, but after that I wouldn't bet. They get lazy. Emil Adler has gotten lazy with age too and is quick to pass you on to another kind of specialist. The kids have all given him up for new doctors of their own. I'm training Claire to be tougher with lawyers than I am, to be independent.

"Bring in anyone else you want to anytime you like. You can handle it all for me from now on. Don't let them brush you off for a second. We don't owe them anything. They're sure to ask for it anytime we do."

None in my family gamble, not even on the stock market. And only Andy has a taste for extravagant things, but he married well, a nice-looking girl with good personality, and seems to be solidlv settled in partnership with his father-in-law in a couple of lively automobile dealerships in Tempe and Scottsdale in Arizona. But he'll never be able to afford a divorce, which might be good, and she will. I own a piece of his share, but that's already been made over to him. Susan has children nearby and is married to a well-mannered carpenter I helped put into building houses, and so far that seems to be working out okay too. Linda is set for life in a teaching job that gives her long vacations and a good pension. She knows how to attract men and maybe she'll marry again. I sometimes wish that Michael was more like me, bolder, had more force of character, asserted himself more loudly and more often, but that could be my doing, and Claire thinks that maybe it is.

"Lew, what else?" she says, when I ask. "You're not an easy act to follow."

"I wouldn't be happy if I thought I was."

Claire won't cooperate when I want to talk about my estate plans and refuses to listen for long.

"Sooner or later-" I tell her.

"Make it later. Change the subject."

"I don't enjoy it either. Okay, I'll change the subject. Eight percent interest on a hundred-thousand-dollar investment will bring you how much a year?"

"Not enough for the new house I want to buy! Lew, for God sakes, will you stop? Have a drink instead. I'll fix it."

She's got more confidence in Teemer now than I have and than he seems to have in himself. Dennis Teemer has moved into the nut ward of his hospital, he tells me, for treatment, although he keeps the same office hours and hospital practice. That sounds crazy to me. So maybe he does know what he's doing, as Sammy says in a wisecrack. When Emil can't help me in the hospital up here, I start going back into the city to Teemer, to be MOPPed up again with those injections that give me that nausea I hate, at least one time a week, at best. MOPP is the name of the mixture in the chemotherapy they give me now, and Teemer lets me think the "mopped up" joke I made is original with me and that he's still never heard it from anyone else.

By now I hate going back to him. I'm in dread and I'm weary. I have to, Emil tells me, and I know that too. By now I think I hate Teemer also. But not enough to break his back. He's become the disease. There's always gloom in his waiting room. When Claire doesn't bring me, I go down and back in the black or pearl-gray limousine from the car service with the same driver, this guy Frank, from Venice, and going in is a drag too. From Teemer's office, to get back uptown to go home or the hospital, you have to ride past that funeral parlor near the corner, and I don't like that part either. There's almost always at least one attendant waiting outside, looking too tidy to be normal, and usually a guy with a knapsack and a walking stick, who must work there, he looks like a hiker, and they eye each car that slows down for the intersection. They eye me too.

By now I'm scared of going back inside Teemer's hospital, but I'll never let it show. With Sammy's Glenda gone and Winkler and his wife living in California, Claire has to stay in a hotel, alone or with one of the girls, and that's not much fun for her. It's the nausea that's going to put me away. I remember what it feels like, and that makes me nauseous too. I'm tired a lot, tired from age, I guess, and tired from the ailment, and by now, I think, I really am sick of amp; it! I worry about that time coming up when I go into the hospital and can't make it out on my own feet.

No one has to tell me I've lived longer than any of us thought I would. And nobody does. If anyone tried to, I think I would jump right up like the Lew Rabinowitz from Coney Island of old and really break a back. Teemer thinks I'm setting some kind of record. I tell him he is. The last time I was in to see him he had a bone man look at a CAT scan of my leg that turned out to be all right. They're starting to think it could have come from a virus. That's okay with me. It makes no difference to Teemer, who would have to deal with it the same way, but it cheers me to know I might not be passing it along as something hereditary. My kids get symptoms when I do. I can tell by their faces when they talk to me. They look nauseous. And they think of running right off to a doctor every time they feel queasy or wake up with a stiff neck. I'm not the unluckiest person who ever lived, but I don't think that makes any difference now.

I'm not young anymore. I have to remember that. I keep forgetting, because between spells I feel as good as ever and can find more ways to have fun than most people I know. But when Marty Kapp died on a golf course in New Jersey and then Stanley Levy did from a heart attack too, and David Goodman almost did at only thirty-eight, and Betty Abrams died of cancer in Los Angeles and Lila Gross from cancer here, and Mario Puzo had a triple bypass and Casey Lee too, and Joey Heller got that paralysis from that crazy Guillain-Barre syndrome no one ever heard of and has to consider now how much his weakened muscles will weaken as he gets older, I had to start getting used to the idea that time was closing in on Lew Rabinowitz too, that I had reached the age where even healthy people got sick and died, and I was not going to live forever either. I picked up a taste for French wines along with my appetite for cheeses on our Caribbean vacations in Martinique and Guadeloupe, and Claire hasn't noticed that I've begun opening all our better ones. I'm emptying my wine cellar. It's harder for me to score a lot of money now than it used to be, and maybe that's another sign I've gotten older. Each time we go someplace now we both take more bottles of different medicines with us. It was easy to see that things like my personal plumbing were going to just stop working right and that sooner or later the serious ailments were going to start piling in. I already had one of mine.

Way back, I never felt that way, that life for me ever could be short, not even in the army in my infantry combat in Europe. I knew there was danger, I saw it right off the bat, but I never thought it could touch me. Coming through in August as a replacement into a French town called Falaise after the big battle there, I saw enough dead Germans rotting in stacks on the ground to last me a lifetime. I saw dozens more before I was through. I saw dead Americans. I saw Eisenhower there reviewing the victory scene, and I thought he looked sick too. In a town called Grosshau past Belgium at the German border near another town, called Hürtgen, I was standing no more than two feet away from Hammer, who was telling me the Germans had pulled out and the place was clear, when he was hit by a sniper in the back of the head. He was still reporting it was safe when he fell forward into my arms and sank down into the snow. It didn't surprise me that it was him, not me. I took for granted I would always be lucky. It turned out I was right. Even in the prison camp I was lucky and not really afraid. The day we finally got there after that miserable train trip and were put on line to be registered in, I saw this cold-looking skinny officer in a clean uniform staring at another Jewish prisoner, named Siegel, in a way I didn't like, and without even thinking I decided to speak up and do something. I was filthy like the rest, lousy, dead tired too, and stank of diarrhea also, but I moved to the officer, making myself look timid, and smiling very politely asked him: "Bist Du auch Jude?"

His mouth opened and he gaped at me like I was mad. I've never seen anyone look more surprised. I have to laugh again when I think of it. I don't think he'd been asked very often in his German army if he also was Jewish.

"Sag das noch einmal," he ordered sharply. He couldn't believe it.

I did what he told me and said it again. Shaking his head, he began to chuckle to himself, and he tossed me a hard biscuit from a small pack he was holding.

"No, I'm afraid not," he answered in English, with a laugh. "Why do you wish to know if I am Jewish?"

Because I was, I told him in German, and showed him that letter J on my dog tags. My name was Rabinowitz, Lewis Rabinowitz, I went on, and then added something I wanted him to think about. "And I can speak German a little."

He snickered again with a look like he couldn't believe me and then drifted away and left us alone.

"Hey, buddy, are you crazy?" said a tall guy behind me with curly, rusty hair, whose name was Vonnegut and who later wrote books. He couldn't believe it either.

They would have found out anyway at the front of the line, I figured.

I was still not afraid.

I was in love with my gun from the first day I had one, and nobody ever had to remind me to keep it clean. After all that junk in the old man's junkshop, it was something like heaven to find myself with a machine like new that worked and could be put to good use. I had great faith in all my guns. When I came into the squad overseas as a new guy and a replacement, I was happy to take the BAR, that Browning automatic rifle, even after I noticed the guys who knew better shying away from it and soon found out why. The man with the firepower was the one who would draw it. It was best never to fire at all unless we had to. I learned that one fast too. The man who gave our position away when there was nothing more important to shoot at than just another German soldier risked being battered around by the rest of us. I had faith in my guns, but I can't remember that I had to fire them much. As a corporal first and then a squad leader, I mostly told the rest of the twelve where to put themselves and what to go for. We were pushing forward into France toward Germany, and it's a fact that we did not often see the human figures we were shooting at until they were dead and we passed them lying stiff on the ground. That part was eerie. We saw empty space, we spotted gun bursts and directed fire there, we shrank from tanks and armored cars, and hugged ground from artillery shells; but in our own platoon we almost never laid eyes on the people we were warring with, and when they weren't charging or bombarding us, it was almost like being back in a Coney Island shooting gallery or a penny arcade.

Except it wasn't always much fun. We were wet, we were cold, we were dirty. The others had a tendency to huddle up together under barrages, and I had to keep bellowing at them to spread out and get away from me and each other, like they were supposed to. I didn't want anybody too close fouling up my own bright destiny.

I came as a replacement into a platoon already filled with replacements, and it didn't take long to figure out what that meant. No one lasted long. The only one I met who had lasted from D day was Buchanan, my sergeant, and he was losing his grip by the time I got there and was cut down later by machine gun fire in a dash from cover to some hedges across the road in this town of Grosshau in the Hürtgen forest that was supposed to be clear. Then there was David Craig, who had landed in Normandy on D day plus nine and took out the Tiger tank, and he was soon in a hospital with a leg wound from artillery outside a place called Luneville.

By the time of the tank, Buchanan did not know what to do when he got the order and he looked at me. I could see the poor guy was shaking. We had no guns with us that would pierce a Tiger. The tank had pinned down the rest of our platoon.

I made the call. "Who's got the bazooka?" I asked, and looked around. "David? Craig? You'll go. Slip through the street through the houses and come up on the back or side."

"Aw, shit, Lew!" By then he'd had enough too.

Aw, shit, I thought, and said, "I'll go with you. I'll handle the shells. Find out where to hit." A rocket from a bazooka would not go through a Tiger's armor plate either.

The instructions were good. Put a shell in the seam of the turret of the cannon. Put another in the tracks if we could, from no more than a hundred feet away. I carried four shells. Once past the houses and outside the village, we followed a gully with a thin stream of green water until we came to a bend, and then it was there, straddling the ditch, no more than thirty feet in front of us. All sixty tons of that big thing right up above us, with a soldier with binoculars in the open hatch, wearing a smile I couldn't stand that made that nerve in the side of rny jaw turn tight and start to tick. We made not a sound. I put a finger to my lips anyway, slipped in a shell and wired it up. Craig had hunted in Indiana. He landed right on target. The binoculars flew when the rocket shell exploded, and the German dropped down out of sight with his head limp. The tank started backing. The second shot hit the tracks and the wheels stopped turning. We watched long enough to see the guys from the rest of the platoon drop grenades down inside as they went charging past, and soon that whole thing was on fire.

Craig and I were put in for a Bronze Star for that one. He was wounded in the thigh from a tree burst outside that place called Luneville before he could get his, and I was a prisoner of war before I got mine. On the ground on the other side of me about five yards away when Craig got hit was a dead kid with his head opened by that same shell, and I wasn't touched. The tree burst got eight of our twelve.

That German soldier in the tank was the one German soldier I ever saw who wasn't dead or a prisoner, except for the ones who captured me, and those looked good as new.

Snow fell in December in the Hürtgen forest, and we knew we would not be home for Christmas. David Craig might be, but not us.

In the middle of the month we were packed up in a hurry in a convoy of troop trucks to be shipped south as reinforcements to a regiment outside a different forest, near a town called Ardennes. When we got there and dismounted, a captain was waiting in the clearing to greet us, and as soon as we were assembled to hear him, he announced: "Men, we're surrounded."

We had a funny guy named Brooks then, and he started yelling: "Surrounded? How can we be surrounded? We just got here. How could we get here if we're all surrounded?"

It was true, it turned out. The Germans had broken through that forest, and it wasn't so funny.

And the next day we found out, only by being told, that we'd surrendered, all of us, the whole regiment.

How could that be? We were armed, we were there, we were equipped. But someone in back had surrendered us all. We were to lay down our arms in a pile on the ground and just wait to be taken in as prisoners. That made no sense.

"Captain, can we try to get back?" someone called out nervously.

"When I turn my back, I'm no longer in command."

"Which way should we go?"

No one knew the answer to that.

Ten of us piled into a light-duty truck with the two drivers who'd brought us there and we took off. We gassed up at the motor pool, that's how calm things were there. We took extra woolen shawls for the face and the neck, dry socks. We had rifles, carbines, and grenades. Inside my shirt against my heavy army underwear I had cartons of food rations, cigarettes, packets cf Nescafe, sugar, matches, my good old reliable Zippo lighter to help start fires, a couple of candles.

We didn't get far.

We didn't even know where we were going. We headed away on the road we'd come in on and turned left onto a wider road when we hit an intersection, thinking we were heading back west toward our own lines. But then the road veered around and we saw we were going north again. We followed other cars. The snowfall turned thick. We began passing jeeps, staff cars, and trucks that had skidded off into drifts and been left there. Then we came to others that had been battered and burned. Some were still smoking. Windows had been shattered. We saw some with bodies. We heard rifle fire, mortars, machine guns, horns, strange whistles. When our own truck fishtailed off into an embankment, we left it and split up into smaller groups to try to go for it separately on foot.

I sloshed off to one side of the road, over the grade and down into the cover of the other side, slipping and sliding as I trudged along as fast as I could move. Two others came with me. Soon we heard cars, dogs, then voices calling orders in German. We moved apart and hid on the ground. They had no trouble finding us. They came right up to us from out of the whirl of snowflakes and had us at gunpoint before we could even make them out. They were dressed in white uniforms that merged into the background, and everything they carried looked brand-new. While we looked like dog shit, as this guy Vonnegut said when I met up with him in the train station and then later put into a book he wrote, Claire told me, and so did the kids.

They caught all of us, all twelve, and had a few hundred more we joined up with as they moved us along. They herded us onto trucks that drove across a river I later found out was the Rhine and dropped us off at a large railroad terminal, where we sat inside moping until a long troop train of boxcars pulled up to the siding. German soldiers hurried out and swarmed into the trucks and staff cars that were waiting. We saw whole detachments wearing American uniforms with MP bands and white helmets, and we had to wonder what the hell was happening. It was the Battle of the Bulge and they were kicking the shit out of us, but we didn't find that out until half a year later.

We spent three nights and three whole days locked inside the cars of that train. We slept standing up, sitting, squatting, and lying down too when we found the room. We had no toilet paper. They didn't care how we did it. We used helmets. When our handkerchiefs were gone, so was our modesty. It took that long to deliver us to that big prisoner of war camp all the way into Germany, almost to the other side. They had a compound there for British soldiers. We recognized the emblem on the gates of the barbed-wire fence. There was another for the Russians. There was one for other Europeans, from which this old guy named Schweik I met later came from. And now there was one for Americans. Some of the Englishmen I spoke to had been prisoners for over four years. I didn't think I could take that. Then I thought that if they could do it, I could too.

About a week and a half after I got there, that officer I spoke to the first day sent for me by name. He began in German.

"You know German, you say?"

"Jawohl, Herr Kommandant."

"Let me hear,' he continued in English. "Speak only in German."

I spoke a little bit of German, I told him. Not well, I knew, but I understood more.

"How does it happen you know it?"

"Ich lernte es in der Schule."

"Why did you study German?"

"Man musste in der Schule erne andere Sprache lernen."

"Did you all pick German?"

"Nein, Hen Commandant."

"The others?"

"Fast alle studierten Franzosisch oder Spanisch."

"Your accent is atrocious."

"Ich weiss. Ich hatte keine Gelegenheit zu üben."

"Why did you choose German?"

I gambled a smile when I told him I thought I would have a chance to speak it someday.

"You were right, you see," he answered dryly. "I am speaking English to you now because I don't want to waste time. Do you like it here, in the camp?"

"Nein, Herr Kommandant."

"Why don't you?"

I did not know the word for boring, but I knew how to tell him I had nothing to do. "Ich babe nicht genug zu tun bier. Hier sind zu viele Manner die nicht genug Arbeit haben."

"I can propose something better. A work detail in the city of Dresden, which is not very far. Do you think you would prefer that?"

"I think I-"

"In German."

"Jawohl, Herr Kommandant. Entschuldigen Sie."

"You will be safe in Dresden, as safe as here. There is no war industry there and no troops stationed, and it will not be bombed. You will eat a bit better and have work to keep you busy. We are sending a hundred or so. We are permitted to do that. Yes?"

I was nodding. "Ich würde auch gerne gehen."

"You would be useful to interpret. The guards there are not educated. They are old or very young, as you will see. The work is correct too. You will be making a food preparation, mainly for pregnant women. Does it still suit you?"

"Ja, das gefallt mir sehr, Herr Kommandant, wenn es nicht verboten ist."

"It is allowed. But," he said, with a pause and a shrug, to let me know there was some kind of catch, "we can put only privates to work. That is all that is allowed by the rules of the Geneva Convention. We are not permitted to send officers, not even noncommissioned officers. And you are a sergeant. Not even when they volunteer."

"Was kann ich tun?" I asked. "Ich glaube Sie würden nicht mit mir reden, wenn Sie wussten dass ich nicht gehen kann." Why else would he send for me if he didn't know a way around it?

"Herr Kommandant," he reminded.

"Herr Kommandant."

He uncupped a palm on the top of his table and pushed toward me a singleedge razor blade. "If you cut off your sergeant's patch we could deal with you like a common soldier. You will lose nothing, no privileges anywhere, not here, not home. Leave the razor blade there when you go, the sergeant's stripes too, if you do decide to take them off."

Dresden was just about the nicest-looking city I'd ever seen. Of course I hadn't seen many then I'd call real cities. Just Manhattan, and then a few thin slices of London, mainly gin mills and bedrooms. There was a river through the middle, and more churches everywhere than I'd seen in my whole life, with spires and domes and crosses on top. There was an opera house in a big square, and around a statue in another place of a man on a horse with a big rump, rows of tents had been put up to house the refugees who were flooding into the city to get away from the Russians who were pushing ahead in the east. The city was working. Trolley cars ran regularly. Kids went to school. People went to jobs, women and old men. The only guy our age we laid eyes on had the stump of a missing arm pinned up in a sleeve. There were plays in the theaters. A big metal sign advertised Yenidze cigarettes. And after a couple of weeks the posters went up, and I saw that a circus was coming to town.

We were put in a building that had been a slaughterhouse when they still had cattle to kill. Underneath was a meat storage basement that was hollowed out of solid rock, and that's where we went when the sirens sounded and the planes came near to bomb somewhere else. They always went to places nearby that had more military value than we did. In the daytime they were American. At night they were English. We could hear the bombs going off very far away and felt good when we did. Often we could see the planes, very high up and in big formations.

Our guards were kids under fifteen or wheezing old men over sixty, except for one tough-looking supervisor they said was Ukrainian who looked into the factory or our billet every few days to make sure we were still there and to see that our uniforms were being preserved. Whenever one of us fell very sick, they took away the uniform and folded it carefully. The Russians were coming close from one side and they hoped, especially the Ukrainian, to escape to us as Americans. The women and girls in the factory were all slave laborers. Most were Polish and some of the old ones looked like my aunts and grandmother did, and even my mother, but thinner, much thinner. I joked a lot to pep things up and made flirting signs. When some joked back or gave those deep looks of longing, I began to think, Oh, boy, wouldn't that be something to talk about. I kidded with the guards about it too, to set me up with a place for a Fraulein and me to use for our Geschmuse.

"Rabinowitz, you're crazy," this guy Vonnegut said to me, more than once. "You do that once with a German woman and they'll shoot you dead."

I was glad he warned me. He must have spotted me eyeing the girls outside as they marched us back and forth.

"Let's have a dance," I decided one time. "I bet I really could get a dance going here if we could talk them into giving us some music."

"Not me," said Schweik, in his heavy accent, and told me again that he wanted only to be a good soldier.

Vonnegut shook his head too.

I decided to try it alone. The planes droned overhead almost every night, and the guards looked more worried every day.

"Herr Reichsmarschall," I said to the oldest.

"Mein lieber Herr Rabinowitz," he answered in kind.

"Ich mochte ein Fest haben und tanzen. Können wir Musik haben, zum Singen und Tanzen? Wir werden mebr arbeiten."

"Mein lieber Herr Rabinowitz." They had fun with me too. " Es ist verboten. Das ist nicht erlaubt."

"Fragen Sie doch, bitte. Würden Sie das nicht auch gerne haben?"

"Es ist nicht erlaubt."

They were too scared to ask anybody. Then came the circus posters, and I decided to make a real try for that one, with Vonnegut and the good soldier Schweik, the three of us. They wanted no part of it. I could see nothing to lose.

"Why not? Shit, wouldn't we all want to? We'll go ask him together. We need a rest. We'll all die here of boredom if we just have to keep waiting."

"Not me," said Schweik, in his very slow English. "Humbly begging your pardon, Rabinowitz, I find I can get myself in enough trouble just doing what I'm told. I've been through this before, longer than you think, more times than you know about. Humbly begging your pardon-"

"Okay, okay." I cut him off. "I'll do it myself." That night the bombers came for us. In the daytime American planes flew in low, far apart, and shattered buildings in different parts of the city, and we thought it strange that the bombs should drop so far from each other and be aimed at nothing but houses. We wondered why. They were making splintered wreckage for the fires to come, but we didn't know that. When the sirens sounded again in the evening we went down as usual to our meat storage locker underneath our slaughterhouse. This time we stayed. There was no all clear. Through our rock walls and cement ceiling we heard strange strong, dull thumps and thuds that did not sound to us like bomb explosions. They were the charges of incendiaries. In a little while the bulbs hanging from the ceiling went out and the hum of the ventilation fans stopped. The power plant was out. Air blew into the vents anyway, and we could breathe. An unusual roar arose, came closer, grew louder, stayed for hours. It was like vhe noise of a train going suddenly into a tunnel with a blast of wind, except it just stayed, or a roller-coaster at the top accelerating down. But it did not weaken. The roar was air, it was the draft miles wide sucked into the whole city by the flames outside, and it was as powerful as a cyclone. When it finally lessened, near dawn, two guards climbed timidly back up the stairs to try a look outside. They came back like ghosts.

"Es brennt. Alles brennt. Die ganze Stadt. Alles ist zerstort."

"Everything's on fire," I translated, in the same hushed voice. "The city is gone."

We could not imagine what that meant.

In the morning when they led us up outside into the rain, everyone else was dead. They were dead in the street, burned black into stubs and turned brown by the ash still dropping from the layers of smoke going up everywhere. They were dead in the blackened houses in which the wood had all burned and dead in the cellars. The churches were gone and the opera house had tilted over and fallen into the square. A trolley car had blown over onto its side and burned also. A column of smoke sailed up through the roof of the blackened skeleton of the railroad station, and the raindrops were blotched with soot and ashes and reminded me of the dingy water from the hose in the junkshop we cleaned up with when the day's work was finished. At the far side of the park, we could see that the trees, all the trees, were burning singly like torches, like a civic display, and I thought of blazing pinwheels, of the fireworks in Coney Island off the Steeplechase pier I'd enjoyed every Tuesday night in the summer for as long as I'd lived, of the million dazzling lights of Luna Park. Our building was gone, the slaughterhouse we'd lived in, and every one of the other buildings in our section of the city. We stood without moving for more than an hour before someone drove up in a car to tell us what to do, and these people in uniform were as dazed as we were. It took more than another hour before they could decide, before they pointed off and told us to walk out of the city toward the hills and the mountains. All around us, as far as we could see, everyone was dead, men, women, and children, every parrot, cat, dog, and canary. I felt sorry for them all. I felt sorry for the Polish slave laborers. I felt sorry for the Germans.

I felt sorry for myself. I didn't count. For a second I almost cried. Didn't they care that we might be there? I still don't know why we were spared.

I saw I made no difference. It all would have taken place without me and come out just the same. I would make no difference anywhere, except at home with my family and maybe with a few friends. And after that, I knew I would never even want to vote. I did for Truman, because he was good for Israel, but after that I never have. After FDR there hasn't been a single one I thought enough about to look up to, and I don't want to give any of those bragging bastards in both parties the satisfaction of thinking for a minute I'm in favor of seeing them succeed in their ambitions.

"They don't know that, Lew," Sammy said to me way back, with that superior, collegeeducated smile he used to wear. He was trying to get me interested in Adlai Stevenson, and then later in John Kennedy. "They don't know that you aren't giving them the satisfaction."

"But I do," I answered. "And that's what I mean. We don't count, and our votes won't count either. About how long do you think it will take you to get sick of Kennedy?"

It took him less than a week, I think, before those inauguraticn balls were even half over, and I don't think Sammy has voted again either since maybe Lyndon Johnson.

I don't spend much time keeping track of the world and can't see that it would change anything if I did. I mind my own business. What's important I hear about. What I learned I remembered, and it turned out to be true. It didn't mean a thing, me being in the army, it didn't count at all. It would have happened the same way without me-the ashes, the smoke, the dead, the outcome. I had nothing to do with Hitler and nothing to do with the state of Israel. I don't want the blame and I don't want the credit. The only place I've counted is at home, with Claire and the kids. Somewhere for whoever wants them later on, maybe the grandchildren, I've put away my Bronze Star, my combat infantryman's badge, my unit citation, the sergeant's stripes I had when I got out of the army, and the shoulder patch with the red number I of the First Division, the Big Red 1, which went through hell before I joined them and went through more hell after I was gone. We've got four grandchildren now. I love everyone in my family and feel I would demolish, maybe really kill, anyone who threatened to hurt any one of them.

"You would break his back?" Sammy said this with a smile the last time he visited.

"I will break his back." I smiled too. "Even now."

Even now.

When it starts popping up again in one spot, the radiation sharpshooters at the hospital can take aim and burn away what they like to call another new growth and I know is another tumor. If it pops up again in what they call the diaphragm and I call the belly, I am nauseous before and nauseous afterward, with that nausea I can't stand the thought of that I really think might finally put me away someday if I have to keep living with it. Unless I'm with Sammy, and then I am "nauseated," because he likes to play at what he calls a pedagogue and I call a smartass.

"Lew, tell me," he asked. He laughed softly. "How many backs have you broken in your lifetime?"

"Counting that guy on the car who grabbed that purse?"

"That wasn't a fight, Lew. And you didn't break his back. How many?"

I thought a minute. "None. I never had to. Saying I would was always enough."

"How many fights have you had?"

"In my life?" I thought hard again. "Only one, Sammy," I remembered, and this time I laughed. "With you. Remember that time you tried to teach me how to box?"