Closing Time

22 Rhine Journey: Melissa

Like the hero Siegfried in Gotterddmmerung, he supposed, Yossarian himself began what he was later to look back on as his own Rhine Journey with a rapid clutch of daylight lovemaking: Siegfried at dawn in his mountain aerie, Yossarian around noon in his M amp; M office in Rockefeller Center. But he ended his pleasurably in the hospital four weeks later with another clean bill of health after his aura and hallucinatory TIA attack, and with five hundred thousand dollars and the sale of a shoe.

Siegfried had Brünnhilde, now mortal, and the rocky haunt they shared.

Yossarian had his nurse, Melissa MacIntosh, most human also, and a desktop, the carpeted floor, the leather armchair, and the broader windowsill of olden times in his office in the newly renamed M amp; M Building, formerly the old Time-Life Building, with a pane of glass looking down on the rink of ice on which Sammy and Glenda had gone skating more times than Sammy could remember now, and who subsequently had become man and wife, until death did them part.

Yossarian, nodding as he groped, did indeed agree that the door to the office was not locked, when he knew that it was, and that somebody might indeed walk in on them while they were thus lustfully teamed, when he knew that no one would or could. He was titillated by her apprehension; her tremors, doubts, and indecisions electrified him fiendishly with mounting passion and affection. Melissa was flustered in her ladylike terror of being come upon uncovered in those disarraying exertions of vigorous sexual informalities and, blushing, wished him, for a change, to finish fast; but she laughed when he did and disclosed the ruse as she was checking his baggage for his medicines and preparing to ride with him to the airport before his flight to Kenosha at the start of his journey. Along with basic toilet articles, he wanted Valium for insomnia, Tylenol or Advil for back pain, Maalox for his hiatus hernia. Much to his wonder, there were direct jumbo-jet flights now to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The phone rang as he zipped closed his carry-on bag.

"Gaffney, what do you want?"

"Aren't you going to congratulate me?" Gaffney spoke merrily, ignoring Yossarian's evident tone of rancor.

"Have you been listening in again?" asked Yossarian, looking furtively at Melissa.

"To what?" asked Gaffney.

"Why'd you call?"

"You just won't give me credit, will you, John?"

"For what? I got a bill from you finally. You didn't charge much."

"I haven't done much. Besides, I'm grateful for your music. You don't know happy I am to play back the tapes we record. I love the Bruckner symphonies at this darkening time of year, and the Boris Godunov."

"Would you like the Ring?"

"Mainly the Siegfried. I don't hear that one often."

"I'll let you know when I schedule the Siegfried," said Yossarian, acidly.

"Yo-Yo, I'll be so obliged. But that's not what I'm talking about."

"Mr. Gaffney," said Yossarian, and paused to allow his point to sink in. "What are you talking about?"

"We're back to Mr. Gaffney, are we, John?"

"We never passed John, Jerry. What do you want?"

"Praise," answered Gaffney. "Everybody likes to be appreciated when he's done something well. Even Señor Gaffney."

"Praise for what, Señor Gaffney?"

Gaffney laughed. Melissa, reposing upon the arm of the leather sofa, was rasping away at her fingernails with an emery board. Yossarian gave her a menacing scowl.

"For my gifts," Gaffney was saying. "I predicted you'd be going to Wisconsin to see Mrs. Tappman. Didn't I say you'd be changing in Chicago, for your trip to Washington to Milo and Wintergreen? You didn't ask me how I knew."

"Am I going to Washington?" Yossarian was amazed.

"You'll be getting Milo 's fax. M2 will phone to the airport to remind you. There, that's the fax coming in now, isn't it? I'm on target again."

"You have been listening, haven't you, you bastard?'

"To what?"

"And maybe watching too. And why would M2 be phoning me when he's right down the hall?"

"He's back at the PABT building with your son Michael, trying to decide if he's willing to be married there."

"To the Maxon girl?"

"He'll have to say yes. I have another good joke that might amuse you, John."

"I'll miss my plane."

"You've plenty of time. There'll be a delay in departure of almost one hour."

Yossarian burst out with a laugh. "Gaffney, you're finally mistaken," he crowed. "I had my secretary call. It's leaving on schedule."

Gaffney laughed too. "Yo-Yo, you have no secretary, and the airline was lying. It will be late taking off by fifty-five minutes. It was your nurse you had call."

"I have no nurse."

"That warms my heart. Please tell Miss MacIntosh the kidney is working again. She will be happy to hear that."

"What kidney?"

"Oh, Yossarian, shame. You don't always listen when she telephones. The kidney of the Belgian patient. And as long as you're going to Washington, why don't you invite Melissa-"

"Melissa, Mr. Gaffney?"

"Miss MacIntosh, Mr. Yossarian. But why don't you invite her to join you there? I bet she'll say she'd really love to go. She's probably never been. She can go to the National Gallery when you're busy with Milo and Noodles Cook, and to the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution."

Yossarian covered the telephone. "Melissa, I'm going to stop in Washington on the way back. How about taking time off to meet me there?"

"I'd really love to go," Melissa replied. "I've never been. I can go to the National Gallery when you're busy, and to that aeronautical museum of the Smithsonian Institution."

"What did she say?" asked Jerry Gaffney.

Yossarian replied respectfully. "I think you know what she said. You really are a man of mystery, aren't you? I haven't figured you out yet."

"I've answered your questions."

"I must think of new ones. When can we meet?"

"Don't you remember? In Chicago, when your connecting flight is delayed."

"It will be delayed?"

"For more than an hour. By unpredictable blizzards in Iowa and Kansas."

"You predict them already?"

"I hear things and see things, John. It's how I earn my living. May I try out my joke now?"

"I'll bet you do. And you have been listening, haven't you? Maybe watching too."

"Listening to what?"

"You think I'm simpleminded, Gaffney? Would you like to hear my joke? Jerry, go fuck yourself."

"That's not a bad one, Yo-Yo," said Gaffney, sociably, "although I've heard it before."

The opera Siegfried brought to mind, Yossarian was recalling in the pearl-gray limousine, that the heldentenor in that one, after a mere touch to his lips of the blood of the slain dragon, illustriously began to understand the language of birds. They told him to take the gold, kill the dwarf, and dash to the mountain through the circle of fire to find Brunnhilde lying there in charmed sleep, this message in bird notes to a youth who had never laid eyes on a woman before and needed more than one look at the buxom Brunnhilde to make the startling discovery that this was not a man!

Siegfried had his birds, but Yossarian had his Gaffney, who could report, when Yossarian phoned him from the car, that the chaplain was passing tritium in his flatulence.

Nurse Melissa MacIntosh had not heard of an intestinal condition like that one before but promised to ask a number of gastroenterologists she was friendly with.

Yossarian was not certain he wanted her to.

He was wounded and abashed by the question that leaped to mind, and too shamed to voice it: to ask if she'd dated these doctors and slept with them too, even with only four or five. It told him again, to his inconceivable delectation, that he indeed thought himself in love. Such pangs of jealousy for him were extremely few. Even far back in his torrid affair with Frances Beach, though almost monogamous himself, he had indifferently assumed that she, in the vernacular of the age, was at that time also "boffing" others who were potentially supportive of her aspirations as actress. Now he reveled like an epicure in the euphoria of impressions of love that were again rejuvenating him. He was not embarrassed or afraid, except that Michael or the other children might find out, while it was still in the outlandish character of a rapture.

In the car she held his hand, pressed his thigh, ran fingers through the curls at the back of his head.

Whereas Siegfried from the start was in the evil hands of a wicked dwarf greedy for dragon's gold and drooling to liquidate him as soon as he had collared it.

Melissa was preferable.

She and her roommate, Angela Moore, or Moorecock, as he now called her, disapproved righteously of married men in quest of secret girlfriends, except for the married men who had quested specifically for them, and Yossarian was glad his newest divorce was final. He thought best not to divulge to her that, even with ravishing women, the seduction over, there was only the infatuation and sex, and that often in men of his years, caprice and fetishism were more arousing than Spanish fly. He was already scheming to take the last shuttle plane back with her from Washington and in the semidarkness of the interior attempt, while she sat near the window, to succeed in removing her underpants in the fifty or so minutes they had. Unless, of course, she wore jeans.

Unlike Angela, she herself never verbally tendered evidence of the versatile range of amatory experiences her roommate and best friend had bawdily claimed for them both. Her vocabulary tended toward the pristine. But she seemed a stranger to nothing and evinced no need for guidance or definitions. In fact, she knew a trick or two he had not imagined. And she so stubbornly resisted conversing about her sexual history that he soon left off searching for it.

"Who is Boris Godunov?" she asked in the car.

"The opera I was listening to the other night when you came in from work and then had me turn it off because you wanted to hear the fucking television news."

"When you get back," she next wanted to know, "can we listen to the Ring together?"

Here again, he considered, they both enjoyed another large advantage over the Wagnerian prototypes.

For good Brünnhilde had savored little delight once Siegfried set out on his mission of heroic deeds and had experienced only betrayal, misery, and jealous fury after he returned to seize and deliver her to another man. It did not once cross her mind while conspiring in his death that he might have been slipped a potion that caused him to forget who she was.

Whereas Yossarian was making Melissa happy.

This was a thing he had not been able to do for long with any other woman. He was hearing bird notes too.

Melissa found him expert and benevolent when he concluded she could indeed give up her staff job and have more money and time as a private-duty nurse, if-and it was a big if-she was willing to forgo her paid vacations and an eventual pension. But for her future security she must make up her mind that she must soon marry a man, handsome or not, even a boor, a dolt, forget charm, who did have a pension plan and would have a retirement income to bequeath when he died. Melissa listened blissfully, as though he were caressing and celebrating her.

"Do you have a pension plan?"

"Forget about me. It must be someone else."

She thought his brain immense.

A simple discharged promise made shortly after they'd met in the hospital affecting outdated silver fillings in two upper teeth meant more than he would have guessed; they were exposed when she laughed; and he'd pledged to have them replaced by porcelain crowns if she kept her eyes out for oversights and he came out of the hospital alive. And this, when done, went farther with her than all the long-stemmed red roses and lingerie from Saks Fifth Avenue, Victoria's Secret, and Frederick's of Hollywood, and suffused her with an exhilarated gratitude he had never witnessed before. Not even Frances Beach, who had so much from Patrick, knew how to feel grateful.

John Yossarian lay awake some nights in a tremulous agitation that this woman with whom he was entertaining himself might already be somewhat in love with him. He was not that positive he wanted what he wished for.

Since the shock in the shower, the course of this true love had run so smoothly as to beguile him into a presumption of the notional, fictitious, and surreal. On the memorable evening following his talk with Michael, in the movie house down from the lobby level of his apartment building, she showed no surprise when he put a hand on her shoulder to fondle her neck awhile, then another on the inside of her knee to see what good he could do for himself there. He was the one surprised when her resistance this time was perfunctory. With the coming of spring she wore no panty hose. Her jacket lay folded in her lap for tasteful concealment. When he moved upward to arrive at the silken touch of the panties and the feel of the lacework of curls underneath, he had come as far as he had aspired to and was content to stop. But she then said: "We don't have to do that here." She spoke with the solemnity of a surgeon rendering a verdict that was inevitable. "We can go upstairs to your apartment."

He found he preferred to see the rest of the movie. "It's okay here. We can just keep watching."

She glanced about at others. "I'm not comfortable here. I'll feel better upstairs."

They never did find out how that movie ended.

"You can't do it like that," she said in his apartment, when they had been there a very little while. "Don't you put something on?"

"I've had a vasectomy. Don't you take the pill?"

"I've had my tubes tied. But what about AIDS?"

"You can see my certificate of blood work. I have it framed on the wall."

"Don't you want to see mine?"

"I'll take; my chances." He put a hand on her mouth. "For God sakes, Melissa, please stop talking so much."

She bent up her legs and he pressed himself down between them, and after that they both knew what to do.

Counting back late the next morning, when he had to believe they finally were through, he found himself convinced he had never in his life been more virile and prodigious, or more desirous, amorous, considerate, and romantic.

It was wonderful, he whistled through his teeth while washing up after the last time, then switched in a syncopated, swinging beat to the foreplay and orgasmic love music from Tristan. It was more marvelous than anything in all his libidinous experience, and he knew in his heart that never, never, not once, would he ever want to have to go through anything like all that again! He preliumed she understood that there would be a rather sheer falling off: he might not, in fact, find the wish, the will, the actual desire, and the elemental physical resources ever to want to make love to her again, or to any other woman!

He recalled Mark Twain in one of his better writings employing the simile of the candlestick and the candleholder to emphasize that between men and women sexually it was not close to an equivalent competition. The candleholder was always there.

And then he heard her on the telephone.

"And that one made it five!" she was confiding exuberantly to Angela, her face flushed with prosperity. "No," she continued, after an impatient pause to listen. "But my knees sure hurt."

He himself would have fixed the tally subjectively at five and three eighths, but he felt a bit better about the near future to hear that her bones were aching also.

"He knows so much about everything," she went on. "He knows about interest rates, and books, and operas. Ange, I've never been happier."

That one gave him pause, for he was not sure he wanted again the accountability of a woman who had never been happier. But the fillip to his vanity sure felt good.

And then came the shock in the shower. When he turned it off he heard men murmuring in wily discussion outside the closed bathroom door. He heard a woman in the obvious cadence of assent. It was some kind of setup. He knotted the bath towel around his waist and moved out to confront whatever danger awaited. It was worse than he could have foreseen.

She had turned on the television set and was listening to the news!

There was no war, no national election, no race riot, no big fire, storm, earthquake, or airplane crash-there was no news, and she was listening to it on television.

But then, while dressing, he caught the savory aromas of eggs scrambling and bacon frying and bread warming into slices of toast. The year he'd lived alone had been the loneliest in his life, and he was living alone still.

But then he saw her putting ketchup on her eggs and had to look at something else. He looked at the television screen.

"Melissa dear," he found himself preparing her two weeks later. He had his arm atop a shoulder again and absently was stroking her neck with his finger. "Let me tell you now what is going to happen. It will have nothing to do with you. These are changes I know will occur with a man like me, even with a woman he cares about very much: a man who likes to be alone much of the time, thinks and daydreams a lot, doesn't really enjoy the give-and-take of companionship of anyone all that much, falls silent much of the time and broods and is indifferent to everything someone else might be talking about, and will not be affected much by anything the woman does, as long as she doesn't talk to him about it and annoy him. It has happened before, it happens to me always."

She was nodding intently at each point, either in agreement or in worldly perception.

"I'm exactly the same way," she began in earnest response, with eyes sparkling and lips shining. "I can't stand people who talk a lot, or speak to me when I'm trying to read, even a newspaper, or call me on the telephone when they've nothing to say, or tell me things I already know, or repeat themselves and interrupt."

"Excuse me," interrupted Yossarian, as she seemed equipped to say more. He killed some time in the bathroom. "I really think," he said, upon returning, "I'm too old, and you're really too young."

"You're not too old."

"I'm older than I look."

"So am I. I've seen your age on the hospital charts."

Oh, shit, he thought. "I have to tell you also that I won't have children and will never have a dog, and I won't buy a vacation house in East Hampton or anywhere else."

Off the entrance to his apartment in each direction was a good-sized bedroom with a bathroom and space for a personal television set, and perhaps they could start that way and meet for meals. But there again was the television, turned back on, and voices were at work to which she was not listening. She never could tell when there might come something interesting. Although television was the one vice in a woman he could not abide, he believed that with this woman it was worth a try.

"No, I won't tell you her name," said Yossarian to Frances Beach, after the next, tumultuous meeting of ACACAMMA, at which Patrick Beach had spoken out dynamically to second the anonymous proposal by Yossarian that the Metropolitan Museum of Art settle financial problems by getting rid of the artwork and selling the building and real estate there on Fifth Avenue to a developer. "It's not a woman you know."

"Is it the friend of the succulent Australian woman you keep talking about, the one named Moore?"

"Moorecock."

"What?"

"Her name is Moorecock, Patrick, not Moore."

Patrick squinted in puzzlement. "I could swear you'd corrected me and said it was Moore."

"He did, Patrick. Pay no attention to him now. Is it that nurse you mentioned? I'd be saddened to think you sank so low as to marry one of my friends."

"Who's talking about marriage?" protested Yossarian.

"You are." Frances laughed. "You're like that elephant who always forgets."

Was he really going to have to marry again?

No one had to remind a doubtful Yossarian of a few of the blessings of living alone. He would riot have to listen to someone else talking on the telephone. On his new CD player with automatic changer, he could put a complete Lohengrin, Boris Godunov, or Die Meistersinger, or four whole symphonies by Bruckner, and play them all through in an elysian milieu of music without hearing someone feminine intruding to say, "What music is that?" or "Do you really like that?" or "Isn't that kind of heavy for the morning?" or "Will you please make it lower? I'm trying to watch the television news," or "I'm talking to my sister on the telephone." He could read a newspaper without having someone pick up the section he wanted next.

He could stand another marriage, he imagined, but did not have time for another divorce.

23 Kenosha

Such portentous food for equivocal thought weighed heavily on Yossarian's mind as he flew west on his journey for his rendezvous with the chaplain's wife, the sole purpose of which visit now was commiseration and a mutual confession of ignominious defeat. Her face fell with a disappointment she was not able to suppress when she picked him out at the airport.

They each had hoped for somebody younger.

The hero Siegfried, he afterward remembered, had cruised into action like a galley slave, rowing Brünnhilde's horse in a boat, and was soon tete-a-tete with another woman, to whom he was swiftly affianced.

Yossarian had his first-class seat on a jet and no such demented daydream in mind.

Siegfried had to climb a mountain and walk through fire to claim the woman Brünnhilde.

Yossarian had Melissa fly to Washington.

Looking back when it was over and he was thinking of a parody for The New Yorker magazine, he considered he had fared pretty well in comparison with the Wagnerian hero.

Half a million dollars richer, he was on the horns of a dilemma but alive to deal with it.

Siegfried was dead at the end; Brünnhilde was dead, even the horse was dead; Valhalla had collapsed, the gods were gone with it; and the composer was elated while his voluptuous music subsided in triumph like a delicate dream, for such is the calculating nature of art and the artist.

Whereas Tossarian could look forward to getting laid again soon. He had his doctor's okay. All his life he had loved women, and in much of that life he had been in love with more than one.

The small port city of Kenosha on Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, just twenty-five miles south of the much larger small city of Milwaukee, now had a jet airport and was experiencing an upturn in economic activity that the town fathers were at a loss to explain. Local social engineers were attributing the middling boom, perhaps waggishly, to benign climate. Several small new businesses of somewhat technical nature had opened and an agency of the federal government had established laboratories rumored to be CIA fronts in an abandoned factory that had long lain idle.

In the lounge in New York, Yossarian had taken note of the other travelers in first class, all men younger than himself and in very good spirits. Only scientists were so happy in their vocations these days. They held pencils at the ready as they talked, and what they talked about most-he was startled to hear-was tritium and deuterium, of which he now knew a little, and lithium deuteride, which, he learned when he asked, was a compound of lithium and heavy water and, more significantly, was the explosive substance of preference in the best hydrogen devices.

"Does everyone know all this?" He was amazed they talked so openly.

Oh, sure. He could find it all written in The Nuclear Almanac and Hogerton's The Atomic Energy Handbook, both perhaps on sale in the paperback rack.

Boarding, he'd recognized in business class several prostitutes and two call girls from the sex clubs in his high-rise building and as streetwalking attractions near the cocktail lounges and cash machines just outside. The call girls were fellow tenants. In economy class he spotted small clumps of the homeless who had somehow acquired the airplane fare to leave the mean streets of New York to be homeless in Wisconsin. They had washed themselves up for the pilgrimage, probably in the lavatories of the PABT building, where posters Michael had once designed still warned Sternly that smoking, loitering, bathing, shaving, laundering, fucking, and sucking were all forbidden in the washbasins and toilet stalls, that alcohol could be harmful to pregnant women, and that anal intercourse could lead to HIV and hepatitis infections. Michael's posters had won art prizes. Their carry-on luggage consisted of shopping carts and paper bags. Yossarian was sure he saw sitting far back the large black woman with the gnarled melanoma moles he had come upon swabbing herself clean in only a sleeveless pink chemise on the emergency staircase the one time he had gone there with McBride. He looked for but did not find the addled woman with one leg who, as a matter of common practice, was raped by one derelict man or another perhaps three or four times daily, or the pasty blonde woman he also remembered from the stairwell who was sewing a seam in a white blouse listlessly.

From the physicists on the plane, Yossarian also thought he heard, without understanding any of it, that in the world of science, time continuously ran backward or forward, and forward and backward, and that particles of matter could travel backward and forward through time without undergoing change. Why, then, couldn't he? He also heard that subatomic particles had always to be simultaneously in every place they could be, and from this he began to consider that in his nonscientific world of humans and groups, everything that could happen did happen, and that anything that did not happen could not happen. Whatever can change, will; and anything that doesn't change, can't.

Mrs. Karen Tappman proved a slight, shy, and uneasy elderly woman, with a vacillating attitude on many aspects of the plight that had brought them into communication. But of the meaning of one thing there could soon be no doubt: the understanding they shared that he was sorry he had come and she regretted having asked him to. They would soon not have much to say to each other. They could think of nothing new to try. He had recognized her, he stated honestly, from the snapshots he remembered the chaplain had carried.

She smiled. "I was just past thirty. I recognize you now too from the photograph in our study."

Yossarian had not guessed the chaplain would possess a picture of him.

"Oh, yes, I'll show you." Mrs. Tappman led the way into the back of the two-story house. "He tells people often you just about saved his life overseas when things were most horrible."

"I think he helped save mine. He backed me up in a decision to refuse to continue fighting. I don't know how much he told you."

"I think he's always told me everything."

"I would have gone ahead anyway, but he gave me the feeling I was right. There's a blowup of that picture of you and the children he used to carry in his wallet."

One wall of the study was filled with photographs spanning almost seventy years, some showing the chaplain as a tiny boy with a fishing pole and a smile with missing teeth, and some of Karen Tappman as a tiny girl in party dress. The photograph he remembered displayed the Karen Tappman of thirty sitting in a group with her three small children, all four of them facing the camera gamely and looking sadly isolated and forsaken, as though in fear of a looming loss. On a separate wall were his war pictures.

Yossarian halted to stare at a very old fading brown photograph of the chaplain's father in World War I, a small figure petrified by the camera, wearing a helmet too massive for the child's face inside it, holding clumsily a rifle with the bayonet fixed, with a canteen in canvas hooked to his belt on one side and a gas mask in a canvas case on the other.

"We used to have the gas mask as a souvenir," said Mrs. Tappman, "and the children would play with it. I don't know what's become of it. He was gassed slightly in one of the battles and was in the veterans hospital awhile, but he took care of himself and lived a long time. He died of lung cancer right here in the house. Now they say he smoked too much. Here is the one he has of you."

Yossarian stifled a smile. "I wouldn't call that a picture of me."

"Well, he does," she answered contentiously, showing a streak he had not thought existed. "He would point it out to everyone. wAnd that's my friend Yossarian,' he would say. 'He helped pull me through when things were rough. w He would say that to everyone. He repeats himself too, I'm afraid."

Yossarian was touched by her candor. The photograph was of a kind taken routinely by the squadron public relations officer, showing members of a crew waiting at a plane before takeoff. In this one he saw himself standing off in the background between the figures in focus and the B-25 bomber. In the foreground were the three enlisted men for that day, seated without evidence of concern on unfused thousand-pound bombs on the ground as they waited to board and start up. And Yossarian, looking as slender and boyish as the others, in parachute harness and his billed, rakish officer's cap, had merely turned to look on. The chaplain had lettered the names of each man there. The name Yossarian was largest. Here again were Samuel Singer, William Knight, and Howard Snowden, all sergeants.

"One of these young men was killed later on," said Mrs. Tappman. "I believe it was this one. Samuel Singer."

"No, Mrs. Tappman. It was Howard Snowden."

"Are you sure?"

"I was with him again on that one too."

"You all look so young. I thought you might still look the same when I was waiting for you at the airport."

"We were young, Mrs. Tappman."

"Too young to be killed."

"I thought so too."

"Albert spoke at his funeral."

"I was there."

"It was very hard for him, he said. He didn't know why. And he almost ran out of words. Do you think they will set him free soon and let him come back home?" Karen Tappman watched Yossarian shrug. "He hasn't done anything wrong. It must be hard for him now. For me too. The woman across the street is a widow and we play bridge together evenings. I suppose I might have to learn to live like a widow sooner or later. But I don't see why I should have to do it now."

"There really is some concern for his health."

"Mr. Yossarian," she answered disapprovingly, in an abrupt change of mood. "My husband is now past seventy. If he's going to be ill, can't he be ill here?"

"I have to agree."

"But I suppose they know what they're doing."

"I never, never could agree with that one. But they're also afraid he might explode."

She missed the point. "Albert doesn't have a temper. He never did."

Neither could think of any new effort to make, what with a local police force recording him as a missing person, a department of the federal government that professed no knowledge of him, another department that brought cash and regards every fifteen days, and a third department that insisted he had been called back into the army reserves.

"They're all rather fishy, aren't they?" he observed.

"Why is that?" she asked.

The newspapers, two senators, a congressman, and the White House were all not impressed. In the latest version of the chaplain's Freedom of Information file, Yossarian had witnessed changes: everything on him now had been blacked out but the words a, an, and the. There was no Social Security number and there remained in the file only a copy of a scrawled personal letter from a serviceman dating back to August 1944, in which all but the salutation "Dear Mary" had been blacked out and, at the bottom, the message from the censor, who'd been Chaplain Tappman: "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." Yossarian thought the handwriting was his own, but could not remember having written it. He said nothing to Karen Tappman, for he did not want to risk upsetting her about a woman in the chaplain's past with the name Mary.

In the psychological profile constructed by the FBI, the chaplain lit the model of that kind of preacher who runs off with another woman, and the empirical evidence was preponderant that the woman he had run off with was the organist in his church.

Mrs. Tappman was not convinced, for there had been no church organist and her husband had been without church or congregation since his retirement.

Yossarian waited almost until they had finished eating before he gave her the new piece of information he had gained from Gaffney in a telephone call from the plane over Lake Michigan. They dined early at her request and were able to save three dollars on the early bird specials. This was new to Yossarian. They enjoyed an additional discount as senior citizens and did not have to show ID cards. This was new too. He ordered dessert only because she did first.

"I don't want to alarm you, Mrs. Tappman," he said, when they were finishing, "but they are also speculating it might be"- the word did not come easily to him-"a miracle."

"A miracle? Why should it alarm me?"

"It would alarm some people."

"Then maybe it should. Who will decide?"

"We will never know."

"But they must know what they're doing."

"I would not go that far."

"They have a right to keep him, don't they?"

"No, they don't have the right."

"Then why can't we do anything?"

"We don't have the right."

"I don't understand."

"Mrs. Tappman, people with force have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing. That's the catch Albert and I found out about in the army. It's what's happening now."

"Then there's not much hope, is there?"

"We can hope for the miracle that they do decide it's a miracle. Then they might have to let him go. There's also the chance they might call it"-he was hesitant again-"a natural evolutionary mutation."

"For making heavy water? My Albert?"

"The problem with the miracle theory is another psychological profile. It's almost always a woman now, in a warm climate. A woman, if you'll pardon me, with full breasts. Your husband just doesn't fit the mold."

"Is that so?" The words were a blunt retort delivered with cold dignity. "Mr. Yossarian," she continued, with a look of belligerent assurance on her sharp face, "I am now going to tell you something we have never disclosed to anybody, not even our children. My husband has already been witness to a miracle. A vision. Yes. It came to him in the army, this vision, to restore his faith at the very moment when he was about to declare as a public confession that: he had given it up, that he no longer could believe. So there."

After a moment during which he feared he had angered her, Yossarian took heart from this show of fighting spirit. "Why would he not want to tell anybody?"

"It was given just to him, and not for notoriety."

"May I pass that information on?"

"It was at that funeral in Pianosa," she related, "at the burial of that young Samuel Singer we spoke of before."

"It was not Singer, Mrs. Tappman. It was Snowden."

"I'm sure he said Singer."

"It makes no difference, but I gave him first aid. Please go on."

"Yes, he was conducting this Singer's funeral service and felt himself running out of words. That's just how he describes it. And then he looked up toward the heavens to confess and resign his office, to renounce right there any belief in God, or religion, or justice, or morality, or mercy, and then, as he was about to do it, with those other officers and enlisted men looking on, he was granted his sign. It was a vision, the image of a man. And he was sitting in a tree. Just outside the cemetery, with a grieving face, watching the funeral with very sad eyes, and he had those eyes fixed on my husband."

"Mrs. Tappman," said Yossarian, with a long sigh, and his heart was heavy, "That was me."

"In the tree?" She arched her brows in ridicule. He had seen such looks before on true believers, true believers in anything, but never a self-assurance more rooted. "It could not be," she informed him, with a certitude almost brutal. "Mr. Yossarian, the figure was unclothed."

With delicacy, he asked, "Your husband never told you how that might have come about?"

"How else could it come about, Mr. Yossarian? It was obviously an angel."

"With wings?"

"You're being sacrilegious now. He did not need wings, for a miracle. Why should an angel ever need wings? Mr. Yossarian, I want my husband back. I don't care about anyone else." She was beginning to cry.

"Mrs. Tappman, you have opened my eyes," said Yossarian, with pity and renewed fervor. He had learned from a lifetime of skepticism that a conviction, even a naive conviction, was in the last analysis more nourishing than the wasteland of none. "I will try my best. In Washington I have a last resort, a man at the White House who owes me some favors."

"Please ask him. I want to know you're still trying."

"I will beg him, implore him. At least one time a day he has access to the President."

"To the little prick?"

It was still early when she dropped him at his motel.

Coming back from the bar after three double Scotches, he saw a red Toyota from New York in the lot, and a woman inside eating, and when he stopped to stare, she turned on the headlights and sped away, and he knew with a half-inebriated sniffle of laughter that he had to have been imagining the Toyota and her.

Lying in bed ingesting candy bars and peanuts and a canned Coca-Cola from the vending machine outside, he felt too wakeful for sleep and too sluggish for the meaningful work of fiction he had carried with him hopefully still one more time. The book was a paperback titled Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories and was by Thomas Mann. Lighter fiction was even heavier for him these days. Even his revered New Yorker seldom had power to rivet his attention. Celebrity gossip now was largely about people who were strangers, the Academy Awards were likely to go to films he did not know and to performers he had not seen or even heard of.

He missed Melissa but was glad he was there alone; or, as he tickled himself in elusive modification, he was glad he was alone, although he missed Melissa. He found a classical music station and was horrified to hear a German Bach choir begin the score from the American musical comedy Carousel. He jammed his middle finger hurling himself at the tuning dial. With the second station he was luckier: he came into a medley that brought him the children's chorus from La Boheme and next the children's chorus from Carmen. And after that, to the accompaniment of rising static from distant sheet lightning, there came the chorus of anvils he recognized from the German Das Rheingold, attending the descent of the gods into the bowels of the earth to steal gold from the dwarfs to pay to the giants who had built their glorious new home, Valhalla, under a contract from whose original terms they were already backing away. The giants had been promised the goddess conferring eternal youth; they had to settle for money. In doing business with the gods, Yossarian judged again, with eyes growing heavier, it was always smarter to collect up front.

As that chorus of anvils diminished into static, he heard faintly in the static an illogical musical pandemonium of primitive wild laughter ascend through the scales in tune and in key and then, nebulously, beneath a hissing layer of electrical interference, a very different, lonely, lovely, angelic wail of a children's chorus in striking polyphonic lament he believed he recognized and could not place. He remembered the novel by Thomas Mann about which he had once thought of writing and wondered in his fuzziness if he was losing his bearings and dreaming he was listening to the Leverkühn Apocalypse of which he had read. And in several more seconds that failing broadcast signal faded out too until there survived only in a primeval void of human silence the insistent sibilance of that simmering and irrepressible electrical interference.

He did dream that night in disjointed sleep that he was back in his high-rise apartment in New York and that the familiar red Toyota with the woman inside eating sugar buns was pulling back into the same spot in the parking area outside his motel room in Kenosha, on whose far border a paunchy, stocky, bearded middle-aged Jew who was a G-man trudged back and forth with moving lips and his head bowed. A lanky, conspicuous, orange-haired man in a seersucker suit looked on inoffensively from a corner, with twinkling flames in his eyes, holding an orange drink with a straw in a large plastic cup, while a darker man with a peculiarly Oriental cast to his features was observing all of them cannily, dressed fastidiously in a blue shirt, rust-colored tie, and a single-breasted fawn-colored herringbone jacket with a thin purple cross-pattern. Hiding slyly in the shadows was a shady man wearing a dark beret who smoked a cigarette without using his hands, which were deep in the pockets of a soiled raincoat that was unbuttoned and ready to be flashed open instantly for the man inside it to expose his hairy self in a lewd invitation to stare at the repellent sight of his underwear and his groin. Yossarian at the end of his dream had satisfying sex briefly with his second wife. Or was it his first? Or both? He came awake thinking of Melissa guiltily.

When he stepped outside for breakfast, the red Toyota with the New York license plates and the woman inside chewing food was parked there again. It pulled away when he stopped to stare, and he knew he had to be fantasizing. She could not be there.

24 Apocalypse

"And why not?" asked Jerry Gaffney, in the airport in Chicago. "With Milo 's bomber and the chaplain's heavy water, and your two divorces, and Nurse Melissa MacIntosh and that Belgian patient, and that fling with that woman with a husband, you must know you're of interest to other people."

"From New York to Kenosha for just one day? She couldn't drive that fast, could she?"

"Sometimes we work in mysterious ways, John."

"She was in my dream, Jerry. And so were you."

"You can't blame us for that. Your dreams are still your own. Are you sure you were not imagining that?"

"My dream?"

"Yes."

"It's how I was able to recognize you, Gaffney. I knew I'd seen you before."

"I keep telling you that."

"When I was in the hospital last year. You were one of the guys looking in on me too, weren't you?"

"Not you, John. I was checking on employees who phoned in sick. One had a staphylococcus infection and the other salmonella food poisoning picked up-"

"From an egg sandwich in the cafeteria there, right?"

Arriving at an airport in turbulent disorder because of flights canceled by unpredictable blizzards in Iowa and Kansas, Yossarian had quickly spotted a dark, tidy, dapper man of average height and slightly Oriental cast waving aloft a plane ticket in a signal to attract him.

"Mr. Gaffney?" he'd inquired.

"It's not the Messiah," said Gaffney, chuckling. "Let's sit down for coffee. We'll have an hour." Gaffney had booked him on the next flight to Washington and gave him the ticket and boarding pass. "You will be happy to know," he seemed pleased to reveal, "that you'll be all the richer for this whole experience. About half a million dollars richer, I'd guess. For your work with Noodles Cook."

"I've done no work with Noodles Cook."

" Milo will want you to. I'm beginning to think of your trip as something of a Rhine Journey."

"I am too."

"It can't be coincidence. But with a happier ending."

Gaffney was dark, stylish, urbane, and good-looking-of Turkish descent, he disclosed, though from Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, New York. His complexion was smooth. He was bald on top, with a shiny pate, and had black hair trimmed close at the sides and black brows. His eyes were brown and narrow and, with the raised mounds of his fine cheekbones, gave to his face the intriguing look of someone cosmopolitan from the east. He was dressed faultlessly, spotlessly, in a fawn-colored single-breasted herringbone jacket with a thin purple cross-pattern, brown trousers, a pale-blue shirt, and a tie of solid rust.

"In the dream," said Yossarian, "you were dressed the same way. Were you in Kenosha yesterday?"

"No, no, Yo-Yo."

"Those clothes were in the dream."

"Your dream is impossible, Yo-Yo, because I never dress the same on consecutive days. Yesterday," Gaffney continued, consulting his appointment diary and licking his lips in obvious awareness of the effect, "I wore a Harris tweed of darker color with an orange interior design, trousers of chocolate brown, a quiet-pink shirt with thin vertical stripes, and a paisley tie of auburn, cobalt blue, and amber. You may not know this, John, but I believe in neatness. Neatness counts. Every day I dress for an occasion so that I am dressed for the occasion when an occasion arises. Tomorrow, I see by my calendar, I'll be wearing oatmeal Irish linen with green, if I go south, or a double-breasted blue blazer with horn buttons and gray trousers if I stay up north. The pants will be flannel. John, only you can say. Did you have sex in your dream?"

"That's not your business, Jerry."

"You seem to be doing it everywhere else."

"That's not your business either."

"I always dream of sex my first night out when I travel alone. It's a reason I don't mind going out of town."

"Mr. Gaffney, that's lovely. But it's none of my business."

"When I go with Mrs. Gaffney, there's no need to dream. Fortunately, she too likes to perform the sex act immediately in every new setting."

"That's lovely too, but I don't want to hear it, and I don't want you to hear about mine."

"You should be more guarded."

"It's the reason I hired you, damn it. I'm followed by you and followed by others I don't know a fucking thing about, and I want it to stop. I want my privacy back."

"Then give up the chaplain."

"I don't have the chaplain."

"I know that, Yo-Yo, but they don't."

"I'm too old for Yo-Yo."

"Your friends call you Yo-Yo."

"Name one, you jackass."

"I will check. But you came to the right man when you came to the Gaff. I can tell you the ways they keep you under surveillance, and I can teach you to avoid surveillance, and then I can give you the measures they employ to thwart someone like you who has learned to thwart their surveillance."

"Aren't you contradicting yourself?"

"Yes. But meanwhile I've spotted four following you who've disguised themselves cleverly. Look, there goes the gentleman we know as our Jewish G-man, trying to get on a plane to New York. He was in Keposha yesterday."

"I saw him somewhere but wasn't sure."

"Possibly in your dream. Pacing in the motel parking lot and saying his evening prayers. How many do you recognize?"

"At least one," said Yossarian, warming to the counterintelligence business in which they now seemed to be conspiring. "And I don't even have to look. A tall man in seersucker with freckles and orange hair. It's almost winter and he's still wearing seersucker. Right? I'll bet he's there, against a wall or column, drinking soda from a paper cup."

"It's an Orange Julius. He wants to be spotted."

"By whom?"

"I'll check."

"No, let me do it!" Yossarian declared. "I'm going to talk to that bastard, once and for all. You keep watch."

"I have a gun in my ankle holster."

"You too?"

"Who else?"

"McBride, a friend of mine."

"At PABT?"

"You know him?"

"I've been there," said Gaffney. "You'll be going again soon now that the wedding has been set."

"It has?" This was news to Yossarian.

Gaffney again looked pleased. "Even Milo doesn't know that yet, but I do. You can order the caviar. Please let me tell him. The SEC has to approve. Do you find that one funny?"

"I've heard it before."

"Don't say much to that agent. He might be CIA."

Yossarian was displeased with himself because he felt no real anger as he strode up to his quarry.

"Hi," said the man, curiously. "What's up?"

Yossarian spoke gruffly. "Didn't I see you following me in New York yesterday?"

"No."

And that was going to be all.

"Were you in New York?" Yossarian was now much less peremptory.

"I was in Florida." His mannerly bearing seemed an immutable mask. "I have a brother in New York."

"Does he look like you?"

"We're twins."

"Is he a federal agent?"

"I don't have to answer that one."

"Are you?"

"I don't know who you are."

"I'm Yossarian. John Yossarian.'w "Let me see your credentials."

"You've both been following me, haven't you?"

"Why would we follow you?"

"That's what I want to find out."

"I don't have to tell you. You've got no credentials."

"I don't have credentials," Yossarian, crestfallen, reported back to Gaffney.

"I've got credentials. Let me go try."

And in less than a minute, Jerry Gaffney and the man in the seersucker suit were chatting away in untroubled affinity like very old friends. Gaffney showed a billfold and gave him what looked to Yossarian like a business card, and when a policeman and four or five other people in plain clothes who might have been policemen also drew close briskly, Gaffney distributed a similar card to each, and then to everyone in the small crowd of bystanders who had paused to watch, and finally to the two young black women behind the food counter serving hot dogs, prepackaged sandwiches, soft pretzels with large grains of kosher salt, and soft drinks like Orange Julius. Gaffney returned eventually, immensely satisfied with himself. He spoke softly, but only Yossarian would know, for his demeanor appeared as serene as before.

"He isn't following you, John," he said, and could have been talking about the weather as far as anyone watching could tell. "He's following someone else who's following you. He wants to find out how much they find out about you."

"Who?" demanded Yossarian. "Which one?"

"He hasn't found out yet," answered Gaffney. "It might be me. That would be funny to somebody else, but I see you're not laughing. John, he thinks you might be CIA."

"That's libelous. I hope you told him I'm not."

"I don't know yet that you're not. But I won't tell him anything until he becomes a client. I only told him this much." Gaffney pushed another one of his business cards across the table. "You should have one too."

Yossarian scanned the card with knitted brow, for the words identified the donor as the proprietor of a Gaffney Real Estate Agency, with offices in the city and on the New York and Connecticut seashores and in the coastal municipalities of Santa Monica and San Diego in lower California.

"I'm not sure I get it," said Yossarian.

"It's a front," said Gaffney. "A come-on."

"Now I do." Yossarian grinned. "It's a screen for your detective agency. Right?"

"You've got it backwards. The agency is a front for my real estate business. There's more money in real estate."

"I'm not sure I can believe you."

"Am I trying to be funny?"

"It's impossible to tell."

"I'm luring him on," Jerry Gaffney explained. "Right into one of my offices pretending he's a prospect looking for a house, while he tries to find out who I really am."

"To find out what he's up to?"

"To sell him a house, John. That's where my real income is. This should interest you. We have choice rentals in East Hampton for next summer, for the season, the year, and the short term. And some excellent waterfront properties too, if you're thinking of buying."

"Mr. Gaffney," said Yossarian.

"Are we back to that?"

"I know less about you now than I did before. You said I'd be making this trip, and here I am making it. You predicted there'd be blizzards, and now there are blizzards."

"Meteorology is easy."

"You seem to know all that's happening on the face of the earth. You know enough to be God."

"There's more money in real estate," answered Gaffney. "That's how I know we have no God. He'd be active in real estate too. That's not a bad one, is it?"

"I've heard worse."

"I have one that may be better. I also know much that goes on under the earth. I've been beneath PABT too, you know."

"You've heard the dogs?"

"Oh, sure," said Gaffney. "And seen the Kilroy material. I have connections in MASSPOB too, electronic connections," he appended, and his thin, sensual lips, which were almost liverish in a rich tinge, spread wide again in that smile of his that was cryptic and somehow incomplete. "I've even," he continued, with some pride, "met Mr. Tilyou."

"Mr. Tilyou?" echoed Yossarian. "Which Mr. Tilyou?"

"Mr. George C. Tilyou," Gaffney explained. "The man who built the old Steeplechase amusement park in Coney Island."

"I thought he was dead."

"He is."

"Is that your joke?"

"Does it give you a laugh?"

"Only a smile."

"You can't say I'm not trying," said Gaffney. "Let's go now. Look back if you wish. That will keep them coming. They won't know whether to stick with Yossarian or follow me. You'll have a smooth trip. Think of this episode as an entr'acte, an intermezzo between Kenosha and your business with Milo and Noodles Cook. Like Wagner's music for Siegfried's Rhine Journey and the Funeral Music in the Gotterddmmerung, or that interlude of clinking anvils in Das Rheingold."

"I heard that one last night, in my room in Kenosha."

"I know."

"And I learned something new that might help the chaplain. His wife thinks he's already had one miracle."

"That's already old, John," belittled Gaffney. "Everything in Kenosha is bugged. But here is something that might be good. To Milo, you might suggest a shoe."

"What kind of shoe?"

"A military shoe. Perhaps an official U. S. Government shoe. He was too late for cigarettes. But the military will always need shoes. For ladies too. And perhaps brassieres. Please give my best to your fiancée."

"What fiancée?" Yossarian shot back.

"Miss MacIntosh?" Gaffney arched his black eyebrows almost into marks of punctuation.

"Miss MacIntosh is not my fiancée," Yossarian remonstrated. "She's only my nurse."

Gaffney tossed his head in a gesture of laughter. "You have no nurse, Yo-Yo," he insisted almost prankishly. "You've told me that a dozen times. Should I check back and count?"

"Gaffney, go north with your Irish linen or south with your blazer and flannel pants. And take those shadows with you."

"In time. You like the German composers, don't you?"

"Who else is there?" answered Yossarian. "Unless you want to count Italian opera."

"Chopin?"

"You'll find him in Schubert," said Yossarian. "And both in Beethoven."

"Not entirely. And how about the Germans themselves?" asked Gaffney.

"They don't much like each other, do they?" replied Yossarian. "I can't think of another people with such vengeful animosities toward each other."

"Except our own?" suggested Gaffney.

"Gaffney, you know too much."

"I've always been interested in learning things." Gaffney confessed this with an air of restraint. "It's proved useful in my work. Tell me, John," he continued, and fixed his eyes on Yossarian significantly. "Have you ever heard of a German composer named Adrian Leverkühn?"

Yossarian looked back at Gatfney with tense consternation. "Yes, I have, Jerry," he answered, searching the bland, impenetrable dark countenance before him for some glimmer of clarification. "I've heard of Adrian Leverkühn. He did an oratorio called Apocalypse."

"I know him for a cantata, The Lamentations of Faust."

"I didn't think that one had ever been performed."

"Oh, yes. It has that very touching children's chorus, and that hellish section in glissandos of adult voices laughing ferociously. The laughter and sad chorus always remind me of photos of Nazi soldiers during the war, your war, herding to death those Jewish children in the ghettos."

"That's the Apocalypse, Jerry."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm positive."

"I'll have to check. And don't forget your shoe."

"What shoe?"

25 Washington

"A fucking shoe?" Wintergreen ridiculed Yossarian on the next leg of his Rhine Journey. "What's so great about a fucking shoe?"

"It's only a fucking thought," said Yossarian, in one of the hotel suites constituting the Washington offices of M amp; M E amp; A. For himself with Melissa he had favored a newer hotel of comparable prestige and livelier clientele that boasted, he recalled with a kind of blissful vanity as he lay in the hospital with his condition stable and the danger of brain damage and paralysis past, a more various choice of superior-grade XXX-rated films in all the languages of UN member nations. "You've been saying you wanted a consumer product."

"But a shoe? By now there must be fifty fucking shoe companies turning out shoes for fucking feet for fucks like us."

"But none with an exclusive franchise for an official U. S. Government shoe."

"Men's shoes or women's shoes?" pondered Milo.

"Both, now that women get killed in combat too." Yossarian was sorry he had started. "Forget it. There's much about business I don't understand. I still can't see how you guys bought eggs for seven cents apiece, sold them for five cents, and made a profit."

"We still do," bragged Wintergreen.

"Eggs spoil," Milo ruminated pitifully. "And break. I'd rather have a shoe. Eugene, look it up."

"I'd rather have the plane," Wintergreen grumbled.

"But after the plane? Suppose there's no more danger of war?"

"I'll look it up."

"I'm not happy with the plane," said Yossarian.

"Are you thinking of leaving us again?" Wintergreen jeered. "You've been objecting for years."

Yossarian was stung by the gibe but ignored it. "Your Shhhhh! could destroy the world, couldn't: it?"

"You've been peeking," answered Wintergreen.

"And it can't," said Milo, with heartache. "We conceded that much at the meeting."

"But maybe Strangelove's can?" Wintergreen needled.

"And that's why," said Milo, "we want the meeting with Noodles Cook."

Yossarian again was shaking his head. "And I'm not happy with the atom bomb. I don't like it anymore."

"Who would you like to see get the contract?" Wintergreen argued. "Fucking Strangelove?"

"And we don't have the bomb." conciliated Milo. "We only have plans for a plane that will deliver it."

"And our plane won't work."

"We'll guarantee that, Yossarian. Even in writing. Our planes won't fly, our missiles won't fire. If they take off, they'll crash; if they fire, they'll miss. We never fail. It's the company motto."

"You can find it on our fucking letterhead," Wintergreen added, and continued deliberately with a sneer. "But let me ask you this, Mr. Yo-Yo. What country would you rather see be strongest if not us? That's the fucking catch, isn't it?"

"That's the catch, all right," Yossarian had to agree.

"And if we don't sell our fucking war products to everyone who wants to buy, our friendly fucking allies and competitors will. There's nothing you can do about it. Time's run out for your fucking ideals. Tell me, if you're so smart, what the fuck would you do if you were running the country?"

"I wouldn't know what to do either," Yossarian admitted, and was enraged with himself for being bested in argument. It never used to happen that way. "But I know I'd want my conscience to be clear."

"Our conscience is clear," responded both.

"I don't want the guilt."

"That's horseshit, Yossarian."

"And I wouldn't: be responsible."

"And that's more horseshit," countered Wintergreen. "There's nothing you can do about it, and you will be responsible. If the world's going to blow up anyway, what the fuck difference does it make who does it?"

"At least my hands will be clean."

Wintergreen laughed coarsely. "They'll be blown off at the wrists, your fucking clean hands. No one will even know they're yours. You won't even be found."

"Go fuck yourself, Wintergreen!" Yossarian answered irately, with raised voice. "Go straight to hell, with your clear conscience!" He turned away, sulking. "I wish you were dead already, so I could finally in this lifetime get at least a little bit of pleasure out of you."

"Yossarian, Yossarian," chided Milo. "Be reasonable. One thing you do know about me-I never lie."

"Unless he has to," appended Wintergreen.

"I think he knows that, Eugene. I'm as moral as the next man. Right, Eugene?"

"Absolutely, Mr. Minderbinder."

" Milo, have you ever," asked Yossarian, "in your life done anything dishonest?"

"Oh, no," Milo responded like a shot. "That would be dishonest. And there's never been need to."

"And that's why," said Wintergreen, "we want this secret meeting with Noodles Cook, to get him to speak secretly to the President. We want everything out in the open."

"Yossarian," said Milo, "aren't you safer with us? Our planes can't work. We have the technology. Please call Noodles Cook."

"Set up the meeting and stop fucking around. And we want to be there."

"You don't trust me?"

"You say you don't fucking understand business."

"You say it puzzles you."

"Yes, and what does fucking puzzle me," said Yossarian, giving in, "is how guys like you do understand it."

Noodles Cook grasped quickly what was wanted of him.

"I know, I know," he began, after the introductions had been effected, speaking directly to Yossarian. "You think I'm a shit, don't you?"

"Hardly ever," answered Yossarian, without surprise, while the other two watched. "Noodles, when people think of the dauphin, they don't always think of you."

"Touche," laughed Noodles. "But I do enjoy being here. Please don't ask me why." What they wanted, he went on, was clearly improper, unsuitable, indefensible, and perhaps illegal. "Normally, gentlemen, I could lobby with the best of them. But we have ethics in government now."

"Who's in charge of our Department of Ethics?"

"They're holding it open until Porter Lovejoy gets out of jail."

"I have a thought," said Yossarian, feeling it was a good one. "You're permitted to give speeches, aren't you?"

"I give them regularly."

"And to receive an honorarium for them?"

"I would not do it without one."

"Noodles," said Yossarian, "I believe these gentlemen want you to make a speech. To an audience of one. To the President alone, recommending that the government buy their plane. Could you deliver a successful speech like that one?"

"I could give a very successful speech like that one."

"And in return, they would give you an honorarium."

"Yes," said Milo. "We would give you an honorarium."

"And how much would that honorarium be?" inquired Noodles.

" Milo?" Yossarian stepped back, for there was much about business he still did not understand.

"Four hundred million dollars," said Milo.

"That sounds fair," responded Noodles, in a manner equally innocuous, as though he too were hearing nothing rare, and it was then, Yossarian recalled with amusement as he killed time later in his hospital bed, that Noodles offered to give him a peek into the Presidential Game Room, after the others had dashed away to the urgent financial meeting they'd mentioned for which they were already anxious to depart, for Gaffney's joke about antitrust approval for the M2 marriage to Christina Maxon turned out, after all, not to be a joke.

"And for you, Yossarian amp;" began Milo, when the three were parting.

"For that wonderful idea you came up with amp;" Wintergreen joined in, expansively.

"That's why we need him, Eugene. To you, Yossarian, we're giving, in gratitude, five hundred thousand dollars."

Yossarian, who had expected nothing, responded levelly, learning fast. "That sounds fair," he said with disappointment.

Milo looked embarrassed. "It's a little bit more than one percent," he insisted sensitively.

"And a little bit less than the one and a half percent of our standard finder's fee, isn't it?" said Yossarian. "But it still sounds fair."

"Yossarian," Wintergreen cajoled, "you're almost seventy and, pretty well off. Look into your heart. Does it really matter if you make another hundred thousand dollars, or even if the world does come to an end in a nuclear explosion after you're gone?" › Yossarian took a good look into his heart and answered honestly.

"No. But you two are just as old. Do you really care if you make millions more or not?"

"Yes," said Milo emphatically.

"And that's the big difference between us."

"Well, we're alone now," said Noodles. "You do think I'm a shit, don't you?"

"No more than me," said Yossarian.

"Are you crazy?" cried Noodles Cook. "You can't compare! Look what I just agreed to do!"

"I proposed it."

"I accepted!" argued Noodles. "Yossarian, there are nine other tutors here who are much bigger shits than you'll ever amount to, and they don't come close to me."

"I give in," said Yossarian. "You're a bigger shit than I am, Noodles Cook." '

"I'm glad you see it my way. Now let me show you our playroom. I'm getting good at video games, better than all the others. He's very proud of me."

The renovated Oval Office of the country's chief executive had been reduced in size drastically to make room for the spacious game room into which it now led. In the shrunken quarters, which now could comfortably hold no more than three or four others, presidential meetings were fewer and quicker, conspiracies simpler, cover-ups instantaneous. The President had more time free for his video games, and these he found more true to life than life itself, he'd said once publicly.

The physical compensations for the change lay in the larger, more imposing second room, which, with extension, was spacious enough for the straight-backed chairs and game tables for the multitudinous video screens, controls, and other attachments that now stood waiting like robotic stewards along the encircling periphery of the walls. The section nearest the entrance was designated THE WAR DEPARTMENT and contained individual games identified singly as The Napoleonic War, The Battle of Gettysburg, The Battle of Bull Run, The Battle of Antietam, Victory in Grenada, Victory in Vietnam, Victory in Panama City, Victory at Pearl Harbor, and The Gulf War Refought. A cheerful poster showed a gleaming apple-cheeked marine above the sentences: STEP RIGHT UP AND TRY.

ANYONE CAN PLAY.

ANY SIDE CAN WIN.

Yossarian moved by games named Indianapolis Speedway, Bombs Away, Beat the Draft, and Die Laughing. The place of prominence in the Presidential Game Room contained a video screen grander than the others and, waist-high, on a surface with the proportions and foundations of a billiard table, a transparent contour map of the country, vivid with different hues of green, black, blue, and desert pinks and tans. On the colorful replica were sets of electric trains on labyrinths of tracks that crossed the continent on different planes and went belowground through tunnels. When Noodles, with an enigmatic smile, pressed the buttons that turned on bright internal lights and set the trains running, Yossarian perceived a model of a whole new miniature world of vast and hermetic complexity functioning beneath the surface of the continent on different plateaus, extending from border to border, through boundaries northward into Canada to Alaska, and eastward and westward to the oceans. The name for this game read: TRIAGE On the map, he spotted first, in the peninsula state of Florida, a tiny cabin-shaped marker labeled Federal Citrus Reservoir. Large numbers of the railroad cars traveling underground were mounted with missiles, and many others carried cannons and transported armored vehicles. He saw several medical trains marked with a red cross. His eyes found a Federal Wisconsin Cheese Depository on the banks of Lake Michigan not far from Kenosha. He noted another Citrus Fruit Reservoir in California and a nationwide subterranean dispersion of pizza parlors and meat lockers. There was the nuclear reactor at the Savannah River, about which he now knew. Star-shaped Washington, D. C. was enlarged in blue within a white circle; he read markers there for the White House, the Burning Tree Country Club, MASSPOB, the new National Military Cemetery, the newest war memorial, and Walter Reed Hospital. And underground beneath every one of these, if he comprehended what he was looking at, was a perfect reconstruction of each concealed on a lower tier. Traveling out from the capital city were directional arrows paralleling the train tracks leadings by subterranean route to destinations including the Greenbrier; Country Club in West Virginia, the Livermore Laboratories in California, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the Burn Treatment Center at New York Hospital, and also in New York City, he noted with tremendous surprise, PABT, the bus terminal so close to the building that was presently his home.

He was stunned to find PABT joined to MASSPOB and incorporated in a local network with an underground tentacle that slithered through the buried canal under Canal Street and a wall walling off Wall Street. In Brooklyn, he saw Coney Island symbolized on the surface by an iron-red miniature of a phallic tower he recognized as the defunct parachute jump of the old Steeplechase Park. And underground, on what appeared to be a facsimile of an amusement park, Steeplechase Park, was a sketch of a grinning face with flat hair and lots of teeth, which he also knew.

"But ours work," Noodles told him with pride. "Or they wouldn't be on our map. He had this whole model built to make sure it's as good as the one in the game. If there's one word he lives by, it's be prepared."

"fThat's two words, isn't it?" corrected Yossarian.

"I used to think that way too," said Noodles, "but now I see it his way. I'm getting better at golf also."

"Is that why those country clubs are there?"

"He's putting them into the video game so they'll both match. See up there in Vermont?" Yossarian saw a Ben amp; Jerry Federal Ice Cream Depository. "He found that one in the video game only a little while ago, and now he wants one too. We'll also have Haagen-Dazs. We may be underneath a long time when it ever comes to that, and he wants to be sure of his ice cream and his golf. This is confidential, but we already have a nine-hole course finished underneath Burning Tree, and it's identical to the one up here. He's down there now, practicing the course so he'll have an advantage over others when the time comes."

"Who would those others be?" asked Yossarian.

"Those of us who've been chosen to survive," answered Noodles, "and to keep the country running underground when there's not much left above."

"I see. When would that be?"

"When he unlocks the box and presses the button. You see that second unit beside the game? That's the Football."

"What football?"

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

"I know that. What happens then?"

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

"Who does the picking?"

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

"Who's on it?"

"Nobody's sure."

"What happens to me and my best friends?"

"You're all disposable, of course."

"That sounds fair," said Yossarian.

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

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

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

"Do you learn a lot?" Yossarian teased.

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

"For what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

26 Yossarian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then he was stricken.

Here again was a Rhine Journey contrast.

Siegfried went out hunting and was stabbed in the back.

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

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