Closing Time

27 PABT

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

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

"Joan not coming?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What other noise? The carousel?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He mailed it. Tommy, I think you ought to come."

"I don't want to find out any more about anything. And I don't like those guys. I think they're CIA."

"They think you're CIA."

"I'm going back to your delivery room." McMahon was running out of energy again. "To rest awhile until one of your pregnant kids shows up and gives us one of your babies she wants to throw away. We haven't got any so far."

"You won't let me announce it. We hear about plenty."

"They'd lock us both up. Now, Larry, do this for me-find something down there to cancel that crazy wedding he's scheduled. I'm too old for that kind of stuff."

"They already have something they can't figure out," McBride reported to Yossarian. "An elevator that's down there and won't move, and we can't find out where it comes from."

From the front of the station house there came abruptly the explosive noise of a brawl.

"Oh, shit," groaned McMahon. "How I've grown to hate them all. Even my cops. Your pregnant mothers too."

Two burly young men who were cronies had broken each other's noses and split each other's mouths in an altercation over money robbed from a drug-addicted young black prostitute, a close friend of theirs, with white skin, yellow hair, and AIDS, syphilis, tuberculosis, and new strains of gonorrhea.

"There's another weird thing about these federal intelligence guys," McBride confided, when the two were out of the station. "They don't see anything funny about those signs. It's like they've seen them before." They cut across the main concourse below the Operations Control Center, and Yossarian remembered he was now on view on one of the five dozen video monitors there, traveling with McBride through the encasing structure. Perhaps Michael was up there again, watching with M2. If he picked his nose someone would see. On another screen, he supposed, might be the redheaded man in the seersucker suit, drinking an Orange Julius, and maybe the scruffy man in the sullied raincoat and blue beret, observed upstairs while observing him.

"They don't seem surprised by anything," grumbled McBride. "All they want to talk about when we plan the wedding is to get themselves invited, their wives too."

The stairwell was practically empty, the floor almost tidy. But the odors were strong, the air fetid with the rancid, mammalian vapors of unwashed bodies and their fecund wastes.

McBride went ahead and tiptoed carefully around the one-legged woman being raped again not far from the large, brown-skinned woman with thickened moles that looked like melanomas, who had taken off her bloomers and her skirt again and was swabbing her backside and armpits with a few damp towels, and Yossarian knew again he had not one thing to talk to her about, except, perhaps, to know if she had ridden to Kenosha on the same plane with him, which was out of the question and entirely possible.

On the last flight of steps sat the skinny blonde woman with a tattered red sweater, still dreamily engaged in sewing a rip in a dirty white blouse. At the bottom, there was already a fresh human shit on the floor in the corner. McBride said nothing about it. They turned underneath the staircase and proceeded to the battered metal closet with the false back and hidden door. In single file they came again into the tiny vestibule, facing the fire door of military green with the warning that read: EMERGENCY ENTRANCE KEEP OUT VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT "They don't see anything funny in that," sulked McBride. Yossarian opened the massive door with just his fingertip and was once more on the tiny landing near the roof of the tunnel, at the top of the staircase that fell steeply. The thoroughfare below was empty again.

McBride did a little jig step on the activating steps that roused the sleeping dogs and sent them back with hardly a peep of protest into the unstirring limbo in which they made their noiseless abode and spent their dateless hours. Showing off, he grinned at Yossarian.

"Where are the loudspeakers?"

"We haven't found them, We aren't authorized to look far yet. We're only checking security for the President."

"What's that water?"

"What water?"

"Oh, shit, Larry, I'm the one who's supposed to be hard of hearing. I hear water, a fucking stream, a babbling brook."

McBride shrugged impartially. "I'll check. We're looking into both ends today. We can't even find out if it's supposed to be secret. That's secret too."

Approaching the bottom of the lopsided ellipse of this staircase, Yossarian caught glimpses below of shoulders and trouser cuffs and shabby shoes, one pair a dingy black, one pair an orange brown. Yossarian was beyond surprise when he reached the last flight and saw the two men waiting: a lanky, pleasant redheaded man with a seersucker jacket and a swarthy, seamy, chunky man in a scruffy raincoat, with ill-shaven cheeks and a blue beret. The latter wore a surly look and compressed a limp cigarette between wet lips. Both hands were deep in the pockets of his raincoat.

They were Bob and Raul. Bob was different from the agent in Chicago. But Raul was the spitting image of the man outside his building and in his dream in Kenosha. Raul badgered his moist cigarette about his mouth, as though in moody exception to some restriction against lighting it.

"Were you in Wisconsin last week?" Yossarian could not help asking, with a guise of affable innocence. "Around the motel near the airport in a place called Kenosha?"

The man shrugged neutrally, with a look at McBride.

"We were together every day last week," McBride answered for him, "going over the floor plans of that catering company you brought in."

"And I was in Chicago," offered the redheaded man named Bob. He folded a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and tossed the crumpled green wrapper aside to the floor.

"Did I meet you in Chicago?" Yossarian faced him doubtfully, positive he had never laid eyes on him. "At the airport there?"

Bob answered leniently. "Wouldn't you know that?"

Yossarian had heard that voice before. "Would you?"

"Of course," said the man. "It's a joke, isn't it? But I don't catch on."

"Yo-Yo, that guy in charge of the wedding wants six dance floors and six bandstands, with one as a backup in case the other five all don't work, and I don't see where they can find the room, and I don't even know what the hell that means."

"Me aussi," said Raul, as though he hardly cared.

"I'll talk to him," said Yossarian.

"And something like thirty-five hundred guests! That's three hundred and fifty round tables. And two tons of caviar. Yo-Yo, that's four thousand pounds!"

"My wife wants to come," said Bob. "I'll have a gun in my ankle holster, but I'd like to pretend I'm a guest."

"I'll take care of it," said Yossarian.

"Moi also," said Raul, and threw away his cigarette.

"I'll take care of that too," said Yossarian. "But tell me what's happening here. What is this place?"

"We're here to find out," said Bob. "We'll talk to the sentries."

"Yo-Yo, wait while we check."

"Yo-Yo." Raul sniggered. "My Dieux."

All three looked left into the tunnel. And then Yossarian saw sitting inside on a bentwood chair a soldier in a red combat uniform with an assault rifle across his lap, and behind him near the wall stood a second armed soldier, with a larger weapon. On the other side, in the amber haze telescoping backward into the narrowing horizon of a beaming vanishing point, he made out two other motionless soldiers, in exactly that grouping. They could have been reflections.

"What's over there?" Yossarian pointed across toward the passageway to SUB-BASEMENTS A-Z.

"Nothing we found yet," said McBride. "You take a look, but don't go far."

"There's something else très funny," said Raul, and finally smiled. He stamped his foot a few times and then began jumping and landing on both heels heavily. "Notice anything, my ami? No noise down here, nous can't make noise."

All shuffled, stamped, jumped in place to demonstrate, Yossarian too. They made no dent in the silence. Bob rapped his knuckles on the banister of the staircase, and the thud was as expected. When he rapped them on the ground there was nothing.

"That's pretty weird, isn't it?" said Bob, smiling. "It's as though we're not even here."

"What's in your pockets?" Yossarian questioned Raul abruptly. "You don't take your hands out. Not in my dream or in the street across from my building."

"My cock and my balls," said Raul at once.

McBride was embarrassed. "His gun and his badge."

"That's mon cock and mes balls," joked Raul, but did not laugh.

"I've got one more question, if you want to come to the wedding," said Yossarian. "Why have you got your sentries there-to keep people in or keep people out?"

All three shot him a look of surprise.

"They aren't ours," said Bob.

"It's what we want to find out," explained McBride.

"Let's allons."

They moved away, with no fall of footsteps.

Yossarian made no sound either when he started across.

He noted next another strange thing. They cast no shadows. He cast none either as he crossed the sterile thoroughfare like a specter or soundless sleepwalker to the catwalk of white tile. The steps going up were also white, and the handrails of an albumescent porcelain that shimmered almost into invisibility against the like background of pure white, and they also were without shadows. And there was no dirt, and not one beaming reflection from one note in the air. He felt himself nowhere. He remembered the gum wrapper and the wet cigarette. He glanced down backward to make sure he was right. He was.

The crumpled green wrapper balled up by Bob was nowhere to be seen. The unlit cigarette had vanished too. Before his eyes as he searched, the green gum wrapper materialized through the surface of the compound underfoot and was again on the ground. Then it dwindled away rearward and was altogether gone. The unlit cigarette came back next. And then that went away also. They had come out of nowhere and gone away someplace, and he had the unearthly sense that he had only to think of an object to bring it into an unreal reality before him-if he mused of a half-undressed Melissa in ivory underwear, she would be lying there obligingly; he did and she was-and to turn his sensibility away to something else and it would dwindle from existence. She disappeared. Next he was sure he heard faintly the distinctive puffing music of the band organ of a carousel. McBride was nowhere near to verify the sound. Possibly, McBride would hear it as a roller-coaster. And then Yossarian was no longer sure, for the calliope was producing gaily in waltz time the somber, forceful Siegfried Funeral Music from the culminating Götterdämmerung, which precedes by less than one hour the immolation of Brunnhilde and her horse, the destruction of Valhalla, and the death knell of those great gods, who were always unhappy, always in anguish.

Yossarian went up to the catwalk and moved into the archway past the memorial affirming that Kilroy had been there. He sensed with a twinge that Kilroy, immortal, was dead too, had died in Korea if not Vietnam.

"Halt!"

The order rang through the archway with an echo. In front on another bentwood chair, slightly forward of a turnstile with rotating bars of steel, sat another armed sentry.

This one too was uniformed in a battle jacket that was crimson and a visored green hat that looked like a jockey cap. Yossarian advanced at his signal, feeling weightless, insubstantial, contingent. The guard was young, had light hair in a crew cut, sharp eyes, and a thin mouth, and Yossarian discerned as he drew close enough to see freckles that he looked exactly like the young gunner Arthur Schroeder, with whom he had flown overseas almost fifty years before.

"Who goes there?"

"Major John Yossarian, retired," said Yossarian.

"Can I be of help to you, Major?"

"I want to go in."

"You'll have to pay."

"I'm with them."

"You'll still have to pay."

"How much?"

"Fifty cents."

Yossarian handed him two quarters and was given a round blue ticket with numbers in sequence wheeling around the rim of the disk of flimsy cardboard on a loop of white string. In helpful pantomime, the guard directed him to slip the loop over his head to hang the ticket around his neck and down over his breast. The name above the piping of his pocket read A. SCHROEDER.

"There's an elevator, sir, if you want to go directly."

"What's down there?"

"You're supposed to know, sir."

"Your name is Schroeder?"

"Yes, sir. Arthur Schroeder."

"That's fucking funny." The soldier said nothing as Yossarian studied him. "Were you ever in the air corps?"

"No, sir."

"How old are you, Schroeder?"

"I'm a hundred and seven."

"That's a good number. How long have you been here?"

"Since 1900."

"Hmmmmm. You were about seventeen when you enrolled?"

"Yes, sir. I came in with the Spanish-American War."

"These are all lies, aren't they?"

"Yes, sir. They are."

"Thank you for telling me the truth."

"I always tell the truth, sir."

"Is that another lie?"

"Yes, sir. I always lie."

"That can't be true then, can it? Are you from Crete?"

"No, sir. I'm from Athens, Georgia. I went to school in Ithaca, New York. My home is now in Carthage, Illinois."

"Is that so?"

"Yes, sir. I cannot tell a lie."

"You are from Crete, aren't you? You know the paradox of the Cretan who tells you Cretans always lie? It's impossible to believe him, isn't it? I want to go inside."

"You have your ticket." The guard punched a hole in the center and another in a number. The number was for the Human Pool Table.

"I can't go on that ride?"

"You've already been, sir," advised the guard named Schroeder. "Those are aluminized metal detectors just inside that arcade. Don't bring drugs or explosives. Be prepared for noise and the bright lights."

Yossarian pushed through the turnstile and walked into the framework of silver metal detectors at the entrance to the hallway. The moment he did, the lighting blinked off. And next, harsh white lights flashed on with a blaze that almost staggered him. He discovered himself inside a brilliantly illuminated hallway of magic mirrors. A roaring noise all but deafened him. It seemed like the blasts of an MRI machine. And he saw that the mirrors glittering grotesquely on all sides and overhead were deforming his reflections dissimilarly, as though he were liquefied into highlighted mercury and melting distinctly into something different from every point of view. Discrete parts of him were enlarged and elongated as though for extracting examination; his images were billowing into quantities of swells. In one mirror, he witnessed his head and neck misshapen into a slender block of Yossarian, while his torso and legs were stunted and bloated. In the mirror beside that one his body was monstrously inflated and his face reduced to a grape, a pimple with hair and a minuscule face with crushed features and a grin. He perceived that he was close to laughing, and the novelty of that surprise tickled him more. In no two mirrors were the deformities alike, in no one lens were the anomalies consistent. His authentic appearance, his objective structure, was no longer absolute. He had to wonder what he truly looked like. And then the ground beneath his feet began to move.

The floor jerked back and forth. He adjusted smoothly, recalling the jolly tricks of George C. Tilyou in his old Steeplechase Park. This was one. The deafening noise had ceased. The heat from the lights was searing. Most piercing was a scorching dazzle of pure white that burned above his right eye and another, just as hot, that gleamed like a flare off his left. He coulcl not find them. When he turned to try, they moved with his vision and remained in place, and then he felt the ground beneath his feet shift again, to a different prank, in which the right half jerked in one backward or forward thrust while the other went opposite, the two reversing themselves rapidly to the regulated pace of an undeviating heartbeat. He bore himself forward easily on this one too. The lights turned indigo blue, and much of him looked black. The lights turned red, and areas of him were drained of color again. Back in normal light, he almost swooned at a hideous glimpse of himself as homeless, abominable, filthy, and depraved. In a different mirror he ballooned into a nauseating metamorphosis of a swollen insect inside a fragile brown carapace; then he was Raul, and Bob, and then with another revolting fright he saw himself reflected as the frowsy, squat, untidy, middle-aged woman with the pudgy chin and crude face dogging him in the red Toyota, and then he changed again to look the way he always thought he did. He walked onward, hurrying away, and found himself challenged at the end by a last mirror in front, which blocked him in like a massive barrier of glass. In this one, he was still himself, but the features on the face in the head on his shoulders were those of a smiling young man with a hopeful, innocent, naive, and defiant demeanor. He saw himself under thirty with a blooming outlook, an optimistic figure no less comely and immortal than the lordliest divinity that ever was, but no more. His hair was short, black, and wavy, and he was at a time in his life when he still smugly fostered audacious expectations that all was possible.

With no hesitation he made use of momentum to take a giant step forward directly into the looking glass, smack into that illusion of himself as a hale youth with something of a middle-aged spread, and he came out the other side a white-haired adult near seventy into the commodious landscape of an amusement park unfurling before him on a level semicircle. He heard a carousel. He heard a roller-coaster.

He heard the high-pitched squeals of gaiety and simulated panic from a far-off group of men and women in a flat-bottomed boat rumbling down a high watery incline to a splashing stop in a pool.

Rotating clockwise slowly in front of him now was the perfect circle of a magic barrel, the Barrel of Fun, number one on his blue-and-white ticket. The ridged outer edges of the turning tubular chamber facing him were the raspberry red of candies and the sweetened syrup at soda fountains, and the sky blue of the rim was marked with yellow comets amid strewn white stars and a sprinkling of apricot crescent moons wearing smiles. He walked through casually simply by guiding himself on a line contrary to the direction of rotation and came out the other end into a conversation the late author Truman Capote was having with a man whose name gave him pause.

"Faust," repeated the stranger.

"Dr. Faust?" inquired Yossarian eagerly.

"No, Irvin Faust," said the man, who wrote novels also. "Good reviews, but never a big best-seller. This is William Saroyan. I bet you never even heard of him."

"Sure I did." Yossarian was miffed. "I saw The Time of Your Life. I read 'The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze'; and 'Forty Thousand Assyrians.' I remember that one."

"They're not in print anymore," mourned William Saroyan. "You can't find them in libraries."

"I used to try to write like you," Yossarian confessed. "I couldn't get far."

"You didn't have my imagination."

"They try to write like me," said Ernest Hemingway. Both wore mustaches. "But don't get far either. Want to fight?"

"I never want to fight."

"They try to write like him too," said Ernest Hemingway, and pointed off to William Faulkner, sitting in profound silence in a packed area populated by heavy drinkers. Faulkner wore a mustache too. So did Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and James Joyce, not far from the area of those with late-life personality disorders embodying depression and nervous breakdowns, in which Henry James sat silent with Joseph Conrad staring at Charles Dickens blending into the populous zone of the suicides where Jerzy Kosinski was chatting up Virginia Woolf near Arthur Koestler and Sylvia Plath. In a cone of brown sunlight on violet sand he spied Gustav Aschenbach on a beach chair and recognized the book in his lap as the same paperback edition as his own copy of Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Aschenbach beckoned.

And Yossarian responded inwardly with a "Fuck you!" and mentally gave him the finger and the obscene Italian gesture of rejection as he hastened past the Whip, the Pretzel, and the Whirlpool. He caught Kafka spying on him with a bloody cough from a shadowy recess below the shut pane of the window from which Marcel Proust watched him above a hooded alleyway with the street sign DESOLATION ROW. He came to a mountain in a framework of iron with tracks rising high and saw the name DRAGON'S GOKGE.

"Holy shit!" exulted McBride, who was nowhere about. "There really is a roller-coaster!"

He came next to the carousel, ornate, elaborate, mirrored, spinning, with panel paintings in antique white molding alternating between the upright oval frames with reflecting glass on the main rounding board and inner cornice. The lively waltz from the calliope was indeed the Siegfried Funeral Music, and situated grandly on one of the gaudy gondolas drawn by swans was an elderly German official with domed helmet and encyclopedic insignia and a bearing majestic enough for an emperor or a kaiser.

Yossarian caught sight of the rowboat before he saw the canal, a wooden craft with riders sitting upright: two, three, and four abreast, floating into view without power in the man-made channel barely wide enough to accommodate one craft at a time, and he was outside the Tunnel of Love, where a watchman in a red jacket and green jockey cap stood guard at the entrance with a portable telephone and a hand-held ticket punch. He had orange hair and a milky complexion and wore a green rucksack on his back. Garish billboards and lavender-and-ginger illustrations gave alluring notice of a fabulous wax museum inside the Tunnel of Love that headlined life-size wax statues of the executed Lindbergh-baby kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann, and a nude Marilyn Monroe lying on a bed, restored in every detail to lifelike death. The fabulous wax museum was called ISLE OF THE DEAD. In the first seat of the flat-bottomed boat coasting out of one murky opening of the tunnel to continue gliding onward into the inky opening of the other, he saw Abraham Lincoln in a stiff stovepipe hat sitting motionless beside the faceless Angel of Death, and they seemed to be holding hands. He saw his wounded gunner Howard Snowden on the same bench. Side by side in the boat, on the bench immediately behind them, he saw Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The mayor was wearing a dashing wide hat with a rolled brim something like a cowboy's, and FDR sported a creased homburg and was flaunting his cigarette holder, and both were grinning as though alive in a frontpage photograph in a bygone newspaper. And on the seat in back of La Guardia and Roosevelt 's he saw his mother and his father, and then his Uncle Sam and Aunt Ida, his Uncle Max and Aunt Hannah, and then his brother Lee, and he knew that he too was going to die. It struck him all of a sudden that overnight everyone he'd known a long time was old-not getting old, not middle-aged, but old! The great entertainment stars of his time were no longer stars, and the celebrated novelists and poets in his day were of piddling significance in the new generation. Like RCA and Time magazine, even IBM and General Motors were of meager stature, and Western Union had passed away. The gods were growing old again, and it was time for another shake-up. Everyone has got to go, Teemer had propounded the last time they'd talked, and, in an uncharacteristic display of emotional emphasis, had added: "Everyone!"

Yossarian rushed past that Tunnel of Love with its true-to-life wax figures on the Isle of the Dead. Crossing a white footbridge with rococo balustrades, he found himself back in Naples, Italy, in 1945, on a line behind the imperturbable old soldier Schweik and the young one named Krautheimer who had changed his name to Joseph Kaye, waiting to go home by steamship outside the vanished old L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway on Surf Avenue past vanished old Steeplechase Park.

"Still here?"

"What happened to you?"

"I'm back here too. What happened to you?"

"I am Schweik."

"I know. The good soldier?"

"I don't know about good."

"I thought I'd be the oldest now," said Yossarian.

"I'm older."

"I know. I'm Yossarian."

"I know. You ran away once to Sweden, didn't you?"

"I didn't get far. I couldn't even get to Rome."

"You didn't escape there? In a little yellow raft?"

"That happens only in the movies. What's your name?"

"Joseph Kaye. I told you before. Why are you asking?"

"I have trouble with names now. Why are you asking?"

"Because somebody has been telling lies about me."

"Maybe that's why we're still on line," said Schweik.

"Why don't you go back to Czechoslovakia?"

"Why should I," said Schweik, "when I can go to America? Why don't you go to Czechoslovakia?"

"What will you do in America?"

"Raise dogs. Anything easy. People live forever in America, don't they?"

"Not really," said Yossarian.

"Will I like it in America?"

"If you make money and think you're well-off."

"Are the people friendly?"

"If you make money and they think you're well-off."

"Where the fuck is that boat?" griped Kaye. "We can't wait here forever."

"Yes, you can," said Schweik.

"It's coming!" cried Kaye.

They heard the rattling noise of outdated wheels on outdated iron rails, and then a chain of roller-coaster carriages painted red and pale gold rode into view at the decelerating end of the ride on the L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway. But instead of stopping as expected, these cars continued onward past them to start around all over again, and, while Kaye shook in frustration, Yossarian stared at the riders. Again he recognized Abraham Lincoln in front. He saw La Guardia and FDR, his mother and his father, his uncles and his aunts, and his brother too. And he saw each of them double, the Angel of Death double and the gunner Snowden too, and he was seeing them twice.

He whirled around, staggering, and hastened back, escaping, and searched in baffled terror for help from the soldier Schroeder who now claimed to be a hundred and seven years old, but found only McBride, both of him, near Bob and Raul, who combined made four. McBride thought Yossarian looked funny and was walking with a falter and a list, a seesawing hand held out for stability.

"Yeah, I do feel funny," Yossarian admitted. "Let me hold your arm."

"How many fingers do you see?"

"Two."

"Now?"

"Ten."

"Now?"

"Twenty."

"You're seeing double."

"I'm beginning to see everything twice again."

"You want some help?"

"Yes."

"Hey, guys, give me a hand with him. From them too?"

"Sure."

28 Hospital

"Cut," said the brain surgeon, in this last stage of his Rhine Journey.

"You cut," said his apprentice.

"No cuts," said Yossarian.

"Now look who's butting in."

"Should we go ahead?"

"Why not?"

"I've never done this before."

"That's what my girlfriend used to say. Where's the hammer?"

"No hammers," said Yossarian.

"Is he going to keep talking that way while we try to concentrate?"

"Give me that hammer."

"Put down that hammer," directed Patrick Beach.

"How many fingers do you see?" demanded Leon Shumacher.

"One."

"How many now?" asked Dennis Teemer.

"Still one. The same."

"He's fooling around, gentlemen," said former stage actress Frances Rolphe, born Frances Rosenbaum, who'd grown up to become mellow Frances Beach, with a face that again looked its age. "Can't you see?"

"We made him all better!"

"Gimme eat," said Yossarian.

"I would cut that dosage in half, Doctor," instructed Melissa MacIntosh. "Halcion wakes him up and Xanax makes him anxious. Prozac depresses him."

"She knows you that well, does she?" clucked Leon Shumacher, after Yossarian had been given more eat.

"We've seen each other."

"Who's her busty blonde friend?"

"Her name is Angela Moorecock."

"Heh, heh. I was hoping for something like that. What time will she get here?"

"After work and before dinner, and she may come again with a house-building boyfriend. My children may be here. Now that I'm out of danger, they may want to bid me farewell."

"That son of yours," began Leon Shumacher.

"The one on Wall Street?"

"All he wanted to hear was the bottom line. Now he won't want to invest more time here if you're not going to die. I told him you wouldn't."

"And I told him you would, naturally," said Dennis Teemer, in bathrobe and pajamas, livelier as a patient than as a doctor. His embarrassed wife told friends he was experimenting. " 'For how much?' he wanted to bet me."

"You still think it's natural?" objected Yossarian.

"For us to die?"

"For me to die."

Teemer glanced aside. "I think it's natural."

"For you?"

"I think that's natural too. I believe in life."

"You lost me."

"Everything that's alive lives on things that are living, Yossarian. You and I take a lot. We have to give back."

"I met a particle physicist on a plane to Kenosha who says that everything living is made up of things that are not."

"I know that too."

"It doesn't make you laugh? It doesn't make you cry? It doesn't make you wonder?"

"In the beginning was the word," said Teemer. "And the word was gene. Now the word is quark. I'm a biologist, not a physicist, and I can't say 'quark.' That belongs to an invisible world of the lifeless. So I stick with the gene."

"So where is the difference between a living gene and a dead quark?"

"A gene isn't living and a quark isn't dead."

"I can't say 'quark' either without wanting to laugh."

"Quark."

"Quark."

"Quark, quark."

"You win," said Yossarian. "But is there a difference between us and that?"

"Nothing in a living cell is alive. Yet the heart pumps and the tongue talks. We both know that."

"Does a microbe? A mushroom?"

"They have no soul?" guessed the surgeon in training.

"There is no soul," said the surgeon training him. "That's all in the head."

"Someone ought to tell the cardinal that."

"The cardinal knows it."

"Even a thought, even this thought, is just an electrical action between molecules."

"But there are good thoughts and bad thoughts," snapped Leon Shumacher, "so let's go on working. Were you ever in the navy with a man named Richard Nixon? He thinks he knows you."

"No, I wasn't."

"He wants to come check you out."

"I was not in the navy. Please keep him away."

"Did you ever play alto saxophone in a jazz band?"

"No."

"Were you ever in the army with the Soldier in White?"

"Twice. Why?"

"He's on a floor downstairs. He wants you to drop by to say hello."

"If he could tell you all that, he's not the same one."

"Were you ever in the army with a guy named Rabinowitz?" asked Dennis Teemer. "Lewis Rabinowitz?"

Yossarian shook his head. "Not that I remember."

"Then I may have it wrong. How about a man named Sammy Singer, his friend? He says he was from Coney Island. He thinks you may remember him from the war."

"Sammy Singer?" Yossarian sat up. "Sure, the tail gunner. A short guy, small, skinny, with wavy black hair."

Teemer smiled. "He's almost seventy now."

"Is he sick too?"

"He's friends with this patient I'm looking at."

"Tell him to drop by."

"Hiya, Captain." Singer shook the hand Yossarian put out.

Yossarian appraised a man delighted to see him, on the smallish side, with hazel eyes projecting slightly in a face that was kindly. Singer was chortling. "It's good to see you again. I've wondered about you. The doctor says you're okay."

"You've grown portly, Sam," said Yossarian, with good humor, "and a little bit wrinkled, and maybe a little taller. You used to be skinny. And you've gotten very gray, with thinning hair. And so have I. Fill me in, Sam. What's been happening the last fifty years? Anything new?"

"Call me Sammy."

"Call me Yo-Yo."

"I'm pretty good, I guess. I lost my wife. Ovarian cancer. I'm kind of floundering around."

"I've been divorced, twice. I flounder too. I suppose I'll have to marry again. It's what I'm used to. Children?"

"One daughter in Atlanta," said Sammy Singer, "and another in Houston. Grandchildren too, already in college. I don't like to throw myself on them. I have an extra bedroom for when they come to visit. I worked for Time magazine a long time-but not as a reporter," Singer added pointedly. "I did well enough, made a good living, and then they retired me to bring in young blood to keep the magazine alive."

"And now it's practically dead," said Yossarian. "I work now in that old Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Looking out on the skating rink. Were you ever in that one?"

"I sure was," said Singer, with recalled affection. "I remember that skating rink. I had some good times there."

"It's now the new M amp; M Building, with M amp; M Enterprises and Milo Minderbinder. Remember old Milo?"

"I sure do." Sammy Singer laughed. "He gave us good food, that Milo Minderbinder."

"He did do that. A better standard of living than I had before."

"Me too. They were saying afterward that he was the one who bombed our squadron that time."

"He did that too. That's another one of the contradictions of capitalism. It's funny, Singer. The last time I was in the hospital, the chaplain popped in out of nowhere to see me."

"What chaplain?"

"Our chaplain. Chaplain Tappman."

"Sure. I know that chaplain. Very quiet, right? Almost went to pieces after those two planes collided over La Spezia, with Dobbs in one plane and Huple in the other and Nately and all the rest of them killed. Remember those names?"

"I remember them all. Remember Orr? He was in my tent."

"I remember Orr. They say he made it to Sweden in a raft after he ditched after Avignon, right before we went home."

"I went down to Kentucky once and saw him there," said Yossarian. "He was a handyman in a supermarket, and we didn't have much to say to each other anymore."

"I was in the plane when we ditched after the first mission to Avignon. He took care of everything. Remember that time? I was down in the raft with that top turret gunner Sergeant Knight."

"I remember Bill Knight. He told me all about it."

"That was the time none of our Mae Wests would inflate because Milo had taken out the carbon dioxide cylinders to make ice cream sodas for all you guys at the officers' club. He left a note instead. That was some Milo then." Singer chuckled.

"You guys had sodas too every Sunday, didn't you?"

"Yes, we did. And then he took the morphine from the first-aid kit on that second mission to Avignon, you said. Was that really true?" "He did that too. He left a note there also."

"Was he dealing in drugs then?"

"I had no way to know. But he sure was dealing in eggs, fresh eggs. Remember?"

"I emember those eggs. I still can't believe eggs can taste so good. I eat them often."

"I'm going to start," Yossarian resolved. "You just convinced me, Sammy Singer. It makes no sense to worry about cholesterol now, does it?"

"You remember Snowden then, Howard Snowden? On that mission to Avignon?"

"Sam, could I ever forget? I would have used up all the morphine in the first-aid kit when I saw him in such pain. That fucking Milo. I cursed him a lot. Now I work with him."

"Did I really black out that much?"

"It looked that way to me."

"That seems funny now. You were covered with so much blood. And then all that other stuff. He just kept moaning. He was cold, wasn't he?" thing, "Yes, he said he was cold. And dying. I was covered with everything, Sammy, and then with my own vomit too."

"And then you took off your clothes and wouldn't put them on again for a while."

"I was sick of uniforms."

"I saw you sitting in a tree at the funeral, naked."

"I had sneakers."

"I saw Milo climb up to you too, with his chocolate-covered cotton. We all kind of always looked up to you then, Yossarian. I still do, you know."

"Why is that, Sam?" asked Yossarian, and hesitated. "I'm only a pseudo Assyrian."

Singer understood. "No, that's not why. Not since the army. I made good friends with Gentiles there. You were one, when that guy started beating me up in South Carolina. And not since those years at Time, where I had fun and hung around with Protestants and my first heavy drinkers."

"We're assimilated. It's another nice thing about this country. If we behave like they do, they might let us in."

"I met my wife there. You know something, Yossarian?"

"Yo-Yo?"

Sam Singer shook his head. "After I was married, I never once cheated on my wife, and never wanted to, and that seemed funny to people everywhere, to other girls too. It didn't to her. They might have thought I was gay. Her first husband was the other way. A ladies' man, the kind I always thought I wanted to be. She preferred me, by the time I met her."

"You miss her."

"I miss her."

"I miss marriage. I'm not used to living alone."

"I can't get used to it either. I can't cook much."

"I don't cook either."

Sam Singer reflected. "No, I think I looked up to you first because you were an officer, and back then I had the kid's idea that all officers had something more on the ball than the rest of us. Or we would be officers too. You always seemed to know what you were doing, except when you were getting lost and taking us out across the Atlantic Ocean. Even when you were going around doing crazy things, it seemed to make more sense than a lot of the rest. Standing in formation naked to get that medal. We all got a big kick out of seeing you do that."

"I wasn't showing off, Sam. I was in panic most of the time. I'd wake up some mornings and try to guess where I was, and then try to figure out what the hell I was doing there. I sometimes wake up't lat way now."

"Baloney," said Singer, and grinned. "And you always seemed to be getting laid a lot, when the rest of us weren't."

"Not as much as you think," said Yossarian, laughing. "There was a lot more of just rubbing it around."

"But, Yossarian, when you said you wouldn't fly anymore, we kept our fingers crossed. We'd finished our seventy missions and were in the same boat."

"Why didn't you come out and walk with me?"

"We weren't that brave. They sent us home right after they caught you, so it worked out fine for us. I said no too, but by then they gave me a choice. What happened to you?"

"They sent me home too. They threatened to kill me, to put me in prison, they said they would ruin me. They promoted me to major and sent me home. They wanted no fuss."

"Most of us admired you. And you seem to know what you're doing now."

"Who says that? I'm not sure of anything anymore."

"Come on, Yo-Yo. On our floor, they're saying you've even got a good thing going with one of the nurses."

Yossarian came close to a blush of pride. "It's traveled that far?

"We even hear it from my friend's doctor," Singer went on, in a merry way. "Back in Pianosa, I remember, you were pretty friendly with a nurse too, weren't you?"

"For a little while. She dumped me as a poor risk. The problem with sweeping a girl off her feet, Sammy, is that you have to keep on sweeping. Love doesn't work that way."

"I know that too," said Singer. "But you and a couple of others were with her up the beach with your suits on that day Kid Sampson was killed by an airplane. You remember Kid Sampson, don't you?"

"Oh, shit, sure," said Yossarian. "Do you think I could ever forget Kid Sampson? Or McWatt, who was in the plane that smashed him apart. McWatt was my favorite pilot."

"Mine too. He was the pilot on the mission to Ferrara when we had to go around on a second bomb run, and Kraft was killed, and a bombardier named Pinkard too."

Were you in the plane with me on that one too?"

"I sure was. I was also in the plane with Hungry Joe when he forgot to use the emergency handle to put down his landing gear. And they gave him a medal."

"They gave me my medal for that mission to Ferrara."

"It's hard to believe it all really happened."

"I know that feeling," said Yossarian. "It's hare to believe I let myself be put through so much."

"I know that feeling. It's funny about Snowden." Singer hesitated. "I didn't know him that well."

"I'd never noticed him."

"But now I feel he was one of my closest friends."

"I have that feeling too."

"And I also feel," Sammy persevered, "he was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I almost hate to put it that way. It sounds immoral. But it gave me an episode, something dramatic to talk about, and something to make me remember that the war was really real. People won't believe much of it; my children and grandchildren aren't much interested in anything so old."

"Bring your friend around and I'll tell him it's true. What's he in here for?"

"Some kind of checkup."

"By Teemer?" Yossarian was shaking his head.

"They know each other," said Singer, "a long time."

"Yeah," said Yossarian, with a sarcastic doubt that left Singer knowing he was unconvinced. "Well, Sammy, where do we go from here? I never could navigate, but I seem to have more direction. I know many women. I may want to marry again."

"I know some too, but mostly old friends."

"Don't get married unless you feel you have to. Unless you need to, you won't be good at it."

"I may travel more," said Singer. "Friends tell me to take a trip around the world. I know people from my days in Time. I've got a good friend in Australia who was hit with a disease called Guillain-Barre a long time ago. He's not young either and doesn't get around too easily on his crutches anymore. I'd like to see him again. There's another in England, who's retired, and one in Hong Kong."

"I think I'd go if I were you. It's something to do. What about the one that's here? Teemer's patient."

"He'll probably be going home soon. He was a prisoner in Dresden with Kurt Vonnegut and another one nimed Schweik. Can you imagine?"

"I stood on line in Naples once with a soldier named Schweik and met a guy named Joseph Kaye. I never even heard about Dresden until I read about it in Vonnegut's novel. Send your friend up. I'd like to hear about Vonnegut."

"He doesn't know him."

"Ask him to drop by anyway if he wants to. I'll be here through the weekend. Well, Sammy, want to gamble? Do you think we might see each other again outside the hospital?"

Singer was taken by surprise. "Yossarian, that's up to you. I've got the time."

"I'll take your number if you're willing to give it. It may be worth a try. I'd like to talk to you again about William Saroyan. You used to try to write stories like his."

"So did you. What happened?"

"I stopped, after a while."

"I gave up too. Ever try The New Yorker?"

"I struck out there every time."

"So did I."

"Sammy tells me you saved his life," said the big-boned man in a dressing gown and his own pajamas, introducing himself as Rabinowitz in a lusty, lighthearted manner, with a hoarse, unfaltering voice. "Tell me how you did it."

"Let him give you the details. You were in Dresden?"

"He'll give you those details." Rabinowitz let his eyes linger again on Angela. "Young lady, you look like someone I met once and can't remember where. She was a knockout too. Did we ever meet? I used to look younger."

"I'm not sure I know. This is my friend Anthony."

"Hello, Anthony. Listen to me good, Anthony. I'm not joshing. Treat her real fine tonight, because if you don't treat her good I will find out about it, and I will start sending her flowers and you will be out in the cold. Right, darling? Good night, my dear. You'll have a good time. Anthony, my name is Lew. Go have some fun.

"I will, Lew," said Anthony.

"I'm retired now, do a little real estate, some building with my son-in-law. What about you?"

"I'm retired too," said Yossarian.

"You're with Milo Minderbinder."

"Part time."

"I've got a friend who'd like to meet him. I'll bring him around. I'm in here with a weight problem. I have to keep it low because of a minor heart condition, and sometimes I take off too much. I like to check that out."

"With Dennis Teemer?"

"I know Teemer long. That lovely blonde lady looks like something special. I know I've seen her."

"I think you'd remember."

"That's why I know."

"Hodgkin's disease," confided Dennis Teemer.

"Shit," said Yossarian. "He doesn't want me to know."

"He doesn't want anybody to know. Not even me. And I know him almost thirty years. He sets records."

"Was he always that way? He likes to flirt."

"So do you. With everybody. You want everybody here to be crazy about you. He's just more open. You're sly."

"You're cunning and know too much."

In Rabinowitz, Yossarian saw a tall, direct man with a large frame who had lost heavy amounts of flesh. He was almost bald on top and wore a gold and graying brush mustache, and he was aggressively attentive to Angela, with an indestructible sexual self-confidence that overrode and reduced her own. Yossarian was amused to see her bend herself forward to take down her bosom, lay her hands in her lap to hold down her skirt, tuck back her legs primly. She was faced with an excess of overbearing friskiness, of a kind she did not take to but could not defeat.

"And he's not even Italian," Yossarian chided.

"You're not Italian, and I don't mind you. The trouble is I do know him from somewhere."

"Aha, Miss Moore, I think I may have it," said Rabinowitz with a probing smile, when he sauntered in and saw her again. "You remind me of a lovely little lady with good personality I met one time with a builder I was doing business with out in Brooklyn, near Sheepshead Bay. An Italian named Benny Salmeri, I think. You liked to dance."

"Really?" answered Angela, looking at him with eye-shadowed eyelids half lowered. "I used to know a builder named Salmeri. I'm not sure it's the same."

"Did you ever have a roommate who was a nurse?"

"I still do," answered Angela, now more flippant. "The one on duty here before. That's my partner, Melissa."

"That nice-looking thing with that good personality?"

"She takes care of our friend here. That's why he's in. She fucks old men and gives them strokes."

"I wish you wouldn't say that to people," Yossarian reproved her mildly, after Rabinowitz had gone. "You'll destroy her prospects. And it wasn't a stroke. You'll ruin mine too."

"And I wish," said Angela, "you wouldn't tell people my name is Moorecock."

Thty studied each other. "Who've I told?"

"Michael. That doctor Shumacher." Angela Moore hesitated, for intentional effect. "Patrick."

"Patrick?" Surprised, Yossarian sensed the reply before he put the question. "Which Patrick? Patrick Beach?"

"Patrick Beach."

"Oh shit," he said, after his jolt of surprise. "You're seeing Patrick?"

"He's called."

"You'll have to go sailing. You'll probably hate it."

"I've already been. I didn't mind."

"Doesn't he have trouble with his prostate?"

"Not right now. It's why he isn't coming by here anymore. You were close with his wife. Do you think she'll know?"

"Frances Beach knows everything, Angela."

"I'm not the first."

"She knows that already. She'll be able to guess."

"There really is something going on between you and that nurse, isn't there?" guessed Frances Beach. "I can almost smell coitus in this rancid air."

"Am I letting it show?"

"No, darling, she is. She watches over you more protectively than she should. And she's much too correct when others are here. Advise her not to be so tense."

"That will make her more tense."

"And you still have that vulgar compulsion I never could abide. You look down at a woman's bottom whenever she turns around, at all women, and with so much pride at hers. It's that pride of possession. You eye mine too, don't you?"

"I know I always do that. It doesn't make me proud. You still look pretty good."

"You would not think that if you didn't have memories."

"I've got another bad habit you'll find even worse."

"I'll bet I can guess. Because I do it too."

"Then tell me."

"Have you also arrived at that wretched stage when you can't look seriously into a human face without already picturing what it will look like when old?"

"I can't see how you knew."

"We've been too much alike."

"I do it only with women. It helps me lose interest."

"I do it with every face already giving clues. It's evil and morbid. This one will wear well."

"Her name is Melissa."

"Let her know it's safe to trust me. Even though I'm rich and fashionable and used to have some bitchy fame as an actress. I'm glad you're not marrying for money."

"Who's thinking of marriage?"

"By my time with Patrick it was much more than the money. I think I approve. Although I don't like her girlfriend. Patrick has taken to sailing again. I think he may be flying as well. What more can you tell me?"

"I can't tell you a thing."

"And I don't want to know, not this time either. I would feel so guilty if he thought I suspected. I would not want to step on anybody's happiness, especially his. I wish I could have more too, but you know my age. Our friend Olivia may be my exception. She won't visit often but fills the room with this glut of flowers. And she signs each card 'Olivia Maxon,' as though it were a British title and you knew a thousand Olivias. I adore your catering company."

"It's Milo Minderbinder's."

"Two tons of caviar is divine."

"We could have got by with one, but it's safe to have a little more. This wedding in the terminal is just aboul the biggest piece of fun I see in my future."

"It's just about my only fun. Oh, John, Johnny, it's a terrible thing you just did to me," said Frances Beach. "When I learned you were sick, I finally felt old for the first time. You will recover, and I never will. There's somebody here. Please come in. Your name is Melissa?"

"Yes, it is. There's someone else here to see him."

"And my name is Rabinowitz, madam, Lewis Rabinowitz, but friends call me Lew. Here's someone else-Mr. Marvin Winkler, just in from California to pay his respects. Where's our lovely friend Angela? Marvin, this is Mr. Yossarian. He's the man who will set it up for you. Winkler wants to meet with Milo Minderbinder about a terrific new product he's got. I told him we'd arrange it."

"What's the product?"

"Lew, let me talk to him alone."

"Well, Winkler?"

"Look down at my foot." Winkler was a man of middle height with conspicuous girth. "Don't you notice anything?"

"What am I looking at?"

"My shoe."

"What about it?"

"It's state-of-the-art."

Yossarian studied him. "You aren't joking?"

"I don't joke about business," answered Winkler, issuing words with strain as though emitting sighs of affliction. His voice was low and guttural, almost inaudible. "I've been in it too long. I manufactured and sold surplus army film after the war. I was in baked goods too and was known for the best honey-glazed doughnuts in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Everything I did was state-of-the-art. I still make chocolate Easter bunnies."

"Have you ever hit it big?"

"I've had trouble with my timing. I was in the food-service business too once and offered home-delivered breakfasts Sunday mornings so that people could sleep late. My firm was Greenacre Farms in Coney Island, and I was the sole proprietor."

"And I was a customer. You never delivered."

"It was not cost-effective."

"Winkler, I will get you your meeting. I can't resist. But I will want you to tell me about it."

"I won't leave out a word."

"We've been thinking of a shoe," Milo admitted, "to sell to the government."

"Then you certainly want mine. It's state-of-the-art."

"Just what does that mean?"

"There's none better, Mr. Minderbinder, and no good reason for the government to choose any other. Look down at my foot again. I see the flexibility? The shoe looks new when you first start to wear it; when it's older it looks used as soon as you break it in. If it's dull you can polish it, or you can leave it the way it is or wear it scuffed, if that's what you want. You can make it lighter or and even change its color."

"But what does it do?"

"It fits over the foot and keeps the sock dry and clean. It helps protect the skin on the sole of the foot against cuts and scratches and other painful inconveniences of walking on the ground. You can walk in it, run in it, or even just sit and talk in it, as I'm doing with you now."

"And it changes color. How did you say it does that?"

"You just put this magic plastic insert into the slot of the heel and then take them to the shoemaker and tell aim to dye it to whatever color you want."

"It seems like a miracle."

"I would say that it is."

"Can you make them for women too?"

"A foot is a foot, Mr. Minderbinder."

"One thing escapes me, Mr. Winkler. What does your shoe do that the ones I'm wearing will not?"

"Make money for both of us, Mr. Minderbinder. Mine is state-of-the-art. Look down at the difference."

"I'm beginning to see. Are you very rich?"

"I've had trouble with my timing. But believe me, Mr. Minderbinder, I'm not without experience. You are doing business with the man who devised and still manufactures the state-of-the-art chocolate Easter bunny."

"What was so different about yours?"

"It was made of chocolate. It could be packaged, shipped, displayed, and, best of all, eaten, like candy."

"Isn't that true of other Easter bunnies?"

"But mine was state-of-the-art. We print that on every package. The public did not want a second-rate chocolate Easter bunny, and our government does not want a second-rate shoe."

"I see, I see," said Milo, brightening. "You know about chocolate?"

"All that there is to know."

"Tell me something. Please try one of these."

"Of course," said Winkler, taking the bonbon and relishing the prospect of eating it. "What is it?"

"Chocolate-covered cotton. What do you think of it?"

Delicately, as though handling something rare, fragile, and repulsive, Winkler lifted the mass from his tongue, while maintaining a smile. "I've never tasted better chocolate-covered cotton. It's state-of-the-art."

"Unfortunately, I seem unable to move it."

"I can't see why. Have you very much?"

"Warehouses full. Have you any ideas?"

"That's where I'm best. I will think of one while you bring my shoe to your procurer in Washington."

"That will definitely be done."

"Then consider this: Remove the chocolate from the cotton. Weave the cotton into fine fabric for shirts and bedsheets. We build today by breaking up. You've been putting together. We get bigger today by getting smaller. You can sell the chocolate to me for my business at a wonderful price for the money I receive from you for my shoe."

"How many shoes do you have now?"

"At the moment, just the pair I'm wearing, and another one at home in my closet. I can gear up for millions as soon as we have a contract and I receive in front all the money I'll need to cover my costs of production. I like money in front, Mr. Minderbinder. That's the only way I do business."

"That sounds fair," said Milo Minderbinder. "I work that way too. Unfortunately, we have a Department of Ethics now in Washington. But our lawyer will be in charge there once he gets out of prison. Meanwhile, we have our private procurers. You will have your contract, Mr. Winkler, for a deal is a deal."

"Thank you, Mr. Minderbinder. Can I send you a bunny for Easter? I can put you on our complimentary list."

"Yes, please do that. Send me a thousand dozen."

"And whom shall I bill?"

"Someone will pay. We both understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch."

"Thank you for the lunch, Mr. Minderbinder. I go away with good news."

"I come with good news," called Angela buoyantly, and swept into the hospital room in an ecstasy of jubilation. "But Melissa thinks you might be angry."

"She's found a new fellow."

"No, not yet."

"She's gone back to the old one."

"There's no chance of that. She's late."

"For what?"

"With her period. She thinks she's pregnant."

Defiantly, Melissa said she wanted the child, and the time left to have a child was not unlimited for either one of them.

"But how can it be?" complained Yossarian, at this end to his Rhine Journey. "You said you had your tubes tied."

"You said you had a vasectomy."

"I was kidding when I said that."

"I didn't know. So I was kidding too."

"Ahem, ahem, excuse me," said Winkler, when he could endure no more. "We have business to finish. Yossarian, I owe everything to you. How much money will you want?"

"For what?"

"For setting up that meeting. I am in your debt. Name what you want."

"I don't want any of it."

"That sounds fair."

29 Mr. Tilyou

Securely ensconced in his afterlife in a world of his own, Mr. George C. Tilyou, dead now just about eighty years, took pleasure in contemplating his possessions and watching the time go by, because time didn't. Purely for adornment, he wore in his waistcoat a gold watch on a gold chain with a snaggletooth pendant of green bloodstone, but it remained unwound.

There were intervals between occurrences, naturally, but no point in measuring them. The rides on both roller-coasters, his Dragon's Gorge and Tornado, and on his Steeplechase Horses, all governed by the constants of gravity and friction, never varied noticeably from beginning to end, and neither did the water journey by boat through his Tunnel of Love. He could, of course, alter the duration on his El Dorado carousel and enlarge or decrease the circlings on the Whip, Caterpillar, Whirlpool, and Pretzel. There was no added cost. Here nothing went to waste. The iron wouldn't rust, paint didn't peel. There was no dust or refuse anywhere. His wing-collared shirt was always clean. His yellow house looked as fresh as the day fifty years before on which he had finally brought it down. Wood did not warp or rot, windows did not stick, glass did not break, plumbing would not even drip. His boats did not leak. It was not that time stood still. There was no time. Mr. Tilyou exulted in the permanence, the eternal stability. Here was a place where the people would not grow older. There would always be new ones, and their number would never grow less. It was a concessionaire's dream.

Once he had back his house, there was nothing on earth he wanted that he did not have. He kept abreast of conditions outside through the felicitous fellowship of General Leslie Groves, who came by periodically to chat and make enjoyable use of the amusements offered, arriving at his railroad siding in his private train. General Groves brought newspapers and weekly newsmagazines that simply vanished into thin air, like all other trash, after Mr. Tilyou had finished skimming only those rare stories peculiar enough to merit his perusal. Punctually too, every three months to the day, a Mr. Gaffney, a pleasant acquaintance of a different order who worked as a private investigator, dropped in from above to find out all he could about anything new. Mr. Tilyou did not tell him everything. Mr. Gaffney was remarkable for his civility and dress, and Mr. Tilyou looked forward ro his alighting there for good. Sometimes General Groves arrived with a guest he thought fitting for Mr. Tilyou to know beforehand. Mr. Tilyou had men and women in abundance and no express need for ministers, and he felt far from slighted upon hearing that the chaplain General Groves had spoken of had declined to be introduced to him. In the larger den in one of the two railroad coaches encompassing the elegant living quarters of General Groves, Mr. Tilyou could entertain himself in singular fashion by peering at the glass pane in any of the windows and, once acquainted with the controls, looking out at just about any place in the world. Usually, he wanted only New York City, and mostly those parts of Brooklyn he thought of as his stamping grounds and his burial ground: the carnival area of Coney Island, and Green-Wood Cemetery in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, in which, in 1914, he had been laid, temporarily, he could now complacently certify, to rest.

The site on which his house had stood remained a vacant space, a parking lot for visitors in high season who now had automobiles. Where his spangled wonderland had flourished famously now functioned objects of lesser reputation. Nowhere he looked was there any new thing under the sun he envied. His gilded age had passed. He saw decline and corrosion at the end of an era. If Paris was France, as he'd been wont to repeat, Coney Island in summer certainly was no longer the world, and he congratulated himself on having gotten out in time.

He could play with the color of things in the windows of General Groves's railroad car, could see the sun go black and the moon turn to blood. The modern skylines of large metropolises did not appeal to his sense of the appropriate and proportionate. He beheld soaring buildings and gigantic commercial enterprises that were not owned by anybody, and this impressed him with a negative dismay. People bought shares of stock which they might not ever see, and these shares had not one thing to do with ownership or control. He himself, as a matter of scale and responsible moral behavior, had always put effort and capital into only such projects as would in entirety be his, and to own only such things as he could see and watch and wish personally to make use of with a satisfaction and pleasure enjoyed by others.

He was better off now than poor Mr. Rockefeller and autocratic Mr. Morgan, who had put their wealth in bequests and their faith in a sympathetic Supreme Being overseeing a mannerly universe, and now lived to regret it.

Mr. Tilyou could have told them, he did indeed keep telling them.

Mr. Tilyou always kept at hand a shiny new dime to give to Mr. Rockefeller, who, though there were no days, came begging almost daily in his repentant struggle to collect back all those shiny new dimes he had handed away in a misguided effort to buy public affection, which he now understood he never had needed.

Mr. Morgan, gimlet-eyed and eternally furious, was firmly convinced that a mistake had been made of which he was the diabolical and undeserving victim. Like clockwork, although there were no working clocks, he demanded to be told if the mandates correcting his situation had come down from on high yet. He was not used to being treated that way, he crossly reminded with sullen astonishment and obstinate stupidity when told they had not. He had no doubt he belonged in heaven. He had gone to the Devil and to Satan too.

"Could God possibly make a mistake?" Mr. Tilyou was finally compelled to point out.

Although there were no weeks, almost a full one passed before Mr. Morgan could answer.

"If God can do anything, he can make a mistake."

Mr. Morgan seethed openly too over his unlit cigar, for Mr. Tilyou would no longer permit anyone to smoke. Mr. Morgan owned a deck of playing cards that he would not share, and although there were no hours, he spent a great many of them alone playing solitaire on one of the gondolas on the sparkling El Dorado carousel created originally for Emperor William II of Germany. One of the more flamboyant chariots on that wheel of fortune that never went anywhere was still embellished pompously with the imperial crest. With the emperor aboard, the carousel always played Wagner.

Mr. Tilyou had warmer sentiments for two airmen from the Second World War, one of them Kid Sampson by name, the other McWatt-sailors and soldiers on leave had always been prevalent in Coney Island and welcome at Steeplechase. Mr. Tilyou always was gladdened by any new arrival from the old Coney Island, like the big newcomer Lewis Rabinowitz, who learned his way around in record time and recognized the George C. Tilyou name.

Mr. Tilyou enjoyed the company of good-natured souls like these, and he joined them frequently on their speedy plunges on the Tornado and the Dragon's Gorge. For relaxation, and in persistent inspection, he cruised back often into his Tunnel of Love, flowing into darkness beneath the lurid billboard images of the Lindbergh kidnapper in the electric chair and Marilyn Monroe dead on her bed, into his wax museum on the Isle of the Dead, to find his future by floating into the past. He had no visceral aversions, none at all, about taking his place alongside Abraham Lincoln and the Angel of Death, where he was likely to find himself in front of a New York City mayor named Fiorello H. La Guardia and the earlier president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mortals from the past who lay ahead in his future. They had come along after his time, as had the Lindbergh kidnapper and Marilyn Monroe. Mr. Tilyou could not yet bring himself to say that the man now in the White House was another little prick, but that was only because neither he nor the Devil used bad language.

Mr. Tilyou had room to grow. Below him was a lake of ice and a desert of burning sand, some meadows of mud, a river of boiling blood, and another of boiling pitch. There were dark woods he could have if he could think what to do with them, with trees with black leaves, and some leopards, a lion, a dog with three heads, and a she-wolf, but these were never to be caged, which ruled out a zoo. But his imagination was not as supple as formerly; he had fears he might be getting old. He had triumphed with symbols, was used to illusions. His Steeplechase ride was not really a steeplechase, his park was not a park. His gifts were in collaborative pretense. His product was pleasure. His Tornado was not a tornado, his Dragon's Gorge was not a gorge. No one thought they were, and he could not imagine what he would have done with a true tornado or a genuine gorge and a real dragon. He was not positive he could hit upon sources of hilarity in a desert with burning sand, a rain of fire, or a river of boiling blood.

The recapture of his house filled him still with pride in his patient tenacity. It had taken thirty years, but where there is no time, one always has plenty.

The house was of yellow wood, with three floors and gabled attic. No one seemed to comment when, shortly after his death, the lowest floor had disappeared and the house of three stories had become a house with two. Neighborhood pedestrians did sometimes remark that the letters on the front of the lowest step appeared to be sinking, as indeed they were. By the time of the war, the name was almost half gone. During the war, young men went into military service, families moved, and Mr. Tilyou spied again his chance to act. Soon after the war, no one found curious the empty space, soon a parking lot, that was where the house had been. When shortly afterward his Steeplechase amusement park disappeared too, and then the Tilyou movie theater closed, his name was gone from the island and out of mind.

Now, in possession of everything he wanted and safe at home, he was the envy of his Morgans and Rockefellers. His engaging magic mirrors never had any deforming effect upon him or his ticket takers.

Returning to his office after work near the end of a day, although there were no days and he had no work, he found Mr. Rockefeller. He gave him another dime and chased him off. It was hard to associate the poor figure even remotely with that complex of business buildings in Rockefeller Center and with that oval pearl of an ice-skating rink. He saw from an imperious note on his rolltop desk that Mr. Morgan would be back to have it out with him once more over Mr. Tilyou's new no-smoking policy. Rather than face him again so soon, Mr. Tilyou took back his dust-free bowler from the peg on his coatrack. He fluffed up the petals of the flower in his lapel, which was always fresh and always would be. With energetic gait, he hurried from the office to his home, humming quietly the delightful Siegfried Funeral Music that resonated from his carousel.

Bounding up his stoop of three steps, he stumbled very slightly on the top one, and this had not happened to him before. On the shelf above the pair of sinks at his kitchen window, he spied something strange. The Waterford crystal vase with the white lilies looked perfectly normal, but, mysteriously, the water inside seemed to lie on an angle. In a minute he found a carpenter's level and set it down on the sill of the window. He shivered with a chilling surprise. The house was out of plumb. He strode back outside with wonder, his brow furrowing. At the stoop with the vertical face bearing his name, he had no need for the carpenter's level to tell him the steps were awry, as was his walkway. The right side was dipping. The baseline of the letters spelling TILYOU was tilting downward and the oval bottoms of the letters at the end were already out of sight. He went rigid with alarm. Without his knowledge or intent, his house was beginning to sink again. He had no idea why.