Closing Time (25 page)

Michael tittered. "How about," he ventured extravagantly, watching his father for the reaction, "enough for another year in law school?"

"If that's what you want," M2 immediately agreed.

"And my living expenses too?"

"Sure."

"He means that also," said Yossarian reassuringly to his incredulous son. "Michael, you won't believe this-I don't really believe it either-but sometimes there is more money in this world than anybody ever thought the planet could hold without sinking away into somewhere else."

"Where does it all come from?"

"Nobody knows," said Yossarian.

"Where does it go when it isn't here?"

"That's another scientific mystery. It just disappears. Like those particles of tritium. Right now there's a lot."

"Are you trying to corrupt me?"

"I think I'm trying to save you."

"Okay, I'll believe you. What do you want me to do?"

"A few loose drawings," said M2. "Can you read engineering blueprints?"

"Let's have a try."

The five blueprints required for an artist's rendering of the external appearance of the plane had already been selected and laid out on a conference table in an adjoining outer inner conference room just outside the rear false front of the second fireproof stand-up vault of thick steel and concrete, with alarm buttons and radioactive dials of tritium.

It took a minute for Michael to assemble coherence in the mechanical drawings of white lines on royal blue, which looked at first like an occult shambles ornamented with scribbled cryptic notations in alphabets that were indecipherable.

"It's kind of ugly, I think." Michael felt stimulated to be at work on something different that was well within his capabilities, "It's starting to look like a flying wing."

"Are there wings that don't fly?" teased Yossarian.

"The wings of a wing collar," Michael answered, without lifting his analytical gaze. "The wings of a theater stage, the wings of a political party."

"You do read, don't you?"

"Sometimes."

"What does a flying wing look like?" M2 was a moist man, and his brow and chin were beaded with shiny droplets.

"Like a plane without a fuselage, Milo. I've got a feeling I've seen this before."

"I hope you haven't. Our plane is new."

"What's this?" Yossarian pointed. In the lower left corner of all five sheets the identifying legends had been masked before copying by a patch of black tape on which was printed a white letter
S
without loops. "I've seen that letter."

"And so has everyone else," Michael answered lightly. "It's the standard stencil. You've seen it on old bomb shelters. But what the hell are these?"

"I meant those too."

To the right of the letter
S
was a trail of minuscule characters that looked like flattened squiggles, and while Yossarian was donning his glasses, Michael peered through a magnifying glass there and found the small letter
h
repeated in script, with an exclamation point too.

"So that," he remarked, still in very good humor, "is what you're going to call your plane, eh? The M & M Shhhhh!"

"You know what we call it." M2 was offended. "It's the M & M E & A Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second Strike Offensive Attack Bomber."

"We'd save time calling it Shhhhh! Tell me again what you want."

M2 talked diffidently. What was wanted were nice-looking pictures of the plane in flight from above, below, and the side, and at least one of the plane on the ground. "They don't have to be accurate. But make them realistic, like the planes in a comic strip or science movie. Leave out details. My father doesn't want them to see any until we get the contract. He doesn't really trust our government anymore. They'd also like a picture of what the plane will really look like in case they ever have to build it."

"Why don't you ask your engineers?" mused Michael.

"We don't really trust our engineers."

"When Ivan the Terrible," reflected Yossarian, "finished building the Kremlin, he had all the architects executed, so that no one alive would ever duplicate it."

"What was so terrible about him?" M2 wondered. "I must tell my father that."

"Leave me alone now," said Michael, rubbing his chin and concentrating. He was slipping off his corduroy jacket, whistling a Mozart melody to himself. "If you close the door, remember I'm locked in and don't forget to get me out one day." To himself, he observed aloud, "It's looking cute."

At the turn into the next century, he was cynically sure, there would be months of senseless ceremonies, tied in with political campaigns too, and the M & M warplane could be an exalted highlight. And no doubt, the first baby born in the new century would be born in the east, but much farther east this time than Eden.

He looked down again at the plans of this weapon for the close of the century and saw a design that seemed to him aesthetically incomplete. Much was lacking in anticipated form, much was missing. And when he looked at the blueprints and into the future in which that plane would fly, he could spy no place staked out anywhere into which he, in the stale words of his father, could fit, in which he could flourish with any more security and satisfaction than he presently enjoyed. He had room for improvement but saw not much chance of any. He remembered Marlene and her astrological charts and tarot cards, and he felt himself missing her again, even though uncertain he had ever cared for her more than any of the others in his sequence of monogamous romances. It was beginning to scare him that he might have no future, that he was already in it; like his father, about whom he'd always harbored mixed feelings, he was already there. He must risk a call to Marlene.

Even his brother Julian was having trouble these days making as much money as he had insolently projected he was destined to make. And his sister too would have to delay her divorce while testing the waters discreetly for a job in private practice with one of the law firms with whose partners she occasionally had contact.

His father would be dead. Papa John had made clear more than once that he did not expect to go deeply into that twenty-first century. For much of his life Michael had confidently presumed his father would always be alive. He felt that way still, although he knew it was untrue. That never happened with real human beings.

And who else would be there for him? There was no one to esteem, no figure to look up to whose merit persisted without blemish for more than fifteen minutes. There were people with power to confer great benefits upon others, like movie directors and the President, but that was all.

The half-million dollars his father had hoped to bequeath him no longer seemed an everlasting fortune. He would not be able to live on the income, though nine tenths of the country lived on less. In time he would have nothing, and no one, have
no one
, his father had underlined, to aid him. His father always had struck him as somewhat peculiar, rationally irrational and illogically logical, and did not always make consistent sense.

"It's easy to win debates as a nihilist," he'd said, "because so many people who ought to know better absurdly take positions."

He spoke slickly of things like Ewing's tumor, Hodgkin's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, TIAs, and osteogenic sarcomas;, and talked freely about his dying with an objectivity so matter-of-fact that Michael had to wonder if he was kidding himself, or faking it. Michael did not always know when he was serious and when he was not, and when he was right and when he was mistaken, and when he was right and wrong at the same time. And Yossarian would profess that he did not always know that about himself either.

"A problem I have," his father had admitted penitently, but with a hint of pride, "is that I'm almost always able to see both sides of almost every question."

And he was almost always too eager to be friendly with one woman or another, obsessed still with the dream to find work that he wished to do and the need to be what he called "in love." Michael had never found work that he wished to do-the law was no worse to him than anything else, and art was no better. He was writing a screenplay but did not want his father to know that yet. But with one thing central, Yossarian seemed right on the button.

"Before you know it, you damned fool," he'd snapped at him irascibly in a tender bad temper, "you'll be as old as I am now, and you won't have a thing."

Not even children, Michael could add ruefully. As far as he could see, that was not in the cards for him either, not in Marlene's tarot cards or any others. Michael again looked down narrowly at the blueprints before him, pulled his pad closer, and took up a pencil. He did not envy people who wished to work much harder to get much more, but had to wonder afresh why he was not like them.

15

M2

"You like Michael, don't you?"

"Yes, I like Michael," said M2.

"Give him work when you can."

"I do that. I will want to work more with him on those video screens at the bus terminal. I'll pay him for another year in law school."

"I'm not sure he'll want that. But go ahead and try."

All the parents he knew with grown children had at least one about whose doubtful prospects they were constantly troubled, and many had two. Milo had this one, and he had Michael.

Irritation mingled with puzzlement as he studied the new messages from Jerry Gaffney of the Gaffney Agency. The first advised him to call his answering machine at home for good news from his nurse and bad news from his son about his first wife. The good news from his nurse was that she was free for dinner that evening to go to a movie with him and that the Belgian patient in the hospital was making a good recovery from the bad dysentery generated by the good antibiotics administered for the bad pneumonia provoked by the salutary removal of a vocal cord in the invasive effort, successful thus far, to save his life. The second fax reported that he had now qualified for the mortgage. Yossarian had no idea what that meant. "How did he even know I was here?" he heard himself thinking out loud.

"Mr. Gaffney knows everything, I think," M2 answered, with faith. "He monitors our fax lines too."

"You pay him for that?"

"Somebody does, I think."

"Who?"

"I've no idea."

"Don't you care?"

"Should I?"

"Can't you find out?"

"I'll have to find out if I can find out."

"I'm surprised you don't want to know."

"Should I want to?"

"M2, Michael calls you Milo. Which name do you prefer?"

Milo's only son turned ill at ease. "I would rather," he said, breathing noisily, "be called Milo, even though that's my father' name. It's my name too, you know. He gave it to me."

"Why haven't you said so?" asked Yossarian, resenting the implication imposed upon him to feel at fault.

"I'm timid, you know. My mother says I'm rabbity. So do my sisters. They keep asking me to change my personality to be strong enough to take over when I have to."

"To be more like your father?"

"They don't think much of my father."

"Who then? Wintergreen?"

"They hate Wintergreen."

"Me?"

"They don't like you either."

"Then who?"

"They can't think of any man who's good enough."

"Let me ask you," said Yossarian, "if you still have your catering company."

"I think we do. It's your company too, you know. Everybody has a share."

The M & M Commercial Catering Company was the oldest continuous catering service in the history of the country, having origins in Milo's labors as a mess officer for his squadron in World War II, wherein he contrived the fruitful and abstruse financial strategies for buying fresh Italian eggs from Sicily in Malta for seven cents apiece and selling them to his mess hall in Pianosa for five cents apiece at a handsome profit that increased the squad-ron's capital supply, in which everybody had a share, he said, and bettered the quality of life and the standard of living of everyone there, and for buying Scotch whisky for Malta at the source in Sicily, eliminating middlemen.

"M2," said Yossarian, and remembered he had forgotten. He had no wish to hurt him. "What will you want me to call you when you're here with your father? Two Milos may prove one too many, maybe two."

"I'll have to find out."

"You really don't know, not even that?"

"I can't decide." M2 was writhing. His hands turned red as he wrung them together. The rims of his eyes reddened too. "I can't make a decision. You remember the last time I tried."

One time far back, just before Yossarian went begging to Milo for help in keeping Michael out of the Vietnam War, a much younger M2 had attempted to make up his mind independently on a subject of transcendent importance. He thought his idea a fine one: to answer the call of what he'd been told was his country and enlist in the army to kill Asian communists in Asia.

"You'll do no such thing!" determined his mother.

"The way to serve your government more," responded his father, in a manner more deliberative, "is to find out who the draft boards are
not
drafting, and then you'll see who's really needed. We'll look into that for you."

The two and a half years M2 spent in divinity school had scarred him for life and instilled in him a traumatic aversion to all things spiritual and a fear and distrust of men and women who did not smoke or drink, swear, wear makeup, walk around anywhere even partly disrobed, did not make sex jokes, smiled an awful lot, even when nothing humorous was said, and smiled when alone, and manifested a shared, beatific faith in a hygienic virtue and self-esteem they thought exclusively their own and which he found malicious and repulsive.

He had never married, and the women he'd kept company with were invariably ladies approximately his own age who dressed plainly in pleated skirts and prim blouses, wore very little makeup daintily, were shy, colorless, and quickly gone.

Make effort as he might, Yossarian could not put to rest the low surmise that M2 belonged to that class of solitary and vindictive men that largely comprised the less boisterous of the two main classes of resolute patrons of prostitutes to be seen in his high-rise apartment building, riding up the elevators for the sex cures in the opulent temple of love on top or downward into the bowels of the structure to the three or four massage parlors of secondary dignity in the sub-basements underlying the several general cinema houses on the first sub-level down from the public sidewalk.