Closing Time (31 page)

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

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

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

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

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

"Ficky-fick," Pinkard answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18

Dante

"In what language?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Than hell?" Michael shook his head.

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

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

"You're smart."

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

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

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

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

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

"Ours," corrected Yossarian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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