Closing Time (46 page)

"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
tr�s
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
G�tterd�mmerung
, 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."