Closing Time (60 page)

By 4:30 in the morning, the twenty-eight Cosa Nostra carting companies subcontracting through the Washington Cosa Loro with the Commercial Catering division of M & M E & A had removed the rest of the trash, and by 6:00 A.M., when the first of the customary bus travelers appeared, all was back to normal, except for the absence of the hustlers and the homeless, who would remain in forced exile until all was secure.

"That was sly of you," Gaffney said, in praise of Yossarian's little speech.

"I can't believe I said that," Yossarian repented.

"You haven't, yet. Well?" added Gaffney with a wish to know, as they watched on the monitor the crowds in the terminal that had not yet gathered there thinning out sort of wanly and drifting back in pale reflections to the places from which they had not yet come. "Mrs. Maxon seemed satisfied."

"Then her husband will be too. I love all that Wagner music. And I also have to laugh. Do you think the end of
G�tterd�mmerung
is a tactful choice for that occasion?"

"Yes. Would you prefer a requiem?" Gaffney's dark eyes twinkled.

"It's turning black again, that God-damned sun," said Hacker lightly, and laughed. "I can't seem to get it out."

"It can't turn black," snapped Yossarian, annoyed by him once more. "If the sun turned black, the sky would be black too, and you wouldn't be able to see it."

"Yeah?" The young man sniggered. "Take a look."

Yossarian took a look and saw that on the central screens, the sun indeed was black in a sky that was blue, the moon had turned red again, and all of the ships in the harbor and the neighboring waters, the tugs, barges, tankers, freighters, commercial fishing vessels, and different varieties of pleasure craft, were again upside down.

"It's a glitch," said Hacker. "We call it a glitch. I'll have to keep working on it."

"I saw another glitch," said Yossarian.

"You mean the President?"

"He never showed up, did he? I didn't see him."

"We can't get him to come out of his office. Here-look." Yossarian recognized the antechamber of the Oval Office in Washington. "He's supposed to walk out, be driven to the MASSPOB building, and take the new supertrain here. Instead, he keeps going off the other way. He walks into his playroom."

"You'll have to reprogram your model."

Hacker snickered again in affected despair and left the answer to Gaffney.

"We can't reprogram the model, Yo-Yo. It's the model. You'll have to reprogram the presidency."

"Me?"

"In fact, he's in there right now," said Hacker. "What the hell's he got in that playroom anyway?"

"Ask Yossarian," said Gaffney. "He's been there."

"He has a video game," said Yossarian. "It's called
Triage
."

BOOK TWELVE

33

Entr'acte

Milo lost interest quickly, flew off on business, and was out of the terminal when the alarm went off, not safely underneath it with Yossarian.

"Where is Mr. Minderbinder?" McBride was asking, as Yossarian came through alone to the landing on which he stood with Gaffney.

"Off to get more skyscrapers in Rockefeller Center," Yossarian reported with derision. "Or build his own. He wants them all." Someday, Yossarian thought as they descended the wrought-iron staircase, those monstrous hounds stirring now might really be there; and what a final tricky surprise
that
would be! They had found all the elevators, McBride told him, exulting. Michael and his girlfriend Marlene had wearied with waiting and had gone far down below with Bob and Raul. McBride had something else to show Yossarian.

"How far is far down?" asked Yossarian, humorously.

McBride tittered nervously, and, shiftily, answered over his shoulder. "Seven miles!"

"Seven miles?"

Gaffney was amused by these yelps of astonishment.

And those were
some
elevators, McBride went on. A mile a minute going up, a hundred miles an hour going down. "And they've got escalators too, going all the way. They say they go down forty-two miles!"

"Gaffney?" asked Yossarian, and Gaffney nodded slowly "Gaffney, Milo's unhappy," Yossarian let him know, in a jocular vein. "I suppose you know."

"Milo's always unhappy."

"He fears."

"And what does he fear today? He's got the contract."

"He fears he did not ask enough and is not getting as much for the Shhhhh! as Strangelove is getting for his plane. And they won't even work."

Halting on the staircase so abruptly that the two men collided, Gaffney, to Yossarian's total astonishment, regarded Yossarian with a lapse in his aplomb.

"They won't? What makes you say that?"

"They will?"

Gaffney relaxed. "They do, Yo-Yo. For a second I thought you knew something I didn't. They're working already."

"They can't be. They won't. They gave me their word."

"They break their word."

"They made me a promise."

"They break their promises."

"I have a guarantee."

"It's no good."

"I have it in writing."

"Stick it in your Freedom of Information file."

"I don't understand. They've beaten Strangelove?"

Gaffney gave his silent laugh. "Yossarian, my friend, they
are
Strangelove. They've blended, of course. Except for the difference in names and companies, aren't they the same? They've had planes going for years."

"Why didn't you ever say so?"

"To whom? Nobody asked."

"You could have told me."

"You didn't ask. Often it's to my advantage to keep things to myself. Sometimes knowledge is power. Some say the ultimate weapon will be good for my business, some say it won't. That's why I'm down here today. To find out."

"What business?"

"Real estate, of course."

"Real estate!" scoffed Yossarian.

"You refuse to believe me," said Gaffney, smiling, "and yet you think you want the truth."

"The truth will make us free, won't it?"

"It doesn't," answered Gaffney. "And it won't. It never has." He pointed down to McBride. "Let's go, Yo-Yo. He has another truth to show you. Recognize that music?"

Ybssarian was almost sure he was hearing the Leverkühn passages again on the speaker system, from the work that had never been written, in a mellow version for orchestra, played rubato, legato, vibrato, tremolo, glissando, and ritardando, sweetly disguised for popular absorption, with no quavering, jolting hint of fearful climax.

"Gaffney, you're wrong about that Leverkühn, you know. It's from the
Apocalypse
."

"I know that now. I looked it up and saw I was mistaken. I can't tell you how it embarrasses me to say so. But I bet I do know what you're going to ask me next."

"Notice anything?" asked Yossarian anyway.

"Of course," said Gaffney. "We cast no shadows down here, our feet make no noise. Do
you
notice anything?" Gaffney asked, as they joined McBride. He was not referring to the guard in the archway on a chair at the elevator. "Do you?"

It was Kilroy.

He was gone.

The words on his plaque had been effaced.

Kilroy was dead, McBride revealed. "I felt I should tell you."

"I had a feeling he was," said Yossarian. "There are people my age who'll be sorry to hear that. Vietnam?"

"Oh, no, no," McBride answered with surprise. "It was cancer. Of the prostate, the bone, the lungs, and the brain. They have it down as a natural death."

"A natural death," repeated Yossarian in lament.

"It could be worse," said Gaffney, sympathizing. "At least Yossarian is alive."

"Sure," said McBride, like a hearty fellow. "Yossarian still lives."

"Yossarian lives?" repeated Yossarian.

"Sure, Yossarian lives," said McBride. "Maybe we can put that one up on the wall instead."

"Sure, and for how long?" Yossarian answered, and the alarm went off.

McBride gave an immediate start. "Hey, what the hell is that?" He looked frightened. "Isn't that the alert?"

Gaffney was nodding. "I think so too."

"You guys wait here!" McBride was already running toward the guard. "I'll go find out."

"Gaffney?" asked Yossarian, quivering.

"I don't know down here," Gaffney answered grimly. "It may be the war, triage time."

"Shouldn't we get the hell out? Let's jump outside." "Don't go crazy, Yossarian. We're much safer here."

BOOK THIRTEEN

34

Finale

When he heard the alarm go off and saw the colored lamps on the mechanism blinking, the President was pleased with himself for having set something in motion and sat back beaming with self-satisfaction until it dawned on him that he did not know how to stop what he had started. He pressed one button after another to no avail. As he was about to call for help, help came crashing in: Noodles Cook, the stout man from the State Department whose name never came readily to mind, his slim aide from the National Security Council, Skinny, and that general from the air force newly promoted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"What happened?" screamed General Bingam, with a horror-stricken countenance inflamed with confusion.

"It works," said the President, with a grin. "You see? Just like the game here."

"Who's attacking us?"

"When did it begin?"

"Is someone attacking us?" asked the President.

"You launched all our missiles!"

"You sent out our planes!"

"I did? Where?"

"Everywhere! With that red button you kept pressing."

"This one? I didn't know that."

"Don't touch it again!"

"How was I supposed to know? Call them all back. Say I'm sorry. I didn't do it on purpose."

"We can't call back the missiles."

"We can call back the bombers."

"We can't call back the bombers! Suppose someone retaliates? we have to take them out first."

"I didn't know that." "And we'll have to send out our second-strike bombers too, in case they want to hit back after our first."

"Come on, sir. We have to hurry."

"Where to?"

"Underground. To the shelters. Triage-don't you remember?"

"Sure. I was playing that one before I switched to this one."

"Damn it, sir! What the hell are you smiling about?"

"There's nothing fucking funny about this!"

"How was I supposed to know?"

"Let's move! We are the ones who have to survive."

"Can I get my wife? My children?"

"You stay here too!"

They charged out like a mob and piled into the cylindrical escape elevator awaiting them. Fat was tripped by C. Porter Lovejoy, arriving desperately to get into the elevator too, and fell down inside, with Lovejoy clinging to his back like a crazed monkey in a clawing fury.

Removing from her dark hair hot rollers of fair blue that closely matched the color of her eyes and applying lipstick and other cosmetics as though for an evening out-she had reason to wish to look her best-nurse Melissa MacIntosh made up her mind again to try to make up her own mind at lunch with John Yossarian in the disagreement over whether to keep her appointment with the obstetrician to preserve her pregnancy or the one with her gynecologist to take steps to terminate it. She had no clue of anything dire happening elsewhere.

She understood his unwillingness to marry again so soon. She helped herself to another chocolate from the one-pound box so close at hand. The candy had come as a gift from the Belgian patient and his wife the day he left the hospital, alive, after nearly two years. She was relieved the Belgians were flying back to Europe, for she had a propensity for empathetic attachments and wanted her mind free to cope with this predicament of her own.

Yossarian could give very sound reasons against fatherhood again for him now.

They made no impression. He was better and quicker in argument, and therefore, to her mind, trickier. She could admit to herself, and to her apartment mate, Angela, that she did not always think things through clearly and was not unfailingly much good at looking ahead.

However, she would not see that as a weakness.

She had something Yossarian did not: confidence, a belief that everything must turn out all right in the end for people like herself, who were good. Even Angela now, since Peter's stroke, wearying of pornography and work, putting on fat and concerned about AIDS, was talking with longing of returning to Australia, where she still had friends and family, and a favorite aunt in a nursing home, whom she hoped to start visiting. If Angela had to start thinking about condoms now, she would just as soon give up sex and get married.

Yossarian made much of that matter of years and had almost neatly tricked her again-she congratulated herself on having thwarted him-just two evenings before.

"I'm just not afraid of anything like that," she let him know defiantly, with her backbone stiffened. "We would get along without you, if we had to."

"No, no," he corrected, almost maliciously. "Suppose
you
are the one who dies soon!"

She refused to consider talking further about that. That picture of her infant daughter with only a father past seventy was too complex a tangle for her to seek to unravel.

She knew she was right.

She had no doubt Yossarian would be adequate with financial help, even if she persisted despite him and they no longer continued as a couple. She knew in her gut she could trust him for that much. It was true he was less frequently fervidly amorous with her than he had been in the earliest stages. He no longer teased about shopping together for lingerie, and he had not yet taken her to Paris or Florence or Munich to buy any. He sent roses now only on birthdays. But she was less amorous too, she reflected now with some contrite misgivings, and occasionally had to remind herself, cerebrally, to strive more lasciviously to achieve the feats of gratifying sensuality that had sprung more normally between them in the beginning. She acknowledged, when Angela asked, that he never seemed jealous anymore and no longer showed interest in her sexual past. He rarely even wanted to take her to the movies. He had already mentioned with no anger and small discontent that, even into the present, he had never found himself with a woman who over a continuous liaison desired to make love as often as he did. She searched back to discern if this had been true with other men who had been her friends. For that matter, he was not working as hard as before to please her either and was not much concerned when he saw he'd failed to.