Closing Time (2 page)

From our apartment we could always hear from the ocean the breaking of waves and the gong from the bell buoy (we called it the "bellboy," and that still sounds right to me). At times of unusual quiet in the early or late afternoon, we could even hear very slightly the indistinct, ghostlike music of our closest merry-go-round, the exotic calliope of the tremendous carousel on the boardwalk with its turning ring of steeds of gold the color of caramels and painted strokes of shiny black and showy tints of blue and pink of other candies, like jelly beans, licorice, and gum-drops-where did those magnificent gliding horses come from? was there a corporation somewhere that manufactured just horses for carousels? was there big money in that?-almost half a mile away. No one was rich.

2

The Little Prick

The new President was coming into office legally with the resignation of his predecessor in a vexation of spiritual fatigue resulting from the need to explain continually why he had chosen such a person as his vice presidential running mate to begin with.

"Why did you pick him?" his closest friend, the secretary of state, felt compelled to keep inquiring. "Tell at least me. Your secret is safe."

"There was no secret!" the nation's chief executive responded pleadingly in his own defense. "There was nothing underhanded, no sneaky reason. I was simply exercising my best judgment. I give you my word, there was no criminal intent."

"That's what's so terrifying."

3

Mr. Yossarian

In the middle of his second week in the hospital, Yossarian dreamed of his mother, and he knew again that he was going to die. The doctors were upset when he gave them the news.

"We can't find anything wrong," they told him.

"Keep looking," he instructed.

"You're in perfect health."

"Just wait," he advised.

Yossarian was back in the hospital for observation, having retreated there once more beneath another neurotic barrage of confusing physical symptoms to which he had become increasingly susceptible since finding himself dwelling alone again for just the second time in his life, and which seemed, one by one, to dissipate like vapor as soon as he described or was tested for each. Just a few months before, he had cured himself of an incurable case of sciatica merely by telephoning one of his physicians to complain of his incurable case of sciatica. He could not learn to live alone. He could not make a bed. He would sooner starve than cook.

This time he had gone bolting back in, so to speak, with a morbid vision of a different morbid vision shortly after hearing that the President, whom he did not like, was going to resign and that the Vice President, whom he did not like even more, would certainly succeed him; and shortly after finding out, inadvertently, that Milo Minderbinder, with whom he too now had been unavoidably and inescapably linked for something like twenty-five years, was expanding beyond surplus stale commodities like old chocolate and vintage Egyptian cotton into military equipment, with plans for a warplane of his own that he intended to sell to thd government: to any government, of course, that could afford to buy.

There were countries in Europe that could afford to buy, and in Asia and the Mideast too.

The vision of the morbid vision he had experienced was of a seizure or a stroke and had set him reminiscing again about durable old Gustav Aschenbach alone on his mythical strand of Mediterranean beach and his immortal death in Venice, worn out at fifty in a city with a plague nobody wished to talk about. In Naples far back, when assembled in line for the troopship sailing him home after he'd flown seventy missions and survived, he'd found himself behind an older soldier named Schweik and a man born Krautheimer who had changed his name to Joseph Kaye to blend more securely into his culture, and his name, like Schweik's, had meant not much to him then.

Given a choice, Yossarian still preferred to live. He ate no eggs and, though he had no headache, swallowed his baby aspirin every other day.

He had no doubt he had lots to worry about. His parents were dead, and so were all his uncles and aunts.

A prick in the White House? It would not be the first time. Another oil tanker had broken up. There was radiation. Garbage. Pesticides, toxic waste, and free enterprise. There were enemies of abortion who wished to inflict the death penalty on everyone who was not pro-life. There was mediocrity in government, and self-interest too. There was trouble in Israel. These were not mere delusions. He was not making them up. Soon they would be cloning human embryos for sale, fun, and replacement parts. Men earned millions producing nothing more substantial than changes in ownership. The cold war was over and there was still no peace on earth. Nothing made sense and neither did everything else. People did things without knowing why and then tried to find out.

When bored in his hospital room, Yossarian played with such high-minded thoughts like a daydreaming youth with his genitals.

At least once each weekday morning they came barging in around him, his doctor, Leon Shumacher, and his brisk and serious entourage of burgeoning young physicians, accompanied by the lively, attractive floor nurse with the pretty face and the magnificent ass who was openly drawn to Yossarian, despite his years, and whom he was slyly enticing to develop a benign crush on him, despite her youthfulness. She was a tall woman with impressive hips who remembered Pearl Bailey but not Pearl Harbor, which put her age somewhere between thirty-five and sixty, the very best stage, Yossarian believed, for a woman, provided, of course, she still had her health. Yossarian possessed but a hazy idea of what she really was like; yet he unscrupulously exploited every chance to help pass the time enjoyably with her for the several peaceful weeks he was resolved to remain in the hospital to rest up and put his outlook together while the great nations of the world restabilized themselves into another new world order for good ana forever once more.

He'd brought his radio and almost always had some Bach or very good chamber, piano, or other choral music on one FM station or another. There were too many disruptions for abiding attention to opera, especially Wagner. It was a good room this time, he was pleased to conclude, with unobjectionable neighbors who were not offensively ill, and it was the attractive floor nurse, in response to his baiting, modestly laughing and with a flounce and a flush of hauteur, who made the defiant boast that the ass she had was magnificent.

Yossarian could see no reason to disagree.

By the middle of the first week he was flirting with her with all his might. Dr. Leon Shumacher did not always look kindly upon this salacious frivolity.

"It's bad enough I let you in here. I suppose we both ought to feel ashamed, you in this room when you aren't sick-"

"Who says I'm not?"

"-and so many people outside on the streets."

"Will you let one in here if I agree to leave?"

"Will you pay the bills?"

Yossarian preferred not to.

A great man with angiograms had confirmed to him soberly that he did not need one, a neurologist reported with equal gloom that there was nothing the matter with his brain. Leon Shumacher again was displaying him pridefully as a rare specimen his pupils would not have opportunity to come upon often in their medical practice, a man of sixty-eight without symptoms of any disease, not even hypochondria.

Late afternoons or sometimes early in the evening, Leon would drop by just to chat awhile in singsong sorrow about his long hours, ghoulish working conditions, and unjustly low earnings in tactless, egocentric fashion to a man they both knew was soon going to die.

He was not considerate.

The name of this nurse was Melissa MacIntosh, and, like all good women to a sophisticated man with a predilection to romanticize, she seemed too good to be true.

By the beginning of his second week she was allowing him to caress with his fingertips the border of lace at the bottom of her slip when she stood or sat beside his bed or chair while she hung around and talked and flirted back by allowing him to advance in his flirting. Pink with discomfort and enlivened by mischief, she neither consented nor prohibited when he toyed with her filmy undergarment, but she was not at ease. She was in terror someone would surprise them in this impermissible intimacy. He was praying somebody would. He concealed from Nurse MacIntosh all the subtle signals of his budding erections. He did not want her to get the idea that his intentions were serious. She was lucky to have him, she agreed when he said so. He was less trouble than the other men and women in the private and semiprivate rooms on the same floor. And he was more intriguing to her, he saw-and therefore more seductive, he understood, and maybe she did not -than all of the few men she was seeing outside the hospital and even the one or two men she had been seeing exclusively, almost exclusively, for a number of years. She had never been married, not even once or twice. Yossarian was so little trouble that he was no trouble at all, and she and the other floor nurses had little more to do for him than look into his room each shift just to make certain he wasn't dead yet and needed nothing done to keep him alive.

"Is everything all right?" each one would inquire.

"Everything but my health," he sighed in response.

"You're in perfect health."

That was the trouble, he took the trouble to explain. It meant he had to get worse.

"It's no joke," he joked when they laughed.

She wore a black slip in one day after he'd begged her to switch, affecting aesthetic longing. Often when he wanted her there he found himself in dire need of something to need. When he pressed his call signal, another nurse might respond.

"Send in my Melissa," he would command.

The others would cooperate. He suffered no nursing shortage. He was in good health, the doctors restated daily, and this time, he was concluding in morose disappointment, with the sense he was being cheated, they appeared to be right.

His appetite and digestion were good. His auditory and spinal apparatus had been CAT-scanned. His sinuses were clear and there was no evidence anywhere of arthritis, bursitis, angina, or neuritis. He was even without a postnasal drip. His blood pressure was the envy of every doctor who saw him. He gave urine and they took it. His cholesterol was low, his hemoglobin was high, his sedimentation rate was a thing of beauty, and his blood nitrogen was ideal. They pronounced him a perfect human being. He thought his first wife and his second, from whom he had now been separated a year, might have some demurrers.

There was a champion cardiologist who found no fault with him, a pathologist for his pathos, who found no cause for concern either, an enterprising gastroenterologist who ran back to the room for a second opinion from Yossarian on some creative investment strategies he was considering in Arizona real estaie, and a psychologist for his psyche, in whom Yossarian was left in the last resort to confide.

"And what about these periodic periods of anomie and fatigue and disinterest and depression?" Yossarian rushed on in a whirlwind of whispers. "I find myself detached from listening to things that other people take seriously. I'm tired of information I can't use. I wish the daily newspapers were smaller and came out weekly. I'm not interested anymore in all that's going on in the world. Comedians don't make me laugh and long stories drive me wild. Is it me or old age? Or is the planet really turning irrelevant? TV news is degenerate. Everyone everywhere is glib. My enthusiasms are exhausted. Do I really feel this healthy now or am I just imagining I do? I even have this full head of hair. Doc, I've got to have the truth. Is my depression mental?"

"It isn't depression and you're not exhausted."

In due course, the psychologist conferred with the chief of psychiatry, who consulted with all the other medical men, ard they concluded with one voice that there was nothing psychosomatic about the excellent health he was enjoying and that the hair on his head was genuine too.

"Although," added the chief psychiatrist, with a clearing of throat, "I am honor bound to flag you as a very good candidate for late-life depression."

"Late-life depression?" Yossarian savored the term. "About when would that be?"

"About now. What do you do that you really enjoy?"

"Not much, I'm afraid. I run after women, but not too hard. I make more money than I need."

"Do you enjoy that?"

"No. I've got no ambition, and there's not much left I want to get done."

"No golf, bridge, tennis? Art or antique collecting?"

"That's all out of the question."

"The prognosis is not good."

"I've always known that."

"The way it looks to us now, Mr. Yossarian," said the chief medical director, speaking for the whole institution, with Leon Shumacher's head, three quarters bald, hanging over his shoulder, "you might live forever."

He had nothing to worry about, it seemed, but inflation and deflation, higher interest rates and lower interest rates, the budget deficit, the threat of war and the dangers of peace, the unfavorable balance of trade and a favorable balance of trade, the new President and the old chaplain, and a stronger dollar and a weaker dollar, along with friction, entropy, radiation, and gravity.

But he worried too about his new pal Nurse Melissa MacIntosh, because she had no money saved. Her parents had none either, and if she lived long enough, she would have to live on only her Social Security benefits and a pittance of a retirement pension from the hospital, provided she continued working there for the next twenty or three hundred years, which seemed out of the question, unless she met and married before then some fine gentleman of means who was as appealing to her then as Yossarian was to her now, which seemed to him entirely out of the question also. Few men could talk dirty to her so charmingly. More than once he contemplated her with a pang: she was too innocent to abandon to the heartless dynamics of financial circumstance, too sweet, unsuspecting, and unselfish.

"What you absolutely must do," he said one day, after she had begged him to advise whether she and her roommate should open individual retirement accounts-Yossarian advised that he could not see what fucking practical use an individual retirement account was going to be in the long run to anybody but the banks soliciting them-"is marry someone like me now, a man with some money saved who knows something about insurance policies and legacies and has been married only one time before."