Joseph Heller - Closing Time

"If you move a muscle, I'll break your back," I said in his ear. He did not move a muscle.

When I saw how careful the cops were in searching him I kept shaking my head with what should have been fear. They combed through his scalp with their fingers for a blade or some kind of pick. They pinched through his collar and pockets and through all of the seams of his shirt and his pants, feeling him everywhere from top to bottom for a gun or a knife or anything small and sharp. I realized I could have been killed. Only when they got down inside his sneaker tops and finished did they all relax.

"You were very lucky, sir," said the young cop in charge, who was the oldest one there.

People kept smiling at me and I kept smiling back. I felt like a hero.

"Okay, Lew, your show is over," Claire said to me dryly, as I could have bet she was going to. "Let's get inside now for the real show."

"One minute more, Claire," I answered her loudly and swaggered. "There's that nice-looking blonde girl over there who I think might like to get to know me better."

"Lew, will you come inside already, for God sakes," she said, "or do I go in without you?"

We walked in laughing. Just two weeks later my symptoms returned, and I was back in the hospital for chemotherapy.

Outside the hospital it was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. Interior decorators were culture heroes, and fashion designers were the social superiors of their clientele.

"And why wouldn't they be?" Frances Beach had already replied to this observation of Yossarian's, exercising an enunciation so nearly perfect that others often pondered how anyone could pronounce English so flawlessly and escape sounding adenoidal. "Have you forgotten what we look like naked?"

"If a man said that, John," said Patrick Beach, her husband, pleased with her once more, "he'd be flayed alive."

"Men do say that, darling," said Frances Beach, "at their spring and fall collections, and make billions dressing us."

There were still plenty of poor people.

Yossarian looked askance at a bunch sprawled on the sidewalk outside the hospital as he strode out to the curb and the stretch limousine with black windows waiting there to transport him to the luxury high-rise apartment building across town in which he now made his home. He had reserved a sedan; they had sent the limousine again; there would be no additional charge. The high-rise apartment house he lived in was called a luxury building because the costs of living in it were large. The rooms were small. The ceilings were low, there were no windows in his two bathrooms, and no space in the kitchen area for a table or a chair.

Less than ten blocks from this home was the bus terminal of the Port of New York Authority, a structure stacked with landings seven stories high. On ground level was a police desk with three principal holding cells continuously in use, which overflowed with new prisoners several times each day, and into which, a year earlier, Michael Yossarian had been hauled upon emerging from a subway exit and attempting to step back in after realizing he had got off too soon on his way downtown to the architectural firm for which he was doing drawings.

"That was the day," he still recalled, "you saved my life and broke my spirit."

"Did you want to be locked up with all those others?"

"I would have died if that happened. But it wasn't easy, seeing you blow up and bamboozle all those cops and get away with it. And knowing I could never do the same."

"We get angry the way we have to, Michael. I don't think I had much choice."

"I get depressed."

"You had an older brother who bullied you. Maybe that's the difference."

"Why didn't you stop him?"

"We didn't know how. We didn't want to bully him."

Michael responded with a token snicker. "You were really something to watch, weren't you?" he accused with envy. "You had a small crowd. There was even clapping."

Afterward they were both devitalized.

People lived in the bus terminal now, a resident population of men and women and wayward boys and girls, most of them sleeping at night in the darker depths and emerging like commuters for much of each day to conduct in the open what normal business affairs were theirs to attend to.

There was hot and cold running water in the lavatories on the different levels, along with an abundance of whores and homosexuals for every appetite, and plentiful shops close at hand for such basic daily necessities as chewing gum, cigarettes, newspapers, and jelly doughnuts. Toilet tissue was free. Fertile mothers in flight from idealized hometowns arrived regularly with small children and took up lodgings. The terminal was a good home base for streetwalkers, beggars, and young runaways. Thousands of business commuters, along with hundreds of visitors, tried paying them little mind as they passed through each morning on their way to employment and back to their homes at the conclusion of the working day. None were rich, for no one who was rich would travel to work by bus.

From the lofty picture windows in his high-rise apartment, Yossarian commanded an unobstructed view of another luxury apartment building with an even higher rise than his own. Between these structures ran the broad thoroughfare below, which teemed more and more monstrously now with growling clans of bellicose and repulsive panhandlers, prostitutes, addicts, dealers, pimps, robbers, pornographers, perverts, and disoriented psychopaths, all of them plying their criminal specialties outdoors amid multiplying strands of degraded and bedraggled people who now were actually living outdoors. Among the homeless were whites now too, and they also pissed against the walls and defecated in the alleyways that others in their circle eventually located as accommodating sites to bed down in.

Even in the better neighborhood of Park Avenue, he knew, women could be seen squatting to relieve themselves in the tended flower beds of the traffic islands in the center.

It was hard not to hate them all.

And this was New York, the Big Apple, the Empire City in the Empire State, the financial heart, brains, and sinews of the country, and the city that was greatest, barring London perhaps, in cultural doings in the whole world.

Nowhere in his lifetime, Yossarian was bound often to remember, not in wartime Rome or Pianosa or even in blasted Naples or Sicily, had he been spectator to such atrocious squalor as he saw mounting up all around him now into an eminent domain of decay. Not even-he had added in his cynicism more than once to Frances Beach, his lady friend from far back-at the sexless fund-raising luncheons and black-tie evening events he attended more times than he wanted to as the only presentable official of M amp; M Enterprises amp; Associates, an eligible male and a person who could chat with some fluency about something other than business matters to well-informed others who imagined egoistically that they were affecting world events by talking about them.

It was nobody's fault, of course.

"My God, what's that?" cried Frances Beach, as the two rode back in her rented limousine with her rented chauffeur from still another tepid tea-and-wine party for those trustees and friends of the trustees of the New York Public Library who were still in town and had concluded, after long bouts with indecision, that they did want to go there.

"The bus terminal," said Yossarian.

"It's awful, isn't it? What the devil is it for?"

"Buses. What the devil did you think it was for? You know, Frances," Yossarian taunted kindly, "you might consider sponsoring your next fashion show in there, or one of your glittering charity balls. I know McBride."

"What are you talking about? Who's McBride?"

"An ex-cop who works there now. Why not a wedding," he went on, "a really big one? That would really make the news. You've had them-"