Joseph Heller - Closing Time

As laid out by McBride, all guests could obtain at least a partial view of the bride and her retinue as they rose to the top of the escalators from the Subway Level on the Ninth Avenue side of the terminal and made their dignified way toward Eighth Avenue and eventually into the North Wing. This route of some duration allowed for an unusual program of music to aggrandize the occasion as unique. Yossarian listened with amazement to the first familiar notes.

The opening piece for the matrimonial celebration was the prelude to the opera Die Meistersinger. w: And it was to the first, blaring, jubilant chords of this that Yossarian watched the bride come levitating up into sight, as though over a horizon, at the head of an escalator. The music, which was of adequate span for the long walk, was handclapping perfect in bouncy spirit. The flower girls and ring bearers were especially stimulated by the quickening and changing tempos and came into their own when the "Dance of the Apprentices" was added for the two minutes and six seconds needed for the last in the bridal party to turn into the passageway to the side exit to the North Wing. There, after the bride had completed her turn outside and crossed the street into the North Wing, the music changed to a ceremonious orchestral rendition of the "Prize Song" from that same Wagnerian opera, which ended on a soft, palpitating note when the bride was in the chapel and came at last to a stop where the cardinal, a Reform rabbi, and six other prelates from different faiths stood waiting with the groom and their primary attendants. Here, while the recitations were made, the music diminished to underlying refrains of the Liebesnacht duet from Tristan, while the cardinal tried to ignore that the music was both heavenly and carnal, and the rabbi tried to forget that it was composed by Wagner. In that part of the ceremony, the lucky couple was pronounced man and wife nine times, by the eight clergymen and Noodles Cook, who was still standing in for the overdue President. When they turned from the altar to kiss chastely before moving to the dance floor, the soaring melodies chosen, Hacker announced before they began, were those of the closing measures of Gotterdammerung, with their soulful, soaring strains of the "Redemption Through Love" theme.; "Do you know it?" asked Hacker.

"I know it," said Yossarian, in surprised appreciation, and was tempted to whistle along with the peaceful violins and somnolent brass now rising and softening into so holy a conclusion. "I was about to suggest it."

"Was he really?" the kid asked Gaffney, and with a button put a pause to the activities.

"No, I wasn't," recanted Yossarian before Gaffney could answer. "But I think it's perfect. It's peaceful, sweet, melodic, erotic, and certainly climactic and final." He gave no voice to his shifty and vindictive presentiment that he was seeing on the video monitors another Götterdämmerung, that it was almost closing time for all of the people he was watching in oblivious revelry on the Video screens, including himself and Frances Beach as he watched himself dance with her, maybe for Melissa too and McBride and his new wife, for the bride and M2. "Your guests will love it, Olivia. They'll walk out to the dance floor humming that Götterdämmerung tune."

"No, sir," corrected smugly the patronizing young man. "No, sirree. Because we come up with something better as they break away. Wait till you hear it."

Gaffney nodded. "I think you said you already have."

"It's a children's chorus," said the computer technician. "As the Wagner fades, softly underneath it and rising steadily we introduce a chorus of children that most people have never heard. It's angelic. And just when it's most moving, we blast in comedy, a chorus of musical laughter, to set the new mood we want for the rest of the evening. It's a chorus of laughing men that overpowers and drowns out the kids, and we're off. They're both by a German composer named Adrian Leverkuhn. Do you know him?"

"I've heard of him," said Yossarian, wary, feeling strangely as though he were wobbling about in time again. "He's a character in a work of fiction," he added nastily.

"I didn't know that," said the young man Hacker. "Then you know how great he was. Both these choruses are from his cantata called The Lamentations of Faust, but we don't have to tell people that."

"Good," snapped Yossarian. "Because they're not. They're from his oratorio called Apocalypse."

The computer whiz smiled up at Yossarian pityingly. "Mr. Gaffney?"

"He's wrong, Hacker," Jerry Gaffney said, shrugging at Yossarian with a shade of courteous apology. "Yo-Yo, you keep making that mistake. It's not the Apocalypse. It's from his Lamentations of Faust."

"God damn it, Gaffney, you're wrong again. And I ought to know. I've been thinking of writing a novel about that work for something like fifteen years."

"How quaint, Yo-Yo. But not thinking seriously, and not a serious novel."

"Cut the Yo-Yo, Gaffney. We're in an argument again. I did the research."

"You were going to have Thomas Mann and Leverkühn in, scenes together, weren't you? And put that Gustav Aschenbach in with Leverkühn as one of his contemporaries. You call that, research?"

"Who's Gustav Aschenbach?" said Hacker.

"A dead man in Venice, Warren.": "Gentlemen, I can settle it easily for both of you, right here on; my computer. Hold on three ten-thousandths of a second. Ah-ha, i come see. There, Mr. Yossarian, Lamentations of Faust. You are mistaken."

"Your computer is wrong." j "Yo-Yo," said Gaffney, "this is a model. It can't be wrong. Go ahead with the wedding. Let them see how it went."

On the largest screens the sun turned black, the moon turned the color of blood, and the ships in the rivers and the harbor were overturned.

" Warren, stop kidding." Gaffney was displeased.

"It's not me, Jerry. I swear. I keep deleting that. And it keeps coming back. Here we go."

The Leverkühn music, Yossarian saw, went over well. As the dying harmonies ending Götterdämmerung neared conclusion, a tender children's chorus Yossarian could not remember having heard before came stealing in ethereally, at first a breath, a hint, then rose gradually into an essence of its own, into a celestial premonition of pathetic heartbreak. And next, when the sweet, painful, and saddening foreshadowing was almost unbearable there smashed in, with no warning, the shattering, unfamiliar, toneless scales of unrelenting masculine voices in crashing choirs of ruthless laughter, of laughter, laughter, laughter, and this produced in the listeners a reaction of amazed relief and tremendous, mounting jollity. The audience quickly joined in with laughter of its own to the barbaric cacophonous ensemble of rollicking jubilation that rebounded from speakers everywhere, and the festal mood for the gala evening was ready to commence gleefully, with food, and drink, and music, and with more ingenious displays and aesthetic delicacies.

Yossarian was there and laughing too, he saw with a shock. He frowned at himself in reproach, while Olivia Maxon, at his side there in the Communications Control Center of the terminal, saw herself laughing with him in the chapel of the North Wing and said it was divine. Yossarian now looked contrite in both places. He was scowling, in this place and that place, in peevish detachment. Staring into this future, Yossarian was mesmerized to find himself in white tie and tails he had never in his life worn white tie and tails, the costume prescribed for all males in that elite group of insiders in the North Wing. Soon he was dancing a restrained two-step with Frances Beach, then in succession with Melissa, the bride, and Olivia. What displeased Yossarian often about himself, he remembered now, seeing these pictures of himself looking silent, acquiescent, and accommodating at that wedding awaiting him, was that he did not truly dislike Milo Minderbinder and never had, that he thought Christopher Maxon congenial and unselfish, and found Olivia Maxon, though unoriginal and unchanging, grating only when expressing strong opinions. He had an abstract belief that he ought to be ashamed, and another abstract idea he should be more ashamed he was not.