Joseph Heller - Closing Time

"The Shhhhh!?" Yossarian was dumbfounded.

"I told you they'd work."

"Gaffney, what's going to happen?"

"I'm cut off from my sources."

Speeding downward in the elevator to the seven-mile level at a hundred miles an hour had taken close to five minutes. The rest of the way to the forty-two-mile bottom would take some twenty minutes more, and the two had agreed to continue awhile on the escalators.

"Can't you guess? Where will it all end?"

Gaffney had an answer. "Where it began, say the physicists, That's what I have in mind for the novel I might want to write. It begins after both those stories of the creation of Adam and Eve. There are two, you know."

"I know," said Yossarian.

"You would be surprised how many people don't. My story begins at the end of the sixth day of creation."

"And then where does it go?"

"Backward," crowed Gaffney, unveiling that idea for his novel as though it were already a triumph. "It goes backward, to the fifth day, like a movie running in reverse. At the beginning of mine, God turns Eve back into a rib and puts the rib back into Adam, as we find in the second version. He simply uncreates Adam and Eve from his own image, as we find in the first, as though they'd never been made. He simply disappears them, along with the cattle and other beasts and creeping things brought forth on that sixth day. On my second day, his fifth, the birds and fish are taken back. Next, the sun and moon are gone, along with the other lights in the firmament. Then the fruit trees and vegetation from the third day are taken away and the waters come back together and the dry land called earth disappears. That was the third day, and on the one after that, he takes back the firmament called heaven that was put in the midst of the waters. And then on the first day, my sixth day, the light goes too and nothing remains to separate the day from the darkness, and the earth is again without form and void. We are back to the beginning, before there was anything. Then I steal from the New Testament for a very clever touch. In the beginning was the word and the word was God, remember? Now, of course, we take away the word, and without the word, there is no God. What do you think of it?"

Yossarian said caustically: "Children will love it."

"Will it make a good movie? Because for a sequel, the whole thing starts all over again in two or three billion years and is recreated exactly the same way, to the tiniest detail."

"Gaffney, I can't wait that long. I've got a pregnant girlfriend upstairs who'll be having a baby soon if I let her. Let's walk a few miles more. I don't trust that elevator."

Looking downward as he went, Yossarian suddenly could not believe his eyes. He had misplaced his eyeglasses. But even with spectacles on, he would not have believed at first glance what he saw walking up toward him.

amp;bnsp; When he heard the alarm, General Leslie R. Groves, who had died of heart disease in 1970, decided to run for his life, downward toward the molten center of the earth, where it was hot as Hades, he knew, but not so hot as the temperature of a fusion explosion or the heat the chaplain would produce if he continued to evolve successfully into a nuclear mixture of tritium and lithium deuteride and achieved a critical mass.

"Don't hit him! Don't grab him! Don't touch him!" he barked out orders as a duty to his country and a last kindness to the chaplain, who declined to go along and save himself too. "Don't let him get overheated! He might go off!"

When they saw the general bolt, all of his scientists, technicians, engineers, and housekeeping staff went running off too, and except for the armed men at battle positions at all of the entrances, the chaplain was alone.

amp;bnsp; When the train jolted to a stop, the chaplain saw the gleaming ice skating rink in Rockefeller Center fall down out of his picture anc the skyscrapers around it begin teetering on the video screen anc come to rest with all of them erratically askew. Once before, the chaplain had sighted Yossarian crossing the street there beside a younger man who could have been his son, passing in back of a long pearl-gray limousine that seemed to be spilling tire tracks of blood from its wheels, with a sinister, angular figure with a walking stick and green rucksack eyeing both with an evil squint. He could not find Yossarian a second time either outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art each time he switched there to wait. He did not think of looking for him at the Port Authority Bus Terminal when he switched back there to gaze at those buildings wistfully. That was where he had come into the city the first time. Return trips home to Kenosha had by now grown painful. Three evenings a week he watched his wife walking slowly to meet the widow across the street to go in a car to the Presbyterian church for another session of bridge, in a group mainly of men and women who had lost their mates, watched with grief because he was no longer part of her life.

When the train stopped and the skating rink dropped, he heard ouitside a sudden racket of shouts and footsteps and guessed that something was amiss. He waited for someone to come tell him what to do. In fewer than ten minutes he was entirely on his own. General Groves was explicit.

"No, I want to go back out," he decided.

"There may be a war there."

"I want to go home."

"Albert, get mad. Don't you ever get mad?"

"I'm so mad now I can explode."

"That's a good one too! And I'll do what I can to clear the way." And that's when the chaplain heard him shouting his las commands before dashing away.

Cautiously, tentatively, the chaplain stepped down from the train. He had on his person some cash from the general, and his Social Security number had been returned to him too. He was last off the train. A distance away he saw a bank of escalators that looked brand-new. He was completely alone but for the guards in red field jackets, green trousers, and brown combat boots. These were stationed with weapons at all the entrances and at the top and the bottom of the down escalator. He was free to go up, free to leave.

"You might have trouble coming back in, sir."

As soon as he stepped aboard the escalator, he began to walk, anxious to get where he was going as quickly as he could. As he climbed, he increased his pace. When he reached the top, he followed the arrow to a cylindrical elevator with transparent panels that, after he pressed the topmost button, began rising with a speed that robbed him of breath initially and made his viscera sink. Through vertical transparent panels he saw himself passing through a golf course and then an amusement park with a roller-coaster and Ferris wheel, with attendants in jackets the same shade of red as the special troops of soldiers. He passed roadways with military vehicles and sedans with civilians. He passed a railway with mobile missiles and another with refrigerated supply cars marked WISCONSIN CHEESE and BEN amp; JERRY'S ICE CREAM. Where the elevator stopped, after a ride of nearly twenty minutes, he found another pair of brand-new escalators. Where these ended he boarded another elevator and again pressed the highest button. Then he was ascending on an escalator again. He felt he had been trudging upward for miles. He did not tire. Gazing ahead upward all the time, he suddenly, in jarring disbelief, came face-to-face with Yossarian, who was walking down toward him rapidly on the other escalator, and they gaped at each other in mutual recognition.

"What are you doing here?" they both exclaimed.

"Me? What are you doing here?" they both retorted.

They rode away in opposite directions.

"Chaplain, don't go out!" Yossarian shouted back up at him through cupped hands. "There's danger outside. A war. Come back down!"

"Fuck you!" cried the chaplain, and wondered where in the world such words had come from.