Joseph Heller - Closing Time

"Only my close ones, Mr. Gaffney."

"Mine call me Jerry."

"I must tell you, Mr. Gaffney, that I find talking to you exasperating."

"I hope that will change. If you'll pardon my saying so, it was heartening to hear that report from your nurse."

"What nurse?" snapped Yossarian. "I have no nurse."

"Her name is Miss Melissa MacIntosh, sir," corrected Gaffney, with a cough that was reproving.

"You heard my answering machine too?"

"Your company did. I'm just a retainer. I wouldn't do it if I didn't get paid. The patient is surviving. There's no sign of infection."

"I think it's phenomenal."

"We're happy you're pleased."

And the chaplain was still out of sight: in detention somewhere for examination and interrogation after tracking Yossarian down in his hospital through the Freedom of Information Act and popping back into his life with the problem he could not grapple with.

Yossarian was lying on his back in his hospital bed when the chaplain had found him there the time before, and he waited with a look of outraged hostility as the door to his room inched open after he'd given no response to the timid tapping he'd heard and saw an equine, bland face with a knobby forehead and thinning strands of hay-colored hair discolored with dull silver come leaning in shyly to peer at him. The eyes were pink-lidded, and they flared with brightness the instant they alighted upon him.

"I knew it!" the man bearing that face burst right out with joy. "I wanted to see you again anyway. I knew I would find you! I knew I would recognize you. How good you look! How happy I am to see we're both still alive! I want to cheer!"

"Who," asked Yossarian austerely, "the fuck are you?"

The reply was instantaneous. "Chaplain, Tappman, Chaplain Tappman, Albert Tappman, Chaplain?" chattered Chaplain Albert Tappman garrulously. "Pianosa? Air force? World War II?"

Yossarian at last allowed himself a beam of recognition. "Well, I'll be damned!" He spoke with some warmth when he at last appreciated that he was again with the army chaplain Albert T. Tappman after more than forty-five years. "Come on in. You look good too," he offered generously to this man who looked peaked, undernourished, harried, and old. "Sit down, for God sakes."

The chaplain sat down submissively. "But, Yossarian. I'm sorry to find you in a hospital. Are you very sick?"

"I'm not sick at all."

"That's good then, isn't it?"

"Yes, that is good. And how are you?"

And all at once the chaplain looked distraught. "Not good, I'm beginning to think, no, maybe not so good."

"That's bad then," said Yossarian, glad that the time to come directly to the point was so soon at hand. "Well, then, tell me, Chaplain, what brings you here? If it's another old air corps reunion, you have come to the wrong man."

"It's not a reunion." The chaplain looked miserable.

"What then?"

"Trouble," he said simply. "I think it may be serious. I don't understand it."

He had been to a psychiatrist, of course, who'd told him he was a very good candidate for late-life depression and already too old to expect any better kind.

"I've got that too."

It was possible, it had been suggested, that the chaplain was imagining it all. The chaplain did not imagine, he imagined, that he was imagining any of it.

But this much was certain.

When none in the continuing stream of intimidating newcomers materializing in Kenosha on official missions to question him about his problem seemed inclined to help him even understand what the problem was, he'd remembered Yossarian and thought of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Freedom of Information Act, the chaplain explained, was a federal regulation obliging government agencies to release all information they had to anyone who made application for it, except information they had that they did not want to release.

And because of this one catch in the Freedom of Information Act, Yossarian had subsequently found out, they were technically not compelled to release any information at all. Hundreds of thousands of pages each week went out regularly to applicants with everything blacked out on them but punctuation marks, prepositions, and conjunctions. It was a good catch, Yossarian judged expertly, because the government did not have to release any information about the information they chose not to release, and it was impossible to know if anyone was complying with the liberalizing federal law called the Freedom of Information Act.

The chaplain was back in Wisconsin no more than one day or two when the detachment of sturdy secret agents descended upon him without notice to spirit him away. They were there, they said, on a matter of such sensitivity and national importance that they could not even say who they were without compromising the secrecy of the agency for which they said they worked. They had no arrest warrant. The law said they did not need one. What law? The same law that said they never had to cite it.

"That's peculiar, isn't it?" mused Yossarian.

"Is it?" said the chaplain's wife with surprise, when they conversed on the telephone. "Why?"

"Please go on."

They read him his rights and said he did not have them. Did he want to make trouble? No, he did not want to make trouble. Then he would have to shut his mouth and go along with them. They had no search warrant either but proceeded to search the house anyway. They and others like them had been back several times since, with crews of technicians with badges and laboratory coats, gloves, Geiger counters, and surgical masks, who took samples of soil, paint, wood, water, and just about everything else in beakers and test tubes and other special containers. They dug up the ground. The neighborhood wondered.

The chaplain's problem was heavy water.

He was passing it.

"I'm afraid it's true," Leon Shumacher had confided to Yossarian, when he had the full urinalysis report. "Where did you get that specimen?"

"From that friend who was here last week when you dropped by. My old chaplain from the army."

"Where did he get it?"

"From his bladder, I guess. Why?"

"Are you sure?"

"How sure can I be?" said Yossarian. "I didn't watch him. Where the hell else would he get it?"

"Grenoble, France. Georgia, Tennessee, or South Carolina, I think. That's where most of it is made."

"Most of what?"

"Heavy water."

"What the hell does all of this mean, Leon?" Yossarian wanted to know. "Are they absolutely sure? There's no mistake?"

"I'Not from what I'm reading here. They could tell it was heavy almost immediately. It took two people to lift the eyedropper. Of course they're sure. There's an extra neutron in each hydrogen molecule of water. Do you know how many molecules there are in just a few ounces? That friend of yours must weigh fifty pounds more than he looks."

"Listen, Leon," Yossarian said, in a voice lowered warily. "You'll keep this secret, won't you?"

"Of course we will. This is a hospital. We'll tell no one but the federal government."

The government? They're the ones who've been bothering him! They're the ones he's most afraid of!"

"They have to, John," Leon Shumacher intoned in an automatic bedside manner. "The lab sent it to radiology to make sure it's safe, and radiology had to notify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy. John, there's not a country in the world that allows heavy water without a license, and this guy is producing it by the quart several times a day. This deuterium oxide is dynamite, John."

"Is it dangerous?"

"Medically? Who knows? I tell you I never heard of anything like this before. But he ought to find out. He might be turning into a nuclear power plant or an atom bomb. You ought to alert him immediately."

By the time Yossarian did telephone Chaplain Albert T. Tappman, USAF, retired, to warn him, there was only Mrs. Tappman at home, in hysteria and in tears. The chaplain had been disappeared only hours before.