Joseph Heller - Closing Time

He handed Noodles a red folder of some bulk with a top sheet with a one-sentence precis of an abstract of a digest of a synopsis of a status report of a summary of a condensation about a retired military chaplain of seventy-one who was manufacturing heavy water internally without a license and was now secretly in custody for examination and interrogation. Noodles knew little about heavy water and nothing about tritium, but he knew enough to betray no flicker of recognition when he read the names John Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, although he pondered somerly over the nurse Melissa MacIntosh, of whom he had never heard, and a roommate named Angela Moore or Angela Moore-cock, and about a mysterious Belgian agent in a New York hospital with throat cancer, about whom the nurse regularly transmitted coded messages by telephone, and a suave, well-dressed mystery man who appeared to be keeping the others under surveillance, either to snoop or as bodyguard. As a connoisseur of expository writing, Noodles was impressed by the genius of an author to abridge so much into a single sentence.

"You want me to decide?" Noodles murmured finally with puzzlement.

"Why not you? And then here's this other thing, about someone with a perfect warplane he wants us to buy and someone else with a better perfect warplane that he wants us to buy, and we can only buy one."

"What does Porter Lovejoy say?"

"He's busy preparing for his trial. I want you to judge."

"I believe I'm not qualified."

"I believe in the flood," the Vice President replied.

"I don't think I heard that."

"I believe in the flood."

"What flood?" Noodles was befuddled again.

"Noah's flood, of course. The one in the Bible. So does my wife. Don't you know about it?"

Through narrowed eyes Noodles searched the guileless countenance for some twinkle of play. "I'm not sure I know what you mean. You believe it was wet?"

"I believe that it's true. In every detail."

"That he took the male and the female of every animal species?"

"That's what it says."

"Sir," said Noodles, with civility. "We have by now catalogued more kinds of animal and insect life than anyone could possibly collect in a lifetime and put onto a ship that size. How would he get them, where would he put them, to say nothing of room for himself and the families of his children, and the problems of the storage of food and the removal of waste in those forty days and nights of rain?"

"You do know about it!"

"I've heard. And for a hundred and fifty days and nights afterward, when the rain stopped."

"You know about that too!" The Vice President regarded him approvingly. "Then you probably also know that evolution is bunk. I hate evolution."

"Where did all this animal life we know about now come from? There are three or four hundred thousand different species of beetles alone."

"Oh, they probably just evolved."

"In only seven thousand years? That's about all it was, as biblical time is measured."

"You can look it up. Noodles. Everything we need to know about the creation of the world is right there in the Bible, put down in plain English." The Vice President regarded him placidly. "I know there are skeptics. They are all of them Reds. They are all of them wrong."

"There's the case of Mark Twain," Noodles could not restrain himself from arguing.

"Oh, I know that name!" the Vice President cried, with greaf vanity and joy. "Mark Twain is that great American humorist from my neighboring state of Missouri, isn't he?"

" Missouri is not a neighboring state of Indiana, sir. And your great American humorist Mark Twain ridiculed the Bible, despised Christianity, detested our imperialistic foreign policy, an heaped piles of scorn on every particular in the story of Noah and his ark, especially for the housefly."

"Obviously," the Vice President replied, with no loss of equanimity, "we are talking about different Mark Twains."

Noodles was enraged. "There was only one, sir," he said softly and smiled. "If you like, I'll prepare a summary of his statements and leave it with one of your secretaries."

"No, I hate written things. Put it on a video, and maybe we can turn it into a game. I really can't see why some people who read have so much trouble coming to grips with the simple truths that are put down there so clearly. And please don't call me sir, Noodles. You're so much older than I am. Won't you call me Prick?"

"No, sir, I won't call you prick."

"Everyone else does. You have a right to. I have taken an oath to support that constitutional right."

"Look, you prick-" Noodles had jumped to his feet and was glancing around frantically, for a blackboard, for chalk and a pointer, for anything! "Water seeks its own level."

"Yes, I've heard that."

" Mount Everest is close to five miles high. For the earth to be covered with water, there would have to be water everywhere on the globe that was close to five miles deep."

His future employer nodded, pleased that he finally seemed to be getting through. "There was that much water then."

"Then the waters receded. Where could they recede to?"

"Into the oceans, of course."

"Where were the oceans, if the world was under water?"

"Underneath the flood, of course," was the unhesitating reply, and the genial man rose. "If you look at a map, Noodles, you will see where the oceans are. And you will also see that Missouri does border on my state of Indiana."

"He believes in the flood!" Noodles Cook, still stewing, and speaking almost in a shout, reported immediately to Porter Lovejoy. It was the first time in the relationship that he had presented himself to his sponsor with anything other than a conspiratorial contentment.

Porter Lovejoy was unruffled. "So does his wife."

"I'll want more money!"

"The job doesn't call for it."

"Change the job!"

"I'll talk to Capone."

His health was good, he was not on welfare, and it was understood now by all involved that as the secretary in charge of health, education and welfare in the new cabinet, Noodles would focus his energies entirely on the education of the President.

Heavy water was up another two points, read the fax in the M amp; M office in Rockefeller Center in New York, on the same floor, and in much the same spot, in which Sammy Singer had spent almost all his adult working life with Time magazine, an office that, as Michael Yossarian again saw, had windows overlooking the fabled skating rink far below, the glittering, frozen centerpiece of the venerable Japanese real estate complex obtained for money earlier from the vanishing Rockefeller financial dynasty. The rink was the same site on which Sammy years before had, with Glenda, gone ice skating for the first time in his life, and didn't fall, and had gone again with her on more than one long lunch hour after they commenced seeing each other regularly, while she was still pressing him to come live with her in her West Side apartment, together with her three children and her remarkable frontier mother from Wisconsin, who approved of Sammy and departed gladly to live again with a sister on a small family farm after he did-none of the New York parents he knew, not even his own, were ever so gracefully self-sacrificing-and tritium, the gas derived from heavy water, had gained an additional two hundred and sixteen points on the international radioactive commodity exchanges in Geneva, Tokyo, Bonn, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, China, Pakistan, London, and New York. The rise in tritium was buoyed optimistically by the natural property of that hydrogen isotope to degenerate at a predictable rate in atomic weapons, necessitating periodic replenishment, and the enticing disposition of the gas to lessen in quantity between the time it was sealed by the shipper and the hour it was received by the purchaser, who, more commonly than not, was a manufacturer of novelties or marking devices with outer surfaces intrinsically luminous or an assembler and supplier of nuclear warheads.