Joseph Heller - Closing Time

But it was only Michael, his youngest son, the underachiever among four adult children in what used to be a family. In addition to Michael there were his daughter, Gillian, a judge in a very low court; Julian, his eldest, another overachiever; and Adrian, who was average and content and was disregarded by the others because he was only average. Michael, unmarried, unsettled, unemployed, and unobjectionable, had stopped by to see what he was doing in the hospital still again and to confess that he was thinking of dropping out of law school because he found the work there no more stimulating than the medical school, business school, art school, graduate school of architecture, and several other graduate schools of assorted character he had been dropping out of after brief trials for as long now, it seemed, as anyone wanted to remember.

"Oh, shit," mourned Yossarian. "I keep pulling strings to get you in, and you keep dropping out."

"I can't help it," Michael said with discouragement. "The more I find out about the practice of law, the more I'm surprised that it isn't illegal."

"That's one of the reasons I gave that up too. How old are you now?"

"I'm not far from forty."

"You still have time."

"I'm not sure if you're joking or not."

"Neither am I," Yossarian told him. "But if you can delay the decision of what you want to do with your life until you're old enough to retire, you will never have to make it."

"I still can't tell if you're joking."

"I'm still not always sure either," Yossarian answered. "Sometimes I mean what I say and don't mean it at the same time. Tell me, my apple of my eye, do you think in my checkered history I ever really wanted to do any of the work I found myself doing?"

"Not even the film scripts?"

"Not really and not for long. That was make-believe and didn't last, and I wasn't that crazy about the finished products there either. Do you think I wanted to go into advertising, or Wall Street, or ever get busy with things like land development or puts and calls? Whoever starts out with a dream to succeed in public relations?"

"Did you really once work for Noodles Cook?"

"Noodles Cook worked for me. Soon after college. Do you think we really wanted to write political speeches, Noodles Cook and I? We wanted to write plays and be published in The New Yorker. Whoever has much choice? We take the best we can get, Michael, not what enraptures us. Even the Prince of Wales."

"That's a hell of a way to live, Dad, isn't it?"

"It's the way we have to."

Michael was silent a minute. "I got scared when I saw that No Visitors sign on your door," he confessed in a mild tone of injury. "Who the hell put it up? I began to think you might really be sick."

"It's my idea of a joke," mumbled Yossarian, who had added to the sign with a brush-point pen the notice that violators would be shot. "It helps keep people out. They just keep popping in all day long without even telephoning. They don't seem to realize that lying around in a hospital all day can be pretty demanding work."

"You never answer your telephone anyway. I bet you're the only patient here with an answering machine. How much longer are you going to stay?"

"Is the mayor still the mayor? The cardinal still the cardinal? Is that prick still in office?"

"What prick?"

"Whatever prick is in office. I want all pricks out."

"You can't stay here that long!" cried Michael. "What the hell are you doing here anyway? You had your annual workup only a couple of months ago. Everyone thinks you're crazy."

"I object. Who does?"

"I do."

"You're crazy."

"We all do."

"I object again. You're all crazy."

"Julian says you could have taken over the whole company a long time ago if you had any ambition and brains."

"He's crazy too. Michael, this time I was scared. I had a vision."

"Of what?"

"It wasn't of taking over M amp; M. I had an aura, or thought I did, and was afraid I was having a seizure or a tumor, and I wasn't sure if I was imagining it or not. When I'm bored I get anxious. I get things like conjunctivitis and athlete's foot. I don't sleep well. You won't believe this, Michael, but when I'm not in love I'm bored, and I'm not in love."

"I can tell," said Michael. "You're not on a diet."

"Is that how you know?"

"It's one of the ways."

"I thought of epilepsy, you know, and of a TIA, a transient ischemic attack, which you don't know about. Then I was afraid of a stroke-everyone should always be afraid of a stroke. Am I talking too much? I had this feeling I was seeing everything twice."

"You mean double?"

"Not that, not yet. The feeling of suspecting that I had gone through everything before. There was hardly anything new for me in the daily news. Every day there seemed to be another political campaign going on or about to start, another election, and when it wasn't that, it was another tennis tournament, or those fucking Olympic Games again. I thought it might be a good idea to come in here and check. Anyway, my brain is sound, my mind is clear. So is my conscience."

"That's all very good."

"Don't be too sure. Great crimes are committed by people whose conscience is clear. And don't forget, my father died of a stroke."

"At ninety-two?"

"Do you think that made him want to jump with joy? Michael, what will you do with yourself? Disturbing my peace of mind is my not knowing where the hell you're going to fit in."

"Now you are talking too much."

"You're the only one in the family I really can talk to, and you won't listen. The others all know this, even your mother, who always wants more alimony. Money does matter, more than almost everything else. Want a sound idea? Get a job now with a company with a good pension plan and a good medical plan, any company and any job, no matter how much you hate it, and stay there until you're too old to continue. That's the only way to live, by preparing to die."

"Oh, shit, Dad, you really believe that?"

"No, I don't, although I think it might be true. But people can't survive on Social Security, and you won't even have that. Even poor Melissa will be better off."

"Who's poor Melissa?"

"That sweetheart of a nurse out there, the one that's attractive and kind of young."

"She's not so attractive and she's older than I am."

"She is?"

"Can't you tell?"

Toward the end of Yossarian's second week in the hospital they hatched the plot that drove him out.

They drove him out with the man from Belgium in the room adjacent to his. The man from Belgium was a financial wise man with the European Economic Community. He was a very sick financial wise man from Belgium and spoke little English, which did not matter much because he had just had part of his rhroat removed and could not speak at all, and understood hardly any English either, which mattered greatly to the nurses and several doctors, who were unable to address him in ways that had meaning. All day and much of the night he had at his bedside his waxen and diminutive Belgian wife in unpressed fashionable clothes, who smoked cigarettes continually and understood no English either and jabbered away at the nurses ceaselessly and hysterically, flying into alarms of shrieking terror each time he groaned or choked or slept or awoke. He had come to this country to be made well, and the doctors had taken out a hunk of his larynx because he certainly would have died had they left it all in. Now it was not so certain he would live. Christ, thought Yossarian, how can he stand it?

Christ, thought Yossarian, how can I?

The man had no way to make his feelings known but to nod or shake his head in reply to insistent questions fired at him by his wife, who had no serviceable way to relay his responses. He was in more dangers and discomforts than Yossarian could tick off on the fingers of both hands. Yossarian ran out of fingers the first time he counted and did not try again. He had grown no new fingers. There was normally such strident commotion in his vicinity that Yossarian could hardly find the time to think about himself. Yossarian worried about the man from Belgium more than he wanted to. He was moving into stress and knew stress was not healthy. People caught cancer under stress. Worrying about his stress put Yossarian under more stress, and he began to feel sorry for himself too.