Joseph Heller - Closing Time

"I don't know how," protested the chaplain.

"It's not I who don't believe you. Then there's this second thing, with a man named Yossarian, John Yossarian. You paid him a mysterious visit in New York as soon as we found out about this. That's one of the reasons they picked you up."

"There was nothing mysterious about it. I went to see him when all of this started to happen. He was in a hospital."

"What was wrong with him?"

"Nothing. He wasn't sick."

"Yet in a hospital? Try to imagine, Albert, how most of this sounds. He was in that hospital at the same time a Belgian agent with throat cancer was there. That man is from Brussels, and Brussels is the center of the EEC. Is that coincidence too? He has cancer of the throat but doesn't get better and doesn't die. How come? In addition, there are these coded messages about him to your friend Yossarian. They go out to him four or five times a day from this woman who pretends she just likes to talk to him on the telephone. I've not met a woman like that. Have you? Now his kidney is failing again, she says, just yesterday. Why should his kidney be failing and not yours? You're the one with the heavy water. I have no opinion. I don't know any more about these things than I do about the prelude to Act III of Lohengrin or a chorus of children singing in anguish. I'm giving you the questions raised by others. There's even a deep suspicion the Belgian is with the CIA. There's even some belief that you're CIA."

"I'm not! I swear I've never been with the CIA!"

"I'm not the one you have to convince. These messages go out from the hospital through Yossarian's nurse."

"Nurse?" cried the chaplain. "Is Yossarian ill?"

"He is fit as a fiddle, Albert, and in better shape than you or I."

"Then why does he have a nurse?"

"For carnal gratification. They have been indulging themselves in sexual congress one way or another now four or five times a week"-the general looked down punctiliously at a line graph on his lap to make absolutely sure-"in his office, in her apartment, and in his apartment, often on the floor of the kitchen with the water running or on the floor of one of the other rooms, beneath the air conditioner. Although I see on this chart that the frequency of libidinous contact is diminishing sharply. The honeymoon may be ending. He no longer sends her long-stemmed red roses often or talks as much about lingerie, according to this latest Gaffney Report."

The chaplain was squirming beneath these accumulating personal details. "Please."

"I'm merely trying to fill you in." The general turned to another page. "And then there's this secret arrangement you seem to have with Mr. Milo Minderbinder that you have not seen fit to mention."

" Milo Minderbinder?" The chaplain's reaction was one of incredulity. "I know him, of course. He sends these packages. I don't know why. I was in the war with him, but I haven't seen or spoken to him in almost fifty years."

"Come, Chaplain, come." Now the general feigned a look of exaggerated disappointment. "Albert, Milo Minderbinder claims ownership of you, has a patent pending on you, has registered a trademark for your brand of heavy water, with a halo, no less. He has offered you to the government in conjunction with a contract for a military airplane for which he is vying, and he receives weekly a very, very hefty payment for every pint of heavy water we extract from you. You're amazed?"

"I've never heard any of this before!"

"Albert, he'd have no right to do that on his own."

"Leslie, now I'm sure I've got you." The chaplain came near to smiling. "You said just a while ago that people have a right to do whatever we can't stop them from doing."

"That's true, Albert. But in practice, it's an argument we can use and you cannot. We can go through all of this again at the weekly review tomorrow afternoon."

At the weekly assembly conducted every Friday, it was the general himself who got wind first of the newest development.

"Who farted?" he asked.

"Yeah, what is that smell?"

"I know it," said the chemical physicist on duty that week, "it's tritium."

"Tritium?"

The Geiger counters in the room were clicking. The chaplain dropped his eyes. An appalling transformation had just come to pass. There was tritium in his flatulence.

"That changes the game, Chaplain," the general reproved him gravely. Every test and procedure would have to be repeated and new ones initiated. "And immediately check everyone in all the other groups."

None of the people in any of the control groups were blowing anything out their asses but the usual methane and hydrogen sulfide.

"I almost hate to send this news on," said the general with gloom. "From now on, Chaplain, no more farting around."

"And no more pissing against the wall."

"That will do, Ace. Does it not strike you as odd," General Groves inquired philosophically one week later at the freewheeling brainstorming symposium, "that it should be a man of God who might be developing within himself the thermonuclear capability for the destruction of life on this planet?"

"No, of course not."

"Why should it?"

"Are you crazy?"

"What's wrong with you?"

"Who else would it be?"

"They molest altar boys, don't they?"

"Shouldn't the force that created the world be the one to end it?"

"It would be even odder," concurred the general, after weighing these contemplations, "if it were anyone else."

It's this feeling nauseous I don't like anymore. By now I can tell the difference. If I think it's nothing, it goes away. If I think it's something, the remission is over and the relapse is back. I'll soon be scratching myself in different places and sweating at night and running a fever. I can tell before anyone if I'm losing weight. The wedding ring gets loose on my finger. I like a few drinks every night before dinner, that same old kid's blend people laugh at now of Carstairs whiskey and Coke, a C amp; C. If I feel pain after drinking alcohol, in my neck again or shoulders or in my abdomen now, I know it's time to phone the doctor and start hoping it's not into the city again for another round with Teemer and maybe into his hospital for another session with one of his radiation sharpshooters. I always let Claire know when I feel something is up. I don't give her false scares. Heartburn is easy. That comes from eating too much. The nausea I'm tired of comes with the sickness and comes with the cure. There's no mistaking it. When I think of the nausea I think of my mother and her green apples. To my mind they taste like what I taste when I'm nauseous. One time as a kid I had an abscessed ear that was lanced at home by a specialist who came to the house with Dr. Abe Levine, and she told us, me and the doctors and anyone else around, that I must have been eating her green apples again. Because that's what you got when you ate green apples. I have to smile when I think of the old girl. She was cute, even toward the end, when she was not always all there. She would remember my name. She had trouble recognizing the others, even the old man, with his watery eyes, but not me. "Louie," she would call quietly. "Boychik. Loualeh. Kim aher to der momma."

By now I've grown sick of feeling sick.

Sammy gets a kick out of hearing me put it that way, so I always make sure to say it every time I see him, just to give him a laugh, when he's up here on another visit or in the city sometimes when we come in to go out. We go into the city for an evening now and then just to prove we still can. We don't know anyone who lives there anymore but him and one of my daughters. I'll go to plays with Claire and try hard not to sleep while I pretend to keep interested in what's happening on the stage. Or I'll sit with Sammy and eat or drink while she goes to museums or art galleries with my daughter Linda or alone. Sometimes Sammy brings along a nice woman with a good personality, but it's easy to see there's nothing hot going on. Winkler calls from California every few weeks just to see how things are and to tell me who died out there we know and to get the latest on people we're still in touch with here. He's selling shoes now, real leather shoes, he tells me, to stores in big chains with shoe departments, and using the cash flow from the shoes to tide him over the slow seasons with his chocolate eggs and Easter bunnies. He's doing something else I don't want to know more about, with overstocks of frozen foods, mainly meats. Sammy still gets a smile out of Marvelous Marvin's business enterprises too. Sammy doesn't seem to have much to enjoy himself with since he's been living alone in that new high-rise apartment building of his. He still doesn't know what to do with his time, except for that work raising money for cancer relief. He's got a good pension from his Time magazine, he says, and had money put away, so that's not a problem. I give him ideas. He doesn't move.