Joseph Heller - Closing Time

I don't spend much time keeping track of the world and can't see that it would change anything if I did. I mind my own business. What's important I hear about. What I learned I remembered, and it turned out to be true. It didn't mean a thing, me being in the army, it didn't count at all. It would have happened the same way without me-the ashes, the smoke, the dead, the outcome. I had nothing to do with Hitler and nothing to do with the state of Israel. I don't want the blame and I don't want the credit. The only place I've counted is at home, with Claire and the kids. Somewhere for whoever wants them later on, maybe the grandchildren, I've put away my Bronze Star, my combat infantryman's badge, my unit citation, the sergeant's stripes I had when I got out of the army, and the shoulder patch with the red number I of the First Division, the Big Red 1, which went through hell before I joined them and went through more hell after I was gone. We've got four grandchildren now. I love everyone in my family and feel I would demolish, maybe really kill, anyone who threatened to hurt any one of them.

"You would break his back?" Sammy said this with a smile the last time he visited.

"I will break his back." I smiled too. "Even now."

Even now.

When it starts popping up again in one spot, the radiation sharpshooters at the hospital can take aim and burn away what they like to call another new growth and I know is another tumor. If it pops up again in what they call the diaphragm and I call the belly, I am nauseous before and nauseous afterward, with that nausea I can't stand the thought of that I really think might finally put me away someday if I have to keep living with it. Unless I'm with Sammy, and then I am "nauseated," because he likes to play at what he calls a pedagogue and I call a smartass.

"Lew, tell me," he asked. He laughed softly. "How many backs have you broken in your lifetime?"

"Counting that guy on the car who grabbed that purse?"

"That wasn't a fight, Lew. And you didn't break his back. How many?"

I thought a minute. "None. I never had to. Saying I would was always enough."

"How many fights have you had?"

"In my life?" I thought hard again. "Only one, Sammy," I remembered, and this time I laughed. "With you. Remember that time you tried to teach me how to box?"

Like the hero Siegfried in Gotterddmmerung, he supposed, Yossarian himself began what he was later to look back on as his own Rhine Journey with a rapid clutch of daylight lovemaking: Siegfried at dawn in his mountain aerie, Yossarian around noon in his M amp; M office in Rockefeller Center. But he ended his pleasurably in the hospital four weeks later with another clean bill of health after his aura and hallucinatory TIA attack, and with five hundred thousand dollars and the sale of a shoe.

Siegfried had Brünnhilde, now mortal, and the rocky haunt they shared.

Yossarian had his nurse, Melissa MacIntosh, most human also, and a desktop, the carpeted floor, the leather armchair, and the broader windowsill of olden times in his office in the newly renamed M amp; M Building, formerly the old Time-Life Building, with a pane of glass looking down on the rink of ice on which Sammy and Glenda had gone skating more times than Sammy could remember now, and who subsequently had become man and wife, until death did them part.

Yossarian, nodding as he groped, did indeed agree that the door to the office was not locked, when he knew that it was, and that somebody might indeed walk in on them while they were thus lustfully teamed, when he knew that no one would or could. He was titillated by her apprehension; her tremors, doubts, and indecisions electrified him fiendishly with mounting passion and affection. Melissa was flustered in her ladylike terror of being come upon uncovered in those disarraying exertions of vigorous sexual informalities and, blushing, wished him, for a change, to finish fast; but she laughed when he did and disclosed the ruse as she was checking his baggage for his medicines and preparing to ride with him to the airport before his flight to Kenosha at the start of his journey. Along with basic toilet articles, he wanted Valium for insomnia, Tylenol or Advil for back pain, Maalox for his hiatus hernia. Much to his wonder, there were direct jumbo-jet flights now to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The phone rang as he zipped closed his carry-on bag.

"Gaffney, what do you want?"

"Aren't you going to congratulate me?" Gaffney spoke merrily, ignoring Yossarian's evident tone of rancor.

"Have you been listening in again?" asked Yossarian, looking furtively at Melissa.

"To what?" asked Gaffney.

"Why'd you call?"

"You just won't give me credit, will you, John?"

"For what? I got a bill from you finally. You didn't charge much."

"I haven't done much. Besides, I'm grateful for your music. You don't know happy I am to play back the tapes we record. I love the Bruckner symphonies at this darkening time of year, and the Boris Godunov."

"Would you like the Ring?"

"Mainly the Siegfried. I don't hear that one often."

"I'll let you know when I schedule the Siegfried," said Yossarian, acidly.

"Yo-Yo, I'll be so obliged. But that's not what I'm talking about."

"Mr. Gaffney," said Yossarian, and paused to allow his point to sink in. "What are you talking about?"

"We're back to Mr. Gaffney, are we, John?"

"We never passed John, Jerry. What do you want?"

"Praise," answered Gaffney. "Everybody likes to be appreciated when he's done something well. Even Señor Gaffney."

"Praise for what, Señor Gaffney?"

Gaffney laughed. Melissa, reposing upon the arm of the leather sofa, was rasping away at her fingernails with an emery board. Yossarian gave her a menacing scowl.

"For my gifts," Gaffney was saying. "I predicted you'd be going to Wisconsin to see Mrs. Tappman. Didn't I say you'd be changing in Chicago, for your trip to Washington to Milo and Wintergreen? You didn't ask me how I knew."

"Am I going to Washington?" Yossarian was amazed.

"You'll be getting Milo 's fax. M2 will phone to the airport to remind you. There, that's the fax coming in now, isn't it? I'm on target again."

"You have been listening, haven't you, you bastard?'

"To what?"

"And maybe watching too. And why would M2 be phoning me when he's right down the hall?"

"He's back at the PABT building with your son Michael, trying to decide if he's willing to be married there."

"To the Maxon girl?"

"He'll have to say yes. I have another good joke that might amuse you, John."

"I'll miss my plane."

"You've plenty of time. There'll be a delay in departure of almost one hour."

Yossarian burst out with a laugh. "Gaffney, you're finally mistaken," he crowed. "I had my secretary call. It's leaving on schedule."

Gaffney laughed too. "Yo-Yo, you have no secretary, and the airline was lying. It will be late taking off by fifty-five minutes. It was your nurse you had call."

"I have no nurse."

"That warms my heart. Please tell Miss MacIntosh the kidney is working again. She will be happy to hear that."

"What kidney?"

"Oh, Yossarian, shame. You don't always listen when she telephones. The kidney of the Belgian patient. And as long as you're going to Washington, why don't you invite Melissa-"

"Melissa, Mr. Gaffney?"

"Miss MacIntosh, Mr. Yossarian. But why don't you invite her to join you there? I bet she'll say she'd really love to go. She's probably never been. She can go to the National Gallery when you're busy with Milo and Noodles Cook, and to the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution."

Yossarian covered the telephone. "Melissa, I'm going to stop in Washington on the way back. How about taking time off to meet me there?"