Joseph Heller - Closing Time

The man was in pain that was unimaginable to Yossarian, who received no painkillers for it and felt he would be unable to endure it much longer and pull through. The man from Belgium was drugged. He was suctioned. He was medicated and sterilized. He kept everyone so busy that Nurse MacIntosh hardly could find time for Yossarian to fondle the lace at the bottom of her slip. Business was business, and the sick man from Belgium was serious business. Melissa was rushed and rumpled, distracted and breathless. He did not feel right cajoling her attention with so much that was critical going on right next door and, once spoiled, felt impoverished without her. No one else would do.

The man from Belgium, who could hardly move, kept them all on the run. He was hyperalimentated through a tube stuck in his neck so that he would not starve to death. They fed water intravenously into the poor man so that he would not dehydrate, suctioned fluids from his lungs so he would not drown.

That man was a full-time job. He had a chest tube and a belly tube and required such constant ministration that Yossarian had little time to think about Chaplain Tappman and his problem or Milo and Wintergreen and their squads of invisible bombers or of the tall Australian roommate with the white makeup in stiletto heels with full breasts or anyone else. A few times a day Yossarian would venture into the hallway to look into the other room just to see what was going on. Each time he did he came reeling back to his own bed and collapsed in a woozy faint with an arm pressed over his eyes.

When his vision cleared and he looked up again, the more mysterious of the private detectives would be peering in at him. This secret agent was a dapper man in trimly tailored suits and muted paisley ties, with a foreign complexion and dark eyes in a strong-boned face that looked vaguely Oriental and reminded him of a nut, a shelled almond.

"Who the fuck are you?" Yossarian wanted to shout out at him more than once.

"Hey, who are you?" he did ask one time amiably, forcing a smile.

"Are you talking to me?" was the lordly rejoinder, in a soft voice with perfect enunciation.

"Is there anything I can help you with?"

"Not at all. I was merely wondering about the thickset, balding gentleman with yellow hair who was here in the corridor a good deal up until a few days ago."

"The other private detective?"

"I haven't the faintest idea who you mean!" the man replied, and ducked away.

"Who the fuck are you?" Yossarian did shout after him just as the familiar cry went up in the corridor again and the pounding of gum-soled shoes resumed.

"Who speaks French? Who speaks French?" The wounded wail went up a dozen times a day from Nurse MacIntosh, Nurse Cramer, or one of the other nurses, or from one in the myriad of attending physicians, technicians, or Afro-American, Hispanic, or Pacific-rim aides and other kinds of economic refugees attending the Belgian on salary in that bizarre, unnatural hospital civilization that was perfectly natural. Now that there was a cash dispensing machine on every floor alongside the candy and soda dispensing machines, a patient with a credit card and major medical insurance never had to set foot outside again.

The secret agent with the faultless speech and impeccable English tailoring did not once volunteer that he could speak French, although Yossarian would bet he was able to, and could break codes too.

Yossarian spoke a little bit of French very poorly but decided to mind his own business. He was nervous about malpractice. Who could tell? Conceivably, an error in translation might render him liable to a charge of practicing medicine without a license. Yossarian could tell: he could tell about himself that if he ever had to go through all that at his age for four or fourteen days just to be able to go on living with or without a voice box for God knew how little longer, he thought he would object. He would prefer not to. In the end it came down to elementals. He could not stand the Belgian's pain.

He was going to have to leave her.

Yossarian was symptom suggestible and knew it. Within a day his voice turned husky.

"What's the matter with you?" Nurse MacIntosh snapped with concern the very next morning after she had reported for work, put on her makeup, straightened the seams of her seamless stockings, and then come into the room looking her niftiest to make sure he was all right. "You don't sound the same. Why aren't you eating?"

"I know. I'm hoarse. I'm not hungry right now. I don't know why I'm so hoarse."

He had no fever or physical discomfort and there was no visible evidence of inflammation anywhere in his ears, nose, or throat, said the ear, nose, and throat man who was summoned.

The next day his throat felt sore. He felt a lump there too and had difficulty swallowing his food, although there was still not a sign of infection or obstruction, and he knew as surely as he knew anything else that he too would soon lose his larynx to a malignancy if he hung around there any longer and did not get the hell away from that hospital fast.

Nurse Melissa MacIntosh looked heartbroken. It was nothing personal, he assured her. He promised gallantly to take her out soon to dinner at a good restaurant, and to Paris and Florence, and Munich too, perhaps, and window-shop for lacy lingerie with her, if they found they hit it off, and if she did not mind being followed by private detectives whenever they were together. She thought he was joking about the private detectives and said she would miss him. He replied with perfection that he would not give her the chance, wondering, even as he gazed sincerely into her earnest blue eyes and warmly pressed her hand good-bye, whether he would ever even remember to want to see her again.

I was born strong and without fear. To this day I don't think I know what it is to be afraid of another human being. I didn't get my muscles and big bones and deep chest from baling old newspapers and doing heavy lifting as a kid in my father's junkshop. If I didn't have the strength he would not have made me do it. He would have put me to work keeping count and running errands, like he did with my sisters and my older brother Ira. We were four sons in my family and two girls, and of the boys I was the second from the last. My mother would tell people I was the strongest baby she ever saw, and also the hungriest. She needed both hands to pull me away from the breast.

"Like Hercules in his crib," Sammy Singer said once.

"Who?"

"Hercules. The infant Hercules."

"What about him?"

"When he was born a couple of big snakes were sent into his crib to kill him. He strangled one with each hand."

"It was nothing like that, wise guy."

Little Sammy Singer knew things like that even when we were kids back in public school in the third or fourth grade. Or maybe was the sixth or seventh. The rest of us were doing book reports on Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe and he was doing them on the Iliad. Sammy was clever, I was smart. He looked things up. I figured them out. He was good at chess, I was good at pinochle. I stopped playing chess, he kept losing money to me at pinochle. Who was the smart one? When we went into the war he wanted be a fighter pilot and picked the air corps. I picked the ground force because I wanted to fight Germans. I hoped to be in a tank and ride right through hundreds of them. He turned out a tail gunner, I wound up in the infantry. He was knocked down into the water once and came home with a medal, I was a prisoner of war and was kept overseas until the end. Maybe he was the smarter one. After the war he went to college with the government paying, I bought a lumberyard outside the city. I bought a building lot and put up a house on spec in partnership with a few of my customers, who knew more about construction than I did. I knew more about business. With the profits from that one I did the next house alone. I discovered credit. We did not know in Coney Island that banks wanted to lend money. He went to operas and I went out shooting ducks and Canada geese with local plumbers and Yankee bankers. As a POW in Germany I worried each time I changed hands what would happen when the new guards looked at my dog tags and found out I was a Jew. I worried, but I don't remember that I ever had fear. Each place I moved as they shipped me deeper and deeper into the country toward Dresden, I made sure to find some way to tell them before they found out. I did not want them to get the idea they had someone who was hiding anything. I did not think until Sammy asked later that they might spit in my face or smash my head with the butt of a gun or just lead me away from the others into the bushes with their rifles and bayonets and stab or shoot me to death. We were most of us kids, and I figured they might bully and sneer awhile and that I just might have to bust a few jaws before I taught them to stop. I never had any question I could do that. I was LR, Lewis Rabinowitz from Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, and I never had doubts back then that I could not be beaten at anything and could succeed in doing whatever I wanted to.