Joseph Heller - Closing Time

The hero Siegfried, he afterward remembered, had cruised into action like a galley slave, rowing Brünnhilde's horse in a boat, and was soon tete-a-tete with another woman, to whom he was swiftly affianced.

Yossarian had his first-class seat on a jet and no such demented daydream in mind.

Siegfried had to climb a mountain and walk through fire to claim the woman Brünnhilde.

Yossarian had Melissa fly to Washington.

Looking back when it was over and he was thinking of a parody for The New Yorker magazine, he considered he had fared pretty well in comparison with the Wagnerian hero.

Half a million dollars richer, he was on the horns of a dilemma but alive to deal with it.

Siegfried was dead at the end; Brünnhilde was dead, even the horse was dead; Valhalla had collapsed, the gods were gone with it; and the composer was elated while his voluptuous music subsided in triumph like a delicate dream, for such is the calculating nature of art and the artist.

Whereas Tossarian could look forward to getting laid again soon. He had his doctor's okay. All his life he had loved women, and in much of that life he had been in love with more than one.

The small port city of Kenosha on Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, just twenty-five miles south of the much larger small city of Milwaukee, now had a jet airport and was experiencing an upturn in economic activity that the town fathers were at a loss to explain. Local social engineers were attributing the middling boom, perhaps waggishly, to benign climate. Several small new businesses of somewhat technical nature had opened and an agency of the federal government had established laboratories rumored to be CIA fronts in an abandoned factory that had long lain idle.

In the lounge in New York, Yossarian had taken note of the other travelers in first class, all men younger than himself and in very good spirits. Only scientists were so happy in their vocations these days. They held pencils at the ready as they talked, and what they talked about most-he was startled to hear-was tritium and deuterium, of which he now knew a little, and lithium deuteride, which, he learned when he asked, was a compound of lithium and heavy water and, more significantly, was the explosive substance of preference in the best hydrogen devices.

"Does everyone know all this?" He was amazed they talked so openly.

Oh, sure. He could find it all written in The Nuclear Almanac and Hogerton's The Atomic Energy Handbook, both perhaps on sale in the paperback rack.

Boarding, he'd recognized in business class several prostitutes and two call girls from the sex clubs in his high-rise building and as streetwalking attractions near the cocktail lounges and cash machines just outside. The call girls were fellow tenants. In economy class he spotted small clumps of the homeless who had somehow acquired the airplane fare to leave the mean streets of New York to be homeless in Wisconsin. They had washed themselves up for the pilgrimage, probably in the lavatories of the PABT building, where posters Michael had once designed still warned Sternly that smoking, loitering, bathing, shaving, laundering, fucking, and sucking were all forbidden in the washbasins and toilet stalls, that alcohol could be harmful to pregnant women, and that anal intercourse could lead to HIV and hepatitis infections. Michael's posters had won art prizes. Their carry-on luggage consisted of shopping carts and paper bags. Yossarian was sure he saw sitting far back the large black woman with the gnarled melanoma moles he had come upon swabbing herself clean in only a sleeveless pink chemise on the emergency staircase the one time he had gone there with McBride. He looked for but did not find the addled woman with one leg who, as a matter of common practice, was raped by one derelict man or another perhaps three or four times daily, or the pasty blonde woman he also remembered from the stairwell who was sewing a seam in a white blouse listlessly.

From the physicists on the plane, Yossarian also thought he heard, without understanding any of it, that in the world of science, time continuously ran backward or forward, and forward and backward, and that particles of matter could travel backward and forward through time without undergoing change. Why, then, couldn't he? He also heard that subatomic particles had always to be simultaneously in every place they could be, and from this he began to consider that in his nonscientific world of humans and groups, everything that could happen did happen, and that anything that did not happen could not happen. Whatever can change, will; and anything that doesn't change, can't.

Mrs. Karen Tappman proved a slight, shy, and uneasy elderly woman, with a vacillating attitude on many aspects of the plight that had brought them into communication. But of the meaning of one thing there could soon be no doubt: the understanding they shared that he was sorry he had come and she regretted having asked him to. They would soon not have much to say to each other. They could think of nothing new to try. He had recognized her, he stated honestly, from the snapshots he remembered the chaplain had carried.

She smiled. "I was just past thirty. I recognize you now too from the photograph in our study."

Yossarian had not guessed the chaplain would possess a picture of him.

"Oh, yes, I'll show you." Mrs. Tappman led the way into the back of the two-story house. "He tells people often you just about saved his life overseas when things were most horrible."

"I think he helped save mine. He backed me up in a decision to refuse to continue fighting. I don't know how much he told you."

"I think he's always told me everything."

"I would have gone ahead anyway, but he gave me the feeling I was right. There's a blowup of that picture of you and the children he used to carry in his wallet."

One wall of the study was filled with photographs spanning almost seventy years, some showing the chaplain as a tiny boy with a fishing pole and a smile with missing teeth, and some of Karen Tappman as a tiny girl in party dress. The photograph he remembered displayed the Karen Tappman of thirty sitting in a group with her three small children, all four of them facing the camera gamely and looking sadly isolated and forsaken, as though in fear of a looming loss. On a separate wall were his war pictures.

Yossarian halted to stare at a very old fading brown photograph of the chaplain's father in World War I, a small figure petrified by the camera, wearing a helmet too massive for the child's face inside it, holding clumsily a rifle with the bayonet fixed, with a canteen in canvas hooked to his belt on one side and a gas mask in a canvas case on the other.

"We used to have the gas mask as a souvenir," said Mrs. Tappman, "and the children would play with it. I don't know what's become of it. He was gassed slightly in one of the battles and was in the veterans hospital awhile, but he took care of himself and lived a long time. He died of lung cancer right here in the house. Now they say he smoked too much. Here is the one he has of you."

Yossarian stifled a smile. "I wouldn't call that a picture of me."

"Well, he does," she answered contentiously, showing a streak he had not thought existed. "He would point it out to everyone. wAnd that's my friend Yossarian,' he would say. 'He helped pull me through when things were rough. w He would say that to everyone. He repeats himself too, I'm afraid."

Yossarian was touched by her candor. The photograph was of a kind taken routinely by the squadron public relations officer, showing members of a crew waiting at a plane before takeoff. In this one he saw himself standing off in the background between the figures in focus and the B-25 bomber. In the foreground were the three enlisted men for that day, seated without evidence of concern on unfused thousand-pound bombs on the ground as they waited to board and start up. And Yossarian, looking as slender and boyish as the others, in parachute harness and his billed, rakish officer's cap, had merely turned to look on. The chaplain had lettered the names of each man there. The name Yossarian was largest. Here again were Samuel Singer, William Knight, and Howard Snowden, all sergeants.