Joseph Heller - Closing Time

Lying in bed ingesting candy bars and peanuts and a canned Coca-Cola from the vending machine outside, he felt too wakeful for sleep and too sluggish for the meaningful work of fiction he had carried with him hopefully still one more time. The book was a paperback titled Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories and was by Thomas Mann. Lighter fiction was even heavier for him these days. Even his revered New Yorker seldom had power to rivet his attention. Celebrity gossip now was largely about people who were strangers, the Academy Awards were likely to go to films he did not know and to performers he had not seen or even heard of.

He missed Melissa but was glad he was there alone; or, as he tickled himself in elusive modification, he was glad he was alone, although he missed Melissa. He found a classical music station and was horrified to hear a German Bach choir begin the score from the American musical comedy Carousel. He jammed his middle finger hurling himself at the tuning dial. With the second station he was luckier: he came into a medley that brought him the children's chorus from La Boheme and next the children's chorus from Carmen. And after that, to the accompaniment of rising static from distant sheet lightning, there came the chorus of anvils he recognized from the German Das Rheingold, attending the descent of the gods into the bowels of the earth to steal gold from the dwarfs to pay to the giants who had built their glorious new home, Valhalla, under a contract from whose original terms they were already backing away. The giants had been promised the goddess conferring eternal youth; they had to settle for money. In doing business with the gods, Yossarian judged again, with eyes growing heavier, it was always smarter to collect up front.

As that chorus of anvils diminished into static, he heard faintly in the static an illogical musical pandemonium of primitive wild laughter ascend through the scales in tune and in key and then, nebulously, beneath a hissing layer of electrical interference, a very different, lonely, lovely, angelic wail of a children's chorus in striking polyphonic lament he believed he recognized and could not place. He remembered the novel by Thomas Mann about which he had once thought of writing and wondered in his fuzziness if he was losing his bearings and dreaming he was listening to the Leverkühn Apocalypse of which he had read. And in several more seconds that failing broadcast signal faded out too until there survived only in a primeval void of human silence the insistent sibilance of that simmering and irrepressible electrical interference.

He did dream that night in disjointed sleep that he was back in his high-rise apartment in New York and that the familiar red Toyota with the woman inside eating sugar buns was pulling back into the same spot in the parking area outside his motel room in Kenosha, on whose far border a paunchy, stocky, bearded middle-aged Jew who was a G-man trudged back and forth with moving lips and his head bowed. A lanky, conspicuous, orange-haired man in a seersucker suit looked on inoffensively from a corner, with twinkling flames in his eyes, holding an orange drink with a straw in a large plastic cup, while a darker man with a peculiarly Oriental cast to his features was observing all of them cannily, dressed fastidiously in a blue shirt, rust-colored tie, and a single-breasted fawn-colored herringbone jacket with a thin purple cross-pattern. Hiding slyly in the shadows was a shady man wearing a dark beret who smoked a cigarette without using his hands, which were deep in the pockets of a soiled raincoat that was unbuttoned and ready to be flashed open instantly for the man inside it to expose his hairy self in a lewd invitation to stare at the repellent sight of his underwear and his groin. Yossarian at the end of his dream had satisfying sex briefly with his second wife. Or was it his first? Or both? He came awake thinking of Melissa guiltily.

When he stepped outside for breakfast, the red Toyota with the New York license plates and the woman inside chewing food was parked there again. It pulled away when he stopped to stare, and he knew he had to be fantasizing. She could not be there.

"And why not?" asked Jerry Gaffney, in the airport in Chicago. "With Milo 's bomber and the chaplain's heavy water, and your two divorces, and Nurse Melissa MacIntosh and that Belgian patient, and that fling with that woman with a husband, you must know you're of interest to other people."

"From New York to Kenosha for just one day? She couldn't drive that fast, could she?"

"Sometimes we work in mysterious ways, John."

"She was in my dream, Jerry. And so were you."

"You can't blame us for that. Your dreams are still your own. Are you sure you were not imagining that?"

"My dream?"

"Yes."

"It's how I was able to recognize you, Gaffney. I knew I'd seen you before."

"I keep telling you that."

"When I was in the hospital last year. You were one of the guys looking in on me too, weren't you?"

"Not you, John. I was checking on employees who phoned in sick. One had a staphylococcus infection and the other salmonella food poisoning picked up-"

"From an egg sandwich in the cafeteria there, right?"

Arriving at an airport in turbulent disorder because of flights canceled by unpredictable blizzards in Iowa and Kansas, Yossarian had quickly spotted a dark, tidy, dapper man of average height and slightly Oriental cast waving aloft a plane ticket in a signal to attract him.

"Mr. Gaffney?" he'd inquired.

"It's not the Messiah," said Gaffney, chuckling. "Let's sit down for coffee. We'll have an hour." Gaffney had booked him on the next flight to Washington and gave him the ticket and boarding pass. "You will be happy to know," he seemed pleased to reveal, "that you'll be all the richer for this whole experience. About half a million dollars richer, I'd guess. For your work with Noodles Cook."

"I've done no work with Noodles Cook."

" Milo will want you to. I'm beginning to think of your trip as something of a Rhine Journey."

"I am too."

"It can't be coincidence. But with a happier ending."

Gaffney was dark, stylish, urbane, and good-looking-of Turkish descent, he disclosed, though from Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, New York. His complexion was smooth. He was bald on top, with a shiny pate, and had black hair trimmed close at the sides and black brows. His eyes were brown and narrow and, with the raised mounds of his fine cheekbones, gave to his face the intriguing look of someone cosmopolitan from the east. He was dressed faultlessly, spotlessly, in a fawn-colored single-breasted herringbone jacket with a thin purple cross-pattern, brown trousers, a pale-blue shirt, and a tie of solid rust.

"In the dream," said Yossarian, "you were dressed the same way. Were you in Kenosha yesterday?"

"No, no, Yo-Yo."

"Those clothes were in the dream."

"Your dream is impossible, Yo-Yo, because I never dress the same on consecutive days. Yesterday," Gaffney continued, consulting his appointment diary and licking his lips in obvious awareness of the effect, "I wore a Harris tweed of darker color with an orange interior design, trousers of chocolate brown, a quiet-pink shirt with thin vertical stripes, and a paisley tie of auburn, cobalt blue, and amber. You may not know this, John, but I believe in neatness. Neatness counts. Every day I dress for an occasion so that I am dressed for the occasion when an occasion arises. Tomorrow, I see by my calendar, I'll be wearing oatmeal Irish linen with green, if I go south, or a double-breasted blue blazer with horn buttons and gray trousers if I stay up north. The pants will be flannel. John, only you can say. Did you have sex in your dream?"

"That's not your business, Jerry."

"You seem to be doing it everywhere else."