Joseph Heller - Closing Time

With no hesitation he made use of momentum to take a giant step forward directly into the looking glass, smack into that illusion of himself as a hale youth with something of a middle-aged spread, and he came out the other side a white-haired adult near seventy into the commodious landscape of an amusement park unfurling before him on a level semicircle. He heard a carousel. He heard a roller-coaster.

He heard the high-pitched squeals of gaiety and simulated panic from a far-off group of men and women in a flat-bottomed boat rumbling down a high watery incline to a splashing stop in a pool.

Rotating clockwise slowly in front of him now was the perfect circle of a magic barrel, the Barrel of Fun, number one on his blue-and-white ticket. The ridged outer edges of the turning tubular chamber facing him were the raspberry red of candies and the sweetened syrup at soda fountains, and the sky blue of the rim was marked with yellow comets amid strewn white stars and a sprinkling of apricot crescent moons wearing smiles. He walked through casually simply by guiding himself on a line contrary to the direction of rotation and came out the other end into a conversation the late author Truman Capote was having with a man whose name gave him pause.

"Faust," repeated the stranger.

"Dr. Faust?" inquired Yossarian eagerly.

"No, Irvin Faust," said the man, who wrote novels also. "Good reviews, but never a big best-seller. This is William Saroyan. I bet you never even heard of him."

"Sure I did." Yossarian was miffed. "I saw The Time of Your Life. I read 'The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze'; and 'Forty Thousand Assyrians.' I remember that one."

"They're not in print anymore," mourned William Saroyan. "You can't find them in libraries."

"I used to try to write like you," Yossarian confessed. "I couldn't get far."

"You didn't have my imagination."

"They try to write like me," said Ernest Hemingway. Both wore mustaches. "But don't get far either. Want to fight?"

"I never want to fight."

"They try to write like him too," said Ernest Hemingway, and pointed off to William Faulkner, sitting in profound silence in a packed area populated by heavy drinkers. Faulkner wore a mustache too. So did Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and James Joyce, not far from the area of those with late-life personality disorders embodying depression and nervous breakdowns, in which Henry James sat silent with Joseph Conrad staring at Charles Dickens blending into the populous zone of the suicides where Jerzy Kosinski was chatting up Virginia Woolf near Arthur Koestler and Sylvia Plath. In a cone of brown sunlight on violet sand he spied Gustav Aschenbach on a beach chair and recognized the book in his lap as the same paperback edition as his own copy of Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Aschenbach beckoned.

And Yossarian responded inwardly with a "Fuck you!" and mentally gave him the finger and the obscene Italian gesture of rejection as he hastened past the Whip, the Pretzel, and the Whirlpool. He caught Kafka spying on him with a bloody cough from a shadowy recess below the shut pane of the window from which Marcel Proust watched him above a hooded alleyway with the street sign DESOLATION ROW. He came to a mountain in a framework of iron with tracks rising high and saw the name DRAGON'S GOKGE.

"Holy shit!" exulted McBride, who was nowhere about. "There really is a roller-coaster!"

He came next to the carousel, ornate, elaborate, mirrored, spinning, with panel paintings in antique white molding alternating between the upright oval frames with reflecting glass on the main rounding board and inner cornice. The lively waltz from the calliope was indeed the Siegfried Funeral Music, and situated grandly on one of the gaudy gondolas drawn by swans was an elderly German official with domed helmet and encyclopedic insignia and a bearing majestic enough for an emperor or a kaiser.

Yossarian caught sight of the rowboat before he saw the canal, a wooden craft with riders sitting upright: two, three, and four abreast, floating into view without power in the man-made channel barely wide enough to accommodate one craft at a time, and he was outside the Tunnel of Love, where a watchman in a red jacket and green jockey cap stood guard at the entrance with a portable telephone and a hand-held ticket punch. He had orange hair and a milky complexion and wore a green rucksack on his back. Garish billboards and lavender-and-ginger illustrations gave alluring notice of a fabulous wax museum inside the Tunnel of Love that headlined life-size wax statues of the executed Lindbergh-baby kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann, and a nude Marilyn Monroe lying on a bed, restored in every detail to lifelike death. The fabulous wax museum was called ISLE OF THE DEAD. In the first seat of the flat-bottomed boat coasting out of one murky opening of the tunnel to continue gliding onward into the inky opening of the other, he saw Abraham Lincoln in a stiff stovepipe hat sitting motionless beside the faceless Angel of Death, and they seemed to be holding hands. He saw his wounded gunner Howard Snowden on the same bench. Side by side in the boat, on the bench immediately behind them, he saw Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The mayor was wearing a dashing wide hat with a rolled brim something like a cowboy's, and FDR sported a creased homburg and was flaunting his cigarette holder, and both were grinning as though alive in a frontpage photograph in a bygone newspaper. And on the seat in back of La Guardia and Roosevelt 's he saw his mother and his father, and then his Uncle Sam and Aunt Ida, his Uncle Max and Aunt Hannah, and then his brother Lee, and he knew that he too was going to die. It struck him all of a sudden that overnight everyone he'd known a long time was old-not getting old, not middle-aged, but old! The great entertainment stars of his time were no longer stars, and the celebrated novelists and poets in his day were of piddling significance in the new generation. Like RCA and Time magazine, even IBM and General Motors were of meager stature, and Western Union had passed away. The gods were growing old again, and it was time for another shake-up. Everyone has got to go, Teemer had propounded the last time they'd talked, and, in an uncharacteristic display of emotional emphasis, had added: "Everyone!"

Yossarian rushed past that Tunnel of Love with its true-to-life wax figures on the Isle of the Dead. Crossing a white footbridge with rococo balustrades, he found himself back in Naples, Italy, in 1945, on a line behind the imperturbable old soldier Schweik and the young one named Krautheimer who had changed his name to Joseph Kaye, waiting to go home by steamship outside the vanished old L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway on Surf Avenue past vanished old Steeplechase Park.

"Still here?"

"What happened to you?"

"I'm back here too. What happened to you?"

"I am Schweik."

"I know. The good soldier?"

"I don't know about good."

"I thought I'd be the oldest now," said Yossarian.

"I'm older."

"I know. I'm Yossarian."

"I know. You ran away once to Sweden, didn't you?"

"I didn't get far. I couldn't even get to Rome."

"You didn't escape there? In a little yellow raft?"

"That happens only in the movies. What's your name?"

"Joseph Kaye. I told you before. Why are you asking?"

"I have trouble with names now. Why are you asking?"

"Because somebody has been telling lies about me."

"Maybe that's why we're still on line," said Schweik.

"Why don't you go back to Czechoslovakia?"

"Why should I," said Schweik, "when I can go to America? Why don't you go to Czechoslovakia?"

"What will you do in America?"

"Raise dogs. Anything easy. People live forever in America, don't they?"

"Not really," said Yossarian.