Joseph Heller - Closing Time

"Will I like it in America?"

"If you make money and think you're well-off."

"Are the people friendly?"

"If you make money and they think you're well-off."

"Where the fuck is that boat?" griped Kaye. "We can't wait here forever."

"Yes, you can," said Schweik.

"It's coming!" cried Kaye.

They heard the rattling noise of outdated wheels on outdated iron rails, and then a chain of roller-coaster carriages painted red and pale gold rode into view at the decelerating end of the ride on the L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway. But instead of stopping as expected, these cars continued onward past them to start around all over again, and, while Kaye shook in frustration, Yossarian stared at the riders. Again he recognized Abraham Lincoln in front. He saw La Guardia and FDR, his mother and his father, his uncles and his aunts, and his brother too. And he saw each of them double, the Angel of Death double and the gunner Snowden too, and he was seeing them twice.

He whirled around, staggering, and hastened back, escaping, and searched in baffled terror for help from the soldier Schroeder who now claimed to be a hundred and seven years old, but found only McBride, both of him, near Bob and Raul, who combined made four. McBride thought Yossarian looked funny and was walking with a falter and a list, a seesawing hand held out for stability.

"Yeah, I do feel funny," Yossarian admitted. "Let me hold your arm."

"How many fingers do you see?"

"Two."

"Now?"

"Ten."

"Now?"

"Twenty."

"You're seeing double."

"I'm beginning to see everything twice again."

"You want some help?"

"Yes."

"Hey, guys, give me a hand with him. From them too?"

"Sure."

"Cut," said the brain surgeon, in this last stage of his Rhine Journey.

"You cut," said his apprentice.

"No cuts," said Yossarian.

"Now look who's butting in."

"Should we go ahead?"

"Why not?"

"I've never done this before."

"That's what my girlfriend used to say. Where's the hammer?"

"No hammers," said Yossarian.

"Is he going to keep talking that way while we try to concentrate?"

"Give me that hammer."

"Put down that hammer," directed Patrick Beach.

"How many fingers do you see?" demanded Leon Shumacher.

"One."

"How many now?" asked Dennis Teemer.

"Still one. The same."

"He's fooling around, gentlemen," said former stage actress Frances Rolphe, born Frances Rosenbaum, who'd grown up to become mellow Frances Beach, with a face that again looked its age. "Can't you see?"

"We made him all better!"

"Gimme eat," said Yossarian.

"I would cut that dosage in half, Doctor," instructed Melissa MacIntosh. "Halcion wakes him up and Xanax makes him anxious. Prozac depresses him."

"She knows you that well, does she?" clucked Leon Shumacher, after Yossarian had been given more eat.

"We've seen each other."

"Who's her busty blonde friend?"

"Her name is Angela Moorecock."

"Heh, heh. I was hoping for something like that. What time will she get here?"

"After work and before dinner, and she may come again with a house-building boyfriend. My children may be here. Now that I'm out of danger, they may want to bid me farewell."

"That son of yours," began Leon Shumacher.

"The one on Wall Street?"

"All he wanted to hear was the bottom line. Now he won't want to invest more time here if you're not going to die. I told him you wouldn't."

"And I told him you would, naturally," said Dennis Teemer, in bathrobe and pajamas, livelier as a patient than as a doctor. His embarrassed wife told friends he was experimenting. " 'For how much?' he wanted to bet me."

"You still think it's natural?" objected Yossarian.

"For us to die?"

"For me to die."

Teemer glanced aside. "I think it's natural."

"For you?"

"I think that's natural too. I believe in life."

"You lost me."

"Everything that's alive lives on things that are living, Yossarian. You and I take a lot. We have to give back."

"I met a particle physicist on a plane to Kenosha who says that everything living is made up of things that are not."

"I know that too."

"It doesn't make you laugh? It doesn't make you cry? It doesn't make you wonder?"

"In the beginning was the word," said Teemer. "And the word was gene. Now the word is quark. I'm a biologist, not a physicist, and I can't say 'quark.' That belongs to an invisible world of the lifeless. So I stick with the gene."

"So where is the difference between a living gene and a dead quark?"

"A gene isn't living and a quark isn't dead."

"I can't say 'quark' either without wanting to laugh."

"Quark."

"Quark."

"Quark, quark."

"You win," said Yossarian. "But is there a difference between us and that?"

"Nothing in a living cell is alive. Yet the heart pumps and the tongue talks. We both know that."

"Does a microbe? A mushroom?"

"They have no soul?" guessed the surgeon in training.

"There is no soul," said the surgeon training him. "That's all in the head."

"Someone ought to tell the cardinal that."

"The cardinal knows it."

"Even a thought, even this thought, is just an electrical action between molecules."

"But there are good thoughts and bad thoughts," snapped Leon Shumacher, "so let's go on working. Were you ever in the navy with a man named Richard Nixon? He thinks he knows you."

"No, I wasn't."

"He wants to come check you out."

"I was not in the navy. Please keep him away."

"Did you ever play alto saxophone in a jazz band?"

"No."

"Were you ever in the army with the Soldier in White?"

"Twice. Why?"

"He's on a floor downstairs. He wants you to drop by to say hello."

"If he could tell you all that, he's not the same one."

"Were you ever in the army with a guy named Rabinowitz?" asked Dennis Teemer. "Lewis Rabinowitz?"

Yossarian shook his head. "Not that I remember."

"Then I may have it wrong. How about a man named Sammy Singer, his friend? He says he was from Coney Island. He thinks you may remember him from the war."

"Sammy Singer?" Yossarian sat up. "Sure, the tail gunner. A short guy, small, skinny, with wavy black hair."

Teemer smiled. "He's almost seventy now."

"Is he sick too?"

"He's friends with this patient I'm looking at."

"Tell him to drop by."

"Hiya, Captain." Singer shook the hand Yossarian put out.

Yossarian appraised a man delighted to see him, on the smallish side, with hazel eyes projecting slightly in a face that was kindly. Singer was chortling. "It's good to see you again. I've wondered about you. The doctor says you're okay."

"You've grown portly, Sam," said Yossarian, with good humor, "and a little bit wrinkled, and maybe a little taller. You used to be skinny. And you've gotten very gray, with thinning hair. And so have I. Fill me in, Sam. What's been happening the last fifty years? Anything new?"

"Call me Sammy."

"Call me Yo-Yo."

"I'm pretty good, I guess. I lost my wife. Ovarian cancer. I'm kind of floundering around."

"I've been divorced, twice. I flounder too. I suppose I'll have to marry again. It's what I'm used to. Children?"

"One daughter in Atlanta," said Sammy Singer, "and another in Houston. Grandchildren too, already in college. I don't like to throw myself on them. I have an extra bedroom for when they come to visit. I worked for Time magazine a long time-but not as a reporter," Singer added pointedly. "I did well enough, made a good living, and then they retired me to bring in young blood to keep the magazine alive."

"And now it's practically dead," said Yossarian. "I work now in that old Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Looking out on the skating rink. Were you ever in that one?"