Closing Time

"Then I suppose we might as well go ahead. Should I hammer your knee to test your reflexes?"

  "For what?"

  "For free."

  "Can't we at least do a biopsy?"

  "Of what?"

  "Of anything that's accessible and simple."

  "If you will find that reassuring."

  "I will sleep easier."

  "We can scrape another mole or another one of your liver spots. Or should we test the prostate again? The prostate is not uncommon."

  "Mine is unique," Yossarian disagreed. "It's the only one that's mine. Let's do the mole. Shumacher has a prostate my age. Let me know when you find something wrong with his."

  "I can tell you now," said Yossarian's favorite oncologist, "that it will give me great pleasure to inform you that the results are negative."

  "I can tell you now," said Yossarian, "that I will be happy to hear it."

  Yossarian yearned to go deeper with this depressed man into the depressing nature of the pathologies in the depressing world of his work and the depressing nature of the universe in which they had each been successful in surviving thus far and which was growing more unreliable daily--there were holes in the ozone, they were running out of room for the disposal of garbage, burn the garbage and you contaminate the air, they were running out of air--but he was afraid the doctor would find that conversation depressing.

  All of this cost money, of course.

  "Of course," said Yossarian.

  "Where is it coming from?" Leon Shumacher wondered out loud, with a palpable snarl of envy.

  "I'm old enough for Medicare now."

  "Medicare won't cover a fraction of this."

  "And the rest is coming from a terrific plan I have."

  "I wish I had a plan like that," Leon sulked.

  It came, explained Yossarian, from the company for which he worked, where he was still on the books in a semi-executive capacity as a semi-retired semi-consultant and could remain for a lifetime provided he never tried to get much done.

  "I wish I had a job like that. What the hell does it mean?" Leon mimicked in sneering derision: "Yossarian, John. Occupation: semi-retired semi-consultant. What the hell are our epidemiologists supposed to make of that one?"

  "It's been another one of my careers. I work part of the time for all of my fee and no one listens to more than half the things I say. I would call that a semi-retired semi-consultant, wouldn't you? The company pays for everything. We are as large as Harold Strangelove Associates and almost as lovable. We are M & M Enterprises & Associates. I am one of the associates. The other people are enterprising. I associate, they enterprise."

  "What do they really do?"

  "Whatever makes money and isn't dishonestly criminal, I suppose," Yossarian answered.

  "Is one word of this true?"

  "I have no way of knowing. They can lie to me as well as to everyone else. We keep secrets from each other. I'm not making it up. You can check. Tie me back up to that heart machine and see if it skips a beat when I tell a lie."

  "Will it do that?" Leon asked with surprise.

  "I don't see why it wouldn't."

  "What do you do there?"

  "I object."

  "Don't get so touchy."

  "I'm answering your question," Yossarian informed him pleasantly. "I object to matters that are not up to my ethical standards. Sometimes I work very hard at objecting. Then they go ahead or don't. I am the conscience of the company, a moral presence, and that's another one of the things I've been doing since I dropped by there more than twenty years ago for illegal help in keeping my children out of the Vietnam War. How'd you keep yours out?"

  "Medical school. Of course, they both switched to business administration as soon as the danger was past. By the way, my grapevine tells me you still seem to be having a pretty hot time with one of our favorite floor nurses."

  "Better than I'm having with you and your associates."

  "She's a very nice girl and a very good nurse."

  "I think I've noticed."

  "Attractive too."

  "I've seen that also."

  "We have a number of very fine specialists here who tell me frankly they'd like to get into her pants."

  "That's crude, Leon, really crude, and you ought to be ashamed," Yossarian rebuked him with disgust. "It's a most obscene way of saying you'd all like to fuck her."

  Leon was sheepish and Yossarian manipulated this momentary loss of self-possession into a favor involving a No Visitors sign outside the door, which was in place before the next one came by to disturb him.

  The knock was so diffident that Yossarian hoped for an instant the chaplain was back as a free man from wherever it was that he was being lawfully detained unlawfully. Yossarian was out of ideas to aid him and just about helpless there too.

  But it was only Michael, his youngest son, the underachiever among four adult children in what used to be a family. In addition to Michael there were his daughter, Gillian, a judge in a very low court; Julian, his eldest, another overachiever; and Adrian, who was average and content and was disregarded by the others because he was only average. Michael, unmarried, unsettled, unemployed, and unobjectionable, had stopped by to see what he was doing in the hospital still again and to confess that he was thinking of dropping out of law school because he found the work there no more stimulating than the medical school, business school, art school, graduate school of architecture, and several other graduate schools of assorted character he had been dropping out of after brief trials for as long now, it seemed, as anyone wanted to remember.

  "Oh, shit," mourned Yossarian. "I keep pulling strings to get you in, and you keep dropping out."

  "I can't help it," Michael said with discouragement. "The more I find out about the practice of law, the more I'm surprised that it isn't illegal."

  "That's one of the reasons I gave that up too. How old are you now?"

  "I'm not far from forty."

  "You still have time."

  "I'm not sure if you're joking or not."

  "Neither am I," Yossarian told him. "But if you can delay the decision of what you want to do with your life until you're old enough to retire, you will never have to make it."

  "I still can't tell if you're joking."

  "I'm still not always sure either," Yossarian answered. "Sometimes I mean what I say and don't mean it at the same time. Tell me, my apple of my eye, do you think in my checkered history I ever really wanted to do any of the work I found myself doing?"

  "Not even the film scripts?"

  "Not really and not for long. That was make-believe and didn't last, and I wasn't that crazy about the finished products there either. Do you think I wanted to go into advertising, or Wall Street, or ever get busy with things like land development or puts and calls? Whoever starts out with a dream to succeed in public relations?"

  "Did you really once work for Noodles Cook?"

  "Noodles Cook worked for me. Soon after college. Do you think we really wanted to write political speeches, Noodles Cook and I? We wanted to write plays and be published in The New Yorker. Whoever has much choice? We take the best we can get, Michael, not what enraptures us. Even the Prince of Wales."

  "That's a hell of a way to live, Dad, isn't it?"

  "It's the way we have to."

  Michael was silent a minute. "I got scared when I saw that No Visitors sign on your door," he confessed in a mild tone of injury. "Who the hell put it up? I began to think you might really be sick."

  "It's my idea of a joke," mumbled Yossarian, who had added to the sign with a brush-point pen the notice that violators would be shot. "It helps keep people out. They just keep popping in all day long without even telephoning. They don't seem to realize that lying around in a hospital all day can be pretty demanding work."

  "You never answer your telephone anyway. I bet you're the only patient here with an answering machine. How much longer are you going to stay?"

  "Is the mayor still the mayor? The cardinal st
ill the cardinal? Is that prick still in office?"

  "What prick?"

  "Whatever prick is in office. I want all pricks out."

  "You can't stay here that long!" cried Michael. "What the hell are you doing here anyway? You had your annual workup only a couple of months ago. Everyone thinks you're crazy."

  "I object. Who does?"

  "I do."

  "You're crazy."

  "We all do."

  "I object again. You're all crazy."

  "Julian says you could have taken over the whole company a long time ago if you had any ambition and brains."

  "He's crazy too. Michael, this time I was scared. I had a vision.

  "Of what?"

  "It wasn't of taking over M & M. I had an aura, or thought I did, and was afraid I was having a seizure or a tumor, and I wasn't sure if I was imagining it or not. When I'm bored I get anxious. I get things like conjunctivitis and athlete's foot. I don't sleep well. You won't believe this, Michael, but when I'm not in love I'm bored, and I'm not in love."

  "I can tell," said Michael. "You're not on a diet."

  "Is that how you know?"

  "It's one of the ways."

  "I thought of epilepsy, you know, and of a TIA, a transient ischemic attack, which you don't know about. Then I was afraid of a stroke--everyone should always be afraid of a stroke. Am I talking too much? I had this feeling I was seeing everything twice."

  "You mean double?"

  "Not that, not yet. The feeling of suspecting that I had gone through everything before. There was hardly anything new for me in the daily news. Every day there seemed to be another political campaign going on or about to start, another election, and when it wasn't that, it was another tennis tournament, or those fucking Olympic Games again. I thought it might be a good idea to come in here and check. Anyway, my brain is sound, my mind is clear. So is my conscience."

  "That's all very good."

  "Don't be too sure. Great crimes are committed by people whose conscience is clear. And don't forget, my father died of a stroke."

  "At ninety-two?"

  "Do you think that made him want to jump with joy? Michael, what will you do with yourself? Disturbing my peace of mind is my not knowing where the hell you're going to fit in."

  "Now you are talking too much."

  "You're the only one in the family I really can talk to, and you won't listen. The others all know this, even your mother, who always wants more alimony. Money does matter, more than almost everything else. Want a sound idea? Get a job now with a company with a good pension plan and a good medical plan, any company and any job, no matter how much you hate it, and stay there until you're too old to continue. That's the only way to live, by preparing to die."

  "Oh, shit, Dad, you really believe that?"

  "No, I don't, although I think it might be true. But people can't survive on Social Security, and you won't even have that. Even poor Melissa will be better off."

  "Who's poor Melissa?"

  "That sweetheart of a nurse out there, the one that's attractive and kind of young."

  "She's not so attractive and she's older than I am."

  "She is?"

  "Can't you tell?"

  Toward the end of Yossarian's second week in the hospital they hatched the plot that drove him out.

  They drove him out with the man from Belgium in the room adjacent to his. The man from Belgium was a financial wise man with the European Economic Community. He was a very sick financial wise man from Belgium and spoke little English, which did not matter much because he had just had part of his throat removed and could not speak at all, and understood hardly any English either, which mattered greatly to the nurses and several doctors, who were unable to address him in ways that had meaning. All day and much of the night he had at his bedside his waxen and diminutive Belgian wife in unpressed fashionable clothes, who smoked cigarettes continually and understood no English either and jabbered away at the nurses ceaselessly and hysterically, flying into alarms of shrieking terror each time he groaned or choked or slept or awoke. He had come to this country to be made well, and the doctors had taken out a hunk of his larynx because he certainly would have died had they left it all in. Now it was not so certain he would live. Christ, thought Yossarian, how can he stand it?

  Christ, thought Yossarian, how can I?

  The man had no way to make his feelings known but to nod or shake his head in reply to insistent questions fired at him by his wife, who had no serviceable way to relay his responses. He was in more dangers and discomforts than Yossarian could tick off on the fingers of both hands. Yossarian ran out of fingers the first time he counted and did not try again. He had grown no new fingers. There was normally such strident commotion in his vicinity that Yossarian could hardly find the time to think about himself. Yossarian worried about the man from Belgium more than he wanted to. He was moving into stress and knew stress was not healthy. People caught cancer under stress. Worrying about his stress put Yossarian under more stress, and he began to feel sorry for himself too.

  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 m
achine 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.