"I don't like the Bible," Michael interrupted.
"Nobody does. Try King Lear instead. But you don't like to read anything."
"It's why I decided to become an artist."
"You never really tried, did you?"
"I never really wanted to. It's much easier to want to succeed at nothing at all, isn't it?"
"No. It's good to want something. I'm finding that out. I used to wake up each day with a brain full of plans I couldn't wait to get started on. Now I wake up listless and wonder what I can find to keep me entertained. It happened overnight. One day I was old, just like that. I've run out of youth, and I'm barely sixty-nine."
Michael gazed at him with love. "Dye your hair. Dye it black if you can't get it gray. Don't wait for Adrian."
"Like Aschenbach?"
"Aschenbach?"
"Gustav Aschenbach."
"From Death in Venice again? I never liked that story much and can't see why you do. I bet I can tell you a few things wrong with it."
"So can I. But it remains unforgettable."
"To you."
"To you too someday, maybe."
Aschenbach too had run out of interests, although he distracted himself with his ridiculous obsession and the conceit that there was still much left for him to do. He was an artist of the intellect, who had tired of working on projects that would no longer yield to even his most patient effort, and knew he now was faking it. But he did not know that his true creative life was over and that he and his era were coming to a close, whether he liked it or not. And he was only just past fifty. Yossarian had the advantage over him there. He had never had much that he had allowed himself to enjoy. A strange nature for Yossarian to empathize with now, this man who lived like a tightened fist and began each day with the same cold shower, who worked in the morning and wished nothing more than to be able to continue his work in the evening.
"He dyed his hair black," Yossarian related, like a lecturer, "easily allowed a barber to persuade him to do that, to put makeup around his eyes for the illusion of a glisten, to color his cheeks with a touch of red, to plump up his eyebrows, to erase the age from his skin with a face cream and round out his lips with tints and with shadows, and he gave up the ghost anyway, right on the dot. And got nothing in return for his trouble but the tormenting delusion that he had fallen in love with a boy with crooked teeth and a sandy nose. Our Aschenbach could not even bring himself to die dramatically, not even of the plague. He simply bowed his head and gave up the ghost."
"I think," said Michael, "you might be trying to make it sound better than it really is."
"Maybe," said Yossarian, who felt qualms it might be so, "but that's where I stand. Here's what Mann wrote then: that a menace had hung over Europe for months."
"World War II?" Michael guessed, indulging him.
"World War I!" Yossarian corrected emphatically. "Even back then, Mann could see where this ungovernable machine we call our civilization was heading. And here's what's been my fate in this latter half of my life. I make money from Milo, whom I don't care for and condemn. And I find myself identifying in self-pity with a fictional German with no humor or any other likable trait. Soon I'll be going down deeper into PABT with McBride to find out what's there. Is that my Venice? I met a man in Paris once, a cultured book publisher, who could not bring himself ever to go to Venice, because of that story. I met another man who could not vacation for as long as a week at any resort in the mountains because of The Magic Mountain. He'd have the hideous dream that he was dying there and would never get away alive if he stayed, and he'd get the hell out the next day."
"Is a Minderbinder going to marry a Maxon?"
"They both have brides to offer. I've suggested M2."
"When are you going back there with McBride?"
"Soon as the President says he might come and we get permission to examine the place. When are you going with M2?"
"As soon as he's hot to look at dirty pictures again. I draw my pay from M & M too."
"If you want to live under water, Michael, you must learn to breathe like a fish."
"How do you feel about that?"
"That we never had a choice. I don't feel good about it, but I won't feel bad. It's our natural destiny, as Teemer might say. Biologically, we are a new species and haven't learned to fit into nature yet. He thinks we're cancers."
"Cancers?"
"But he likes us anyway, and he doesn't like cancer."
"I think he's crazy," Michael protested.
"He thinks so too," Yossarian replied, "and has moved into the psychiatric ward of the hospital for treatment while he continues work as an oncologist. Does that seem crazy?"
"It doesn't seem sane."
"That doesn't mean he's mistaken. We can see the social pathology. What else worries you, Michael?"
"I'm pretty much alone, I told you," said Michael. "And I'm starting to get scared. About money too. You've managed to get me worried about that."
"I'm glad I've been useful."
"I wouldn't know where to get it if I didn't have any. I couldn't even mug anybody. I don't know how."
"And would probably get mugged trying to learn."
"I can't even learn how to drive a car."
"You would do what I would do if I had no money."
"What's that, Dad?"
"Kill myself, son."
"You're a barrel of laughs, Dad."
"It's what I would do. It's no worse than dying. I couldn't learn to be poor either, and I'd sooner give up."
"What will happen to those drawings I did?"
"They'll be printed in brochures and taken to Washington for the next meeting on the plane. I may have to go there too. You made money on that one, that flying wing."
"Finishing something I never even wanted to start."
"If you want to live like a fish ... Michael, there are things you and I won't do for money, but there are some things we have to, or we won't have any. You've got those few more years to find out how to take care of yourself. For Christ sakes, learn how to drive! You can't live anywhere else if you can't do that."
"Where would I go?"
"To whoever you want to see."
"There's no one I want to see."
"To drive away from people you don't want to be with."
"I just know I'll kill somebody."
"Let's take that chance."
"You said that before. Is there really going to be a wedding at the bus terminal? I'd like to go."
"I'll get you an invitation."
"Make it two?" Michael moved his eyes away sheepishly. "Marlene is back in the city and needed a place for a while. She'll probably like that."
"Arlene?"
"Marlene, the one who just left. Maybe this time she'll stay. She says she doesn't think she'd mind if I have to work as a lawyer. My God, a wedding in that bus terminal. What kind of people would hold a wedding in a place like that just to get their name in the newspapers?"
"Their kind."
"And what kind of asshole came up with a crazy notion like that one?"
"My kind," said Yossarian, roaring. "It was your dad's idea."
19
MASSPOB
"And what does a flying wing look like?"
"Other flying wings," Wintergreen interposed adroitly, with Milo struck dumb by a query he had not anticipated.
"And what do other flying wings look like?"
"Our flying wing," answered Milo, his composure restored.
"Will it look," asked a major, "like the old Stealth?"
"No. Only in appearance."
"Absolutely, Colonel Pickering?"
"Positively, Major Bowes."
Since the first session on the M & M defensive second-strike offensive attack bomber, Colonel Pickering had elected early retirement with full pension benefits to capitalize on the opportunity for a more remunerative, if less showy, position with the Airborne Division of M & M Enterprises & Associates, where his opening yearly income wa
s precisely half a hundred times richer than his earnings in federal employ. General Bernard Bingam, at Milo's request, was delaying a similar move in hopes of promotion and eventual elevation to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and after that, given half a break with a good war, perhaps the White House itself.
It was fortunate Pickering was there to help, for this newest session on the Minderbinder bomber was proving more prickly than the others. A hint of difficulties in store had come with the unexpected attendance of the fat man from the State Department and the skinny one from the National Security Council. It was now no secret they were partisans of the competitive Strangelove entry, and they had placed themselves on opposite ends of the curved table to project the impression they were speaking separately with independent voices.
Both were career diplomats who regularly spent time away as Strangelove Associates, replenishing with newly acquired supplies the secondhand influence and fine contacts that, with bombast, were the stock-in-trade of the Strangelove empire. Another cause of consternation for Milo was the absence of an ally he'd counted on, C. Porter Lovejoy, who was otherwise occupied, perhaps, Milo feared, at a similar meeting in MASSPOB on the Strangelove B-Ware, as an ally of that one.
General Bingam was obviously delighted to be parading his aptitudes before officers from other branches who outranked him and masters in atomic matters and related abstruse scientific areas. Bingam knew a feather in his cap when he had one. There were thirty-two others in this elite enclave, and all were eager to speak, even though there were no television cameras.
"Tell them about the technology, Milo," General Bingam suggested, to move things along advantageously.
"Let me distribute these pictures first," answered Milo, as rehearsed, "so we can see what our planes look like."
"These are lovely," said a bespectacled lieutenant colonel with experience in design. "Who drew them?"
"An artist named Yossarian."
"Yossarian?"
"Michael Yossarian. He is a specialist in military art and works exclusively for us."
Coming down as instructed from the MASSPOB basement through the door to Sub-Basement A, Milo and Wintergreen had been met by three armed MASSPOB guards in uniforms they had not seen before: red battle jackets, green pants, and black leather combat boots, with name tags in cerise letters against a lustrous fabric of silken mother-of-pearl. They were checked against a roster and replied correctly when asked the password: Bingam's Baby. They were handed round pasteboard passes with numbers in a border of blue, to be worn around the neck on a skimpy white string, and instructed to proceed directly to the Bingam's Baby conference room in Sub-Basement A, the circular chamber in which Michael's pictures were now making so auspicious an impression.
All present were reminded that the plane was a second-strike weapon designed to slip through remaining defenses and destroy weapons and command posts surviving the first strike.
"Now, everything you see in these pictures is absolutely right," continued Milo, "except those that are wrong. We don't want to show anything that will allow others to counter the technology or copy it. That make sense, General Bingam?"
"Absolutely, Milo."
"But how will any of us here know," objected the fat man from the State Department, "what it will really look like?"
"Why the fuck must you know?" countered Wintergreen.
"It's invisible," added Milo. "Why must you see it?"
"I guess we don't have to know, do we?" conceded a lieutenant general, and looked toward an admiral.
"Why do we have to know?" wondered the other.
"Sooner or later," fumed the skinny Strangelove partisan, "the press will want to know."
"Fuck the press," said Wintergreen. "Show them these."
"Are they true?"
"What the fuck difference does it fucking make if they're fucking true or not?" asked Wintergreen. "It gives them another fucking story when they find out we lied."
"Now you're talking my fucking language, sir," said the adjutant to the commandant of marines.
"And I applaud your fucking honesty," admitted a colonel. "Admiral?"
"I can live with that. Where's the fucking cockpit?"
"Inside the fucking wing, sir, with everything else."
"Will a crew of two," asked someone, "be as effective as a fucking crew of four?"
"More," said Milo.
"And what the fuck fucking difference does it fucking make if they're fucking effective or not?" asked Wintergreen.
"I get your fucking point, sir," said Major Bowes.
"I don't."
"I can live with that fucking point."
"I'm not sure I get that fucking point."
"Milo, what's your angle?"
There were no angles. The flying wing allowed the aircraft to be fabricated with rounded edges in material deflecting radar. What was being fucking offered, explained Wintergreen, was a fucking long-range airplane to roam over fucking enemy territory with only two fucking fliers. Even without midair refueling, the plane could go from there to San Francisco with a full load of bombs.
"Does this mean we could bomb San Francisco from here and get back without more gas?"
"We could bomb New York too on the way back."
"Guys, get serious," commanded the major general there. "This is war, not social planning. How many refuelings to China or the Soviet Union?"
"Two or three on the way in, maybe none coming back, if you don't get sentimental."
And just one M & M bomber could carry the same bomb load as all thirteen fighter-bombers used in the Ronald Reagan air raid in Libya in--in--April 1986.
"It seems like only yesterday," mused an elderly air force man dreamily.
"We can give you a plane," promised Wintergreen, "that will do it yesterday."
"Shhhhh!" Milo said.
"The Shhhhh!?" said the expert on military nomenclature. "That's a perfect name for a noiseless bomber."
"Then the Shhhhh! is the name of our plane. It goes faster than sound."
"It goes faster than light."
"You can bomb someone before you even decide to do it. Decide it today, it's done--yesterday!"
"I don't really think," said someone, "we have need for a plane that can bomb someone yesterday."
"But think of the potential," argued Wintergreen. "They attack Pearl Harbor. You shoot them down the day before."
"I could live with that one. How much more--"
"Wait a minute, wait a minute," begged someone else among the several now stirring rebelliously. "How can that be? Artie, can anything go faster than light?"
"Sure, Marty. Light can go faster than light."
"Read your fucking Einstein!" yelled Wintergreen.
"And our first operational plane can go on alert in the year 2000 and give you something really to celebrate."
"What happens if we get in a nuclear war before then?"
"You won't have our product. You have to wait."
"Your bomber, then, is an instrument for peace?"
"Yes. And we also have a man we'll throw in," confided Milo, "who can produce heavy water for you internally."
"I want that man! At any price!"
"Absolutely, Dr. Teller?"
"Positively, Admiral Rickover."
"And our instrument for peace can be used to dump heavy bomb loads on cities too."
"We don't like to bomb civilians."
"Yes, we do. It's cost-effective. You can also arm our Shhhhh! with conventional bombs, for surprise attacks too. The big surprise will come when there's no nuclear explosion. You can use these against friendly nations, with no lasting radiation aftereffects. Will Strangelove do that?"
"What does Porter Lovejoy say?"
"Not guilty."
"I mean before his indictment."
"Buy both planes."
"Is there money for both?"
"It doesn't matter."
"I wouldn't want to tell the President that."
"We have a man wh
o will talk to the President," volunteered Milo. "His name is Yossarian."
"Yossarian? I've heard that name."
"He's a very famous artist, Bernie."
"Sure, I know his work," said General Bingam.
"This is a different Yossarian."
"Isn't it time for another recess?"
"I may need Yossarian," muttered Milo, with his palm sheltering his mouth, "to talk to Noodles Cook. And where the fuck is that chaplain?"
"They keep moving him around, sir," whispered Colonel Pickering. "We don't know where the fuck he is."
This ten-minute recess turned out to be a five-minute recess in which six MASSPOB guards paraded in with a mulberry birthday cake for General Bernard Bingam and the papers promoting him from a brigadier general to a major general. Bingam blew out the candles on his first try and asked jovially: "Is there anything more?"
"Yes! Definitely yes!" cried the stout man from the State Department.
"I'll say there is!" cried just as loudly the slim one from National Security.
Fat and Skinny had a race to make the most of the fact that a number of features in the M & M Shhhhh! were identical to those of the old Stealth.
"Sir, your fucking ejection seats were originally in plans for the fucking old Stealth. Our reports show these fucking seats were shredding dummies in tests."
"We can supply you," said Milo, "with all the replacement dummies you need."
Fat fell down and broke his face.
"He was concerned, I believe," interposed the Dean of Humanities and Social Work at the War College, "about the men, not the fucking dummies."
"We can supply as many men as you need too."
Skinny was muddled, and Fat was struck dumb.
"We are inquiring as to their safety, sir. Your machines, you say, can stay aloft for long periods, even years. Our machines with men aboard must be able to come back."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yeah, what for?"
"Why the fuck do they have to come back?"
"What the fuck is wrong with all you fucking idiots anyway?" demanded Wintergreen, with a disbelieving shake of his head. "Our plane is a second-strike weapon. Colonel Pickering, will you talk to these fucking shitheads and explain?"
Closing Time Page 26