Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  "It was given just to him, and not for notoriety."

  "May I pass that information on?"

  "It was at that funeral in Pianosa," she related, "at the burial of that young Samuel Singer we spoke of before."

  "It was not Singer, Mrs. Tappman. It was Snowden."

  "I'm sure he said Singer."

  "It makes no difference, but I gave him first aid. Please go on."

  "Yes, he was conducting this Singer's funeral service and felt himself running out of words. That's just how he describes it. And then he looked up toward the heavens to confess and resign his office, to renounce right there any belief in God, or religion, or justice, or morality, or mercy, and then, as he was about to do it, with those other officers and enlisted men looking on, he was granted his sign. It was a vision, the image of a man. And he was sitting in a tree. Just outside the cemetery, with a grieving face, watching the funeral with very sad eyes, and he had those eyes fixed on my husband."

  "Mrs. Tappman," said Yossarian, with a long sigh, and his heart was heavy. "That was me."

  "In the tree?" She arched her brows in ridicule. He had seen such looks before on true believers, true believers in anything, but never a self-assurance more rooted. "It could not be," she informed him, with a certitude almost brutal. "Mr. Yossarian, the figure was unclothed."

  With delicacy, he asked, "Your husband never told you how that might have come about?"

  "How else could it come about, Mr. Yossarian? It was obviously an angel."

  "With wings?"

  "You're being sacrilegious now. He did not need wings, for a miracle. Why should an angel ever need wings? Mr. Yossarian, I want my husband back. I don't care about anyone else." She was beginning to cry.

  "Mrs. Tappman, you have opened my eyes," said Yossarian, with pity and renewed fervor. He had learned from a lifetime of skepticism that a conviction, even a naive conviction, was in the last analysis more nourishing than the wasteland of none. "I will try my best. In Washington I have a last resort, a man at the White House who owes me some favors."

  "Please ask him. I want to know you're still trying."

  "I will beg him, implore him. At least one time a day he has access to the President."

  "To the little prick?"

  It was still early when she dropped him at his motel.

  Coming back from the bar after three double Scotches, he saw a red Toyota from New York in the lot, and a woman inside eating, and when he stopped to stare, she turned on the headlights and sped away, and he knew with a half-inebriated sniffle of laughter that he had to have been imagining the Toyota and her.

  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 Leverkuhn 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.

  24

  Apocalypse

  "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'l
l 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."

  "That's not your business either."

  "I always dream of sex my first night out when I travel alone. It's a reason I don't mind going out of town."

  "Mr. Gaffney, that's lovely. But it's none of my business."

  "When I go with Mrs. Gaffney, there's no need to dream. Fortunately, she too likes to perform the sex act immediately in every new setting."

  "That's lovely too, but I don't want to hear it, and I don't want you to hear about mine."

  "You should be more guarded."

  "It's the reason I hired you, damn it. I'm followed by you and followed by others I don't know a fucking thing about, and I want it to stop. I want my privacy back."

  "Then give up the chaplain."

  "I don't have the chaplain."

  "I know that, Yo-Yo, but they don't."

  "I'm too old for Yo-Yo."

  "Your friends call you Yo-Yo."

  "Name one, you jackass."

  "I will check. But you came to the right man when you came to the Gaff. I can tell you the ways they keep you under surveillance, and I can teach you to avoid surveillance, and then I can give you the measures they employ to thwart someone like you who has learned to thwart their surveillance."

  "Aren't you contradicting yourself?"

  "Yes. But meanwhile I've spotted four following you who've disguised themselves cleverly. Look, there goes the gentleman we know as our Jewish G-man, trying to get on a plane to New York. He was in Kenosha yesterday."

  "I saw him somewhere but wasn't sure."

  "Possibly in your dream. Pacing in the motel parking lot and saying his evening prayers. How many do you recognize?"

  "At least one," said Yossarian, warming to the counterintelligence business in which they now seemed to be conspiring. "And I don't even have to look. A tall man in seersucker with freckles and orange hair. It's almost winter and he's still wearing seersucker. Right? I'll bet he's there, against a wall or column, drinking soda from a paper cup."

  "It's an Orange Julius. He wants to be spotted."

  "By whom?"

  "I'll check."

  "No, let me do it!" Yossarian declared. "I'm going to talk to that bastard, once and for all. You keep watch."

  "I have a gun in my ankle holster."

  "You too?"

  "Who else?"

  "McBride, a friend of mine."

  "At PABT?"

  "You know him?"

  "I've been there," said Gaffney. "You'll be going again soon now that the wedding has been set."

  "It has?" This was news to Yossarian.

  Gaffney again looked pleased. "Even Milo doesn't know that yet, but I do. You can order the caviar. Please let me tell him. The SEC has to approve. Do you find that one funny?"

  "I've heard it before."

  "Don't say much to that agent. He might be CIA."

  Yossarian was displeased with himself because he felt no real anger as he strode up to his quarry.

  "Hi," said the man, curiously. "What's up?"

  Yossarian spoke gruffly. "Didn't I see you following me in New York yesterday?"

  "No."

  And that was going to be all.

  "Were you in New York?" Yossarian was now much less peremptory.

  "I was in Florida." His mannerly bearing seemed an immutable mask. "I have a brother in New York."

  "Does he look like you?"

  "We're twins."

  "Is he a federal agent?"

  "I don't have to answer that one."

  "Are you?"

  "I don't know who you are."

  "I'm Yossarian. John Yossarian."

  "Let me see your credentials."

  "You've both been following me, haven't you?"

  "Why would we follow you?"

  "That's what I want to find out."

  "I don't have to tell you. You've got no credentials."

  "I don't have credentials," Yossarian, crestfallen, reported back to Gaffney.

  "I've got credentials. Let me go try."

  And in less than a minute, Jerry Gaffney and the man in the seersucker suit were chatting away in untroubled affinity like very old friends. Gaffney showed a billfold and gave him what looked to Yossarian like a business card, and when a policeman and four or five other people in plain clothes who might have been policemen also drew close briskly, Gaffney distributed a similar card to each, and then to everyone in the small crowd of bystanders who had paused to watch, and finally to the two young black women behind the food counter serving hot dogs, prepackaged sandwiches, soft pretzels with large grains of kosher salt, and soft drinks like Orange Julius. Gaffney returned eventually, immensely satisfied with himself. He spoke softly, but only Yossarian would know, for his demeanor appeared as serene as before.

  "He isn't following you, John," he said, and could have been talking about the weather as far as anyone watching could tell. "He's following someone else who's following you. He wants to find out how much they find out about you."

  "Who?" demanded Yossarian. "Which one?"

  "He hasn't found out yet," answered Gaffney. "It might be me. That would be funny to somebody else, but I see you're not laughing. John, he thinks you might be CIA."

  "That's libelous. I hope you told him I'm not."

  "I don't know yet that you're not. But I won't tell him anything until he becomes a client. I only told him this much." Gaffney pushed another one of his business cards across the table. "You should have one too."

  Yossarian scanned the card with knitted brow, for the words identified the donor as the proprietor of a Gaffney Real Estate Agency, with offices in the city and on the New York and Connecticut seashores and in the coastal municipalities of Santa Monica and San Diego in lower California.

  "I'm not sure I get it," said Yossarian.

  "It's a front," said Gaffney. "A come-on."

  "Now I do." Yoss
arian grinned. "It's a screen for your detective agency. Right?"

  "You've got it backwards. The agency is a front for my real estate business. There's more money in real estate."

  "I'm not sure I can believe you."

  "Am I trying to be funny?"

  "It's impossible to tell."

  "I'm luring him on," Jerry Gaffney explained. "Right into one of my offices pretending he's a prospect looking for a house, while he tries to find out who I really am."

  "To find out what he's up to?"

  "To sell him a house, John. That's where my real income is. This should interest you. We have choice rentals in East Hampton for next summer, for the season, the year, and the short term. And some excellent waterfront properties too, if you're thinking of buying."

  "Mr. Gaffney," said Yossarian.

  "Are we back to that?"

  "I know less about you now than I did before. You said I'd be making this trip, and here I am making it. You predicted there'd be blizzards, and now there are blizzards."

  "Meteorology is easy."

  "You seem to know all that's happening on the face of the earth. You know enough to be God."

  "There's more money in real estate," answered Gaffney. "That's how I know we have no God. He'd be active in real estate too. That's not a bad one, is it?"

  "I've heard worse."

  "I have one that may be better. I also know much that goes on under the earth. I've been beneath PABT too, you know."

  "You've heard the dogs?"

  "Oh, sure," said Gaffney. "And seen the Kilroy material. I have connections in MASSPOB too, electronic connections," he appended, and his thin, sensual lips, which were almost liverish in a rich tinge, spread wide again in that smile of his that was cryptic and somehow incomplete. "I've even," he continued, with some pride, "met Mr. Tilyou."

  "Mr. Tilyou?" echoed Yossarian. "Which Mr. Tilyou?"

  "Mr. George C. Tilyou," Gaffney explained. "The man who built the old Steeplechase amusement park in Coney Island."

  "I thought he was dead."

  "He is."

  "Is that your joke?"

  "Does it give you a laugh?"

  "Only a smile."

  "You can't say I'm not trying," said Gaffney. "Let's go now. Look back if you wish. That will keep them coming. They won't know whether to stick with Yossarian or follow me. You'll have a smooth trip. Think of this episode as an entr'acte, an intermezzo between Kenosha and your business with Milo and Noodles Cook. Like Wagner's music for Siegfried's Rhine Journey and the Funeral Music in the Gotterdammerung, or that interlude of clinking anvils in Das Rheingold."