Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  "Were you in Wisconsin last week?" Yossarian could not help asking, with a guise of affable innocence. "Around the motel near the airport in a place called Kenosha?"

  The man shrugged neutrally, with a look at McBride.

  "We were together every day last week," McBride answered for him, "going over the floor plans of that catering company you brought in."

  "And I was in Chicago," offered the redheaded man named Bob. He folded a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and tossed the crumpled green wrapper aside to the floor.

  "Did I meet you in Chicago?" Yossarian faced him doubtfully, positive he had never laid eyes on him. "At the airport there?"

  Bob answered leniently. "Wouldn't you know that?"

  Yossarian had heard that voice before. "Would you?"

  "Of course," said the man. "It's a joke, isn't it? But I don't catch on."

  "Yo-Yo, that guy in charge of the wedding wants six dance floors and six bandstands, with one as a backup in case the other five all don't work, and I don't see where they can find the room, and I don't even know what the hell that means."

  "Me aussi," said Raul, as though he hardly cared.

  "I'll talk to him," said Yossarian.

  "And something like thirty-five hundred guests! That's three hundred and fifty round tables. And two tons of caviar. Yo-Yo, that's four thousand pounds!"

  "My wife wants to come," said Bob. "I'll have a gun in my ankle holster, but I'd like to pretend I'm a guest."

  "I'll take care of it," said Yossarian.

  "Moi also," said Raul, and threw away his cigarette.

  "I'll take care of that too," said Yossarian. "But tell me what's happening here. What is this place?"

  "We're here to find out," said Bob. "We'll talk to the sentries."

  "Yo-Yo, wait while we check."

  "Yo-Yo." Raul sniggered. "My Dieux."

  All three looked left into the tunnel. And then Yossarian saw sitting inside on a bentwood chair a soldier in a red combat uniform with an assault rifle across his lap, and behind him near the wall stood a second armed soldier, with a larger weapon. On the other side, in the amber haze telescoping backward into the narrowing horizon of a beaming vanishing point, he made out two other motionless soldiers, in exactly that grouping. They could have been reflections.

  "What's over there?" Yossarian pointed across toward the passageway to SUB-BASEMENTS A-Z.

  "Nothing we found yet," said McBride. "You take a look, but don't go far."

  "There's something else tres funny," said Raul, and finally smiled. He stamped his foot a few times and then began jumping and landing on both heels heavily. "Notice anything, my ami? No noise down here, nous can't make noise."

  All shuffled, stamped, jumped in place to demonstrate, Yossarian too. They made no dent in the silence. Bob rapped his knuckles on the banister of the staircase, and the thud was as expected. When he rapped them on the ground there was nothing.

  "That's pretty weird, isn't it?" said Bob, smiling. "It's as though we're not even here."

  "What's in your pockets?" Yossarian questioned Raul abruptly. "You don't take your hands out. Not in my dream or in the street across from my building."

  "My cock and my balls," said Raul at once.

  McBride was embarrassed. "His gun and his badge."

  "That's mon cock and mes balls," joked Raul, but did not laugh.

  "I've got one more question, if you want to come to the wedding," said Yossarian. "Why have you got your sentries there--to keep people in or keep people out?"

  All three shot him a look of surprise.

  "They aren't ours," said Bob.

  "It's what we want to find out," explained McBride.

  "Let's allons

  They moved away, with no fall of footsteps.

  Yossarian made no sound either when he started across.

  He noted next another strange thing. They cast no shadows. He cast none either as he crossed the sterile thoroughfare like a specter or soundless sleepwalker to the catwalk of white tile. The steps going up were also white, and the handrails of an albumescent porcelain that shimmered almost into invisibility against the like background of pure white, and they also were without shadows. And there was no dirt, and not one beaming reflection from one mote in the air. He felt himself nowhere. He remembered the gum wrapper and the wet cigarette. He glanced down backward to make sure he was right. He was.

  The crumpled green wrapper balled up by Bob was nowhere to be seen. The unlit cigarette had vanished too. Before his eyes as he searched, the green gum wrapper materialized through the surface of the compound underfoot and was again on the ground. Then it dwindled away rearward and was altogether gone. The unlit cigarette came back next. And then that went away also. They had come out of nowhere and gone away someplace, and he had the unearthly sense that he had only to think of an object to bring it into an unreal reality before him--if he mused of a half-undressed Melissa in ivory underwear, she would be lying there obligingly; he did and she was--and to turn his sensibility away to something else and it would dwindle from existence. She disappeared. Next he was sure he heard faintly the distinctive puffing music of the band organ of a carousel. McBride was nowhere near to verify the sound. Possibly, McBride would hear it as a roller-coaster. And then Yossarian was no longer sure, for the calliope was producing gaily in waltz time the somber, forceful Siegfried Funeral Music from the culminating Gotterdammerung, which precedes by less than one hour the immolation of Brunnhilde and her horse, the destruction of Valhalla, and the death knell of those great gods, who were always unhappy, always in anguish.

  Yossarian went up to the catwalk and moved into the archway past the memorial affirming that Kilroy had been there. He sensed with a twinge that Kilroy, immortal, was dead too, had died in Korea if not Vietnam.

  "Halt!"

  The order rang through the archway with an echo. In front on another bentwood chair, slightly forward of a turnstile with rotating bars of steel, sat another armed sentry.

  This one too was uniformed in a battle jacket that was crimson and a visored green hat that looked like a jockey cap. Yossarian advanced at his signal, feeling weightless, insubstantial, contingent. The guard was young, had light hair in a crew cut, sharp eyes, and a thin mouth, and Yossarian discerned as he drew close enough to see freckles that he looked exactly like the young gunner Arthur Schroeder, with whom he had flown overseas almost fifty years before.

  "Who goes there?"

  "Major John Yossarian, retired," said Yossarian.

  "Can I be of help to you, Major?"

  "I want to go in."

  "You'll have to pay."

  "I'm with them."

  "You'll still have to pay."

  "How much?"

  "Fifty cents."

  Yossarian handed him two quarters and was given a round blue ticket with numbers in sequence wheeling around the rim of the disk of flimsy cardboard on a loop of white string. In helpful pantomime, the guard directed him to slip the loop over his head to hang the ticket around his neck and down over his breast. The name above the piping of his pocket read A. SCHROEDER.

  "There's an elevator, sir, if you want to go directly."

  "What's down there?"

  "You're supposed to know, sir."

  "Your name is Schroeder?"

  "Yes, sir. Arthur Schroeder."

  "That's fucking funny." The soldier said nothing as Yossarian studied him. "Were you ever in the air corps?"

  "No, sir."

  "How old are you, Schroeder?"

  "I'm a hundred and seven."

  "That's a good number. How long have you been here?"

  "Since 1900."

  "Hmmmmm. You were about seventeen when you enrolled?"

  "Yes, sir. I came in with the Spanish-American War."

  "These are all lies, aren't they?"

  "Yes, sir. They are."

  "Thank you for telling me the truth."

  "I always tell the truth, sir."

  "Is tha
t another lie?"

  "Yes, sir. I always lie."

  "That can't be true then, can it? Are you from Crete?"

  "No, sir. I'm from Athens, Georgia. I went to school in Ithaca, New York. My home is now in Carthage, Illinois."

  "Is that so?"

  "Yes, sir. I cannot tell a lie."

  "You are from Crete, aren't you? You know the paradox of the Cretan who tells you Cretans always lie? It's impossible to believe him, isn't it? I want to go inside."

  "You have your ticket." The guard punched a hole in the center and another in a number. The number was for the Human Pool Table.

  "I can't go on that ride?"

  "You've already been, sir," advised the guard named Schroeder. "Those are aluminized metal detectors just inside that arcade. Don't bring drugs or explosives. Be prepared for noise and the bright lights."

  Yossarian pushed through the turnstile and walked into the framework of silver metal detectors at the entrance to the hallway. The moment he did, the lighting blinked off. And next, harsh white lights flashed on with a blaze that almost staggered him. He discovered himself inside a brilliantly illuminated hallway of magic mirrors. A roaring noise all but deafened him. It seemed like the blasts of an MRI machine. And he saw that the mirrors glittering grotesquely on all sides and overhead were deforming his reflections dissimilarly, as though he were liquefied into highlighted mercury and melting distinctly into something different from every point of view. Discrete parts of him were enlarged and elongated as though for extracting examination; his images were billowing into quantities of swells. In one mirror, he witnessed his head and neck misshapen into a slender block of Yossarian, while his torso and legs were stunted and bloated. In the mirror beside that one his body was monstrously inflated and his face reduced to a grape, a pimple with hair and a minuscule face with crushed features and a grin. He perceived that he was close to laughing, and the novelty of that surprise tickled him more. In no two mirrors were the deformities alike, in no one lens were the anomalies consistent. His authentic appearance, his objective structure, was no longer absolute. He had to wonder what he truly looked like. And then the ground beneath his feet began to move.

  The floor jerked back and forth. He adjusted smoothly, recalling the jolly tricks of George C. Tilyou in his old Steeplechase Park. This was one. The deafening noise had ceased. The heat from the lights was searing. Most piercing was a scorching dazzle of pure white that burned above his right eye and another, just as hot, that gleamed like a flare off his left. He could not find them. When he turned to try, they moved with his vision and remained in place, and then he felt the ground beneath his feet shift again, to a different prank, in which the right half jerked in one backward or forward thrust while the other went opposite, the two reversing themselves rapidly to the regulated pace of an undeviating heartbeat. He bore himself forward easily on this one too. The lights turned indigo blue, and much of him looked black. The lights turned red, and areas of him were drained of color again. Back in normal light, he almost swooned at a hideous glimpse of himself as homeless, abominable, filthy, and depraved. In a different mirror he ballooned into a nauseating metamorphosis of a swollen insect inside a fragile brown carapace; then he was Raul, and Bob, and then with another revolting fright he saw himself reflected as the frowsy, squat, untidy, middle-aged woman with the pudgy chin and crude face dogging him in the red Toyota, and then he changed again to look the way he always thought he did. He walked onward, hurrying away, and found himself challenged at the end by a last mirror in front, which blocked him in like a massive barrier of glass. In this one, he was still himself, but the features on the face in the head on his shoulders were those of a smiling young man with a hopeful, innocent, naive, and defiant demeanor. He saw himself under thirty with a blooming outlook, an optimistic figure no less comely and immortal than the lordliest divinity that ever was, but no more. His hair was short, black, and wavy, and he was at a time in his life when he still smugly fostered audacious expectations that all was possible.

  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 GORGE.

  "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 front-page 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.