Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  "Does it live as long as a normal cell?"

  "A cancer cell is normal," was the frustrating answer, "for what it is. Biologically, why would you expect it to behave any differently? They can live forever--"

  "Forever?"

  "In the laboratory, unlike our others. They multiply irresistibly. Doesn't that sound healthy? They migrate and colonize and expand. Biologically, in the world of living things, why would you expect there would not be cells more aggressive than the rest?"

  "Hmmmmm."

  "And biology always does what it has to do. It doesn't know why and it doesn't care. It doesn't have choices. But unlike us, it doesn't seek reasons."

  "Those are very large thoughts you are working with," I said to him, ambiguously.

  "I wish he would stop," said his wife.

  "It's my pleasure," said Teemer, with what passed for a smile. "Radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy are my work. But it's not the work that depresses me. It's the depression that depresses me."

  "I wish he'd come home," said Mrs. Teemer.

  He was honored to be taken seriously by his medical colleagues in psychiatry: they thought he was crazy but found that irrelevant.

  Meeting Yossarian again brought back a flood of treasured war memories, even of gruesome events that were perilous and revolting, like those of wounded Snowden dying of cold and Yossarian throwing up numbly into his own lap. And of me blacking out dizzily each time I recovered and saw something else taking place I could not force myself to watch: Yossarian folding flesh back into a wound on the thigh, cutting bandages, retching, using the pearly cloth of Snowden's parachute as a blanket to warm him, and then as a shroud. There was that ditching with Orr, and the missing carbon dioxide cylinders for the ice cream sodas from Milo that the officers could have every day and we enlisted men got only on Sundays. At the investigation, it turned out logistically that there could be life vests or sodas, not both. They voted for sodas, because there were more of us to enjoy sodas than would ever need life jackets. I had that crash-landing with Hungry Joe. They gave him a medal for bringing the plane back and wrecking it needlessly. And there was a medal to Yossarian for going around over the bridge at Ferrara a second time, with McWatt at the controls caroling: "Oh, well, what the hell." Yossarian, seeing the crosshairs drifting and knowing he would miss, had not wasted his bombs. We were the only planes left with a chance at the target, and now all the antiaircraft fire would be aimed just at us.

  "I guess we have to go back in again, don't we?" I heard McWatt on the intercom, when the bridge was undamaged.

  "I guess we do," Yossarian answered.

  "Do we?" said McWatt.

  "Yeah."

  "Oh, well," sang McWatt, "what the hell."

  And back we went and hit the bridge, and saw Kraft, our copilot in the States, get killed in the plane alongside. And then Kid Sampson too, of course, cut apart at the beach by McWatt in a plane while capering on the raft anchored in the water. And "Oh, well, what the hell," McWatt had caroled to the control tower, before banking around lazily to fly himself into a mountain. And, of course, always Howie Snowden, cold and bleeding just a few feet away, crying out suddenly as he bled:

  "It's starting to hurt me!"

  And then I saw he was in pain. Until then I didn't know there could be pain. And I saw death. And from that mission on, I prayed to God at the start of every one, although I did not believe in God and had no faith in prayer.

  At home, there was never much interest in that war, my war, except by Michael, whose attention span was short. To the girls it was merely a tall tale and a travelogue. Michael would listen hard a minute or two before whirling off on tangents more personal. As a tail gunner, I faced backward and crouched on my knees or sat on a rest like a bike seat. And Michael could picture it perfectly, he contended swiftly, because he had a bike with a seat and would ride it to the beach to stare at the waves and the bathers and could I look straight ahead while facing backward? Michael, that wasn't funny, the girls scolded. He grinned as though joking. No, I answered, I could look only straight back, but a top turret gunner like Bill Knight could spin his guns around in all directions. "Well, I can also," said Michael, "still spin. I can still spin a top, I betcha. Do you know how come we all put away our bathing suits at the same time of year, and ... begin spinning our tops?" The girls threw up their hands. Glenda too. Michael did not seem to me always to be trying to be funny, although he obligingly assumed that character when charged. We called him Sherlock Holmes because he paid attention to details and sounds the rest of us ignored, and he played that role too with the same exaggerated comic theatricality. He had difficulty with proverbs, such as I had not imagined could exist. He could understand that a stitch in time might save nine, but he could not see how that applied to anything but sewing. He appeared absolutely dumbfounded one time when Glenda, advising him about something else, remarked that it was always better to look before you leaped, for he had not been thinking about leaping. Like his mother when a child, he was obedient to everyone. He helped with dishes when asked to. And when classmates told him to take drugs, he took drugs. When we demanded he stop, he did. He started again when urged to. He had no close friends and seemed pathetically to want them. By the time he was fifteen, we knew he would not be able to go through college. We speculated privately about work for him that would not involve close relationships with others: forest ranger, night watchman, lighthouse keeper, those were among our darkest jokes and far-fetched outlooks. By the time he was nineteen, we were wondering what we could do with him. Michael made the decision for us. Glenda found him first when she stepped out the back with a basket of wash from the washing machine. In the backyard of the house we had rented on Fire Island there was just one small tree, a stubby Scotch pine, they told us, and he had hanged himself from that.

  The photographs we had of Michael could break your heart. Glenda said nothing when I put them away in the cabinet in which she had stored the photographs of herself as a cheerleader and her father as a vendor of agricultural supplies. Into the same cabinet with my Air Medal and gunner's wings, my patch of sergeant's stripes, that old picture of me with Snowden and Bill Knight sitting on a row of bombs, with Yossarian looking on from the background, and that older picture of my father with a gas mask and a helmet in World War I.

  Not long after, Glenda, who had always been healthy, began suffering often with symptoms of vague character that eluded verification: Reiter's syndrome, Epstein-Barr virus, fluctuations in blood chemistry, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, numbness and tinglings in the extremities, and, finally, digestive upsets and the ailment that was all too specific.

  I'd met Teemer through Lew, who suggested we at least consult with the oncologist who'd been managing his Hodgkin's disease. Teemer reviewed the data and did not disagree. The primary growth in the ovary was no longer the main problem. The ones in other areas could prove tougher.

  "It will depend," he counseled evasively, the first time he talked to us, "on the individual biology of the tumors. Unfortunately, those in the ovary do not reveal themselves until they've already spread. What I feel we--"

  "Do I have one year?" Glenda broke in curtly.

  "One year?" faltered Teemer, who looked taken aback.

  "I mean a good one, Doctor. Can you promise me that?"

  "I can't promise you that," said Teemer, with a regretful gloom we soon learned was typical.

  Glenda, who had asked her question with false, blithe confidence, was shocked by his answer. "Can you promise six months?" Her voice was weaker. "Good ones?"

  "No, I can't promise you that."

  She forced a smile. "Three?"

  "It's not up to me."

  "I won't ask you for less."

  "I can guarantee one, and it won't be all good. But there won't be much pain. We will have to see."

  "Sam." Glenda heaved a great sigh. "Bring home the girls. I think we'd better start planning."

  She died all at once in the hospita
l just thirty days later, from a coronary embolism while a new medication was being administered experimentally, and I've always suspected a humanitarian covenant about which I was told nothing. Yossarian, who knew Teemer well, thought the possibility credible.

  Yossarian, paunchy, large, with hair turning white, was not how I would have pictured him. I had not turned out the way he would have guessed either. He would have pictured a lawyer or professor. I was surprised to find him associated with Milo Minderbinder; he awarded me no honors for my promotion work at Time. Yet we agreed it was marvelous that, by luck and natural selection, we had managed to survive prosperously.

  It seemed logical that the two of us should have taught school awhile and then moved into advertising and public relations, for the higher salaries and livelier milieu, and that we both had aspired to write fiction that would elevate us into that elite of the famous and opulent, and distinguished plays and film scripts too.

  "By now we like luxury and call it security," he observed with a cursory rue. "As we grow older, Samuel, we're always in danger of turning into the kind of person we used to say we despised when young. What did you imagine I would look like now?"

  "An air force captain, still in his twenties, who looked a little bit crazy, and always knew what he was doing."

  "And unemployed?" he answered with a laugh. "We don't have much choice, do we?"

  "I walked into a room once in Rome," I revealed to him, "a room I was sharing with Snowden on one of our rest leaves, and saw you on top of that chubby maid who was always putting out for any of us who asked her to and had those lime-colored panties she always wore."

  "I remember that maid. I remember them all. She was nice. Do you ever stop to wonder what she looks like now? I have no trouble doing that, I do that all the time. I'm never wrong. I can't work backwards, though. I can't look at a woman now and see what she looked like when young. I find it much easier to predict the future than to predict the past. Don't you? Am I talking too much?"

  "I think you sound like Teemer with that last one."

  I also thought he was talking with a spark of the old Yossarian, and he liked hearing that.

  He and Lew did not really take to each other. I could sense each wondering what I saw in the other. There was space in those hospital colloquies for only one life of the party, and it was hard for Lew to triumph as an extrovert when he was six feet tall and his weight had dropped down below a hundred and fifty. Lew toned down tactfully with Yossarian and his more sedate visitors like Patrick Beach and the socialite Olivia Maxon, with all her ludicrous delight in her two tons of caviar, and even with the sprightly blonde woman and the pretty nurse.

  Often we would congregate evenings in Teemer's room in the psychiatric ward to talk about sanity, democracy, neo-Darwinism, and immortality amid the other patients there, all of them heavily medicated and staring impassively at us with no interest, as though waiting like cows with dropped jaws while we struggled to our conclusions, and that seemed a little bit crazy too. To live or not to live was still the question for Yossarian, and he was not mollified to hear that he had already been living much longer than he thought he had, perhaps even since the origin of the species, and, through the DNA transmitted into his children, would go on living long after he died, genetically speaking.

  "Genetically speaking is not what I mean, Dennis, and you know that. Put a gene in me that will disable the ones that are aging me. I want to remain forever the way I am now."

  Teemer socializing was crazily obsessed with the laboratory knowledge that metastatic cancer cells were genetic advances on the original malignancy, vastly more hardy, adroit, and destructive. He had to think of them, therefore, as evolutionary improvements and to wonder if all his medical interventions on behalf of patients were crimes against nature, trespassing intrusions upon the balancing currents of biological life he saw germinating in harmonious synchronization everywhere things lived. After all, he'd had to ask, what was so noble about mankind, or essential?

  "We've had nothing to do with our own evolution and are having everything to do with our own decline. I know it sounds revolutionary, but I have to consider that possibility. I'm a neo-Darwinist and a man of science."

  "I'm a man of junk," said Lew, who'd by then had enough of the hospital. "It's how I began."

  "No, Lew, you began in a sperm cell as a strand of DNA that still doesn't know who you are."

  "Balls!" Lew told him.

  "Exactly," said Teemer. "And that's all we ever are."

  "Sure, Dennis, if that's what you like to think," said Lew, who'd had enough of such intellectualizing too and went home the next day to wait things out there.

  For that matter, Yossarian and I were not all that compatible either. I'd not heard of his movie scripts. And he seemed a bit miffed when I reacted to his idea of a play about the Dickens family with only a smile and with nothing at all to his thought of a comic novel about Thomas Mann and a composer in one of his novels who'd made a Faustian bargain.

  What I did not like about Yossarian was that he seemed somewhat conscious of himself as a special being and more than a trifle smug in the range of his friendships.

  And what I did not like about myself was that I still felt disposed to accept him as someone superior. I was amazed to find among his visitors the man McBride from the bus terminal, with a pleasant, bright-eyed woman he introduced as his fiancee. A man named Gaffney dropped by to shake his head reproachfully at Yossarian in his sickbed. He expressed the idea he had of a primeval Faustian bargain between God, or maybe it was the Devil, and the first man, who perhaps was a woman.

  "I will give you intelligence," submitted the Creator, "enough knowledge to destroy everything on earth, but you will have to use it."

  "Done!" said our ancestor, and that was our Genesis.

  "How do you like it?" asked Gaffney.

  "Let me think about that one," said Teemer. "It may be the key to my unified theory."

  "Come home," said his wife.

  "Are you crazy?" cried Teemer. "Not till I'm done."

  McBride was the man at PABT who'd given me the money to get home after I was arrested there. It was fascinating to see him friendly with Yossarian and both working together on that wedding at the bus terminal, to which the President might come by underground railway, and at which the cardinal would be among the several prelates officiating.

  "If you get the chance," I schemed subtly with Yossarian, "ask the cardinal whose genes Jesus had."

  "Teemer wants to know that too."

  I want to take that trip around the world while there still is a world. In Hawaii, there's a woman who used to work with me and also the former wife of a friend from whom I used to buy artwork when I was still doing slide shows for the space salesmen at Time. She's been married to someone else a long time now. I'd like to see both these acquaintances once more. Yossarian advises me not to miss New Zealand as long as I'm going to Australia, and especially the south island for its high mountains and glacier. I might even try trout fishing with waders while there. That is something else I've never done. In Sydney I have my old office buddy and his wife in a house facing the bay, with a swimming pool for the exercises he's been doing since the age of twenty-nine to keep the muscles in his upper body strong, and they've already decreed I stay with them at least two weeks. He lost the use of both legs when paralyzed by the disease called Guillain-Barre after preventive antitoxin inoculations for a sales meeting in Mexico. Yossarian knows unmarried women in Sydney and Melbourne and has offered to telephone with introductions. He suggests I send a dozen red roses to each beforehand. He says red roses always appeal. After that I want to go to Singapore, where a girl who used to be an assistant now lives with her husband, a lawyer there for an American firm, and then to Hong Kong, where I still also know people. From there I will fly to Italy, just to Rome. I want to try to find the building at the top of the Via Veneto in which we had those apartments on two whole floors. I think I might enjoy Rome more than last ti
me, when I went as a fill-in to a speedy business conference, but not nearly as much as I did the first time as a young soldier in wartime with a ravenous appetite for Italian cooking and a youthful libido that was highly combustible and mystically and inexhaustibly renewable. After that, I'll go to England, where I know a couple of others I used to work with too. It seems a shame to skip Paris, but I don't know anyone in France anymore, and I don't think I'd know what to do with myself if I went there alone. And then back again to my high-rise apartment after seven weeks or eight, to a house and life without the person who'd meant more to me than any other.

  I've picked safe countries and neutral airlines. But I'll probably be hijacked by terrorists anyway, Esther jokes, and then shot to death because of my American passport and Jewish origin. Esther probably would marry me if I could bring myself to ask, but only if she could safeguard all her widow's assets. She's officious and opinionated. We would not get along.

  Yossarian is better off than I am because he still has big decisions to make. Or so says Winkler, who was there in the hospital room reporting on his business agreement with Milo Minderbinder for his new state-of-the-art shoe--I still laugh when I remember those days as kids when Winkler was starting up his new state-of-the-art breakfast-sandwiches-for-home-delivery business and I was writing the copy, headlined SLEEP LATE SUNDAY MORNING! for his advertising leaflets--when the flashy blonde woman came bursting into the hospital room with the news for Yossarian that had to be a shocker. Approaching age seventy, he was faced with the daunting prospect of becoming a father again, or not, and marrying a third time, or not.

  "Holy shit," were the words Winkler remembered emerging from him.

  The woman thus fertilized was the dark-haired nurse. It was obvious to everyone they'd been close for some time. If ever she was going to have a child, she wanted it to be his. And if she didn't have this one now, they both might soon be too old.

  "Doesn't she realize," exhorted Yossarian, "that when he asks me to run out for a pass, I'll be eighty-four years old?"

  "She doesn't care about that."