Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  "I could have sworn," said Yossarian, "that Milo had been left behind."

  Gaffney formed with his mouth the one word "Never."

  It was then that Yossarian decided to keep his date with Melissa. He did not want to remain down there with Strangelove and those others. Gaffney was shocked and thought he was mad. It was not in the cards.

  "Oh, no, no, Yo-Yo." Gaffney was shaking his head. "You can't go out. It makes no sense now. You won't go."

  "Gaffney, I am going. You're wrong again."

  "But you won't get far. You won't last long."

  "We'll see. I'll try."

  "You'll have to be careful. There's danger outside."

  "There's danger in here. Anyone coming?"

  McBride, as though waiting, jumped forward and joined him. "You'd never find your way out without me." At Yossarian's side, he confessed, "I'm worried about Joan out there alone."

  Gaffney would wait until he knew much more. "I know enough now not to take chances."

  Michael too did not like taking chances, and Yossarian did not blame him for that one either.

  Bob and Raul had too much intelligence to put themselves at risk when they did not have to, and could worry about their families just as well from down there.

  As he saw Yossarian riding up away from him on the escalator to the elevator to keep a lunch date with his pregnant girlfriend, Michael, who'd been both proud and embarrassed by his father's love affair, had the listless, desolate feeling that one of them was dying, maybe both.

  Yossarian, striding anxiously up the escalator to hurry back outside as fast as he could get there, was stimulated joyously by a resurrection of optimism more native to Melissa than himself, the innate--and inane--conviction that nothing harmful could happen to him, that nothing bad could happen to a just man. This was nonsense, he knew; but he also knew, in his gut, he'd be as safe as she was, and had no doubt then that all three of them, he, Melissa, and the new baby, would survive, flourish, and live happily--forever after.

  "Haagen-Dazs."

  "What was that about?" the aviator Kid Sampson asked, from the back compartment of the invisible and noiseless sub-supersonic attack bomber.

  "Was your father a shoemaker?" answered the pilot McWatt. "Are you the son of a barber?"

  "I can't sew either."

  "Then we have to go on. It's another mission for us."

  "Where to?"

  "I've forgotten. But inertia will guide us. Our inertial guidance system will always take us."

  "McWatt?"

  "Sampson?"

  "How long have we been together now? Two years, three?"

  "It feels more like fifty. Sampson, you know what I regret? That we never talked more to each other."

  "We never got more to talk about, did we?"

  "What's that down there? A missile?"

  "Let me see on my radar." Crossing below them on a course almost perpendicular were four parallel contrails gliding out from jet engines as though extruded in chalk. "It's an airliner, McWatt. A passenger plane on the way to Australia."

  "I wonder how those passengers would feel if they knew we were up here on this mission again ... ghost riders in the sky."

  "McWatt?"

  "Sampson?"

  "Do we really have to go in again?"

  "I guess we have to, don't we?"

  "Do we?"

  "Yeah."

  "Yeah. I think we have to."

  "Oh, well. What the hell."

  Sam Singer had no illusions. Unlike Yossarian, he had no hopes of finding romance and falling in love again with somebody new. Succumbing unresistingly to the harsh necessity of living alone, to which he had been presented with no agreeable alternative, he had not been shattered by the merciless deprivations. He had discussed this future with Glenda, who, despite her terminal condition, worried more about his solitary years ahead than he had been able to do.

  He saw friends, read more, watched television news. He had New York. He went to plays and movies, occasionally to opera, used to always have engaging classical music on one of the FM radio stations, played bridge one or two evenings most weeks in neighborly communal groups of people largely like himself who were mostly even-tempered and congenial. Each time he listened to Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony he was filled with awe and amazed. He had his volunteer work with the cancer relief agency. He had his few female friends. He drank no more than before. He learned quickly to eat by himself, carry-out dishes at home, lunches and dinners in neighborhood coffee shops and small restaurants, meals that were not feasts, reading too at a table alone, his book or magazine or his second newspaper of the day. Occasionally, he played pinochle with others left over from Coney Island. He still was not good. He went out evenings about as often as he wished to.

  He was greatly pleased so far on his trip around the world, greatly surprised by his feeling of well-being and his large amounts of satisfaction. It was good again to be out of his apartment. In Atlanta and Houston with his daughters and their husbands and children he had at last reached a stage at which he found himself sated with their company before any of them showed signs of growing restless with his. He must be feeling his age, he offered in apology early each evening, before departing for the night. He insisted always on staying in nearby hotels. In Los Angeles he was still in lifelong harmony with Winkler and his wife. They all three tired in perfect coordination. He had a few good dates with his nephew and his family and was genuinely charmed by the precocious brightness and beauty of the children. But between himself and all the young adults with whom he found himself, he had to concede that more than a generation gap divided them.

  Once outside New York, he was thankful he had taken his cassette player and tapes and some books of solid content that demanded studious involvement.

  In Hawaii he sunned himself in daytime and finished rereading Middlemarch. Knowing better what to expect, he was able to appreciate it richly. In his two evenings there he had dinner with the former wife of his old friend and her present husband, and with the woman, now single, he'd worked with at Time magazine, with whom Glenda had been acquainted too. Had she invited him home to spend the night with her, he would have certainly consented. But she did not seem to know that. Lew or Yossarian would have managed it better.

  He looked forward keenly to the two weeks in Australia with old good friends, also from his days back at Time. He had no hesitation about staying in their house in Sydney. He and Glenda had been there together one time before. The man walked with metal canes. A long time had passed since they'd last come to New York. In the narrow pool outdoors, on the harbor side of the house, he would swim thirty or sixty laps before breakfast--Sam was not sure he remembered which--and another thirty or sixty soon after, keeping his torso hefty enough to continue moving about on the canes and in the car with hand controls he'd been using since the illness that had rendered him paraplegic forty years back. From the hips up he probably would still have the brawny body of a weight lifter. They had five grown children. Sam was eager to see them again too. One was in agriculture in Tasmania, and they planned to fly there for two days. Another ranched, a third did work in genetics in a laboratory in the university in Canberra. All five were married. None had been divorced.

  Sam left Hawaii on an Australian airliner in dead of night and was scheduled to arrive in Sydney after breakfast the next morning. He read, he drank, he ate, he slept and wakened. Daybreak came stealing in with a dingy dawn, and the sun seemed slow in rising. Clouds lay unbroken below. What light appeared remained sunken on a low horizon and continued dim. To one side of him the sky was navy blue, with a full yellow moon hanging low and distant like a hostile clock; on the other, the sky looked gray and black, almost the color of charcoal. High above, he saw snowy contrails cross the path of his own plane, in a ghostly formation traveling eastward at a speed more swift, and assumed they came from a military group on morning maneuvers. There was some consternation in the cabin crew when the radio system first went silent. But
the other navigational systems remained operational, and there was no cause for alarm. Earlier there was a vague news report of an oil tanker colliding with a cargo ship somewhere below.

  Sam Singer soon had going on his cassette player a tape of the Fifth Symphony of Gustav Mahler. Listening again, he discovered more new things he treasured. The remarkable symphony was infinite in its secrets and multiple satisfactions, ineffable in loveliness, sublime, and hauntingly mysterious in the secrets of its powers and genius to so touch the human soul. He could hardly wait for the closing notes of the finale to speed jubilantly to their triumphant end, in order to start right back at the beginning and revel again in all of the engrossing movements in which he was basking now. Although he knew it was coming and always prepared himself, he was expectantly bewitched each time by the mournful sweet melody filtering so gently into the foreboding horns opening the first movement, so sweetly mournful and Jewish. The small adagio movement later was as beautiful as beautiful melodic music ever could be. Mostly of late in music he preferred the melancholy to the heroic. His biggest fear now in the apartment in which he dwelt alone was a horror of decomposing there. The book he was holding in his lap when he settled back to read while listening was a paperback edition of eight stories by Thomas Mann. The yellow moon turned orange and soon was as red as a setting sun.

  Acknowledgments

  If I hadn't thought it better to present this novel without introductory statements, I would have dedicated it to Valerie, my wife, and again, as at first, to my daughter, Erica, and my son, Ted. I would have extended the dedication to Marvin and Evelyn Winkler, husband and wife, and to Marion Berkman and the memory of her husband, Lou--friends since childhood to whom I feel thankful for more than their encouragement, assistance, and cooperation.

  Michael Korda proved a formidable and perfect editor for me, responsive, critical, blunt, appreciative.

  One chapter of this novel, by droll coincidence the one titled "Dante," was prepared and written while I was a resident guest at Lake Como, Italy, at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center of the Rockefeller Foundation. The enjoyments and conveniences there were inimitable, and we, Valerie and I, remain grateful to all involved for the hospitality and work facilities and for the warm friendships we made with fellow residents that are still maintained.