Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

To the right of the letter S was a trail of minuscule characters that looked like flattened squiggles, and while Yossarian was donning his glasses, Michael peered through a magnifying glass there and found the small letter h repeated in script, with an exclamation point too.

"So that," he remarked, still in very good humor, "is what you're going to call your plane, eh? The M & M Shhhhh!"

"You know what we call it." M2 was offended. "It's the M & M E & A Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber."

"We'd save time calling it Shhhhh! Tell me again what you want."

M2 talked diffidently. What was wanted were nice-looking pictures of the plane in flight from above, below, and the side, and at least one of the plane on the ground. "They don't have to be accurate. But make them realistic, like the planes in a comic strip or science movie. Leave out details. My father doesn't want them to see any until we get the contract. He doesn't really trust our government anymore. They'd also like a picture of what the plane will really look like in case they ever have to build it."

"Why don't you ask your engineers?" mused Michael.

"We don't really trust our engineers."

"When Ivan the Terrible," reflected Yossarian, "finished building the Kremlin, he had all the architects executed, so that no one alive would ever duplicate it."

"What was so terrible about him?" M2 wondered. "I must tell my father that."

"Leave me alone now," said Michael, rubbing his chin and concentrating. He was slipping off his corduroy jacket, whistling a Mozart melody to himself. "If you close the door, remember I'm locked in and don't forget to get me out one day." To himself, he observed aloud, "It's looking cute."

At the turn into the next century, he was cynically sure, there would be months of senseless ceremonies, tied in with political campaigns too, and the M & M warplane could be an exalted highlight. And no doubt, the first baby born in the new century would be born in the east, but much farther east this time than Eden.

He looked down again at the plans of this weapon for the close of the century and saw a design that seemed to him aesthetically incomplete. Much was lacking in anticipated form, much was missing. And when he looked at the blueprints and into the future in which that plane would fly, he could spy no place staked out anywhere into which he, in the stale words of his father, could fit, in which he could flourish with any more security and satisfaction than he presently enjoyed. He had room for improvement but saw not much chance of any. He remembered Marlene and her astrological charts and tarot cards, and he felt himself missing her again, even though uncertain he had ever cared for her more than any of the others in his sequence of

monogamous romances. It was beginning to scare him that he might have no future, that he was already in it; like his father, about whom he'd always harbored mixed feelings, he was already there. He must risk a call to Marlene.

Even his brother Julian was having trouble these days making as much money as he had insolently projected he was destined to make. And his sister too would have to delay her divorce while testing the waters discreetly for a job in private practice with one of the law firms with whose partners she occasionally had contact.

His father would be dead. Papa John had made clear more than once that he did not expect to go deeply into that twenty-first century. For much of his life Michael had confidently presumed his father would always be alive. He felt that way still, although he knew it was untrue. That never happened with real human beings.

And who else would be there for him? There was no one to esteem, no figure to look up to whose merit persisted without blemish for more than fifteen minutes. There were people with power to confer great benefits upon others, like movie directors and the President, but that was all.

The half-million dollars his father had hopes to bequeath him no longer seemed an everlasting fortune. He would not be able to live on the income, though nine tenths of the country lived on less. In time he would have nothing, and no one, have no one, his father had underlined, to aid him. His father always had struck him as somewhat peculiar, rationally irrational and illogically logical, and did not always make consistent sense.

"It's easy to win debates as a nihilist," he'd said, "because so many people who ought to know better absurdly take positions."

He spoke slickly of things like Ewing's tumor, Hodgkin's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, TIAs, and osteogenic sarcomas, and talked freely about his dying with an objectivity so matter-of-fact that Michael had to wonder if he was kidding himself, or faking it. Michael did not always know when he was serious and when he was not, and when he was right and when he was mistaken, and when he was right and wrong at the same time. And Yossarian would profess that he did not always know that about himself either.

"A problem I have," his father had admitted penitently, but with a hint of pride, "is that I'm almost always able to see both sides of almost every question."

And he was almost always too eager to be friendly with one woman or another, obsessed still with the dream to find work that he wished to do and the need to be what he called "in love." Michael had never found work that he wished to do--the law was no worse to him than anything else, and art was no better. He was writing a screenplay but did not want his father to know that yet. But with one thing central, Yossarian seemed right on the button.

"Before you know it, you damned fool," he'd snapped at him irascibly in a tender bad temper, "you'll be as old as I am now, and you won't have a thing."

Not even children, Michael could add ruefully. As far as he could see, that was not in the cards for him either, not in Marlene's tarot cards or any others. Michael again looked down narrowly at the blueprints before him, pulled his pad closer, and took up a pencil. He did not envy people who wished to work much harder to get much more, but had to wonder afresh why he was not like them.

15

M2

"You like Michael, don't you?"

"Yes, I like Michael," said M2.

"Give him work when you can."

"I do that. I will want to work more with him on those video screens at the bus terminal. I'll pay him for another year in law school."

"I'm not sure he'll want that. But go ahead and try."