Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"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."