Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"Gaffney, I can't wait that long. I've got a pregnant girlfriend upstairs who'll be having a baby soon if I let her. Let's walk a few miles more. I don't trust that elevator."

Looking downward as he went, Yossarian suddenly could not believe his eyes. He had misplaced his eyeglasses. But even with spectacles on, he would not have believed at first glance what he saw walking up toward him.

When he heard the alarm, General Leslie R. Groves, who had died of heart disease in 1970, decided to run for his life, downward toward the molten center of the earth, where it was hot as Hades, he knew, but not so hot as the temperature of a fusion explosion or the heat the chaplain would produce if he continued to evolve successfully into a nuclear mixture of tritium and lithium deuteride and achieved a critical mass.

"Don't hit him! Don't grab him! Don't touch him!" he barked out orders as a duty to his country and a last kindness to the chaplain, who declined to go along and save himself too. "Don't let him get overheated! He might go off!"

When they saw the general bolt, all of his scientists, technicians, engineers, and housekeeping staff went running off too, and except for the armed men at battle positions at all of the entrances, the chaplain was alone.

When the train jolted to a stop, the chaplain saw the gleaming ice-skating rink in Rockefeller Center fall down out of his picture and the skyscrapers around it begin teetering on the video screen and come to rest with all of them erratically askew. Once before, the chaplain had sighted Yossarian crossing the street there beside a younger man who could have been his son, passing in back of a long pearl-gray limousine that seemed to be spilling tire tracks of blood from its wheels, with a sinister, angular figure with a walking stick and green rucksack eyeing both with an evil squint. He could not find Yossarian a second time either outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art each time he switched there to wait. He did not think of looking for him at the Port Authority Bus Terminal when he switched back there to gaze at those buildings wistfully. That was where he had come into the city the first time. Return trips home to Kenosha had by now grown painful. Three evenings a week he watched his wife walking slowly to meet the widow across the street to go in a car to the Presbyterian church for another session of bridge, in a group mainly of men and women who had lost their mates, watched with grief because he was no longer part of her life.

When the train stopped and the skating rink dropped, he heard outside a sudden racket of shouts and footsteps and guessed that something was amiss. He waited for someone to come tell him what to do. In fewer than ten minutes he was entirely on his own. General Groves was explicit.

"No, I want to go back out," he decided.

"There may be a war there."

"I want to go home."

"Albert, get mad. Don't you ever get mad?"

"I'm so mad now I can explode."

"That's a good one too! And I'll do what I can to clear the way." And that's when the chaplain heard him shouting his last commands before dashing away.

Cautiously, tentatively, the chaplain stepped down from the train. He had on his person some cash from the general, and his Social Security number had been returned to him too. He was last off the train. A distance away he saw a bank of escalators that looked brand-new. He was completely alone but for the guards in red field jackets, green trousers, and brown combat boots. These were stationed with weapons at all the entrances and at the top and the bottom of the down escalator. He was free to go up, free to leave.

"You might have trouble coming back in, sir."

As soon as he stepped aboard the escalator, he began to walk, anxious to get where he was going as quickly as he could. As he climbed, he increased his pace. When he reached the top, he followed the arrow to a cylindrical elevator with transparent panels that, after he pressed the topmost button, began rising with a speed that robbed him of breath initially and made his viscera sink. Through vertical transparent panels he saw himself passing through a golf course and then an amusement park with a roller-coaster and Ferris wheel, with attendants in jackets the same shade of red as the special troops of soldiers. He passed roadways with military vehicles and sedans with civilians. He passed a railway with mobile missiles and another with refrigerated supply cars marked WISCONSIN CHEESE and BEN & JERRY'S ICE CREAM. Where the elevator stopped, after a ride of nearly twenty minutes, he found another pair of brand-new escalators. Where these ended he boarded another elevator and again pressed the highest button. Then he was ascending on an escalator again. He felt he had been trudging upward for miles. He did not tire. Gazing ahead upward all the time, he suddenly, in jarring disbelief, came face-to-face with Yossarian, who was walking down toward him rapidly on the other escalator, and they gaped at each other in mutual recognition.

"What are you doing here?" they both exclaimed.

"Me? What are you doing here?" they both retorted.

They rode away in opposite directions.

"Chaplain, don't go out!" Yossarian shouted back up at him through cupped hands. "There's danger outside. A war. Come back down!"

"Fuck you!" cried the chaplain, and wondered where in the world such words had come from.

Having passed his lips, they spurred him on with a spirit of liberation he himself thought fanatic. Eventually, he stormed from the last of the elevators and found himself facing a thoroughfare cluttered with transport and rushing pedestrians, with a steep staircase of wrought iron across the way that rose in short flights to spiraling landings and had a platform at the top at an exit with a large metal door. Mounting these, he paid no attention to an outburst of barking wild dogs he heard behind him. At the top was a guard. On the door were the words:

EMERGENCY ENTRANCE

NO ADMITTANCE

THIS DOOR MUST BE LOCKED AND BOLTED WHEN IN USE

The guard made no move to stop him. Instead, obligingly, he turned the lock, shifted the bolt, and slid open the door. Two more guards were on duty at the other side. These did not interfere with him either. He found himself walking through a metal closet into a small service room of some kind and then outside into a corridor underneath a staircase slanting upward over his head, and then, out in front of him, he saw an exit door leading to the street. His heart leaped. He was beginning to see the light, he told himself, and pushed outside into a dark day, passing a small mound of shit in a corner, at which he glanced but briefly.

He was at the bus terminal, in a side street on a lower level from which buses set out. One, with engine warming, was about to leave for Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was one of three passengers. Once relaxed in his seat, he blew his nose, coughed to clear his throat, sighed heavily in relief. Each time they stopped for food he would try a phone call until he reached her. The boarding platform was beneath a sheltering overhang, and he was not surprised to see the light so dull. But when they were through the tunnel and out on the highway, the sky was no brighter. With hardly any curiosity, he looked upward out his window and saw that the sun itself was an ashy gray and darkened around its rim in a circle of black. In Wisconsin on drab days he had seen such feeble suns often behind masses of clouds. He didn't see that there were no clouds.

In the editorial meeting at the New York Times conducted daily to determine the makeup of the front page of the ensuing edition, they decided to predict, and the television newscasters would therefore decide to report, an unpredictable solar eclipse.

Frances Beach, devoting herself with priority to the care and comfort of an invalid husband, had long since passed the point where she cared what the New York Times or any other newspaper decided about anything but fashion. In her final years, she was not surprised to find herself deeply in love with Yossarian again. What had been lacking in their affection, she concluded benevolently with a remorseful sm

ile, looking up from her book and lifting her reading glasses, was strife and drama. Neither had ever had real need for the other. What was wrong between them was that nothing between them had ever gone wrong.