Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"We sometimes use it for that," said the driver

, who'd told us he was from Venice and the brother of a gondolier there. "The seats go flat and the back opens."

Claire left him a very big tip. We always tip big, but this time it was for luck.

Teemer had his office on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum and a waiting room of quiet patients. Down the block on the way uptown to his hospital was the Frank Campbell Funeral Home--a "home," they called it--and I made jokes to myself about the convenient location. Now when I hear about those big society parties they have at the museum and places like that, I get the feeling I'm upside down in a world that's turned topsy-turvy. There are big new buildings in the city that I don't even recognize. There are new multimillionaires where there used to be Rockefellers and J. P. Morgans, and I don't know where they came from or what they're doing.

After that first time in Dr. Teemer's office, I never let Claire walk inside there with me again. She would cross into the museum and I would meet her when I was finished and we'd look at pictures if she still wanted to and then go off for lunch somewhere and go home. In that waiting room there is no one ever laughing, and I am never in a mood myself to try to get anything jolly going there. Teemer himself is still a skinny little guy with a gloomy manner, and when he does cheer me up, he does it in a way that always leaves me cranky.

"You might be interested to know, Mr. Rabinowitz," he began when we met, "that we no longer think of it as incurable."

All at once I felt very much better. "I'll strangle Emil. He didn't tell me that."

"He doesn't always know."

"So there is a cure? Huh?"

Teemer shook his head, and my breath caught. "No, I wouldn't put it that way. We don't think of it as a cure."

Now I felt I might sock him. "I'm listening good, Dr. Teemer. The disease is now curable, but you don't have a cure?"

"It's a matter of vocabulary," he went on. "We have treatments." He was trying his hardest, maybe too hard, to be nice. "And the treatments usually work. They will work with you, but we don't know how well. Or how long. We can't really cure it. We can suppress it. That's not the same as a cure. We never feel sure we've gotten rid of it for good, because the genesis of the disease, the origin, is always in yourself."

"For how long can you suppress it?"

"For very long when the treatments are effective. There are problems, but we'll handle them. In the periods of remission you should feel perfectly normal. When the symptoms come back, we will treat it some more."

"You're sure they'll come back?"

"They mostly seem to."

It was not the asbestos I'd worked with that brought it on. He could almost be positive about that, if anyone could be sure of anything when it came to one's genes, which were always selfish, he said, and oblivious too.

"They won't do what I want?" I almost laughed, nervously. "They're mine and they don't care about me?"

"They don't know about you, Mr. Rabinowitz." He smiled just a bit. "It might be triggered by any number of things. Tobacco, radiation."

"From what?"

"Radium, electricity, uranium, maybe even tritium."

"What's tritium?"

"A radioactive gas that comes from heavy water. You may even have some on your wristwatch or bedroom clock."

"Radiation causes it and radiation cures it--excuse me, suppresses it?" I said, making my joke.

"And chemicals too," he said. "Or--I almost hate to say this, some people don't like hearing it--it might be your natural biological destiny, nothing more sinister than that."

"Natural? You'd call that natural?"

"In the world of nature, Mr. Rabinowitz, all diseases are natural." It made sense to me at the time, but I didn't like hearing it. "I've depressed you enough. Now let me help. You will be going into the hospital. You've got transportation? Has your wife made plans to stay?"

She stayed at a hotel that first time, the next, seven years later, when we both thought she was losing me, with Sammy and Glenda, because she needed someone to talk to. This last time there was no Glenda, so she stayed at a hotel again with my older daughter, but they ate with Sammy and he came every day. Teemer had been Glenda's doctor too.

I was better in three days and home in five. But the day I knew I'd survive I felt very bad too, because then I knew I was going to die.

I'd always known I was going to die. But then I knew I was going to die. The night that sank in, I woke up in the morning with my eyes wet, and one of the night nurses noticed but didn't say anything, and I never told anyone but Claire. We were going home after my breakfast.