Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

At various times when not in transit he was led down the few steps from his carriage to walk briskly around it for twenty, thirty, then forty minutes, observed by armed guards positioned some distance away. Always someone paced alongside--a medical specialist, a scientist, an intelligence agent, an officer, or the general himself--and periodically there was a medical cuff on his arm to record his pressure and his pulse, and a mask with a canister covering his nose and his mouth in which his exhalations were recovered. From these sessions of exercise and exertion he perceived that he was underground at least much of the time.

Indoors in his quarters he could approach any of the windows on either side in all his rooms and see Paris, if he chose, Montmartre from the prominent rampart of the Arc de Triomphe, or a view from Montmartre enveloping the Louvre, the same triumphal arch, the Eiffel Tower, and the serpentine Seine. The receding spectacle of the rooftops was monumental too. Or he could look out a window and see, if he preferred, the Spanish city of Toledo from a choice of perspectives, the university city of Salamanca, the Alhambra, or move to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, or Saint Catherine's College at Oxford University. The controls on the consoles at each of the windows were simple to master. Each window was a video screen offering a virtually unlimited selection of locations.

In New York the default perspective was from a picture window on an upper floor of a high-rise apartment building. He could move about the city as expeditiously as he could move about the world. Across the avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal one day soon after he was taken into custody he was so positive he saw Yossarian dismounting from a taxicab that he nearly cried out his name. In Washington, D.C., he was enabled to pass indoors and window-shop in leisure in the lobby of MASSPOB and at any of the fabulous displays on the retail mezzanines. In all of his places the lighting and various colorations altered with the hours to match his own time of day. His favorite views in darkness were of the casinos in Las Vegas and of the city of Los Angeles at night from the Sunset Strip. He was free to look outside at almost any place he wanted from his windows

except at what really was there. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, he had the sight of his city from the covered veranda at the front of his house and the equally reassuring picture at the back from the small patio bordering his small garden, where he was wont to sit with his wife on the swing at dusk on temperate moonlit nights and, while watching fireflies, wonder together in tristful reminiscence where all the time had gone, how fast the century had passed. His green thumb had lost its expert touch. He still loved weeding but tired quickly and was frequently discouraged by the aches in his legs and lower back from what his doctor called lumbago. Looking out the window of his train from the front of his house one time, he saw a neighbor across the street he was certain had passed away a few years before, and he was momentarily disoriented. He was stunned to think that beneath the surface of his familiar city, in which he had spent nearly his whole life, there might be this hidden, subterranean railway on which he was now an unwilling passenger.

By this time, everything and, though most did not know it, everyone in a broad vicinity surrounding the chaplain's home in Kenosha had been looked at, inspected, examined, and investigated by the most discerning and discriminating of advanced instruments and techniques: the food, the drinking water from wells and the reservoir, the air they breathed, the sewage, the garbage. Every flush of a toilet was logged for analysis, and every disposal by a home garbage disposal unit. There was no evidence yet of a contamination related however remotely to the one of which he himself was still uniquely the possessor. Nowhere in Kenosha was a molecule to be found of deuterium oxide, or, in plainer language, heavy water.

"It began as a urinary problem," Chaplain Albert Taylor Tappman repeated still one more time.

"I've had those too," revealed the psychiatrist, and emitted a sigh. "But not, of course, like yours. If I had, I suppose I would be in quarantine here with you. You really don't know how you do it, or what you did to start it?"

The chaplain said so again with an apologetic stammer. He sat with his soft fists resting on his thighs, and this doctor seemed to believe him. His doctor at home had sensed something not normal right away and had taken a second specimen.

"I don't know, Albert. It still feels funny to me, sort of heavy."

"What's it mean, Hector?"

"I'm not sure, but I don't think you're allowed to do what you're doing without a government license. Let's see what the laboratory says. They might have to report it."

In no time at all the government agents moved into his house and swarmed all through it; then came the chemists, the physicists, the radiologists and urologists, the endocrinologists and gastroenterologists. In short order he was plumbed medically by every conceivable kind of specialist and environmentalist in a determined and comprehensive effort to find out where that extra hydrogen neutron was coming from in every molecule of water he passed. It was not in his perspiration. That was clean, as were the fluids everywhere else inside him.

Then came the interrogations, mannerly at first, then abusive and filled with connotations of brutality. Had he been drinking liquid hydrogen? Not to his knowledge. Oh, he would know it if he had been. He'd be dead.

"Then why are you asking me?"

It was a trick question, they crowed, cackling. They all smoked cigarettes and their hands were yellow. Liquid oxygen? He wouldn't even know where to get it.

He would have to know in order to drink it.

He didn't even know what it was.

Then how could he be sure he had not been drinking it?

They put that one down for the record too. It was another trick question.

"And you fell for it, Chaplain. That was good, Ace. Right, Butch?"

"You said it, Slugger."

There were three, and they insisted on knowing whether he had friends, wives, or children in any of the countries formerly behind the iron curtain or had any now in the CIA.

"I don't have any in the CIA either," said the psychiatrist. "I don't know how I'd defend myself if I did."

Right off, they had confiscated his passport and tapped his telephone. His mail was intercepted, his bank accounts were frozen. His safe-deposit box was padlocked. Worst of all, they had taken away his Social Security number.

"No checks?" exclaimed the psychiatrist in horror.

The checks were continuing, but the Social Security number was gone. Without it, he had no identity.

The psychiatrist went ashen and trembled. "I can guess how you must feel," he commiserated. "I couldn't live without mine. And you really can't tell them how you do it?"

The chemical physicists and physical chemists ruled out an insect bite. The entomologists agreed.

At the beginning, people on the whole tended to be kind and patronizing and to handle him considerately. The medical men approached him amiably as both a curiosity and opportunity. In short order, however, the sociability of all but the psychiatrist and the general grew strained and thinner. Accumulating frustration shortened tolerance. Tempers turned raw and the consultations turned adversarial. This was especially true with the intelligence agents. They were not from the FBI and not from the CIA but from someplace deeper under cover. His inability to illuminate insulted, and he was censured for an obstinate refusal to yield explanations that he did not possess.

"You are being willful," said the biggest of the bullying interrogators.