Closing Time (24 page)

"No, sir, I won't call you prick."

"Everyone else does. You have a right to. I have taken an oath to support that constitutional right."

"Look, you prick-" Noodles had jumped to his feet and was glancing around frantically, for a blackboard, for chalk and a pointer, for anything! "Water seeks its own level."

"Yes, I've heard that."

"Mount Everest is close to five miles high. For the earth to be covered with water, there would have to be water everywhere on the globe that was close to five miles deep."

His future employer nodded, pleased that he finally seemed to be getting through. "There was that much water then."

"Then the waters receded. Where could they recede to?"

"Into the oceans, of course."

"Where were the oceans, if the world was under water?"

"Underneath the flood, of course," was the unhesitating reply, and the genial man rose. "If you look at a map, Noodles, you will see where the oceans are. And you will also see that Missouri
does
border on my state of Indiana."

"He believes in the flood!" Noodles Cook, still stewing, and speaking almost in a shout, reported immediately to Porter Lovejoy. It was the first time in the relationship that he had presented himself to his sponsor with anything other than a conspiratorial contentment.

Porter Lovejoy was unruffled. "So does his wife."

"I'll want more money!"

"The job doesn't call for it."

"Change the job!"

"I'll talk to Capone."

His health was good, he was not on welfare, and it was understood now by all involved that as the secretary in charge of health, education and welfare in the new cabinet, Noodles would focus his energies entirely on the education of the President.

BOOK FIVE

13

Tritium

Heavy water was up another two points, read the fax in the M & M office in Rockefeller Center in New York, on the same floor, and in much the same spot, in which Sammy Singer had spent almost all his adult working life with
Time
magazine, an office that, as Michael Yossarian again saw, had windows overlooking the fabled skating rink far below, the glittering, frozen centerpiece of the venerable Japanese real estate complex obtained for money earlier from the vanishing Rockefeller financial dynasty. The rink was the same site on which Sammy years before had, with Glenda, gone ice skating for the first time in his life, and didn't fall, and had gone again with her on more than one long lunch hour after they commenced seeing each other regularly, while she was still pressing him to come live with her in her West Side apartment, together with her three children and her remarkable frontier mother from Wisconsin, who approved of Sammy and departed gladly to live again with a sister on a small family farm after he did-none of the New York parents he knew, not even his own, were ever so gracefully self-sacrificing-and tritium, the gas derived from heavy water, had gained an additional
two hundred and sixteen points
on the international radioactive commodity exchanges in Geneva, Tokyo, Bonn, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, China, Pakistan, London, and New York. The rise in tritium was buoyed optimistically by the natural property of that hydrogen isotope to degenerate at a predictable rate in atomic weapons, necessitating periodic replenishment, and the enticing disposition of the gas to lessen in quantity between the time it was sealed by the shipper and the hour it was received by the purchaser, who, more commonly than not, was a manufacturer of novelties or marking devices with outer surfaces intrinsically luminous or an assembler and supplier of nuclear warheads.

Customers frequently reported receiving as much as forty percent less of the tritium than they had paid for and forty percent less than had been packed and shipped, with no indications of theft, diversion, or leakage.

The tritium simply was not there when delivered.

Not long before, a test shipment from merely one building to another to comprehend this loss resulted in no new information and the disappearance of three quarters of the tritium packed for the test. It was inaccurate to say, said a sheepish spokesman, that it disappeared into thin air. They were monitoring the air. The air was not thin and the tritium wasn't in it.

Despite the radiation and consequent potential as a galvanizer of cancer, tritium was still the material of choice for illuminated guides and dial faces, for gun sights for nighttime marksmanship, for icons like swastikas, crosses, Stars of David, and halos that glowed in the dark, and for the stupendous enhancement in the explosive yield of nuclear weapons.

Melissa MacIntosh's ravishing roommate, Angela Moore, whom Yossarian could no longer resist thinking of by any other name than Angela Moorecock, had by now already put forth to her elderly, gentlemanly employers the idea of luminescent items highlighting the more protuberant organs of copulation phosphorescently and had tested on buyers at the toy fair, men and women, her notion for a bedroom clock with a radiating face of tritium in a compound of paint in which the hour and minute hands were circumcised male members and the numbers were not numbers but a succession of nude female figures unfolding sensually and progressively with the hours in systematic stages of erotic trance until satiation was attained at the terminal hour of twelve. Yossarian got hot hearing her discourse on this inspiration for a consumer product in the cocktail lounge a day or two before she sucked him off the first time and sent him home because he was older than the men she was accustomed to and she was not sure she cared to know him more intimately than that, and afterward, because of Melissa's growing affection for him, along with a growing apprehension of AIDS, declined to suck him off a second time or oblige him in any equivalent way; and listening observantly to her rave that first time, he'd found himself with almost half a semi-hard-on, and he took her hand as they sat beside each other on the red velvet banquette at the plush cocktail lounge and rubbed it over the fly of his pants to let her feel for herself.

The great jump in explosive yield induced by the action of tritium in atomic warheads made possible an aesthetic reduction in the size and weight of the bombs, missiles, and shells devised, allowing a greater number to be carried by smaller implements of delivery like Milo's projected bombers, and Strangelove's too, with no notable sacrifice in nuclear destructive capability.

The chaplain was up in value and completely safe.

14

Michael Yossarian

"When can I see him?" Michael Yossarian heard his father demand. His father's hair was thicker than his own and curly white, a color for which his brother Adrian was assiduously seeking a chemical formula for tinting; to a youthful, natural gray that would not be youthful on any man Yossarian's age and would not look natural.

"As soon as he's safe," answered M2, in a clean white shirt that was not yet rumpled, wet, or in need of ironing.

"Michael, didn't he just say the chaplain was safe?"

"It's what I thought I heard."

Michael smiled to himself. He pressed his brow against the pane of the glass window in order to gaze down intently at the ice rink below and its colorful kaleidoscope of leisurely skaters, wondering, with a downhearted presentiment of already having missed out on much, if there could possibly be abiding in that pastime rewards he might find diverting if ever he could bring himself to take the trouble to seek them. The reflecting oval of ice was ringed these days with drifting tides of panhandlers and vagrants, with working strollers on lunch and coffee breaks, with mounted policemen on daunting horses. Michael Yossarian would not dance; he could not get into the rhythm. He would not play golf, ski, or play tennis, and he knew already he would never ice-skate.

"I mean safe for us." He heard M2 defend himself plaintively and turned to watch. M2 appeared triumphantly prepared for the question he'd been asked. "He is safe for M & M Enterprises and cannot be appropriated by even Mercedes-Benz or the N & N Division of Nippon & Nippon Enterprises. Even Strangelove is barred. We will patent the chaplain as soon as we find out how he works, and we are looking for a trademark. We are thinking of a halo. Because he is a chaplain, of course, a Day-Glo halo. Maybe one that lights up in the dark, all night long."

"Why not tritium?"

"Tritium is expensive and radioactive. Michael, can you draw a halo?"

"It shouldn't be hard."

"We would want something cheerful but serious."

"I would try," said Michael, smiling again, "to make it serious, and it's hard to picture one that isn't cheerful."

"Where have they got him?" Yossarian wanted to know.

"In the same place, I would guess. I really don't know."

"Does your father know?"

"Do I know if he knows?"

"If you did would you tell me?"

"If he said that I could."

"If he said that you couldn't?"

"I would say I don't know."

"As you're saying right now. At least you're truthful."

"I try."

"Even when you lie. There's a paradox here. We are talking in circles."

"I went to divinity school."

"And what," said Yossarian, "do I tell the chaplain's wife? I'll be seeing her soon. If there's anyone else I can advise her to complain to, I will certainly tell her."

"Who could she find? The police are helpless."

"Strangelove?"

"Oh, no," said M2, turning whiter than customary. "I will have to find out. What you can tell Karen Tappman now-"

"Karen?"

"It's what it says on my prompt sheet. What you can tell Karen Tappman truthfully-"

"I don't think I would lie to her."

"We never choose to be anything but truthful. It's right there in our manual, under Lies. What you must tell Karen Tappman," M2 recited dutifully, "is that he is well and misses her. He looks forward to rejoining her as soon as he is not a danger to himself or the community and his presence in the family and the conjugal bed would not be injurious to her health."

"That's a new fucking wrinkle, isn't it?"

"Please." M2 flinched. "This one happens to be true."

"You would say that even if it weren't?"

"That is perfectly true," admitted M2. "But if tritium starts showing up inside him from that heavy water, he could be radioactive, and we'd all have to keep clear of him anyway."

"M2," said Yossarian harshly, "I'm going to want to talk to the chaplain soon. Has your father seen him? I know what you'll say. You have to find out."

"First, I'll have to find out if I can find out."

"Find out if you can find out if he can arrange it. Strangelove could."

M2 paled again. "You'd go to Strangelove?"

"Strangelove will come to me. And the chaplain won't produce if I tell him not to."

"I must tell my father."

"I've already told him, but he doesn't always hear."

M2 was shaken. "I just thought of something else. Should we be talking about all this in front of Michael? The chaplain is secret now, and I'm not sure I'm authorized to let anyone else hear about him."

"About who?" asked Michael mischievously.

"The chaplain," responded M2.

"What chaplain?"

"Chaplain Albert T. Tappman," said M2. "That friend of your father's from the army who's producing heavy water inside himself without a license and is now secretly in custody while they investigate and examine him while we try to patent him and register a trademark. Do you know about him?"

Michael spoke with a grin. "You mean that friend of my father's from the army who began producing heavy water inside himself illegally and is now-"

"That's the one!" M2 cried, and gaped as though confronted by a specter. "How'd you find out?"

"You just told me," laughed Michael.

"I did it again, didn't I?" blubbered M2, and collapsed with a thump into the chair at his desk in a grieving paroxysm of repentant lamentation. Now his shiny white shirt, which was of synthetic fabric, was rumpled, wet, and in need of ironing, and sopping adumbrations of a fidgety, sweltering anxiety were already darkening the fabric below the armholes of a sleeveless white undershirt he never failed to wear as well. "I just can't keep a secret, can I? My father is still angry with me for telling you about the bomber. He says he could kill me. So is my mother. So are my sisters. But it's your fault too, you know. It's his job to restrain me from telling him secrets like that."

"Like what?" asked Michael.

"Like that one about the bomber."

"What bomber?"

"Our M & M E & A Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber. I hope you don't know about it."

"I know about it now."

"How'd you find out?"

"I have my ways," said Michael, and turned to his father with a glower. "Are we in munitions now too?"

Yossarian answered testily. "Somebody is going to have to be in munitions whether we like it or not, they tell me, so it might as well be them, and somebody is going to work with them on this, whether I say yes or no, so it might as well be you and me, and that's the perfect truth."

"Even though it's a lie?"

"They told me it was a cruise ship."

"It does cruise," M2 explained to Michael.

"With two people?" Yossarian contradicted him. "And here's another way out, to put your conscience at rest," Yossarian added to Michael. "It won't work. Right, M2?"

"We guarantee it."

"And besides," said Yossarian, with resentment surfacing, "you're only being asked to draw a picture of the plane, not to fly the fucking thing or launch an attack. This plane is for the new century. These things take forever, and we both may be dead before they get one into the air, even if they do get the contract. They don't care now if it works or not. All they want is the money. Right, M2?"

"And we'll pay you, of course," offered M2, coming back to his feet and fidgeting. He was slender, spare, with formless shoulders and prominent collarbones.

"How much will you pay?" asked Michael awkwardly.

"As much as you want," answered M2.

"He means it," said Yossarian, when Michael looked clownishly at him for interpretation.