Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22

the sequel to catch-22

In the middle of his second week in the hospital, Yossarian dreamed of his mother, and he knew again that he was going to die. The doctors were upset when he gave them the news.

"We can't find anything wrong," they told him.

"Keep looking," he instructed.

"You're in perfect health."

'Just wait," he advised.

Yossarian was back once more in the hospital for observation, having retreated there beneath a neurotic barrage of confusing physical symptoms to which he had become increasingly susceptible since finding himself dwelling alone for just the second time in his life, and which seemed, one by one, to dissipate like vapor as soon as he described or was tested for each. Just a few months before, he had cured himself of an incurable case of sciatica merely by telephoning one of his physicians to complain of his incurable case of sciatica. He could not learn to live alone. He could not make a bed. He would sooner starve than cook.

This time he had gone bolting in, so to speak, with a morbid vision of a different morbid vision shortly after hearing that the president, whom he did not like, was going to resign, and that the vice president, whom he did not like even more, would certainly succeed him, and shortly after finding out, inadvertently, that Milo Minderbinder, with whom he now had been unavoidably and inescapably linked for something like 25 years, was expanding beyond surplus stale commodities like old chocolate and vintage Egyptian cotton into military equipment with plans for a warplane of his own that he intended to sell to the government. To any government, of course, that could afford to buy.

There were countries in Europe that could afford to buy, and in Asia and the Mideast too. He had no doubt he had much to worry about.

A prick in the White House? It would not be the first time. Another oil tanker had broken up. There was radiation. Garbage. Pesticides, toxic waste and free enterprise. There were enemies of abortion who wished to inflict the death penalty on everyone who was not pro-life. There was mediocrity in government, and self-interest too. There was trouble in Israel. These were not mere delusions. He was not making them up. Soon they would be cloning human embryos for sale, fun and replacement parts. Men earned millions producing nothing more substantial than changes in ownership. The Cold War was over and there was still no peace on earth. Nothing made sense and neither did everything else. People did things without knowing why and then tried to find out.

When bored in his hospital room, Yossarian played with such high-minded thoughts like a daydreaming youth with his genitals.

At least once each weekday morning they came barging in around him, his doctor, Leon Shumacher, and Dr. Shumacher's brisk and serious entourage of burgeoning young physicians, accompanied by the lively floor nurse with the pretty face and the magnificent ass, who was openly drawn to Yossarian, despite his years, and whom he was slyly enticing to develop a benign crush on him, despite her youthfulness. She was a tall woman with impressive hips who remembered Pearl Bailey but not Pearl Harbor, which put her age somewhere between 35 and 60, the very best stage, Yossarian believed, for a woman, provided, of course, she still had her health. Yossarian possessed but a hazy idea of what she really was like, yet he unscrupulously exploited every chance to help pass the time enjoyably with her for the several peaceful weeks he was resolved to remain in the hospital to rest up and put his outlook together while the great nations of the world restabilized themselves into another new world order for good and forever once more.

He'd brought his radio and almost always had some Bach or good chamber, piano or other choral music on one FM station or another. There were too many disruptions for abiding attention to opera, especially Wagner. It was a good room this time, he was pleased to conclude, with unobjectionable neighbors who were not offensively ill, and it was the attractive floor nurse, in response to his baiting, modestly laughing and with a flounce and a flush of hauteur, who made the defiant boast that the ass she had was magnificent. Yossarian could see no reason to disagree.

By the middle of the first week he was flirting with her with all his might. Dr. Leon Shumacher did not always look kindly upon this salacious frivolity.

"It's bad enough I let you in here. I suppose we both ought to feel ashamed, you in this room when you aren't sick--"

"Who says I'm not?"

"And so many people outside on the streets."

"Will you let one in here if I agree to leave?"

"Will you pay the bills?"

Yossarian preferred not to.

A great man with angiograms had confirmed to him soberly that he did not need one; a neurologist reported with equal gloom that there was nothing the matter with his brain.

Leon Shumacher again was displaying him pridefully as a rare specimen his pupils would not have the opportunity to come upon often in their medical practice, a man of 68 without symptoms of any disease, not even hypochondria.

Late afternoons or sometimes early in the evening, Leon would drop by just to chat awhile in singsong sorrow about his long hours, ghoulish working conditions and unjustly low earnings--in tactless, egocentric fashion to a man they both knew was soon going to die.

Leon was not considerate.

The name of this nurse was Melissa MacIntosh, and, like all good women to a sophisticated man with a predilection to romanticize, she seemed too good to be true.

By the beginning of his second week she was allowing him to caress with his fingertips the border of lace on the skirt of her slip when she stood or sat beside his bed or chair while she hung around and talked and flirted back by allowing him to advance in his flirting. Pink with discomfort and enlivened by mischief, she neither consented nor prohibited when he toyed with the hem of this filmy undergarment, but she was not at ease. She was terrified that someone would surprise them in this impermissible intimacy. He was praying somebody would. He concealed from nurse MacIntosh all the subtle signals of his budding erections. He did not want her to get the idea that his intentions were serious. She was lucky to have him; she agreed when he said so. He was less trouble than the other men and women in the private and semiprivate rooms on the same floor. And he was more intriguing to her, he saw--and therefore more seductive, he understood, and maybe she did not--than all of the few men she was seeing outside the hospital and even the one or two men she had been seeing exclusively, almost exclusively, for a number of years. She had never been married, not even once or twice. Yossarian was so little trouble that he was no trouble at all, and she and the other floor nurses had little more to do for him than look into his room each shift just to make certain he wasn't dead yet and needed nothing done to keep him alive.

"Is everything all right?" each one would inquire.

"Everything but my health," he sighed in response.

"You're in perfect health."

That was the trouble, he took the trouble to explain. It meant that he had to get worse.

"It's no joke," he joked when they laughed.

She wore a black slip one day when he begged her to switch, affecting esthetic longing. Often when he wanted her there he found himself in dire need of something to need. When he pressed his call signal, another nurse might respond.

"Send in my Melissa," he would command. The others would cooperate. He suffered no nursing shortage. He was in good health, the doctors restated daily, and this time, he was concluding in morose disappointment, with the sense he was being cheated, they appeared to be right.

His appetite and digestion were good. His auditory and spinal apparatuses had been CAT-scanned. His sinuses were clear and there was no evidence anywhere of arthritis, bursitis, angina or neuritis. He was even without a postnasal drip. His blood pressure was the envy of every doctor who saw him. He gave urine and they took it. His cholesterol was low, his hemoglobin was high, his sedimentation rate was a thing of beauty and his blood nitrogen was ideal. They pronounced him a perfect human being. He thought his first wife and his second, from whom he had now been separated about a year, might have some demurrers.

There was a champion cardiologist who found no fault with him, a pathologist for his pathos who found no cause for concern either, an enterprising gastroenterologist who ran back to the room for a second opinion from Yossarian on some creative investment strategies he was considering in Arizona real estate, and a psychologist for his psyche, in whom Yossarian was left in the last resort to confide.

"And what about these periodic periods of anomie and fatigue and disinterest and depression?" Yossarian rushed on in a whirlwind of whispers. "I find myself detached from listening to things that other people take seriously. I'm tired of information I can't use. I wish the daily newspapers were smaller and came out weekly. I'm not interested anymore in all that's going on in the world. Comedians don't make me laugh and long stories drive me wild. Is it me or old age? Or is the planet really turning irrelevant? TV news is degenerate. Everyone everywhere is glib. My enthusiasms are exhausted. Do I really feel this healthy now or am I just imagining I do? I even have this full head of hair. Doc, I must have the truth. Is my depression mental?"

"It isn't depression and you are not exhausted."

In due course, the psychologist conferred with the chief of psychiatry, who consulted with all the other medical men. They concluded with one voice (continued on page 156)Closing Time(continued from page 80) that there was nothing psychosomatic about the excellent health Yossarian was enjoying, and that the hair on his head was genuine too.

"Although," added the chief psychiatrist, clearing his throat, "I am honor-bound to flag you as a very good candidate for late-life depression."

"Late-life depression?" Yossarian savored the term. "About when would that be?"

"About now. What do you do that you really enjoy?"

"Not much, I'm afraid. I run after women, but not too hard. I make more money than I need."

"Do you enjoy that?"

"No. I've got no ambition and there's not much left I want to get done."

"No golf, bridge, tennis? Art or antique collecting?"

"That's all out of the question."

"The prognosis is not good."

"I've always known that."

"The way it looks to us now, Mr. Yossarian," said the chief medical director, speaking for the whole institution, with Leon Shumacher's head, three-quarters bald, hanging over his shoulder, "you might live forever."

He had nothing to worry about, it seemed, but inflation and deflation, higher interest rates and lower interest rates, the budget deficit, the threat of war and the dangers of peace, the unfavorable balance of trade and a favorable balance of trade, the new president and the old chaplain, and a stronger dollar and a weaker dollar, along with friction, entropy, radiation and gravity.

But he worried too about his new pal nurse Melissa MacIntosh because she had no money saved. Her parents had none either, and if she lived long enough, she would have to live on only her Social Security benefits and a pittance of a retirement pension from the hospital, provided she continued working there for the next 20 or 30 years, which seemed out of the question, unless she met and married before then some fine gentleman of means who was as appealing to her then as Yossarian was to her now, which seemed to him entirely out of the question also. Few men could talk dirty to her so charmingly. More than once he contemplated her with a pang: She was too innocent to abandon to the heartless dynamics of financial circumstance, too sweet, unsuspecting and unselfish.

"What you absolutely must do," he said one day after she had begged him to advise whether she and her roommate should open individual retirement accounts--Yossarian advised that he could not see what fucking practical use an individual retirement account was going to be in the long run to anybody but the banks soliciting them--"is marry someone like me now, a man with some money saved who knows something about insurance policies and legacies and has been married only one time before."

"Would you be too old for me?" she asked in a fright.

"You would be too young for me. Do it soon, do it today. Even a doctor might work. Before you know it you'll be as old as I am and you won't have a thing."

He worried too about the reckless sentimentality of extending concern to a person who needed it.

That was not the American way.

The last thing he needed was another dependent. Or two, for she spoke with pride of an eye-catching, fun-loving roommate in her cramped apartment, a woman named Angela Moore who was taller than she and freer, a natural blonde Australian with her brighter-blonde hair and a larger bosom, who wore stiletto heels and used white lipstick and white eye makeup and who worked as sales representative for a novelty manufacturer to which she submitted ribald ideas for new products that rendered tongue-tied and incredulous the two elderly Jewish family men who owned the company as partners, and made them blush. She liked the effect she knew she made in the costly midtown bars to which she often went after work to meet the convivial business executives to go dancing with after dinner and then discard without pity at the downstairs doorway of the apartment house when her evening ended. She hardly ever met any she liked enough to want to stay longer with because she hardly ever let herself drink enough to get drunk. The private phone number she gave out was of the city morgue, a fact Melissa Macintosh related to him in such joyful praise of her confident and exuberant conduct that Yossarian knew he would fall in love with this woman at first sight provided that he never laid eyes on her, and would remain deeply in love until he saw her the second time. But the tall blonde somewhere near 40 with the white makeup and black stockings with climbing serpentine patterns had no rich parents or money saved either, and Yossarian wondered to himself:

What was wrong with this lousy earth, anyway?

It seemed to him reasonable that everyone toward whom he bore no grudge should have enough money assured to face a future without fear, and he hung his head in his noble reverie of compassion and wanted to take this outstanding, full-bosomed waif of a roommate into his arms to dry her tears and assuage all her anxieties and unzip her dress as he stroked her backside.

He began to grow so troubled about Melissa MacIntosh's good heart and precarious economic future that he began to worry about his own future as well and decided to demand the oncologist back for some tip-top guarantees about a major killer and to hear him discourse further perhaps on the supremacy of biology in human activities and the tyranny of the genes in regulating societies and history.

"You're crazy," said Leon.

"Then get me the psychiatrist too."

"You don't have cancer. Why do you want him?"

"To do him a good deed, dope. Don't you believe in good deeds? The poor little fuck is just about the gloomiest bastard I've ever laid eyes on. How many patients do you think he sees in a week to whom he can bring good news? That guy's disasters are among the few around me I might be able to avert."

"They aren't mine," said the joyless oncologist, upon whose small features a foreboding aspect seemed to have settled as naturally as the blackness of night and the gray skies of winter. "You'd be surprised, though, how many people come to believe they really are my fault. Even colleagues don't like me. Not many people want to talk to me. It may be the reason that I'm quiet. I don't get enough practice."

"I like that spirit," said Yossarian, who could not see that he had much. "Does it buck you up to know that sooner or later you are likely to play an important role in my life?"

"Only a little." His name was Dennis Teemer. "And where would you want me to begin?"

"Wherever you want to that is without pain or discomfort," Yossarian answered cheerily.

"You don't have a symptom anywhere that might suggest a closer investigation."

"Why wait for symptoms?" queried Yossarian, talking down to his specialist. "Is it not conceivable that since we concluded our last explorations something may have originated that is blooming as the two of us sit here procrastinating complacently?"

Dennis Teemer went along with a shimmer of animation. "I guess I have more fun with you than I do with most of my other patients, don't I?"

"I told Leon that."

"But that may be because you're not really my patient," said Dr. Teemer. "What you conjecture is conceivable, of course. But it is no more likely to be happening to you than to anybody else."

."And what difference does that make to me?" countered Yossarian. "It is not much solace to know we all are susceptible. Leon thinks I'll feel better knowing I'm no worse off than he is. Let's get started."

"Suppose we begin with another chest X ray?"

"God, no!" cried Yossarian in mock alarm. "That might just get one started! You know how I feel about X rays and asbestos."

"And tobacco too. Should I give you a statistic I think you'll relish? Did you know that more Americans die each year of diseases related to smoking than were killed in all of the years of World War Two?"

"Yes."

"Then I suppose we might as well go ahead. Should I hammer your knee to test your reflexes?"

"For what?"

"For free."

"Can't we at least do a biopsy?"

"Of what?"

"Of anything that is accessible and simple."

"If you will find that reassuring."

"I will sleep easier."

"We can scrape another mole or another one of your liver spots. Or should we test the prostate again?--The prostate is not uncommon."

"Mine is unique," Yossarian disagreed. "It's the only one that's mine. Let's do the mole. Shumacher has a prostate my age. Let me know when you find something wrong with his."

"I can tell you now," said Yossarian's favorite oncologist, "that it will give me great pleasure to inform you that the results are negative."

"I can tell you now," said Yossarian, "that I will be happy to hear it."

Yossarian yearned to go deeper with this depressed man into the depressing nature of the pathologies in the depressing world of his work and the depressing nature of the universe in which they had each been successful in surviving thus far and which was growing more unreliable daily--there were holes in the ozone, they were running out of room for the disposal of garbage, burning the garbage contaminates the air, they were running out of air--but Yossarian was afraid he would find that conversation depressing.

All of this cost money, of course.

"Of course," said Yossarian.

"Where is it coming from?" Leon Shumacher wondered out loud, with a palpable snarl of envy.

"I'm old enough for Medicare now."

"Medicare won't cover a fraction of this."

"And the rest is coming from a terrific plan I have."

"I wish I had a plan like that," Leon said, sulking.

It came, explained Yossarian, from the company for which he worked, where he was on the books in a semiexecutive capacity as a semiretired semiconsultant and could remain for a lifetime provided he never tried to get much done.

"I wish I had a job like that. What the hell does it mean?" Leon mimicked in sneering derision. "Yossarian, John. Occupation: semiretired semiconsultant. What the hell are our epidemiologists supposed to make of that one?"

"It's been another one of my careers. I work part of the time for all of my fee and no one listens to more than half the things I say. I would call that a semiretired semiconsultant, wouldn't you? We are M&M Enterprises and Associates. I am one of the associates. The other people are enterprising. I associate, they enterprise."

"What do they really do?"

"Whatever makes money and isn't dishonestly criminal, I suppose," Yossarian answered.

"Is one word of this true?"

"I have no way of knowing. They can lie to me as well as to everyone else. We keep secrets from one another. I'm not making it up. You can check. Tie me back up to that heart machine and see if it skips a beat when I tell a lie."

"Will it do that?" Leon asked with surprise.

"I don't see why it wouldn't."

"What do you do there?"

"I object."

"Don't get so touchy."

"I'm answering your question," Yossarian informed him pleasantly. "I object to matters that are not up to my ethical standards. Sometimes I work very hard at objecting. Then they go ahead or don't. I am the conscience of the company, a moral presence, and that's another one of the things I've been doing since I dropped by there more than 20 years ago for illegal help in keeping my children out of the Vietnam war. How'd you keep yours out?"

"Medical school. Of course, they both switched to business administration as soon as the danger was past. By the way, my grapevine tells me you still seem to be having a pretty hot time with one of our favorite floor nurses."

"Better than I'm having with you and your associates."

"She's a very nice girl and a very good nurse."

"I think I've noticed."

"Attractive, too."

"I've seen that also."

"We have a number of fine specialists here who tell me frankly they'd like to get into her pants."

"That's crude, Leon, really crude, and you ought to be ashamed," Yossarian rebuked him with disgust. "It's a most obscene way of saying you'd all like to fuck her."

•

Toward the end of Yossarian's second week in the hospital they hatched the plot that drove him out.

They drove him out with the man from Belgium in the room adjacent to his. The man from Belgium was a financial wise man with the European Union. He was a very sick financial wise man who spoke little English, which did not matter much because he had just had part of his throat removed and could not speak at all. He understood hardly any either, which mattered greatly to the nurses and several doctors, who were unable to address him in ways that had' meaning. All day and much of the night he had at his bedside his waxen and diminutive Belgian wife in unpressed fashionable clothes, who smoked cigarettes continually and understood no English either and jabbered away at the nurses ceaselessly and hysterically, flying into alarms of shrieking terror each time he groaned or choked or slept or awoke. He had come to this country to be made well, and the doctors had taken out his larynx because he certainly would have died had they left it in. Now it was not so certain he would live. Christ, thought Yossarian, how can he stand it?

Christ, thought Yossarian, how can I?

Yossarian was symptom-suggestible and knew it. Within a day his voice turned husky.

"What's the matter with you?" nurse MacIntosh snapped with concern the next morning after she had reported for work, put on her makeup, straightened the seams of her seamless stockings and then come into the room looking her niftiest to make sure he was all right. "You don't sound the same. Why aren't you eating?"

"I know. I'm hoarse. I'm not hungry right now. I don't know why I'm so hoarse."

He had no fever or physical discomfort and there was no visible evidence of inflammation anywhere in his ears, nose or throat, said the ear, nose and throat man who was summoned.

The next day his throat was sore. He felt a lump there too and had difficulty swallowing his food, though there was still no sign of infection or obstruction, and he knew as surely as he knew anything else that he too would soon lose his larynx to a malignancy if he did not get the hell away from that hospital fast.

Nurse Melissa Macintosh looked heartbroken. It was nothing personal, he assured her. He promised gallantly to take her out soon to dinner at a good restaurant, and to Paris and Florence, and Munich too, perhaps, and window-shop for lacy lingerie with her, if they found they hit it off. She said she would miss him. He replied with perfection that he would not give her the chance, wondering, even as he gazed sincerely into her earnest blue eyes and warmly pressed her hand goodbye, whether he would ever even remember to want to see her again.