The luggage hustlers at curbside stared through him icily when he alighted without any. Inside the bus terminal things looked normal. Travelers streamed toward goals, those departing descending to buses below that carried them everywhere, or upward to the second, third, and fourth levels to buses that carried them away everywhere else.
“I’ll do you for a nickel, mister,” a thin boy of about fourteen spoke up to him bashfully.
A nickel was five dollars, and Yossarian did not have the heart to tell the lad that he did not think he was worth it.
“I’ll do you for a nickel, mister,” said a flat-chested girl immediately beyond, a few years older but lacking the ballooning contours of budding female maturity, while a stout woman with painted lids and rouged cheeks and dimpled faces of fat around the chubby knees exposed by her tight skirt looked on from ahead, laughing to herself.
“I’ll lick your balls,” the woman proposed while Yossarian walked by, and rolled her eyes coquettishly. “We can do it in the emergency stairwell.”
Now he tensed with outrage. I am sixty-eight, he said to himself. What was there about him that gave these people the notion he had come to the terminal to be done or have his balls licked? Where the fuck was McMahon?
Police Captain Thomas McMahon of the Port Authority police force was inside the police station with civilian deputy director Lawrence McBride, watching Michael Yossarian draw with a pencil on the back of a broad sheet of paper, looking on with that special reverence some people of inexperience bestow upon the ordinary skills of the artistic performer which they themselves lack. Yossarian could have told them that Michael probably would stop before finishing his sketch and leave it behind. Michael tended not to finish things and prudently did not start many.
He was busy executing a horrified picture of himself in the wall cuff to which he had still been chained when Yossarian had come charging into the police station the day he was arrested. With looping strokes he had transformed the rectangular modes of the prison cells into a vertical pit of sludge with spinning sides into which one peered slantwise, and in which the stiff human stick figure of himself he had just outlined stood engulfed and forlorn.
“You leave him right where he is!” Yossarian had thundered on the telephone half an hour before to the officer who had called to establish identification because the receptionist at the architectural firm for which Michael was doing elevations did not know he’d been taken on for a freelance assignment. “Don’t you dare put him in a cell!”
“One minute, sir, one minute, sir!” broke in the offended cop, in a high-pitched outcry of objection. “I’m calling to establish identity. We have our procedures.”
“You go fuck your procedures!” Yossarian commanded. “Do you understand me?” He was mad enough and scared enough and felt helpless enough to kill. “You do what I say or I’ll have your ass!” he bellowed roughly, with the belief that he meant it.
“Hey, hey, hey, one minute, buddy, hey, one minute, buddy!” The young cop was screaming now in a frenzy almost hysterical. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“I am Major John Yossarian of the M & M Pentagon Air Force Project,” Yossarian replied in crisp, stern tones. “You insolent cocksucker. Where’s your superior?”
“Captain McMahon here,” said an older man, with emotionless surprise. “What’s your trouble, sir?”
“This is Major John Yossarian of the M & M Pentagon Air Force Project, Captain. You’ve got my son there. I don’t want him touched, I don’t want him moved, I don’t want him put near anyone who might harm him. And that includes your cops. Do we understand each other?”
“I understand you,” McMahon came back coolly. “But I don’t think you understand me. Who did you say this is?”
“John Yossarian, Major John Yossarian. And if you tie me up on this any longer it will be your ass too. I’ll be there in six minutes.”
To the taxi driver he gave a hundred-dollar bill and said respectfully, hearing his heart pound: “Please pass every traffic light you can pass safely. If you’re stopped by a cop I’ll give you another hundred and go the rest of the way on foot. I’ve got a child in trouble.”
That the child was past thirty-seven did not matter. That he was defenseless did.
But Michael was still safe, handcuffed to the wall on a chain as though he would founder to the floor if he did not have that chain for support, and he was white as a ghost.
The station was in an uproar. People were moving and shouting everywhere. The cages were swarming with arms and sweaty faces and with gleaming eyes and mouths, the hallway too, the air stank of everything, and the officers and prison guards, sweating and swarming all over too, labored powerfully in picking, pulling, shoving, and heaving prisoners to be steered outside into vans and trucked downtown for delivery into other hands. Of all who were there, only Michael and Yossarian showed awareness of anything uncommon. Even the prisoners seemed ideally acclimated to the turbulent environment and vigorous procedures. Many were bored, others were amused and contemptuous, some ranted crazily. Several young women were hooting with laughter and shrieking obscenities brazenly in taunting debauchery, baiting and incensing the frustrated guards, who had to endure and cope with them without retaliating.
McMahon and the desk sergeant were awaiting him with stony faces.
“Captain—you him?” Yossarian began, talking directly into McMahon’s light-blue, steely eyes with a hard-boiled stare of his own. “Get used to the idea! You’re not going to put him into one of those cells. And I don’t want him in a van with those others either. A squad car is all right, but I’ll want to go with him. If you like, I’ll hire a private car, and you can put some officers in with us.”
McMahon listened with folded arms. “Is that right?” he said quietly. He was slim, straight, and more than six feet tall, with a bony face with tiny features, and the crests of his high cheekbones were spotted pink with a faint efflorescence, as though in savoring anticipation of the conflict at hand. “Tell me again, sir. Who did you say you were?”
“Major John Yossarian. I’m at work on the M & M Pentagon Air Force Project.”
“And you think that makes your son an exception?”
“He is an exception.”
“Is he?”
“Are you blind?” Yossarian exploded. “Take a good look, for Christ sakes. He’s the only one here with a dry crotch and a dry nose. He’s the only one here who’s white.”
“No, he’s not, Captain,” meekly corrected the sergeant. “We’ve got two other Caucasians we’re holding in back who beat up a cop by mistake. They were looking for money.”
Everyone around was contemplating Yossarian now as though he were something bizarre. And when he finally appreciated why, that he was poised before them with his arms raised in an asinine prizefighter’s stance, as though ready to punch, he wanted to whimper in ironic woe. He had forgotten his age. Michael too had been regarding him with astonishment.
And at just that point of unnerving self-discovery, McBride wandered up and, in a gentle manner both firm and conciliatory, asked: “What’s up, guys?”
Yossarian saw a sturdy man of middle height with a flushed face and a polyester suit of vapid light gray, with a broad chest that bellied outward and down so that from his neck to his waist he seemed a bulwark.
“Who the fuck are you?” sighed Yossarian in despair.
McBride replied softly, with the fearless confidence of a man competent at riot control. “Hello. I’m Deputy Supervisor Lawrence McBride of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Hello, Tommy. Something going on?”
“He thinks he’s big,” said McMahon. “He says he’s a major. And he thinks he can tell us what to do.”
“Major Yossarian,” Yossarian introduced himself. “He’s got my son here, Mr. McBride, chained to that wall.”
“He’s been arrested,” said McBride pleasantly. “What would you want them to do with him?”
“I want them to leave him where he is until we decide what we will do. That’s all. He has no criminal record.” To the police guard nearest Michael, Yossarian barked an order. “Unlock him now. Please do that right now.”
McMahon pondered a moment and signaled permission.
Yossarian resumed amicably. “Tell us where you want him to be. We’re not running away. I don’t want trouble. Should I hire that car? Am I talking too much?”
Michael was aggrieved. “They never even read me my right to be silent.”
“They probably didn’t ask you to say anything,” McBride explained. “Did they?”
“And the handcuffs hurt like hell! Not that one. The real handcuffs, God damn it. That’s brutality.”
“Tommy, what’s he charged with?” asked McBride.
McMahon hung his head. “Beating the subway fare.”
“Oh, shit, Tommy,” said McBride, entreating.
“Where’s Gonzales?” McMahon asked the sergeant.
“That’s the guy who grabbed me,” Michael called out.
The sergeant blushed. “Back at the subway exit, Captain, making his quota.”
“I thought they had a fucking quota!” Michael shouted.
“Major, can’t you keep your son quiet while we settle this?” asked McMahon, begging a favor.
“Tommy,” said McBride, “couldn’t you just give him a summons and release him on a DTA? We know he’ll appear.”
“What did you think we were going to do, Larry?” McMahon replied. He appealed to Yossarian as though they were allies. “You hear that, Major? I’m a captain, he was a sergeant, and now he’s telling me how to handle my business. Sir, are you really a major?”
“Retired,” admitted Yossarian. He found the business card he wanted of the several he carried. “My card, Captain. And one for you, Mr. McBride—McBride, is it?—in case I can return the favor. You’ve been a godsend.”
“Here’s mine, Major,” said McBride, and gave a second one to Michael. “And one for you too, in case you’re ever in trouble here again.”
Michael was moping as they walked out with McBride. “It’s a good thing I’ve still got you to look after me, isn’t it?” he accused sullenly. Yossarian shrugged. “I feel like such a fucking weakling now.”
McBride intervened. “Hey, you did the right thing, kiddo.” He paused for a chuckle, laughed louder. “How could you convince us you’d break our backs and legs, when we had you in handcuffs?”
“Is that what I did?” said Yossarian with fright.
McBride laughed again. “Where’s the credibility? That right, Major Yossarian?”
“Call me Yo-Yo, for God’s sake,” said Yossarian jovially. “I must have been forgetting my age.”
“You sure were,” charged Michael. “I was scared, damn it. And you guys are laughing. You were a champ, Pop,” he continued sardonically. “Me, I don’t even have a loud voice. Before when I was stopped by that cop, my hands shook so much he was afraid I was having a heart attack and almost let me go.”
“It’s the way we are, Michael, when we’re angry or scared. I get crazy and talk too much.”
“I couldn’t even give them my right name so they’d believe me. And when the hell were you really ever a major?”
“Want a business card?” Yossarian snickered slyly and turned to McBride. “For about a minute and a half,” he explained. “They gave me a temporary boost near the end because they didn’t know what else to do with me. Then they shipped me home, brought me back to my permanent grade, and gave me my honorable discharge. I had the medals, I had the points, I even had my Purple Heart.”
“You were wounded?” cried McBride.
“Yeah, and crazy too,” replied Michael, proudly. “Another time he went walking around naked.”
“You walked around naked?” cried McBride.
“And they gave him a medal,” boasted Michael, completely at ease now. “A medal for bravery.”
“You got a medal for bravery?” cried McBride.
“And couldn’t pin it on.”
“Because he was naked?”
“Still naked.”
“Weren’t you embarrassed? Didn’t they do anything?”
“He was crazy.”
“What’d you get the medal for, Major? How’d you get the Purple Heart? Why’d you walk around naked?”
“Stop calling me Major, Mr. McBride,” said Yossarian, who had no wish to talk now about the waist gunner from the South who’d been killed over Avignon and the small tail gunner Sam Singer from Coney Island who kept fainting away each time he came to and saw the waist gunner dying and Yossarian throwing up all over himself as he worked with bandages and tried vainly to save the dying man. It was sometimes funny to him since in just those gruesome anecdotal aspects. The wounded waist gunner was cold and in pain, and Yossarian could find nothing to do that would warm him up. Every time Singer revived, he opened his eyes on something else Yossarian was busy with that made him faint away again: retching, wrapping up dead flesh, wielding scissors. The dying gunner was freezing to death on the floor in a patch of Mediterranean sunlight, Sam Singer kept fainting, and Yossarian had taken off all his clothes because the sight of the vomit and blood on his flight uniform made him want to vomit some more and to feel with nauseated certitude that he would never want to have to wear any kind of uniform ever again, not ever, and by the time they landed, the medics were not sure which one of the three to take into the ambulance first. “Let’s talk about you.”
Yossarian now knew that McBride’s wife had left him—transformed almost overnight into a wrathful figure of pure fury by an inner rage he had never guessed existed—and that he had been living alone since his daughter had moved to California with a boyfriend to work as a physical therapist. To McBride, the unexpected breakup of his marriage was one more heartrending cruelty he could not puzzle out in a world he saw seething barbarously with multitudes of others. Former detective sergeant Larry McBride of the Port Authority police force was fifty and had the boyish, chubby face of an introspective seraph in hard times. As a cop he had never been able to outgrow the sympathy he suffered for every type of victim he encountered—even now his knowledge of the one-legged woman living in the terminal tormented him—and always after wrapping up a case, to his racking emotional detriment, he would begin suffering compassion for the criminals too, no matter how hardened, bestial, or obtuse, no matter how vicious the crime. He would see them all pityingly, as they’d been as children. When the opportunity arose to retire on a full pension and take the executive position at good salary at the bus terminal—in which, in fact, as one kind of guardian or another, he had by now spent his entire working life—he seized it joyfully.
The end of a marriage he had thought satisfactory was a blow from which it seemed at first he did not think he would recover. Now, while Michael prepared to wait, Yossarian wondered what new thing McBride wanted to show him.
“You tell me,” McBride answered mysteriously.
The time before, he had unveiled his plans for a maternity cell, for converting one of the two auxiliary prison cages in the rear, for which there never had been need, into a room for mothers of unwanted babies who most generally disposed of the newborn infants in alleys and hallways or threw them away into wastebaskets, garbage cans, and Dumpsters. He had already moved in at his own expense some pieces of furniture from his apartment for which he no longer had need. Yossarian nodded as he listened, sucking his cheeks inward a bit, and then he nodded some more. Nobody wanted those babies, he could have told him, and nobody cared for those mothers, who were rendering a service to the community by throwing them away.
For the other jail cell, McBride resumed, he had in mind a sort of pediatric day care center for the several little kids always living in the bus terminal, to afford their mothers a clean, safe place in which to place their offspring while they journeyed outside to panhandle and hustle for drugs and booze and food, and also for the runaway kids who kept showing up in this heart of the city until they made their good connections with a satisfactory drug dealer or pimp.
Yossarian broke in regretfully.
“McBride?”
“You think I’m nuts?” McBride rushed on defensively. “I know Tommy thinks I’m nuts. But we could have mobiles and stuffed toys and coloring books for the little ones. And for the older ones television sets and video games, maybe computers, sure, even word processors, couldn’t they learn that?”
“McBride?” repeated Yossarian.
“Yossarian?” McBride had adopted unconsciously a number of Yossarian’s speaking traits.
“Mobiles and word processors for kids who want drugs and sex?”
“Just while they’re hanging around making their contacts. They’d be safer here than anywhere else, wouldn’t they? What’s wrong? Yossarian, what’s wrong?”
Yossarian sighed wearily, feeling undone. “You’re talking about a facility in a police station for aspiring child prostitutes? Larry, the public would scream bloody murder. So would I.”
“What would you do that’s better? They come here anyway, don’t they?”
From the fact that McBride had been silent since on the subject of these humanitarian undertakings, Yossarian surmised they’d been stalled or forbidden.
Today he had some new surprise in store, and Yossarian went outside with him into the capacious structure of the bus terminal, where activities of all varieties had picked up bullishly. People were moving more quickly, and there were many more of them, traveling automatically like spirits who would have chosen a different course than the ones they were following had they found themselves free to decide. So many were eating as they walked, dripping crumbs and wrappers—candy bars, apples, hot dogs, pizzas, sandwiches, potato chips. The hustlers were at work at their assorted specialties, the best of them animated, with sharp eyes fishing around shrewdly for targets of opportunity, others blundering about crudely in search of just about anything, and still others, male and female, white and black, floating in blank-eyed, wistful stupors and looking less like predators than crippled prey.
“Pickpockets,” McBride said, with a signal of his chin toward a group of three men and two girls, all of good appearance, and of Latin American countenance. “They’re better trained than we are. They even know more law. Look.”
A jolly group of transvestites moved up by escalator to the floor above, the faces glistening with a cosmetic sheen, all androgynous and vain in face and attire, the entire bunch as frisky and flirtatious as pubescent girl scouts high on hormones.
With McBride steering him, they passed the empty space below the pillars supporting the mezzanine floor of the observation bubble overhead with its staff of several employees doing drugs while monitoring the five dozen video screens in the Communications Control Center of the terminal. The hundreds of azure-eyed, dumb video cameras poked their flat snouts into every cranny on every level of the rambling, seven-story complex bestriding two city blocks, poking without blushing even into the men’s toilets and the notorious emergency stairwells into which most of those living in the terminal crept at night for sleep and friendship and apathetic intercourse. Milo and Wintergreen were already thinking of the Communications Control Center converted into a lucrative enterprise by increasing the number of screens and selling units of time to eager spectators and players, who would replace the Port Authority employees and their salaries and their costly medical plans and vacation and retirement plans. People would flock to watch, to play cop and Peeping Tom. They could call it “The Real Thing.” When crime slackened, they would present fakes and that way guarantee enough sex and violence to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty paying crowds.
They could book in Japanese tour groups. Sooner or later they could spin the whole thing off to a Japanese motion picture company.
McBride moved past a newsstand run by Indians, with newspapers and colorful periodicals like Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine headlining the collapse of Russian socialism, the grandeur of American capitalism, and the latest business bankruptcy, unemployment figures, and sale of another national mercantile landmark to foreigners, and they came to the entrance of one of the emergency stairwells. Yossarian did not want to take that tour again.
“Just one floor,” promised McBride.
“Something awful?”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
Loafing voices echoed mellifluously from above. The stairway was practically empty, the floor almost tidy. But the odors in this civilization were strong, the air reeking of smoke and unwashed bodies and their waste, a stench of rot and degradation that was violently disgusting and vilely intolerable to all but the mass producing it daily. By midnight there was scarcely a charmed body with enough living space to be free of another body more dissipated and fetid tumbled against it. People squabbled. There were shouts, quarrels, stabbings, burns, sex, drugs, drinking, and breaking glass; by morning there were casualties and an accumulation of filth of all sorts save industrial waste. There was no water or toilet. Garbage was not collected until morning, when the locals roused and took themselves to the sinks and the toilets in the rest rooms in sanitary preparation for the day’s work ahead and, despite posted bans, to bathe and do laundry in the washbasins.
By this hour, the maintenance men had been through with their hoses and face masks to clean away the messes of excrement, trash, and garbage left the night before, the charred matchsticks and empty vials from dope, the soda cans, needles, wine bottles, and used condoms and old Band-Aids. The astringent smell of caustic disinfectant hung ineradicably in the air like the carbolic harbinger of a remorseless decay.
McBride took the staircase down past two raffish men of insolent and bored demeanor who were smoking marijuana and drinking wine and fell silent in tacit approbation after sizing him up and acknowledging with a kind of objective acceptance the latent authority and prowess he exuded. Near the bottom of the steps a solitary man slept with his back to the banister.
They passed to the concrete landing without disturbing him and tiptoed carefully around the one-legged woman being raped by a man with scrawny blanched buttocks and a livid scrotum not many yards from a large, brown-skinned woman who had taken off her bloomers and her skirt and was swabbing her backside and her armpits with a few damp towels she had laid out on newspapers with some folded dry ones near two brown shopping bags. She had splotchy freckles about her puffy eyes and bore scarred, tar-colored moles on her neck and back that made him think of melanoma. She stared at each in turn with a separate nod of matter-of-fact amity. Her pendulous breasts in a pink chemise were huge and her armpits were dark and bushy. Yossarian did not want to look down at her exposed vaginal area. He did not know who she was, but he knew he had not one thing he wanted to talk to her about.
On the last flight down to the sub-level outside, there sat only a skinny blonde woman with a bruised eye and a tattered red sweater, dreamily engaged in sewing a rip in a dirty white blouse. At the bottom, where the staircase came to an end facing an exit door to the street, someone had already shit in a corner. They looked away and walked looking down, as though in dire misgiving of a step into something sinful. Instead of heading outside, McBride turned beneath the staircase and proceeded into heavy shadows almost to the end of this lowest landing, until he came to a colorless door that Yossarian would have supposed invisible.
He switched on a light that was weak and yellow. The small room into which they stepped held only a metal closet with rusting doors on broken hinges that stood against a wall. McBride forced these doors apart and stepped inside the wasted relic. It had no back. He located a latch and pushed open an entranceway built into the wall itself.
“An addict found it,” he mumbled rapidly. “I let him believe he was imagining it. Go on in.”
Yossarian gasped with surprise in a cramped vestibule blocked by a wide fire door a few feet in front of his face. The slick surface was military green and painted at eye level with a warning in bold letters that could not be overlooked by anyone able to read.
The sturdy door seemed new, the letters fresh on the unmarred surface.
“Go on in. It’s what I want to show you.”
“I’m not allowed.”
“Neither am I.”
“Where’s the key?”
“Where’s the lock?” McBride grinned victoriously, his head cocked. “Go on.”
The handle turned and the massive door slid open as though leveraged by counterweights and pivoting on noiseless bearings.
“They make it easy for people to get in, don’t they?” said Yossarian softly.
McBride hung back, forcing Yossarian through first. Yossarian recoiled as he discovered himself on a tiny landing of wrought iron near the roof of a tunnel that seemed greatly higher than it was because of the dizzying angle downward of the staircase on which he was standing. Instinctively, he grasped the handrail. Here the flights of steps were small and reversed direction abruptly around an elliptical tiny platform of metal grillwork, where the next flight turned sharply back beneath him and dropped away out of sight at that same precipitous angle of descent. He could not see where the staircase came to an end in that abyss of a basement, whose dark floor seemed newly paved with some kind of rubberized compound. Looking down through the wrought-iron pattern of winding vine leaves that seemed to mock its own heavy composition, he was all at once reminded ridiculously of one of those vertical slides at an old-fashioned amusement park in which one embarked supine into darkness inside a cylindrical pillar with arms folded and went spiraling down with increasing momentum, to be expelled at last into a flat round arena of polished wood with disks rotating in contrary directions that bore him this way and that way for the pleasure of idle watchers until ultimately spilling him aside onto the stationary embankment that ringed the circular area of that particular attraction. The one he remembered best was named the Human Pool Table in the old George C. Tilyou Steeplechase Park in Coney Island. There, an iron handrail circling the viewing enclosure had been rigged electrically to administer stinging shocks of harmless voltage to unwary patrons whenever one of the red-suited attendants in green jockey caps thought the timing appropriate. That sudden onrush of tiny prickling needles bursting into the hands and arms was intolerable and memorable, and all who observed that half second of fright and panicked embarrassment of others laughed; the victims laughed too, afterward. There was laughter bursting from loudspeakers as well. Not many blocks away were freak shows featuring people with small heads.
Yossarian was standing now near the top of something nearly two stories high, a strange subterranean thoroughfare of impressive breadth and no discernible use, with a vaulted ceiling insulated with scored and pitted peach-colored acoustical tiles and outlined with slender borders of apple green. The high, flat walls of stone were of dark-reddish hue. These were tiled in white at the base like those of the underground stations of the subway system. The strange passageway was as wide as a city avenue, without curbs or sidewalks. It could have served as a train station too, except that he saw no rails or platforms. Then he spied near the bottom on the other side a long reflecting arrow in red that reminded him one moment of a fiery penis and the next of a flaming missile that shot vividly to the left and then dipped downward perpendicularly toward words in black that proclaimed:
Sub-Basements A-Z
Above the arrow, where the white tiling ended, and perhaps thirty feet to the right, he recognized a large stenciled letter S of luminescent amber on a square of glossy black. Obviously, they were inside an old bomb shelter, he knew, until he spotted near the ground a door of metal of the same olive-drab shade as on the one behind him, with writing on it in white he could not believe, even after he had donned his trifocals to see into the distance more clearly.
“That could mean at least two different things, couldn’t it?” he said.
McBride nodded grimly. “That’s what I thought too.” Unexpectedly, he let out a laugh, as though proud of himself. “Now look at that plaque.”
“What plaque?”
“In dark letters. It’s set into the wall near the doorway and says that a man named Kilroy was here.”
Yossarian gave McBride a searching look. “Kilroy? It says that? Kilroy was here?”
“You know Kilroy?”
“I was in the army with Kilroy,” said Yossarian.
“Maybe it’s not the same Kilroy.”
“He’s the one.”
“Overseas?”
“Everywhere. Shit, I ought to know him by now. Everywhere I was stationed, he was there too. You always saw it written on a wall. When I was arrested and put in the stockade for a week, he’d been locked up there also. In college after the war, when I went into the library stacks, he’d already been there.”
“Could you find him for me?”
“I never met him. I never met anyone who saw him.”
“I could find him,” said McBride. “Through the Freedom of Information Act. Once I get his Social Security number I can nail him cold. Will you come talk to him with me?”
“Is he still alive?”
“Why wouldn’t he be alive?” asked McBride, who was only fifty. “I want to know more about this, I want to know what he was doing here. I want to know what the hell this is.”
“How far down does all this go?”
“I don’t know. It’s not on the plans.”
“Why does it bother you?”
“I’m still a detective, I guess. Go down a few steps,” McBride instructed next. “Try one more.”
Yossarian froze when he heard the noise begin. It was an animal, the heaving ire of something live, the ominous burring of some dangerous beast disturbed, a rumble welling in smoldering stages into an elongated snarling. Next came growling, guttural and deadly, and an agitated shudder of awakened power, and the movement of veering limbs striding about underneath where he could not see. Then a second animal joined in; perhaps there were three.
“Go down,” whispered McBride, “one more step.”
Yossarian shook his head. McBride nudged. On tiptoe Yossarian touched his foot down one more step and heard the jangling commence, as though of metal scraping on stone and of metal jingling against metal, and those noises were building swiftly toward a demonic climax of some calamitous sort, and all at once, as though without warning, although the warnings had been cumulative and unremitting, there was the blowout, the explosion, the ferocious and petrifying bedlam of piercing barks and deafening roars and a tumultuous charge of forceful paws pounding forward with unleashed savagery and then mercifully brought to a halt in a quaking crash of chains that made him jump with fright and afterward went reverberating like a substance of great ballistic bulk deep into the contracting gloom at both ends of the underground chamber in which they were standing. The fierce rumpus below turned more savage still with the incensed raging of the beasts at the rugged restraints against which they were now tearing and snapping with all their supernatural might. They growled and they roared and they snarled and they howled. And Yossarian kept straining his ears in a frantic irrational desire to hear more. He knew he would never be able to move again. The instant he could move, he stepped up backward in noiseless motion, hardly breathing, until he stood on the landing alongside McBride, where he took McBride’s arm and held on. He was icy and he knew he was sweating. He had the giddy fear his heart was going to convulse and stop, that an artery in his head would split. He knew he could think of eight other ways he might die on the spot, if he did not die before he could list them. The raw fury in the fierce passions below seemed gradually to flag. The untamed monsters understood they had missed him, and he listened with relief to the invisible dangers subsiding and to whatever carnivorous forms that drew breath below receding with chains dragging to the dark lairs from which they had sprung. At last there was silence, the last tinkling noises melting away into a tone as delicate as a chime and dissolving into a fading resonance that seemed incongruously to be the pumped, haunting carnival music of some outlying, solitary carousel, and this receded into silence too.
He thought he knew now how it felt to be torn to pieces. He trembled.
“What do you make of it?” McBride asked, in an undertone. His lips were white. “They’re always there; that happens every time you touch that step.”
“It’s recorded,” said Yossarian.
For the moment, McBride was speechless. “Are you sure?”
“No,” said Yossarian, surprised himself by the spontaneous insight he had just expressed. “But it’s just too perfect. Isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
Yossarian did not want to talk now about Dante, Cerberus, Virgil, or Charon, or the rivers Acheron and Styx. “It might be there just to scare us away.”
“It sure scared hell out of that drug addict, I can tell you,” said McBride. “He was sure he was hallucinating. I let everyone but Tommy think that he was.”
Then they heard the new noise.
“You hear that?” said McBride.
Yossarian heard the wheels turning and looked to the base of the wall opposite. Somewhere beyond it was the muffled rolling of wheels on rails, muted by distance and barriers.
“The subway?”
McBride shook his head. “That’s too far. What would you say,” he continued speculatively, “to a roller-coaster?”
“Are you crazy?”
“It could be a recording too, couldn’t it?” insisted McBride. “Why is that crazy?”
“Because it’s not a roller-coaster.”
“How do you know?”
“I think I can tell. Stop playing detective.”
“When’s the last time you rode on one?”
“A million years ago. But it’s too steady. There’s no acceleration. What more do you want? I’m going to laugh. Let’s call it a train,” continued Yossarian, as the vehicle came abreast and rolled away to the left. It might have been the Metroliner going down from Boston to Washington, but McBride would know that. And when he considered a roller-coaster, he did start to laugh, for he remembered that he had already lived much longer than he ever thought he would.
He stopped laughing when he saw the catwalk and railing running along the wall about three feet from the bottom and disappearing into the white-misted, golden obscurity of the enclosures on both sides.
“Was that down there all the time?” He was puzzled. “I thought I was hallucinating when I noticed it just now.”
“It’s been there,” said McBride.
“Then I must have been hallucinating when I imagined it wasn’t. Let’s get the hell out.”
“I want to go down there,” said McBride.
“I won’t go with you,” Yossarian told him.
He had never liked surprises.
“Aren’t you curious?”
“I’m afraid of the dogs.”
“You said,” said McBride, “it was only a recording.”
“That might scare me more. Go with Tom. That’s his business.”
“It’s not on Tommy’s beat. I’m not even supposed to be here,” McBride admitted. “I’m supposed to enforce these restrictions, not violate them. Notice anything now?” he added, as they turned back up the stairs.
On the inside of the metal door Yossarian now saw two solid locks, one spring loaded, the other dead bolt. And above the locks, under a rectangle of lacquer, he saw a block of white printing on a scarlet background framed in a thin margin of silver, that read:
Yossarian scratched his head. “From this side it looks like they want to keep people out, don’t they?”
“Or in?”
He would guess, he guessed, as they proceeded outside, that it was an old bomb shelter that was not on the old plans. He could not explain the signs, he admitted, as McBride closed the fire door quietly and conscientiously switched off the electric light to leave everything the same as when they had come. The dogs, the sound of the killer guard dogs? “To scare people out, I guess, like that addict, and you and me. Why did you want me to see it?”
“To let you know. You seem to know everything.”
“I don’t know this one.”
“And you’re someone I trust.”
They could tell from voices higher up that the stairwell had crowded considerably. They heard clearly the bawdy laughter, the languorous salutes of greeting and recognition, the obscenities, they could smell the smoke of matches and dope and scorched newspapers, they heard a glass bottle break, they heard the splash one floor up of a man or a woman urinating, and they smelled that too. At the top of the lowest flight, they saw the one-legged woman, who was white, drinking wine with a man and two women who were black. Her expression was blank and she talked in a daze, crushing pink underwear in a hand that lay restfully in her lap. Her wooden crutches, which were old and chipped and splintered and spotted, were lying on the staircase at her hip.
“She gets a wheelchair,” McBride had already explained, “and someone steals it. Then friends steal one from someone else. Then someone steals that one.”
This time McBride took the exit door, and Yossarian found himself on the sidewalk passing buses on the sub-level driving ramps, where the exploding exhausts and grinding engines were noisier and the air was stinking with diesel fumes and the smell of hot rubber, and they walked past boarding stations with long-distance buses for EI Paso and Saint Paul, with connections continuing far up into Canada and down all the way through Mexico into Central America.
McBride took an entrepreneur’s gratification in the operational efficiency of the bus terminal: the figures of almost five hundred boarding gates, sixty-eight hundred buses, and nearly two hundred thousand passengers in and out every normal working day tripped from his tongue fluently. The work still went on, he was speedy to assert, the terminal functioned, and that was the point, wasn’t it?
Yossarian wasn’t sure.
Now they rode by escalator back to the main floor. Passing the Communications Control Center, they glanced uneasily at the flocks of male and female hookers already congregating in the central areas of prostitution, where more and more would continue crowding in crafty and pathetic legions like molecules of matter in human form drawn insensibly to a central mass from which they could not want to free themselves. They strode past a shrunken black woman who stood near a post between state-authorized Lottery and Lotto stands in unlaced sneakers and held out a soiled paper cup while chanting tunelessly, “Fifteen cents? Gimme fifteen cents? Any food? Used food?” A gray-haired bloated woman in a green tam-o’-shanter and green sweater and skirt, with sores on her splotched legs, was singing an Irish song off-key blissfully in a cracked voice near a filthy, sleeping teenager on the floor and a wild-eyed, slender, chocolate-colored tall man who was spotlessly clean and seemed all bones, preaching Christian salvation in a Caribbean accent to a stout black woman who nodded and a skinny white Southerner with closed eyes who kept breaking in with calls of thrilled affirmation. As they drew near the police station, Yossarian remembered with malicious caprice his wish to find out something special from his capable guide.
“McBride?”
“Yossarian?”
“I was talking to some friends. They’re thinking of holding a wedding here in the terminal.”
McBride flushed generously. “Sure, hey, that’s a good idea. Yeah, Yo-Yo. I could pitch in and help. We could make them a nice wedding, I think we could. I’ve still got that empty cell there for the kids. We could turn that into the chapel. And of course, right next door, ahem, I’ve still got the bed, for the honeymoon night. We could give them a big wedding breakfast in one of the food shops and maybe buy them some lottery tickets as a good-luck present. What’s funny? Why couldn’t they use it?”
It took Yossarian a minute to stop laughing. “No, Larry, no,” he explained. “I’m talking about a big wedding, gigantic, high society, hundreds of guests, limousines at the bus ramps, newspapermen and cameras, a dance floor with a big band, maybe two dance floors and two bands.”
“Are you crazy, Yo-Yo?” Now McBride was the one who was chuckling. “The commissioners would never allow it!”
“These people know the commissioners. They’d be there as guests. And the mayor and the cardinal, maybe even the new President. Secret Service men and a hundred police.”
“If you had the President we’d be allowed to go all the way down there to look. The Secret Service would want that.”
“Sure, you would like that too. It would be the wedding of the year. Your terminal would be famous.”
“You’d have to clear out the people! Stop all the buses!”
“Nah.” Yossarian shook his head. “The buses and crowds could be part of the entertainment. It would get in the newspapers. Maybe a picture inside with you and McMahon, if I pose you right.”
“Hundreds of guests?” McBride restated shrilly. “A band and a dance floor? Limousines too?”
“Maybe fifteen hundred! They could use your bus ramps and park upstairs in your garages. And caterers and florists, waiters and bartenders. They could go riding on the escalators, in time to the music. I could talk to the orchestras.”
“That could not be done!” McBride declared. “Everything would go wrong. It would be a catastrophe.”
“Fine,” said Yossarian. “Then I’ll want to go ahead. Check it out for me, will you, please? Get out of my way!”
He snapped this last out at an oily Hispanic man just ahead who was flashing a stolen American Express credit card at him seductively with a smile of insinuating and insulting familiarity and caroling happily, “Just stolen, just stolen. Don’t leave home without it. You can check it out, check it out.”
Inside the police station, there were no reports of any new dead babies, the officer at the desk volunteered to McBride with a jocular impertinence.
“And no live ones either.”
“I hate that guy,” McBride muttered, coloring uncomfortably. “He thinks I’m crazy too.”
McMahon was out on an emergency call, and Michael, who was finished with his unfinished drawing, inquired casually:
“Where’ve you been?”
“Coney Island,” Yossarian said jauntily. “And guess what. Kilroy was there.”
“Kilroy?”
“Right, Larry?”
“Who’s Kilroy?” asked Michael.
“McBride?”
“Yossarian?”
“In Washington once, I went to look for a name on the Vietnam Memorial, with the names of all who’d been killed there. Kilroy was there, one Kilroy.”
“The same one?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“I’ll check him out,” promised McBride. “And let’s talk more about that wedding. Maybe we could do it, I believe we could. I’ll check that out too.”
“What’s this about a wedding?” Michael demanded with truculence, when they were out of the police station and walking away through the terminal.
“Not mine.” Yossarian laughed. “I’m too old to marry again.”
“You’re too old to get married again.”
“That’s what I said. And are you still too young? Marriage may not be good, but it’s not always all bad.”
“Now you’re talking too much.”
Yossarian had his routine for moving through panhandlers, handing one-dollar bills from the folded daily allotment in his pocket to those who were timid and to those who looked threatening. A hulking man with inflamed eyes and a scrap of cloth offered to wipe his eyeglasses for a dollar or smash them to pieces if he declined. Yossarian gave him two dollars and put his eyeglasses away. Nothing surprising seemed unusual anymore in this deregulated era of free enterprise. He was under a death sentence, he knew, but he tried imparting that news to Michael euphemistically. “Michael, I want you to stay in law school,” he decided seriously.
Michael stepped away. “Oh, shit, Dad. I don’t want that. It’s expensive too. Someday,” he went on, with a dejected pause, “I’d like to work at something worthwhile.”
“Know anything? I’ll pay for the law school.”
“You won’t know what I mean, but I don’t want to feel like a parasite.”
“Yes, I would. It’s why I gave up commodities, currency trading, stock trading, arbitrage, and investment banking. Michael, I’ll give you seven more years of good health. That’s the most I can promise you.”
“What happens then?”
“Ask Arlene.”
“Who’s Arlene?
“That woman you’re living with. Isn’t that her name? The one with the crystals and the tarot cards.”
“That’s Marlene, and she moved out. What happens to me in seven years?”
“To me, you damned fool. I’ll be seventy-five. Michael, I’m already sixty-eight. I’ll guarantee you seven more years of my good health in which to learn how to live without me. If you don’t, you’ll drown. After that I can’t promise you anything. You can’t live without money. It’s addictive once you’ve tried it. People steal to get it. The most I’ll be able to leave each of you, after taxes, will be about half a million.”
“Dollars?” Michael brightened brilliantly. “That sounds like a fortune!”
“At eight percent,” Yossarian told him flatly, “you’d get forty thousand a year. At least a third will go to taxes, leaving you twenty-seven.”
“Hey, that’s nothing! I can’t live on that!”
“I know that too. That’s why I am talking too much to you. Where’s your future? Can you see one? Move this way.”
They stepped out of the path of a young man in sneakers running for his life from a half-dozen policemen running just as fast and closing in on him from different sides because he had just murdered with a knife someone in another part of the terminal. Pounding among them in heavy black shoes was Tom McMahon, who looked ill from the strain. Cut off in front, the nimble youth left them all in the lurch by swerving sharply and ducking down into the same emergency stairwell Yossarian had taken with McBride and probably, Yossarian mused fancifully, would never be heard of again—or better still, was already back on their level, walking behind them in his sneakers, looking blameless. They passed a man sitting asleep on the floor in a puddle of his own making, and another teenager, out cold, and then found their way blocked by a skinny woman somewhere near forty with stringy blonde hair and a lurid blister on her mouth.
“I’ll do you for a nickel, mister,” she offered.
“Please,” said Yossarian, stepping around her.
“I’ll do you both for a nickel each. I’ll do you both at the same time for a nickel each. Pop, I’ll do you both for the same nickel.”
Michael, with a strained smile, skittered around her. She plucked at Yossarian’s sleeve and held on.
“I’ll lick your balls.”
Yossarian stumbled free, mortified. His face burned. And Michael was aghast to see his father so shaken.