The dogs were a recording, of course. McBride skipped down to the steps that set them stirring and charging, then to the next, that closed them back into silence. The fierce charge came from three, said the official audiologists. Or from one—Yossarian reasoned—with three heads.
“Michael not here?” McBride asked at the beginning.
“Joan not coming?”
Joan, a lawyer with the Port Authority, was McBride’s new lady friend. It would be funny, Yossarian had already conjectured, if their wedding too took place in the bus terminal. He could picture the Lohengrin “Wedding March” in the police station and the nuptial procession past the wall chains to the makeshift altar in a prison cell in back modified to a chapel. McBride’s obstetrical cell was now a resting place for McMahon. The play cell for children was a recreation room utilized by officers on their breaks and as a hangout for those in no hurry to go home. There were checkerboards and jigsaw puzzles too, girlie magazines, a television set, and a video player on which to rerun the XXX-rated movies confiscated from pornographers, while smoking dope extorted from drug dealers, whom they also despised. McMahon had to look the other way. McBride was disillusioned again.
“Where’s your friend?” timidly asked McBride.
“She has to work, Larry. She’s still a nurse.”
“Aren’t you jealous,” McBride wished to know, “of men patients and doctors?”
“All the time,” admitted Yossarian, remembering adventurers like himself, and his fingers on the lace of her slip. “What do you know about those agents?”
“They’re downstairs. They think I’m CIA. I’m not sure I trust them. I guess that other noise is phony too.”
“What other noise? The carousel?”
“What carousel? I mean the roller-coaster.”
“What roller-coaster? Larry, that train is not a roller-coaster. Are we waiting for Tommy?”
“He says it’s none of his business, because it’s not on his chart. He’s resting again.”
Yossarian found McMahon where he expected to find him, in bed in the cell in back, the television on. Captain Thomas McMahon had more or less moved all his office work and his telephone into the cell with the bed and now spent much of each working day resting. He came in on days off too. His wife had died of emphysema that year, and living alone, he would relate while smoking cigarettes, with a glass ashtray on the arm of the rocker he had found, was not much fun. He had found the rocker in a thrift shop that raised money for cancer relief. His eyes had grown sizable in his narrow face, and the bones seemed gaunt and crude, for he had been losing weight. A year or so earlier, he had lost his breath chasing a youth who had murdered someone in another part of the terminal, and he had not yet got it all back. McMahon now disliked his work but would not retire, for keeping this occupation he loathed, now that he was a widower, was all the fun he had.
“There are more of them now than there are of us,” McMahon would reiterate moodily about his criminals. “And that’s something you educated wise guys never thought of with that Constitution of yours. What’s out there now?” he asked wearily, folding away a tabloid newspaper. He enjoyed following grotesque new crimes. He was bored working on them.
“A drunk on the floor, three druggies in chairs. Two brown, one white.”
“I guess I’ll have to go look.” McMahon uncoiled himself and rose, panting in the effort from what could have been lassitude. He seemed now to Yossarian another good candidate for late-life depression. “You know, we don’t arrest every crook we can catch,” he repeated, in a repetitious lament. “We don’t have the men to process them, we don’t have the cells to put them in, we don’t have the courts to find them guilty, and we don’t have the prisons to keep them in. And that’s something a lot of you people complaining all the time about cops and courts don’t want to understand, not even that man from Time magazine who had his pocket picked and raised such a racket.” McMahon paused for a chuckle. “We had to lock him up, while those thieves who’d robbed him looked on at all of us with smiles.”
McMahon smiled too and told about the retired advertising executive from Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine who’d been left without a penny because he had given his change to some panhandlers and had then had his wallet stolen. He had his Social Security number but could not prove it was his. He went out of control when the policemen made no move to arrest any in the slick band of pickpockets. The wallet was already miles away; there would be no evidence. “We’re stuck with this lousy legal system of yours that says a person is innocent until we can prove him guilty,” said McMahon. “Since when, is what we would like to know! That’s what drove him crazy, I think. There were the crooks. Here were the cops. And here was the cold fact that he couldn’t do a thing about it. And he had no identification. He couldn’t even prove he was him. That’s when he panicked and made such a fuss we had to chain him in a wall cuff before he showed some sense and shut up. He saw what we had waiting for him in the cells, where he wouldn’t have a chance of competing. Neither would we, or you. Then he could not establish his identity. That’s always fun to watch. That always terrifies them. Nobody we telephoned was home. He couldn’t even prove his own name. Finally”—McMahon was chuckling now—“he had to give us the name of this friend up in Orange Valley somewhere who turned out to be a big war hero in World War II. A big shot now in the army reserves. A big man in the construction industry too, he told us, and a big contributor to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. He had a name like Berkowitz or Rabinowitz, and he talked strong on the telephone, the way you did the first time you called, Yossarian, except this guy was telling the truth and wasn’t sort of full of shit, the way you were. Then this guy Singer had no money to get home. So Larry here gave him a twenty-dollar bill for a taxi, remember? And guess what. The guy paid him back. Right, Larry?”
“He mailed it. Tommy, I think you ought to come.”
“I don’t want to find out any more about anything. And I don’t like those guys. I think they’re CIA.”
“They think you’re CIA.”
“I’m going back to your delivery room.” McMahon was running out of energy again. “To rest awhile until one of your pregnant kids shows up and gives us one of your babies she wants to throw away. We haven’t got any so far.”
“You won’t let me announce it. We hear about plenty.”
“They’d lock us both up. Now, Larry, do this for me—find something down there to cancel that crazy wedding he’s scheduled. I’m too old for that kind of stuff.”
“They already have something they can’t figure out,” McBride reported to Yossarian. “An elevator that’s down there and won’t move, and we can’t find out where it comes from.”
From the front of the station house there came abruptly the explosive noise of a brawl.
“Oh, shit,” groaned McMahon. “How I’ve grown to hate them all. Even my cops. Your pregnant mothers too.”
Two burly young men who were cronies had broken each other’s noses and split each other’s mouths in an altercation over money robbed from a drug-addicted young black prostitute, a close friend of theirs, with white skin, yellow hair, and AIDS, syphilis, tuberculosis, and new strains of gonorrhea.
“There’s another weird thing about these federal intelligence guys,” McBride confided, when the two were out of the station. “They don’t see anything funny about those signs. It’s like they’ve seen them before.”
They cut across the main concourse below the Operations Control Center, and Yossarian remembered he was now on view on one of the five dozen video monitors there, traveling with McBride through the encasing structure. Perhaps Michael was up there again, watching with M2. If he picked his nose someone would see. On another screen, he supposed, might be the redheaded man in the seersucker suit, drinking an Orange Julius, and maybe the scruffy man in the sullied raincoat and blue beret, observed upstairs while observing him.
“They don’t seem surprised by anything,” grumbled McBride. “All they want to talk about when we plan the wedding is to get themselves invited, their wives too.”
The stairwell was practically empty, the floor almost tidy. But the odors were strong, the air fetid with the rancid, mammalian vapors of unwashed bodies and their fecund wastes.
McBride went ahead and tiptoed carefully around the one-legged woman being raped again not far from the large, brown-skinned woman with thickened moles that looked like melanomas, who had taken off her bloomers and her skirt again and was swabbing her backside and armpits with a few damp towels, and Yossarian knew again he had not one thing to talk to her about, except, perhaps, to know if she had ridden to Kenosha on the same plane with him, which was out of the question and entirely possible.
On the last flight of steps sat the skinny blonde woman with a tattered red sweater, still dreamily engaged in sewing a rip in a dirty white blouse. At the bottom, there was already a fresh human shit on the floor in the corner. McBride said nothing about it. They turned underneath the staircase and proceeded to the battered metal closet with the false back and hidden door. In single file they came again into the tiny vestibule, facing the fire door of military green with the warning that read:
EMERGENCY ENTRANCE
KEEP OUT
VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT
“They don’t see anything funny in that,” sulked McBride. Yossarian opened the massive door with just his fingertip and was once more on the tiny landing near the roof of the tunnel, at the top of the staircase that fell steeply. The thoroughfare below was empty again.
McBride did a little jig step on the activating steps that roused the sleeping dogs and sent them back with hardly a peep of protest into the unstirring limbo in which they made their noiseless abode and spent their dateless hours. Showing off, he grinned at Yossarian.
“Where are the loudspeakers?”
“We haven’t found them. We aren’t authorized to look far yet. We’re only checking security for the President.”
“What’s that water?”
“What water?”
“Oh, shit, Larry, I’m the one who’s supposed to be hard of hearing. I hear water, a fucking stream, a babbling brook.”
McBride shrugged impartially. “I’ll check. We’re looking into both ends today. We can’t even find out if it’s supposed to be secret. That’s secret too.”
Approaching the bottom of the lopsided ellipse of this staircase, Yossarian caught glimpses below of shoulders and trouser cuffs and shabby shoes, one pair a dingy black, one pair an orange brown. Yossarian was beyond surprise when he reached the last flight and saw the two men waiting: a lanky, pleasant redheaded man with a seersucker jacket and a swarthy, seamy, chunky man in a scruffy raincoat, with ill-shaven cheeks and a blue beret. The latter wore a surly look and compressed a limp cigarette between wet lips. Both hands were deep in the pockets of his raincoat.
They were Bob and Raul. Bob was different from the agent in Chicago. But Raul was the spitting image of the man outside his building and in his dream in Kenosha. Raul badgered his moist cigarette about his mouth, as though in moody exception to some restriction against lighting it.
“Were you in Wisconsin last week?” Yossarian could not help asking, with a guise of affable innocence. “Around the motel near the airport in a place called Kenosha?”
The man shrugged neutrally, with a look at McBride.
“We were together every day last week,” McBride answered for him, “going over the floor plans of that catering company you brought in.”
“And I was in Chicago,” offered the redheaded man named Bob. He folded a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and tossed the crumpled green wrapper aside to the floor.
“Did I meet you in Chicago?” Yossarian faced him doubtfully, positive he had never laid eyes on him. “At the airport there?”
Bob answered leniently. “Wouldn’t you know that?”
Yossarian had heard that voice before. “Would you?”
“Of course,” said the man. “It’s a joke, isn’t it? But I don’t catch on.”
“Yo-Yo, that guy in charge of the wedding wants six dance floors and six bandstands, with one as a backup in case the other five all don’t work, and I don’t see where they can find the room, and I don’t even know what the hell that means.”
“Me aussi,” said Raul, as though he hardly cared.
“I’ll talk to him,” said Yossarian.
“And something like thirty-five hundred guests! That’s three hundred and fifty round tables. And two tons of caviar. Yo-Yo, that’s four thousand pounds!”
“My wife wants to come,” said Bob. “I’ll have a gun in my ankle holster, but I’d like to pretend I’m a guest.”
“I’ll take care of it,” said Yossarian.
“Moi also,” said Raul, and threw away his cigarette.
“I’ll take care of that too,” said Yossarian. “But tell me what’s happening here. What is this place?”
“We’re here to find out,” said Bob. “We’ll talk to the sentries.”
“Yo-Yo, wait while we check.”
“Yo-Yo.” Raul sniggered. “My Dieux.”
All three looked left into the tunnel. And then Yossarian saw sitting inside on a bentwood chair a soldier in a red combat uniform with an assault rifle across his lap, and behind him near the wall stood a second armed soldier, with a larger weapon. On the other side, in the amber haze telescoping backward into the narrowing horizon of a beaming vanishing point, he made out two other motionless soldiers, in exactly that grouping. They could have been reflections.
“What’s over there?” Yossarian pointed across toward the passageway to SUB-BASEMENTS A-Z.
“Nothing we found yet,” said McBride. “You take a look, but don’t go far.”
“There’s something else très funny,” said Raul, and finally smiled. He stamped his foot a few times and then began jumping and landing on both heels heavily. “Notice anything, my ami? No noise down here, nous can’t make noise.”
All shuffled, stamped, jumped in place to demonstrate, Yossarian too. They made no dent in the silence. Bob rapped his knuckles on the banister of the staircase, and the thud was as expected. When he rapped them on the ground there was nothing.
“That’s pretty weird, isn’t it?” said Bob, smiling. “It’s as though we’re not even here.”
“What’s in your pockets?” Yossarian questioned Raul abruptly. “You don’t take your hands out. Not in my dream or in the street across from my building.”
“My cock and my balls,” said Raul at once.
McBride was embarrassed. “His gun and his badge.”
“That’s mon cock and mes balls,” joked Raul, but did not laugh.
“I’ve got one more question, if you want to come to the wedding,” said Yossarian. “Why have you got your sentries there—to keep people in or keep people out?”
All three shot him a look of surprise.
“They aren’t ours,” said Bob.
“It’s what we want to find out,” explained McBride.
They moved away, with no fall of footsteps.
Yossarian made no sound either when he started across.
He noted next another strange thing. They cast no shadows. He cast none either as he crossed the sterile thoroughfare like a specter or soundless sleepwalker to the catwalk of white tile. The steps going up were also white, and the handrails of an albumescent porcelain that shimmered almost into invisibility against the like background of pure white, and they also were without shadows. And there was no dirt, and not one beaming reflection from one mote in the air. He felt himself nowhere. He remembered the gum wrapper and the wet cigarette. He glanced down backward to make sure he was right. He was.
The crumpled green wrapper balled up by Bob was nowhere to be seen. The unlit cigarette had vanished too. Before his eyes as he searched, the green gum wrapper materialized through the surface of the compound underfoot and was again on the ground. Then it dwindled away rearward and was altogether gone. The unlit cigarette came back next. And then that went away also. They had come out of nowhere and gone away someplace, and he had the unearthly sense that he had only to think of an object to bring it into an unreal reality before him—if he mused of a half-undressed Melissa in ivory underwear, she would be lying there obligingly; he did and she was—and to turn his sensibility away to something else and it would dwindle from existence. She disappeared. Next he was sure he heard faintly the distinctive puffing music of the band organ of a carousel. McBride was nowhere near to verify the sound. Possibly, McBride would hear it as a roller-coaster. And then Yossarian was no longer sure, for the calliope was producing gaily in waltz time the somber, forceful Siegfried Funeral Music from the culminating Götterdämmerung, which precedes by less than one hour the immolation of Brünnhilde and her horse, the destruction of Valhalla, and the death knell of those great gods, who were always unhappy, always in anguish.
Yossarian went up to the catwalk and moved into the archway past the memorial affirming that Kilroy had been there. He sensed with a twinge that Kilroy, immortal, was dead too, had died in Korea if not Vietnam.
“Halt!”
The order rang through the archway with an echo. In front on another bentwood chair, slightly forward of a turnstile with rotating bars of steel, sat another armed sentry.
This one too was uniformed in a battle jacket that was crimson and a visored green hat that looked like a jockey cap. Yossarian advanced at his signal, feeling weightless, insubstantial, contingent. The guard was young, had light hair in a crew cut, sharp eyes, and a thin mouth, and Yossarian discerned as he drew close enough to see freckles that he looked exactly like the young gunner Arthur Schroeder, with whom he had flown overseas almost fifty years before.
“Who goes there?”
“Major John Yossarian, retired,” said Yossarian.
“Can I be of help to you, Major?”
“I want to go in.”
“You’ll have to pay.”
“I’m with them.”
“You’ll still have to pay.”
“How much?”
“Fifty cents.”
Yossarian handed him two quarters and was given a round blue ticket with numbers in sequence wheeling around the rim of the disk of flimsy cardboard on a loop of white string. In helpful pantomime, the guard directed him to slip the loop over his head to hang the ticket around his neck and down over his breast. The name above the piping of his pocket read A. SCHROEDER.
“There’s an elevator, sir, if you want to go directly.”
“What’s down there?”
“You’re supposed to know, sir.”
“Your name is Schroeder?”
“Yes, sir. Arthur Schroeder.”
“That’s fucking funny.” The soldier said nothing as Yossarian studied him. “Were you ever in the air corps?”
“No, sir.”
“How old are you, Schroeder?”
“I’m a hundred and seven.”
“That’s a good number. How long have you been here?”
“Since 1900.”
“Hmmmmm. You were about seventeen when you enrolled?”
“Yes, sir. I came in with the Spanish-American War.”
“These are all lies, aren’t they?”
“Yes, sir. They are.”
“Thank you for telling me the truth.”
“I always tell the truth, sir.”
“Is that another lie?”
“That can’t be true then, can it? Are you from Crete?”
“No, sir. I’m from Athens, Georgia. I went to school in Ithaca, New York. My home is now in Carthage, Illinois.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, sir. I cannot tell a lie.”
“You are from Crete, aren’t you? You know the paradox of the Cretan who tells you Cretans always lie? It’s impossible to believe him, isn’t it? I want to go inside.”
“You have your ticket.” The guard punched a hole in the center and another in a number. The number was for the Human Pool Table.
“I can’t go on that ride?”
“You’ve already been, sir,” advised the guard named Schroeder. “Those are aluminized metal detectors just inside that arcade. Don’t bring drugs or explosives. Be prepared for noise and the bright lights.”
Yossarian pushed through the turnstile and walked into the framework of silver metal detectors at the entrance to the hallway. The moment he did, the lighting blinked off. And next, harsh white lights flashed on with a blaze that almost staggered him. He discovered himself inside a brilliantly illuminated hallway of magic mirrors. A roaring noise all but deafened him. It seemed like the blasts of an MRI machine. And he saw that the mirrors glittering grotesquely on all sides and overhead were deforming his reflections dissimilarly, as though he were liquefied into highlighted mercury and melting distinctly into something different from every point of view. Discrete parts of him were enlarged and elongated as though for extracting examination; his images were billowing into quantities of swells. In one mirror, he witnessed his head and neck misshapen into a slender block of Yossarian, while his torso and legs were stunted and bloated. In the mirror beside that one his body was monstrously inflated and his face reduced to a grape, a pimple with hair and a minuscule face with crushed features and a grin. He perceived that he was close to laughing, and the novelty of that surprise tickled him more. In no two mirrors were the deformities alike, in no one lens were the anomalies consistent. His authentic appearance, his objective structure, was no longer absolute. He had to wonder what he truly looked like. And then the ground beneath his feet began to move.
The floor jerked back and forth. He adjusted smoothly, recalling the jolly tricks of George C. Tilyou in his old Steeplechase Park. This was one. The deafening noise had ceased. The heat from the lights was searing. Most piercing was a scorching dazzle of pure white that burned above his right eye and another, just as hot, that gleamed like a flare off his left. He could not find them. When he turned to try, they moved with his vision and remained in place, and then he felt the ground beneath his feet shift again, to a different prank, in which the right half jerked in one backward or forward thrust while the other went opposite, the two reversing themselves rapidly to the regulated pace of an undeviating heartbeat. He bore himself forward easily on this one too. The lights turned indigo blue, and much of him looked black. The lights turned red, and areas of him were drained of color again. Back in normal light, he almost swooned at a hideous glimpse of himself as homeless, abominable, filthy, and depraved. In a different mirror he ballooned into a nauseating metamorphosis of a swollen insect inside a fragile brown carapace; then he was Raul, and Bob, and then with another revolting fright he saw himself reflected as the frowsy, squat, untidy, middle-aged woman with the pudgy chin and crude face dogging him in the red Toyota, and then he changed again to look the way he always thought he did. He walked onward, hurrying away, and found himself challenged at the end by a last mirror in front, which blocked him in like a massive barrier of glass. In this one, he was still himself, but the features on the face in the head on his shoulders were those of a smiling young man with a hopeful, innocent, naive, and defiant demeanor. He saw himself under thirty with a blooming outlook, an optimistic figure no less comely and immortal than the lordliest divinity that ever was, but no more. His hair was short, black, and wavy, and he was at a time in his life when he still smugly fostered audacious expectations that all was possible.
With no hesitation he made use of momentum to take a giant step forward directly into the looking glass, smack into that illusion of himself as a hale youth with something of a middle-aged spread, and he came out the other side a white-haired adult near seventy into the commodious landscape of an amusement park unfurling before him on a level semicircle. He heard a carousel. He heard a roller-coaster.
He heard the high-pitched squeals of gaiety and simulated panic from a far-off group of men and women in a flat-bottomed boat rumbling down a high watery incline to a splashing stop in a pool. Rotating clockwise slowly in front of him now was the perfect circle of a magic barrel, the Barrel of Fun, number one on his blue-and-white ticket. The ridged outer edges of the turning tubular chamber facing him were the raspberry red of candies and the sweetened syrup at soda fountains, and the sky blue of the rim was marked with yellow comets amid strewn white stars and a sprinkling of apricot crescent moons wearing smiles. He walked through casually simply by guiding himself on a line contrary to the direction of rotation and came out the other end into a conversation the late author Truman Capote was having with a man whose name gave him pause.
“Faust,” repeated the stranger.
“Dr. Faust?” inquired Yossarian eagerly.
“No, Irvin Faust,” said the man, who wrote novels also. “Good reviews, but never a big best-seller. This is William Saroyan. I bet you never even heard of him.”
“Sure I did.” Yossarian was miffed. “I saw The Time of Your Life. I read The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ and ‘Forty Thousand Assyrians.’ I remember that one.”
“They’re not in print anymore,” mourned William Saroyan. “You can’t find them in libraries.”
“I used to try to write like you,” Yossarian confessed. “I couldn’t get far.”
“You didn’t have my imagination.”
“They try to write like me,” said Ernest Hemingway. Both wore mustaches. “But don’t get far either. Want to fight?”
“I never want to fight.”
“They try to write like him too,” said Ernest Hemingway, and pointed off to William Faulkner, sitting in profound silence in a packed area populated by heavy drinkers. Faulkner wore a mustache too. So did Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and James Joyce, not far from the area of those with late-life personality disorders embodying depression and nervous breakdowns, in which Henry James sat silent with Joseph Conrad staring at Charles Dickens blending into the populous zone of the suicides where Jerzy Kosinski was chatting up Virginia Woolf near Arthur Koestler and Sylvia Plath. In a cone of brown sunlight on violet sand he spied Gustav Aschenbach on a beach chair and recognized the book in his lap as the same paperback edition as his own copy of Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Aschenbach beckoned.
And Yossarian responded inwardly with a “Fuck you!” and mentally gave him the finger and the obscene Italian gesture of rejection as he hastened past the Whip, the Pretzel, and the Whirlpool. He caught Kafka spying on him with a bloody cough from a shadowy recess below the shut pane of the window from which Marcel Proust watched him above a hooded alleyway with the street sign DESOLATION ROW. He came to a mountain in a framework of iron with tracks rising high and saw the name DRAGON’S GORGE.
“Holy shit!” exulted McBride, who was nowhere about. “There really is a roller-coaster!”
He came next to the carousel, ornate, elaborate, mirrored, spinning, with panel paintings in antique white molding alternating between the upright oval frames with reflecting glass on the main rounding board and inner cornice. The lively waltz from the calliope was indeed the Siegfried Funeral Music, and situated grandly on one of the gaudy gondolas drawn by swans was an elderly German official with domed helmet and encyclopedic insignia and a bearing majestic enough for an emperor or a kaiser.
Yossarian caught sight of the rowboat before he saw the canal, a wooden craft with riders sitting upright two, three, and four abreast, floating into view without power in the man-made channel barely wide enough to accommodate one craft at a time, and he was outside the Tunnel of Love, where a watchman in a red jacket and green jockey cap stood guard at the entrance with a portable telephone and a hand-held ticket punch. He had orange hair and a milky complexion and wore a green rucksack on his back. Garish billboards and lavender-and-ginger illustrations gave alluring notice of a fabulous wax museum inside the Tunnel of Love that headlined life-size wax statues of the executed Lindbergh-baby kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann, and a nude Marilyn Monroe lying on a bed, restored in every detail to lifelike death. The fabulous wax museum was called ISLE OF THE DEAD. In the first seat of the flat-bottomed boat coasting out of one murky opening of the tunnel to continue gliding onward into the inky opening of the other, he saw Abraham Lincoln in a stiff stovepipe hat sitting motionless beside the faceless Angel of Death, and they seemed to be holding hands. He saw his wounded gunner Howard Snowden on the same bench. Side by side in the boat, on the bench immediately behind them, he saw Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The mayor was wearing a dashing wide hat with a rolled brim something like a cowboy’s, and FDR sported a creased homburg and was flaunting his cigarette holder, and both were grinning as though alive in a front-page photograph in a bygone newspaper. And on the seat in back of La Guardia and Roosevelt’s he saw his mother and his father, and then his Uncle Sam and Aunt Ida, his Uncle Max and Aunt Hannah, and then his brother Lee, and he knew that he too was going to die. It struck him all of a sudden that overnight everyone he’d known a long time was old—not getting old, not middle-aged, but old! The great entertainment stars of his time were no longer stars, and the celebrated novelists and poets in his day were of piddling significance in the new generation. Like RCA and Time magazine, even IBM and General Motors were of meager stature, and Western Union had passed away. The gods were growing old again, and it was time for another shake-up. Everyone has got to go, Teemer had propounded the last time they’d talked, and, in an uncharacteristic display of emotional emphasis, had added: “Everyone!”
Yossarian rushed past that Tunnel of Love with its true-to-life wax figures on the Isle of the Dead. Crossing a white footbridge with rococo balustrades, he found himself back in Naples, Italy, in 1945, on a line behind the imperturbable old soldier Schweik and the young one named Krautheimer who had changed his name to Joseph Kaye, waiting to go home by steamship outside the vanished old L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway on Surf Avenue past vanished old Steeplechase Park.
“Still here?”
“What happened to you?”
“I’m back here too. What happened to you?”
“I am Schweik.”
“I know. The good soldier?”
“I don’t know about good.”
“I thought I’d be the oldest now,” said Yossarian.
“I’m older.”
“I know. I’m Yossarian.”
“I know. You ran away once to Sweden, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t get far. I couldn’t even get to Rome.”
“You didn’t escape there? In a little yellow raft?”
“That happens only in the movies. What’s your name?”
“Joseph Kaye. I told you before. Why are you asking?”
“I have trouble with names now. Why are you asking?”
“Because somebody has been telling lies about me.”
“Maybe that’s why we’re still on line,” said Schweik.
“Why don’t you go back to Czechoslovakia?”
“Why should I,” said Schweik, “when I can go to America? Why don’t you go to Czechoslovakia?”
“What will you do in America?”
“Raise dogs. Anything easy. People live forever in America, don’t they?”
“Not really,” said Yossarian.
“Will I like it in America?”
“If you make money and think you’re well-off.”
“Are the people friendly?”
“If you make money and they think you’re well-off.”
“Where the fuck is that boat?” griped Kaye. “We can’t wait here forever.”
“Yes, you can,” said Schweik. “It’s coming!” cried Kaye.
They heard the rattling noise of outdated wheels on outdated iron rails, and then a chain of roller-coaster carriages painted red and pale gold rode into view at the decelerating end of the ride on the L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway. But instead of stopping as expected, these cars continued onward past them to start around all over again, and, while Kaye shook in frustration, Yossarian stared at the riders. Again he recognized Abraham Lincoln in front. He saw La Guardia and FDR, his mother and his father, his uncles and his aunts, and his brother too. And he saw each of them double, the Angel of Death double and the gunner Snowden too, and he was seeing them twice.
He whirled around, staggering, and hastened back, escaping, and searched in baffled terror for help from the soldier Schroeder who now claimed to be a hundred and seven years old, but found only McBride, both of him, near Bob and Raul, who combined made four. McBride thought Yossarian looked funny and was walking with a falter and a list, a seesawing hand held out for stability.
“Yeah, I do feel funny,” Yossarian admitted. “Let me hold your arm.”
“How many fingers do you see?”
“Two.”
“Now?”
“Ten.”
“Twenty.”
“You’re seeing double.”
“I’m beginning to see everything twice again.”
“You want some help?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, guys, give me a hand with him. From them too?”
“Sure.”