“Cut,” said the brain surgeon, in this last stage of his Rhine Journey.
“You cut,” said his apprentice.
“No cuts,” said Yossarian.
“Now look who’s butting in.”
“Should we go ahead?”
“Why not?”
“I’ve never done this before.”
“That’s what my girlfriend used to say. Where’s the hammer?”
“No hammers,” said Yossarian.
“Is he going to keep talking that way while we try to concentrate?”
“Give me that hammer.”
“Put down that hammer,” directed Patrick Beach.
“How many fingers do you see?” demanded Leon Shumacher.
“One.”
“How many now?” asked Dennis Teemer.
“Still one. The same.”
“He’s fooling around, gentlemen,” said former stage actress Frances Rolphe, born Frances Rosenbaum, who’d grown up to become mellow Frances Beach, with a face that again looked its age. “Can’t you see?”
“We made him all better!”
“Gimme eat,” said Yossarian.
“I would cut that dosage in half, Doctor,” instructed Melissa MacIntosh. “Halcion wakes him up and Xanax makes him anxious. Prozac depresses him.”
“She knows you that well, does she?” clucked Leon Shumacher, after Yossarian had been given more eat.
“We’ve seen each other.”
“Who’s her busty blonde friend?”
“Her name is Angela Moorecock.”
“Heh, heh. I was hoping for something like that. What time will she get here?”
“After work and before dinner, and she may come again with a house-building boyfriend. My children may be here. Now that I’m out of danger, they may want to bid me farewell.”
“That son of yours,” began Leon Shumacher.
“The one on Wall Street?”
“All he wanted to hear was the bottom line. Now he won’t want to invest more time here if you’re not going to die. I told him you wouldn’t.”
“And I told him you would, naturally,” said Dennis Teemer, in bathrobe and pajamas, livelier as a patient than as a doctor. His embarrassed wife told friends he was experimenting. “‘For how much?’ he wanted to bet me.”
“You still think it’s natural?” objected Yossarian.
“For us to die?”
“For me to die.”
Teemer glanced aside. “I think it’s natural.”
“For you?”
“I think that’s natural too. I believe in life.”
“You lost me.”
“Everything that’s alive lives on things that are living, Yossarian. You and I take a lot. We have to give back.”
“I met a particle physicist on a plane to Kenosha who says that everything living is made up of things that are not.”
“I know that too.”
“It doesn’t make you laugh? It doesn’t make you cry? It doesn’t make you wonder?”
“In the beginning was the word,” said Teemer. “And the word was gene. Now the word is quark. I’m a biologist, not a physicist, and I can’t say ‘quark.’ That belongs to an invisible world of the lifeless. So I stick with the gene.”
“So where is the difference between a living gene and a dead quark?”
“A gene isn’t living and a quark isn’t dead.”
“I can’t say ‘quark’ either without wanting to laugh.”
“Quark.”
“Quark, quark.”
“You win,” said Yossarian. “But is there a difference between us and that?”
“Nothing in a living cell is alive. Yet the heart pumps and the tongue talks. We both know that.”
“Does a microbe? A mushroom?”
“They have no soul?” guessed the surgeon in training.
“There is no soul’,” said the surgeon training him. “That’s all in the head.”
“Someone ought to tell the cardinal that.”
“The cardinal knows it.”
“Even a thought, even this thought, is just an electrical action between molecules.”
“But there are good thoughts and bad thoughts,” snapped Leon Shumacher, “so let’s go on working. Were you ever in the navy with a man named Richard Nixon? He thinks he knows you.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“He wants to come check you out.”
“I was not in the navy. Please keep him away.”
“Did you ever play alto saxophone in a jazz band?”
“No.”
“Were you ever in the army with the Soldier in White?”
“Twice. Why?”
“He’s on a floor downstairs. He wants you to drop by to say hello.”
“If he could tell you all that, he’s not the same one.”
“Were you ever in the army with a guy named Rabinowitz?” asked Dennis Teemer. “Lewis Rabinowitz?”
Yossarian shook his head. “Not that I remember.”
“Then I may have it wrong. How about a man named Sammy Singer, his friend? He says he was from Coney Island. He thinks you may remember him from the war.”
“Sam Singer?” Yossarian sat up. “Sure, the tail gunner. A short guy, small, skinny, with wavy black hair.”
Teemer smiled. “He’s almost seventy now.”
“Is he sick too?”
“He’s friends with this patient I’m looking at.”
“Tell him to drop by.”
“Hiya, Captain.” Singer shook the hand Yossarian put out. Yossarian appraised a man delighted to see him, on the smallish side, with hazel eyes projecting slightly in a face that was kindly. Singer was chortling. “It’s good to see you again. I’ve wondered about you. The doctor says you’re okay.”
“You’ve grown portly, Sam,” said Yossarian, with good humor, “and a little bit wrinkled, and maybe a little taller. You used to be skinny. And you’ve gotten very gray, with thinning hair. And so have I. Fill me in, Sam. What’s been happening the last fifty years? Anything new?”
“Call me Sammy.”
“Call me Yo-Yo.”
“I’m pretty good, I guess. I lost my wife. Ovarian cancer. I’m kind of floundering around.”
“I’ve been divorced, twice. I flounder too. I suppose I’ll have to marry again. It’s what I’m used to. Children?”
“One daughter in Atlanta,” said Sammy Singer, “and another in Houston. Grandchildren too, already in college. I don’t like to throw myself on them. I have an extra bedroom for when they come to visit. I worked for Time magazine a long time—but not as a reporter,” Singer added pointedly. “I did well enough, made a good living, and then they retired me to bring in young blood to keep the magazine alive.”
“And now it’s practically dead,” said Yossarian. “I work now in that old Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Looking out on the skating rink. Were you ever in that one?”
“I sure was,” said Singer, with recalled affection. “I remember that skating rink. I had some good times there.”
“It’s now the new M & M Building, with M & M Enterprises and Milo Minderbinder. Remember old Milo?”
“I sure do.” Sammy Singer laughed. “He gave us good food, that Milo Minderbinder.”
“He did do that. A better standard of living than I had before.”
“Me too. They were saying afterward that he was the one who bombed our squadron that time.”
“He did that too. That’s another one of the contradictions of capitalism. It’s funny, Singer. The last time I was in the hospital, the chaplain popped in out of nowhere to see me.”
“What chaplain?”
“Our chaplain. Chaplain Tappman.”
“Sure. I know that chaplain. Very quiet, right? Almost went to pieces after those two planes collided over La Spezia, with Dobbs in one plane and Huple in the other and Nately and all the rest of them killed. Remember those names?”
“I remember them all. Remember Orr? He was in my tent.”
“I remember Orr. They say he made it to Sweden in a raft after he ditched after Avignon, right before we went home.”
“I went down to Kentucky once and saw him there,” said Yossarian. “He was a handyman in a supermarket, and we didn’t have much to say to each other anymore.”
“I was in the plane when we ditched after the first mission to Avignon. He took care of everything. Remember that time? I was down in the raft with that top turret gunner Sergeant Knight.”
“I remember Bill Knight. He told me all about it.”
“That was the time none of our Mae Wests would inflate because Milo had taken out the carbon dioxide cylinders to make ice cream sodas for all you guys at the officers’ club. He left a note instead. That was some Milo then.” Singer chuckled.
“You guys had sodas too every Sunday, didn’t you?”
“Yes, we did. And then he took the morphine from the first-aid kit on that second mission to Avignon, you said. Was that really true?”
“He did that too. He left a note there also.”
“Was he dealing in drugs then?”
“I had no way to know. But he sure was dealing in eggs, fresh eggs. Remember?”
“I remember those eggs. I still can’t believe eggs can taste so good. I eat them often.”
“I’m going to start,” Yossarian resolved. “You just convinced me, Sammy Singer. It makes no sense to worry about cholesterol now, does it?”
“You remember Snowden then, Howard Snowden? On that mission to Avignon?”
“Sam, could I ever forget? I would have used up all the morphine in the first-aid kit when I saw him in such pain. That fucking Milo. I cursed him a lot. Now I work with him.”
“Did I really black out that much?”
“It looked that way to me.”
“That seems funny now. You were covered with so much blood. And then all that other stuff. He just kept moaning. He was cold, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he said he was cold. And dying. I was covered with everything, Sammy, and then with my own vomit too.”
“And then you took off your clothes and wouldn’t put them on again for a while.”
“I was sick of uniforms.”
“I saw you sitting in a tree at the funeral, naked.”
“I had sneakers.”
“I saw Milo climb up to you too, with his chocolate-covered cotton. We all kind of always looked up to you then, Yossarian. I still do, you know.”
“Why is that, Sam?” asked Yossarian, and hesitated. “I’m only a pseudo Assyrian.”
Singer understood. “No, that’s not why. Not since the army. I made good friends with Gentiles there. You were one, when that guy started beating me up in South Carolina. And not since those years at Time, where I had fun and hung around with Protestants and my first heavy drinkers.”
“We’re assimilated. It’s another nice thing about this country. If we behave like they do, they might let us in.”
“I met my wife there. You know something, Yossarian?”
“Yo-Yo?”
Sam Singer shook his head. “After I was married, I never once cheated on my wife, and never wanted to, and that seemed funny to people everywhere, to other girls too. It didn’t to her. They might have thought I was gay. Her first husband was the other way. A ladies’ man, the kind I always thought I wanted to be. She preferred me, by the time I met her.”
“You miss her.”
“I miss her.”
“I miss marriage. I’m not used to living alone.”
“I can’t get used to it either. I can’t cook much.”
“I don’t cook either.”
Sam Singer reflected. “No, I think I looked up to you first because you were an officer, and back then I had the kid’s idea that all officers had something more on the ball than the rest of us. Or we would be officers too. You always seemed to know what you were doing, except when you were getting lost and taking us out across the Atlantic Ocean. Even when you were going around doing crazy things, it seemed to make more sense than a lot of the rest. Standing in formation naked to get that medal. We all got a big kick out of seeing you do that.”
“I wasn’t showing off, Sam. I was in panic most of the time. I’d wake up some mornings and try to guess where I was, and then try to figure out what the hell I was doing there. I sometimes wake up that way now.”
“Baloney,” said Singer, and grinned. “And you always seemed to be getting laid a lot, when the rest of us weren’t.”
“Not as much as you think,” said Yossarian, laughing. “There was a lot more of just rubbing it around.”
“But, Yossarian, when you said you wouldn’t fly anymore, we kept our fingers crossed. We’d finished our seventy missions and were in the same boat.”
“Why didn’t you come out and walk with me?”
“We weren’t that brave. They sent us home right after they caught you, so it worked out fine for us. I said no too, but by then they gave me a choice. What happened to you?”
“They sent me home too. They threatened to kill me, to put me in prison, they said they would ruin me. They promoted me to major and sent me home. They wanted no fuss.”
“Most of us admired you. And you seem to know what you’re doing now.”
“Who says that? I’m not sure of anything anymore.”
“Come on, Yo-Yo. On our floor, they’re saying you’ve even got a good thing going with one of the nurses.”
Yossarian came close to a blush of pride. “It’s traveled that far?”
“We even hear it from my friend’s doctor,” Singer went on, in a merry way. “Back in Pianosa, I remember, you were pretty friendly with a nurse too, weren’t you?”
“For a little while. She dumped me as a poor risk. The problem with sweeping a girl off her feet, Sammy, is that you have to keep on sweeping. Love doesn’t work that way.”
“I know that too,” said Singer. “But you and a couple of others were with her up the beach with your suits on that day Kid Sampson was killed by an airplane. You remember Kid Sampson, don’t you?”
“Oh, shit, sure,” said Yossarian. “Do you think I could ever forget Kid Sampson? Or McWatt, who was in the plane that smashed him apart. McWatt was my favorite pilot.”
“Mine too. He was the pilot on the mission to Ferrara when we had to go around on a second bomb run, and Kraft was killed, and a bombardier named Pinkard too.”
“Were you in the plane with me on that one too?”
“I sure was. I was also in the plane with Hungry Joe when he forgot to use the emergency handle to put down his landing gear. And they gave him a medal.”
“They gave me my medal for that mission to Ferrara.”
“It’s hard to believe it all really happened.”
“I know that feeling,” said Yossarian. “It’s hard to believe I let myself be put through so much.”
“I know that feeling. It’s funny about Snowden.” Singer hesitated. “I didn’t know him that well.”
“I’d never noticed him.”
“But now I feel he was one of my closest friends.”
“I have that feeling too.”
“And I also feel,” Sammy persevered, “he was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I almost hate to put it that way. It sounds immoral. But it gave me an episode, something dramatic to talk about, and something to make me remember that the war was really real. People won’t believe much of it; my children and grandchildren aren’t much interested in anything so old.”
“Bring your friend around and I’ll tell him it’s true. What’s he in here for?”
“Some kind of checkup.”
“By Teemer?” Yossarian was shaking his head.
“They know each other,” said Singer, “a long time.”
“Yeah,” said Yossarian, with a sarcastic doubt that left Singer knowing he was unconvinced. “Well, Sammy, where do we go from here? I never could navigate, but I seem to have more direction. I know many women. I may want to marry again.”
“I know some too, but mostly old friends.”
“Don’t get married unless you feel you have to. Unless you need to, you won’t be good at it.”
“I may travel more,” said Singer. “Friends tell me to take a trip around the world. I know people from my days in Time. I’ve got a good friend in Australia who was hit with a disease called Guillain-Barré a long time ago. He’s not young either and doesn’t get around too easily on his crutches anymore. I’d like to see him again. There’s another in England, who’s retired, and one in Hong Kong.”
“I think I’d go if I were you. It’s something to do. What about the one that’s here? Teemer’s patient.”
“He’ll probably be going home soon. He was a prisoner in Dresden with Kurt Vonnegut and another one named Schweik. Can you imagine?”
“I stood on line in Naples once with a soldier named Schweik and met a guy named Joseph Kaye. I never even heard about Dresden until I read about it in Vonnegut’s novel. Send your friend up. I’d like to hear about Vonnegut.”
“He doesn’t know him.”
“Ask him to drop by anyway if he wants to. I’ll be here through the weekend. Well, Sammy, want to gamble? Do you think we might see each other again outside the hospital?”
Singer was taken by surprise. “Yossarian, that’s up to you. I’ve got the time.”
“I’ll take your number if you’re willing to give it. It may be worth a try. I’d like to talk to you again about William Saroyan. You used to try to write stories like his.”
“So did you. What happened?”
“I stopped, after a while.”
“I gave up too. Ever try The New Yorker?”
“I struck out there every time.”
“So did I.”
“Sammy tells me you saved his life,” said the big-boned man in a dressing gown and his own pajamas, introducing himself as Rabinowitz in a lusty, lighthearted manner, with a hoarse, unfaltering voice. “Tell me how you did it.”
“Let him give you the details. You were in Dresden?”
“He’ll give you those details.” Rabinowitz let his eyes linger again on Angela. “Young lady, you look like someone I met once and can’t remember where. She was a knockout too. Did we ever meet? I used to look younger.”
“I’m not sure I know. This is my friend Anthony.”
“Hello, Anthony. Listen to me good, Anthony. I’m not joshing. Treat her real fine tonight, because if you don’t treat her good I will find out about it, and I will start sending her flowers and you will be out in the cold. Right, darling? Good night, my dear. You’ll have a good time. Anthony, my name is Lew. Go have some fun.”
“I will, Lew,” said Anthony.
“I’m retired now, do a little real estate, some building with my son-in-law. What about you?”
“I’m retired too,” said Yossarian.
“You’re with Milo Minderbinder.”
“Part time.”
“I’ve got a friend who’d like to meet him. I’ll bring him around. I’m in here with a weight problem. I have to keep it low because of a minor heart condition, and sometimes I take off too much. I like to check that out.”
“With Dennis Teemer?”
“I know Teemer long. That lovely blonde lady looks like something special. I know I’ve seen her.”
“I think you’d remember.”
“That’s why I know.”
“Hodgkin’s disease,” confided Dennis Teemer.
“Shit,” said Yossarian. “He doesn’t want me to know.”
“He doesn’t want anybody to know. Not even me. And I know him almost thirty years. He sets records.”
“Was he always that way? He likes to flirt.”
“So do you. With everybody. You want everybody here to be crazy about you. He’s just more open. You’re sly.”
“You’re cunning and know too much.”
In Rabinowitz, Yossarian saw a tall, direct man with a large frame who had lost heavy amounts of flesh. He was almost bald on top and wore a gold and graying brush mustache, and he was aggressively attentive to Angela, with an indestructible sexual self-confidence that overrode and reduced her own. Yossarian was amused to see her bend herself forward to take down her bosom, lay her hands in her lap to hold down her skirt, tuck back her legs primly. She was faced with an excess of overbearing friskiness, of a kind she did not take to but could not defeat.
“And he’s not even Italian,” Yossarian chided.
“You’re not Italian, and I don’t mind you. The trouble is I do know him from somewhere.”
“Aha, Miss Moore, I think I may have it,” said Rabinowitz with a probing smile, when he sauntered in and saw her again. “You remind me of a lovely little lady with good personality I met one time with a builder I was doing business with out in Brooklyn, near Sheepshead Bay. An Italian named Benny Salmeri, I think. You liked to dance.”
“Really?” answered Angela, looking at him with eye-shadowed eyelids half lowered. “I used to know a builder named Salmeri. I’m not sure it’s the same.”
“Did you ever have a roommate who was a nurse?”
“I still do,” answered Angela, now more flippant. “The one on duty here before. That’s my partner, Melissa.”
“That nice-looking thing with that good personality?”
“She takes care of our friend here. That’s why he’s in. She fucks old men and gives them strokes.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that to people,” Yossarian reproved her mildly, after Rabinowitz had gone. “You’ll destroy her prospects. And it wasn’t a stroke. You’ll ruin mine too.”
“And I wish,” said Angela, “you wouldn’t tell people my name is Moorecock.”
They studied each other. “Who’ve I told?”
“Michael. That doctor Shumacher.” Angela Moore hesitated, for intentional effect. “Patrick.”
“Patrick?” Surprised, Yossarian sensed the reply before he put the question. “Which Patrick?
Patrick Beach?”
“Patrick Beach.”
“Oh, shit,” he said, after his jolt of surprise. “You’re seeing Patrick?”
“He’s called.”
“You’ll have to go sailing. You’ll probably hate it.”
“I’ve already been. I didn’t mind.”
“Doesn’t he have trouble with his prostate?”
“Not right now. It’s why he isn’t coming by here anymore. You were close with his wife. Do you think she’ll know?”
“Frances Beach knows everything, Angela.”
“I’m not the first.”
“She knows that already. She’ll be able to guess.”
“There really is something going on between you and that nurse, isn’t there?” guessed Frances Beach. “I can almost smell coitus in this rancid air.”
“Am I letting it show?”
“No, darling, she is. She watches over you more protectively than she should. And she’s much too correct when others are here. Advise her not to be so tense.”
“That will make her more tense.”
“And you still have that vulgar compulsion I never could abide. You look down at a woman’s bottom whenever she turns around, at all women, and with so much pride at hers. It’s that pride of possession. You eye mine too, don’t you?”
“I know I always do that. It doesn’t make me proud. You still look pretty good.”
“You would not think that if you didn’t have memories.”
“I’ve got another bad habit you’ll find even worse.”
“I’ll bet I can guess. Because I do it too.”
“Have you also arrived at that wretched stage when you can’t look seriously into a human face without already picturing what it will look like when old?”
“I can’t see how you knew.”
“We’ve been too much alike.”
“I do it only with women. It helps me lose interest.”
“I do it with every face already giving clues. It’s evil and morbid. This one will wear well.”
“Her name is Melissa.”
“Let her know it’s safe to trust me. Even though I’m rich and fashionable and used to have some bitchy fame as an actress. I’m glad you’re not marrying for money.”
“Who’s thinking of marriage?”
“By my time with Patrick it was much more than the money. I think I approve. Although I don’t like her girlfriend. Patrick has taken to sailing again. I think he may be flying as well. What more can you tell me?”
“I can’t tell you a thing.”
“And I don’t want to know, not this time either. I would feel so guilty if he thought I suspected. I would not want to step on anybody’s happiness, especially his. I wish I could have more too, but you know my age. Our friend Olivia may be my exception. She won’t visit often but fills the room with this glut of flowers. And she signs each card Olivia Maxon,’ as though it were a British title and you knew a thousand Olivias. I adore your catering company.”
“It’s Milo Minderbinder’s.”
“Two tons of caviar is divine.”
“We could have got by with one, but it’s safe to have a little more. This wedding in the terminal is just about the biggest piece of fun I see in my future.”
“It’s just about my only fun. Oh, John, Johnny, it’s a terrible thing you just did to me,” said Frances Beach. “When I learned you were sick, I finally felt old for the first time. You will recover, and I never will. There’s somebody here. Please come in. Your name is Melissa?”
“Yes, it is. There’s someone else here to see him.”
“And my name is Rabinowitz, madam, Lewis Rabinowitz, but friends call me Lew. Here’s someone else—Mr. Marvin Winkler, just in from California to pay his respects. Where’s our lovely friend Angela? Marvin, this is Mr. Yossarian. He’s the man who will set it up for you. Winkler wants to meet with Milo Minder-binder about a terrific new product he’s got. I told him we’d arrange it.”
“What’s the product?”
“Lew, let me talk to him alone.”
“Well, Winkler?”
“Look down at my foot.” Winkler was a man of middle height with conspicuous girth. “Don’t you notice anything?”
“What am I looking at?”
“My shoe.”
“What about it?”
“It’s state-of-the-art.”
Yossarian studied him. “You aren’t joking?”
“I don’t joke about business,” answered Winkler, issuing words with strain as though emitting sighs of affliction. His voice was low and guttural, almost inaudible. “I’ve been in it too long. I manufactured and sold surplus army film after the war. I was in baked goods too and was known for the best honey-glazed doughnuts in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Everything I did was state-of-the-art. I still make chocolate Easter bunnies.”
“Have you ever hit it big?”
“I’ve had trouble with my timing. I was in the food-service business too once and offered home-delivered breakfasts Sunday mornings so that people could sleep late. My firm was Greenacre Farms in Coney Island, and I was the sole proprietor.”
“And I was a customer. You never delivered.”
“It was not cost-effective.”
“Winkler, I will get you your meeting. I can’t resist. But I will want you to tell me about it.”
“I won’t leave out a word.”
“We’ve been thinking of a shoe,” Milo admitted, “to sell to the government.”
“Then you certainly want mine. It’s state-of-the-art.”
“Just what does that mean?”
“There’s none better, Mr. Minderbinder, and no good reason for the government to choose any other. Look down at my foot again. See the flexibility? The shoe looks new when you first start to wear it; when it’s older it looks used as soon as you break it in. If it’s dull you can polish it, or you can leave it the way it is or wear it scuffed, if that’s what you want. You can make it lighter or darker and even change its color.”
“But what does it do?”
“It fits over the foot and keeps the sock dry and clean. It helps protect the skin on the sole of the foot against cuts and scratches and other painful inconveniences of walking on the ground. You can walk in it, run in it, or even just sit and talk in it, as I’m doing with you now.”
“And it changes color. How did you say it does that?”
“You just put this magic plastic insert into the slot of the heel and then take them to the shoemaker and tell him to dye it to whatever color you want.”
“It seems like a miracle.”
“I would say that it is.”
“Can you make them for women too?”
“A foot is a foot, Mr. Minderbinder.”
“One thing escapes me, Mr. Winkler. What does your shoe do that the ones I’m wearing will not?”
“Make money for both of us, Mr. Minderbinder. Mine is state-of-the-art. Look down at the difference.”
“I’m beginning to see. Are you very rich?”
“I’ve had trouble with my timing. But believe me, Mr. Minderbinder, I’m not without experience. You are doing business with the man who devised and still manufactures the state-of-the-art chocolate Easter bunny.”
“What was so different about yours?”
“It was made of chocolate. It could be packaged, shipped, displayed, and, best of all, eaten, like candy.”
“Isn’t that true of other Easter bunnies?”
“But mine was state-of-the-art. We print that on every package. The public did not want a second-rate chocolate Easter bunny, and our government does not want a second-rate shoe.”
“I see, I see,” said Milo, brightening. “You know about chocolate?”
“All that there is to know.”
“Tell me something. Please try one of these.”
“Of course,” said Winkler, taking the bonbon and relishing the prospect of eating it. “What is it?”
“Chocolate-covered cotton. What do you think of it?”
Delicately, as though handling something rare, fragile, and repulsive, Winkler lifted the mass from his tongue, while maintaining a smile. “I’ve never tasted better chocolate-covered cotton. It’s state-of-the-art.”
“Unfortunately, I seem unable to move it.”
“I can’t see why. Have you very much?”
“Warehouses full. Have you any ideas?”
“That’s where I’m best. I will think of one while you bring my shoe to your procurer in Washington.”
“That will definitely be done.”
“Then consider this: Remove the chocolate from the cotton. Weave the cotton into fine fabric for shirts and bedsheets. We build today by breaking up. You’ve been putting together. We get bigger today by getting smaller. You can sell the chocolate to me for my business at a wonderful price for the money I receive from you for my shoe.”
“How many shoes do you have now?”
“At the moment, just the pair I’m wearing, and another one at home in my closet. I can gear up for millions as soon as we have a contract and I receive in front all the money I’ll need to cover my costs of production. I like money in front, Mr. Minderbinder. That’s the only way I do business.”
“That sounds fair,” said Milo Minderbinder. “I work that way too. Unfortunately, we have a Department of Ethics now in Washington. But our lawyer will be in charge there once he gets out of prison. Meanwhile, we have our private procurers. You will have your contract, Mr. Winkler, for a deal is a deal.”
“Thank you, Mr. Minderbinder. Can I send you a bunny for Easter? I can put you on our complimentary list.”
“Yes, please do that. Send me a thousand dozen.”
“And whom shall I bill?”
“Someone will pay. We both understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch.”
“Thank you for the lunch, Mr. Minderbinder. I go away with good news.”
“I come with good news,” called Angela buoyantly, and swept into the hospital room in an ecstasy of jubilation. “But Melissa thinks you might be angry.”
“She’s found a new fellow.”
“No, not yet.”
“She’s gone back to the old one.”
“There’s no chance of that. She’s late.”
“For what?”
“With her period. She thinks she’s pregnant.”
Defiantly, Melissa said she wanted the child, and the time left to have a child was not unlimited for either one of them.
“But how can it be?” complained Yossarian, at this end to his Rhine Journey. “You said you had your tubes tied.”
“You said you had a vasectomy.”
“I was kidding when I said that.”
“I didn’t know. So I was kidding too.”
“Ahem, ahem, excuse me,” said Winkler, when he could endure no more. “We have business to finish. Yossarian, I owe everything to you. How much money will you want?”
“For what?”
“For setting up that meeting. I am in your debt. Name what you want.”
“I don’t want any of it.”
“That sounds fair.”