Closing Time

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 cra

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-ski

On the last flight down to the sub-level outside, there sat only a ski

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.

EMERGENCY ENTRANCE

KEEP OUT

VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT

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 grmned 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 tu