Closing Time

He was stu

"But ours work," Noodles told him with pride. "Or they wouldn't be on our map. He had this whole model built to make sure it's as good as the one in the game. If there's one word he lives by, it's be prepared."

"fThat's two words, isn't it?" corrected Yossarian.

"I used to think that way too," said Noodles, "but now I see it his way. I'm getting better at golf also."

"Is that why those country clubs are there?"

"He's putting them into the video game so they'll both match. See up there in Vermont?" Yossarian saw a Ben amp; Jerry Federal Ice Cream Depository. "He found that one in the video game only a little while ago, and now he wants one too. We'll also have Haagen-Dazs. We may be underneath a long time when it ever comes to that, and he wants to be sure of his ice cream and his golf. This is confidential, but we already have a nine-hole course finished underneath Burning Tree, and it's identical to the one up here. He's down there now, practicing the course so he'll have an advantage over others when the time comes."

"Who would those others be?" asked Yossarian.

"Those of us who've been chosen to survive," answered Noodles, "and to keep the country ru

"I see. When would that be?"

"When he unlocks the box and presses the button. You see that second unit beside the game? That's the Football."

"What football?"

"Newspapermen like to call it the Football. It's the unit that will launch all our planes and defensive-offensive weapons as soon as there's word of the big attack or we decide to launch our own war. That will have to happen, sooner or later."

"I know that. What happens then?"

"We go down below, the little prick and I, until the embers cool and the radiation blows away. Along with the rest who've been picked to survive."

"Who does the picking?"

"The National Bipartisan Triage Committee. They've picked themselves, of course, and their best friends."

"Who's on it?"

"Nobody's sure."

"What happens to me and my best friends?"

"You're all disposable, of course."

"That sounds fair," said Yossarian.

"It's a pity we don't have time for a game now," said Noodles. "It's something to watch when we're fighting each other for purified water. Would you like to begin one?"

"I'm meeting a lady friend in the aeronautical museum of the Smithsonian."

"'And I have a history lesson to give when he gets back from his golf. That part isn't easy."

"Do you learn a lot?" Yossarian teased.

"We both learn a lot," said Noodles, offended. "Well, Yossarian, it will soon be Thanksgiving, and we ought to talk turkey. How much will you want?"

"For what?"

"For getting me that speaking engagement. You're in for a piece, naturally. Name your price."

"Noodles," said Yossarian in censure, "I couldn't take anything. That would be a kickback. I don't want a pe

"That sounds fair," said Noodles, and gri

"There's that one I do want," Yossarian remembered later he had requested earnestly. "I want the chaplain set free."

And at that point Noodles had turned grave. "I've tried. There are complications. They don't know what to do with him and are sorry now they ever found him. If they could dispose of him safely as radioactive waste, I think they would do it."

After the tritium, they had to see what came out of the chaplain next. Plutonium would be dreadful. And worse, lithium, that medication of choice he'd been receiving for his depression, bonded with heavy water into the lithium deuteride of the hydrogen bomb, and that could be a catastrophe.

26 Yossarian

Noodles Cook had his history lesson to prepare and Yossarian had his date at the museum. Yossarian was remembering Noodles a week later when he drew near PABT and heard the tiny steam whistles of the nearby vendors of hot peanuts. These brought back to mind the tuneful phrases of the "Forest Murmurs" in Siegfried, and the struggle for that magic ring of stolen gold that supposedly conferred world power on anyone who owned it-and brought doleful misery and ruin to all those who did. As he pushed through the doors to enter the bus terminal, he envisioned that Germanic hero, who was only Icelandic, at the lair of the dormant dragon that was lying there minding its own business. "Let me sleep," was the growling thanks to wretched king-god Wotan, who, in mournful, frustrated hopes of getting back that ring in gratitude, had come sneaking up to warn him of the fearless hero approaching.

Young Siegfried had his dragon to face, and Yossarian had those savage dogs below at the entrance to that mysterious underworld of basements that McBride now had license to inspect.

Yossarian, looking back, could recall no intimations then of what he came to know later in the hospital when contemplating his Rhine Journey as narrative jest, that he would start seeing double that same day and end in the hospital with his predicament with Melissa and his half-million dollars, and with the sale of a shoe.

With Germany unified and bristling with neo-Nazi violence again, he thought The New Yorker might jump at this mordant spoof of a Rhine Journey by a contemporary American middle-class Assyrian Siegfried of ambiguous Semitic extraction, surely a contradiction. But, inevitably, distracting visitors and doctors soon depleted him of time and that optimistic verve essential for the renewal and consummation of serious literary ambition.

Yossarian was forced to admire the veteran poise with which Melissa and even Angela could turn nondescript in the presence of his children or Frances and Patrick Beach, blending i

Siegfried, he contrived in analogy, had gone zipping off on foot to awaken Bru

Whereas Yossarian went by taxi and had more than a kiss in mind for Melissa when he came upon her practically alone in the semidarkness of the cinema in the museum with the continuously ru

At night after di