Closing Time

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, Te

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 GOKGE.

"Holy shit!" exulted McBride, who was nowhere about. "There really is a roller-coaster!"

He came next to the carousel, ornate, elaborate, mirrored, spi

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 cha

Yossarian rushed past that Tu

"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?"