Closing Time Read Free

vexation of spiritual fatigue resulting from the need to explain continually why he had chosen such a person as his vice presidential running mate to begin with.
    "Why did you pick him?" his closest friend, the secretary of state, felt compelled to keep inquiring. "Tell at least me. Your secret is safe."
    "There was no secret!" the nation's chief executive responded pleadingly in his own defense. "There was nothing underhanded, no sneaky reason. I was simply exercising my best judgment. I give you my word, there was no criminal intent."
    "That's what's so terrifying."
    3
    Mr. Yossarian
    In the middle of his second week in the hospital, Yossarian dreamed of his mother, and he knew again that he was going to die. The doctors were upset when he gave them the news.
    "We can't find anything wrong," they told him.
    "Keep looking," he instructed.
    "You're in perfect health."
    "Just wait," he advised.
    Yossarian was back in the hospital for observation, having retreated there once more beneath another neurotic barrage of confusing physical symptoms to which he had become increasingly susceptible since finding himself dwelling alone again for just the second time in his life, and which seemed, one by one, to dissipate like vapor as soon as he described or was tested for each. Just a few months before, he had cured himself of an incurable case of sciatica merely by telephoning one of his physicians to complain of his incurable case of sciatica. He could not learn to live alone. He could not make a bed. He would sooner starve than cook.
    This time he had gone bolting back in, so to speak, with a morbid vision of a different morbid vision shortly after hearing that the President, whom he did not like, was going to resign and that the Vice President, whom he did not like even more, would certainly succeed him; and shortly after finding out, inadvertently, that Milo Minderbinder, with whom he too now had been unavoidably and inescapably linked for something like twenty-five years, was expanding beyond surplus stale commodities like old chocolate and vintage Egyptian cotton into military equipment, with plans for a warplane of his own that he intended to sell to thd government: to any government, of course, that could afford to buy.
    There were countries in Europe that could afford to buy, and in Asia and the Mideast too.
    The vision of the morbid vision he had experienced was of a seizure or a stroke and had set him reminiscing again about durable old Gustav Aschenbach alone on his mythical strand of Mediterranean beach and his immortal death in Venice, worn out at fifty in a city with a plague nobody wished to talk about. In Naples far back, when assembled in line for the troopship sailing him home after he'd flown seventy missions and survived, he'd found himself behind an older soldier named Schweik and a man born Krautheimer who had changed his name to Joseph Kaye to blend more securely into his culture, and his name, like Schweik's, had meant not much to him then.
    Given a choice, Yossarian still preferred to live. He ate no eggs and, though he had no headache, swallowed his baby aspirin every other day.
    He had no doubt he had lots to worry about. His parents were dead, and so were all his uncles and aunts.
    A prick in the White House? It would not be the first time. Another oil tanker had broken up. There was radiation. Garbage. Pesticides, toxic waste, and free enterprise. There were enemies of abortion who wished to inflict the death penalty on everyone who was not pro-life. There was mediocrity in government, and self-interest too. There was trouble in Israel. These were not mere delusions. He was not making them up. Soon they would be cloning human embryos for sale, fun, and replacement parts. Men earned millions producing nothing more substantial than changes in ownership. The cold war was over and there was still no peace on earth. Nothing made sense and neither did everything else. People did things without knowing why and