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 channel barely wide enough to accommodate one craft at a time, and he was outside the Tunnel of Love, where a watchman in a red jacket and green jockey cap stood guard at the entrance with a portable telephone and a hand-held ticket punch. He had orange hair and a milky complexion and wore a green rucksack on his back. Garish billboards and lavender-and-ginger illustrations gave alluring notice of a fabulous wax museum inside the Tunnel of Love that headlined life-size wax statues of the executed Lindbergh-baby kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann, and a nude Marilyn Monroe lying on a bed, restored in every detail to lifelike death. The fabulous wax museum was called ISLE OF THE DEAD. In the first seat of the flat-bottomed boat coasting out of one murky opening of the tunnel to continue gliding onward into the inky opening of the other, he saw Abraham Lincoln in a stiff stovepipe hat sitting motionless beside the faceless Angel of Death, and they seemed to be holding hands. He saw his wounded gunner Howard Snowden on the same bench. Side by side in the boat, on the bench immediately behind them, he saw Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The mayor was wearing a dashing wide hat with a rolled brim something like a cowboy's, and FDR sported a creased homburg and was flaunting his cigarette holder, and both were grinning as though alive in a frontpage photograph in a bygone newspaper. And on the seat in back of La Guardia and Roosevelt 's he saw his mother and his father, and then his Uncle Sam and Aunt Ida, his Uncle Max and Aunt Hannah, and then his brother Lee, and he knew that he too was going to die. It struck him all of a sudden that overnight everyone he'd known a long time was old-not getting old, not middle-aged, but old! The great entertainment stars of his time were no longer stars, and the celebrated novelists and poets in his day were of piddling significance in the new generation. Like RCA and Time magazine, even IBM and General Motors were of meager stature, and Western Union had passed away. The gods were growing old again, and it was time for another shake-up. Everyone has got to go, Teemer had propounded the last time they'd talked, and, in an uncharacteristic display of emotional emphasis, had added: "Everyone!"
Yossarian rushed past that Tunnel of Love with its true-to-life wax figures on the Isle of the Dead. Crossing a white footbridge with rococo balustrades, he found himself back in Naples, Italy, in 1945, on a line behind the imperturbable old soldier Schweik and the young one named Krautheimer who had changed his name to Joseph Kaye, waiting to go home by steamship outside the vanished old L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway on Surf Avenue past vanished old Steeplechase Park.
"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?"
"Not really," said Yossarian.
"Will I like it in America?"
"If you make money and think you're well-off."
"Are the people friendly?"
"If you make money and they think you're well-off."
"Where the fuck is that boat?" griped Kaye. "We can't wait here forever."
"Yes, you can," said Schweik.
"It's coming!" cried Kaye.
They heard the rattling noise of outdated wheels on outdated iron rails, and then a chain of roller-coaster carriages painted red and pale gold rode into view at the decelerating end of the ride on the L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway. But instead of stopping as expected, these cars continued onward past them to start around all over again, and, while Kaye shook in frustration, Yossarian stared at the riders. Again he recognized Abraham Lincoln in front. He saw La Guardia and FDR, his mother and his father, his uncles and his aunts, and his brother too. And he saw each of them double, the Angel of Death double and the gunner Snowden too, and he was seeing them twice.
He whirled around, staggering, and hastened back, escaping, and searched in baffled terror for help from the soldier Schroeder who now claimed to be a hundred and seven years old, but found only McBride, both of him, near Bob and Raul, who combined made four. McBride thought Yossarian looked funny and was walking with a falter and a list, a seesawing hand held out for stability.
"Yeah, I do feel funny," Yossarian admitted. "Let me hold your arm."
"How many fingers do you see?"
"Two."
"Now?"
"Ten."
"Now?"
"Twenty."
"You're seeing double."
"I'm beginning to see everything twice again."
"You want some help?"
"Yes."
"Hey, guys, give me a hand with him. From them too?"
"Sure."
28 Hospital
"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."