"I met a particle physicist on a plane to Kenosha who says that everything living is made up of things that are not."
"I know that too."
"It doesn't make you laugh? It doesn't make you cry? It doesn't make you wonder?"
"In the beginning was the word," said Teemer. "And the word was gene. Now the word is quark. I'm a biologist, not a physicist, and I can't say 'quark.' That belongs to an invisible world of the lifeless. So I stick with the gene."
"So where is the difference between a living gene and a dead quark?"
"A gene isn't living and a quark isn't dead."
"I can't say 'quark' either without wanting to laugh."
"Quark."
"Quark."
"Quark, quark."
"You win," said Yossarian. "But is there a difference between us and that?"
"Nothing in a living cell is alive. Yet the heart pumps and the tongue talks. We both know that."
"Does a microbe? A mushroom?"
"They have no soul?" guessed the surgeon in training.
"There is no soul," said the surgeon training him. "That's all in the head."
"Someone ought to tell the cardinal that."
"The cardinal knows it."
"Even a thought, even this thought, is just an electrical action between molecules."
"But there are good thoughts and bad thoughts," snapped Leon Shumacher, "so let's go on working. Were you ever in the navy with a man named Richard Nixon? He thinks he knows you."
"No, I wasn't."
"He wants to come check you out."
"I was not in the navy. Please keep him away."
"Did you ever play alto saxophone in a jazz band?"
"No."
"Were you ever in the army with the Soldier in White?"
"Twice. Why?"
"He's on a floor downstairs. He wants you to drop by to say hello."
"If he could tell you all that, he's not the same one."
"Were you ever in the army with a guy named Rabinowitz?" asked Dennis Teemer. "Lewis Rabinowitz?"
Yossarian shook his head. "Not that I remember."
"Then I may have it wrong. How about a man named Sammy Singer, his friend? He says he was from Coney Island. He thinks you may remember him from the war."
"Sammy Singer?" Yossarian sat up. "Sure, the tail gunner. A short guy, small, skinny, with wavy black hair."
Teemer smiled. "He's almost seventy now."
"Is he sick too?"
"He's friends with this patient I'm looking at."
"Tell him to drop by."
"Hiya, Captain." Singer shook the hand Yossarian put out.
Yossarian appraised a man delighted to see him, on the smallish side, with hazel eyes projecting slightly in a face that was kindly. Singer was chortling. "It's good to see you again. I've wondered about you. The doctor says you're okay."
"You've grown portly, Sam," said Yossarian, with good humor, "and a little bit wrinkled, and maybe a little taller. You used to be skinny. And you've gotten very gray, with thinning hair. And so have I. Fill me in, Sam. What's been happening the last fifty years? Anything new?"
"Call me Sammy."
"Call me Yo-Yo."
"I'm pretty good, I guess. I lost my wife. Ovarian cancer. I'm kind of floundering around."
"I've been divorced, twice. I flounder too. I suppose I'll have to marry again. It's what I'm used to. Children?"
"One daughter in Atlanta," said Sammy Singer, "and another in Houston. Grandchildren too, already in college. I don't like to throw myself on them. I have an extra bedroom for when they come to visit. I worked for Time magazine a long time-but not as a reporter," Singer added pointedly. "I did well enough, made a good living, and then they retired me to bring in young blood to keep the magazine alive."
"And now it's practically dead," said Yossarian. "I work now in that old Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Looking out on the skating rink. Were you ever in that one?"
"I sure was," said Singer, with recalled affection. "I remember that skating rink. I had some good times there."
"It's now the new M amp; M Building, with M amp; M Enterprises and Milo Minderbinder. Remember old Milo?"
"I sure do." Sammy Singer laughed. "He gave us good food, that Milo Minderbinder."
"He did do that. A better standard of living than I had before."
"Me too. They were saying afterward that he was the one who bombed our squadron that time."
"He did that too. That's another one of the contradictions of capitalism. It's funny, Singer. The last time I was in the hospital, the chaplain popped in out of nowhere to see me."
"What chaplain?"
"Our chaplain. Chaplain Tappman."
"Sure. I know that chaplain. Very quiet, right? Almost went to pieces after those two planes collided over La Spezia, with Dobbs in one plane and Huple in the other and Nately and all the rest of them killed. Remember those names?"
"I remember them all. Remember Orr? He was in my tent."
"I remember Orr. They say he made it to Sweden in a raft after he ditched after Avignon, right before we went home."
"I went down to Kentucky once and saw him there," said Yossarian. "He was a handyman in a supermarket, and we didn't have much to say to each other anymore."
"I was in the plane when we ditched after the first mission to Avignon. He took care of everything. Remember that time? I was down in the raft with that top turret gunner Sergeant Knight."
"I remember Bill Knight. He told me all about it."
"That was the time none of our Mae Wests would inflate because Milo had taken out the carbon dioxide cylinders to make ice cream sodas for all you guys at the officers' club. He left a note instead. That was some Milo then." Singer chuckled.
"You guys had sodas too every Sunday, didn't you?"
"Yes, we did. And then he took the morphine from the first-aid kit on that second mission to Avignon, you said. Was that really true?" "He did that too. He left a note there also."
"Was he dealing in drugs then?"
"I had no way to know. But he sure was dealing in eggs, fresh eggs. Remember?"
"I emember those eggs. I still can't believe eggs can taste so good. I eat them often."
"I'm going to start," Yossarian resolved. "You just convinced me, Sammy Singer. It makes no sense to worry about cholesterol now, does it?"
"You remember Snowden then, Howard Snowden? On that mission to Avignon?"
"Sam, could I ever forget? I would have used up all the morphine in the first-aid kit when I saw him in such pain. That fucking Milo. I cursed him a lot. Now I work with him."
"Did I really black out that much?"
"It looked that way to me."
"That seems funny now. You were covered with so much blood. And then all that other stuff. He just kept moaning. He was cold, wasn't he?" thing, "Yes, he said he was cold. And dying. I was covered with everything, Sammy, and then with my own vomit too."
"And then you took off your clothes and wouldn't put them on again for a while."
"I was sick of uniforms."
"I saw you sitting in a tree at the funeral, naked."
"I had sneakers."
"I saw Milo climb up to you too, with his chocolate-covered cotton. We all kind of always looked up to you then, Yossarian. I still do, you know."
"Why is that, Sam?" asked Yossarian, and hesitated. "I'm only a pseudo Assyrian."
Singer understood. "No, that's not why. Not since the army. I made good friends with Gentiles there. You were one, when that guy started beating me up in South Carolina. And not since those years at Time, where I had fun and hung around with Protestants and my first heavy drinkers."
"We're assimilated. It's another nice thing about this country. If we behave like they do, they might let us in."
"I met my wife there. You know something, Yossarian?"
"Yo-Yo?"
Sam Singer shook his head. "After I was married, I never once cheated on my wife, and never wanted to, and that seemed funny to people everywhere, to other girls too. It didn't to her. They might have thought I was gay. Her first husband was the other way. A ladies' man, the kind I always thought I wanted to be. She preferred me, by the time I met her."