At home, there was never much interest in that war, my war, except by Michael, whose attention span was short. To the girls it was merely a tall tale and a travelogue. Michael would listen hard a minute or two before whirling off on tangents more personal. As a tail gunner, I faced backward and crouched on my knees or sat on a rest like a bike seat. And Michael could picture it perfectly, he contended swiftly, because he had a bike with a seat and would ride it to the beach to stare at the waves and the bathers and could I look straight ahead while facing backward? Michael, that wasn't funny, the girls scolded. He grinned as though joking. No, I answered, I could look only straight back, but a top turret gunner like Bill Knight could spin his guns around in all directions. "Well, I can also," said Michael, "still spin. I can still spin a top, I betcha. Do you know how come we all put away our bathing suits at the same time of year, and amp; begin spinning our tops?" The girls threw up their hands. Glenda too. Michael did not seem to me always to be trying to be funny, although he obligingly assumed that character when charged. We called him Sherlock Holmes because he paid attention to details and sounds the rest of us ignored, and he played that role too with the same exaggerated comic theatricality. He had difficulty with proverbs, such as I had not imagined could exist. He could understand that a stitch in time might save nine, but he could not see how that applied to anything but sewing. He appeared absolutely dumbfounded one time when Glenda, advising him about something else, remarked that it was always better to look before you leaped, for he had not been thinking about leaping. Like his mother when a child, he was obedient to everyone. He helped with dishes when asked to. And when classmates told him to take drugs, he took drugs. When we demanded he stop, he did. He started again when urged to. He had no close friends and seemed pathetically to want them. By the time he was fifteen, we knew he would not be able to go through college. We speculated privately about work for him that would not involve close relationships with others: forest ranger, night watchman, lighthouse keeper, those were among our darkest jokes and far-fetched outlooks. By the time he was nineteen, we were wondering what we could do with him. Michael made the decision for us. Glenda found him first when she stepped out the back with a basket of wash from the washing machine. In the backyard of the house we had rented on Fire Island there was just one small tree, a stubby Scotch pine, they told us, and he had hanged himself from that.
The photographs we had of Michael could break your heart. Glenda said nothing when I put them away in the cabinet in which she had stored the photographs of herself as a cheerleader and her father as a vendor of agricultural supplies. Into the same cabinet with my Air Medal and gunner's wings, my patch of sergeant's stripes, that old picture of me with Snowden and Bill Knight sitting on a row of bombs, with Yossarian looking on from the background, and that older picture of my father with a gas mask and a helmet in World War I.
Not long after, Glenda, who had always been healthy, began suffering often with symptoms of vague character that eluded verification: Reiter's syndrome, Epstein-Barr virus, fluctuations in blood chemistry, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, numbness and tinglings in the extremities, and, finally, digestive upsets and the ailment that was all too specific.
I'd met Teemer through Lew, who suggested we at least consult with the oncologist who'd been managing his Hodgkin's disease. Teemer reviewed the data and did not disagree. The primary growth in the ovary was no longer the main problem. The ones in other areas could prove tougher.
"It will depend," he counseled evasively, the first time he talked to us, "on the individual biology of the tumors. Unfortunately, those in the ovary do not reveal themselves until they've already spread. What I feel we-"
"Do I have one year?" Glenda broke in curtly.
"One year?" faltered Teemer, who looked taken aback.
"I mean a good one, Doctor. Can you promise me that?"
"I can't promise you that," said Teemer, with a regretful gloom we soon learned was typical.
Glenda, who had asked her question with false, blithe confidence, was shocked by his answer. "Can you promise six months?" Her voice was weaker. "Good ones?"
"No, I can't promise you that."
She forced a smile. "Three?"
"It's not up to me."
"I won't ask you for less."
"I can guarantee one, and it won't be all good. But there won't be much pain. We will have to see."
"Sam." Glenda heaved a great sigh. "Bring home the girls. I think we'd better start planning."
She died all at once in the hospital just thirty days later, from a coronary embolism while a new medication was being administered experimentally, and I've always suspected a humanitarian covenant about which I was told nothing. Yossarian, who knew Teemer well, thought the possibility credible.
Yossarian, paunchy, large, with hair turning white, was not how I would have pictured him. I had not turned out the way he would have guessed either. He would have pictured a lawyer or professor. I was surprised to find him associated with Milo Minderbinder; he awarded me no honors for my promotion work at Time. Yet we agreed it was marvelous that, by luck and natural selection, we had managed to survive prosperously.
It seemed logical that the two of us should have taught school awhile and then moved into advertising and public relations, for the higher salaries and livelier milieu, and that we both had aspired to write fiction that would elevate us into that elite of the famous and opulent, and distinguished plays and film scripts too.
"By now we like luxury and call it security," he observed with a cursory rue. "As we grow older, Samuel, we're always in danger of turning into the kind of person we used to say we despised when young. What did you imagine I would look like now?"
"An air force captain, still in his twenties, who looked a little bit crazy, and always knew what he was doing."
"And unemployed?" he answered with a laugh. "We don't have much choice, do we?"
"I walked into a room once in Rome," I revealed to him, "a room I was sharing with Snowden on one of our rest leaves, and saw you on top of that chubby maid who was always putting out for any of us who asked her to and had those lime-colored panties she always wore."
"I remember that maid. I remember them all. She was nice. Do you ever stop to wonder what she looks like now? I have no trouble doing that, I do that all the time. I'm never wrong. I can't work backwards, though. I can't look at a woman now and see what she looked like when young. I find it much easier to predict the future than to predict the past. Don't you? Am I talking too much?"
"I think you sound like Teemer with that last one."
I also thought he was talking with a spark of the old Yossarian, and he liked hearing that.
He and Lew did not really take to each other. I could sense each wondering what I saw in the other. There was space in those hospital colloquies for only one life of the party, and it was hard for Lew to triumph as an extrovert when he was six feet tall and his weight had dropped down below a hundred and fifty. Lew toned down tactfully with Yossarian and his more sedate visitors like Patrick Beach and the socialite Olivia Maxon, with all her ludicrous delight in her two tons of caviar, and even with the sprightly blonde woman and the pretty nurse.
Often we would congregate evenings in Teemer's room in the psychiatric ward to talk about sanity, democracy, neo-Darwinism, and immortality amid the other patients there, all of them heavily medicated and staring impassively at us with no interest, as though waiting like cows with dropped jaws while we struggled to our conclusions, and that seemed a little bit crazy too. To live or not to live was still the question for Yossarian, and he was not mollified to hear that he had already been living much longer than he thought he had, perhaps even since the origin of the species, and, through the DNA transmitted into his children, would go on living long after he died, genetically speaking.