"Genetically speaking is not what I mean, Dennis, and you know that. Put a gene in me that will disable the ones that are aging me. I want to remain forever the way I am now."
Teemer socializing was crazily obsessed with the laboratory knowledge that metastatic cancer cells were genetic advances on the original malignancy, vastly more hardy, adroit, and destructive. He had to think of them, therefore, as evolutionary improvements and to wonder if all his medical interventions on behalf of patients were crimes against nature, trespassing intrusions upon the balancing currents of biological life he saw germinating in harmonious synchronization everywhere things lived. After all, he'd had to ask, what was so noble about mankind, or essential?
"We've had nothing to do with our own evolution and are having everything to do with our own decline. I know it sounds revolutionary, but I have to consider that possibility. I'm a neo-Darwinist and a man of science."
"I'm a man of junk," said Lew, who'd by then had enough of the hospital. "It's how I began."
"No, Lew, you began in a sperm cell as a strand of DNA that still doesn't know who you are."
"Balls!" Lew told him.
"Exactly," said Teemer. "And that's all we ever are."
"Sure, Dennis, if that's what you like to think," said Lew, who'd hid enough of such intellectualizing too and went home the next day to wait things out there.
For that matter, Yossarian and I were not all that compatible either. I'd not heard of his movie scripts. And he seemed a bit miffed when I reacted to his idea of a play about the Dickens family with only a smile and with nothing at all to his thought of a comic novel about Thomas Mann and a composer in one of his novels who'd made a Faustian bargain.
What I did not like about Yossarian was that he seemed somewhat conscious of himself as a special being and more than a trifle smug in the range of his friendships.
And what I did not like about myself was that I still felt disposed to accept him as someone superior. I was amazed to find among his visitors the man McBride from the bus terminal, with a pleasant, bright-eyed woman he introduced as his fiancee. A man named Gaffney dropped by to shake his head reproachfully at Yossarian in his sickbed. He expressed the idea he had of a primeval Faustian bargain between God, or maybe it was the Devil, and the first man, who perhaps was a woman.
"I will give you intelligence," submitted the Creator, "enough knowledge to destroy everything on earth, but you will have to use it."
"Done!" said our ancestor, and that was our Genesis.
"How do you like it?" asked Gaffney.
"Let me think about that one," said Teemer. "It may be the key to my unified theory."
"Come home," said his wife.
"Are you crazy?" cried Teemer. "Not till I'm done."
McBride was the man at PABT who'd given me the money to get home after I was arrested there. It was fascinating to see him friendly with Yossarian and both working together on that wedding at the bus terminal, to which the President might come by underground railway, and at which the cardinal would be among the several prelates officiating.
"If you get the chance," I schemed subtly with Yossarian, "ask the cardinal whose genes Jesus had."
"Teemer wants to know that too."
I want to take that trip around the world while there still is a world. In Hawaii, there's a woman who used to work with me and also the former wife of a friend from whom I used to buy artwork when I was still doing slide shows for the space salesmen at Time. She's been married to someone else a long time now. I'd like to see both these acquaintances once more. Yossarian advises me not to miss New Zealand as long as I'm going to Australia, and especially the south island for its high mountains and glacier. I might even try trout fishing with waders while there. Thst is something else I've never done. In Sydney I have my old office buddy and his wife in a house facing the bay, with a swimming pool for the exercises he's been doing since the age of twenty-nine to keep the muscles in his upper body strong, and they've already decreed I stay with them at least two weeks. He lost the use of both legs when paralyzed by the disease called Guillain-Barre after preventive antitoxin inoculations for a sales meeting in Mexico. Yossarian knows unmarried women in Sydney and Melbourne and has offered to telephone with introductions. He suggests I send a dozen red roses to each beforehand. He says red roses always appeal. After that I want to go to Singapore, where a girl who used to be an assistant now lives with her husband, a lawyer there for an American firm, and then to Hong Kong, where I still also know people. From there I will fly to Italy, just to Rome. I want to try to find the building at the top of the Via Veneto in which we had those apartments on two whole floors. I think I might enjoy Rome more than last time, when I went as a fill-in to a speedy business conference, but not nearly as much as I did the first time as a young soldier in wartime with a ravenous appetite for Italian cooking and a youthful libido that was highly combustible and mystically and inexhaustibly renewable. After that, I'll go to England, where I know a couple of others I used to work with too. It seems a shame to skip Paris, but I don't know anyone in France anymore, and I don't think I'd know what to do with myself if I went there alone. And then back again to my high-rise apartment after seven weeks or eight, to a house and life without the person who'd meant more to me than any other.
I've picked safe countries and neutral airlines. But I'll probably be hijacked by terrorists anyway, Esther jokes, and then shot to death because of my American passport and Jewish origin. Esther probably would marry me if I could bring myself to ask, but only if she could safeguard all her widow's assets. She's officious and opinionated. We would not get along.
Yossarian is better off than I am because he still has big decisions to make. Or so says Winkler, who was there in the hospital room reporting on his business agreement with Milo Minderbinder for his new state-of-the-art shoe-I still laugh when I remember those days as kids when Winkler was starting up his new state-of-the-art breakfast-sandwiches-for-home-delivery business and I was writing the copy, headlined SLEEP LATE SUNDAY MORNING! for his advertising leaflets-when the flashy blonde woman came bursting into the hospital room with the news for Yossarian that had to be a shocker. Approaching age seventy, he was faced with the daunting prospect of becoming a father again, or not, and marrying a third time, or not.
"Holy shit," were the words Winkler remembered emerging from him.
The woman thus fertilized was the dark-haired nurse. It was obvious to everyone they'd been close for some time. If ever she was going to have a child, she wanted it to be his. And if she didn't have this one now, they both might soon be too old.
"Doesn't she realize," exhorted Yossarian, "that when he asks me to run out for a pass, I'll be eighty-four years old?"
"She doesn't care about that."
"She'll want me to marry her?"
"Of course. I do too."
"Listen-you too, Winkler!-not a word about this," commanded Yossarian. "I don't want anyone else to know."
"Who would I tell?" asked Winkler, and immediately told me. "I know what I would do," he offered, with the pompous demeanor he likes to affect as a businessman.
"What would you do?" I asked.
"I don't know what I would do," he answered, and we both laughed again.
Finding Yossarian there in the hospital and seeing all that he's up to, with that enthusiastic blonde for a friend and that pregnant nurse who wants him to marry her, with Patrick Beach and his wife there, and with something secret going on between Beach and that blonde, as well as between Yossarian and the woman married to Patrick Beach, and with McBride with his fiancee dropping in regularly too, and their talk about the bus terminal and the crazy wedding scheduled there, and with those two tons of caviar on order-all that and more leave me with the sheepish remorse that I've missed out on much, and that now that I no longer have it, mere happiness was not enough.