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The four-year-old tomato vendor had strapped in with M&M Enterprises and ran along the slippery slope of profit and corruption.
He wasn’t really four years old; in reality, he’d just had his thirty-third birthday. The morning felt frabjous and deserving of some celebration, but he spent it outside the store, hollering with his blatant American accent in poorly parsed Spanish to convince passersby to buy his tomatoes. He felt important. No one wanted nor needed tomatoes, but who else would spend their day selling them? He was doing everyone a great favor.
That morning, Milo stopped by and gave him tickets to New York via syndicate airplane. They cost Milo nothing and cost the vendor five dollars, which Milo reassured him to be inexpensive. “Now, I’ve arranged for a series of tomato shipments to come from several farms around Munroe that’ll be shipped into the city. I need someone knowledgeable about tomatoes, you see, and Yossarian said you’d be a fine option.”
“He’s that son of a bitch who loiters around and tries to get a price deduction, isn’t he?” the tomato vendor demanded.
Milo gave a nod and adjusted his jacket perfunctorily. “Why, yes, I suppose he is. That doesn’t matter, all that matters is that you get the proper tomatoes and bring them back here.”
“Why can’t you get the tomatoes?”
“There’s unfortunately only one of me.”
“Why’d you pick me?”
“There’s thankfully only one of you.”
“I used to live in New York,” the tomato vendor admitted, rubbing the back of his head. He didn’t recall that much after waking up in a bed, but he could reminisce on the childhood scents and breezes of the New York streets.
Milo flashed the tomato vendor a dashing smile, which his misshapen moustache made proportionately less winsome. “Yossarian told me, don’t you worry. You’ll be perfect for the job, just perfect!”
And he was. Three mornings later, the plane took off from a run-down landing strip in Rome. Two years had passed since anyone landed on it and the base had fallen into dilapidated disrepair. The plane bounced along with fervour until it took a shaky lurch and leapt into the air. The tomato vendor’s stomach twisted and he held his breath with trepidation, unable to look out the window. The motion of flight was gut-wrenchingly familiar; apparently, the tomato vendor used to fly.
“¿Cómo te llamas, chico?”
The boy felt himself coming to, opening his eyes slowly. One was obstructed with a thick ace bandage, although he could see fine through the other. He shook his throbbing head. “English,” he muttered, and the old man above him drew back and called for a young woman, who bolted over and scrutinized him.
“What’s your name, boy?” she asked, and the tomato vendor thought.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The girl gave a buoyant giggle. “That is such a stupid name. Papa, listen to them giving the boys stupid names! Who looks at a boy and names him ‘I don’t know’?”
“I don’t know,” he said again.
“I wasn’t talking to you!” she flounced, her voluptuous skirt moving in unison with her, “See, papa, he’s delirious! He just keeps saying his name!”
“Esperanza, ¿cómo se llama?”
Esperanza looked at the tomato vendor with pity in her soft almond eyes. It evanesced without a trace within moments, never to be seen again. “Se llama ‘Ildel Noe’, Papa.”
Ildel Noe had arrived in a plane crash, the only living member of his plane. He remembered plummeting to Earth, reminding himself that he was brave and a hero to his country, especially if he died. However, he didn’t. Ildel Noe lived. Each day, he rehabilitated himself with Esperanza’s family - they sold produce for a living - and he became the tomato vendor at one of their small shops which were eventually bought up by M&M Enterprises.
He remembered some, but not all of his life before the crash. He didn’t remember the Assyrian who visited town every Tuesday and bought nine and a half tomatoes although he seemed familiar. He didn’t remember the slight, timorous man with whom the Assyrian walked hand-in-hand. He still wore a little silver cross pin on his collar accompanied by tan hair and a faint smile, although he, too, seemed familiar. He didn’t remember the enterprising maven who wound up buying out the tomato farm and sending him to New York, although he also seemed familiar.
Ildel Noe was surrounded by strangers who remembered him.
The New York landing strip lay barren and welcoming as the plane settled down, wheels rattling violently in the holsters. Bustling noises of the city and street musicians surrounded the tomato vendor in a glorious cacophony. He inspired the scent of diesel gas and street hot dogs; sensed the steam drifting off the freshly cleaned tarmac.
Everything seemed just slightly changed from the way he remembered it, but the tomato vendor didn’t care. For once, he felt at home.
The first day the Assyrian - Yossarian, that was his name - brought Albert with him to buy tomatoes was the third time Ildel Noe had met him. Just before Yossarian left with his nine and a half tomatoes, Ildel Noe stopped him passionately. “What was the name of your friend?” he asked. Ever since the Assyrian revealed that he’d had a friend who died, Ildel Noe had been thinking about it.
“Which friend?”
“The dead one.”
Yossarian frowned. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be more specific, I’ve got lots of dead friends.”
“My condolences,” Ildel Noe murmured since a little voice in the back of his head told him that was the proper thing to do. He nabbed a couple of tomatoes which seemed ready to spring off the cart in his left hand. “You told me I should be him since he’s someone - unlike me - but that was the only respect in which we differed. Cle-”
“Oh, Clevinger?”
“Yes, him. How’d he die, exactly?”
Yossarian and Albert shared a look. “No clue. Allegedly, he was flying his plane in formation and was eaten by a cloud.”
Idel Noe squinted at Yossarian as if that’d elucidate anything. “What the hell do you mean, ‘eaten by a cloud’? Clouds can’t eat people. They’re clouds .”
“Eighteen planes went up into a cloud by Elba, seventeen came back down, and one plane was lost - presumably in the cloud - along the way. They never found the crash. He was declared dead, I guess, since no one ever saw Clevinger again. He was an awful lot like you. If he wasn’t dead, I certainly would’ve thought you were him.”
Elba sounded familiar, flying up into a cloud felt familiar, but when Ildel Noe thought about it, his mind felt cloudy and coated in impregnable cellophane. Yossarian left once Idel Noe gave him the tomatoes and Albert bid him a sympathetic farewell.
Latterly, Idel Noe adopted the concept of being someone and ironically called himself Ildel Noe Clevinger after Yossarian’s dead friend. There wasn’t truth in it and there didn’t have to be. He remembered growing up, graduating high school, studying philosophy at Harvard University, his twenty-fifth birthday, then nothing for two years. He walked each day one foot after the other, traversing a tunnel of his past, present, and future merging.
Tomatoes, philosophy, and yearning to remember were his life now. Ildel Noe could accept that.
Night fell on the New York streets a day after Ildel Noe Clevinger arrived. The tomato shipment held delays due to a mud ravine the truck accidentally plummeted into, and Milo set Ildel Noe up with a couple of hotel rooms to sustain his sojourn. Still, he hadn’t had dinner by nine and set out onto the dark streets illuminated only by a streetlight.
His leather business shoes slogged through the rainwater nestled between cracks in the sidewalk. Ildel Noe watched the raindrops plummet through the air in hundreds - no, thousands - visible for fleeting seconds while headlights lit them up. He was positive he’d reach his destination, although he didn’t know where he was going.
Blinding lights obstructed Ildel Noe’s view from one oncoming car and he shielded his eyes. The tires screeched through a deep puddle which drenched the tomato vendor. He hit something hard and fell to the ground with an unsatisfactory thud.
“I’m sorry, are you alright?” a voice asked.
For a moment, Ildel Noe lay in the rainwater. Then he stood up. “I’m fine, yourself?”
“Yeah. Landed on my good leg,” the man gave a strained smile and Idel Noe jumped.
“Dunbar!?” he exclaimed. He didn’t remember how or why the name came to mind, yet it resurfaced and flew off his tongue.
Dunbar perused Ildel Noe: his face, stature, and dusty business suit. “Clevinger?” he asked, his tongue unwieldy in his mouth before straightening up with shock, “Clevinger!” Then, backing away skeptically, he narrowed his eyes, “Are you real? They said you were dead.”
Clevinger looked himself up and down. He didn’t feel dead, although to be fair, he wasn’t certain what death felt like. He hoped it’d be peaceful, or idyllic and heavenly like they used to tell him every Sunday morning in church when he was a little boy. Still, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe death was just silence and desolation. Either way, Clevinger found himself increasingly certain that he lived. He gave a flurried smile which fit right in with his bulging eyes and anxious features. “Well, I’m certainly not dead.”
“And it’s a good thing you’re not. They were painfully equivocal about it all, you know.”
“Who’re they?”
“The Air Force command, that’s who. They lied, I knew it!” Dunbar’s sullen skepticism fell from his expression. “You were alive in your cloud and years and years and years are gone but you’re here safe. Years, Clevinger, years!” he cradled Clevinger’s nonplussed face in his palms, “They go so quickly and they’re gone in a-” he held out his hand, snapping his fingers, “Like that, they’re over and you’re an old man past your prime and the world’s fallen from your hands but you’re alive.”
Despite himself, Clevinger began to laugh. “Dunbar, what are you talking about?”
“I’ve already explained it to you,” Dunbar told him coolly, linking his arm with Clevinger’s as they started to walk down the pitch-black street, “Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t remember a damn thing,” Clevinger hung his head, “Just you. I’m not even certain where I know you from. Were we close?”
“The closest.”
“Are you sure I’m Clevinger?”
“If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck. Besides, who the hell else would you be?”
In all fairness, Clevinger didn’t know. Idel Noe was, quite literally, no one. Maybe Clevinger wasn’t a dead man, maybe he’d just been abandoned to a bygone time, lying in wait to be salvaged. There may have been verity to his identity - by dint of Dunbar - and Clevinger came to accept that he wasn’t a stranger. He’d been a friend, at the very least. To him, Dunbar was a familiar face, the first of many that hadn’t belonged to a stranger. A presence with a name. Clevinger found himself overwhelmed with the intensity of being a real person. “Why don’t we go get a drink?”
Dunbar looked at him. “I was about to ask you that.”
“And?”
“Why don’t we?”
“Why don’t we?” Clevinger repeated, “Come again?”
“Get dinner.”
“Weren’t we going for a drink?”
“Sure, I guess we can do that, too.”
Clevinger found himself torn between vexation and exhilaration at the old familiarity of their conversation. “Do what too?”
“Get a drink.”
“What about dinner?”
“Well, of course, we’re getting dinner. The question’s a drink.”
“No, no,” Clevinger corrected, “We’ve already agreed to a drink. Are we or aren’t we getting dinner?”
“We agreed on dinner,” Dunbar corrected back, “Do you want to go to a bar or not after?”
“Fine. Both,” Clevinger crossed his arms contumeliously, “I’m not going to argue with you if you can’t even remember what I said seconds ago.”
“You said dinner,” Dunbar refuted under his breath, giving Clevinger - who had fallen silent with perfervid exasperation - a hearty pat on the arm. Clevinger had been correct, but conversational accuracy only mattered when it was recognized by both parties, which Dunbar complacently refused to do. Clevinger was tangled in bewilderment more than anything else, but settled down and went back to engaging in dull colloquy. Tomato vendor life was mundane; Dunbar’s accounting firm work had apparently been even more so.
Beside himself, Clevinger massaged his temples in exasperation rather than leaping over a table or pounding his fists on a hard surface in exuberance, both of which he preferred. “If you can’t stand monotonous tasks and accounting is monotonous, why join an accounting firm of all things?”
“Same reason I adopted a dog.”
“Why’d you adopt a dog?”
“Who gives a fuck?”
Bazooka bubble gum that’d been left out of the wrapper for three days was no good; practically inedible. Dunbar decided that made it best, picking up five of the powdery pink sheets and stuffing them all into his mouth at once. It lost its flavor in five-and-ten minutes at the latest, which added to the misery. Dunbar reclined onto the cement wall, closing his eyes as he gnawed on the unforgiving rubber. There wasn’t a better way to spend the day.
Allegedly, the war was over. Allegedly, three years had passed. Dunbar wasn’t certain about these statements; his cell had solid ventilation but no view of the outside world. Every twenty-one hours (he’d counted the seconds), a colonel in a pristine, white coat came in and spoke to him for ninety-seven minutes (he’d counted the seconds there, too) and then checked his non-existent watch before leaving. Sometimes he left a pack of gum. This was the second time Dunbar had been the recipient of Bazooka.
Dunbar didn’t mind the isolation, nor the gum, nor the lack of any timepieces. With time, he’d become less bitter and stopped taking his blatant anger out on his acquaintances. The colonel in the coat didn’t believe him. “I’m telling you, I haven’t got aggressions to take out on anyone,” Dunbar insisted.
“You haven’t got anyone to take them out on,” the colonel explained, “I’ll bet if another man were to come in here, you’d have a hell of a time browbeating him.”
“Au contraire. You have brought a man in here,” Dunbar pointed out.
“No, it’s just been you. No one else.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t count,” the colonel informed him snidely.
“Oh? Aren’t you a person?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then why don’t you count?”
“You know you’d never get out of this place if you bullied me.”
“Then doesn’t that prove I’ve got rational thought? Crazy- why, what’s crazy? Aggressive? Insane? Violent? Oh, you’ve got the wrong man. I’m not crazy, doc. I’m not a murderer. I wouldn’t fly those missions because I wouldn’t kill people. The madmen are the ones zipping in, signing their lives away, killing without a thought. That’s not me. I’m one of the sanest men you’ll ever meet,” Dunbar held eye contact, leaning forward as he extended one hand to poke at the colonel’s taut chest with each word, “The. Most. Sane. Man. You’ll. Ever. Meet.”
The colonel was not impressed. He returned the next day to inform Dunbar that he’d earned himself another three months in his cell for bullying him, insanity, and having murderous intent, all of which Dunbar spent lying on his back with his ankles crossed, and chowing down on rock-hard gum until his teeth ached.
Bubblegum, isolation, and yearning to forget the past were his life now. And Dunbar couldn’t accept that.
Clevinger woke up to the sound of a ticking clock. Sunlight bounced off the maroon varnished oak sides which had been whittled to form an elongated arch. Engravings around the inside glass annulus created a vaguely elegant pattern, which Clevinger admired until he recognized the neuralgia on the side of his head and rolled back over to bury his face in a pillow.
He lay on his side, still letting the world filter into his consciousness. “Hey, Clev?”
“Yeah?” he asked, his eyes half settling on Dunbar, “Oh, Dunbar. I didn’t know you were here.”
“Yeah. Clev?” Dunbar rubbed his temples, “Did we-?”
Clevinger blinked, shielding his eyes. “Yeah? Yeah. I think we did.”
He glanced around the room all but in silence; the roar of early Wednesday morning traffic came from outside and the timepiece kept clicking along the seconds. “Clev?”
“Yeah?”
“Could we- again?”
Clevinger flopped back on his pillow. “You’ve gotta be joking. You… you actually want me to?”
“I do.”
“I- I don’t know what I’m doing,” Clevinger stared up at the ceiling with glazed eyes like he’d seen the answer of the universe, “Last night- well- it’s easier not to think and analyze everything when you aren’t sober.”
“I don’t mind. We’ll figure it out. Hell, we can talk through it.”
“What if it takes too long?”
“Years.”
“Dunbar, there’s no way it’d take-”
“Hours.”
Clevinger rolled his eyes. “I’ll be damned if it takes-”
“So many are gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“Years. Hours. Minutes.”
“And? What about it? They’re gone. There’s more to come. We’re listening to seconds tick by on your insufferable clock. How the hell do you sleep with that, by the way? Even in the contingency that you didn’t-”
“Shut up for a minute, will you?” Dunbar scoffed affectionately. He propped himself up with one arm, ignoring his own dizzying alcohol-induced headache. “Let’s- again? Before more is gone. Time’s fleeting.”
Clevinger scooted back over obediently. “You’re still crazy.”
“No, no, Clev,” Dunbar kissed Clevinger’s cheek without cracking a smile, “ You’re the crazy one.”
Dunbar was bitter over the three years he’d lost to imprisonment as they let him out. He made a personal promise that upon his release, the only people he wouldn’t lash out at would be McWatt (who was dead), Kid Sampson (who was also dead), Yossarian (who was his friend and probably dead, too), and Clevinger (who was certainly dead because he’d been inhaled by a cloud). He glared at the hunchback major as he unlocked the barred door. “You aren’t being released because you’re mentally sound,” the major snapped at him, “This federal prison lost funding and you have to go now.”
“No,” Dunbar snarked back, “You’re letting me out because I’m not crazy and haven’t ever been, but you’re a chucklehead and won’t look at the truth when it’s right in front of you.”
The major yanked the door open and belligerently pocketed the key hoop. “Go on. Get out. You only live once.”
“Wrong.”
Wide-eyed, the major stared at Dunbar in confusion, his jowls accentuating his frown. “What?”
“You only die once. You live every day.”
“Whatever. Just get out. No one’s got the time for this sort of nonsense.”
Dunbar cleared his throat. “ I’ve got time for this sort of nonsense.”
“Well, I haven’t,” the major replied, herding him out of the building’s front door, “Scram. Go find yourself someone who has.”
And Dunbar packed up the personal items he didn’t have and set off down the road to become an accountant, with which he had some experience. He was dismayed to wisen up to the fact that it hadn’t been three years, but four, and he stood despondently smack-dab in the middle of 1948. He’d been concomitantly right and wrong; he spent so much time making time go longer that three years had passed just the same, and no matter if they felt like three hundred or one, the time was still gone.
“Was it unco futile?” he asked himself, but no one heard. If they heard, they didn’t care. If they cared, they didn’t answer. Dunbar kicked at the road vehemently and left to find the nearest accounting firm.
Clevinger decided he liked being back in New York. Every inch of it was a far cry from the Spanish countryside with Esperanza and her family, but he woke up each day with renewed vigor. He stared in the mirror, combing back his burnt-umber hair, and his intensely taut features stared right back. Milo Minderbinder had extended his visit by an entire week, and Clevinger had taken the jejune daily tasks in stride. He carted himself around to grocery shops and stocked the little two-by-three pantry in his motel room until the warped, wooden door refused to close. He bought himself a neat grey three-piece suit that matched his pallid face impeccably. He mailed postcards to his acquaintances back in Cullera to delineate his serendipity.
Some days, he lunched with Dunbar to catch up about events that he couldn’t remember taking place. They spoke about themselves and got to know one another; Clevinger recalled marginal amounts of Dunbar’s life but wanted to acquaint himself better with him, and Dunbar found Clevinger’s monologues of his childhood in Albany repetitious and prompted the same stories he’d heard threescore and ten times already.
Afterward, Dunbar accompanied him on his farcical errands as he knew the city well and Clevinger had a wretched ineptitude when it came to reading maps. The first map of New York Clevinger purchased fell into a puddle after Clevinger tripped over his shoelaces and dropped it. The writing was smeared from the diesel-infused sludge, rendering it completely useless. Still, he clung to it until Dunbar snatched it from him and shredded it so he wouldn’t be fifty minutes late to lunch again due to misreading the map.
On Thursday, Clevinger buttoned up his un-ironed coat and caught a cab to Columbia University, where Dunbar had a friend and arranged a job interview for him. Clevinger found himself incredulous when he first received the news. “What do you mean, you got me a job?”
Dunbar shrugged. “I didn’t get you a job. I arranged an interview for you. If you want the job, you’ll have to get it yourself.”
Clevinger gave a tight smile and glanced down at the ground. His heart soared, excitement welling up in him the same way passion did when he engrossed himself in an argument over any topic. There was nothing he wouldn’t debate someone over; his opinions were stronger than steel and in Clevinger’s eyes, they simply couldn’t be wrong. That would defeat the purpose of the argument. “How’d you know I wanted to teach philosophy?” he asked.
“Have you heard yourself? You’re a broken record on the subject. I could even teach philosophical concepts if I wanted to - and that’s just from what I’ve heard from you!”
Clevinger got the job. It came as a thrilling phone call just before he was about to fall asleep in an old buttoned-up shirt from Esperanza’s father. Relief washed over him and he dropped the receiver back in the holster without a second thought.
Milo Minderbinder appeared at Clevinger’s door promptly at eight the next morning, pounding on the door until Clevinger dragged himself out of bed and let him in. “Ildel Noe, we’ve got to go back now,” Milo told him, “The plane’s departing at nine, we’ll take the tomatoes and then I’d like to stop by Newfoundland to pick up a shipment of pomegranates.”
“Mr. Minderbinder,” Clevinger rubbed his eyes and blinked at the intense light, “I think I’d like to stay here.”
“No, no, Mr. Clevinger. We’ve got to go back now. Come on, get dressed and pack up. We haven’t got time for this,” Milo reassured stubbornly.
“ You haven’t got time for this. I’m staying right here.”
“You haven’t got a hotel room in two hours,” Milo informed him pointedly. He smoothed down the smart black lapels of his suit and straightened the navy tie which Wintergreen bought off the black market as a gift from two Iranian peddlers. “I’m not paying for your rooms for another night. I’ll be damned to lose profit off you.”
Clevinger finally processed the situation and snapped into reality. “Milo, I’ve got a job!” he cried ardently, “I can’t go now. What’s in Cullera for me? Days under the sun selling tomatoes no one buys? What sort of a life is that?”
“Yours.”
“Oh, not that old chestnut again! Why, you’re just as… as… as fatuous as the next man! That’s right! You’re fatuous! I’m staying here, I’m going to be a professor. A professor, Milo! Why, I might even be the next Socrates and my students could go on to become Platos. Imagine that, Milo, just imagine it!” Clevinger gripped Milo by either of his forearms in delight.
“Oh dear…” Milo let out a staggering moan of grief at the thought of returning to Wintergreen and admitting he lost Clevinger in New York. Lost profit! Nothing could be more egregious! “I am imagining it.”
Besides, more Clevingers spawning from a philosophy class was a terrifying concept - even to Milo - who considered tomato vendor Clevinger a friend of his to some extent.
As Milo stood in affright, Clevinger tossed him out of the motel room, locked the door, and refused to open it again until Milo tried climbing in the window to fish him out. Clevinger thwarted that plan, too, by barricading the window with the solid-oak desk and yelling at Milo to vamoose. Upon realizing that he’d miss his flight if he carried on, Milo vamoosed, and Clevinger got dressed in peace.
At ten o’clock, the hotel staff knocked politely on Clevinger’s door and informed him that he had to vamoose too or they’d throw him out, and as he hadn’t heard them, the manager busted the door down and chucked Clevinger out through the front door. Enraptured with the knowledge that he’d get to remain in New York without Milo, Clevinger called Dunbar and invited him to lunch. He had a certain jones to see Dunbar again, although he couldn’t understand why. Maybe he’d simply become beholden to him. Admiration? No - Clevinger didn’t admire Dunbar, especially with all his whacko time and dream business that should’ve earned him time in therapy, off the battlefield.
Yossarian was a very interesting topic.
Clevinger liked to hear stories about Yossarian and Dunbar in the hospital, which either brought him to hysterics or impassioned him enough to start squabbling one-sidedly with Dunbar, who had decided he liked playing devil’s advocate. Dunbar liked to hear the story about Yossarian buying tomatoes with Albert, even though there was only one. Watching Clevinger trip over himself as he told the story again and again was the interesting part, and Dunbar drew great delight from the helpless tedium as he convinced Clevinger for the umpteenth time that he hadn’t recounted Yossarian buying tomatoes yet and that he’d love to hear it.
Mazed, Clevinger told the story verbatim again, and once he’d finished, Dunbar requested it again. One hour spent like this - much to Dunbar’s evident bemusement - was worth seventy-two hours. He reveled in how long it could take. Occasionally Clevinger temporarily had to adjourn his storytelling to make sure Dunbar wasn’t cataleptic. He never was, and time passed on.
Generalissimo Hazrat Milo Minderbinder found himself enraptured in matters of the syndicate and his leman, ex-sergeant Wintergreen the Herald. He lobbied for Wintergreen to receive some titles, although Milo still maintained a higher rank than him in all but two places.
Wintergreen couldn’t understand why Milo was willing to stick his neck out on his behalf, but he didn’t mind. Sometimes he went so far as to tease Milo about it, even though they slept together in the nights and mentioned nothing in the mornings. Wintergreen considered asking him about it after they’d showered and he’d let Milo button his shirt up and kiss his forehead before starting their day, but never did.
Milo ducked out of the exquisite dinner arranged by the Vice-Generalissimo to head back to his room. Wintergreen already lay on his stomach on the bed, a towel wrapped around his waist and a paper copy of Ulysses in his hands. He didn’t look up when Milo slammed the front door behind himself and slumped down on a chair. “I’m here when you’re ready,” Wintergreen called, and after a handful of minutes, Milo nudged open the door and undressed.
“Shut the door,” Wintergreen reminded without looking up, and Milo gave it a swift kick and rolled over on the bed. Wintergreen tossed Ulysses into the corner and pulled Milo towards himself.
Ten minutes later, the phone rang. Milo bolted upright and glanced at the door. “I should answer that, shouldn’t I?” he asked, and Wintergreen shook his head.
“Stay with me. You’ll have plenty of time to talk to whomever it is later, won’t you?”
“No, no. What if- what if it’s that cordial seller? Or maybe they’ve struck oil in Ouargla! I have to answer it now, any delay could be the end of enterprise. A good businessman never snubs his potential opportunities,” Milo gave Wintergreen a quick kiss and tossed aside the covers to answer the phone.
“If it isn’t someone important, just say ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson’ and hang up.”
“Who?”
“Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
Milo shook his head and picked up the receiver. “I’m not going to do that, Wintergreen- Hello, Milo Minderbinder of M&M Enterprises speaking, how may I help?”
“Good afternoon- evening?” someone from the other end said.
“Evening,” another voice added.
“Yes, good evening, Milo! It’s me, Clevinger-”
“I’m here too.”
“Apologies. It’s Dunbar and myself.”
Wintergreen had crawled back under the sheets and started reading Ulysses again. “Milo, who is it?” he called.
“It’s Clevinger and Dunbar!” Milo called back.
“Clev, what son of a bitch is he talking to?”
“Jesus Christ, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
Milo tapped his barefoot on the carpet. He’d neglected to grab so much as a towel and now stood in the center of the residence buck naked, which was only vaguely uncomfortable. “Clevinger, what can I do for you?” he asked instead.
“Dunbar and I were talking and I remembered-”
“ We remembered-”
“Dunbar- ugh- fine! We remembered that you kept a correspondence with Yossarian and I wanted-”
“ We wanted-”
“Dunbar I swear to God-”
“There’s no God.”
“WE wanted to reach out to him. His number, address, or anything…?”
Wintergreen flipped onto his back. “Milo,” he called, accentuating the ‘o’. “Who are these guys?”
“Friends,” Milo called back, then turned to the receiver, “I’ll jot it down for you in a moment-”
“Friends?” Wintergreen asked, “Oh you mean lovers ? Like us?”
“Wintergreen! I’m on the phone!” Milo hissed loudly, covering the receiver, “My sincerest apologies. Now, let me find the address, I know I’ve got it around here somewhere.”
“Why does Wintergreen think we’re lovers?” Dunbar wanted to know.
“Who’s Wintergreen?”
“That’s right, you probably don’t remember him. He used to be a mail clerk until he got busted down to private for treating the officers contemptuously and-”
“But why on earth does that imbecile think we’re lovers?”
“Aren’t we?”
“Oh for-”
“Look! Why not prove him right, the one damn thing he’s ever been right about!”
“Honestly now-”
“I’ll just say ‘I love you, Clev, will you marry-’”
“Dunbar! Shut up! I’m on the-”
“ We’re on the-”
“-phone! Milo, how’s the address coming?”
Milo had dug up the slip of cardboard with Yossarian’s address on it and tried hard to remember the remaining digit of his phone number. “Ready your paper and pencil, I’ll start reading it whenever you’re set.”
“Milo, come back,” Wintergreen moaned helplessly, keeping his face buried in Ulysses, “You’re taking too long.”
“I’ll be back soon,” Milo sighed, turning back to the phone, “Alright. You’re ready?”
“Dunbar, if you don’t mind, the pencil’s on the bureau and-”
“Go get your own damn pencil.”
“Oh- why? What are you even doing? You’re standing like a catatonic. Why, in any era before ours, you’d be mistaken for dead.”
“No,” Dunbar stood a little taller, “In fact, I’m going to live even longer than you because I’m not spending every minute in a frenzy, scrambling around like you’re Mercury except you aren’t immortal and one day you’ll be lying on your deathbed and wondering where it all-”
“Just get the damn pencil!”
“Are you ready for the address?” Milo inquired again, this time with marginally more impatience, “And, while you’re at it, I don’t suppose there are any pencil factories which happen to be bailing out for a formidable price, are there?”
“Address,” Clevinger said into the phone, pencil in hand, “This lazy bastard wouldn’t help. What’s the address?”
“What about pencil sales?” Milo cried out instead.
“Milo, they called for an address, not to inform you of pencil sales,” Wintergreen shouted over from the next room, “Why don’t you give them the address and send them on their way?”
“If I could just arrange a pencil monopoly in New York and buy out the other factories in the European-”
“Who the hell said anything about a pencil monopoly?”
“Why, didn’t you?”
“Milo, what’s the address?”
“Milo, just give them the address and come back to bed! We can find a pencil monopoly after we’re done if it means so much to you.”
Milo grudgingly shelled out both Yossarian’s bijou villa address and his phone number, then threw the receiver across the room, despairing about the pencil monopoly he didn’t have and wouldn’t have until about a month later. About a month later, Milo would own around 50% of global commercial business, which was what he dreamed about each night - well, that and Wintergreen. On the verge of sleep, he murmured, “So according to you, we’re lovers now?”
“Aren’t we?”
“Mmm,” Milo replied, then: “I wonder if we can’t export some extra-virgin olive oil from Iceland… I think they’d be willing to give it to us for six turkeys per bushel… don’t you?”
“I love you, too,” Wintergreen decided, and fell asleep.
Clevinger prepared himself as best he could for the first day of instruction at the university and Dunbar listened to him while golfing. New York was an excellent city for recreational sports since nothing was ever too far nor too close. Dunbar had initially complained about being unable to track down a decent skeet-shooting range with a reasonable price and settled upon golfing at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club as the next most pedestrian avocation. Occasionally, he struck up a conversation with the other men, or simply brought along Clevinger and attended whatever he had to say.
“Are you certain they’ll listen?” Clevinger wrung his hands, glancing down at the coffee-stained paper he’d typed three nights before, his red correction pen peppering the surface, “It has to be perfect; the smallest detail could derail the entire first class.”
Dunbar swung his golf club, making an easy ace and taking a large chunk out of the ground. “Clev, they’re kids. They aren’t going to care if you say ‘derisive’ instead of ‘decisive’ or if you start talking about Heraclitus when you mean to weave an anecdote about Hercules.”
“Then I’d be laughing stock!” Clevinger wailed, “Are you crazy?”
“Maybe,” Dunbar said, making his way to the third hole, “If it’s such a problem, read it to me again.”
“I’ve read it to you eleven times already.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Well, aren’t you tired of hearing it? You know, sometimes I wonder about you. Maybe if you went into one of those old brick and mortar buildings with ivy on the outside and a licensed physician or two on the inside and told them all this rubbish, they’d say you had non compos mentis and mens rea and you’d-”
“Who cares?”
“I do, and you ought to-”
“Who asked you?”
“-ought to- why, what do you think Freud would say?”
Dunbar gave him an incredulous side-eye and struck the ball halfway across the field. “Freud!”
“Yes, Sigmund Freud-”
“What do I care? He’s dead.”
Clevinger’s hands shook apoplectically and he took a deep breath in to steady himself before leaping onto the beginning of a great tirade. “Just because he’s deceased doesn’t mean he didn’t have philosophical greatness and benefaction which is still vastly apropos to us, today. In fact-”
“What’re you trying to get at, anyway?” Dunbar asked rhetorically, “Shut up and read your preliminaries.”
And for the first time in forever, Clevinger did just that.
Nights were long, regardless of the season. Within the darkness, there could be anything. Therein lay the universal truths, but the feasibility of discovering them was naught because it was too dark to see anything, and the preponderance of people were too caught up in their dreams to ruminate over the unknowable fragments of the universe. Clevinger spent his dreams trying to remember the two years that he’d lost in the plane crash and occasionally woke up in a cold sweat, hysterical over his inability to remember. He flicked on the light and bolted up anxiously. “I can’t remember,” he lamented tearfully aloud, staring out the rain-stained window panes with the occasional fulguration of passing cars, “I keep thinking and every time I get close, every time I see a- a fragment of those years, it’s gone and I’m here.”
“That’s how years go,” Dunbar had woken up to the commotion and sat beside him, “They roll by and here you are. We were serving in the Air Force and bam! What’s it been, now? Fourteen? Fourteen years fly by and we’re lying awake at some absurd hour.”
Clevinger shook his head, his overwrought brown eyes on the verge of tears. “I just can’t remember that time. I’ve tried, but I can’t.”
“I forget sometimes, too.”
“You do?” Clevinger asked with surprise.
Dunbar nodded. He propped himself up with one arm and wrapped the other around Clevinger’s shoulders, which were rather bony and uncomfortable. Still, it was clear that Clevinger had been conciliated to some degree. “When they took me away, I got clocked on the head. It’s easier to drag away an unconscious man, you know.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, forgetting things like that?”
“Not really. I just ask you about them again, and you tell me. You know, a great man once told me that when it comes to time? Some’s gone, and there’s more to come.”
Clevinger furrowed his eyebrows. He wiped the glistening tracks of tears that had begun to run down his cheeks. “Didn’t I tell you that? How the hell did you remember?”
“I don’t forget everything ,” Dunbar replied sardonically, “If you forget, just ask.”
“So I’m going to wake you up at two and badger you about that Captain Orr you told me about? Or I suppose I should just poke you awake and ask if you remember what Milo’s first name is.”
Clevinger stared at Dunbar in earnest. Dunbar stared right back. “Yossarian was right. You’re a dope. You’re an idiot! What do you think Milo’s first name is?”
“John,” Clevinger answered sincerely, without missing a beat.
“No, no, that’s my name. It’s three, lie back down and see if you can’t sleep. You’re teaching tomorrow, dope.” Dunbar pulled the little twine string and the light flickered off.
He helped Clevinger lie back down again before easing himself back into his side of the bed, which had gone pitifully cold. Gruntled yet enervated, he shut his eyes. Just before he’d drifted off, he felt Clevinger tenderly kiss his cheek and intertwine his clammy hand with Dunbar’s own. He scooted up beside him, and Dunbar decided he wasn’t so cold anymore. “You know,” Clevinger murmured, languidly running a hand through Dunbar’s balding hair, “You’re still crazy after all these years.”
Half asleep, Dunbar smiled.