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"Nothing we found yet," said McBride. "You take a look, but don't go far."
"There's something else tres funny," said Raul, and finally smiled. He stamped his foot a few times and then began jumping and landing on both heels heavily. "Notice anything, my ami? No noise down here, nous can't make noise."
All shuffled, stamped, jumped in place to demonstrate, Yossarian too. They made no dent in the silence. Bob rapped his knuckles on the banister of the staircase, and the thud was as expected. When he rapped them on the ground there was nothing.
"That's pretty weird, isn't it?" said Bob, smiling. "It's as though we're not even here."
"What's in your pockets?" Yossarian questioned Raul abruptly. "You don't take your hands out. Not in my dream or in the street across from my building."
"My cock and my balls," said Raul at once.
McBride was embarrassed. "His gun and his badge."
"That's mon cock and mes balls," joked Raul, but did not laugh.
"I've got one more question, if you want to come to the wedding," said Yossarian. "Why have you got your sentries there--to keep people in or keep people out?"
All three shot him a look of surprise.
"They aren't ours," said Bob.
"It's what we want to find out," explained McBride.
"Let's allons
They moved away, with no fall of footsteps.
Yossarian made no sound either when he started across.
He noted next another strange thing. They cast no shadows. He cast none either as he crossed the sterile thoroughfare like a specter or soundless sleepwalker to the catwalk of white tile. The steps going up were also white, and the handrails of an albumescent porcelain that shimmered almost into invisibility against the like background of pure white, and they also were without shadows. And there was no dirt, and not one beaming reflection from one mote in the air. He felt himself nowhere. He remembered the gum wrapper and the wet cigarette. He glanced down backward to make sure he was right. He was.
The crumpled green wrapper balled up by Bob was nowhere to be seen. The unlit cigarette had vanished too. Before his eyes as he searched, the green gum wrapper materialized through the surface of the compound underfoot and was again on the ground. Then it dwindled away rearward and was altogether gone. The unlit cigarette came back next. And then that went away also. They had come out of nowhere and gone away someplace, and he had the unearthly sense that he had only to think of an object to bring it into an unreal reality before him--if he mused of a half-undressed Melissa in ivory underwear, she would be lying there obligingly; he did and she was--and to turn his sensibility away to something else and it would dwindle from existence. She disappeared. Next he was sure he heard faintly the distinctive puffing music of the band organ of a carousel. McBride was nowhere near to verify the sound. Possibly, McBride would hear it as a roller-coaster. And then Yossarian was no longer sure, for the calliope was producing gaily in waltz time the somber, forceful Siegfried Funeral Music from the culminating Gotterdammerung, which precedes by less than one hour the immolation of Brunnhilde and her horse, the destruction of Valhalla, and the death knell of those great gods, who were always unhappy, always in anguish.
Yossarian went up to the catwalk and moved into the archway past the memorial affirming that Kilroy had been there. He sensed with a twinge that Kilroy, immortal, was dead too, had died in Korea if not Vietnam.
"Halt!"
The order rang through the archway with an echo. In front on another bentwood chair, slightly forward of a turnstile with rotating bars of steel, sat another armed sentry.
This one too was uniformed in a battle jacket that was crimson and a visored green hat that looked like a jockey cap. Yossarian advanced at his signal, feeling weightless, insubstantial, contingent. The guard was young, had light hair in a crew cut, sharp eyes, and a thin mouth, and Yossarian discerned as he drew close enough to see freckles that he looked exactly like the young gunner Arthur Schroeder, with whom he had flown overseas almost fifty years before.
"Who goes there?"
"Major John Yossarian, retired," said Yossarian.
"Can I be of help to you, Major?"
"I want to go in."
"You'll have to pay."
"I'm with them."
"You'll still have to pay."
"How much?"
"Fifty cents."
