Catch-22 (2 page)

   ‘Of the 256th Squadron?’

   ‘Of the fighting 256th Squadron,’ Yossarian replied. ‘I
didn’t know there were any other Captain Yossarians. As far as I know, I’m the
only Captain Yossarian I know, but that’s only as far as I know.’

   ‘I see,’ the chaplain said unhappily.

   ‘That’s two to the fighting eighth power,’ Yossarian pointed
out, ‘if you’re thinking of writing a symbolic poem about our squadron.’

   ‘No,’ mumbled the chaplain. ‘I’m not thinking of writing a
symbolic poem about your squadron.’ Yossarian straightened sharply when he
spied the tiny silver cross on the other side of the chaplain’s collar. He was
thoroughly astonished, for he had never really talked with a chaplain before.

   ‘You’re a chaplain,’ he exclaimed ecstatically. ‘I didn’t
know you were a chaplain.’

   ‘Why, yes,’ the chaplain answered. ‘Didn’t you know I was a
chaplain?’

   ‘Why, no. I didn’t know you were a chaplain.’ Yossarian
stared at him with a big, fascinated grin. ‘I’ve never really seen a chaplain
before.’ The chaplain flushed again and gazed down at his hands. He was a
slight man of about thirty-two with tan hair and brown diffident eyes. His face
was narrow and rather pale. An innocent nest of ancient pimple pricks lay in
the basin of each cheek. Yossarian wanted to help him.

   ‘Can I do anything at all to help you?’ the chaplain asked.

   Yossarian shook his head, still grinning. ‘No, I’m sorry. I
have everything I need and I’m quite comfortable. In fact, I’m not even sick.’

   ‘That’s good.’ As soon as the chaplain said the words, he was
sorry and shoved his knuckles into his mouth with a giggle of alarm, but
Yossarian remained silent and disappointed him. ‘There are other men in the
group I must visit,’ he apologized finally. ‘I’ll come to see you again,
probably tomorrow.’

   ‘Please do that,’ Yossarian said.

   ‘I’ll come only if you want me to,’ the chaplain said,
lowering his head shyly. ‘I’ve noticed that I make many of the men
uncomfortable.’ Yossarian glowed with affection. ‘I want you to,’ he said. ‘You
won’t make me uncomfortable.’ The chaplain beamed gratefully and then peered
down at a slip of paper he had been concealing in his hand all the while. He
counted along the beds in the ward, moving his lips, and then centered his
attention dubiously on Dunbar.

   ‘May I inquire,’ he whispered softly, ‘if that is Lieutenant
Dunbar?’

   ‘Yes,’ Yossarian answered loudly, ‘that is Lieutenant
Dunbar.’

   ‘Thank you,’ the chaplain whispered. ‘Thank you very much. I
must visit with him. I must visit with every member of the group who is in the
hospital.’

   ‘Even those in other wards?’ Yossarian asked.

   ‘Even those in other wards.’

   ‘Be careful in those other wards, Father,’ Yossarian warned.
‘That’s where they keep the mental cases. They’re filled with lunatics.’

   ‘It isn’t necessary to call me Father,’ the chaplain
explained. ‘I’m an Anabaptist.’

   ‘I’m dead serious about those other wards,’ Yossarian
continued grimly. ‘M.P.s won’t protect you, because they’re craziest of all.
I’d go with you myself, but I’m scared stiff: Insanity is contagious. This is
the only sane ward in the whole hospital. Everybody is crazy but us. This is
probably the only sane ward in the whole world, for that matter.’ The chaplain
rose quickly and edged away from Yossarian’s bed, and then nodded with a
conciliating smile and promised to conduct himself with appropriate caution. ‘And
now I must visit with Lieutenant Dunbar,’ he said. Still he lingered,
remorsefully. ‘How is Lieutenant Dunbar?’ he asked at last.

   ‘As good as they go,’ Yossarian assured him. ‘A true prince.
One of the finest, least dedicated men in the whole world.’

   ‘I didn’t mean that,’ the chaplain answered, whispering
again. ‘Is he very sick?’

   ‘No, he isn’t very sick. In fact, he isn’t sick at all.’

   ‘That’s good.’ The chaplain sighed with relief.

   ‘Yes,’ Yossarian said. ‘Yes, that is good.’

   ‘A chaplain,’ Dunbar said when the chaplain had visited him
and gone. ‘Did you see that? A chaplain.’

   ‘Wasn’t he sweet?’ said Yossarian. ‘Maybe they should give
him three votes.’

   ‘Who’s they?’ Dunbar demanded suspiciously.

   In a bed in the small private section at the end of the ward,
always working ceaselessly behind the green plyboard partition, was the solemn
middle-aged colonel who was visited every day by a gentle, sweet-faced woman
with curly ash-blond hair who was not a nurse and not a Wac and not a Red Cross
girl but who nevertheless appeared faithfully at the hospital in Pianosa each
afternoon wearing pretty pastel summer dresses that were very smart and white
leather pumps with heels half high at the base of nylon seams that were
inevitably straight. The colonel was in Communications, and he was kept busy
day and night transmitting glutinous messages from the interior into square
pads of gauze which he sealed meticulously and delivered to a covered white
pail that stood on the night table beside his bed. The colonel was gorgeous. He
had a cavernous mouth, cavernous cheeks, cavernous, sad, mildewed eyes. His
face was the color of clouded silver. He coughed quietly, gingerly, and dabbed
the pads slowly at his lips with a distaste that had become automatic.

   The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still
specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him. They hurled lights
in his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles into nerves to hear if he
could feel. There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph,
an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a
dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a
cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic cetologist from the zoology
department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps
by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying
colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.

   The colonel had really been investigated. There was not an
organ of his body that had not been drugged and derogated, dusted and dredged,
fingered and photographed, removed, plundered and replaced. Neat, slender and
erect, the woman touched him often as she sat by his bedside and was the epitome
of stately sorrow each time she smiled. The colonel was tall, thin and stooped.
When he rose to walk, he bent forward even more, making a deep cavity of his
body, and placed his feet down very carefully, moving ahead by inches from the
knees down. There were violet pools under his eyes. The woman spoke softly,
softer than the colonel coughed, and none of the men in the ward ever heard her
voice.

   In less than ten days the Texan cleared the ward. The
artillery captain broke first, and after that the exodus started. Dunbar,
Yossarian and the fighter captain all bolted the same morning. Dunbar stopped
having dizzy spells, and the fighter captain blew his nose. Yossarian told the
doctors that the pain in his liver had gone away. It was as easy as that. Even the
warrant officer fled. In less than ten days, the Texan drove everybody in the
ward back to duty—everybody but the C.I.D. man, who had caught cold from the
fighter captain and come down with pneumonia.

   In a way the C.I.D. man was pretty lucky,
because outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were
rewarded with medals. All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line
were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and
no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young
lives. There was no end in sight. The only end in sight was Yossarian’s own,
and he might have remained in the hospital until doomsday had it not been for
that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls and his lumpy,
rumpleheaded, indestructible smile cracked forever across the front of his face
like the brim of a black ten-gallon hat. The Texan wanted everybody in the ward
to be happy but Yossarian and Dunbar. He was really very sick.

   But Yossarian couldn’t be happy, even though the Texan didn’t
want him to be, because outside the hospital there was still nothing funny
going on. The only thing going on was a war, and no one seemed to notice but
Yossarian and Dunbar. And when Yossarian tried to remind people, they drew away
from him and thought he was crazy. Even Clevinger, who should have known better
but didn’t, had told him he was crazy the last time they had seen each other,
which was just before Yossarian had fled into the hospital.

   Clevinger had stared at him with apoplectic rage and
indignation and, clawing the table with both hands, had shouted, ‘You’re
crazy!’

   ‘Clevinger, what do you want from people?’ Dunbar had replied
wearily above the noises of the officers’ club.

   ‘I’m not joking,’ Clevinger persisted.

   ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ Yossarian told him calmly.

   ‘No one’s trying to kill you,’ Clevinger cried.

   ‘Then why are they shooting at me?’ Yossarian asked.

   ‘They’re shooting at everyone,’ Clevinger answered. ‘They’re
trying to kill everyone.’

   ‘And what difference does that make?’ Clevinger was already
on the way, half out of his chair with emotion, his eyes moist and his lips
quivering and pale. As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in
which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and
blinking back bitter tears of conviction. There were many principles in which
Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.

   ‘Who’s they?’ he wanted to know. ‘Who, specifically, do you
think is trying to murder you?’

   ‘Every one of them,’ Yossarian told him.

   ‘Every one of whom?’

   ‘Every one of whom do you think?’

   ‘I haven’t any idea.’

   ‘Then how do you know they aren’t?’

   ‘Because…’ Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with
frustration.

   Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had
proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he
flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all. And if
that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that weren’t even funnier. There
was nothing funny about living like a bum in a tent in Pianosa between fat
mountains behind him and a placid blue sea in front that could gulp down a
person with a cramp in the twinkling of an eye and ship him back to shore three
days later, all charges paid, bloated, blue and putrescent, water draining out
through both cold nostrils.

   The tent he lived in stood right smack up against the wall of
the shallow, dull-colored forest separating his own squadron from Dunbar ’s.
Immediately alongside was the abandoned railroad ditch that carried the pipe
that carried the aviation gasoline down to the fuel trucks at the airfield.
Thanks to Orr, his roommate, it was the most luxurious tent in the squadron.
Each time Yossarian returned from one of his holidays in the hospital or rest
leaves in Rome, he was surprised by some new comfort Orr had installed in his
absence—running water, wood-burning fireplace, cement floor. Yossarian had
chosen the site, and he and Orr had raised the tent together. Orr, who was a
grinning pygmy with pilot’s wings and thick, wavy brown hair parted in the
middle, furnished all the knowledge, while Yossarian, who was taller, stronger,
broader and faster, did most of the work. Just the two of them lived there,
although the tent was big enough for six. When summer came, Orr rolled up the
side flaps to allow a breeze that never blew to flush away the air baking
inside.

   Immediately next door to Yossarian was Havermeyer, who liked
peanut brittle and lived all by himself in the two-man tent in which he shot
tiny field mice every night with huge bullets from the.45 he had stolen from
the dead man in Yossarian’s tent. On the other side of Havermeyer stood the
tent McWatt no longer shared with Clevinger, who had still not returned when
Yossarian came out of the hospital. McWatt shared his tent now with Nately, who
was away in Rome courting the sleepy whore he had fallen so deeply in love with
there who was bored with her work and bored with him too. McWatt was crazy. He
was a pilot and flew his plane as low as he dared over Yossarian’s tent as
often as he could, just to see how much he could frighten him, and loved to go
buzzing with a wild, close roar over the wooden raft floating on empty oil
drums out past the sand bar at the immaculate white beach where the men went
swimming naked. Sharing a tent with a man who was crazy wasn’t easy, but Nately
didn’t care. He was crazy, too, and had gone every free day to work on the
officers’ club that Yossarian had not helped build.

   Actually, there were many officers’ clubs that Yossarian had
not helped build, but he was proudest of the one on Pianosa. It was a sturdy
and complex monument to his powers of determination. Yossarian never went there
to help until it was finished; then he went there often, so pleased was he with
the large, fine, rambling, shingled building. It was truly a splendid
structure, and Yossarian throbbed with a mighty sense of accomplishment each
time he gazed at it and reflected that none of the work that had gone into it
was his.

   There were four of them seated together at a table in the
officers’ club the last time he and Clevinger had called each other crazy. They
were seated in back near the crap table on which Appleby always managed to win.
Appleby was as good at shooting crap as he was at playing ping-pong, and he was
as good at playing ping-pong as he was at everything else. Everything Appleby
did, he did well. Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God,
Motherhood and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of
them, and everybody who knew him liked him.

   ‘I hate that son of a bitch,’ Yossarian growled.

   The argument with Clevinger had begun a few minutes earlier
when Yossarian had been unable to find a machine gun. It was a busy night. The
bar was busy, the crap table was busy, the ping-gong table was busy. The people
Yossarian wanted to machine-gun were busy at the bar singing sentimental old
favorites that nobody else ever tired of. Instead of machine-gunning them, he
brought his heel down hard on the ping-pong ball that came rolling toward him
off the paddle of one of the two officers playing.

   ‘That Yossarian,’ the two officers laughed, shaking their
heads, and got another ball from the box on the shelf.

   ‘That Yossarian,’ Yossarian answered them.

   ‘Yossarian,’ Nately whispered cautioningly.

   ‘You see what I mean?’ asked Clevinger.

   The officers laughed again when they heard Yossarian
mimicking them. ‘That Yossarian,’ they said more loudly.

   ‘That Yossarian,’ Yossarian echoed.

   ‘Yossarian, please,’ Nately pleaded.

   ‘You see what I mean?’ asked Clevinger. ‘He has antisocial
aggressions.’

   ‘Oh, shut up,’ Dunbar told Clevinger. Dunbar liked Clevinger
because Clevinger annoyed him and made the time go slow.

   ‘Appleby isn’t even here,’ Clevinger pointed out triumphantly
to Yossarian.

   ‘Who said anything about Appleby?’ Yossarian wanted to know.

   ‘Colonel Cathcart isn’t here, either.’

   ‘Who said anything about Colonel Cathcart?’

   ‘What son of a bitch do you hate, then?’

   ‘What son of a bitch is here?’

   ‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ Clevinger decided. ‘You
don’t know who you hate.’

   ‘Whoever’s trying to poison me,’ Yossarian told him.

   ‘Nobody’s trying to poison you.’

   ‘They poisoned my food twice, didn’t they? Didn’t they put
poison in my food during Ferrara and during the Great Big Siege of Bologna?’

   ‘They put poison in everybody’s food,’ Clevinger explained.

   ‘And what difference does that make?’

   ‘And it wasn’t even poison!’ Clevinger cried heatedly,
growing more emphatic as he grew more confused.

   As far back as Yossarian could recall, he explained to
Clevinger with a patient smile, somebody was always hatching a plot to kill
him. There were people who cared for him and people who didn’t, and those who
didn’t hated him and were out to get him. They hated him because he was
Assyrian. But they couldn’t touch him, he told Clevinger, because he had a
sound mind in a pure body and was as strong as an ox. They couldn’t touch him
because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was
Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the
Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was miracle ingredient
Z-247. He was—’Crazy!’ Clevinger interrupted, shrieking. ‘That’s what you are!
Crazy!

   ‘—immense. I’m a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness,
three-fisted humdinger. I’m a bona fide supraman.’

   ‘Superman?’ Clevinger cried. ‘Superman?’

   ‘Supraman,’ Yossarian corrected.

   ‘Hey, fellas, cut it out,’ Nately begged with embarrassment.
‘Everybody’s looking at us.’

   ‘You’re crazy,’ Clevinger shouted vehemently, his eyes
filling with tears. ‘You’ve got a Jehovah complex.’

   ‘I think everyone is Nathaniel.’ Clevinger arrested himself
in mid-declamation, suspiciously. ‘Who’s Nathaniel?’

   ‘Nathaniel who?’ inquired Yossarian innocently.

   Clevinger skirted the trap neatly. ‘You think everybody is
Jehovah. You’re no better than Raskolnkov—’

   ‘Who?’

   ‘—yes, Raskolnikov, who—’

   ‘Raskolnikov!’

   ‘—who—I mean it—who felt he could justify killing an old
woman—’

   ‘No better than?’

   ‘—yes, justify, that’s right—with an ax! And I can prove it
to you!’ Gasping furiously for air, Clevinger enumerated Yossarian’s symptoms:
an unreasonable belief that everybody around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse
to machine-gun strangers, retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion
that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him.

   But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to
Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong. Everywhere he
looked was a nut, and it was all a sensible young gentleman like himself could
do to maintain his perspective amid so much madness. And it was urgent that he
did, for he knew his life was in peril.

   Yossarian eyed everyone he saw warily when he returned to the
squadron from the hospital. Milo was away, too, in Smyrna for the fig harvest.
The mess hall ran smoothly in Milo ’s absence. Yossarian had responded
ravenously to the pungent aroma of spicy lamb while he was still in the cab of
the ambulance bouncing down along the knotted road that lay like a broken
suspender between the hospital and the squadron. There was shish-kabob for lunch,
huge, savory hunks of spitted meat sizzling like the devil over charcoal after
marinating seventy-two hours in a secret mixture Milo had stolen from a crooked
trader in the Levant, served with Iranian rice and asparagus tips Parmesan,
followed by cherries jubilee for dessert and then steaming cups of fresh coffee
with Benedictine and brandy. The meal was served in enormous helpings on damask
tablecloths by the skilled Italian waiters Major—de Coverley had kidnaped from
the mainland and given to Milo.

   Yossarian gorged himself in the mess hall until he thought he
would explode and then sagged back in a contented stupor, his mouth filmy with
a succulent residue. None of the officers in the squadron had ever eaten so
well as they ate regularly in Milo ’s mess hall, and Yossarian wondered awhile
if it wasn’t perhaps all worth it. But then he burped and remembered that they
were trying to kill him, and he sprinted out of the mess hall wildly and ran
looking for Doc Daneeka to have himself taken off combat duty and sent home. He
found Doc Daneeka in sunlight, sitting on a high stool outside his tent.

   ‘Fifty missions,’ Doc Daneeka told him, shaking his head.
‘The colonel wants fifty missions.’

   ‘But I’ve only got forty-four!’ Doc Daneeka was unmoved. He was
a sad, birdlike man with the spatulate face and scrubbed, tapering features of
a well-groomed rat.

   ‘Fifty missions,’ he repeated, still shaking his head. ‘The
colonel wants fifty missions.’