Catch-22

Catch-22

Catch-22

   It was love at first sight.

   The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in
love with him.

   Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that
fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it
wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t
become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being
short of jaundice all the time confused them.

   Each morning they came around, three brisk and serious men
with efficient mouths and inefficient eyes, accompanied by brisk and serious
Nurse Duckett, one of the ward nurses who didn’t like Yossarian. They read the
chart at the foot of the bed and asked impatiently about the pain. They seemed
irritated when he told them it was exactly the same.

   ‘Still no movement?’ the full colonel demanded.

   The doctors exchanged a look when he shook his head.

   ‘Give him another pill.’ Nurse Duckett made a note to give
Yossarian another pill, and the four of them moved along to the next bed. None
of the nurses liked Yossarian. Actually, the pain in his liver had gone away,
but Yossarian didn’t say anything and the doctors never suspected. They just
suspected that he had been moving his bowels and not telling anyone.

   Yossarian had everything he wanted in the hospital. The food
wasn’t too bad, and his meals were brought to him in bed. There were extra
rations of fresh meat, and during the hot part of the afternoon he and the
others were served chilled fruit juice or chilled chocolate milk. Apart from the
doctors and the nurses, no one ever disturbed him. For a little while in the
morning he had to censor letters, but he was free after that to spend the rest
of each day lying around idly with a clear conscience. He was comfortable in
the hospital, and it was easy to stay on because he always ran a temperature of
101. He was even more comfortable than Dunbar, who had to keep falling down on
his face in order to get his meals brought to him in bed.

   After he had made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in
the hospital, Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew saying that he was in
the hospital but never mentioning why. One day he had a better idea. To
everyone he knew he wrote that he was going on a very dangerous mission. ‘They
asked for volunteers. It’s very dangerous, but someone has to do it. I’ll write
you the instant I get back.’ And he had not written anyone since.

   All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor
letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in
wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to
learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than
the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break
the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day,
and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and
every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher
plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the
letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he
felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he
was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text
untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation ‘Dear Mary’ from a
letter, and at the bottom he wrote, ‘I yearn for you tragically. R. O. Shipman,
Chaplain, U.S. Army.’ R.O. Shipman was the group chaplain’s name.

   When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he
began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole
homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his
wrist as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear
the censoring officer’s name. Most letters he didn’t read at all. On those he
didn’t read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote,
‘Washington Irving.’ When that grew monotonous he wrote, ‘Irving Washington.’ Censoring
the envelopes had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some
ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D. man back into the ward posing
as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about
an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he
wouldn’t censor letters. He found them too monotonous.

   It was a good ward this time, one of the best he and Dunbar
had ever enjoyed. With them this time was the twenty-four-year-old fighter-pilot
captain with the sparse golden mustache who had been shot into the Adriatic Sea
in midwinter and not even caught cold. Now the summer was upon them, the
captain had not been shot down, and he said he had the grippe. In the bed on
Yossarian’s right, still lying amorously on his belly, was the startled captain
with malaria in his blood and a mosquito bite on his ass. Across the aisle from
Yossarian was Dunbar, and next to Dunbar was the artillery captain with whom
Yossarian had stopped playing chess. The captain was a good chess player, and
the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped playing chess with him
because the games were so interesting they were foolish. Then there was the
educated Texan from Texas who looked like someone in Technicolor and felt,
patriotically, that people of means—decent folk—should be given more votes than
drifters, whores, criminals, degenerates, atheists and indecent folk—people
without means.

   Yossarian was unspringing rhythms in the letters the day they
brought the Texan in. It was another quiet, hot, untroubled day. The heat
pressed heavily on the roof, stifling sound. Dunbar was lying motionless on his
back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll’s. He was
working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom.
Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought
he was dead. They put the Texan in a bed in the middle of the ward, and it
wasn’t long before he donated his views.

   Dunbar sat up like a shot. ‘That’s it,’ he cried excitedly.
‘There was something missing—all the time I knew there was something
missing—and now I know what it is.’ He banged his fist down into his palm. ‘No
patriotism,’ he declared.

   ‘You’re right,’ Yossarian shouted back. ‘You’re right, you’re
right, you’re right. The hot dog, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mom’s apple pie. That’s
what everyone’s fighting for. But who’s fighting for the decent folk? Who’s
fighting for more votes for the decent folk? There’s no patriotism, that’s what
it is. And no matriotism, either.’ The warrant officer on Yossarian’s left was
unimpressed. ‘Who gives a shit?’ he asked tiredly, and turned over on his side
to go to sleep.

   The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and
likable. In three days no one could stand him.

   He sent shudders of annoyance scampering up ticklish spines,
and everybody fled from him—everybody but the soldier in white, who had no
choice. The soldier in white was encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze.
He had two useless legs and two useless arms. He had been smuggled into the
ward during the night, and the men had no idea he was among them until they
awoke in the morning and saw the two strange legs hoisted from the hips, the
two strange arms anchored up perpendicularly, all four limbs pinioned strangely
in air by lead weights suspended darkly above him that never moved. Sewn into
the bandages over the insides of both elbows were zippered lips through which
he was fed clear fluid from a clear jar. A silent zinc pipe rose from the
cement on his groin and was coupled to a slim rubber hose that carried waste
from his kidneys and dripped it efficiently into a clear, stoppered jar on the
floor. When the jar on the floor was full, the jar feeding his elbow was empty,
and the two were simply switched quickly so that the stuff could drip back into
him. All they ever really saw of the soldier in white was a frayed black hole
over his mouth.

   The soldier in white had been filed next to the Texan, and
the Texan sat sideways on his own bed and talked to him throughout the morning,
afternoon and evening in a pleasant, sympathetic drawl. The Texan never minded
that he got no reply.

   Temperatures were taken twice a day in the ward. Early each
morning and late each afternoon Nurse Cramer entered with a jar full of
thermometers and worked her way up one side of the ward and down the other,
distributing a thermometer to each patient. She managed the soldier in white by
inserting a thermometer into the hole over his mouth and leaving it balanced
there on the lower rim. When she returned to the man in the first bed, she took
his thermometer and recorded his temperature, and then moved on to the next bed
and continued around the ward again. One afternoon when she had completed her
first circuit of the ward and came a second time to the soldier in white, she
read his thermometer and discovered that he was dead.

   ‘Murderer,’ Dunbar said quietly.

   The Texan looked up at him with an uncertain grin.

   ‘Killer,’ Yossarian said.

   ‘What are you fellas talkin’ about?’ the Texan asked
nervously.

   ‘You murdered him,’ said Dunbar.

   ‘You killed him,’ said Yossarian.

   The Texan shrank back. ‘You fellas are crazy. I didn’t even
touch him.’

   ‘You murdered him,’ said Dunbar.

   ‘I heard you kill him,’ said Yossarian.

   ‘You killed him because he was a nigger,’ Dunbar said.

   ‘You fellas are crazy,’ the Texan cried. ‘They don’t allow
niggers in here. They got a special place for niggers.’

   ‘The sergeant smuggled him in,’ Dunbar said.

   ‘The Communist sergeant,’ said Yossarian.

   ‘And you knew it.’ The warrant officer on Yossarian’s left
was unimpressed by the entire incident of the soldier in white. The warrant
officer was unimpressed by everything and never spoke at all unless it was to
show irritation.

   The day before Yossarian met the chaplain, a stove exploded
in the mess hall and set fire to one side of the kitchen. An intense heat
flashed through the area. Even in Yossarian’s ward, almost three hundred feet
away, they could hear the roar of the blaze and the sharp cracks of flaming
timber. Smoke sped past the orange-tinted windows. In about fifteen minutes the
crash trucks from the airfield arrived to fight the fire. For a frantic half
hour it was touch and go. Then the firemen began to get the upper hand.
Suddenly there was the monotonous old drone of bombers returning from a
mission, and the firemen had to roll up their hoses and speed back to the field
in case one of the planes crashed and caught fire. The planes landed safely. As
soon as the last one was down, the firemen wheeled their trucks around and
raced back up the hill to resume their fight with the fire at the hospital.
When they got there, the blaze was out. It had died of its own accord, expired
completely without even an ember to be watered down, and there was nothing for
the disappointed firemen to do but drink tepid coffee and hang around trying to
screw the nurses.

   The chaplain arrived the day after the fire. Yossarian was
busy expurgating all but romance words from the letters when the chaplain sat
down in a chair between the beds and asked him how he was feeling. He had
placed himself a bit to one side, and the captain’s bars on the tab of his
shirt collar were all the insignia Yossarian could see. Yossarian had no idea
who he was and just took it for granted that he was either another doctor or
another madman.

   ‘Oh, pretty good,’ he answered. ‘I’ve got a slight pain in my
liver and I haven’t been the most regular of fellows, I guess, but all in all I
must admit that I feel pretty good.’

   ‘That’s good,’ said the chaplain.

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

   ‘I meant to come around sooner,’ the chaplain said, ‘but I
really haven’t been well.’

   ‘That’s too bad,’ Yossarian said.

   ‘Just a head cold,’ the chaplain added quickly.

   ‘I’ve got a fever of a hundred and one,’ Yossarian added just
as quickly.

   ‘That’s too bad,’ said the chaplain.

   ‘Yes,’ Yossarian agreed. ‘Yes, that is too bad.’ The chaplain
fidgeted. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he asked after a while.

   ‘No, no.’ Yossarian sighed. ‘The doctors are doing all that’s
humanly possible, I suppose.’

   ‘No, no.’ The chaplain colored faintly. ‘I didn’t mean
anything like that. I meant cigarettes… or books… or… toys.’

   ‘No, no,’ Yossarian said. ‘Thank you. I have everything I
need, I suppose—everything but good health.’

   ‘That’s too bad.’

   ‘Yes,’ Yossarian said. ‘Yes, that is too bad.’ The chaplain
stirred again. He looked from side to side a few times, then gazed up at the
ceiling, then down at the floor. He drew a deep breath.

   ‘Lieutenant Nately sends his regards,’ he said.

   Yossarian was sorry to hear they had a mutual friend. It
seemed there was a basis to their conversation after all. ‘You know Lieutenant
Nately?’ he asked regretfully.

   ‘Yes, I know Lieutenant Nately quite well.’

   ‘He’s a bit loony, isn’t he?’ The chaplain’s smile was
embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t say. I don’t think I know him that well.’

   ‘You can take my word for it,’ Yossarian said. ‘He’s as goofy
as they come.’ The chaplain weighed the next silence heavily and then shattered
it with an abrupt question. ‘You are Captain Yossarian, aren’t you?’

   ‘Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.’

   ‘Please excuse me,’ the chaplain persisted timorously. ‘I may
be committing a very grave error. Are you Captain Yossarian?’

   ‘Yes,’ Captain Yossarian confessed. ‘I am Captain Yossarian.’