Catch-22 (22 page)

   Yossarian shoved him out of the way and ran right into the
hospital.

   Yossarian ran right into the hospital,
determined to remain there forever rather than fly one mission more than the
thirty-two missions he had. Ten days after he changed his mind and came out,
the colonel raised the missions to forty-five and Yossarian ran right back in,
determined to remain in the hospital forever rather than fly one mission more
than the six missions more he had just flown.

   Yossarian could run into the hospital whenever he wanted to
because of his liver and because of his eyes; the doctors couldn’t fix his
liver condition and couldn’t meet his eyes each time he told them he had a
liver condition. He could enjoy himself in the hospital, just as long as there
was no one really very sick in the same ward. His system was sturdy enough to
survive a case of someone else’s malaria or influenza with scarcely any
discomfort at all. He could come through other people’s tonsillectomies without
suffering any postoperative distress, and even endure their hernias and
hemorrhoids with only mild nausea and revulsion. But that was just about as
much as he could go through without getting sick. After that he was ready to
bolt. He could relax in the hospital, since no one there expected him to do
anything. All he was expected to do in the hospital was die or get better, and
since he was perfectly all right to begin with, getting better was easy.

   Being in the hospital was better than being over Bologna or
flying over Avignon with Huple and Dobbs at the controls and Snowden dying in
back.

   There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the
hospital as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, and there were generally fewer
people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much lower
death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier
death rate. Few people died unnecessarily. People knew a lot more about dying
inside the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job of it. They
couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her
behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn’t keep Death out, but while
she was in she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy
and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation
about dying that was so common outside the hospital. They did not blow up in
mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, or freeze to death in
the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his
secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane.

   ‘I’m cold,’ Snowden had whimpered. ‘I’m cold.’

   ‘There, there,’ Yossarian had tried to comfort him. ‘There,
there.’ They didn’t take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger
had done. They didn’t explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn’t drown
or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They
didn’t get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to
death in saloons, bludgeoned to death with axes by parents or children or die
summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to
death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an
oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t
business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-and-now-I-ain’t.
There were no famines or floods. Children didn’t suffocate in cradles or
iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn’t stick
their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come
plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating
at the rate of sixteen feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the
sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy
strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.

   All things considered, Yossarian often preferred the
hospital, even though it had its faults. The help tended to be officious, the
rules, if heeded, restrictive, and the management meddlesome. Since sick people
were apt to be present, he could not always depend on a lively young crowd in
the same ward with him, and the entertainment was not always good. He was
forced to admit that the hospitals had altered steadily for the worse as the
war continued and one moved closer to the battlefront, the deterioration in the
quality of the guests becoming most marked within the combat zone itself where
the effects of booming wartime conditions were apt to make themselves
conspicuous immediately. The people got sicker and sicker the deeper he moved
into combat, until finally in the hospital that last time there had been the
soldier in white, who could not have been any sicker without being dead, and he
soon was.

   The soldier in white was constructed entirely of gauze,
plaster and a thermometer, and the thermometer was merely an adornment left
balanced in the empty dark hole in the bandages over his mouth early each
morning and late each afternoon by Nurse Cramer and Nurse Duckett right up to
the afternoon Nurse Cramer read the thermometer and discovered he was dead. Now
that Yossarian looked back, it seemed that Nurse Cramer, rather than the
talkative Texan, had murdered the soldier in white; if she had not read the
thermometer and reported what she had found, the soldier in white might still
be lying there alive exactly as he had been lying there all along, encased from
head to toe in plaster and gauze with both strange, rigid legs elevated from
the hips and both strange arms strung up perpendicularly, all four bulky limbs
in casts, all four strange, useless limbs hoisted up in the air by taut wire
cables and fantastically long lead weights suspended darkly above him. Lying
there that way might not have been much of a life, but it was all the life he
had, and the decision to terminate it, Yossarian felt, should hardly have been
Nurse Cramer’s.

   The soldier in white was like an unrolled bandage with a hole
in it or like a broken block of stone in a harbor with a crooked zinc pipe
jutting out. The other patients in the ward, all but the Texan, shrank from him
with a tenderhearted aversion from the moment they set eyes on him the morning
after the night he had been sneaked in. They gathered soberly in the farthest
recess of the ward and gossiped about him in malicious, offended undertones,
rebelling against his presence as a ghastly imposition and resenting him
malevolently for the nauseating truth of which he was bright reminder. They
shared a common dread that he would begin moaning.

   ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if he does begin moaning,’ the
dashing young fighter pilot with the golden mustache had grieved forlornly. ‘It
means he’ll moan during the night, too, because he won’t be able to tell time.’
No sound at all came from the soldier in white all the time he was there. The
ragged round hole over his mouth was deep and jet black and showed no sign of
lip, teeth, palate or tongue. The only one who ever came close enough to look
was the affable Texan, who came close enough several times a day to chat with
him about more votes for the decent folk, opening each conversation with the
same unvarying greeting: ‘What do you say, fella? How you coming along?’ The
rest of the men avoided them both in their regulation maroon corduroy bathrobes
and unraveling flannel pajamas, wondering gloomily who the soldier in white
was, why he was there and what he was really like inside.

   ‘He’s all right, I tell you,’ the Texan would report back to
them encouragingly after each of his social visits.

   ‘Deep down inside he’s really a regular guy. He’s feeling a
little shy and insecure now because he doesn’t know anybody here and can’t
talk. Why don’t you all just step right up to him and introduce yourselves? He
won’t hurt you.’

   ‘What the goddam hell are you talking about?’ Dunbar
demanded. ‘Does he even know what you’re talking about?’

   ‘Sure he knows what I’m talking about. He’s not stupid. There
ain’t nothing wrong with him.’

   ‘Can he hear you?’

   ‘Well, I don’t know if he can hear me or not, but I’m sure he
knows what I’m talking about.’

   ‘Does that hole over his mouth ever move?’

   ‘Now, what kind of a crazy question is that?’ the Texan asked
uneasily.

   ‘How can you tell if he’s breathing if it never moves?’

   ‘How can you tell it’s a he?’

   ‘Does he have pads over his eyes underneath that bandage over
his face?’

   ‘Does he ever wiggle his toes or move the tips of his
fingers?’ The Texan backed away in mounting confusion. ‘Now, what kind of a
crazy question is that? You fellas must all be crazy or something. Why don’t
you just walk right up to him and get acquainted? He’s a real nice guy, I tell
you.’ The soldier in white was more like a stuffed and sterilized mummy than a
real nice guy. Nurse Duckett and Nurse Cramer kept him spick-and-span. They
brushed his bandages often with a whiskbroom and scrubbed the plaster casts on
his arms, legs, shoulders, chest and pelvis with soapy water. Working with a
round tin of metal polish, they waxed a dim gloss on the dull zinc pipe rising
from the cement on his groin. With damp dish towels they wiped the dust several
times a day from the slim black rubber tubes leading in and out of him to the
two large stoppered jars, one of them, hanging on a post beside his bed,
dripping fluid into his arm constantly through a slit in the bandages while the
other, almost out of sight on the floor, drained the fluid away through the
zinc pipe rising from his groin. Both young nurses polished the glass jars
unceasingly. They were proud of their housework. The more solicitous of the two
was Nurse Cramer, a shapely, pretty, sexless girl with a wholesome unattractive
face. Nurse Cramer had a cute nose and a radiant, blooming complexion dotted
with fetching sprays of adorable freckles that Yossarian detested. She was
touched very deeply by the soldier in white. Her virtuous, pale-blue,
saucerlike eyes flooded with leviathan tears on unexpected occasions and made
Yossarian mad.

   ‘How the hell do you know he’s even in there?’ he asked her.

   ‘Don’t you dare talk to me that way!’ she replied
indignantly.

   ‘Well, how do you? You don’t even know if it’s really him.’

   ‘Who?’

   ‘Whoever’s supposed to be in all those bandages. You might
really be weeping for somebody else. How do you know he’s even alive?’

   ‘What a terrible thing to say!’ Nurse Cramer exclaimed. ‘Now,
you get right into bed and stop making jokes about him.’

   ‘I’m not making jokes. Anybody might be in there. For all we
know, it might even be Mudd.’

   ‘What are you talking about?’ Nurse Cramer pleaded with him
in a quavering voice.

   ‘Maybe that’s where the dead man is.’

   ‘What dead man?’

   ‘I’ve got a dead man in my tent that nobody can throw out.
His name is Mudd.’ Nurse Cramer’s face blanched and she turned to Dunbar
desperately for aid. ‘Make him stop saying things like that,’ she begged.

   ‘Maybe there’s no one inside,’ Dunbar suggested helpfully.
‘Maybe they just sent the bandages here for a joke.’ She stepped away from
Dunbar in alarm. ‘You’re crazy,’ she cried, glancing about imploringly. ‘You’re
both crazy.’ Nurse Duckett showed up then and chased them all back to their own
beds while Nurse Cramer changed the stoppered jars for the soldier in white.
Changing the jars for the soldier in white was no trouble at all, since the
same clear fluid was dripped back inside him over and over again with no
apparent loss. When the jar feeding the inside of his elbow was just about
empty, the jar on the floor was just about full, and the two were simply
uncoupled from their respective hoses and reversed quickly so that the liquid
could be dripped right back into him. Changing the jars was no trouble to
anyone but the men who watched them changed every hour or so and were baffled
by the procedure.

   ‘Why can’t they hook the two jars up to each other and
eliminate the middleman?’ the artillery captain with whom Yossarian had stopped
playing chess inquired. ‘What the hell do they need him for?’

   ‘I wonder what he did to deserve it,’ the warrant officer
with malaria and a mosquito bite on his ass lamented after Nurse Cramer had
read her thermometer and discovered that the soldier in white was dead.

   ‘He went to war,’ the fighter pilot with the golden mustache
surmised.

   ‘We all went to war,’ Dunbar countered.

   ‘That’s what I mean,’ the warrant officer with malaria
continued. ‘Why him? There just doesn’t seem to be any logic to this system of
rewards and punishment. Look what happened to me. If I had gotten syphilis or a
dose of clap for my five minutes of passion on the beach instead of this damned
mosquito bite, I could see justice. But malaria? Malaria? Who can explain
malaria as a consequence of fornication?’ The warrant officer shook his head in
numb astonishment.

   ‘What about me?’ Yossarian said. ‘I stepped out of my tent in
Marrakech one night to get a bar of candy and caught your dose of clap when
that Wac I never even saw before kissed me into the bushes. All I really wanted
was a bar of candy, but who could turn it down?’

   ‘That sounds like my dose of clap, all right,’ the warrant
officer agreed. ‘But I’ve still got somebody else’s malaria. Just for once I’d
like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting
exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.’

   ‘I’ve got somebody else’s three hundred thousand dollars,’
the dashing young fighter captain with the golden mustache admitted. ‘I’ve been
goofing off since the day I was born. I cheated my way through prep school and
college, and just about all I’ve been doing ever since is shacking up with
pretty girls who think I’d make a good husband. I’ve got no ambition at all. The
only thing I want to do after the war is marry some girl who’s got more money
than I have and shack up with lots more pretty girls. The three hundred
thousand bucks was left to me before I was born by a grandfather who made a
fortune selling on an international scale. I know I don’t deserve it, but I’ll
be damned if I give it back. I wonder who it really belongs to.’