Catch-22 (23 page)

   ‘Maybe it belongs to my father,’ Dunbar conjectured. ‘He
spent a lifetime at hard work and never could make enough money to even send my
sister and me through college. He’s dead now, so you might as well keep it.’

   ‘Now, if we can just find out who my malaria belongs to we’d
be all set. It’s not that I’ve got anything against malaria. I’d just as soon
goldbrick with malaria as with anything else. It’s only that I feel an
injustice has been committed. Why should I have somebody else’s malaria and you
have my dose of clap?’

   ‘I’ve got more than your dose of clap,’ Yossarian told him.
‘I’ve got to keep flying combat missions because of that dose of yours until
they kill me.’

   ‘That makes it even worse. What’s the justice in that?’

   ‘I had a friend named Clevinger two and a half weeks ago who
used to see plenty of justice in it.’

   ‘It’s the highest kind of justice of all,’ Clevinger had
gloated, clapping his hands with a merry laugh. ‘I can’t help thinking of the
Hippolytus of Euripides, where the early licentiousness of Theseus is probably
responsible for the asceticism of the son that helps bring about the tragedy
that ruins them all. If nothing else, that episode with the Wac should teach
you the evil of sexual immorality.’

   ‘It teaches me the evil of candy.’

   ‘Can’t you see that you’re not exactly without blame for the
predicament you’re in?’ Clevinger had continued with undisguised relish. ‘If
you hadn’t been laid up in the hospital with venereal disease for ten days back
there in Africa, you might have finished your twenty-five missions in time to
be sent home before Colonel Nevers was killed and Colonel Cathcart came to
replace him.’

   ‘And what about you?’ Yossarian had replied. ‘You never got
clap in Marrakech and you’re in the same predicament.’

   ‘I don’t know,’ confessed Clevinger, with a trace of mock
concern. ‘I guess I must have done something very bad in my time.’

   ‘Do you really believe that?’ Clevinger laughed. ‘No, of
course not. I just like to kid you along a little.’ There were too many dangers
for Yossarian to keep track of. There was Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, for
example, and they were all out to kill him. There was Lieutenant Scheisskopf
with his fanaticism for parades and there was the bloated colonel with his big
fat mustache and his fanaticism for retribution, and they wanted to kill him,
too. There was Appleby, Havermeyer, Black and Korn. There was Nurse Cramer and
Nurse Duckett, who he was almost certain wanted him dead, and there was the
Texan and the C.I.D. man, about whom he had no doubt. There were bartenders,
bricklayers and bus conductors all over the world who wanted him dead,
landlords and tenants, traitors and patriots, lynchers, leeches and lackeys,
and they were all out to bump him off. That was the secret Snowden had spilled
to him on the mission to Avignon —they were out to get him; and Snowden had
spilled it all over the back of the plane.

   There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were
kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain. There
was Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were
fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell.
There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung,
diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were
diseases of the head, diseases of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of
the intestines, diseases of the crotch. There even were diseases of the feet.
There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night
like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy,
and every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that
it took a truly diseased mind to even think about them as often as he and
Hungry Joe did.

   Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged
them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any
one he wanted to worry about. He grew very upset whenever he misplaced some or
when he could not add to his list, and he would go rushing in a cold sweat to
Doc Daneeka for help.

   ‘Give him Ewing’s tumor,’ Yossarian advised Doc Daneeka, who
would come to Yossarian for help in handling Hungry Joe, ‘and follow it up with
melanoma. Hungry Joe likes lingering diseases, but he likes the fulminating
ones even more.’ Doc Daneeka had never heard of either. ‘How do you manage to
keep up on so many diseases like that?’ he inquired with high professional
esteem.

   ‘I learn about them at the hospital when I study the Reader’s
Digest.’ Yossarian had so many ailments to be afraid of that he was sometimes
tempted to turn himself in to the hospital for good and spend the rest of his
life stretched out there inside an oxygen tent with a battery of specialists
and nurses seated at one side of his bed twenty-four hours a day waiting for
something to go wrong and at least one surgeon with a knife poised at the
other, ready to jump forward and begin cutting away the moment it became
necessary. Aneurisms, for instance; how else could they ever defend him in time
against an aneurism of the aorta? Yossarian felt much safer inside the hospital
than outside the hospital, even though he loathed the surgeon and his knife as
much as he had ever loathed anyone. He could start screaming inside a hospital
and people would at least come running to try to help; outside the hospital
they would throw him in prison if he ever started screaming about all the
things he felt everyone ought to start screaming about, or they would put him
in the hospital. One of the things he wanted to start screaming about was the
surgeon’s knife that was almost certain to be waiting for him and everyone else
who lived long enough to die. He wondered often how he would ever recognize the
first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip,
loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning
of the inevitable end.

   He was afraid also that Doc Daneeka would still refuse to
help him when he went to him again after jumping out of Major Major’s office,
and he was right.

   ‘You think you’ve got something to be afraid about?’ Doc Daneeka
demanded, lifting his delicate immaculate dark head up from his chest to gaze
at Yossarian irascibly for a moment with lachrymose eyes. ‘What about me? My
precious medical skills are rusting away here on this lousy island while other
doctors are cleaning up. Do you think I enjoy sitting here day after day
refusing to help you? I wouldn’t mind it so much if I could refuse to help you
back in the States or in some place like Rome. But saying no to you here isn’t
easy for me, either.’

   ‘Then stop saying no. Ground me.’

   ‘I can’t ground you,’ Doc Daneeka mumbled. ‘How many times do
you have to be told?’

   ‘Yes you can. Major Major told me you’re the only one in the
squadron who can ground me.’ Doc Daneeka was stunned. ‘Major Major told you
that? When?’

   ‘When I tackled him in the ditch.’

   ‘Major Major told you that? In a ditch?’

   ‘He told me in his office after we left the ditch and jumped
inside. He told me not to tell anyone he told me, so don’t start shooting your
mouth off.’

   ‘Why that dirty, scheming liar!’ Doc Daneeka cried. ‘He
wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Did he tell you how I could ground you?’

   ‘Just by filling out a little slip of paper saying I’m on the
verge of a nervous collapse and sending it to Group. Dr. Stubbs grounds men in
his squadron all the time, so why can’t you?’

   ‘And what happens to the men after Stubbs does ground them?’
Doc Daneeka retorted with a sneer. ‘They go right back on combat status, don’t
they? And he finds himself right up the creek. Sure, I can ground you by
filling out a slip saying you’re unfit to fly. But there’s a catch.’

   ‘Catch-22?’

   ‘Sure. If I take you off combat duty, Group has to approve my
action, and Group isn’t going to. They’ll put you right back on combat status,
and then where will I be? On my way to the Pacific Ocean, probably. No, thank
you. I’m not going to take any chances for you.’

   ‘Isn’t it worth a try?’ Yossarian argued. ‘What’s so hot
about Pianosa?’

   ‘Pianosa is terrible. But it’s better than the Pacific Ocean.
I wouldn’t mind being shipped someplace civilized where I might pick up a buck
or two in abortion money every now and then. But all they’ve got in the Pacific
is jungles and monsoons, I’d rot there.’

   ‘You’re rotting here.’ Doc Daneeka flared up angrily. ‘Yeah?
Well, at least I’m going to come out of this war alive, which is a lot more
than you’re going to do.’

   ‘That’s just what I’m trying to tell you, goddammit. I’m
asking you to save my life.’

   ‘It’s not my business to save lives,’ Doc Daneeka retorted sullenly.

   ‘What is your business?’

   ‘I don’t know what my business is. All they ever told me was
to uphold the ethics of my profession and never give testimony against another
physician. Listen. You think you’re the only one whose life is in danger? What
about me? Those two quacks I’ve got working for me in the medical tent still
can’t find out what’s wrong with me.’

   ‘Maybe it’s Ewing’s tumor,’ Yossarian muttered sarcastically.

   ‘Do you really think so?’ Doc Daneeka exclaimed with fright.

   ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Yossarian answered impatiently. ‘I just
know I’m not going to fly any more missions. They wouldn’t really shoot me,
would they? I’ve got fifty-one.’

   ‘Why don’t you at least finish the fifty-five before you take
a stand?’ Doc Daneeka advised. ‘With all your bitching, you’ve never finished a
tour of duty even once.’

   ‘How the hell can I? The colonel keeps raising them every
time I get close.’

   ‘You never finish your missions because you keep running into
the hospital or going off to Rome. You’d be in a much, stronger position if you
had your fifty-five finished and then refused to fly. Then maybe I’d see what I
could do.’

   ‘Do you promise?’

   ‘I promise.’

   ‘What do you promise?’

   ‘I promise that maybe I’ll think about doing something to
help if you finish your fifty-five missions and if you get McWatt to put my
name on his flight log again so that I can draw my flight pay without going up
in a plane. I’m afraid of airplanes. Did you read about that airplane crash in
Idaho three weeks ago? Six people killed. It was terrible. I don’t know why
they want me to put in four hours’ flight time every month in order to get my
flight pay. Don’t I have enough to worry about without worrying about being
killed in an airplane crash too?’

   ‘I worry about the airplane crashes also,’ Yossarian told
him. ‘You’re not the only one.’

   ‘Yeah, but I’m also pretty worried about that Ewing’s tumor,’
Doc Daneeka boasted. ‘Do you think that’s why my nose is stuffed all the time
and why I always feel so chilly? Take my pulse.’ Yossarian also worried about
Ewing’s tumor and melanoma. Catastrophes were lurking everywhere, too numerous
to count. When he contemplated the many diseases and potential accidents
threatening him, he was positively astounded that he had managed to survive in
good health for as long as he had. It was miraculous. Each day he faced was
another dangerous mission against mortality. And he had been surviving them for
twenty-eight years.

   The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice

   Yossarian owed his good health to exercise, fresh air,
teamwork and good sportsmanship; it was to get away from them all that he had
first discovered the hospital. When the physical-education officer at Lowery
Field ordered everyone to fall out for calisthenics one afternoon, Yossarian,
the private, reported instead at the dispensary with what he said was a pain in
his right side.

   ‘Beat it,’ said the doctor on duty there, who was doing a
crossword puzzle.

   ‘We can’t tell him to beat it,’ said a corporal. ‘There’s a
new directive out about abdominal complaints. We have to keep them under
observation five days because so many of them have been dying after we make
them beat it.’

   ‘All right,’ grumbled the doctor. ‘Keep him under observation
five days and then make him beat it.’ They took Yossarian’s clothes away and
put him in a ward, where he was very happy when no one was snoring nearby. In
the morning a helpful young English intern popped in to ask him about his
liver.

   ‘I think it’s my appendix that’s bothering me,’ Yossarian
told him.

   ‘Your appendix is no good,’ the Englishman declared with
jaunty authority. ‘If your appendix goes wrong, we can take it out and have you
back on active duty in almost no time at all. But come to us with a liver
complaint and you can fool us for weeks. The liver, you see, is a large, ugly
mystery to us. If you’ve ever eaten liver you know what I mean. We’re pretty
sure today that the liver exists and we have a fairly good idea of what it does
whenever it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Beyond that, we’re really
in the dark. After all, what is a liver? My father, for example, died of cancer
of the liver and was never sick a day of his life right up till the moment it
killed him. Never felt a twinge of pain. In a way, that was too bad, since I
hated my father. Lust for my mother, you know.’

   ‘What’s an English medical officer doing on duty here?’
Yossarian wanted to know.

   The officer laughed. ‘I’ll tell you all about that when I see
you tomorrow morning. And throw that silly ice bag away before you die of
pneumonia.’ Yossarian never saw him again. That was one of the nice things
about all the doctors at the hospital; he never saw any of them a second time.
They came and went and simply disappeared. In place of the English intern the
next day, there arrived a group of doctors he had never seen before to ask him
about his appendix.