Catch-22 (27 page)

   ‘No,’ Corporal Whitcomb said, and walked out.

   It was hot and humid inside the tent, and the chaplain felt
himself turning damp. He listened like an unwilling eavesdropper to the
muffled, indistinguishable drone of the lowered voices outside. As he sat
inertly at the rickety bridge table that served as a desk, his lips were
closed, his eyes were blank, and his face, with its pale ochre hue and ancient,
confined clusters of minute acne pits, had the color and texture of an
uncracked almond shell. He racked his memory for some clue to the origin of
Corporal Whitcomb’s bitterness toward him. In some way he was unable to fathom,
he was convinced he had done him some unforgivable wrong. It seemed incredible
that such lasting ire as Corporal Whitcomb’s could have stemmed from his
rejection of Bingo or the form letters home to the families of the men killed
in combat. The chaplain was despondent with an acceptance of his own
ineptitude. He had intended for some weeks to have a heart-to-heart talk with
Corporal Whitcomb in order to find out what was bothering him, but was already
ashamed of what he might find out.

   Outside the tent, Corporal Whitcomb snickered. The other man
chuckled. For a few precarious seconds, the chaplain tingled with a weird,
occult sensation of having experienced the identical situation before in some
prior time or existence. He endeavored to trap and nourish the impression in
order to predict, and perhaps even control, what incident would occur next, but
the afatus melted away unproductively, as he had known beforehand it would.
Déjà vu. The subtle, recurring confusion between illusion
and reality that was characteristic of paramnesia fascinated the chaplain, and
he knew a number of things about it. He knew, for example, that it was called
paramnesia, and he was interested as well in such corollary optical phenomena
as jamais vu, never seen, and presque vu, almost seen. There were terrifying,
sudden moments when objects, concepts and even people that the chaplain had
lived with almost all his life inexplicably took on an unfamiliar and irregular
aspect that he had never seen before and which made them totally strange:
jamais vu. And there were other moments when he almost saw absolute truth in
brilliant flashes of clarity that almost came to him: presque vu. The episode
of the naked man in the tree at Snowden’s funeral mystified him thoroughly. It
was not déjà vu, for at the time he had experienced no
sensation of ever having seen a naked man in a tree at Snowden’s funeral
before. It was not jamais vu, since the apparition was not of someone, or
something, familiar appearing to him in an unfamiliar guise. And it was certainly
not presque vu, for the chaplain did see him.

   A jeep started up with a backfire directly outside and roared
away. Had the naked man in the tree at Snowden’s funeral been merely a
hallucination? Or had it been a true revelation? The chaplain trembled at the
mere idea. He wanted desperately to confide in Yossarian, but each time he
thought about the occurrence he decided not to think about it any further,
although now that he did think about it he could not be sure that he ever
really had thought about it.

   Corporal Whitcomb sauntered back in wearing a shiny new smirk
and leaned his elbow impertinently against the center pole of the chaplain’s
tent.

   ‘Do you know who that guy in the red bathrobe was?’ he asked
boastfully. ‘That was a C.I.D. man with a fractured nose. He came down here
from the hospital on official business. He’s conducting an investigation.’ The
chaplain raised his eyes quickly in obsequious commiseration. ‘I hope you’re
not in any trouble. Is there anything I can do?’

   ‘No, I’m not in any trouble,’ Corporal Whitcomb replied with
a grin. ‘You are. They’re going to crack down on you for signing Washington
Irving’s name to all those letters you’ve been signing Washington Irving’s name
to. How do you like that?’

   ‘I haven’t been signing Washington Irving’s name to any
letters,’ said the chaplain.

   ‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ Corporal Whitcomb answered.
‘I’m not the one you have to convince.’

   ‘But I’m not lying.’

   ‘I don’t care whether you’re lying or not. They’re going to get
you for intercepting Major Major’s correspondence, too. A lot of that stuff is
classified information.’

   ‘What correspondence?’ asked the chaplain plaintively in
rising exasperation. ‘I’ve never even seen any of Major Major’s
correspondence.’

   ‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ Corporal Whitcomb replied.
‘I’m not the one you have to convince.’

   ‘But I’m not lying!’ protested the chaplain.

   ‘I don’t see why you have to shout at me,’ Corporal Whitcomb
retorted with an injured look. He came away from the center pole and shook his
finger at the chaplain for emphasis. ‘I just did you the biggest favor anybody
ever did you in your whole life, and you don’t even realize it. Every time he
tries to report you to his superiors, somebody up at the hospital censors out
the details. He’s been going batty for weeks trying to turn you in. I just put
a censor’s okay on his letter without even reading it. That will make a very
good impression for you up at C.I.D. headquarters. It will let them know that
we’re not the least bit afraid to have the whole truth about you come out.’ The
chaplain was reeling with confusion. ‘But you aren’t authorized to censor
letters, are you?’

   ‘Of course not,’ Corporal Whitcomb answered. ‘Only officers
are ever authorized to do that. I censored it in your name.’

   ‘But I’m not authorized to censor letters either. Am I?’

   ‘I took care of that for you, too,’ Corporal Whitcomb assured
him. ‘I signed somebody else’s name for you.’

   ‘Isn’t that forgery?’

   ‘Oh, don’t worry about that either. The only one who might
complain in a case of forgery is the person whose name you forged, and I looked
out for your interests by picking a dead man. I used Washington Irving’s name.’
Corporal Whitcomb scrutinized the chaplain’s face closely for some sign of
rebellion and then breezed ahead confidently with concealed irony. ‘That was
pretty quick thinking on my part, wasn’t it?’

   ‘I don’t know,’ the chaplain wailed softly in a quavering
voice, squinting with grotesque contortions of anguish and incomprehension. ‘I
don’t think I understand all you’ve been telling me. How will it make a good
impression for me if you signed Washington Irving’s name instead of my own?’

   ‘Because they’re convinced that you are Washington Irving.
Don’t you see? They’ll know it was you.’

   ‘But isn’t that the very belief we want to dispel? Won’t this
help them prove it?’

   ‘If I thought you were going to be so stuffy about it, I
wouldn’t even have tried to help,’ Corporal Whitcomb declared indignantly, and
walked out. A second later he walked back in. ‘I just did you the biggest favor
anybody ever did you in your whole life and you don’t even know it. You don’t
know how to show your appreciation. That’s another one of the things that’s
wrong with you.’

   ‘I’m sorry,’ the chaplain apologized contritely. ‘I really am
sorry. It’s just that I’m so completely stunned by all you’re telling me that I
don’t even realize what I’m saying. I’m really very grateful to you.’

   ‘Then how about letting me send out those form letters?’ Corporal
Whitcomb demanded immediately. ‘Can I begin working on the first drafts?’ The
chaplain’s jaw dropped in astonishment. ‘No, no,’ he groaned. ‘Not now.’
Corporal Whitcomb was incensed. ‘I’m the best friend you’ve got and you don’t
even know it,’ he asserted belligerently, and walked out of the chaplain’s
tent. He walked back in. ‘I’m on your side and you don’t even realize it. Don’t
you know what serious trouble you’re in? That C.I.D. man has gone rushing back
to the hospital to write a brand-new report on you about that tomato.’

   ‘What tomato?’ the chaplain asked, blinking.

   ‘The plum tomato you were hiding in your hand when you first
showed up here. There it is. The tomato you’re still holding in your hand right
this very minute!’ The captain unclenched his fingers with surprise and saw
that he was still holding the plum tomato he had obtained in Colonel Cathcart’s
office. He set it down quickly on the bridge table. ‘I got this tomato from
Colonel Cathcart,’ he said, and was struck by how ludicrous his explanation
sounded. ‘He insisted I take it.’

   ‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ Corporal Whitcomb answered. ‘I
don’t care whether you stole it from him or not.’

   ‘Stole it?’ the chaplain exclaimed with amazement. ‘Why
should I want to steal a plum tomato?’

   ‘That’s exactly what had us both stumped,’ said Corporal
Whitcomb. ‘And then the C.I.D. man figured out you might have some important
secret papers hidden away inside it.’ The chaplain sagged limply beneath the
mountainous weight of his despair. ‘I don’t have any important secret papers
hidden away inside it,’ he stated simply. ‘I didn’t even want it to begin with.
Here, you can have it and see for yourself.’

   ‘I don’t want it.’

   ‘Please take it away,’ the chaplain pleaded in a voice that
was barely audible. ‘I want to be rid of it.’

   ‘I don’t want it,’ Corporal Whitcomb snapped again, and
stalked out with an angry face, suppressing a smile of great jubilation at
having forged a powerful new alliance with the C.I.D. man and at having succeeded
again in convincing the chaplain that he was really displeased.

   Poor Whitcomb, sighed the chaplain, and blamed himself for
his assistant’s malaise. He sat mutely in a ponderous, stultifying melancholy,
waiting expectantly for Corporal Whitcomb to walk back in. He was disappointed
as he heard the peremptory crunch of Corporal Whitcomb’s footsteps recede into
silence. There was nothing he wanted to do next. He decided to pass up lunch
for a Milky Way and a Baby Ruth from his foot locker and a few swallows of
luke-warm water from his canteen. He felt himself surrounded by dense,
overwhelming fogs of possibilities in which he could perceive no glimmer of
light. He dreaded what Colonel Cathcart would think when the news that he was
suspected of being Washington Irving was brought to him, then fell to fretting
over what Colonel Cathcart was already thinking about him for even having
broached the subject of sixty missions. There was so much unhappiness in the
world, he reflected, bowing his head dismally beneath the tragic thought, and
there was nothing he could do about anybody’s, least of all his own.

   Colonel Cathcart was not thinking anything
at all about the chaplain, but was tangled up in a brand-new, menacing problem
of his own: Yossarian!

   Yossarian! The mere sound of that execrable, ugly name made
his blood run cold and his breath come in labored gasps. The chaplain’s first
mention of the name Yossarian! had tolled deep in his memory like a portentous
gong. As soon as the latch of the door had clicked shut, the whole humiliating
recollection of the naked man in formation came cascading down upon him in a
mortifying, choking flood of stinging details. He began to perspire and
tremble. There was a sinister and unlikely coincidence exposed that was too
diabolical in implication to be anything less than the most hideous of omens.
The name of the man who had stood naked in ranks that day to receive his
Distinguished Flying Cross from General Dreedle had also been—Yossarian! And
now it was a man named Yossarian who was threatening to make trouble over the
sixty missions he had just ordered the men in his group to fly. Colonel
Cathcart wondered gloomily if it was the same Yossarian.

   He climbed to his feet with an air of intolerable woe and
began moving about his office. He felt himself in the presence of the
mysterious. The naked man in formation, he conceded cheerlessly, had been a
real black eye for him. So had the tampering with the bomb line before the
mission to Bologna and the seven-day delay in destroying the bridge at Ferrara,
even though destroying the bridge at Ferrara finally, he remembered with glee,
had been a real feather in his cap, although losing a plane there the second
time around, he recalled in dejection, had been another black eye, even though
he had won another real feather in his cap by getting a medal approved for the
bombardier who had gotten him the real black eye in the first place by going
around over the target twice. That bombardier’s name, he remembered suddenly
with another stupefying shock, had also been Yossarian! Now there were three!
His viscous eyes bulged with astonishment and he whipped himself around in
alarm to see what was taking place behind him. A moment ago there had been no
Yossarians in his life; now they were multiplying like hobgoblins. He tried to
make himself grow calm. Yossarian was not a common name; perhaps there were not
really three Yossarians but only two Yossarians, or maybe even only one
Yossarian—but that really made no difference! The colonel was still in grave
peril. Intuition warned him that he was drawing close to some immense and
inscrutable cosmic climax, and his broad, meaty, towering frame tingled from
head to toe at the thought that Yossarian, whoever he would eventually turn out
to be, was destined to serve as his nemesis.

   Colonel Cathcart was not superstitious, but he did believe in
omens, and he sat right back down behind his desk and made a cryptic notation
on his memorandum pad to look into the whole suspicious business of the
Yossarians right away. He wrote his reminder to himself in a heavy and decisive
hand, amplifying it sharply with a series of coded punctuation marks and
underlining the whole message twice, so that it read: Yossarian!!! (?)!

   The colonel sat back when he had finished and was extremely
pleased with himself for the prompt action he had just taken to meet this
sinister crisis. Yossarian—the very sight of the name made him shudder. There
were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word
subversive itself. It was like seditious and insidious too, and like socialist,
suspicious, fascist and Communist. It was an odious, alien, distasteful name,
that just did not inspire confidence. It was not at all like such clean, crisp,
honest, American names as Cathcart, Peckem and Dreedle.

   Colonel Cathcart rose slowly and began drifting about his
office again. Almost unconsciously, he picked up a plum tomato from the top of
one of the bushels and took a voracious bite. He made a wry face at once and
threw the rest of the plum tomato into his waste-basket. The colonel did not
like plum tomatoes, not even when they were his own, and these were not even
his own. These had been purchased in different market places all over Pianosa
by Colonel Korn under various identities, moved up to the colonel’s farmhouse
in the hills in the dead of night, and transported down to Group Headquarters
the next morning for sale to Milo, who paid Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn
premium prices for them. Colonel Cathcart often wondered if what they were
doing with the plum tomatoes was legal, but Colonel Korn said it was, and he
tried not to brood about it too often. He had no way of knowing whether or not
the house in the hills was legal, either, since Colonel Korn had made all the
arrangements. Colonel Cathcart did not know if he owned the house or rented it,
from whom he had acquired it or how much, if anything, it was costing. Colonel
Korn was the lawyer, and if Colonel Korn assured him that fraud, extortion, currency
manipulation, embezzlement, income tax evasion and black-market speculations
were legal, Colonel Cathcart was in no position to disagree with him.

   All Colonel Cathcart knew about his house in the hills was
that he had such a house and hated it. He was never so bored as when spending
there the two or three days every other week necessary to sustain the illusion
that his damp and drafty stone farmhouse in the hills was a golden palace of
carnal delights. Officers’ clubs everywhere pulsated with blurred but knowing
accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and sex orgies there and of secret,
intimate nights of ecstasy with the most beautiful, the most tantalizing, the
most readily aroused and most easily satisfied Italian courtesans, film
actresses, models and countesses. No such private nights of ecstasy or
hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might have occurred if
either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking
part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly
not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless
there was something in it for him.

   The colonel dreaded his dank lonely nights at his farmhouse
and the dull, uneventful days. He had much more fun back at Group, browbeating
everyone he wasn’t afraid of. However, as Colonel Korn kept reminding him,
there was not much glamour in having a farmhouse in the hills if he never used
it. He drove off to his farmhouse each time in a mood of self-pity. He carried
a shotgun in his jeep and spent the monotonous hours there shooting it at birds
and at the plum tomatoes that did grow there in untended rows and were too much
trouble to harvest.

   Among those officers of inferior rank toward whom Colonel
Cathcart still deemed it prudent to show respect, he included Major—de
Coverley, even though he did not want to and was not sure he even had to.
Major—de Coverley was as great a mystery to him as he was to Major Major and to
everyone else who ever took notice of him. Colonel Cathcart had no idea whether
to look up or look down in his attitude toward Major—de Coverley. Major—de
Coverley was only a major, even though he was ages older than Colonel Cathcart;
at the same time, so many other people treated Major—de Coverley with such
profound and fearful veneration that Colonel Cathcart had a hunch they might
know something. Major– de Coverley was an ominous, incomprehensible presence
who kept him constantly on edge and of whom even Colonel Korn tended to be
wary. Everyone was afraid of him, and no one knew why. No one even knew
Major—de Coverley’s first name, because no one had ever had the temerity to ask
him. Colonel Cathcart knew that Major—de Coverley was away and he rejoiced in
his absence until it occurred to him that Major—de Coverley might be away
somewhere conspiring against him, and then he wished that Major—de Coverley
were back in his squadron where he belonged so that he could be watched.

   In a little while Colonel Cathcart’s arches began to ache
from pacing back and forth so much. He sat down behind his desk again and
resolved to embark upon a mature and systematic evaluation of the entire
military situation. With the businesslike air of a man who knows how to get
things done, he found a large white pad, drew a straight line down the middle
and crossed it near the top, dividing the page into two blank columns of equal
width. He rested a moment in critical rumination. Then he huddled over his
desk, and at the head of the left column, in a cramped and finicky hand, he
wrote, ‘Black Eyes!!!’ At the top of the right column he wrote, ‘Feathers in My
Cap!!!!!’ He leaned back once more to inspect his chart admiringly from an
objective perspective. After a few seconds of solemn deliberation, he licked
the tip of his pencil carefully and wrote under ‘Black Eyes!!!,’ after intent
intervals: Ferrara Bologna (bomb line moved on map during) Skeet range Naked
man information (after Avignon) Then he added: Food poisoning (during Bologna)
and Moaning (epidemic of during Avignon briefing) Then he added: Chaplain
(hanging around officers’ club every night) He decided to be charitable about
the chaplain, even though he did not like him, and under ‘Feathers in My
Cap!!!!!’ he wrote: Chaplain (hanging around officers’ club every night) The
two chaplain entries, therefore, neutralized each other. Alongside ‘Ferrara’
and ‘Naked man in formation (after Avignon)’ he then wrote: Yossarian!
Alongside ‘ Bologna (bomb line moved on map during)’, ‘Food poisoning (during
Bologna)’ and ‘Moaning (epidemic of during Avignon briefing)’ he wrote in a
bold, decisive hand:? Those entries labeled ‘?’ were the ones he wanted to
investigate immediately to determine if Yossarian had played any part in them.

   Suddenly his arm began to shake, and he was unable to write
any more. He rose to his feet in terror, feeling sticky and fat, and rushed to
the open window to gulp in fresh air. His gaze fell on the skeet-range, and he
reeled away with a sharp cry of distress, his wild and feverish eyes scanning the
walls of his office frantically as though they were swarming with Yossarians.

   Nobody loved him. General Dreedle hated him, although General
Peckem liked him, although he couldn’t be sure, since Colonel Cargill, General
Peckem’s aide, undoubtedly had ambitions of his own and was probably sabotaging
him with General Peckem at every opportunity. The only good colonel, he
decided, was a dead colonel, except for himself. The only colonel he trusted
was Colonel Moodus, and even he had an in with his father-in-law. Milo, of
course, had been the big feather in his cap, although having his group bombed
by Milo’s planes had probably been a terrible black eye for him, even though
Milo had ultimately stilled all protest by disclosing the huge net profit the
syndicate had realized on the deal with the enemy and convincing everyone that
bombing his own men and planes had therefore really been a commendable and very
lucrative blow on the side of private enterprise. The colonel was insecure
about Milo because other colonels were trying to lure him away, and Colonel
Cathcart still had that lousy Big Chief White Halfoat in his group who that
lousy, lazy Captain Black claimed was the one really responsible for the bomb
line’s being moved during the Big Siege of Bologna. Colonel Cathcart liked Big
Chief White Halfoat because Big Chief White Halfoat kept punching that lousy
Colonel Moodus in the nose every time he got drunk and Colonel Moodus was
around. He wished that Big Chief White Halfoat would begin punching Colonel Korn
in his fat face, too. Colonel Korn was a lousy smart aleck. Someone at
Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters had it in for him and sent back every
report he wrote with a blistering rebuke, and Colonel Korn had bribed a clever
mail clerk there named Wintergreen to try to find out who it was. Losing the
plane over Ferrara the second time around had not done him any good, he had to
admit, and neither had having that other plane disappear inside that cloud—that
was one he hadn’t even written down! He tried to recall, longingly, if
Yossarian had been lost in that plane in the cloud and realized that Yossarian
could not possibly have been lost in that plane in the cloud if he was still
around now raising such a big stink about having to fly a lousy five missions
more.

   Maybe sixty missions were too many for the men to fly,
Colonel Cathcart reasoned, if Yossarian objected to flying them, but he then
remembered that forcing his men to fly more missions than everyone else was the
most tangible achievement he had going for him. As Colonel Korn often remarked,
the war was crawling with group commanders who were merely doing their duty,
and it required just some sort of dramatic gesture like making his group fly
more combat missions than any other bomber group to spotlight his unique
qualities of leadership. Certainly none of the generals seemed to object to
what he was doing, although as far as he could detect they weren’t particularly
impressed either, which made him suspect that perhaps sixty combat missions
were not nearly enough and that he ought to increase the number at once to
seventy, eighty, a hundred, or even two hundred, three hundred, or six
thousand!

   Certainly he would be much better off under somebody suave
like General Peckem than he was under somebody boorish and insensitive like
General Dreedle, because General Peckem had the discernment, the intelligence
and the Ivy League background to appreciate and enjoy him at his full value,
although General Peckem had never given the slightest indication that he
appreciated or enjoyed him at all. Colonel Cathcart felt perceptive enough to
realize that visible signals of recognition were never necessary between
sophisticated, self-assured people like himself and General Peckem who could
warm to each other from a distance with innate mutual understanding. It was
enough that they were of like kind, and he knew it was only a matter of waiting
discreetly for preferment until the right time, although it rotted Colonel
Cathcart’s self-esteem to observe that General Peckem never deliberately sought
him out and that he labored no harder to impress Colonel Cathcart with his
epigrams and erudition than he did to impress anyone else in earshot, even
enlisted men. Either Colonel Cathcart wasn’t getting through to General Peckem
or General Peckem was not the scintillating, discriminating, intellectual,
forward-looking personality he pretended to be and it was really General
Dreedle who was sensitive, charming, brilliant and sophisticated and under whom
he would certainly be much better off, and suddenly Colonel Cathcart had
absolutely no conception of how strongly he stood with anyone and began banging
on his buzzer with his fist for Colonel Korn to come running into his office
and assure him that everybody loved him, that Yossarian was a figment of his
imagination, and that he was making wonderful progress in the splendid and
valiant campaign he was waging to become a general.