Catch-22 Read online

  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.

  Catch-22

  Clevinger

  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.'

  Catch-22

  Havermeyer

  Actually, no one was around when Yossarian returned from the hospital but Orr and the dead man in Yossarian's tent. The dead man in Yossarian's tent was a pest, and Yossarian didn't like him, even though he had never seen him. Having him lying around all day annoyed Yossarian so much that he had gone to the orderly room several times to complain to Sergeant Towser, who refused to admit that the dead man even existed, which, of course, he no longer did. It was still more frustrating to try to appeal directly to Major Major, the long and bony squadron commander, who looked a little bit like Henry Fonda in distress and went jumping out the window of his office each time Yossarian bullied his way past Sergeant Towser to speak to him about it. The dead man in Yossarian's tent was simply not easy to live with. He even disturbed Orr, who was not easy to live with, either, and who, on the day Yossarian came back, was tinkering with the faucet that fed gasoline into the stove he had started building while Yossarian was in the hospital.

  'What are you doing?' Yossarian asked guardedly when he entered the tent, although he saw at once.

  'There's a leak here,' Orr said. 'I'm trying to fix it.'

  'Please stop it,' said Yossarian. 'You're making me nervous.'

  'When I was a kid,' Orr replied, 'I used to walk around all day with crab apples in my cheeks. One in each cheek.' Yossarian put aside the musette bag from which he had begun removing his toilet articles and braced himself suspiciously. A minute passed. 'Why?' he found himself forced to ask finally.

  Orr tittered triumphantly. 'Because they're better than horse chestnuts,' he answered.

  Orr was kneeling on the floor of the tent. He worked without pause, taking the faucet apart, spreading all the tiny pieces out carefully, counting and then studying each one interminably as th
ough he had never seen anything remotely similar before, and then reassembling the whole apparatus, over and over and over and over again, with no loss of patience or interest, no sign of fatigue, no indication of ever concluding. Yossarian watched him tinkering and felt certain he would be compelled to murder him in cold blood if he did not stop. His eyes moved toward the hunting knife that had been slung over the mosquito-net bar by the dead man the day he arrived. The knife hung beside the dead man's empty leather gun holster, from which Havermeyer had stolen the gun.

  'When I couldn't get crab apples,' Orr continued, 'I used horse chestnuts. Horse chestnuts are about the same size as crab apples and actually have a better shape, although the shape doesn't matter a bit.'

  'Why did you walk around with crab apples in your cheeks?' Yossarian asked again. 'That's what I asked.'

  'Because they've got a better shape than horse chestnuts,' Orr answered. 'I just told you that.'

  'Why,' swore Yossarian at him approvingly, 'you evil-eyed, mechanically-aptituded, disaffiliated son of a bitch, did you walk around with anything in your cheeks?'

  'I didn't,' Orr said, 'walk around with anything in my cheeks. I walked around with crab apples in my cheeks. When I couldn't get crab apples I walked around with horse chestnuts. In my cheeks.' Orr giggled. Yossarian made up his mind to keep his mouth shut and did. Orr waited. Yossarian waited longer.

  'One in each cheek,' Orr said.

  'Why?' Orr pounced. 'Why what?' Yossarian shook his head, smiling, and refused to say.

  'It's a funny thing about this valve,' Orr mused aloud.

  'What is?' Yossarian asked.

  'Because I wanted--' Yossarian knew. 'Jesus Christ! Why did you want--'

  '--apple cheeks.'

  '--apple cheeks?' Yossarian demanded.