Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

  'How long are you going to keep giving me those pills and shots?' Yossarian asked him.

  'Until you feel better.'

  'I feel all right now.' Doc Daneeka's frail suntanned forehead furrowed with surprise. 'Then why don't you put some clothes on? Why are you walking around naked?'

  'I don't want to wear a uniform any more.' Doc Daneeka accepted the explanation and put away his hypodermic syringe. 'Are you sure you feel all right?'

  'I feel fine. I'm just a little logy from all those pills and shots you've been giving me.' Yossarian went about his business with no clothes on all the rest of that day and was still naked late the next morning when Milo, after hunting everywhere else, finally found him sitting up a tree a small distance in back of the quaint little military cemetery at which Snowden was being buried. Milo was dressed in his customary business attire--olive-drab trousers, a fresh olive-drab shirt and tie, with one silver first lieutenant's bar gleaming on the collar, and a regulation dress cap with a stiff leather bill.

  'I've been looking all over for you,' Milo called up to Yossarian from the ground reproachfully.

  'You should have looked for me in this tree,' Yossarian answered. 'I've been up here all morning.'

  'Come on down and taste this and tell me if it's good. It's very important.' Yossarian shook his head. He sat nude on the lowest limb of the tree and balanced himself with both hands grasping the bough directly above. He refused to budge, and Milo had no choice but to stretch both arms about the trunk in a distasteful hug and start climbing. He struggled upward clumsily with loud grunts and wheezes, and his clothes were squashed and crooked by the time he pulled himself up high enough to hook a leg over the limb and pause for breath. His dress cap was askew and in danger of falling. Milo caught it just in time when it began slipping. Globules of perspiration glistened like transparent pearls around his mustache and swelled like opaque blisters under his eyes. Yossarian watched him impassively. Cautiously Milo worked himself around in a half circle so that he could face Yossarian. He unwrapped tissue paper from something soft, round and brown and handed it to Yossarian.

  'Please taste this and let me know what you think. I'd like to serve it to the men.'

  'What is it?' asked Yossarian, and took a big bite.

  'Chocolate-covered cotton.' Yossarian gagged convulsively and sprayed his big mouthful of chocolate-covered cotton right into Milo's face. 'Here, take it back!' he spouted angrily. 'Jesus Christ! Have you gone crazy? You didn't even take the goddam seeds out.'

  'Give it a chance, will you?' Milo begged. 'It can't be that bad. Is it really that bad?'

  'It's even worse.'

  'But I've got to make the mess halls feed it to the men.'

  'They'll never be able to swallow it.'

  'They've got to swallow it,' Milo ordained with dictatorial grandeur, and almost broke his neck when he let go with one arm to wave a righteous finger in the air.

  'Come on out here,' Yossarian invited him. 'You'll be much safer, and you can see everything.' Gripping the bough above with both hands, Milo began inching his way out on the limb sideways with utmost care and apprehension. His face was rigid with tension, and he sighed with relief when he found himself seated securely beside Yossarian. He stroked the tree affectionately. 'This is a pretty good tree,' he observed admiringly with proprietary gratitude.

  'It's the tree of life,' Yossarian answered, waggling his toes, 'and of knowledge of good and evil, too.' Milo squinted closely at the bark and branches. 'No it isn't,' he replied. 'It's a chestnut tree. I ought to know. I sell chestnuts.'

  'Have it your way.' They sat in the tree without talking for several seconds, their legs dangling and their hands almost straight up on the bough above, the one completely nude but for a pair of crepe-soled sandals, the other completely dressed in a coarse olive-drab woolen uniform with his tie knotted tight. Milo studied Yossarian diffidently through the corner of his eye, hesitating tactfully.

  'I want to ask you something,' he said at last. 'You don't have any clothes on. I don't want to butt in or anything, but I just want to know. Why aren't you wearing your uniform?'

  'I don't want to.' Milo nodded rapidly like a sparrow pecking. 'I see, I see,' he stated quickly with a look of vivid confusion. 'I understand perfectly. I heard Appleby and Captain Black say you had gone crazy, and I just wanted to find out.' He hesitated politely again, weighing his next question. 'Aren't you ever going to put your uniform on again?'

  'I don't think so.' Milo nodded with spurious vim to indicate he still understood and then sat silent, ruminating gravely with troubled misgiving. A scarlet-crested bird shot by below, brushing sure dark wings against a quivering bush. Yossarian and Milo were covered in their bower by tissue-thin tiers of sloping green and largely surrounded by other gray chestnut trees and a silver spruce. The sun was high overhead in a vast sapphire-blue sky beaded with low, isolated, puffy clouds of dry and immaculate white. There was no breeze, and the leaves about them hung motionless. The shade was feathery. Everything was at peace but Milo, who straightened suddenly with a muffled cry and began pointing excitedly.

  'Look at that!' he exclaimed in alarm. 'Look at that! That's a funeral going on down there. That looks like the cemetery. Isn't it?' Yossarian answered him slowly in a level voice. 'They're burying that kid who got killed in my plane over Avignon the other day. Snowden.'

  'What happened to him?' Milo asked in a voice deadened with awe.

  'He got killed.'

  'That's terrible,' Milo grieved, and his large brown eyes filled with tears. 'That poor kid. It really is terrible.' He bit his trembling lip hard, and his voice rose with emotion when he continued. 'And it will get even worse if the mess halls don't agree to buy my cotton. Yossarian, what's the matter with them? Don't they realize it's their syndicate? Don't they know they've all got a share?'

  'Did the dead man in my tent have a share?' Yossarian demanded caustically.

  'Of course he did,' Milo assured him lavishly. 'Everybody in the squadron has a share.'

  'He was killed before he even got into the squadron.' Milo made a deft grimace of tribulation and turned away. 'I wish you'd stop picking on me about that dead man in your tent,' he pleaded peevishly. 'I told you I didn't have anything to do with killing him. Is it my fault that I saw this great opportunity to corner the market on Egyptian cotton and got us into all this trouble? Was I supposed to know there was going to be a glut? I didn't even know what a glut was in those days. An opportunity to corner a market doesn't come along very often, and I was pretty shrewd to grab the chance when I had it.' Milo gulped back a moan as he saw six uniformed pallbearers lift the plain pine coffin from the ambulance and set it gently down on the ground beside the yawning gash of the freshly dug grave. 'And now I can't get rid of a single penny's worth,' he mourned.

  Yossarian was unmoved by the fustian charade of the burial ceremony, and by Milo's crushing bereavement. The chaplain's voice floated up to him through the distance tenuously in an unintelligible, almost inaudible monotone, like a gaseous murmur. Yossarian could make out Major Major by his towering and lanky aloofness and thought he recognized Major Danby mopping his brow with a handkerchief. Major Danby had not stopped shaking since his run-in with General Dreedle. There were strands of enlisted men molded in a curve around the three officers, as inflexible as lumps of wood, and four idle gravediggers in streaked fatigues lounging indifferently on spades near the shocking, incongruous heap of loose copperred earth. As Yossarian stared, the chaplain elevated his gaze toward Yossarian beatifically, pressed his fingers down over his eyeballs in a manner of affliction, peered upward again toward Yossarian searchingly, and bowed his head, concluding what Yossarian took to be a climactic part of the funeral rite. The four men in fatigues lifted the coffin on slings and lowered it into the grave. Milo shuddered violently.

  'I can't watch it,' he cried, turning away in anguish. 'I just can't sit here and watch while those mess halls let my syndicate die.' He gnashed his teeth and sho
ok his head with bitter woe and resentment. 'If they had any loyalty, they would buy my cotton till it hurts so that they can keep right on buying my cotton till it hurts them some more. They would build fires and burn up their underwear and summer uniforms just to create bigger demand. But they won't do a thing. Yossarian, try eating the rest of this chocolate-covered cotton for me. Maybe it will taste delicious now.' Yossarian pushed his hand away. 'Give up, Milo. People can't eat cotton.' Milo's face narrowed cunningly. 'It isn't really cotton,' he coaxed. 'I was joking. It's really cotton candy, delicious cotton candy. Try it and see.'

  'Now you're lying.'

  'I never lie!' Milo rejoindered with proud dignity.

  'You're lying now.'

  'I only lie when it's necessary,' Milo explained defensively, averting his eyes for a moment and blinking his lashes winningly. 'This stuff is better than cotton candy, really it is. It's made out of real cotton. Yossarian, you've got to help me make the men eat it. Egyptian cotton is the finest cotton in the world.'

  'But it's indigestible,' Yossarian emphasized. 'It will make them sick, don't you understand? Why don't you try living on it yourself if you don't believe me?'

  'I did try,' admitted Milo gloomily. 'And it made me sick.' The graveyard was yellow as hay and green as cooked cabbage. In a little while the chaplain stepped back, and the beige crescent of human forms began to break up sluggishly, like flotsam. The men drifted without haste or sound to the vehicles parked along the side of the bumpy dirt road. With their heads down disconsolately, the chaplain, Major Major and Major Danby moved toward their jeeps in an ostracized group, each holding himself friendlessly several feet away from the other two.

  'It's all over,' observed Yossarian.

  'It's the end,' Milo agreed despondently. 'There's no hope left. And all because I left them free to make their own decisions. That should teach me a lesson about discipline the next time I try something like this.'

  'Why don't you sell your cotton to the government?' Yossarian suggested casually, as he watched the four men in streaked fatigues shoveling heaping bladefuls of the copperred earth back down inside the grave.

  Milo vetoed the idea brusquely. 'It's a matter of principle,' he explained firmly. 'The government has no business in business, and I would be the last person in the world to ever try to involve the government in a business of mine. But the business of government is business,' he remembered alertly, and continued with elation. 'Calvin Coolidge said that, and Calvin Coolidge was a President, so it must be true. And the government does have the responsibility of buying all the Egyptian cotton I've got that no one else wants so that I can make a profit, doesn't it?' Milo's face clouded almost as abruptly, and his spirits descended into a state of sad anxiety. 'But how will I get the government to do it?'

  'Bribe it,' Yossarian said.

  'Bribe it!' Milo was outraged and almost lost his balance and broke his neck again. 'Shame on you!' he scolded severely, breathing virtuous fire down and upward into his rusty mustache through his billowing nostrils and prim lips. 'Bribery is against the law, and you know it. But it's not against the law to make a profit, is it? So it can't be against the law for me to bribe someone in order to make a fair profit, can it? No, of course not!' He fell to brooding again, with a meek, almost pitiable distress. 'But how will I know who to bribe?'

  'Oh, don't you worry about that,' Yossarian comforted him with a toneless snicker as the engines of the jeeps and ambulance fractured the drowsy silence and the vehicles in the rear began driving away backward. 'You make the bribe big enough and they'll find you. Just make sure you do everything right out in the open. Let everyone know exactly what you want and how much you're willing to pay for it. The first time you act guilty or ashamed, you might get into trouble.'

  'I wish you'd come with me,' Milo remarked. 'I won't feel safe among people who take bribes. They're no better than a bunch of crooks.'

  'You'll be all right,' Yossarian assured him with confidence. 'If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country requires a strong domestic Egyptian-cotton speculating industry.'

  'It does,' Milo informed him solemnly. 'A strong Egyptian-cotton speculating industry means a much stronger America.'

  'Of course it does. And if that doesn't work, point out the great number of American families that depend on it for income.'

  'A great many American families do depend on it for income.'

  'You see?' said Yossarian. 'You're much better at it than I am. You almost make it sound true.'

  'It is true,' Milo exclaimed with a strong trace of old hauteur.

  'That's what I mean. You do it with just the right amount of conviction.'

  'You're sure you won't come with me?' Yossarian shook his head.

  Milo was impatient to get started. He stuffed the remainder of the chocolate-covered cotton ball into his shirt pocket and edged his way back gingerly along the branch to the smooth gray trunk. He threw this arms about the trunk in a generous and awkward embrace and began shinnying down, the sides of his leather-soled shoes slipping constantly so that it seemed many times he would fall and injure himself. Halfway down, he changed his mind and climbed back up. Bits of tree bark stuck to his mustache, and his straining face was flushed with exertion.

  'I wish you'd put your uniform on instead of going around naked that way,' he confided pensively before he climbed back down again and hurried away. 'You might start a trend, and then I'll never get rid of all this goldarned cotton.'

  Catch-22

  The Chaplain

  It was already some time since the chaplain had first begun wondering what everything was all about. Was there a God? How could he be sure? Being an Anabaptist minister in the American Army was difficult enough under the best of circumstances; without dogma, it was almost intolerable.

  People with loud voices frightened him. Brave, aggressive men of action like Colonel Cathcart left him feeling helpless and alone. Wherever he went in the Army, he was a stranger. Enlisted men and officers did not conduct themselves with him as they conducted themselves with other enlisted men and officers, and even other chaplains were not as friendly toward him as they were toward each other. In a world in which success was the only virtue, he had resigned himself to failure. He was painfully aware that he lacked the ecclesiastical aplomb and savoir-faire that enabled so many of his colleagues in other faiths and sects to get ahead. He was just not equipped to excel. He thought of himself as ugly and wanted daily to be home with his wife.

  Actually, the chaplain was almost good-looking, with a pleasant, sensitive face as pale and brittle as sandstone. His mind was open on every subject.

  Perhaps he really was Washington Irving, and perhaps he really had been signing Washington Irving's name to those letters he knew nothing about. Such lapses of memory were not uncommon in medical annals, he knew. There was no way of really knowing anything. He remembered very distinctly--or was under the impression he remembered very distinctly--his feeling that he had met Yossarian somewhere before the first time he had met Yossarian lying in bed in the hospital. He remembered experiencing the same disquieting sensation almost two weeks later when Yossarian appeared at his tent to ask to be taken off combat duty. By that time, of course, the chaplain had met Yossarian somewhere before, in that odd, unorthodox ward in which every patient seemed delinquent but the unfortunate patient covered from head to toe in white bandages and plaster who was found dead one day with a thermometer in his mouth. But the chaplain's impression of a prior meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him.

  Doubts of such kind gnawed at the chaplain's lean, suffering frame insatiably. Was there a single true faith, or a life after death? How many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and with what matters did God occup
y himself in all the infinite aeons before the Creation? Why was it necessary to put a protective seal on the brow of Cain if there were no other people to protect him from? Did Adam and Eve produce daughters? These were the great, complex questions of ontology that tormented him. Yet they never seemed nearly as crucial to him as the question of kindness and good manners. He was pinched perspinngly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope.

  'Have you ever,' he inquired hesitantly of Yossarian that day in his tent as Yossarian sat holding in both hands the warm bottle of Coca-Cola with which the chaplain had been able to solace him, 'been in a situation which you felt you had been in before, even though you knew you were experiencing it for the first time?' Yossarian nodded perfunctorily, and the chaplain's breath quickened in anticipation as he made ready to join his will power with Yossarian's in a prodigious effort to rip away at last the voluminous black folds shrouding the eternal mysteries of existence. 'Do you have that feeling now?' Yossarian shook his head and explained that déjà vu was just a momentary infinitesimal lag in the operation of two coactive sensory nerve centers that commonly functioned simultaneously. The chaplain scarcely heard him. He was disappointed, but not inclined to believe Yossarian, for he had been given a sign, a secret, enigmatic vision that he still lacked the boldness to divulge.

  There was no mistaking the awesome implications of the chaplain's revelation: it was either an insight of divine origin or a hallucination; he was either blessed or losing his mind. Both prospects filled him with equal fear and depression. It was neither déjà vu, presque vu nor jamais vu. It was possible that there were other vus of which he had never heard and that one of these other vus would explain succinctly the bafing phenomenon of which he had been both a witness and a part; it was even possible that none of what he thought had taken place, really had taken place, that he was dealing with an aberration of memory rather than of perception, that he never really had thought he had seen, that his impression now that he once had thought so was merely the illusion of an illusion, and that he was only now imagining that he had ever once imagined seeing a naked man sitting in a tree at the cemetery.