Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

  'But I went back again this morning to see him.'

  'And they painted his gums purple again,' said Nately.

  'But I did get to speak to him,' the chaplain argued in a plaintive tone of self-justification. 'Doctor Daneeka seems like such an unhappy man. He suspects that someone is plotting to transfer him to the Pacific Ocean. All this time he's been thinking of coming to me for help. When I told him I needed his help, he wondered if there wasn't a chaplain I couldn't go see.' The chaplain waited in patient dejection when Yossarian and Dunbar both broke into laughter. 'I used to think it was immoral to be unhappy,' he continued, as though keening aloud in solitude. 'Now I don't know what to think any more. I'd like to make the subject of immorality the basis of my sermon this Sunday, but I'm not sure I ought to give any sermon at all with these purple gums. Colonel Korn was very displeased with them.'

  'Chaplain, why don't you come into the hospital with us for a while and take it easy?' Yossarian invited. 'You could be very comfortable here.' The brash iniquity of the proposal tempted and amused the chaplain for a second or two. 'No, I don't think so,' he decided reluctantly. 'I want to arrange for a trip to the mainland to see a mail clerk named Wintergreen. Doctor Daneeka told me he could help.'

  'Wintergreen is probably the most influential man in the whole theater of operations. He's not only a mail clerk, but he has access to a mimeograph machine. But he won't help anybody. That's one of the reasons he'll go far.'

  'I'd like to speak to him anyway. There must be somebody who will help you.'

  'Do it for Dunbar, Chaplain,' Yossarian corrected with a superior air. 'I've got this million-dollar leg wound that will take me out of combat. If that doesn't do it, there's a psychiatrist who thinks I'm not good enough to be in the Army.'

  'I'm the one who isn't good enough to be in the Army,' Dunbar whined jealously. 'It was my dream.'

  'It's not the dream, Dunbar,' Yossarian explained. 'He likes your dream. It's my personality. He thinks it's split.'

  'It's split right down the middle,' said Major Sanderson, who had laced his lumpy GI shoes for the occasion and had slicked his charcoal-dull hair down with some stiffening and redolent tonic. He smiled ostentatiously to show himself reasonable and nice. 'I'm not saying that to be cruel and insulting,' he continued with cruel and insulting delight. 'I'm not saying it because I hate you and want revenge. I'm not saying it because you rejected me and hurt my feelings terribly. No, I'm a man of medicine and I'm being coldly objective. I have very bad news for you. Are you man enough to take it?'

  'God, no!' screamed Yossarian. 'I'll go right to pieces.' Major Sanderson flew instantly into a rage. 'Can't you even do one thing right?' he pleaded, turning beet-red with vexation and crashing the sides of both fists down upon his desk together. 'The trouble with you is that you think you're too good for all the conventions of society. You probably think you're too good for me too, just because I arrived at puberty late. Well, do you know what you are? You're a frustrated, unhappy, disillusioned, undisciplined, maladjusted young man!' Major Sanderson's disposition seemed to mellow as he reeled off the uncomplimentary adjectives.

  'Yes, sir,' Yossarian agreed carefully. 'I guess you're right.'

  'Of course I'm right. You're immature. You've been unable to adjust to the idea of war.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you're at war and might get your head blown off any second.'

  'I more than resent it, sir. I'm absolutely incensed.'

  'You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate.'

  'Consciously, sir, consciously,' Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. 'I hate them consciously.'

  'You're antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Slums depress you. Greed depresses you. Crime depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're a manic-depressive!'

  'Yes, sir. Perhaps I am.'

  'Don't try to deny it.'

  'I'm not denying it, sir,' said Yossarian, pleased with the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. 'I agree with all you've said.'

  'Then you admit you're crazy, do you?'

  'Crazy?' Yossarian was shocked. 'What are you talking about? Why am I crazy? You're the one who's crazy!' Major Sanderson turned red with indignation again and crashed both fists down upon his thighs. 'Calling me crazy,' he shouted in a sputtering rage, 'is a typically sadistic and vindictive paranoiac reaction! You really are crazy!'

  'Then why don't you send me home?'

  'And I'm going to send you home!'

  'They're going to send me home!' Yossarian announced jubilantly, as he hobbled back into the ward.

  'Me too!' A. Fortiori rejoiced. 'They just came to my ward and told me.'

  'What about me?' Dunbar demanded petulantly of the doctors.

  'You?' they replied with asperity. 'You're going with Yossarian. Right back into combat!' And back into combat they both went. Yossarian was enraged when the ambulance returned him to the squadron, and he went limping for justice to Doc Daneeka, who glared at him glumly with misery and disdain.

  'You!' Doc Daneeka exclaimed mournfully with accusing disgust, the egg-shaped pouches under both eyes firm and censorious. 'All you ever think of is yourself. Go take a look at the bomb line if you want to see what's been happening since you went to the hospital.' Yossarian was startled. 'Are we losing?'

  'Losing?' Doc Daneeka cried. 'The whole military situation has been going to hell ever since we captured Paris. I knew it would happen.' He paused, his sulking ire turning to melancholy, and frowned irritably as though it were all Yossarian's fault. 'American troops are pushing into German soil. The Russians have captured back all of Romania. Only yesterday the Greeks in the Eighth Army captured Rimini. The Germans are on the defensive everywhere!' Doc Daneeka paused again and fortified himself with a huge breath for a piercing ejaculation of grief. 'There's no more Luftwaffe left!' he wailed. He seemed ready to burst into tears. 'The whole Gothic line is in danger of collapsing!'

  'So?' asked Yossarian. 'What's wrong?'

  'What's wrong?' Doc Daneeka cried. 'If something doesn't happen soon, Germany may surrender. And then we'll all be sent to the Pacific!' Yossarian gawked at Doc Daneeka in grotesque dismay. 'Are you crazy? Do you know what you're saying?'

  'Yeah, it's easy for you to laugh,' Doc Daneeka sneered.

  'Who the hell is laughing?'

  'At least you've got a chance. You're in combat and might get killed. But what about me? I've got nothing to hope for.'

  'You're out of your goddam head!' Yossarian shouted at him emphatically, seizing him by the shirt front. 'Do you know that? Now keep your stupid mouth shut and listen to me.' Doc Daneeka wrenched himself away. 'Don't you dare talk to me like that. I'm a licensed physician.'

  'Then keep your stupid licensed physician's mouth shut and listen to what they told me up at the hospital. I'm crazy. Did you know that?'

  'So?'

  'Really crazy.'

  'So?'

  'I'm nuts. Cuckoo. Don't you understand? I'm off my rocker. They sent someone else home in my place by mistake. They've got a licensed psychiatrist up at the hospital who examined me, and that was his verdict. I'm really insane.'

  'So?'

  'So?' Yossarian was puzzled by Doc Daneeka's inability to comprehend. 'Don't you see what that means? Now you can take me off combat duty and send me home. They're not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?'

  'Who else will go?'

  Catch-22

  Dobbs

  McWatt went, and McWatt was not crazy. And so did Yossarian, still walking with a limp, and when Yossarian had gone two more times and then found himself menaced by the rumor of another mission to Bologna, he limped determinedl
y into Dobbs's tent early one warm afternoon, put a finger to his mouth and said, 'Shush!'

  'What are you shushing him for?' asked Kid Sampson, peeling a tangerine with his front teeth as he perused the dog-eared pages of a comic book. 'He isn't even saying anything.'

  'Screw,' said Yossarian to Kid Sampson, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder toward the entrance of the tent.

  Kid Sampson cocked his blond eyebrows discerningly and rose to co-operate. He whistled upward four times into his drooping yellow mustache and spurted away into the hills on the dented old green motorcycle he had purchased secondhand months before. Yossarian waited until the last faint bark of the motor had died away in the distance. Things inside the tent did not seem quite normal. The place was too neat. Dobbs was watching him curiously, smoking a fat cigar. Now that Yossarian had made up his mind to be brave, he was deathly afraid.

  'All right,' he said. 'Let's kill Colonel Cathcart. We'll do it together.' Dobbs sprang forward off his cot with a look of wildest terror. 'Shush!' he roared. 'Kill Colonel Cathcart? What are you talking about?'

  'Be quiet, damn it,' Yossarian snarled. 'The whole island will hear. Have you still got that gun?'

  'Are you crazy or something?' shouted Dobbs. 'Why should I want to kill Colonel Cathcart?'

  'Why?' Yossarian stared at Dobbs with an incredulous scowl. 'Why? It was your idea, wasn't it? Didn't you come to the hospital and ask me to do it?' Dobbs smiled slowly. 'But that was when I had only fifty-eight missions,' he explained, puffing on his cigar luxuriously. 'I'm all packed now and I'm waiting to go home. I've finished my sixty missions.'

  'So what?' Yossarian replied. 'He's only going to raise them again.'

  'Maybe this time he won't.'

  'He always raises them. What the hell's the matter with you, Dobbs? Ask Hungry Joe how many time he's packed his bags.'

  'I've got to wait and see what happens,' Dobbs maintained stubbornly. 'I'd have to be crazy to get mixed up in something like this now that I'm out of combat.' He flicked the ash from his cigar. 'No, my advice to you,' he remarked, 'is that you fly your sixty missions like the rest of us and then see what happens.' Yossarian resisted the impulse to spit squarely in his eye. 'I may not live through sixty,' he wheedled in a flat, pessimistic voice. 'There's a rumor around that he volunteered the group for Bologna again.'

  'It's only a rumor,' Dobbs pointed out with a self-important air. 'You mustn't believe every rumor you hear.'

  'Will you stop giving me advice?'

  'Why don't you speak to Orr?' Dobbs advised. 'Orr got knocked down into the water again last week on that second mission to Avignon. Maybe he's unhappy enough to kill him.'

  'Orr hasn't got brains enough to be unhappy.' Orr had been knocked down into the water again while Yossarian was still in the hospital and had eased his crippled airplane down gently into the glassy blue swells off Marseilles with such flawless skill that not one member of the six-man crew suffered the slightest bruise. The escape hatches in the front and rear sections flew open while the sea was still foaming white and green around the plane, and the men scrambled out as speedily as they could in their flaccid orange Mae West life jackets that failed to inflate and dangled limp and useless around their necks and waists. The life jackets failed to inflate because Milo had removed the twin carbon-dioxide cylinders from the inflating chambers to make the strawberry and crushed-pineapple ice-cream sodas he served in the officers' mess hall and had replaced them with mimeographed notes that read: 'What's good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country.' Orr popped out of the sinking airplane last.

  'You should have seen him!' Sergeant Knight roared with laughter as he related the episode to Yossarian. 'It was the funniest goddam thing you ever saw. None of the Mae Wests would work because Milo had stolen the carbon dioxide to make those ice-cream sodas you bastards have been getting in the officers' mess. But that wasn't too bad, as it turned out. Only one of us couldn't swim, and we lifted that guy up into the raft after Orr had worked it over by its rope right up against the fuselage while we were all still standing on the plane. That little crackpot sure has a knack for things like that. Then the other raft came loose and drifted away, so that all six of us wound up sitting in one with our elbows and legs pressed so close against each other you almost couldn't move without knocking the guy next to you out of the raft into the water. The plane went down about three seconds after we left it and we were out there all alone, and right after that we began unscrewing the caps on our Mae Wests to see what the hell had gone wrong and found those goddam notes from Milo telling us that what was good for him was good enough for the rest of us. That bastard! Jesus, did we curse him, all except that buddy of yours, Orr, who just kept grinning as though for all he cared what was good for Milo might be good enough for the rest of us.

  'I swear, you should have seen him sitting up there on the rim of the raft like the captain of a ship while the rest of us just watched him and waited for him to tell us what to do. He kept slapping his hands on his legs every few seconds as though he had the shakes and saying, "All right now, all right," and giggling like a crazy little freak, then saying, "All right now, all right," again, and giggling like a crazy little freak some more. It was like watching some kind of a moron. Watching him was all that kept us from going to pieces altogether during the first few minutes, what with each wave washing over us into the raft or dumping a few of us back into the water so that we had to climb back in again before the next wave came along and washed us right back out. It was sure funny. We just kept falling out and climbing back in. We had the guy who couldn't swim stretched out in the middle of the raft on the floor, but even there he almost drowned, because the water inside the raft was deep enough to keep splashing in his face. Oh, boy!

  'Then Orr began opening up compartments in the raft, and the fun really began. First he found a box of chocolate bars and he passed those around so we sat there eating salty chocolate bars while the waves kept knocking us out of the raft into the water. Next he found some bouillon cubes and aluminum cups and made us some soup. Then he found some tea. Sure, he made it! Can't you see him serving us tea as we sat there soaking wet in water up to our ass? Now I was falling out of the raft because I was laughing so much. We were all laughing. And he was dead serious, except for that goofy giggle of his and that crazy grin. What a jerk! Whatever he found he used. He found some shark repellent and he sprinkled it right out into the water. He found some marker dye and he threw it into the water. The next thing he finds is a fishing line and dried bait, and his face lights up as though the Air-Sea Rescue launch had just sped up to save us before we died of exposure or before the Germans sent a boat out from Spezia to take us prisoner or machine-gun us. In no time at all, Orr had that fishing line out into the water, trolling away as happy as a lark. "Lieutenant, what do you expect to catch?" I asked him. "Cod," he told me. And he meant it. And it's a good thing he didn't catch any, because he would have eaten that codfish raw if he had caught any, and would have made us eat it, too, because he had found this little book that said it was all right to eat codfish raw.

  'The next thing he found was this little blue oar about the size of a Dixie-cup spoon, and, sure enough, he began rowing with it, trying to move all nine hundred pounds of us with that little stick. Can you imagine? After that he found a small magnetic compass and a big waterproof map, and he spread the map open on his knees and set the compass on top of it. And that's how he spent the time until the launch picked us up about thirty minutes later, sitting there with that baited fishing line out behind him, with the compass in his lap and the map spread out on his knees, and paddling away as hard as he could with that dinky blue oar as though he was speeding to Majorca. Jesus!' Sergeant Knight knew all about Majorca, and so did Orr, because Yossarian had told them often of such sanctuaries as Spain, Switzerland and Sweden where American fliers could be interned for the duration of the war under conditions of utmost ease and luxury merely by flying there. Yossarian was the squadron's leading
authority on internment and had already begun plotting an emergency heading into Switzerland on every mission he flew into northernmost Italy. He would certainly have preferred Sweden, where the level of intelligence was high and where he could swim nude with beautiful girls with low, demurring voices and sire whole happy, undisciplined tribes of illegitimate Yossarians that the state would assist through parturition and launch into life without stigma; but Sweden was out of reach, too far away, and Yossarian waited for the piece of flak that would knock out one engine over the Italian Alps and provide him with the excuse for heading for Switzerland. He would not even tell his pilot he was guiding him there. Yossarian often thought of scheming with some pilot he trusted to fake a crippled engine and then destroy the evidence of deception with a belly landing, but the only pilot he really trusted was McWatt, who was happiest where he was and still got a big boot out of buzzing his plane over Yossarian's tent or roaring in so low over the bathers at the beach that the fierce wind from his propellers slashed dark furrows in the water and whipped sheets of spray flapping back for seconds afterward.

  Dobbs and Hungry Joe were out of the question, and so was Orr, who was tinkering with the valve of the stove again when Yossarian limped despondently back into the tent after Dobbs had turned him down. The stove Orr was manufacturing out of an inverted metal drum stood in the middle of the smooth cement floor he had constructed. He was working sedulously on both knees. Yossarian tried paying no attention to him and limped wearily to his cot and sat down with a labored, drawn-out grunt. Prickles of perspiration were turning chilly on his forehead. Dobbs had depressed him. Doc Daneeka depressed him. An ominous vision of doom depressed him when he looked at Orr. He began ticking with a variety of internal tremors. Nerves twitched, and the vein in one wrist began palpitating.

  Orr studied Yossarian over his shoulder, his moist lips drawn back around convex rows of large buck teeth. Reaching sideways, he dug a bottle of warm beer out of his foot locker, and he handed it to Yossarian after prying off the cap. Neither said a word. Yossarian sipped the bubbles off the top and tilted his head back. Orr watched him cunningly with a noiseless grin. Yossarian eyed Orr guardedly. Orr snickered with a slight, mucid sibilance and turned back to his work, squatting. Yossarian grew tense.