Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

  'What does that mean, sir?' the chaplain persisted in a voice turning shrill.

  Colonel Korn stopped with an unpleasant expression and took a step back down. 'It means we'll think about it, Padre,' he answered with sarcasm and contempt. 'You wouldn't want us to do anything without thinking about it, would you?'

  'No, sir, I suppose not. But you have been thinking about it, haven't you?'

  'Yes, Padre, we have been thinking about it. But to make you happy, we'll think about it some more, and you'll be the first person we'll tell if we reach a new decision. And now, adios.' Colonel Korn whirled away again and hurried up the stairs.

  'Colonel Korn!' The chaplain's cry made Colonel Korn stop once more. His head swung slowly around toward the chaplain with a look of morose impatience. Words gushed from the chaplain in a nervous torrent. 'Sir, I would like your permission to take the matter to General Dreedle. I want to bring my protests to Wing Headquarters.' Colonel Korn's thick, dark jowls inflated unexpectedly with a suppressed guffaw, and it took him a moment to reply. 'That's all right, Padre,' he answered with mischievous merriment, trying hard to keep a straight face. 'You have my permission to speak to General Dreedle.'

  'Thank you, sir. I believe it only fair to warn you that I think I have some influence with General Dreedle.'

  'It's good of you to warn me, Padre. And I believe it only fair to warn you that you won't find General Dreedle at Wing.' Colonel Korn grinned wickedly and then broke into triumphant laughter. 'General Dreedle is out, Padre. And General Peckem is in. We have a new wing commander.' The chaplain was stunned. 'General Peckem!'

  'That's right, Chaplain. Have you got any influence with him?'

  'Why, I don't even know General Peckem,' the chaplain protested wretchedly.

  Colonel Korn laughed again. 'That's too bad, Chaplain, because Colonel Cathcart knows him very well.' Colonel Korn chuckled steadily with gloating relish for another second or two and then stopped abruptly. 'And by the way, Padre,' he warned coldly, poking his finger once into the chaplain's chest. 'The jig is up between you and Dr. Stubbs. We know very well he sent you up here to complain today.'

  'Dr. Stubbs?' The chaplain shook his head in baffled protest. 'I haven't seen Dr. Stubbs, Colonel. I was brought here by three strange officers who took me down into the cellar without authority and questioned and insulted me.' Colonel Korn poked the chaplain in the chest once more. 'You know damned well Dr. Stubbs has been telling the men in his squadron they didn't have to fly more than seventy missions.' He laughed harshly. 'Well, Padre, they do have to fly more than seventy missions, because we're transferring Dr. Stubbs to the Pacific. So adios, Padre. Adios.'

  Catch-22

  General Scheisskopf

  Dreedle was out, and General Peckem was in, and General Peckem had hardly moved inside General Dreedle's office to replace him when his splendid military victory began falling to pieces around him.

  'General Scheisskopf?' he inquired unsuspectingly of the sergeant in his new office who brought him word of the order that had come in that morning. 'You mean Colonel Scheisskopf, don't you?'

  'No, sir, General Scheisskopf He was promoted to general this morning, sir.'

  'Well, that's certainly curious! Scheisskopf? A general? What grade?'

  'Lieutenant general, sir, and--'

  'Lieutenant general!'

  'Yes, sir, and he wants you to issue no orders to anyone in your command without first clearing them through him.'

  'Well, I'll be damned,' mused General Peckem with astonishment, swearing aloud for perhaps the first time in his life. 'Cargill, did you hear that? Scheisskopf was promoted way up to lieutenant general. I'll bet that promotion was intended for me and they gave it to him by mistake.' Colonel Cargill had been rubbing his sturdy chin reflectively. 'Why is he giving orders to us?' General Peckem's sleek, scrubbed, distinguished face tightened. 'Yes, Sergeant,' he said slowly with an uncomprehending frown. 'Why is he issuing orders to us if he's still in Special Services and we're in combat operations?'

  'That's another change that was made this morning, sir. All combat operations are now under the jurisdiction of Special Services. General Scheisskopf is our new commanding officer.' General Peckem let out a sharp cry. 'Oh, my God!' he wailed, and all his practical composure went up in hysteria. 'Scheisskopf in charge? Scheisskopf?' He pressed his fists down on his eyes with horror. 'Cargill, get me Wintergreen! Scheisskopf? Not Scheisskopf!' All phones began ringing at once. A corporal ran in and saluted.

  'Sir, there's a chaplain outside to see you with news of an injustice in Colonel Cathcart's squadron.'

  'Send him away, send him away! We've got enough injustices of our own. Where's Wintergreen?'

  'Sir, General Scheisskopf is on the phone. He wants to speak to you at once.'

  'Tell him I haven't arrived yet. Good Lord!' General Peckem screamed, as though struck by the enormity of the disaster for the first time. 'Scheisskopf? The man's a moron! I walked all over that blockhead, and now he's my superior officer. Oh, my Lord! Cargill! Cargill, don't desert me! Where's Wintergreen?'

  'Sir, I have an ex-Sergeant Wintergreen on your other telephone. He's been trying to reach you all morning.'

  'General, I can't get Wintergreen,' Colonel Cargill shouted, 'His line is busy.' General Peckem was perspiring freely as he lunged for the other telephone.

  'Wintergreen!'

  'Peckem, you son of a bitch--'

  'Wintergreen, have you heard what they've done?'

  '--what have you done, you stupid bastard?'

  'They put Scheisskopf in charge of everything!' Wintergreen was shrieking with rage and panic. 'You and your goddam memorandums! They've gone and transferred combat operations to Special Services!'

  'Oh, no,' moaned General Peckem. 'Is that what did it? My memoranda? Is that what made them put Scheisskopf in charge? Why didn't they put me in charge?'

  'Because you weren't in Special Services any more. You transferred out and left him in charge. And do you know what he wants? Do you know what the bastard wants us all to do?'

  'Sir, I think you'd better talk to General Scheisskopf,' pleaded the sergeant nervously. 'He insists on speaking to someone.'

  'Cargill, talk to Scheisskopf for me. I can't do it. Find out what he wants.' Colonel Cargill listened to General Scheisskopf for a moment and went white as a sheet. 'Oh, my God!' he cried, as the phone fell from his fingers. 'Do you know what he wants? He wants us to march. He wants everybody to march!'

  Catch-22

  Kid Sister

  Yossarian marched backward with his gun on his hip and refused to fly any more missions. He marched backward because he was continously spinning around as he walked to make certain no one was sneaking up on him from behind. Every sound to his rear was a warning, every person he passed a potential assassin. He kept his hand on his gun butt constantly and smiled at no one but Hungry Joe. He told Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren that he was through flying. Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren left his name off the flight schedule for the next mission and reported the matter to Group Headquarters.

  Colonel Korn laughed cahnly. 'What the devil do you mean, he won't fly more missions?' he asked with a smile, as Colonel Cathcart crept away into a corner to brood about the sinister import of the name Yossarian popping up to plague him once again. 'Why won't he?'

  'His friend Nately was killed in the crash over Spezia. Maybe that's why.'

  'Who does he think he is--Achilles?' Colonel Korn was pleased with the simile and filed a mental reminder to repeat it the next time he found himself in General Peckem's presence. 'He has to fly more missions. He has no choice. Go back and tell him you'll report the matter to us if he doesn't change his mind.'

  'We already did tell him that, sir. It made no difference.'

  'What does Major Major say?'

  'We never see Major Major. He seems to have disappeared.'

  'I wish we could disappear him!' Colonel Cathcart blurted out from the corner peevishly. 'The way th
ey did that fellow Dunbar.'

  'Oh, there are plenty of other ways we can handle this one,' Colonel Korn assured him confidently, and continued to Piltchard and Wren, 'Let's begin with the kindest. Send him to Rome for a rest for a few days. Maybe this fellow's death really did hurt him a bit.' Nately's death, in fact, almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to Nately's whore in Rome she uttered a piercing, heartbroken shriek and tried to stab him to death with a potato peeler.

  'Bruto!' she howled at him in hysterical fury as he bent her arm up around behind her back and twisted gradually until the potato peeler dropped from her grasp. 'Bruto! Bruto!' She lashed at him swiftly with the long-nailed fingers of her free hand and raked open his cheek. She spat in his face viciously.

  'What's the matter?' he screamed in stinging pain and bewilderment, flinging her away from him all the way across the room to the wall. 'What do you want from me?' She flew back at him with both fists flailing and bloodied his mouth with a solid punch before he was able to grab her wrists and hold her still. Her hair tossed wildly. Tears were streaming in single torrents from her flashing, hate-filled eyes as she struggled against him fiercely in an irrational frenzy of maddened might, snarling and cursing savagely and screaming 'Bruto! Bruto!' each time he tried to explain. Her great strength caught him off guard, and he lost his footing. She was nearly as tall as Yossarian, and for a few fantastic, terror-filled moments he was certain she would overpower him in her crazed determination, crush him to the ground and rip him apart mercilessly limb from limb for some heinous crime he had never committed. He wanted to yell for help as they strove against each other frantically in a grunting, panting stalemate, arm against arm. At last she weakened, and he was able to force her back and plead with her to let him talk, swearing to her that Nately's death had not been his fault. She spat in his face again, and he pushed her away hard in disgusted anger and frustration. She hurled herself down toward the potato peeler the instant he released her. He flung himself down after her, and they rolled over each other on the floor several times before he could tear the potato peeler away. She tried to trip him with her hand as he scrambled to his feet and scratched an excruciating chunk out of his ankle. He hopped across the room in pain and threw the potato peeler out the window. He heaved a huge sigh of relief once he saw he was safe.

  'Now, please let me explain something to you,' he cajoled in a mature, reasoning, earnest voice.

  She kicked him in the groin. Whoosh! went the air out of him, and he sank down on his side with a shrill and ululating cry, doubled up over his knees in chaotic agony and retching for breath. Nately's whore ran from the room. Yossarian staggered up to his feet not a moment too soon, for she came charging back in from the kitchen carrying a long bread knife. A moan of incredulous dismay wafted from his lips as, still clutching his throbbing, tender, burning bowels in both hands, he dropped his full weight down against her shins and knocked her legs out from under her. She flipped completely over his head and landed on the floor on her elbows with a jarring thud. The knife skittered free, and he slapped it out of sight under the bed. She tried to lunge after it, and he seized her by the arm and yanked her up. She tried to kick him in the groin again, and he slung her away with a violent oath of his own. She slammed into the wall off balance and smashed a chair over into a vanity table covered with combs, hairbrushes and cosmetic jars that all went crashing off. A framed picture fell to the floor at the other end of the room, the glass front shattering.

  'What do you want from me?' he yelled at her in whining and exasperated confusion. 'I didn't kill him.' She hurled a heavy glass ash tray at his head. He made a fist and wanted to punch her in the stomach when she came charging at him again, but he was afraid he might harm her. He wanted to clip her very neatly on the point of the jaw and run from the room, but there was no clear target, and he merely skipped aside neatly at the last second and helped her along past him with a strong shove. She banged hard against the other wall. Now she was blocking the door. She threw a large vase at him. Then she came at him with a full wine bottle and struck him squarely on the temple, knocking him down half-stunned on one knee. His ears were buzzing, his whole face was numb. More than anything else, he was embarrassed. He felt awkward because she was going to murder him. He simply did not understand what was going on. He had no idea what to do. But he did know he had to save himself, and he catapulted forward off the floor when he saw her raise the wine bottle to clout him again and barreled into her midriff before she could strike him. He had momentum, and he propelled her before him backward in his driving rush until her knees buckled against the side of the bed and she fell over onto the mattress with Yossarian sprawled on top of her between her legs. She plunged her nails into the side of his neck and gouged as he worked his way up the supple, full hills and ledges of her rounded body until he covered her completely and pressed her into submission, his fingers pursuing her thrashing arm persistently until they arrived at the wine bottle finally and wrenched it free. She was still kicking and cursing and scratching ferociously. She tried to bite him cruelly, her coarse, sensual lips stretched back over her teeth like an enraged omnivorous beast's. Now that she lay captive beneath him, he wondered how he would ever escape her without leaving himself vulnerable. He could feel the tensed, straddling inside of her buffeting thighs and knees squeezing and churning around one of his legs. He was stirred by thoughts of sex that made him ashamed. He was conscious of the voluptuous flesh of her firm, young-woman's body straining and beating against him like a humid, fluid, delectable, unyielding tide, her belly and warm, live, plastic breasts thrusting upward against him vigorously in sweet and menacing temptation. Her breath was scalding. All at once he realized--though the writhing turbulence beneath him had not diminished one whit--that she was no longer grappling with him, recognized with a quiver that she was not fighting him but heaving her pelvis up against him remorselessly in the primal, powerful, rhapsodic instinctual rhythm of erotic ardor and abandonment. He gasped in delighted surprise. Her face--as beautiful as a blooming flower to him now--was distorted with a new kind of torture, the tissues serenely swollen, her half-closed eyes misty and unseeing with the stultifying languor of desire.

  'Caro,' she murmured hoarsely as though from the depths of a tranquil and luxurious trance. 'Ooooh, caro mio.' He stroked her hair. She drove her mouth against his face with savage passion. He licked her neck. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged. He felt himself falling, falling ecstatically in love with her as she kissed him again and again with lips that were steaming and wet and soft and hard, mumbling deep sounds to him adoringly in an incoherent oblivion of rapture, one caressing hand on his back slipping deftly down inside his trouser belt while the other groped secretly and treacherously about on the floor for the bread knife and found it. He saved himself just in time. She still wanted to kill him! He was shocked and astounded by her depraved subteruge as he tore the knife from her grasp and hurled it away. He bounded out of the bed to his feet. His face was agog with befuddlement and disillusion. He did not know whether to dart through the door to freedom or collapse on the bed to fall in love with her and place himself abjectly at her mercy again. She spared him from doing either by bursting unpredictably into tears. He was stunned again.

  This time she wept with no other emotion than grief, profound, debilitating, humble grief, forgetting all about him. Her desolation was pathetic as she sat with her tempestuous, proud, lovely head bowed, her shoulders sagging, her spirit melting. This time there was no mistaking her anguish. Great racking sobs choked and shook her. She was no longer aware of him, no longer cared. He could have walked from the room safely then. But he chose to remain and console and help her.

  'Please,' he urged her inarticulately with his arm about her shoulders, recollecting with pained sadness how inarticulate and enfeebled he had felt in the plane coming back from Avignon when Snowden kept whimpering to him that he was cold, he was cold, and all Yossarian could offer him in return was 'There, ther
e. There, there.'

  'Please,' he repeated to her sympathetically. 'Please, please.' She rested against him and cried until she seemed too weak to cry any longer, and did not look at him once until he extended his handkerchief when she had finished. She wiped her cheeks with a tiny, polite smile and gave the handkerchief back, murmuring 'Grazie, grazie' with meek, maidenly propriety, and then, without any warning whatsoever of a change in mood, clawed suddenly at his eyes with both hands. She landed with each and let out a victorious shriek.

  'Ha! Assassino!' she hooted, and raced joyously across the room for the bread knife to finish him off.

  Half blinded, he rose and stumbled after her. A noise behind him made him turn. His senses reeled in horror at what he saw. Nately's whore's kid sister, of all people, was coming after him with another long bread knife!

  'Oh, no,' he wailed with a shudder, and he knocked the knife out of her hand with a sharp downward blow on her wrist. He lost patience entirely with the whole grotesque and incomprehensible melee. There was no telling who might lunge at him next through the doorway with another long bread knife, and he lifted Nately's whore's kid sister off the floor, threw her at Nately's whore and ran out of the room, out of the apartment and down the stairs. The two girls chased out into the hall after him. He heard their footsteps lag farther and farther behind as he fled and then cease altogether. He heard sobbing directly overhead. Glancing backward up the stair well, he spied Nately's whore sitting in a heap on one of the steps, weeping with her face in both hands, while her pagan, irrepressible kid sister hung dangerously over the banister shouting 'Bruto! Bruto!' down at him happily and brandished her bread knife at him as though it were an exciting new toy she was eager to use.

  Yossarian escaped, but kept looking back over his shoulder anxiously as he retreated through the street. People stared at him strangely, making him more apprehensive. He walked in nervous haste, wondering what there was in his appearance that caught everyone's attention. When he touched his hand to a sore spot on his forehead, his fingers turned gooey with blood, and he understood. He dabbed his face and neck with a handkerchief. Wherever it pressed, he picked up new red smudges. He was bleeding everywhere. He hurried into the Red Cross building and down the two steep flights of white marble stairs to the men's washroom, where he cleansed and nursed his innumerable visible wounds with cold water and soap and straightened his shirt collar and combed his hair. He had never seen a face so badly bruised and scratched as the one still blinking back at him in the mirror with a dazed and startled uneasiness. What on earth had she wanted from him?