“I think you’re crazy,” was the way Clevinger had responded to Dunbar’s discovery.
“Who wants to know?” Dunbar answered.
“I mean it,” Clevinger insisted.
“Who cares?” Dunbar answered.
“I really do. I’ll even go so far as to concede that life seems longer i—”
“—is longer i—”
“—is longer—Is longer? All right, is longer if it’s filled with periods of boredom and discomfort, b—”
“Guess how fast?” Dunbar said suddenly.
“Huh?”
“They go,” Dunbar explained.
“Who?”
“Years.”
“Years?”
“Years,” said Dunbar. “Years, years, years.”
“Clevinger, why don’t you let Dunbar alone?” Yossarian broke in. “Don’t you realize the toll this is taking?”
“It’s all right,” said Dunbar magnanimously. “I have some decades to spare. Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?”
“And you shut up also,” Yossarian told Orr, who had begun to snigger.
“I was just thinking about that girl,” Orr said. “That girl in Sicily. That girl in Sicily with the bald head.”
“You’d better shut up also,” Yossarian warned him.
“It’s your fault,” Dunbar said to Yossarian. “Why don’t you let him snigger if he wants to? It’s better than having him talking.”
“All right. Go ahead and snigger if you want to.”
“Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?” Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. “This long.” He snapped his fingers. “A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you’re an old man.”
“Old?” asked Clevinger with surprise. “What are you talking about?”
“Old.”
“I’m not old.”
“You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?” Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.
“Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. “Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?”
“I do,” Dunbar told him.
“Why?” Clevinger asked.
“What else is there?”
• • 5 • •
Chief White Halfoat
Doc Daneeka lived in a splotched gray tent with Chief White Halfoat, whom he feared and despised.
“I can just picture his liver,” Doc Daneeka grumbled.
“Picture my liver,” Yossarian advised him.
“There’s nothing wrong with your liver.”
“That shows how much you don’t know,” Yossarian bluffed, and told Doc Daneeka about the troublesome pain in his liver that had troubled Nurse Duckett and Nurse Cramer and all the doctors in the hospital because it wouldn’t become jaundice and wouldn’t go away.
Doc Daneeka wasn’t interested. “You think you’ve got troubles?” he wanted to know. “What about me? You should’ve been in my office the day those newlyweds walked in.”
“What newlyweds?”
“Those newlyweds that walked into my office one day. Didn’t I ever tell you about them? She was lovely.”
So was Doc Daneeka’s office. He had decorated his waiting room with goldfish and one of the finest suites of cheap furniture. Whatever he could he bought on credit, even the goldfish. For the rest, he obtained money from greedy relatives in exchange for shares of the profits. His office was in Staten Island in a two-family firetrap just four blocks away from the ferry stop and only one block south of a supermarket, three beauty parlors, and two corrupt druggists. It was a corner location, but nothing helped. Population turnover was small, and people clung through habit to the same physicians they had been doing business with for years. Bills piled up rapidly, and he was soon faced with the loss of his most precious medical instruments: his adding machine was repossessed, and then his typewriter. The goldfish died. Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.
“It was a godsend,” Doc Daneeka confessed solemnly. “Most of the other doctors were soon in the service, and things picked up overnight. The corner location really started paying off, and I soon found myself handling more patients than I could handle competently. I upped my kickback fee with those two drugstores. The beauty parlors were good for two, three abortions a week. Things couldn’t have been better, and then look what happened. They had to send a guy from the draft board around to look me over. I was Four-F. I had examined myself pretty thoroughly and discovered that I was unfit for military service. You’d think my word would be enough, wouldn’t you, since I was a doctor in good standing with my county medical society and with my local Better Business Bureau. But no, it wasn’t, and they sent this guy around just to make sure I really did have one leg amputated at the hip and was helplessly bedridden with incurable rheumatoid arthritis. Yossarian, we live in an age of distrust and deteriorating spiritual values. It’s a terrible thing,” Doc Daneeka protested in a voice quavering with strong emotion. “It’s a terrible thing when even the word of a licensed physician is suspected by the country he loves.”