Catch-22(7)

“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 Raskolnikov—”

“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 kidnapped 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.”





• • 3 • •



Havermyer


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.