Yossarian ran right into the hospital, determined to remain there forever rather than fly one mission more thanthe thirty-two missions he had. Ten days after he changed his mind and came out, the colonel raised the missionsto forty-five and Yossarian ran right back in, determined to remain in the hospital forever rather than fly onemission more than the six missions more he had just flown.
Yossarian could run into the hospital whenever he wanted to because of his liver and because of his eyes; thedoctors couldn’t fix his liver condition and couldn’t meet his eyes each time he told them he had a livercondition. He could enjoy himself in the hospital, just as long as there was no one really very sick in the sameward. His system was sturdy enough to survive a case of someone else’s malaria or influenza with scarcely anydiscomfort at all. He could come through other people’s tonsillectomies without suffering any postoperativedistress, and even endure their hernias and hemorrhoids with only mild nausea and revulsion. But that was justabout as much as he could go through without getting sick. After that he was ready to bolt. He could relax in thehospital, since no one there expected him to do anything. All he was expected to do in the hospital was die or getbetter, and since he was perfectly all right to begin with, getting better was easy.
Being in the hospital was better than being over Bologna or flying over Avignon with Huple and Dobbs at thecontrols and Snowden dying in back.
There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, andthere were generally fewer people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much lower deathrate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier death rate. Few people died unnecessarily.
People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job of it. Theycouldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners.
They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost withdelicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was socommon outside the hospital. They did not blow up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret toYossarian in the back of the plane.
“I’m cold,” Snowden had whimpered. “I’m cold.”
“There, there,” Yossarian had tried to comfort him. “There, there.”
They didn’t take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn’t explode into bloodand clotted matter. They didn’t drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides.
They didn’t get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned todeath with axes by parents or children or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death.
People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. Therewas none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none ofthat now-I-am-and-now-I-ain’t. There were no famines or floods. Children didn’t suffocate in cradles or iceboxesor fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn’t stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jumpin front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!,accelerating at the rate of sixteen feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and diedisgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.
All things considered, Yossarian often preferred the hospital, even though it had its faults. The help tended to beofficious, the rules, if heeded, restrictive, and the management meddlesome. Since sick people were apt to bepresent, he could not always depend on a lively young crowd in the same ward with him, and the entertainmentwas not always good. He was forced to admit that the hospitals had altered steadily for the worse as the warcontinued and one moved closer to the battlefront, the deterioration in the quality of the guests becoming mostmarked within the combat zone itself where the effects of booming wartime conditions were apt to makethemselves conspicuous immediately. The people got sicker and sicker the deeper he moved into combat, untilfinally in the hospital that last time there had been the soldier in white, who could not have been any sickerwithout being dead, and he soon was.
The soldier in white was constructed entirely of gauze, plaster and a thermometer, and the thermometer wasmerely an adornment left balanced in the empty dark hole in the bandages over his mouth early each morningand late each afternoon by Nurse Cramer and Nurse Duckett right up to the afternoon Nurse Cramer read thethermometer and discovered he was dead. Now that Yossarian looked back, it seemed that Nurse Cramer, ratherthan the talkative Texan, had murdered the soldier in white; if she had not read the thermometer and reportedwhat she had found, the soldier in white might still be lying there alive exactly as he had been lying there allalong, encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze with both strange, rigid legs elevated from the hips and bothstrange arms strung up perpendicularly, all four bulky limbs in casts, all four strange, useless limbs hoisted up inthe air by taut wire cables and fantastically long lead weights suspended darkly above him. Lying there that waymight not have been much of a life, but it was all the life he had, and the decision to terminate it, Yossarian felt,should hardly have been Nurse Cramer’s.
The soldier in white was like an unrolled bandage with a hole in it or like a broken block of stone in a harborwith a crooked zinc pipe jutting out. The other patients in the ward, all but the Texan, shrank from him with a tenderhearted aversion from the moment they set eyes on him the morning after the night he had been sneaked in.
They gathered soberly in the farthest recess of the ward and gossiped about him in malicious, offendedundertones, rebelling against his presence as a ghastly imposition and resenting him malevolently for thenauseating truth of which he was bright reminder. They shared a common dread that he would begin moaning.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if he does begin moaning,” the dashing young fighter pilot with the golden mustachehad grieved forlornly. “It means he’ll moan during the night, too, because he won’t be able to tell time.”
No sound at all came from the soldier in white all the time he was there. The ragged round hole over his mouthwas deep and jet black and showed no sign of lip, teeth, palate or tongue. The only one who ever came closeenough to look was the affable Texan, who came close enough several times a day to chat with him about morevotes for the decent folk, opening each conversation with the same unvarying greeting: “What do you say, fella?
How you coming along?” The rest of the men avoided them both in their regulation maroon corduroy bathrobesand unraveling flannel pajamas, wondering gloomily who the soldier in white was, why he was there and whathe was really like inside.
“He’s all right, I tell you,” the Texan would report back to them encouragingly after each of his social visits.
“Deep down inside he’s really a regular guy. He’s feeling a little shy and insecure now because he doesn’t knowanybody here and can’t talk. Why don’t you all just step right up to him and introduce yourselves? He won’t hurtyou.”
“What the goddam hell are you talking about?” Dunbar demanded. “Does he even know what you’re talkingabout?”
“Sure he knows what I’m talking about. He’s not stupid. There ain’t nothing wrong with him.”
“Can he hear you?”
“Well, I don’t know if he can hear me or not, but I’m sure he knows what I’m talking about.”
“Does that hole over his mouth ever move?”
“Now, what kind of a crazy question is that?” the Texan asked uneasily.
“How can you tell if he’s breathing if it never moves?”
“How can you tell it’s a he?”
“Does he have pads over his eyes underneath that bandage over his face?”
“Does he ever wiggle his toes or move the tips of his fingers?”
The Texan backed away in mounting confusion. “Now, what kind of a crazy question is that? You fellas must allbe crazy or something. Why don’t you just walk right up to him and get acquainted? He’s a real nice guy, I tellyou.”
The soldier in white was more like a stuffed and sterilized mummy than a real nice guy. Nurse Duckett andNurse Cramer kept him spick-and-span. They brushed his bandages often with a whiskbroom and scrubbed theplaster casts on his arms, legs, shoulders, chest and pelvis with soapy water. Working with a round tin of metalpolish, they waxed a dim gloss on the dull zinc pipe rising from the cement on his groin. With damp dish towelsthey wiped the dust several times a day from the slim black rubber tubes leading in and out of him to the twolarge stoppered jars, one of them, hanging on a post beside his bed, dripping fluid into his arm constantly througha slit in the bandages while the other, almost out of sight on the floor, drained the fluid away through the zincpipe rising from his groin. Both young nurses polished the glass jars unceasingly. They were proud of theirhousework. The more solicitous of the two was Nurse Cramer, a shapely, pretty, sexless girl with a wholesomeunattractive face. Nurse Cramer had a cute nose and a radiant, blooming complexion dotted with fetching spraysof adorable freckles that Yossarian detested. She was touched very deeply by the soldier in white. Her virtuous,pale-blue, saucerlike eyes flooded with leviathan tears on unexpected occasions and made Yossarian mad.
“How the hell do you know he’s even in there?” he asked her.
“Don’t you dare talk to me that way!” she replied indignantly.
“Well, how do you? You don’t even know if it’s really him.”
“Who?”
“Whoever’s supposed to be in all those bandages. You might really be weeping for somebody else. How do youknow he’s even alive?”
“What a terrible thing to say!” Nurse Cramer exclaimed. “Now, you get right into bed and stop making jokesabout him.”
“I’m not making jokes. Anybody might be in there. For all we know, it might even be Mudd.”
“What are you talking about?” Nurse Cramer pleaded with him in a quavering voice.
“Maybe that’s where the dead man is.”
“What dead man?”
“I’ve got a dead man in my tent that nobody can throw out. His name is Mudd.”
Nurse Cramer’s face blanched and she turned to Dunbar desperately for aid. “Make him stop saying things likethat,” she begged.
“Maybe there’s no one inside,” Dunbar suggested helpfully. “Maybe they just sent the bandages here for a joke.”
She stepped away from Dunbar in alarm. “You’re crazy,” she cried, glancing about imploringly. “You’re bothcrazy.”
Nurse Duckett showed up then and chased them all back to their own beds while Nurse Cramer changed thestoppered jars for the soldier in white. Changing the jars for the soldier in white was no trouble at all, since thesame clear fluid was dripped back inside him over and over again with no apparent loss. When the jar feeding theinside of his elbow was just about empty, the jar on the floor was just about full, and the two were simplyuncoupled from their respective hoses and reversed quickly so that the liquid could be dripped right back intohim. Changing the jars was no trouble to anyone but the men who watched them changed every hour or so andwere baffled by the procedure.
“Why can’t they hook the two jars up to each other and eliminate the middleman?” the artillery captain withwhom Yossarian had stopped playing chess inquired. “What the hell do they need him for?”
“I wonder what he did to deserve it,” the warrant officer with malaria and a mosquito bite on his ass lamentedafter Nurse Cramer had read her thermometer and discovered that the soldier in white was dead.
“He went to war,” the fighter pilot with the golden mustache surmised.
“We all went to war,” Dunbar countered.
“That’s what I mean,” the warrant officer with malaria continued. “Why him? There just doesn’t seem to be anylogic to this system of rewards and punishment. Look what happened to me. If I had gotten syphilis or a dose ofclap for my five minutes of passion on the beach instead of this damned mosquito bite, I could see justice. Butmalaria? Malaria? Who can explain malaria as a consequence of fornication?” The warrant officer shook hishead in numb astonishment.
“What about me?” Yossarian said. “I stepped out of my tent in Marrakech one night to get a bar of candy andcaught your dose of clap when that Wac I never even saw before hissed me into the bushes. All I really wantedwas a bar of candy, but who could turn it down?”
“That sounds like my dose of clap, all right,” the warrant officer agreed. “But I’ve still got somebody else’smalaria. Just for once I’d like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactlywhat he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.”
“I’ve got somebody else’s three hundred thousand dollars,” the dashing young fighter captain with the goldenmustache admitted. “I’ve been goofing off since the day I was born. I cheated my way through prep school andcollege, and just about all I’ve been doing ever since is shacking up with pretty girls who think I’d make a goodhusband. I’ve got no ambition at all. The only thing I want to do after the war is marry some girl who’s got moremoney than I have and shack up with lots more pretty girls. The three hundred thousand bucks was left to me before I was born by a grandfather who made a fortune selling on an international scale. I know I don’t deserveit, but I’ll be damned if I give it back. I wonder who it really belongs to.”
“Maybe it belongs to my father,” Dunbar conjectured. “He spent a lifetime at hard work and never could makeenough money to even send my sister and me through college. He’s dead now, so you might as well keep it.”
“Now, if we can just find out who my malaria belongs to we’d be all set. It’s not that I’ve got anything againstmalaria. I’d just as soon goldbrick with malaria as with anything else. It’s only that I feel an injustice has beencommitted. Why should I have somebody else’s malaria and you have my dose of clap?”
“I’ve got more than your dose of clap,” Yossarian told him. “I’ve got to keep flying combat missions because ofthat dose of yours until they kill me.”
“That makes it even worse. What’s the justice in that?”
“I had a friend named Clevinger two and a half weeks ago who used to see plenty of justice in it.”
“It’s the highest kind of justice of all,” Clevinger had gloated, clapping his hands with a merry laugh. “I can’thelp thinking of the Hippolytus of Euripides, where the early licentiousness of Theseus is probably responsiblefor the asceticism of the son that helps bring about the tragedy that ruins them all. If nothing else, that episodewith the Wac should teach you the evil of sexual immorality.”
“It teaches me the evil of candy.”
“Can’t you see that you’re not exactly without blame for the predicament you’re in?” Clevinger had continuedwith undisguised relish. “If you hadn’t been laid up in the hospital with venereal disease for ten days back therein Africa, you might have finished your twenty-five missions in time to be sent home before Colonel Nevers waskilled and Colonel Cathcart came to replace him.”
“And what about you?” Yossarian had replied. “You never got clap in Marrakech and you’re in the samepredicament.”
“I don’t know,” confessed Clevinger, with a trace of mock concern. “I guess I must have done something verybad in my time.”
“Do you really believe that?”
Clevinger laughed. “No, of course not. I just like to kid you along a little.”
There were too many dangers for Yossarian to keep track of. There was Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, for example,and they were all out to kill him. There was Lieutenant Scheisskopf with his fanaticism for parades and there wasthe bloated colonel with his big fat mustache and his fanaticism for retribution, and they wanted to kill him, too.
There was Appleby, Havermeyer, Black and Korn. There was Nurse Cramer and Nurse Duckett, who he was almost certain wanted him dead, and there was the Texan and the C.I.D. man, about whom he had no doubt.
There were bartenders, bricklayers and bus conductors all over the world who wanted him dead, landlords andtenants, traitors and patriots, lynchers, leeches and lackeys, and they were all out to bump him off. That was thesecret Snowden had spilled to him on the mission to Avignon—they were out to get him; and Snowden hadspilled it all over the back of the plane.
There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There weretumors of the brain. There was Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile redmeadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell. There were diseases of the skin, diseases of thebone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were diseasesof the head, diseases of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the crotch. Thereeven were diseases of the feet. There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night likedumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitorand foe. There were so many diseases that it took a truly diseased mind to even think about them as often as heand Hungry Joe did.
Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his fingerwithout delay on any one he wanted to worry about. He grew very upset whenever he misplaced some or whenhe could not add to his list, and he would go rushing in a cold sweat to Doc Daneeka for help.
“Give him Ewing’s tumor,” Yossarian advised Doc Daneeka, who would come to Yossarian for help in handlingHungry Joe, “and follow it up with melanoma. Hungry Joe likes lingering diseases, but he likes the fulminatingones even more.”
Doc Daneeka had never heard of either. “How do you manage to keep up on so many diseases like that?” heinquired with high professional esteem.
“I learn about them at the hospital when I study the Reader’s Digest.”
Yossarian had so many ailments to be afraid of that he was sometimes tempted to turn himself in to the hospitalfor good and spend the rest of his life stretched out there inside an oxygen tent with a battery of specialists andnurses seated at one side of his bed twenty-four hours a day waiting for something to go wrong and at least onesurgeon with a knife poised at the other, ready to jump forward and begin cutting away the moment it becamenecessary. Aneurisms, for instance; how else could they ever defend him in time against an aneurism of theaorta? Yossarian felt much safer inside the hospital than outside the hospital, even though he loathed the surgeonand his knife as much as he had ever loathed anyone. He could start screaming inside a hospital and peoplewould at least come running to try to help; outside the hospital they would throw him in prison if he ever startedscreaming about all the things he felt everyone ought to start screaming about, or they would put him in thehospital. One of the things he wanted to start screaming about was the surgeon’s knife that was almost certain tobe waiting for him and everyone else who lived long enough to die. He wondered often how he would everrecognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse ofmemory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.
He was afraid also that Doc Daneeka would still refuse to help him when he went to him again after jumping outof Major Major’s office, and he was right.
“You think you’ve got something to be afraid about?” Doc Daneeka demanded, lifting his delicate immaculatedark head up from his chest to gaze at Yossarian irascibly for a moment with lachrymose eyes. “What about me?
My precious medical skills are rusting away here on this lousy island while other doctors are cleaning up. Doyou think I enjoy sitting here day after day refusing to help you? I wouldn’t mind it so much if I could refuse tohelp you back in the States or in some place like Rome. But saying no to you here isn’t easy for me, either.”
“Then stop saying no. Ground me.”
“I can’t ground you,” Doc Daneeka mumbled. “How many times do you have to be told?”
“Yes you can. Major Major told me you’re the only one in the squadron who can ground me.”
Doc Daneeka was stunned. “Major Major told you that? When?”
“When I tackled him in the ditch.”
“Major Major told you that? In a ditch?”
“He told me in his office after we left the ditch and jumped inside. He told me not to tell anyone he told me, sodon’t start shooting your mouth off.”
“Why that dirty, scheming liar!” Doc Daneeka cried. “He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Did he tell you how Icould ground you?”
“Just by filling out a little slip of paper saying I’m on the verge of a nervous collapse and sending it to Group.
Dr. Stubbs grounds men in his squadron all the time, so why can’t you?”
“And what happens to the men after Stubbs does ground them?” Doc Daneeka retorted with a sneer. “They goright back on combat status, don’t they? And he finds himself right up the creek. Sure, I can ground you byfilling out a slip saying you’re unfit to fly. But there’s a catch.”
“Catch-22?”
“Sure. If I take you off combat duty, Group has to approve my action, and Group isn’t going to. They’ll put youright back on combat status, and then where will I be? On my way to the Pacific Ocean, probably. No, thank you.
I’m not going to take any chances for you.”
“Isn’t it worth a try?” Yossarian argued. “What’s so hot about Pianosa?”
“Pianosa is terrible. But it’s better than the Pacific Ocean. I wouldn’t mind being shipped someplace civilized where I might pick up a buck or two in abortion money every now and then. But all they’ve got in the Pacific isjungles and monsoons, I’d rot there.”
“You’re rotting here.”
Doc Daneeka flared up angrily. “Yeah? Well, at least I’m going to come out of this war alive, which is a lot morethan you’re going to do.”
“That’s just what I’m trying to tell you, goddammit. I’m asking you to save my life.”
“It’s not my business to save lives,” Doc Daneeka retorted sullenly.
“What is your business?”
“I don’t know what my business is. All they ever told me was to uphold the ethics of my profession and nevergive testimony against another physician. Listen. You think you’re the only one whose life is in danger? Whatabout me? Those two quacks I’ve got working for me in the medical tent still can’t find out what’s wrong withme.”
“Maybe it’s Ewing’s tumor,” Yossarian muttered sarcastically.
“Do you really think so?” Doc Daneeka exclaimed with fright.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Yossarian answered impatiently. “I just know I’m not going to fly any more missions. Theywouldn’t really shoot me, would they? I’ve got fifty-one.”
“Why don’t you at least finish the fifty-five before you take a stand?” Doc Daneeka advised. “With all yourbitching, you’ve never finished a tour of duty even once.”
“How the hell can I? The colonel keeps raising them every time I get close.”
“You never finish your missions because you keep running into the hospital or going off to Rome. You’d be in amuch, stronger position if you had your fifty-five finished and then refused to fly. Then maybe I’d see what Icould do.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“What do you promise?”
“I promise that maybe I’ll think about doing something to help if you finish your fifty-five missions and if youget McWatt to put my name on his flight log again so that I can draw my flight pay without going up in a plane.
I’m afraid of airplanes. Did you read about that airplane crash in Idaho three weeks ago? Six people killed. It wasterrible. I don’t know why they want me to put in four hours’ flight time every month in order to get my flightpay. Don’t I have enough to worry about without worrying about being killed in an airplane crash too?”
“I worry about the airplane crashes also,” Yossarian told him. “You’re not the only one.”
“Yeah, but I’m also pretty worried about that Ewing’s tumor,” Doc Daneeka boasted. “Do you think that’s whymy nose is stuffed all the time and why I always feel so chilly? Take my pulse.”
Yossarian also worried about Ewing’s tumor and melanoma. Catastrophes were lurking everywhere, toonumerous to count. When he contemplated the many diseases and potential accidents threatening him, he waspositively astounded that he had managed to survive in good health for as long as he had. It was miraculous.
Each day he faced was another dangerous mission against mortality. And he had been surviving them for twenty-eight years.