Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [7]
‘Colonel Cathcart isn’t here, either.’
‘Who said anything about Colonel Cathcart?’
‘What son of a bitch do you hate, then?’
‘What son of a bitch is here?’
‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ Clevinger decided. ‘You don’t know who you hate.’
‘Whoever’s trying to poison me,’ Yossarian told him.
‘Nobody’s trying to poison you.’
‘They poisoned my food twice, didn’t they? Didn’t they put poison in my food during Ferrara and during the Great Big Siege of Bologna?’
‘They put poison in everybody’s food,’ Clevinger explained.
‘And what difference does that make?’
‘And it wasn’t even poison!’ Clevinger cried heatedly, growing more emphatic as he grew more confused.
As far back as Yossarian could recall, he explained to Clevinger with a patient smile, somebody was always hatching a plot to kill him. There were people who cared for him and people who didn’t, and those who didn’t hated him and were out to get him. They hated him because he was Assyrian. But they couldn’t touch him, he told Clevinger, because he had a sound mind in a pure body and was as strong as an ox. They couldn’t touch him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was miracle ingredient Z-247. He was—’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 Raskolnkov—’
‘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 kidnaped 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