Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [92]
‘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 never give testimony against another physician. Listen. You think you’re the only one whose life is in danger? What about me? Those two quacks I’ve got working for me in the medical tent still can’t find out what’s wrong with me.’
‘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. They wouldn’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 your bitching, 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 a much, stronger position if you had your fifty-five finished and then refused to fly. Then maybe I’d see what I could 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 you get 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 was terrible. I don’t know why they want me to put in four hours’ flight time every month in order to get my flight pay. 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 why my 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, too numerous to count. When he contemplated the many diseases and potential accidents threatening him, he was positively 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.
The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice
Yossarian owed his good health to exercise, fresh air, teamwork and good sportsmanship; it was to get away from them all that he had first discovered the hospital. When the physical-education officer at Lowery Field ordered everyone to fall out for calisthenics one afternoon, Yossarian, the private, reported instead at the dispensary with what he said was a pain in his right side.
‘Beat it,’ said the doctor on duty there, who was doing a crossword puzzle.
‘We can’t tell him to beat it,’ said a corporal. ‘There’s a new directive out about abdominal complaints. We have to keep them under observation five days because so many of them have been dying after we make them beat it.’
‘All right,’ grumbled the doctor. ‘Keep him under observation five days and then make him beat it.’ They took Yossarian’s clothes away and put him in a ward, where he was very happy when no one was snoring nearby. In the morning a helpful young English intern popped in to ask him about his liver.
‘I think it’s my appendix that’s bothering me,’ Yossarian told him.
‘Your appendix is no good,’ the Englishman declared with jaunty authority. ‘If your appendix goes wrong, we can take it out and have you back on active duty in almost no time at all. But come to us with a liver complaint and you can fool us for weeks. The liver, you see, is a large, ugly mystery to us. If you’ve ever eaten liver you know what I mean. We’re pretty sure today that the liver exists and we have a fairly good idea of what it does whenever it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.