“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 81
The plane was slammed again suddenly with another loud, jarring explosion that
almost rocked it over on its back, and the nose filled immediately with sweet clouds of
blue smoke. Something was on fire! Yossarian whirled to escape and smacked into
Aarfy, who had struck a match and was placidly lighting his pipe. Yossarian gaped at his
grinning, moon-faced navigator in utter shock and confusion. It occurred to him that one
of them was mad.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he screamed at Aarfy in tortured amazement. ‘Get the hell out of the
nose! Are you crazy? Get out!’
‘What?’ said Aarfy.
‘Get out!’ Yossarian yelled hysterically, and began clubbing Aarfy backhanded with
both fists to drive him away. ‘Get out!’
‘I still can’t hear you,’ Aarfy called back innocently with an expression of mild and
reproving perplexity. ‘You’ll have to talk a little louder.’
‘Get out of the nose!’ Yossarian shrieked in frustration. ‘They’re trying to kill us! Don’t
you understand? They’re trying to kill us!’
‘Which way should I go, goddam it?’ McWatt shouted furiously over the intercom in a
suffering, high-pitched voice. ‘Which way should I go?’
‘Turn left! Left, you goddam dirty son of a bitch! Turn left hard!’ Aarfy crept up close
behind Yossarian and jabbed him sharply in the ribs with the stem of his pipe. Yossarian
flew up toward the ceiling with a whinnying cry, then jumped completely around on his
knees, white as a sheet and quivering with rage. Aarfy winked encouragingly and jerked
his thumb back toward McWatt with a humorous moue.
‘What’s eating him?’ he asked with a laugh.
Yossarian was struck with a weird sense of distortion. ‘Will you get out of here?’ he
yelped beseechingly, and shoved Aarfy over with all his strength. ‘Are you deaf or
something? Get back in the plane!’ And to McWatt he screamed, ‘Dive! Dive!’ Down
they sank once more into the crunching, thudding, voluminous barrage of bursting
antiaircraft shells as Aarfy came creeping back behind Yossarian and jabbed him
sharply in the ribs again. Yossarian shied upward with another whinnying gasp.
‘I still couldn’t hear you,’ Aarfy said.
‘I said get out of here!’ Yossarian shouted, and broke into tears. He began punching
Aarfy in the body with both hands as hard as he could. ‘Get away from me! Get away!’
Punching Aarfy was like sinking his fists into a limp sack of inflated rubber. There was
no resistance, no response at all from the soft, insensitive mass, and after a while
Yossarian’s spirit died and his arms dropped helplessly with exhaustion. He was
overcome with a humiliating feeling of impotence and was ready to weep in self-pity.
‘What did you say?’ Aarfy asked.
‘Get away from me,’ Yossarian answered, pleading with him now. ‘Go back in the
plane.’
‘I still can’t hear you.’
‘Never mind,’ wailed Yossarian, ‘never mind. Just leave me alone.’
‘Never mind what?’ Yossarian began hitting himself in the forehead. He seized Aarfy
by the shirt front and, struggling to his feet for traction, dragged him to the rear of the
nose compartment and flung him down like a bloated and unwieldy bag in the entrance
of the crawlway. A shell banged open with a stupendous clout right beside his ear as he
was scrambling back toward the front, and some undestroyed recess of his intelligence
wondered that it did not kill them all. They were climbing again. The engines were
howling again as though in pain, and the air inside the plane was acrid with the smell of
machinery and fetid with the stench of gasoline. The next thing he knew, it was snowing!
Thousands of tiny bits of white paper were falling like snowflakes inside the plane,
milling around his head so thickly that they clung to his eyelashes when he blinked in
astonishment and fluttered against his nostrils and lips each time he inhaled. When he
spun around in his bewilderment, Aarfy was grinning proudly from ear to ear like
something inhuman as he held up a shattered paper map for Yossarian to see. A large
chunk of flak had ripped up from the floor through Aarfy’s colossal jumble of maps and