“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 91
‘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
blood and 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 to death 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. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t business
so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-and-now-I-ain’t. There
were no famines or floods. Children didn’t suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under
trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn’t stick their heads into ovens with the
gas on, jump in 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 die disgustingly 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 be officious, the rules, if heeded, restrictive, and the
management meddlesome. Since sick people were apt to be present, he could not
always depend on a lively young crowd in the same ward with him, and the
entertainment was not always good. He was forced to admit that the hospitals had
altered steadily for the worse as the war continued and one moved closer to the
battlefront, the deterioration in the quality of the guests becoming most marked within
the combat zone itself where the effects of booming wartime conditions were apt to
make themselves conspicuous immediately. The people got sicker and sicker the
deeper he moved into combat, until finally in the hospital that last time there had been
the soldier in white, who could not have been any sicker without being dead, and he
soon was.
The soldier in white was constructed entirely of gauze, plaster and a thermometer, and
the thermometer was merely an adornment left balanced in the empty dark hole in the
bandages over his mouth early each morning and late each afternoon by Nurse Cramer
and Nurse Duckett right up to the afternoon Nurse Cramer read the thermometer and
discovered he was dead. Now that Yossarian looked back, it seemed that Nurse
Cramer, rather than the talkative Texan, had murdered the soldier in white; if she had
not read the thermometer and reported what she had found, the soldier in white might
still be lying there alive exactly as he had been lying there all along, encased from head
to toe in plaster and gauze with both strange, rigid legs elevated from the hips and both
strange arms strung up perpendicularly, all four bulky limbs in casts, all four strange,
useless limbs hoisted up in the air by taut wire cables and fantastically long lead weights
suspended darkly above him. Lying there that way might 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 harbor with 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,
offended undertones, rebelling against his presence as a ghastly imposition and
resenting him malevolently for the nauseating 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 mustache had 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 mouth was deep and jet black
and showed no sign of lip, teeth, palate or tongue. The only one who ever came close
enough to look was the affable Texan, who came close enough several times a day to