“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 94
justice in it.’
‘It’s the highest kind of justice of all,’ Clevinger had gloated, clapping his hands with a
merry laugh. ‘I can’t help thinking of the Hippolytus of Euripides, where the early
licentiousness of Theseus is probably responsible for the asceticism of the son that
helps bring about the tragedy that ruins them all. If nothing else, that episode with 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 continued with undisguised relish. ‘If you hadn’t been laid up in the
hospital with venereal disease for ten days back there in Africa, you might have finished
your twenty-five missions in time to be sent home before Colonel Nevers was killed 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 same predicament.’
‘I don’t know,’ confessed Clevinger, with a trace of mock concern. ‘I guess I must have
done something very bad 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 was the 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 and
tenants, traitors and patriots, lynchers, leeches and lackeys, and they were all out to
bump him off. That was the secret Snowden had spilled to him on the mission to
Avignon —they were out to get him; and Snowden had spilled 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 were tumors of the brain. There was Hodgkin’s disease,
leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile red meadows of epithelial
tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell. There were diseases of the skin, diseases of
the bone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood
and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases of the neck, diseases of the
chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the crotch. There even were diseases of
the feet. There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night
like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every
one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that it took a truly
diseased mind to even think about them as often as he and Hungry Joe did.
Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so
that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about. He grew
very upset whenever he misplaced some or when he 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 handling Hungry Joe, ‘and follow it up with melanoma. Hungry Joe
likes lingering diseases, but he likes the fulminating ones even more.’ Doc Daneeka had
never heard of either. ‘How do you manage to keep up on so many diseases like that?’
he inquired 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
hospital for good and spend the rest of his life stretched out there inside an oxygen tent
with a battery of specialists and nurses seated at one side of his bed twenty-four hours a
day waiting for something to go wrong and at least one surgeon with a knife poised at
the other, ready to jump forward and begin cutting away the moment it became