“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.

18 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. Beyond that, we’re really in the dark. After all, what is a liver? My father, for example, died of cancer of the liver and was never sick a day of his life right up till the moment it killed him. Never felt a twinge of pain. In a way, that was too bad, since I hated my father. Lust for my mother, you know.”

“What’s an English medical officer doing on duty here?” Yossarian wanted to know.

The officer laughed. “I’ll tell you all about that when I see you tomorrow morning. And throw that silly ice bag away before you die of pneumonia.”

Yossarian never saw him again. That was one of the nice things about all the doctors at the hospital; he never saw any of them a second time. They came and went and simply disappeared. In place of the English intern the next day, there arrived a group of doctors he had never seen before to ask him about his appendix.

“There’s nothing wrong with my appendix,” Yossarian informed them. “The doctor yesterday said it was my liver.”

“Maybe it is his liver,” replied the white-haired officer in charge. “What does his blood count show?”

“He hasn’t had a blood count.”

“Have one taken right away. We can’t afford to take chances with a patient in his condition. We’ve got to keep ourselves covered in case he dies.” He made a notation on his clipboard and spoke to Yossarian. “In the meantime, keep that ice bag on. It’s very important.”

“I don’t have an ice bag on.”

“Well, get one. There must be an ice bag around here somewhere. And let someone know if the pain becomes unendurable.”

At the end of ten days, a new group of doctors came to Yossarian with bad news; he was in perfect health and had to get out. He was rescued in the nick of time by a patient across the aisle who began to see everything twice. Without warning, the patient sat up in bed and shouted.

“I see everything twice!”

A nurse screamed and an orderly fainted. Doctors came running up from every direction with needles, lights, tubes, rubber mallets and oscillating metal tines. They rolled up complicated instruments on wheels. There was not enough of the patient to go around, and specialists pushed forward in line with raw tempers and snapped at their colleagues in front to hurry up and give somebody else a chance. A colonel with a large forehead and horn-rimmed glasses soon arrived at a diagnosis.

“It’s meningitis,” he called out emphatically, waving the others back. “Although Lord knows there’s not the slightest reason for thinking so.”

“Then why pick meningitis?” inquired a major with a suave chuckle. “Why not, let’s say, acute nephritis?”

“Because I’m a meningitis man, that’s why, and not an acute-nephritis man,” retorted the colonel. “And I’m not going to give him up to any of you kidney birds without a struggle. I was here first.”

In the end, the doctors were all in accord. They agreed they had no idea what was wrong with the soldier who saw everything twice, and they rolled him away into a room in the corridor and quarantined everyone else in the ward for fourteen days.

Thanksgiving Day came and went without any fuss while Yossarian was still in the hospital. The only bad thing about it was the turkey for dinner, and even that was pretty good. It was the most rational Thanksgiving he had ever spent, and he took a sacred oath to spend every future Thanksgiving Day in the cloistered shelter of a hospital. He broke his sacred oath the very next year, when he spent the holiday in a hotel room instead in intellectual conversation with Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife, who had Dori Duz’s dog tags on for the occasion and who henpecked Yossarian sententiously for being cynical and callous about Thanksgiving, even though she didn’t believe in God just as much as he didn’t.

“I’m probably just as good an atheist as you are,” she speculated boastfully. “But even I feel that we all have a great deal to be thankful for and that we shouldn’t be ashamed to show it.”

“Name one thing I’ve got to be thankful for,” Yossarian challenged her without interest.

“Well…” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife mused and paused a moment to ponder dubiously. “Me.”