Catch As Catch Can

by Joseph Heller

  “It isn’t depression, and you aren’t exhausted,” the psychologist told him bluntly, with a glance at his wristwatch, and then went away abruptly to take his lithium.

  In due course, the psychologist conferred with the chief of

  psychiatry, who consulted with Shumacher and most of the rest of the medical men, and they concluded with one voice that there was nothing psychosomatic about the excellent health he was enjoying and that the hair on his head was real, too.

  “The way it looks to us now, Mr. Yossarian,” said the chief medical director, speaking for the whole institution, with Leon Shumacher’s head, three-quarters bald, hanging over his shoulder and moving up and down, “you might live forever.”

  Toward the end of Yossarian’s second week in the hospital, the doctors hatched the plot that drove him out. They drove him out with the man from Belgium in the room adjacent to his. The man from Belgium was a very sick man and spoke no English, which did not matter much because he had just had his larynx removed and could not speak at all, understood no English either, which mattered greatly to the nurses and several doctors, who were unable to address him in meaningful ways. All day and much of the night he had at his bedside his waxen and diminutive Belgian wife in unpressed fashionable clothes, who smoked cigarettes continually while she spoke and understood no English either and jabbered away at the nurses ceaselessly and hysterically, flying into alarms of shrieking fright each time he groaned or choked or slept or awoke or tried to twist away out of bed from all the overwhelming miseries afflicting him and the tangled and inhuman maze of apparatus supporting and restraining him. He had come to this country only to be made well medically, and the doctors had taken out his larynx because he certainly would have died had they left it in. Now it was not so certain he would live. He had a chest tube and a belly tube and required constant vigilance. Christ, thought Yossarian, how can the guy stand it?

  Yossarian worried about the man from Belgium more than he wanted to. His sympathies were overburdened. He was moving into a state of stress and knew that stress was not healthy. He worried about that also and began to feel sorry for himself too.

  A few times a day Yossarian would venture from his own bed into the hallway to look into the other room just to see what was going on. Each time, he came reeling back to his own bed after a few seconds and collapsed there in a woozy faint, moaning soundlessly to himself with an arm thrown over his face to block out his persistence of vision. When he looked up again, the most mysterious of the several private detectives who had shadowed him into the hospital would be peering in at him quizzically. This secret agent was spare and short, with a sallow complexion and small, dark eyes in a thin, long, oval face that looked vaguely Asian and reminded him of a nut, a shelled almond.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Yossarian wanted to shout at him.

  “Who speaks French?” the people taking care of the Belgian cried out a dozen times a day.

  Yossarian spoke a little bit of French very poorly, but after the first few torturous attempts at being of some assistance to the staff and the overwrought Belgian woman with the bodice of her dress always mottled palely with streaks of cigarette ash, he decided to mind his own business and pretend he knew none. He was nervous about malpractice. Who could tell? Conceivably, an error in translation might very well render him liable to a charge of practicing medicine without a license. Yossarian could tell: he could tell about himself and the man from Belgium that if he ever had to go through all of that at his age for four or fourteen days just to be able to go on living with or without a voice box for God knew how little longer, he thought he would prefer not to. In the end it came down to elementals. He could not stand the Belgian’s pain and the nearness of his imminent death.

  Yossarian was symptom suggestible and knew it. Within half a day of the arrival of the Belgian, his voice turned husky. He had no fever or physical discomfort, and there was no visible evidence

  of inflammation anywhere in his ears, nose, or throat, said the ear, nose, and throat man who had been summoned.

  The next day, though, his throat did feel sore. He felt a lump back there too that seemed to be growing by the minute, and he had difficulty swallowing his food, although there was still not a sign of infection or obstruction, and he knew as absolutely as he knew anything else on earth that he too would soon lose his larynx to a malignancy if he hung around there any longer and did not get the hell away from that hospital room fast.

  2

  Outside the hospital it was still going on. A draft dodger named Dan Quayle was about to be president and was disliked by many for having given to the ancient tradition of draft dodging a very bad name. Now even he on public occasions told modest jokes about himself immodestly. Even newspapermen laughed.

  There were still plenty of poor people.

  Yossarian looked askance at a few living on the sidewalk outside the hospital as he strode from the entranceway to the car and driver he had reserved to transport him across town to the luxury high-rise apartment building in which he now made his home. It was called a luxury building because the costs of living there were large. The rooms were small, the ceilings were low, there were no windows in his two bathrooms, and there was no room in the kitchen area for a table or chair.

  Fewer than ten blocks away was the notorious and often scandalous bus terminal of the Port of New York Authority, as it was known lawfully, with its police desk and three holding cells in use, which overflowed several times each day with new prisoners and into which his youngest son, Michael Yossarian, had once been conducted on charges of emerging from a subway exit

  while carrying a pipe without tobacco and attempting to step back in without paying an additional fare upon realizing he had got off one stop too soon on his way downtown to the architectural firm for which he was doing drawings.

  “That was the day,” Michael still needed to recall, “you saved my life and broke my spirit.”

  “Did you want me to let them lock you up with those others and take you downtown to be booked?”

  “I would have died if they had. But it wasn’t easy seeing you blow up at all those cops and get away with it. And knowing I wasn’t able to do the same.”

  “We get angry in the way we have to, Michael. I don’t think I had much choice.”

  “I get depressed.”

  “You don’t have much choice, do you? You had an older brother who bullied you,” Yossarian ventured, alluding to Adrian, the firstborn son. “Maybe that’s why.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “We didn’t know how,” confessed Yossarian. “We didn’t want to bully him.”

  “He would bully me still if I gave him the chance. You were something to watch. You had a whole crowd. There was even clapping.”

  They were both drained afterward. There was no sense of triumph. Michael was one of only three whites among the four dozen prisoners arrested and squeezed into the detention cells or shackled to the wall chains outside, and the other two were crack addicts who had by error jumped a plainclothesman for money.

  People lived in the bus terminal now, a resident population of men and women and wayward boys and girls, and, under the safeguards of the U.S. Constitution, could not be forced out from a public facility unrestricted to others.

  There was hot and cold running water in the lavatories on the different levels of the terminal, along with an abundance

  of whores and homosexuals for every appetite imaginable, and plentiful shops close at hand for such basic daily necessities as chewing gum, cigarettes, newspapers, and jelly doughnuts. Toilet tissue was free. Fertile mothers in flight from idyllic home-towns arrived regularly with small children and took up lodgings there immediately as the safest place in the world they could find for refuge and drugs. The terminal was a good home base for streetwalking. Thousands of business commuters, along with hundreds of visitors to the metropolis as well, paid them little mind as they passed through each morning on their way to employme
nt and went back to their homes at the conclusion of each working day.

  From the lofty picture windows of the bedroom and living room in his high-rise apartment, Yossarian commanded an excellent view of another luxury apartment building just across the way with an even higher rise than his own, and between these over-towering structures ran the broad thoroughfare below, which teemed more and more monstrously now with growing clans of bellicose and repulsive panhandlers, prostitutes, addicts, dealers, pimps, robbers, pornographers, perverts, and disoriented psychopaths, all of them plying their criminal specialties outdoors amid multiplying strands of degraded and bedraggled people who were living outdoors. Among the homeless there were whites now too, and they also pissed against the wall and defecated in the alleyways that others in their circle eventually located as accommodating sites to bed down in. Here and there one occasionally spotted elderly white-haired couples clinging to their remaining shreds of respectability, sitting clean and upright side by side in the recessed entrance to some locked-up store they had found for the night, sometimes on chairs and sometimes on the ground, swaddled neatly to the lips and eyes in scarves and in colored sheets and blankets in defense against the swirls of wind

  and dust that spun and skipped along the pavement, their savings of a lifetime stored up in bundles at their feet and in bundles, wrappings, and paper-bag packages stacked neatly in grocery shopping carts curiously purloined. Even in the better neighborhood along Park Avenue, Yossarian knew, women could be seen squatting to relieve themselves in the tended flower beds of the traffic islands in the center.

  It was hard not to hate them all.

  “They don’t vote,” said the mayor, “because they don’t have a voting address, and they don’t turn out their friends for elections because they have no friends.”

  “The way to eliminate crime in the streets,” said the cardinal, “is to eliminate streets.”

  “The way to eliminate poverty,” said Olivia Maxon, a socialite woman prominent most of all for her prominent attendance at philanthropic social events, “is to eliminate poor people.”

  “You must listen to my wife when she tells you that, Mr. Yossarian,” instructed her husband, Christopher, who managed money.

  “You can believe my husband when he tells you that,” said his wife, “for he did not get where he is by being stupid.”

  “You can believe my wife when she tells you that.”

  This was New York, the Big Apple, the Empire City in the Empire State, the financial heart, brains and sinews of the country, and the city that was greatest, barring London, perhaps, in cultural actions in the whole world.

  Nowhere in his lifetime, Yossarian was bound often to remember, not in wartime Rome or on the island of Pianosa or even in blasted Naples or Sicily, when he was there as a captain in the air force during World War II, had he been spectator to such atrocious, blatant squalor as he saw crowding in around him now. Nor observed such joyless sexual and other social and occupational transactions as, merely by looking, he could witness negotiated in the street scores of times an hour between prostitute and purchaser, dealer and user, policeman and quarry, buyer of stolen property and seller of stolen property. Not even—he had commented once in his cynicism to his youngest son, once in the hospital to his new woman friend, Melissa Wedenmuller, and more than once to an old lady friend from the past—at the lusterless gala fund-raising luncheons and black-tie dinners he attended more times than he wanted to as a kind of goodwill ambassador for his company and to which he was routinely invited as the only presentable official of the Double-M E&A concern.

  It was nobody’s fault. Landlords were blamed. Banks were helpless. “It’s not our business,” said people in the federal government.

  “My God, what’s that?” cried Frances Beach, Yossarian’s friend from the past, as they rode in her rented limousine with her rented chauffeur from still another tepid daytime party at the New York Public Library.

  “The bus terminal.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’ve never seen anything so seedy.”

  “Yes, you have. You might consider sponsoring your next fashion show inside. That would really make the news.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve made some friends there since my son was busted. I’ve got good contacts. Why not a wedding? A real big wedding?”

  “Please stop joking. A society wedding in the bus terminal?”

  “Sounds good to me. You’ve had them in the museum and the opera house. The terminal’s more picturesque.”

  “You must be mad. Although it sounds like fun. My God!” She sat up suddenly as the car cruised onward. “Look at those people! Are they men or women? And why must they do those things right out in the street? Why can’t they wait till they’re home?”

  “Many don’t have homes, Frances dear,” said Yossarian, smiling at her. “And the lines for the toilets at the bus terminal are too long. Reservations must be made in the peak hours. No one can be seated without them. The lavatories in the restaurants and hotels, say the signs, are for the convenience of patrons only. Have you ever noticed, Frances, that men who take leaks in the street usually take long ones?”

  No, she had not noticed, she informed him frostily.

  “You sound so bitter now,” she added. “You used to be funnier.”

  “They flow into Times Square. Would you like to see more?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Times Square.”

  “I insist,” he muttered.

  “And so cynical.”

  Years back, before either was married, they had luxuriated together in what would today be termed an affair, although neither then would have thought of applying a title so decorous to the things they were doing with each other so incessantly and passionately.

  “You used to be more sympathetic,” he reminded her now.

  “You too.”

  “And radical.”

  “So were you. And now you’re so negative,” she observed without much feeling. “And always sarcastic, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t realize that,” he answered soberly.

  “No wonder our men are not always comfortable with you. They don’t know what you really think. And you’re always flirting.”

  “I am not!”

  “Yes, you are,” Frances Beach insisted, without even turning her head to give emphasis to her argument. “With just about everyone but me. You know very well who flirts and who doesn’t. Patrick and Christopher don’t. You do. You always did.”

  “Well, I don’t ever mean it. It’s the way I joke.”

  “Our women don’t know that, John. They imagine you have one young mistress a day.”

  “Mistress?” Yossarian turned the sound of the word into a snorting guffaw. “I don’t want even one.”

  “A companion, a girlfriend? What would you like to call her?”

  “Only one would be too many.”

  Frances Beach laughed, and the suggestion of strain with which she had been sitting for several minutes seemed to vanish. They were both past sixty-five. He had known her when her name was Franny. She remembered when they called him Yo-Yo. They had not toyed with each other since, not even after she’d learned from others that he was now living alone.

  “There seem to be more and more of these poor and awful people everywhere,” she murmured wearily, with a despair she made clear would be easily controlled, “every hour, doing everything imaginable right out on all of the streets. Patrick’s pocket was picked a month ago just in front of our house, and there are whores on the corners day and night. John, you used to know everything. What can be done about them?”

  “Nothing,” he obliged her helpfully in reply.

  For things were good, he reminded her: this time only the poor were very poor, and the need for new prison cells was more pressing than the needs of the homeless. He did not add that by now he was one more in the solid middle class who wa
s not keen to have his taxes raised to ameliorate the miseries of those who paid none. He preferred more prisons.

  His second wife was still divorcing him. All of his children came from his first. In that marriage, six or seven years after he had discontinued all extramarital dalliances, his wife began to accuse him of starting them, and when he finally tired of hearing her tell him to move out, he finally did.

  His daughter, Gillian, a bossy overachiever, was divorcing her husband, who was not achieving as much.

  His oldest son, Adrian, was another overachiever, a minor major hotshot on Wall Street, and he and his wife were now living in separate quarters of their obsolete suburban mansion while their respective lawyers made ready to sue and countersue for divorce while attempting, impossibly, to arrive at a division of property and children that would supply total satisfaction to both.

  Yossarian sensed trouble brewing in the marriage between his second son, Julian, a chemist without a graduate degree who worked for a cosmetics manufacturer in New Jersey, and his wife: she had taken to enrolling in adult-education courses.

  Michael, unmarried and still without steady employment, had once joked to Yossarian that he was going to put money away for his divorce before starting to save for his marriage, and Yossarian resisted wisecracking back that his joke was not a joke.