There were countries in Europe that could afford to buy, and in Asia and the Mideast too.
The vision of the morbid vision he had experienced was of a seizure or a stroke and had set him reminiscing again about durable old Gustav Aschenbach alone on his mythical strand of Mediterranean beach and his immortal death in Venice, worn out at fifty in a city with a plague nobody wished to talk about. In Naples far back, when assembled in line for the troopship sailing him home after he'd flown seventy missions and survived, he'd found himself behind an older soldier named Schweik and a man born Krautheimer who had changed his name to Joseph Kaye to blend more securely into his culture, and his name, like Schweik's, had meant not much to him then.
Given a choice, Yossarian still preferred to live. He ate no eggs and, though he had no headache, swallowed his baby aspirin every other day.
He had no doubt he had lots to worry about. His parents were dead, and so were all his uncles and aunts.
A prick in the White House? It would not be the first time. Another oil tanker had broken up. There was radiation. Garbage. Pesticides, toxic waste, and free enterprise. There were enemies of abortion who wished to inflict the death penalty on everyone who was not pro-life. There was mediocrity in government, and self-interest too. There was trouble in Israel. These were not mere delusions. He was not making them up. Soon they would be cloning human embryos for sale, fun, and replacement parts. Men earned millions producing nothing more substantial than changes in ownership. The cold war was over and there was still no peace on earth. Nothing made sense and neither did everything else. People did things without knowing why and then tried to find out.
When bored in his hospital room, Yossarian played with such high-minded thoughts like a daydreaming youth with his genitals.
At least once each weekday morning they came barging in around him, his doctor, Leon Shumacher, and his brisk and serious entourage of burgeoning young physicians, accompanied by the lively, attractive floor nurse with the pretty face and the magnificent ass who was openly drawn to Yossarian, despite his years, and whom he was slyly enticing to develop a benign crush on him, despite her youthfulness. She was a tall woman with impressive hips who remembered Pearl Bailey but not Pearl Harbor, which put her age somewhere between thirty-five and sixty, the very best stage, Yossarian believed, for a woman, provided, of course, she still had her health. Yossarian possessed but a hazy idea of what she really was like; yet he unscrupulously exploited every chance to help pass the time enjoyably with her for the several peaceful weeks he was resolved to remain in the hospital to rest up and put his outlook together while the great nations of the world restabilized themselves into another new world order for good and forever once more.
He'd brought his radio and almost always had some Bach or very good chamber, piano, or other choral music on one FM station or another. There were too many disruptions for abiding attention to opera, especially Wagner. It was a good room this time, he was pleased to conclude, with unobjectionable neighbors who were not offensively ill, and it was the attractive floor nurse, in response to his baiting, modestly laughing and with a flounce and a flush of hauteur, who made the defiant boast that the ass she had was magnificent.
Yossarian could see no reason to disagree.
By the middle of the first week he was flirting with her with all his might. Dr. Leon Shumacher did not always look kindly upon this salacious frivolity.
"It's bad enough I let you in here. I suppose we both ought to feel ashamed, you in this room when you aren't sick--"
"Who says I'm not?"
"--and so many people outside on the streets."
"Will you let one in here if I agree to leave?"
"Will you pay the bills?"
Yossarian preferred not to.
A great man with angiograms had confirmed to him soberly that he did not need one, a neurologist reported with equal gloom that there was nothing the matter with his brain. Leon Shumacher again was displaying him pridefully as a rare specimen his pupils would not have opportunity to come upon often in their medical practice, a man of sixty-eight without symptoms of any disease, not even hypochondria.
Late afternoons or sometimes early in the evening, Leon would drop by just to chat awhile in singsong sorrow about his long hours, ghoulish working conditions, and unjustly low earnings in tactless, egocentric fashion to a man they both knew was soon going to die.
He was not considerate.
The name of this nurse was Melissa MacIntosh, and, like all good women to a sophisticated man with a predilection to romanticize, she seemed too good to be true.
By the beginning of his second week she was allowing him to caress with his fingertips the border of lace at the bottom of her slip when she stood or sat beside his bed or chair while she hung around and talked and flirted back by allowing him to advance in his flirting. Pink with discomfort and enlivened by mischief, she neither consented nor prohibited when he toyed with her filmy undergarment, but she was not at ease. She was in terror someone would surprise them in this impermissible intimacy. He was praying somebody would. He concealed from Nurse MacIntosh all the subtle signals of his budding erections. He did not want her to get the idea that his intentions were serious. She was lucky to have him, she agreed when he said so. He was less trouble than the other men and women in the private and semiprivate rooms on the same floor. And he was more intriguing to her, he saw--and therefore more seductive, he understood, and maybe she did not--than all of the few men she was seeing outside the hospital and even the one or two men she had been seeing exclusively, almost exclusively, for a number of years. She had never been married, not even once or twice. Yossarian was so little trouble that he was no trouble at all, and she and the other floor nurses had little more to do for him than look into his room each shift just to make certain he wasn't dead yet and needed nothing done to keep him alive.
"Is everything all right?" each one would inquire.
"Everything but my health," he sighed in response.
"You're in perfect health."
That was the trouble, he took the trouble to explain. It meant he had to get worse.
"It's no joke," he joked when they laughed.
She wore a black slip in one day after he'd begged her to switch, affecting aesthetic longing. Often when he wanted her there he found himself in dire need of something to need. When he pressed his call signal, another nurse might respond.
"Send in my Melissa," he would command.
The others would cooperate. He suffered no nursing shortage. He was in good health, the doctors restated daily, and this time, he was concluding in morose disappointment, with the sense he was being cheated, they appeared to be right.
His appetite and digestion were good. His auditory and spinal apparatus had been CAT-scanned. His sinuses were clear and there was no evidence anywhere of arthritis, bursitis, angina, or neuritis. He was even without a postnasal drip. His blood pressure was the envy of every doctor who saw him. He gave urine and they took it. His cholesterol was low, his hemoglobin was high, his sedimentation rate was a thing of beauty, and his blood nitrogen was ideal. They pronounced him a perfect human being. He thought his first wife and his second, from whom he had now been separated a year, might have some demurrers.
There was a champion cardiologist who found no fault with him, a pathologist for his pathos, who found no cause for concern either, an enterprising gastroenterologist who ran back to the room for a second opinion from Yossarian on some creative investment strategies he was considering in Arizona real estate, and a psychologist for his psyche, in whom Yossarian was left in the last resort to confide.
"And what about these periodic periods of anomie and fatigue and disinterest and depression?" Yossarian rushed on in a whirlwind of whispers. "I find myself detached from listening to things that other people take seriously. I'm tired of information I can't use. I wish the daily newspapers were smaller and came out weekly. I'm not interested anymore in all that's going on in the worl
d. Comedians don't make me laugh and long stories drive me wild. Is it me or old age? Or is the planet really turning irrelevant? TV news is degenerate. Everyone everywhere is glib. My enthusiasms are exhausted. Do I really feel this healthy now or am I just imagining I do? I even have this full head of hair. Doc, I've got to have the truth. Is my depression mental?"
"It isn't depression and you're not exhausted."
In due course, the psychologist conferred with the chief of psychiatry, who consulted with all the other 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 genuine too.
"Although," added the chief psychiatrist, with a clearing of throat, "I am honor bound to flag you as a very good candidate for late-life depression."
"Late-life depression?" Yossarian savored the term. "About when would that be?"
"About now. What do you do that you really enjoy?"
"Not much, I'm afraid. I run after women, but not too hard. I make more money than I need."
"Do you enjoy that?"
"No. I've got no ambition, and there's not much left I want to get done."
"No golf, bridge, tennis? Art or antique collecting?"
"That's all out of the question."
"The prognosis is not good."
"I've always known that."
"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, "you might live forever."
He had nothing to worry about, it seemed, but inflation and deflation, higher interest rates and lower interest rates, the budget deficit, the threat of war and the dangers of peace, the unfavorable balance of trade and a favorable balance of trade, the new President and the old chaplain, and a stronger dollar and a weaker dollar, along with friction, entropy, radiation, and gravity.
But he worried too about his new pal Nurse Melissa MacIntosh, because she had no money saved. Her parents had none either, and if she lived long enough, she would have to live on only her Social Security benefits and a pittance of a retirement pension from the hospital, provided she continued working there for the next twenty or three hundred years, which seemed out of the question, unless she met and married before then some fine gentleman of means who was as appealing to her then as Yossarian was to her now, which seemed to him entirely out of the question also. Few men could talk dirty to her so charmingly. More than once he contemplated her with a pang: she was too innocent to abandon to the heartless dynamics of financial circumstance, too sweet, unsuspecting, and unselfish.
"What you absolutely must do," he said one day, after she had begged him to advise whether she and her roommate should open individual retirement accounts--Yossarian advised that he could not see what fucking practical use an individual retirement account was going to be in the long run to anybody but the banks soliciting them--"is marry someone like me now, a man with some money saved who knows something about insurance policies and legacies and has been married only one time before."
"Would you be too old for me?" she asked in a fright.
"You would be too young for me. Do it soon, do it today. Even a doctor might work. Before you know it you'll be as old as I am and you won't have a thing."
He worried too about the reckless sentimentality of extending concern to a person who needed it.
That was not the American way.
The last thing he needed was another dependent. Or two, for she spoke with pride of an eye-catching, fun-loving roommate in her cramped apartment, a woman named Angela Moore who was taller than she and freer, a natural-blonde Australian with brighter-blonde hair and a larger bosom in stiletto heels and white lipstick and white eye makeup who worked as sales representative for a novelty manufacturer to whom she submitted ribald ideas for new products that rendered tongue-tied and incredulous the two elderly Jewish family men who owned the company as partners and made them blush. She liked the effect she knew she made in the costly midtown bars to which she often went after work to meet the convivial business executives to go dancing with after dinner and then discard without pity at the downstairs doorway of the apartment house when her evening was ended. She hardly ever met any she liked enough to want to stay longer with because she hardly ever let herself drink enough to get drunk. The private phone number she gave out was of the city morgue, Melissa MacIntosh related to him in such joyful praise of her confident and exuberant conduct that Yossarian knew he would fall in love with this woman at very first sight provided he never laid eyes on her, and would remain deeply in love until he saw her the second time. But the tall blonde somewhere near forty with the white makeup and black stockings with climbing serpentine patterns had no rich parents or money saved either, and Yossarian asked himself: What was wrong with this lousy earth anyway?
It seemed to him reasonable that everyone toward whom he bore no grudge should have enough money assured to face a future without fear, and he hung his head in his noble reverie of compassion and wanted to take this outstanding, full-bosomed waif of a roommate into his arms to dry her tears and assuage all her anxieties and unzip her dress as he stroked her backside.
That would really be something for the private detectives who'd been following him to write home about, wouldn't it? The first private eye--he took for granted the eye was private--had trailed him right into the hospital during visiting hours and come down immediately with a serious staphylococcus infection that confined him to bed with a poisoning of the blood in a different wing of the hospital with three former visitors to other patients in the hospital who had also come down with serious staphylococcus infections and who, for all Yossarian knew, might be private detectives also. Yossarian could have told all four of them that a hospital was a dangerous place. People died there. A man from Belgium checked in one day and had his throat cut. A private detective dispatched to replace the first was laid low in a day by salmonella food poisoning from an egg salad sandwich eaten in the hospital cafeteria and was now bedridden also and recuperating slowly. Yossarian considered sending flowers. Instead, he signed the name Albert T. Tappman on the get-well card he sent to each. Albert T. Tappman was the name of the chaplain of his old army bomber group, and he wrote that calling down too and wondered what the recipients of these get-well cards thought upon receiving them and where the chaplain had been taken and whether he was being intimidated, abused, starved, or tortured. A day after that he sent second get-well cards to both private detectives and signed them with the name Washington Irving. And the day after that he mailed two more cards, and these he signed Irving Washington.
The second private detective was succeeded by two more, who appeared to be strangers to each other, one of whom seemed as mysteriously curious about investigating all the others as in keeping track of Yossarian.
He wondered what they hoped to find out about him that he would not be willing to tell them outright. If they wanted adultery he would give them adultery, and he began to grow so troubled about Melissa MacIntosh's good heart and precarious economic future that he began to worry about his own future as well and decided to demand the oncologist back for some tip-top guarantees about a major killer and to hear him discourse further perhaps on the supremacy of biology in human activities and the tyranny of the genes in regulating societies and history.
"You're crazy," said Leon.
"Then get me the psychiatrist too."
"You don't have cancer. Why do you want him?"
"To do him a good deed, dope. Don't you believe in good deeds? The poor little fuck is just about the gloomiest bastard I've ever laid eyes on. How many patients do you think he sees in a week to whom he can bring good news? That guy's disasters are among the few around me I might be able to avert."
"They aren't mine," said the joyless oncologist, upon whose small features a foreboding aspect seemed to have settled as naturally as the blackness of night and the gray skies of
winter. "You'd be surprised, though, how many people come to believe they really are my fault. Even colleagues don't like me. Not many people want to talk to me. It may be the reason I'm quiet. I don't get enough practice."
"I like that spirit," said Yossarian, who could not see that he had much. "Does it buck you up to know that sooner or later you are likely to play an important role in my life?"
"Only a little." His name was Dennis Teemer. "Where would you want me to begin?"
"Wherever you want to that is without pain or discomfort," Yossarian answered cheerily.
"You haven't a symptom anywhere that might suggest closer investigation."
"Why must we wait for symptoms?" queried Yossarian, talking down to his specialist. "Is it not conceivable that since we concluded our last explorations something may have originated that is blooming away hardily even as the two of us sit here procrastinating complacently?"
Dennis Teemer went along, with a shimmer of animation. "I guess I have more fun with you than I do with most of my other patients, don't I?"
"I told Leon that."
"But that may be because you're not really my patient," said Dr. Teemer. "What you conjecture is conceivable, of course, Mr. Yossarian. But it is no more likely to be happening to you than to anybody else."
"And what difference does that make to me?" countered Yossarian. "It is not much solace to know we all are susceptible. Leon thinks I'll feel better knowing I'm no worse off than he is. Let's get started."
"Suppose we begin with another chest X ray?"
"God, no!" cried Yossarian in mock alarm. "That might just get one started! You know how I feel about X rays and asbestos."
"And tobacco too. Should I give you a statistic I think you'll relish? Did you know that more Americans die each year of diseases related to smoking than were killed in all of the years of World War II?"
"Yes."