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supraman.’
       ‘Superman?’ Clevinger cried. ‘Superman?’
       ‘Supraman,’ Yossarian corrected.
       ‘Hey, fellas, cut it out,’ Nately begged with embarrassment.
‘Everybody’s looking at us.’
       ‘You’re crazy,’ Clevinger shouted vehemently, his eyes
filling with tears. ‘You’ve got a Jehovah complex.’
       ‘I think everyone is Nathaniel.’ Clevinger arrested himself
in mid-declamation, suspiciously. ‘Who’s Nathaniel?’
       ‘Nathaniel who?’ inquired Yossarian innocently.
       Clevinger skirted the trap neatly. ‘You think everybody is
Jehovah. You’re no better than Raskolnkov—’
       ‘Who?’
       ‘—yes, Raskolnikov, who—’
       ‘Raskolnikov!’
       ‘—who—I mean it—who felt he could justify killing an old
woman—’
       ‘No better than?’
       ‘—yes, justify, that’s right—with an ax! And I can prove it
to you!’ Gasping furiously for air, Clevinger enumerated Yossarian’s symptoms:
an unreasonable belief that everybody around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse
to machine-gun strangers, retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion
that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him.
       But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to
Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong. Everywhere he
looked was a nut, and it was all a sensible young gentleman like himself could
do to maintain his perspective amid so much madness. And it was urgent that he
did, for he knew his life was in peril.
       Yossarian eyed everyone he saw warily when he returned to the
squadron from the hospital. Milo was away, too, in Smyrna for the fig harvest.
The mess hall ran smoothly in Milo ’s absence. Yossarian had responded
ravenously to the pungent aroma of spicy lamb while he was still in the cab of
the ambulance bouncing down along the knotted road that lay like a broken
suspender between the hospital and the squadron. There was shish-kabob for lunch,
huge, savory hunks of spitted meat sizzling like the devil over charcoal after
marinating seventy-two hours in a secret mixture Milo had stolen from a crooked
trader in the Levant, served with Iranian rice and asparagus tips Parmesan,
followed by cherries jubilee for dessert and then steaming cups of fresh coffee
with Benedictine and brandy. The meal was served in enormous helpings on damask
tablecloths by the skilled Italian waiters Major—de Coverley had kidnaped from
the mainland and given to Milo.
       Yossarian gorged himself in the mess hall until he thought he
would explode and then sagged back in a contented stupor, his mouth filmy with
a succulent residue. None of the officers in the squadron had ever eaten so
well as they ate regularly in Milo ’s mess hall, and Yossarian wondered awhile
if it wasn’t perhaps all worth it. But then he burped and remembered that they
were trying to kill him, and he sprinted out of the mess hall wildly and ran
looking for Doc Daneeka to have himself taken off combat duty and sent home. He
found Doc Daneeka in sunlight, sitting on a high stool outside his tent.
       ‘Fifty missions,’ Doc Daneeka told him, shaking his head.
‘The colonel wants fifty missions.’
       ‘But I’ve only got forty-four!’ Doc Daneeka was unmoved. He was
a sad, birdlike man with the spatulate face and scrubbed, tapering features of
a well-groomed rat.
       ‘Fifty missions,’ he repeated, still shaking his head. ‘The
colonel wants fifty missions.’

Catch-22
    Havermeyer
       Actually, no one was around when Yossarian
returned from the hospital but Orr and the dead man in Yossarian’s tent. The
dead man in Yossarian’s tent was a pest, and Yossarian didn’t like him, even
though he had never seen him. Having him lying around all day annoyed Yossarian
so much that he had gone to the orderly room several times to complain to
Sergeant Towser, who refused to admit that the dead man even existed, which,