‘I didn’t grab Nurse Duckett by the bosom,’ said Yossarian.
‘I grabbed her by the bosom,’ said Dunbar.
‘Are you both crazy?’ the doctor cried shrilly, backing away in paling confusion.
‘Yes, he really is crazy, Doc,’ Dunbar assured him.
‘Every night he dreams he’s holding a live fish in his hands.’
The doctor stopped in his tracks with a look of elegant amazement and distaste, and the ward grew still.
‘He does what?’ he demanded.
‘He dreams he’s holding a live fish in his hand.’
‘What kind of fish?’ the doctor inquired sternly of Yossarian.
‘I don’t know,’ Yossarian answered.
‘I can’t tell one kind of fish from another.’
‘In which hand do you hold them?’
‘It varies,’ answered Yossarian.
‘It varies with the fish,’ Dunbar added helpfully.
The colonel turned and stared down at Dunbar suspiciously with a narrow squint.
‘Yes?
And how come you seem to know so much about it?’
‘I’m in the dream,’ Dunbar answered without cracking a smile.
The colonel’s face flushed with embarrassment.
He glared at them both with cold, unforgiving resentment.
‘Get up off the floor and into your bed,’ he directed Dunbar through thin lips.
‘And I don’t want to hear another word about this dream from either one of you.
I’ve got a man on my staff to listen to disgusting bilge like this.’
‘Just why do you think,’ carefully inquired Major Sanderson, the soft and thickset smiling staff psychiatrist to whom the colonel had ordered Yossarian sent, ‘that Colonel Ferredge finds your dream disgusting?’
Yossarian replied respectfully. ‘I suppose it’s either some quality in the dream or some quality in Colonel Ferredge.’
‘That’s very well put,’ applauded Major Sanderson, who wore squeaking GI shoes and had charcoal-black hair that stood up almost straight.
‘For some reason,’ he confided, ‘Colonel Ferredge has always reminded me of a sea gull.
He doesn’t put much faith in psychiatry, you know.’
‘You don’t like sea gulls, do you?’ inquired Yossarian.
‘No, not very much,’ admitted Major Sanderson with a sharp, nervous laugh and pulled at his pendulous second chin lovingly as though it were a long goatee.
‘I think your dream is charming, and I hope it recurs frequently so that we can continue discussing it.
Would you like a cigarette?’
He smiled when Yossarian declined.
‘Just why do you think,’ he asked knowingly, ‘that you have such a strong aversion to accepting a cigarette from me?’
‘I put one out a second ago.
It’s still smoldering in your ash tray.’
Major Sanderson chuckled.
‘That’s a very ingenious explanation.
But I suppose we’ll soon discover the true reason.’
He tied a sloppy double bow in his opened shoelace and then transferred a lined yellow pad from his desk to his lap.
‘This fish you dream about. Let’s talk about that.
It’s always the same fish, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Yossarian replied.
‘I have trouble recognizing fish.’
‘What does the fish remind you of?’
‘Other fish.’
‘And what do other fish remind you of?’
‘Other fish.’
Major Sanderson sat back disappointedly.
‘Do you like fish?’