'Don't worry about it,' Yossarian counseled him as kindly as he could. 'You'll probably be able to find her again. We know where all the whores hang out.'
'Please don't call her that,' Nately begged, looking as though he might cry.
'I'm sorry,' murmured Yossarian.
Aarfy thundered jovially, 'There are hundreds of whores just as good crawling all over the streets. That one wasn't even pretty.' He chuckled mellifluously with resonant disdain and authority. 'Why, you rushed forward to open that door as though you were in love with her.'
'I think I am in love with her,' Nately confessed in a shamed, far-off voice.
Aarfy wrinkled his chubby round rosy forehead in comic disbelief. 'Ho, ho, ho, ho!' he laughed, patting the expansive forest-green sides of his officer's tunic prosperously. 'That's rich. You in love with her? That's really rich.' Aarfy had a date that same afternoon with a Red Cross girl from Smith whose father owned an important milk-of-magnesia plant. 'Now, that's the kind of girl you ought to be associating with, and not with common sluts like that one. Why, she didn't even look clean.'
'I don't care!' Nately shouted desperately. 'And I wish you'd shut up, I don't even want to talk about it with you.'
'Aarfy, shut up,' said Yossarian.
'Ho, ho, ho, ho!' Aarfy continued. 'I just can't imagine what your father and mother would say if they knew you were running around with filthy trollops like that one. Your father is a very distinguished man, you know.'
'I'm not going to tell him,' Nately declared with determination. 'I'm not going to say a word about her to him or Mother until after we're married.'
'Married?' Aarfy's indulgent merriment swelled tremendously. 'Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho! Now you're really talking stupid. Why, you're not even old enough to know what true love is.' Aarfy was an autho
rity on the subject of true love because he had already fallen truly in love with Nately's father and with the prospect of working for him after the war in some executive capacity as a reward for befriending Nately. Aarfy was a lead navigator who had never been able to find himself since leaving college. He was a genial, magnanimous lead navigator who could always forgive the other man in the squadron for denouncing him furiously each time he got lost on a combat mission and led them over concentrations of antiaircraft fire. He got lost on the streets of Rome that same afternoon and never did find the eligible Red Cross girl from Smith with the important milk-of-magnesia plant. He got lost on the mission to Ferrara the day Kraft was shot down and killed, and he got lost again on the weekly milk run to Parma and tried to lead the planes out to sea over the city of Leghorn after Yossarian had dropped his bombs on the undefended inland target and settled back against his thick wall of armor plate with his eyes closed and a fragrant cigarette in his fingertips. Suddenly there was flak, and all at once McWatt was shrieking over the intercom, 'Flak! Flak! Where the hell are we? What the hell's going on?' Yossarian flipped his eyes open in alarm and saw the totally unexpected bulging black puffs of flak crashing down in toward them from high up and Aarfy's complacent melon-round tiny-eyed face gazing out at the approaching cannon bursts with affable bemusement. Yossarian was flabbergasted. His leg went abruptly to sleep. McWatt had started to climb and was yelping over the intercom for instructions. Yossarian sprang forward to see where they were and remained in the same place. He was unable to move. Then he realized he was sopping wet. He looked down at his crotch with a sinking, sick sensation. A wild crimson blot was crawling upward rapidly along his shirt front like an enormous sea monster rising to devour him. He was hit! Separate trickles of blood spilled to a puddle on the floor through one saturated trouser leg like countless unstoppable swarms of wriggling red worms. His heart stopped. A second solid jolt struck the plane. Yossarian shuddered with revulsion at the queer sight of his wound and screamed at Aarfy for help.
'I lost my balls! Aarfy, I lost my balls!' Aarfy didn't hear, and Yossarian bent forward and tugged at his arm. 'Aarfy, help me,' he pleaded, almost weeping, 'I'm hit! I'm hit!' Aarfy turned slowly with a bland, quizzical grin. 'What?'
'I'm hit, Aarfy! Help me!' Aarfy grinned again and shrugged amiably. 'I can't hear you,' he said.
'Can't you see me?' Yossarian cried incredulously, and he pointed to the deepening pool of blood he felt splashing down all around him and spreading out underneath. 'I'm wounded! Help me, for God's sake! Aarfy, help me!'
'I still can't hear you,' Aarfy complained tolerantly, cupping his podgy hand behind the blanched corolla of his ear. 'What did you say?' Yossarian answered in a collapsing voice, weary suddenly of shouting so much, of the whole frustrating, exasperating, ridiculous situation. He was dying, and no one took notice. 'Never mind.'
'What?' Aarfy shouted.
'I said I lost my balls! Can't you hear me? I'm wounded in the groin!'
'I still can't hear you,' Aaxfy chided.
'I said never mind!' Yossarian screamed with a trapped feeling of terror and began to shiver, feeling very cold suddenly and very weak.
Aarfy shook his head regretfully again and lowered his obscene, lactescent ear almost directly into Yossarian's face. 'You'll just have to speak up, my friend. You'll just have to speak up.'
'Leave me alone, you bastard! You dumb, insensitive bastard, leave me alone!' Yossarian sobbed. He wanted to pummel Aarfy, but lacked the strength to lift his arms. He decided to sleep instead and keeled over sideways into a dead faint.
He was wounded in the thigh, and when he recovered consciousness he found McWatt on both knees taking care of him. He was relieved, even though he still saw Aarfy's bloated cherub's face hanging down over McWatt's shoulder with placid interest. Yossarian smiled feebly at McWatt, feeling ill, and asked, 'Who's minding the store?' McWatt gave no sign that he heard. With growing horror, Yossarian gathered in breath and repeated the words as loudly as he could.
McWatt looked up. 'Christ, I'm glad you're still alive!' he exclaimed, heaving an enormous sigh. The good-humored, friendly crinkles about his eyes were white with tension and oily with grime as he kept unrolling an interminable bandage around the bulky cotton compress Yossarian felt strapped burdensomely to the inside of one thigh. 'Nately's at the controls. The poor kid almost started bawling when he heard you were hit. He still thinks you're dead. They knocked open an artery for you, but I think I've got it stopped. I gave you some morphine.'
'Give me some more.'
'It might be too soon. I'll give you some more when it starts to hurt.'
'It hurts now.'
'Oh, well, what the hell,' said McWatt and injected another syrette of morphine into Yossarian's arm.
'When you tell Nately I'm all right...' said Yossarian to McWatt, and lost consciousness again as everything went fuzzy behind a film of strawberry-strained gelatin and a great baritone buzz swallowed him in sound. He came to in the ambulance and smiled encouragement at Doc Daneeka's weevil-like, glum and overshadowed countenance for the dizzy second or two he had before everything went rose-petal pink again and then turned really black and unfathomably still.
Yossarian woke up in the hospital and went to sleep. When he woke up in the hospital again, the smell of ether was gone and Dunbar was lying in pajamas in the bed across the aisle maintaining that he was not Dunbar but a fortiori. Yossarian thought he was cracked. He curled his lip skeptically at Dunbar's bit of news and slept on it fitfully for a day or two, then woke up while the nurses were elsewhere and eased himself out of bed to see for himself. The floor swayed like the floating raft at the beach and the stitches on the inside of his thigh bit into his flesh like fine sets of fish teeth as he limped across the aisle to peruse the name on the temperature card on the foot of Dunbar's bed, but sure enough, Dunbar was right: he was not Dunbar any more but Second Lieutenant Anthony F. Fortiori.