“Jesus, Garp,” the pilot said. Some holes and glass cracks had been visible in the porthole of the ball turret. The medic now unzipped the porthole of the side car's canopy and peered into Garp's eyes. Something was wrong with Garp's eyes, because they rolled around independently of each other; the medic thought that the world, for Garp, was probably looming up, then going by, then looming up again—if Garp could see at all. What the pilot and the medic couldn't know, at the time, was that some sharp and slender shards from the flak blast had damaged one of the oculomotor nerves in Garp's brain—and other parts of his brain as well. The oculomotor nerve consists chiefly of motor fibers that innervate most of the muscles of the eyeball. As for the rest of Garp's brain, he had received some cuts and slashes a lot like a prefrontal lobotomy—though it was rather careless surgery.
The medic had a great fear of how carelessly a lobotomy had been performed on Sergeant Garp, and for that reason he thought against taking off the blood sodden flight hat which was stuck to Garp and yanked down to where it touched a taut, shiny knob that appeared, now, to be growing on his forehead. Everyone looked around for the medic's motorcyclist, but he was off vomiting somewhere and the medic supposed he would have to find someone to sit in the sidecar with Garp while he drove the motorcycle himself.
“Garp?” Garp said to the medic, trying his new word.
“Garp,” the medic confirmed. Garp seemed pleased. He had both his small hands on his impressive erection when he successfully masturbated.
“Garp!” he barked. There was joy in his voice, but also surprise. He rolled his eyes at his audience, begging the world to loom up and hold still. He was unsure of what he'd done. “Garp?” he asked, doubtfully.
The pilot patted his arm and nodded to the others of the flight and landing crew, as if to say: Let's give a bit of support to the sergeant, men. Please, let's make him feel at home. And the men, respectfully dumbstruck by Garp's ejaculation, all said, “Garp! Garp! Garp!” to him—a reassuring, seal-like chorus intent on putting Garp at ease.
Garp nodded his head, happily, but the medic held his arm and whispered anxiously to him, “No! Don't move your head, okay? Garp? Please don't move your head.” Garp's eyes roamed past the pilot and the medic, who waited for them to come around again. “Easy does it, Garp,” the pilot whispered. “Just sit tight, okay?”
Garp's face radiated pure peace. With both hands holding his dying erection, the little sergeant looked as if he had done just the thing that the situation called for.
They could do nothing for Sergeant Garp in England. He was lucky to have been brought home to Boston long before the end of the war. Some senator was actually responsible. An editorial in a Boston newspaper had accused the U.S. Navy of transporting wounded servicemen back home only if the wounded came from wealthy and important American families. In an effort to quell such a vile rumor, a U.S. senator claimed that if any of the severely wounded were lucky enough to get back to America, “even an orphan would get to make the trip—just like anyone else.” There was then some scurrying around to come up with a wounded orphan, to prove the senator's point, but they came up with a perfect person.
Not only was Technical Sergeant Garp an orphan; he was an idiot with a one-word vocabulary, so he was not complaining to the press. And in all the photographs they took, Gunner Garp was smiling.
When the drooling sergeant was brought to Boston Mercy, Jenny Fields had trouble categorizing him. He was clearly an Absentee, more docile than a child, but she wasn't sure how much else was wrong with him.
“Hello. How are you?” she asked him, when they wheeled him—grinning—into the ward.
“Garp!” he barked. The oculomotor nerve had been partially restored, and his eyes now leapt, rather than rolled, but his hands were wrapped in gauze mittens, the result of Garp's playing in an accidental fire that broke out in the hospital compound aboard his transport ship. He'd seen the flames and had reached out his hands to them, spreading some of the flames up to his face; he'd singed off his eyebrows. He looked a lot like a shaved owl, to Jenny.
With the burns, Garp was an External and an Absentee all at once. Also, with his hands so heavily bandaged, he had lost the ability to masturbate, an activity that his papers said he pursued frequently and successfully—and without any self-consciousness. Those who'd observed him closely, since his accident with the ship's fire, feared that the childish gunner was becoming depressed—his one adult pleasure taken from him, at least until his hands healed.
It was possible, of course, that Garp had Vital Organ damage as well. Many fragments had entered his head; many of them were too delicately located to be removed. Sergeant Garp's brain damage might not stop with his crude lobotomy; his internal destruction could be progressing. “Our general deterioration is complicated enough,” Garp wrote, “without the introduction of flak to our systems.”
There'd been a patient before Sergeant Garp whose head had been similarly penetrated. He'd been fine for months, just talking to himself and occasionally peeing in his bed. Then he started to lose his hair; he had trouble completing his sentences. Just before he died, he began to develop breasts.
Given the evidence, the shadows, and the white needles in the X rays, Gunner Garp was probably a Goner. But to Jenny Fields he looked very nice. A small, neat man, the former ball turret gunner was as innocent and straightforward in his demands as a two-year-old. He cried “Garp!” when he was hungry and “Garp!” when he was glad; he asked “Garp?” when something puzzled him, or when addressing strangers, and he said “Garp” without the question mark when he recognized you. He usually did what he was told, but be couldn't be trusted; he forgot easily, and if one time he was as obedient as a six-year-old, another time he was as mindlessly curious as if he were one and a half.
His depressions, which were well documented in his transport papers, seemed to occur simultaneously with his erections. At these moments he would clamp his poor, grown-up peter between his gauzy, mittened hands and weep. He wept because the gauze didn't feel as good as his short memory of his hands, and also because it hurt his hands to touch anything. It was then that Jenny Fields would come sit with him. She would rub his back between his shoulder blades, until he tipped back his head like a cat, and she'd talk to him all the while, her voice friendly and full of exciting shifts of accent. Most nurses droned to their patients—a steady, changeless voice intent on producing sleep, but Jenny knew that it wasn't sleep Garp needed. She knew he was only a baby, and he was bored—he needed some distraction. So Jenny entertained him. She played the radio for him, but some of the programs upset Garp; no one knew why. Other programs gave him terrific erections, which led to his depressions, and so forth. One program, just once, gave Garp a wet dream, which so surprised and pleased him that he was always eager to see the radio. But Jenny couldn't find that program again, she couldn't repeat the performance. She knew that if she could plug poor Garp into the wet-dream program, her job and his life would be much happier. But it wasn't that easy.
She gave up trying to teach him a new word. When she fed him and she saw that he liked what he was eating, she'd say, “Good! That's good.”
“Garp!” he'd agree.
And when he spat out food on his bib and made a terrible face, she'd say, “Bad! That stuff's bad, right?”
“Garp!” he'd gag.
The first sign Jenny had of his deterioration was when he seemed to lose the G. One morning he greeted her with an “Arp.”