The World According To Garp Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Garp,” said Garp, as if he had just learned the word. The pilot nodded to Garp, encouraging him to remember his name. Garp smiled. “Garp,” he said. He seemed to think this was how people greeted each other. Not hello, hello!—but Garp, Garp!
    “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