Whenever Garp began imagining, he only saw the bloody Volvo. There were Duncan's screams, and outside he could hear Helen calling; and someone else. He twisted himself from behind the steering wheel and kneeled on the driver's seat; he held Duncan's face in his hands, but the blood would not stop and Garp couldn't see everything that was wrong.
"It's okay," he whispered to Duncan. "Hush, you're going to be all right." But because of his tongue, there were no words--only a soft spray.
Duncan kept screaming, and so did Helen, and someone else kept groaning--the way a dog dreams in its sleep. But what did Garp hear that frightened him so? What else?
"It's all right, Duncan, believe me," he whispered, incomprehensibly. "You're going to be all right." He wiped the blood from the boy's throat with his hand; nothing at the boy's throat was cut, he could see. He wiped the blood from the boy's temples, and saw that they were not bashed in. He kicked open the driver's-side door, to be sure; the door light went on and he could see that one of Duncan's eyes was darting. The eye was looking for help, but Garp could see that the eye could see. He wiped more blood with his hand, but he could not find Duncan's other eye. "It's okay," he whispered to Duncan, but Duncan screamed even louder.
Over his father's shoulder, Duncan had seen his mother at the Volvo's open door. Blood streamed from her gashed nose and her sliced tongue, and she held her right arm as if it had broken off somewhere near her shoulder. But it was the fright in her face that frightened Duncan. Garp turned and saw her. Something else frightened him.
It was not Helen's screaming, it was not Duncan's screaming. And Garp knew that Michael Milton, who was grunting, could grunt himself to death--for all Garp cared. It was something else. It was not a sound. It was no sound. It was the absence of sound.
"Where's Walt?" Helen said, trying to see into the Volvo. She stopped screaming.
"Walt!" cried Garp. He held his breath. Duncan stopped crying.
They heard nothing. And Garp knew Walt had a cold you could hear from the next room--even two rooms away, you could hear that wet rattle in the child's chest.
"Walt!" they screamed.
Both Helen and Garp would whisper to each other, later, that at that moment they imagined Walt with his ears underwater, listening intently to his fingers at play in the bathtub.
"I can still see him," Helen whispered, later.
"All the time," Garp said. "I know."
"I just shut my eyes," said Helen.
"Right," Garp said. "I know."
But Duncan said it best. Duncan said that sometimes it was as if his missing right eye was not entirely gone. "It's like I can still see out of it, sometimes," Duncan said. "But it's like memory, it's not real--what I see."
"Maybe it's become the eye you see your dreams with," Garp told him.
"Sort of," Duncan said. "But it seems so real."
"It's your imaginary eye," Garp said. "That can be very real."
"It's the eye I can still see Walt with," Duncan said. "You know?"
"I know," Garp said.
* * *
--
Many wrestlers' children have hardy necks, but not all the children of wrestlers have necks that are hardy enough.
For Duncan and Helen, now, Garp seemed to have an endless reservoir of gentleness; for a year, he spoke softly to them; for a year, he was never impatient with them. They must have grown impatient with his delicacy. Jenny Fields noticed that the three of them needed a year to nurse each other.
In that year, Jenny wondered, what did they do with the other feelings human beings have? Helen hid them; Helen was very strong. Duncan saw them only with his missing eye. And Garp? He was strong, but not that strong. He wrote a novel called The World According to Bensenhaver, into which all his other feelings flew.
When Garp's editor, John Wolf, read the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver, he wrote to Jenny Fields. "What in hell is going on out there?" Wolf wrote to Jenny. "It is as if Garp's grief has made his heart perverse."
But T. S. Garp felt guided by an impulse as old as Marcus Aurelius, who had the wisdom and the urgency to note that "in the life of a man, his time is but a moment...his sense a dim rushlight."
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THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BENSENHAVER