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dress. She touched her finger to Garp’s lips.
    On the other side of Garp’s white-shrouded bed was a Vital Organ patient on his way to becoming an Absentee. He had lost most of his lower intestine and his rectum; now a kidney was giving him trouble and his liver was driving him crazy. He had terrible nightmares that he was being forced to urinate and defecate, though this was ancient history for him. He was actually quite unaware when he did those things, and he did them through tubes into rubber bags. He groaned frequently and, unlike Garp, he groaned in whole words.
    “Shit,” he groaned.
    “Garp?” Jenny whispered. She stepped out of her slip and her panties; she took off her bra and pulled back the sheet.
    “Christ,” said the External, softly; his lips were blistered with burns.
    “Goddamn shit!” cried the Vital Organ man.
    “Garp,” said Jenny Fields. She took hold of his erection and straddled him.
    “Aaa,” said Garp. Even the
r
was gone. He was reduced to a vowel sound to express his joy or his sadness. “Aaa,” he said, as Jenny drew him inside her and sat on him with all her weight.
    “Garp?” she asked. “Okay? Is that good, Garp?”
    “
Good
,” he agreed, distinctly. But it was only a word from his wrecked memory, thrown clear for a moment when he came inside her. It was the first and last true word that Jenny Fields heard him speak: good. As he shrank and his vital stuff seeped from her, he was once again reduced to Aaa’s; he closed his eyes and slept. When Jenny offered him her breast, he wasn’t hungry.
    “God!” called the External, being very gentle with the
d
; his tongue had been burned, too.
    “Piss!” snarled the Vital Organ man.
    Jenny Fields washed Garp and herself with warm water and soap in a white enamel hospital bowl. She wasn’t going to douche, of course, and she had no doubt that the magic had worked. She felt more receptive than prepared soil—the nourished earth—and she had felt Garp shoot up inside her as generously as a hose in summer (as if he could water a lawn).
    She never did it with him again. There was no reason. She didn’t enjoy it. From time to time she helped him with her hand, and when he cried for it, she gave him her breast, but in a few weeks he had no more erections. When they took the bandages off his hands, they noticed that even the healing process seemed to be working in reverse; they wrapped him back up again. He lost all interest in nursing. His dreams struck Jenny as the dreams a fish might have. He was back in the womb, Jenny knew; he resumed a fetal position, tucked up small in the center of the bed. He made no sound at all. One morning Jenny watched him kick with his small, weak feet; she imagined she felt a kick
inside
. Though it was too soon for the real thing, she knew the real thing was on its way.
    Soon Garp stopped kicking. He still got his oxygen by breathing air with his lungs, but Jenny knew this was simply an example of human adaptability. He wouldn’t eat; they had to feed him intravenously, so once again he was attached to a kind of umbilical cord. Jenny anticipated his last phase with some anxiousness. Would there be a struggle at the end, like the sperm’s frantic struggle? Would the sperm shield be lifted and the naked egg wait, expectantly, for death? In little Garp’s return trip, how would his
soul
at last divide? But the phase passed without Jenny’s observation. One day, when she was off duty, Technical Sergeant Garp died.
    “When
else
could he have died?” Garp has written. “With my mother off duty was the only way he could escape.”
    “Of course I
felt
something when he died,” Jenny Fields wrote in her famous autobiography. “But the best of him was inside me. That was the best thing for both of us, the only way he could go on living, the only way I wanted to have a child. That the rest of the world finds this an immoral act only shows me that the rest of the world doesn’t respect the rights of