Johnny Got His Gun

by Dalton Trumbo

  All he knew was that on a day in September in 1918 time stopped. There was a howl somewhere and he dived into a dugout and things blotted out and he lost time. From that instant to the present he might as well figure that there was a chunk of time he could never regain. Even if he discovered a way to check up on time from now on that which was gone was lost forever and he would always be living behind the rest of the world because of it. He could remember nothing after the explosion until he woke up and realized he was deaf. His wounds were very serious and he might have been unconscious for two weeks two months six months before he awakened who could tell? And then afterwards the faintings in and out and the long periods when he simply lay in between thinking and dreaming and imagining things.

  When you’re completely unconscious there is no such thing as time it goes like the snap of your finger you’re awake and zip you’re awake again with no idea of how long a time passed between. Then when you’re fainting in and out time must still seem shorter than to a normal person because you’re really half crazy and half awake and time bunches up on you. They said his mother was in labor three days when she had him and yet when it was all over she figured she had been in labor for about ten hours. Even with pain and everything time had seemed shorter to her than it really was. Now if all this was true he probably had lost more time than he suspected. He might even have lost a year two years. The idea gave him a funny prickling feeling. It was a kind of fear yet not like any ordinary fear. It was more of a panic it was the panicky dread of losing yourself even from yourself. It made him a little stick at his stomach.

  The whole idea had been taking form in his head for a long while the idea of trapping time and getting himself back into the world but he hadn’t been able to concentrate en it. He had drifted off into dreams or he had found himself suddenly in the middle of thinking of something entirely different. Once he thought he had the problem solved by the visits of the nurse. He didn’t know how many times she came into his room every twenty-four hours but she must have a schedule. All he had to do was to count the seconds then the minutes then the hours between each visit she made until he had twenty-four hours counted and after that he would be able to figure the days simply by counting her visits. There would be no danger of a slip-up because the vibration of her footsteps always awakened him. Then just in case the spacing of her visits might be changed sometime he could figure out things like the number of his bowel movements each day and he could also figure out the other things which happened maybe only two or three or four times a week like his baths and the changing of his bed clothes and mask. Then if any of these things changed he could check up on it by the others.

  It took a long time to make his mind stick on the idea long enough to figure out this formula because he wasn’t used to thinking but in the end he thought it through and started putting it into effect. The instant the nurse left him he began to count. He counted to sixty which meant a minute as nearly as he would ever be able to figure it. Then in one side of his mind he checked up the minute he had measured and began counting from one to sixty again. The first time he tried it he got up to eleven minutes before his mind slipped off the track and his figures were lost. It happened like this. He was counting along on the seconds when all of a sudden he thought maybe you’re counting too fast and then he thought remember it seems to take a sprinter an awful long time to run a hundred yards yet he does it in only ten seconds. Then he slowed down his counting while he watched an imaginary sprinter step off a hundred yards and then he was in the middle of a high school track meet Shale City against Montrose watching Ted Smith run the hundred yard dash and win it with his head high lunging for the tape and all the kids from Shale City yelling their heads off and then he had lost count.

  That meant he had to wait all over again for the nurse because she was his starting point. It seemed like hundreds maybe thousands of times that he got started out and then lost track and had to sink back angrily into the darkness of his mind and wait for the vibration of her feet and the feel of her hands on him again so he could start anew. Once he got up to a hundred and fourteen minutes and thought I wonder how long a hundred and fourteen minutes is in hours and stopped in spite of himself to figure it out and discovered it was an hour and fifty-four minutes and then he remembered a phrase fifty-four forty or fight and almost went crazy trying to recall where it came from and what it meant. He couldn’t remember and when he got back to the counting he realized that he had lost a lot of minutes in thinking and so even though he had broken a record he was no farther along than when the idea of time first entered his mind.

  On that day he realized he was tackling the thing from the wrong angle because to figure it out he would have to stay awake for twenty-four hours in a stretch counting steadily all the time without making a mistake. In the first place it was almost impossible for a normal person to stay awake counting that long much less a guy whose body was two-thirds asleep to begin with. And in the second place he couldn’t help making a mistake because he couldn’t keep the minute figures separate in his mind from the second figures. He would be counting along on the seconds when all of a sudden he would get panicky and think how many minutes was it I had? And even though he was almost positive it was twenty-two or thirty-seven or whatever it was the tinge of doubt that had first caused him to ask the question hung on and then he was sure he was wrong and by that time he had lost count again.

  He never succeeded in counting the time from one visit to the next but he began to realize that even if he did he would then have to keep three sets of figures the seconds the minutes and the count of the nurse’s visits until twenty-four hours were completed. Then he would have to stop sometime to reduce the minutes to hours because when the minute figures got too high he wouldn’t be able to remember them at all. So with the hours he would have a fourth set of figures. In counting just the seconds and minutes which was as far as he ever got he tried to pretend that they were actual figures that he could see on a blackboard. He pretended he was in a room with a blackboard on the right side and another on the left. He would keep the minutes on the left hand blackboard and then they would be there when he needed to add another to them. But it didn’t work. He couldn’t remember. Each time he failed he could feel choking gasps in his chest and stomach and he knew that he was crying.

  He decided to forget all about the counting and to check up on simpler things. It didn’t take long to discover that he had a bowel movement about once in every three visits from the nurse although sometimes it took four visits. But that didn’t tell him anything. He remembered that doctors used to say twice a day was healthy but the people doctors were talking about had normal food and they ate it with their mouths and swallowed it with their throats. The stuff he was fed might give him a much higher average than ordinary people. Then again just lying in his bed from one year to the next he might not need much food and so his score might be much less than ordinary people. He also discovered that his bath and change of bed clothes came about once in every twelve visits. It was thirteen once and another time only ten so he couldn’t count on it absolutely but it was at least a figure. He was a little surprised to discover that where he had first thought of seconds and minutes he was now thinking of days and even series of days. That was how he got on the right track.

  It came to him while he was lying and feeling with the skin of his neck the line that the covers made at his throat. He got to imagining them a mountain range snuggling down against his throat. He had one or two strangling dreams from them but he kept on thinking. He got to thinking that the only part of him that wasn’t covered up that was free that was just as it should be was the skin on the sides of his neck which went from the cover-line to his ears and the half of his forehead above the mask. That skin and his hair. He says to himself maybe there is some way you could use those patches of skin they are free to the air and they are healthy and a guy with as few healthy things as you’ve got should put them to use. So he got to thinking of what a man did
with skin and he realized that it was used to feel with. But that didn’t seem enough. He thought about skin some more and then he remembered that you could also sweat with it and that when you started sweating you were hot but by the time the sweat covered your skin you were…cool from the air drying the sweat. That was how he got the idea of heat and cold and that was how he came to wait for the sunrise.

  The whole thing was so simple that his stomach grew hard with excitement just from thinking about it. All he had to do was to feel with his skin. When the temperature changed from cool to warm he would know it was sunrise and the beginning of a day. Then he would check right through counting the nurse’s visits to the next sunrise and then he would have the number of her visits per day and he would forever afterward be able to tell time.

  He started trying to stay awake until the change in temperature occurred but half a dozen times running he fell asleep before it happened. Other times he got confused thinking to himself is it hot now or is it cool what kind of a change am I waiting for maybe I am running a fever maybe I am too excited and am sweating from excitement and that would spoil the whole thing oh please god don’t let me sweat don’t let me run a temperature let me know whether I’m hot now or whether I’m cold. Give me some idea of when the sunrise is coming and then I’ll be able to catch it. And then after a long long while with a lot of false starts he said to himself here sit down and think this thing over seriously. Right now you’re panicky you’re too anxious and you’re blundering. Each time you make a mistake you’ve lost more time and that is one thing you can’t afford to lose. Think what usually happens in the morning in a hospital and try to figure out what follows that. That’s easy he said to himself in the mornings in a hospital nurses try to get their heavy work done. That meant that he was bathed and his bed clothes were probably changed in the morning. He would have to take that as his starting point. He would have to assume a few things and the first assumption would be that this was true. He already knew that the bath and change of bedding came on an average of once in every twelve visits.

  Now he had to begin assuming again. You would think in a hospital like this that your bedding would be changed at least every other day. Maybe it was once a day but he didn’t think so because at the rate of one change in every twelve visits that would make the nurse visit him every two hours and there was so little to do he couldn’t see why her trips should be that often. So he would figure that every two days she bathed him and changed his bedclothes and that she did this in the morning. If this was true then she came into his room six times in a day and night. That would make it every four hours. The simplest schedule for her to follow would be to come in at eight twelve four eight twelve four and so on. She would probably change the bedding as early as possible in the morning so that would be at eight o’clock.

  Now he said to himself what is it you want to try to check up on the sunrise first or the sunset? He decided it was the sunrise because when the sun sets the warmth of the day usually hangs on and the change is so slow that those two pieces of skin on his neck might not be able to catch it. But in the early dawn everything is cool and almost the first flash of sunlight should give some kind of heat. At least the change should be more complete in the morning than at night so he would catch the sunrise.

  He had a panicky minute when he thought what if you are on the west side of the hospital and the setting sun comes in full on the bed and then you’ll mistake that for sunrise? What if you’re on the north or south side of the hospital and never get the direct sunlight at all? Maybe that would be simpler. Then he realized that even if he were on the west side and caught the heat of the setting sun he would still have the visits of the nurse to check on to tell him which was which because by now he was convinced she changed the bed clothes in the morning.

  Now you damn fool he said to himself you’re getting things so complicated you’ll never come out if you don’t stop. The first thing to do is to catch the sunrise. Next time the nurse comes into the room and bathes you and changes the bed clothes you are going to assume it is eight o’clock in the morning. Then you can think about anything you want to without worrying or you can even go to sleep because each time she comes in she awakens you. You will wait and count five more visits and that should make the fifth one somewhere around four o’clock in the morning. Four o’clock in the morning is just before sunrise so after the fifth visit from the nurse you will stay awake and concentrate every bit of your mind and skin on the job of catching the temperature change when it comes. Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t. If it does all you have to do is to wait six more trips and see if there is another sunrise and if there is you’ll have the number of trips every twenty-four hours and that will give you a way of setting up a calendar around the nurse’s visits. The important thing is to catch two sunrises in a row and then you have trapped time forever then you can begin to catch up with the world.

  It was eight visits later before he felt the nurse’s hands on him as she took off his nightshirt and began to sponge his stump with warm water. He felt his heart quicken and his blood send a warm glow of excitement to his skin because he was going to start out once more to trap time only now he was doing it smartly he was doing it wisely. He felt himself rolled over on his side and held there while the bed quivered from the nurse’s work. Then he was rolled back between crisp cool sheets. The nurse thumped around at the foot of the bed for a minute. He felt the vibrations of her footsteps as she walked from place to place in the room. Then the vibrations receded and there was a sharp little tremor of the door closing and he knew he was alone.

  Calm down he said to himself calm down because you haven’t proved anything yet. You may have this thing doped out all wrong. Maybe the things you’ve assumed are all wrong. If they are then you’ve got to make a whole new set of assumptions so don’t get so cocky. Just calm down and lie back and count five more visits. He dozed a little and he thought of a lot of things but always on the blackboard in his mind he kept the number two or three or whatever it was and finally the fifth visit came with the nurse’s feet vibrating against the floor and her hands on him and on the bed. According to the things he had figured out it should now be four o’clock in the morning and in a little while depending on whether it was winter or summer or fall or spring the sun would rise.

  When she left he began concentrating. He didn’t dare fall asleep. He didn’t dare permit his mind to wander for one minute. He didn’t dare let the suffocating excitement that was all over him and inside of him interfere with his thinking and feeling as he lay there waiting for the sunrise. He had come on the trail of something so precious and so exciting that it was almost like being born all over again into the world. He lay there and thought in one hour three hours certainly in ten hours I will feel a change on my skin and then I will know whether it is day or night.

  It seemed that time was standing perfectly still just to spite him. He got panicky little spasms when he felt sure the change had occurred without him catching it and with each little spasm he seemed to get sick to his stomach. Then there would be a clear period when he would very calmly feel with his skin and convince himself that he was sane that he hadn’t fallen asleep and missed it that his mind hadn’t wandered that the change was still ahead.

  And then all of a sudden he realized it was coming. The muscles in his back and thighs and stomach stiffened because he knew it was coming. He could almost feel the sweat squeeze out of his body as he tried to hold his breath lest he miss it. The pieces of skin on each side of his neck and the half of his forehead seemed to tingle as if they had been paralyzed and now were getting a fresh supply of blood. It felt as if the pores of his neck were actually reaching out to grab at the change to suck it in.

  The whole thing was so slow so gradual that it seemed impossible it was happening at all. There was no danger now of his mind wandering or of falling asleep. It would be like falling asleep in the middle of a first kiss. It would be like falling asleep in the middle of running
a hundred yard dash and winning it. The only thing he could do was wait and feel out with his skin and catch every second of the change every slow movement of time and temperature as they offered him a return of life.

  It seemed like he lay there stiff and expectant and excited for hours. There were tunes when he was sure that the nerves of his neck were not registering when it seemed they had suddenly gone numb and that the change might slip away from him. And then there were other times when it felt as if his nerves had jabbed through so near the surface of his skin that there was actual pain sharp and fine and penetrating as they groped to register the change.

  And then the thing began to happen swiftly and more swiftly and although he knew he was in a sheltered hospital room as far removed as possible from changes in temperature it seemed to him when it came that it came in a blaze of heat. It felt like his neck was seared burned scorched from the heat of the rising sun. It had penetrated his room. He had recaptured time—he had won his fight. The muscles of his body relaxed. In his mind in his heart in whatever parts of him that were left he was singing singing singing.

  It was dawn.

  All over the world or at least all over the country to which he had been brought the sun was rising in the east and people were getting out of bed and the hills were turning pink and birds were singing. All over Europe or all over America it was sun-up. What the hell did it matter if you didn’t have any nose so long as you could smell the dawn? He lay without nostrils and he sniffed. He caught the smell of dew on grass and he shivered because it was so delicious. He shaded his eyes against the first bright rays of the morning sun and looked off and he saw the high mountains of Colorado in the east and he saw the sun coming over them and he saw colors creeping down their sides and in the nearer distance he saw rolling brown hills which became pink and lavender like the inside of a seashell. And still closer in the field in which he stood and clear up to his ankles he saw the green grass and it was sparkling and he burst into tears. He thanked god that he could see the dawn.