Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  The echo of the final chord caught Dr. Sear’s voice still pitched loud. “… can’t be proved,” he was asserting; then he went on quickly in an audible whisper: “It’s not the kind of thing you reason about, my dear: you believe it or you don’t.”

  Stoker poked me in the side and advised me to “make it short” lest Croaker interrupt the ceremonies. While I pronounced Words of Passage over the body, he declared, he would turn on the closed-circuit Telerama, as was his wont at the end of a Spring-Carnival party, so that the assemblage could watch the Sunrise Service on Founder’s Hill, and the first rays of morning strike Tower Clock.

  I nodded shortly, almost angrily, neither knowing nor caring what closed-circuit Telerama might be. My eyes were strong with tears now, and I was obliged to clutch G. Herrold’s fleece, as well as lean upon my stick for support. A long and desolating day had been this first of my Grand-Tutorhood, whose dawn seemed ages past! Stunned with liquor and fatigue, I leaned on my friend for the last time and felt to the full his responsibility for my life, and mine for his death. Now I resented Croaker and Stoker and Anastasia too, the chance encounter in George’s Gorge and its fatal issue—which was to say, at last I was appalled by the monstrous ease of my seduction, my heartless casting-off of Max, my forswearing of every bond and precept to carouse at my savior’s bier and lust for the tart who had brought him to it. Late in the day, late in the day, to come to mourning!

  “Omniscient Founder,” I began—but no words followed. I was not used to invoking that name; in truth I’d never before addressed Him or much pondered who He was, beyond imagining Him a kind of super-Max—which kidly image no more served. The guards growled. Those guests nearby who had paused to hear me shuffled and turned. Suddenly I perspired all over; my insides sank. At the same moment when I reached to take the shophar from G. Herrold, a guard tramped down on something with his booted foot: instantly the cushions parted, swinging down like double trap-doors into the bier itself, which was revealed to be a chute. G. Herrold folded in the middle and slid into the searing air that blasted up; for part of a second his fingers gripped the shophar still, and pulled me after; I jerked back, blinded and terrified, and the horn came free. One thump I heard, far down in the awful drop, before the cushions sprang into place with a click. The crowd-noise welled. I believed I would go mad. I raised the shophar and blew blind honks, horn-rips that I wished would burst my head.

  “Olé!” they cried behind.

  As if responding to my note the horns of the orchestra began a grand chorale, its measured chords resounding in all my nerves. Anastasia was before me, led onto the dais by the Sears; we regarded each other with brimming eyes. Mrs. Sear hugged my arm and declared, “Well, I believe in him.” Her tone was petulant, as if to scold Anastasia. “I think he’s cute.”

  “We’ve almost got you a convert,” Dr. Sear said lightly. “I told her that belief has to come before believability, but it must not sound convincing when I say it.”

  I shook off their hands. The horns took up my pain and gave it back in gold sonorities. Imperious, austere, nobly suffering, they spoke both to and for me. Even as I slipped the shophar’s lanyard over my head, a red bulb lighted in the tassel of the pull-cord.

  “Ready!” cried one of the guards.

  But now the floodlights dimmed and the waiting party murmured as on the far wall a great screen glowed, blinked hugely, and focused into a picture: a single shaft, like a stark stone finger, pointed against a pale gray sky; winding towards it up a dark slope in the foreground was a procession of flickering lights, and from the column-top itself a larger flame roared. A new sound burst into the room, as it seemed from all directions, blending with and mounting over the splendid brass.

  “That’s the dawn-service upstairs on the Hill,” Dr. Sear remarked for my benefit. “Big ceremony for the new spring registrants. They run the organ on natural steam from down here and use the tunnels for resonance. Superb bass response.”

  Anastasia moved to me in the dim light, stirred no doubt as I was by the sound and spectacle. “Your poor friend,” she said.

  I could not find my voice. Mrs. Sear drew us closer.

  “That’s the place where Enos Enoch passed on,” Anastasia said, referring to the hilltop. “For all studentdom.”

  I shook my head. “Only for the kids who believed in Him.”

  “Come on,” Mrs. Sear insisted, reaching as if to unbelt Anastasia’s robe. The girl pressed against me to forestall her, and we found ourselves kissing—stiffly, then not so. Abruptly she turned her face away.

  “I want to believe you!” she said, much distressèd. “I almost can!”

  From behind me somewhere Stoker instructed me that the whistle was ready when I was, and bade me not delay. “Take her to the couch, Heddy,” he said.

  “I’m trying,” Mrs. Sear fretted. “Come on, dears!”

  “You must make yourself believe,” Dr. Sear said pleasantly to Anastasia. “Matter of will, actually.”

  But she shook her head. “It’s not right. Especially at a funeral service.”

  Before I could inquire what exactly was afoot, Stoker himself came up on the dais and firmly ordered his wife to go with Dr. and Mrs. Sear. She hesitated, her face distraught, and then permitted herself to be led to the bier. There were a few olés and some scattered applause—whether for her, or a newly roused Croaker, or something on the screen, I was too grieved to care.

  “Now,” Stoker said briskly. “You know what service means, George; I’ve heard you use the word yourself. Well, that’s the Spring Sunrise Service going on on the Hill—you can’t see the actual servicing because it’s too dark. And when somebody important dies we have a Memorial Service in his honor. Life over Death, all that sort of thing. Usually private, you know, between married relatives, but since you’re the Grand Tutor … Blow the whistle as soon as you’re done.”

  With a clap on the shoulder he took me to the couch, beside which Anastasia stood and would not let Mrs. Sear unbelt her.

  “It’s not so, George!” she said. “There’s no such custom at all, except at these parties. Believe me!”

  But the swelling organ bore my doubts away. “You believe me,” I said. “Nothing else matters.” With my free hand I gave her sash the needed jerk; Mrs. Sear moved quickly to open the robe.

  “Look, Ken!” she cried. “Oh, you little darling! I wish I were a Grand Tutor!”

  As evenly as I could before the revelation I said to Anastasia, “Do you believe?”

  “Hind to,” Stoker directed the Sears, who having loosed her half-reluctant grip upon the robe and removed the garment entirely, to the pleasure of the assemblage, were gently pressing her upon the bier. “He’s a goat-boy, remember.” They turned her about—lightly, with constant caresses—until, pliant and full of doubt, she knelt on the bier’s end, facing away. Only as they drew down to the cushion her head and shoulders, stroking her all the while, she wondered, “George …”

  A light fell on us; the music rose, could not imaginably soar higher. Upon the screen glowed a larger image of the column, its base ringed now by torches. The crowd took the hymn up, mighty, mighty, as I leaned my stick against the bier, raised my wrap, and steadied myself with a hand upon the perfect rump that swam in my tears.

  “In the name of the Founder,” I declared, “and of the sun—”

  “Olé!” they cried behind me.

  “—and of the Grand Tutor so be it!”

  Incredibly, as I mounted home, the music swelled and rose to bursting. As ever in goatdom, the service was instant: swiftly as the sunflash smiting now the Founder’s Shaft I drove and was done. Anastasia squealed into the cushion, “I do believe!” and fell flat. Unmuscled at once like Brickett Ranunculus, like him overbalanced by my thrust, I tumbled back and would have fallen had I not been hoist amid a chorus of olés by Croaker, who caught me from behind and hiked me up on his shoulders. The guards sprang from the dais into the crowd; Dr. and Mrs. Sear, alarm in their faces, pulle
d Anastasia to her feet and then, as she could not support herself, shrank away and left her leaning against the bier, her face in her hands. I had just had time, as I pitched from the service, to snatch up my stick. Gripping Croaker with my legs I raised it to strike now—at him, perhaps, or at Stoker, the sight of whom (with my serviced Anastasia limp in his arms) suddenly enraged me—at anyone, for I was transport with grief and the aftermath of passion. But when I made to bring the weapon down it tangled in the cord, and a howling whistle—the loudest shriek I’d ever heard—drowned out organ, crowd, and orchestra. Again and again it blasted as I tried to free the stick and keep my perch on lurching Croaker. It was the same wild summons which had opened that dreadful day, and after the first few screams of it pandemonium broke out in the hall. Whether out of fear of my bellowing mount and his frantic rider, or because in their liquor they believed that an EAT-wave truly was upon them, the carousers yelled and sprang, mobbing the doorways, tripping and trampling, climbing one another in their haste. The musicians fled the bandstand and joined them, swinging their golden horns like clubs. On the Telerama, too, all was disorder: the celebrants flung away their torches and ran, sprinting down footpaths and through shrubbery, diving behind rocks, flinging themselves flat upon the ground or into bushes. The organ-music turned wild and broken, then ceased altogether, and the crowd-din grew berserker.

  At last I freed my stick, and the EAT-whistle stopped. But it had blown from my head all liquor and delusion and left me stricken by my folly, aghast at how far and lightly I’d strayed from Grand-Tutorhood. Had that been, as Max had suggested, Stoker’s purpose? He stood now on the loveseat-bier itself, soiling the cushions with his boots, and surveyed with a grin the general panic. Hands on his hips, he laughed at the scrambling worshipers, at the frenzied party-guests, and at me—virtually in my face, for on our separate perches we were of a height.

  “Couldn’t do better myself!” he cried. “Why not go to work for me?”

  I might have attacked him, but Croaker was too excited by the chaos in the room to heed my orders. Stinging with self-reproach I dug my heels in, and we charged into the crowd, who now that the whistling had stopped were beginning to recover their senses. I looked with mixed feelings for Anastasia, but she and the Sears were gone; Madge however I observed belly-down on a nearby table, laid out across several platters of cold-cuts: an apple was in her unbandaged mouth, her eyes were closed, and the guards from the dais were spreading mustard on her hams. I spurred Croaker on lest he too catch sight of her. We bounded to the exit-door, which opened at our approach, and as we entered the corridor beyond, Stoker’s merry voice roared out from loudspeakers on every side:

  “Think it over, Goat-Boy! I’ll see you again!”

  And his laugh preceded and pursued us as we went, unopposed, unaccompanied, from hallway to hallway, chamber to chamber. Guards stood back with a grin; levers were pulled, lights flashed, all doors opened before us and closed behind—even the last, that great iron portal of the entrance-chamber through which we issued now as we had entered hours before, not knowing how we’d got there. The watchdogs snarled, but were held in check; Croaker snarled back, but I steered him on. We crossed the graveled apron, floodlit still and chilly in the early light, and plunged down a wooded slope, through groves of oak and dew-soaked laurel. At the foot, in a bright-misted clearing near the road, a kilometer at least from the Powerhouse, we came to ground—collapsed in fact together into the leaves, from an exhaustion I’d not guessed he shared. And though rage, remorse, and doubt burned in me like Stoker’s awful fires, which no amount of tears could quench, yet weariness banked and dampered them: careless of comfort, of health, of safety (but Croaker seemed no longer a menace, having come to the dais, now I reflected on it, more probably to aid than to assault me; and as for Stoker, I saw little cause why he might pursue us, and less hope of eluding him if he should), I glanced over at my companion, already snoring, then closed my eyes and, just as I had fallen, pitched asleep.

  Third Reel

  1.

  From ill dreams of among other things peanut butter I woke to the sound of what I took for squirrels, a scratchy gnaw against a scolding chitter, and for one sweet second couldn’t place myself. Then I saw Croaker hunkered near in a patch of forenoon light, biting on my stick while gray squirrels fussed overhead in the oaks, and recollection like a morning muscle ached along me.

  It wasn’t memory alone and bone-joints pained, but head and belly, the one a-crack, the other heaving. I sat up, reeled, and retched, too ill at once for more remorse about G. Herrold, Max, Anastasia. Croaker came to me and banished any doubts of his fidelity by grunting gently at my state and offering me nourishment. He had been up betimes and made a little fire somehow; in its coals he’d roasted a quantity of migratory songbirds and small mammals—shrews, perhaps, or infant possums—a double handful of whose charred carcasses he now dumped proudly in my lap. When I had done gagging and flapping them off me, he proffered fare more to my taste: a store of chestnuts, not all of them wormy, which too he’d roasted in his fire and which suggested, considering the season, that the burnt animals were offspring of those haranguing squirrels, their provender gone the way of their progeny. But the warm hulls were welcome in my hands, the light meats easy in my stomach. More welcome yet, for I had a cruel thirst, he’d stoppered the shophar-tip with elderberry pith and filled the whole horn with springwater, which worked miracles of bracing and clearing when I rinsed me inside and out with it. Last, most marvelously, he’d found and plundered us a bee-tree! No better redress than honey for gastric abuse: so sweet to my innards was that amber balm, redolent of last year’s clover, I suffered my provider to eat roast rodent in my sight while I breakfasted on chestnuts and honey, and vomited no more. Uncertain how much he could understand—of my language and generally—I thanked him with a whole heart for the meal, and was gratified to see him smile and offer me more. I accepted a mouthful of honeycomb-cappings to chew as we traveled, and was further delighted a moment later, upon standing to urinate on the coals, when he gave me my stick before I could ask for it.

  “What’s this, now?” I marveled.

  Along the ashen shaft, with no other instrument than his teeth so far as I could discover, he had incised a number of humanish figures, recognizable though much stylized, and not unattractive. Their torsos were squat, sometimes nonexistent except for the apparatus of generation; their faces were squared, their eyes, ears, noses, and mouths very large, their teeth pointed. They rode one another’s shoulders or stood upon one another’s heads, two columns of them up the stick, and on each level the figure in this was engaged with its counterpart in that, in one or several ways: they clapped and coupled, buggered and bit; also sniffed and fiddled and fingered and shat, thrust out their tongues and forth their pudenda—a rare interclutchment it was of appetites. Again I thanked him, pointing to the design to make my message clear; he frowned and shook his head. I was puzzled until with invitation in his eyes he fetched up his gown and took his own mighty organ in one hand while with the other he indicated a pair of figures on the stick: two blocky chaps more neatly scissored than ever G. Herrold and I in wrestling-days. I understood then that the artwork was functional as well as a decorative—that to point to any pair of Croaker’s figures was to give a particular command—and that my own finger had rested inadvertently on a full-faced shelah-na-gig, which being female had nonplussed him. I was to learn later of further significances in the arrangement of figures from bottom to top—a kind of hierarchic psychronology of lust whereof the ingenuity, combined with the art of the composition, suggested that Croaker was working in some tradition more sophisticated than himself. I declined his invitation; signaled my desire to mount his shoulders instead and be off for Great Mall in search of Max. Though I had no claim on Croaker, he seemed a willing and most valuable servant as well as a formidable ally; I could make better time on his legs than on my own, and be reasonably sure besides that he’d commit no further mayhem while un
der my governance.

  Following a brief confusion (our commands were not clearly worked out yet, and he was still thinking in stickly terms) he put me on him lightly as a hat, I pointed ahead, and we went off, first down to the road and then, as I hoped, towards New Tammany—in any case, away from the Powerhouse. It was an asphalt pavement in good repair, yet apparently little used—I’d heard no vehicles upon it since waking—and I chose to go in plain sight rather than stalk through the woods, reasoning that if Stoker or others were bent on obstructing me they’d find me anyhow, if not hereabouts then at Main Gate, and in the meantime I could cover more ground and perhaps locate Max. Not impossibly, too, I was aware that to be “captured” by Stoker (for whatever reason) could mean seeing Anastasia once again, and her good escutcheon—but I have little patience with this sort of analysis. She was most certainly on my mind, with sundry other matters, as we went along; the road was straight, the scenery unvarying, the sun high and warm on my face: everything conduced to reverie. It was not my habit to think in a directed manner, but rather to brood upon what images came to mind as it were unbid: not to manipulate and question them, but to attend like an interested spectator their links and twinings, stuntful as the folk upon my stick. Max and G. Herrold, Anastasia and Stoker, Dr. and Mrs. Sear, Sakhyan in his yellow robe and Madge with her mustard buttocks—they came and went and came again, myself among them, rehearsing deeds and speeches from the script of memory or improvising new. And in lieu of reasoned conclusions, net feelings were what I came to. I had, ever since waking and despite my hangover, felt unaccountably cleansed, emptied: now as I watched myself watch me drinking the black liquor with Stoker, biting Anastasia’s belly and servicing her upon G. Herrold’s public bier, I noted with interest that while I was perplexed, I was penitent no longer: my humility was nothing humiliation, but more nearly awe before the special nature of my freedom, not appreciated thitherto. Truly it seemed to me (though I could no more word it then than Croaker could discourse upon low-relief woodcarving) that a deed became Grand-Tutorial from its having been done by the Grand Tutor and in no other way; at the same time, that the Grand Tutor defines Himself ineluctably and exclusively in the Grand-Tutoriality of His deeds. There was no cause, I strongly felt, to worry about myself: if I was indeed Grand Tutor then I would choose infallibly the Grand-Tutorial thing—how could I do otherwise?—whose Grand-Tutoriality could yet be said to derive from my recognition. If I was not, then no choice of actions could make me so, because in my un-Grand-Tutoriality I would make the wrong choices. The statement is paradoxical; the feeling was not. Max believed that a Grand Tutor was a man who acted thus-and-so, who did the Grand-Tutorial work: Enos Enoch, Max argued, said Love thy classmate as thyself because to love one’s classmate as oneself was a Right Answer; He’d had no option, except to be or not to be a Grand Tutor; had He commanded us otherwise, He’d not have been one. I on the contrary had sometimes held that to love one’s classmate as oneself was Correct only because Enos Enoch so commanded; that to hate oneself and one’s classmate would be just as Correct instead had He commanded that; in short that His choice was free because His nature wasn’t, He being in any case a Grand Tutor. But now I felt that we both had been in error: Max himself might love his classmate and the rest, and teach others to—might even sacrifice himself in the name of studentdom as Enos Enoch did—and yet by no means be a Grand Tutor in his own right, but only an imitation Enos Enoch. On the other hand Enos could not have gone about saying just anything, or nothing, and still have been Enos Enoch. In truth the doer did not define the deed nor did the deed the doer; their relation (in the case at least of Grand Tutors and Grand-Tutoring) was first of all that of artists, say, to their art, and to speak of freedom or its opposite in such a relation was not quite meaningful. Without Grand Tutors there’d be no Answers, no Commencement, any more than there’d be great poems without great poets: to ask whether Maro, say, could have not-written the Epic of Anchisides is to ask whether he was free to be not-Maro—a futile question. There remained this difference: a great poem might be anonymous, the manner of its making and the character of its maker not even known except as implied in the piece itself. What Enos Enoch said and and did, on the other hand—or Maios the Lykeionian, or the original Sakhyan—was if anything less important than the way of His doing it: Grand Tutoring was inseparable from the Grand Tutor, of Whose personality it was the expression; it could never be anonymous, and thus must be always more or less lost by the Tutees, as Enos Enoch was lost in Enochism. Yet the analogy held, after all: a man who transcribed a copy of the Anchisides or imitated it was not Maro, any more than the Graduate was the Grand Tutor. And as the poet might transcend the conventions of his art and with his talent make beautiful what in lesser hands would be ugly, so the Grand Tutor in His passèdness stood beyond ordinary Truth and Falsehood. Maios drank the night long and let young men fall in love with Him; Sakhyan in His youth had a herd of mistresses, and in His Tutorship never lent a helping hand to anyone (any more than His descendant—I was stirred to recall—had tried to rescue G. Herrold); Enos Enoch Himself had once railed against the Founder, lost His temper on several occasions, and contradicted not only the teachings of the Old Syllabus but even His own obiter dicta—and had passed both Carpo the Fool and Gaffer McKeon the Perfect Cheat.