Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “Dr. Sear!” Greene laughed. “You know Kennard Sear? He was my analyst I was telling you about! Heck of a nice fellow, ain’t he? Couldn’t do a passèd thing with me, but he’s a smart one, Sear is.”

  I agreed that he seemed a most courteous gentleman, and pressed back to the subject: “I think I still don’t understand why you’re hitchhiking to Great Mall, when you’re so wealthy, and what you’re going to do when you get there.”

  Peter Greene was more or less durned if he quite knew either, except about the hitchhiking, which he did purely for the heck of it and to stay “in shape”—the fact being that for all his regimen of calisthenics, vitamin pills, mechanical exercisers, and low-fat diets, he was overweight. The best reason he could offer for placing his children in a boarding-school (though it had “near killed him” to part with them), closing the house, neglecting his business, and taking to the road, was that while he was absolutely sure he was passed, he was certain he was failed. He had betrayed, deceived, and defiled Miss Sally Ann in the wanton arms of O.B.G.’s hot daughter—whom, however, for better or worse, he had once again found himself impotent with and who, ungrateful as always, had laughed at him in the morning when he’d offered to raise her wage. He’d had no choice then but to discipline such uppitiness. And though he loved, honored, and respected his unhappy wife, he was also profoundly troubled by their reciprocal grievances, which he felt sure were justified albeit unjust. In sum, he was so utterly of two minds about himself and his connections with things that he seemed rather a pair of humans in a single skin: the one energetic, breezy, optimistic, self-assured, narrow-minded, hospitable, out-going, quick-thinking, belligerent, and strong; the other apathetic, abject, pessimistic, self-despising, indulgent, rude, introspective, complaisant, uncouth, feckless, and flabby. He had lost faith initially in the Founder and then in himself—in his ability to pass, as it were, with neither syllabus nor Grand Tutor to aid him, and to Commence himself without believing in Commencement. It was presently the season for his annual inventory and report: for paying his debts, collecting his dividends, assessing the solvency of his various concerns, and establishing policy for the year ahead; but he had found himself unable to address the task. Moreover, he was plagued of late by headaches that made his eye water (I’d observed that he dosed himself with pills and liquids as he talked); his own newspapers were critical of his “deteriorating image,” as they called it, unaware that he was hampered by his thing about mirrors; his neighbors declared he ought either to marry O.B.G.’s daughter or leave her alone, unaware that she was the best-treated darky in the Quad; his children were embarrassed by him and swore they would make themselves into his opposite, whatever that might be.

  Then a day had come when Miss Sally Ann told him calmly that in a short time she would be ready to leave the Rest House and come home, but not to the situation she had left. She was not, she declared, blaming him—but her survival, not to say well-being, depended on an end to the tensions between them. She had not permitted him to reply: if he was at home when she arrived, after the Carnival holidays, his presence would signify his readiness to Start Afresh; if not, she would assume that he had found himself finally and for all unwilling, or unable, to respond to her needs—which he would then be free to regard as excessive if it comforted him to do so—and they would legalize their separation.

  “I walked down the steps of that there house with my head fit to crack,” he told me. “And on one step I loved Sally Ann and hated myself, and on the next it was vicey-versy. I tried to think I’m okay, and what the heck anyhow—but it never did sound just right. So I figured I’d better stroll around some to clear my head, and next thing I knew, I was out along the highway, and I thought I saw a cycle go by with some young slicker a-driving it, and Miss Sally Ann in the sidecar!”

  I expressed my astonishment, and Max, who had waked again in time to hear the last few episodes of Peter Greene’s history, said “Hah,” not very sympathetically. But Greene himself seemed more bemused than disturbed by his vision.

  “I don’t see how it could of been, do you, George? The fellow weren’t more’n twenty agewise, smiling and flash-eyed; and Sally Ann was a-gig-gling at something he’d said to her, holding her hand to her mouth the way she does, and I swear she looked exactly like she did the first day of that Carnival: happy and fresh as a spring lamb, and pretty as all outdoors. Must of been some co-ed and her date, just looked like her. Must of been! Or my oldest girl Barbara May that’s about gone kerflooey herself, playing hooky from school. It don’t matter. All I could think was how sweet and happy Sally Ann was when I took her to the Carnival, and how tore up we’ve been since. And no matter whose flunking fault it is—hers or mine or the terms we live in—I just stood there and bawled to think of it. And then I decided, by Billy Gumbo, I’d thumb me a ride to Great Mall in time for this year’s Carnival. Kind of look things over, you know, back where it all started, and see what’s what.” He sighed, blinked his eye several times, and glanced at his wristwatch. “Which we better get along down the road for, don’t we’ll never find rooms tonight.”

  “I don’t understand,” I protested. “You’re just going to the Spring Carnival, and not to register?”

  He had initialed our bill for the waitress and was squinting with his good eye at the young hams that flexed and pressed beneath her tight uniform. He reddened and turned at my words, thumbing his chest.

  “Look here, sir: I’m okay, doggone it! Any man’s liable to have trouble with a strange gal when he’s been married long as I have; that’s the only reason I couldn’t make the grade with O.B.G.’s daughter.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Both his terminology and his attitude perplexed me.

  “Ah, flunk it. Let’s hit the road.”

  As if, having lingered such a while at the Pedal Inn, he found it suddenly unbearable, Greene all but fled the place. As we wakened snoring Croaker (whose vine-work now climbed halfway up my stick) I saw our troubled host doing push-ups on the gravel apron and grinning at the cordial taunts of young couples parked all about. Max shook his head. Outside in the cooling floodlit dark I remounted Croaker and Max the cycle, but before we set out Greene left off the bantering he’d resumed, and took his hand from the throttle briefly to squint up at me.

  “S’pose there really was a Grand Tutor!” he cried. Max had been sitting with his eyes closed; now he opened them to contemplate his driver’s twisted grin. “S’pose you were Him right enough, come to put good old New Tammany on the track again, and you’d heard all the stuff I’ve told you ’bout me and Sally Ann and how everything’s gone kerflooey! What would you say?”

  Flabbergasted that he’d not truly believed me all that while, I could only stare at him. After a second he turned his face away and bitterly raced the engine. But the lights had flashed twice-bright for that second in both his eyes, the true and the false alike made mirrors by the pain he spoke of.

  3.

  Now we passed swiftly through a series of residential districts—rather handsome, I thought, though I could not understand at once why a family of four or five required as much stall-space as our entire herd—and pressed into the formidable traffic of the central quads. I clutched Croaker’s head and gazed as one reluctant to believe his eyes; I could not have said which were most dismaying: the mighty buildings, square after square ablaze with light; the multitude of human folk, mostly young people in similar costume, who thronged the sidewalks with books in their hands and plugs in their ears, through which I was told they heard musical sounds from a central transmitter; or the elm-lined avenues themselves, wide as a pasture, paved in black, and lit like noon by blue-white lamps armed out from poles. All glittered in observance of the Spring Carnival: huge foil-and-tinsel ovoids hung suspended over intersections; on the arm of every lamp-post perched a mammoth butterfly, terrifying until I learned they were not real creatures; their sequined wings, three meters in span, slowly closed and opened, sparkling with little lights in half a dozen colors.
Here and there we saw groups of celebrants in gaudy garb, singing and roistering; some wore dominoes and checkered tights, others caps with bells or full-face masks, horrid of aspect; here was a girl delicious in white tights and tall silk ears, with a ball of cotton fluff atop the cleft of her rump; there a muscled red-cloaked chap with hayfork and imitation horns. These sometimes saluted as we passed, and merrily I waved my stick in reply; the rest ignored them and us alike, unless to make apprehensive way for Croaker. From everywhere the bold bright messages flashed at us: DEGREES WITH EASE—SAY “PHYS. ED., PLEASE.” NO SWEAT: PRE-VET. HAPPY CARNIVAL FROM YOUR DEPARTMENT OF POULTRY HUSBANDRY.

  “No zing in that there last one,” Peter Greene remarked. Having made our way down what appeared to be the widest and most resplendent thoroughfare, we parked the motorcycle at its end. Here the boulevard became a mighty lawn of grass, flanked by statelier buildings and nobler elms, and fronted, just before us, by an iron fence-gate twenty meters tall. Unlike all else of eminence round about, Main Gate (for so I recognized it, with a shiver, and the lawn as Great Mall, and the imposing edifice far down it as Tower Hall) was unlit: guards prowled in the shadow along the ivied, gargoyled wall into which it made and before the famous one-way turnstile at the road’s end. I was much excited by the general spectacle, and impatient to see all at once. It was the last night of the Carnival: crews of workmen were already dismantling some temporary structures along the mall; on one side of us was many-storied Bi-Sci House, the exclusive apartment hotel for professors of the natural sciences, with its notorious Vivisection Bar-B-Q underneath; adjacent were the glittering Gate House Ballroom, the Sophomore Cinema and Shooting Gallery, and other places of amusement whose fame was campus-wide. Opposite were cultural attractions: the Fine Arts Salesroom, the Pan-Sororal Playhouse, and nearest us, sloping down from Mall Wall, the vast Amphitheater managed jointly by the Sub-Departments of Ancient Narrative and Theatrical Science. I was taken with particular curiosity by this last because the playbills advertised that evening’s performance as The Tragedy of Taliped Decanus, a work of whose hero I had heard though I hadn’t read the tale of his adventures. It was to be the conclusion of a week-long series of classical productions, and lines of people were already filing in to witness it.

  “Y’all want to take a look-see?” Greene suggested when I expressed my interest. “I never was much a one for stage-plays, but they do say there’s hot stuff in this one.” He insisted then that we permit him to buy tickets for the four of us, including Croaker, who though surely unable to comprehend the play could not safely be left alone; there would be ample time afterwards to tour the midway, if we chose. Before this generosity I saw Max’s expression soften; nevertheless he declined the invitation on the grounds that we had yet to find cheap lodging for the night, and that I had better retire early against the ordeal of registration, which was scheduled for sunup next morning—especially as I’d done my share of celebrating the night before. Moreover, he had certain advices and cautions to give me that evening, in case there should be no opportunity next day. I was disappointed, and yet gratified to see Max displaying something of his old concern for me.

  But Greene would not be gainsaid. “Tell him what you want to while I fetch the tickets,” he proposed, and offered further to spare us the bother of searching for rooms; all he had to do, he declared, was telephone from the ticket-office to the JELI, or Junior Enochist League Inn, where as past League Chairman he was always entitled to free accommodations. He would hear no further protests, just as during the ride from the Pedal Inn he’d refused to listen seriously to my assurances that I was in good faith a Grand Tutor, or Grand-Tutor-to-be, and not a pretender, madman, or costumed Carnival-goer. “The woods is full of ’em this time of year,” he’d smiled. “But I know by your face you’re okay. I believe for a fact you’re the Goat-Boy, like you said, and that’s wonder enough.” Now, as then, Max shrugged, as if to say there was no use contending further, Greene might have it as he pleased. And he admitted that it might be fitting to witness the profoundest of the Lykeionian tragedies before I matriculated: there was no coincidence in its being produced just at Carnival’s end, before the Spring Matriculation rituals. But he really must speak to me first confidentially, as my advisor. Greene went off happily to buy the tickets.

  “Odd chap!” I remarked after him. “I don’t know whether I like him, but he’s certainly obliging.”

  Max made a deprecating gesture. “He’s okay; I don’t mind him.”

  I made bold to point out that he, Max, had not been consistently so tolerant during the afternoon and earlier evening, towards either Greene or myself, and begged him please to excuse once and for all my behavior at the Powerhouse or, if he found it inexcusable, allow me to proceed upon my way as I had set out, without the benefit of his company and counsel. The rebuke didn’t sting him; indeed, he seemed if anything pleased to hear it. He nodded several times and said quietly, “You don’t talk like a kid, all right. Na, George …” He put an arm about my back (I had come down off Croaker) with more affection than he’d shown me for some time; I was quite moved by the gesture and the warmth in his voice as he explained what lay immediately ahead for me, though at the same time I wondered at a mournful urgency in his face, as if what he was saying must be said without delay.

  “We’ll talk about the Powerhouse and Maurice Stoker when there’s time,” he said. “There’s more important business now.” Leaving Croaker my stick to gnaw upon. we strolled onto the grassy verge of the Mall, near the gate. “Things like the Gorge and the Power Plant were just sidetracks, Georgie, bad as they were. Same with that poor girl Anastasia that thinks I’m her poppa—just a sidetrack, whether she meant to be or not. But right there is the first big hurdle you got to get over.” He indicated the Turnstile with a wave of his hand. “It shouldn’t be any trouble—what I mean, it’s either impossible or easy, never in-between—but you mustn’t get sidetracked or hesitate even for an eyeblink when the time comes, or you’re kaput.”

  He then explained briefly the ritual of registration and matriculation as it had developed in the West-Campus colleges, especially New Tammany, in modern times. The large gates on either side of the Turnstile, presently closed, normally stood open and were the common entryways to the heart of the College, the site originally of all its buildings and latterly of the administrative and military-science quadrangles. Theoretically no one except Graduates and Certified Candidates for Graduation was admitted, and in the heyday of the Enochist Curriculum this restriction was technically enforced, the Enochist Fraternity ruling on credentials as the Founder’s deputy in the University. Over the semesters, however, as the Fraternity’s authority had declined and the nature and existence of the Founder Himself was debated and challenged, the practice had fallen into disuse. Even in the old days those outside the various Mall Walls of West Campus had always outnumbered those within and were included in the Fraternal hegemony and instructed by its professors; Many are Registered but few are Qualified, Enos Enoch had said, and inasmuch as none but Him could tell true Candidates from false, the Fraternity tutored everybody. Today it was strictly forbidden in the by-laws of colleges such as NTC to disqualify a man for matriculation and campus office by reason of his pedagogical beliefs, and in lieu of the old Degrees of Wisdom, the administration conferred upon anyone who completed his course-work successfully and passed certain “technical examinations” a Certificate of Proficiency in the Field; such men were called “graduates,” were said to have “commenced,” and were eligible either for employment in their “fields” or for further study beyond the C.P.F., at the end of which they became “professors” in their own right—a far cry from the original meaning of those terms! Yet the Enochist tradition was preserved in certain college rituals—echoed, rather, for the celebrants had little idea what it was they celebrated: the Spring Carnival itself, with its attendant symbols, was one such tradition, orginating in ancient agronomical ceremonies and modified by the Enochist Fraternity to ce
lebrate the Expulsion of Enos Enoch, His promotion of the Old-Syllabus Emeritus Profs from the Nether Campus, and His triumphal Reinstatement. Trial-by-Turnstile was another, observed at the opening of each term and with especial solemnity at Spring Registration, which was scheduled for next morning. The tradition was that only bonafide Candidates for Graduation (using the terms in their original sense) could pass through the Turnstile and the tiny gate somewhere beyond it—both which, being one-way affairs, committed the passer-through not to anything so prosaic as “Minimums” and C.P.F.’s, but to the Final Examination and thus to absolute Commencement or Flunking Out.

  “The trouble is,” Max smiled, “there haven’t been any Candidates since ancient terms, and things being how they are, the Enochists wouldn’t dare say any more who’s a Graduate and who isn’t—even in the old days they never decided on that until after the student passed away. So the Turnstile’s never been turned—it’s probably rusted shut—and Scrapegoat Grate’s been locked since it was built.”

  My fancy was caught by that latter name, and I squinted into the shadows with new interest. Max explained that the word had nothing to do with scapegoat, more the pity, but alluded to three characteristically anticaprine remarks of Enos Enoch’s: that He was come to separate the sheep from the goats; that the Way to Graduation was too narrow for even a goat to walk, but a broad mall for His flock; and that it were easier for a goat to scrape through an iron fence-grating than for a merely learned man to enter Commencement Gate. The present practice in West-Campus colleges was for the strongest and nimblest young men from each quadrangle—generally the winners of athletic competitions held in conjunction with the Carnival—to fling themselves against the Turnstile, bleating in what they took to be goatly fashion, while the new registrants and spectators cheered them on and a figure dressed to represent the Dean o’ Flunks endeavored to block their way. When all the athletes had failed they were garlanded with lilies by Miss University and by her symbolically driven from the scene, to the Dean o’ Flunks’ delight; then the great Right and Left Gates were thrown open, as if they were Scrapegoat Grate, and while the Dean o’ Flunks gnashed his teeth in mock frustration, the hosts of actual new registrants were admitted into the Gatehouse just inside Mall Wall, and the business of scheduling courses for the term was begun. Few who participated in these festivities were aware of their original significance, any more than they recognized Carnival as coming from the Remusian “farewell to flesh” that preceded any period of fasting or mourning; Trial-by-Turnstile was no more than an amusing sport at the end of a week’s carouse, and it was cause enough to rejoice for most students if they were able to turn out at all so early on that Friday morning, after partying all through Randy-Thursday night.