by John Barth
“You and Bray and this Living Sakhyan fellow—we’re watching all of you, naturally, as much as we can. A Grand Tutor’s always a potential threat, as you’re no doubt aware: that was even a criterion in the GILES program.”
I was too much stricken by Anastasia’s defection—how else interpret her behavior?—to be properly appalled by these disclosures. So passionately she had affirmed me in the Living Room, only to embrace the first impostor to come along! Eblis Eierkopf of course was merely amused; he offered the suggestion that she might accept Certification from Bray in order to reinforce his own authenticity, if she felt he needed the support-had she not done the same for me, and half a dozen others?
“The things she used to do for me with Croaker!” he exclaimed. “She knew it helped me to watch her through the night-glass, especially when the gossips said she might be my daughter. Remarkable girl!”
He would have documented in more detail, but I waved away the offer. In an effort then to raise my spirits he had Croaker refill my stein and recounted what he knew of Harold Bray.
“A crazy-man. A fake. A mountebank,” he insisted. “Don’t believe him for a minute; he doesn’t even have the qualifications you have.” But, he allowed, Bray was an extraordinary fellow, if a gross impostor, and had acquired a diverse notoriety on the campus before ever the “Grand-Tutor craze” began. It was generally agreed that he’d first appeared in NTC about eight years previously—though no one could say for sure when and whence he’d come, and it was merely a hypothesis, albeit a likely one, that the several roles attributed to him under different names and appearances had been played by a single man. “Sometimes I think he’s a species instead of one man,” Eierkopf declared. “At least he must be quintuplets.”
In brief, within a few months of his appearance in NTC he seemed to know the names, histories, achievements, and involvements of nearly everyone on campus—including their friendships, enmities, and privatest lives, as if he had an S.S. system of his own. Basically squat and dark-haired, and in years somewhere between young manhood and early middle age, he nonetheless contrived to change his appearance substantially overnight from time to time, and his vocation as well. First he’d been an avant-garde poet—bearded, booted, long-locked, and malodorous—the darling of eccentric undergraduates, an enfant terrible in exotic garb who’d boasted of his sexual prowess, dropped famous names like birdlime all over Great Mall, spread slanderous gossip (always with a grain of substance in it) that set the members of the Poetry Department at one another’s throats, and published scores of poems, some of which could not be proved to have been plagiarized. Subsequently—perhaps even simultaneously, it was far from certain—he had been a psychotherapist—bald, cleanshaven, dapper, washed, and fat—cashiered from the Psych Clinic when his glowing reference-letters proved to be forgeries, but not before he’d achieved a fair percentage of apparently successful cures. Again, under a third name, with a crew haircut and a stocky-muscled build, he’d been a field entomologist, explorer, and survival expert, able to flourish indefinitely in the wilderness without so much as a pocketknife or canteen of water-but the Departments of Cartography and Entomology, satisfied as they were with his abilities and indifferent of his credentials, had reluctantly to fire him when he refused to disclose his methods. He had no ID-card; rather, he had such a variety of forged and stolen ones that no one could say what his actual, original name was. No one had ever seen him eat, sleep, or relieve himself; no one knew where he lived; he spent all his hours in taverns and other people’s offices and dwelling-places, talking endlessly and knowledgeably on any subject whatever—he was either a pathological liar or a widely traveled polymath, everyone agreed. Neither had anyone seen him at work; yet books and monographs in a dozen languages and a score of fields (survival techniques excepted) appeared under his noms-de-plume and sundry aliases; they were always challenged, but seldom wholly discredited. In time he had become the chief topic of conversation at New Tammany committee-meetings and cocktail parties. He was laughed at and over, reviled, contemned, cashiered, threatened with lawsuits—and yet stood in awe of, especially by students. His most hostile critics agreed that the man was a gifted impostor—so much so that in some instances the question of his fraudulence became more metaphysical than legal or ethical. If a man utterly without experience and knowledge of painting resolves to pose as an artist, Eierkopf hypothesized, and purely as part of the mimicry comes up with a painting that at least a few respectable critics deem a work of art, is the painter a fraud? If to prevent its being discovered that his surgical knowledge is only feigned, a man successfully removes an appendix, is he a hoax? Many people thought not, and the celebrated impostor had in time become a bonafide celebrity, an institution, a kind of college mascot whose deceptions often delighted the deceived. New Tammanians waited with approving curiosity to see where Bray would turn up next, and in what capacity; his poems, paintings, and scholarly articles became collector’s items; everyone agreed that he was in his counterfeit way as considerable a genius as the encyclopedic giants of the Rematriculation, and in some quadrangles it was fashionable to claim for his productions a legitimate intrinsic value.
“So if anybody can mimic a Grand Tutor, it’s Bray,” Dr. Eierkopf concluded. “No telling what he’s got up his sleeve; the curious thing is that he’s posing without disguise. He’s using one of the names he’s known by instead of making up a new one, and the face is the same face he used as a psychotherapist.” In consequence, it was already being suggested by some news commentators that this time he wasn’t posing at all; that his former impostures had been in the nature of preparatory omens, or deliberate challenges to faith, as who should say, “I dare you to believe in me!” That thousands were ready to accept the challenge was evident: what Eierkopf was interested in seeing was how many actual Passages Bray could effect; how he would comport himself as an accepted Grand Tutor, especially in the matter of descending into WESCAC; how WESCAC itself would appraise him—as inevitably it must, if it had not already; and what would occur when the time came for him to meet that end described in the GILES profile as the fate of all Grand Tutors …
“The Enochists say that a man can teach the Syllabi effectively even though he’s flunkèd himself,” he declared. “If everybody believes Bray’s the Grand Tutor, and he goes into WESCAC’s Belly and Commences the student body, does it make any difference whether he’s the real thing?”
“Absolutely!” I cried. “All the difference on campus! I’m the Grand Tutor, whether anybody believes it or not!” Even as I protested, my throat smarted at the thought of Peter Greene’s apostasy, and Dr. Sear’s (though I knew they’d only been being agreeable from the beginning), and particularly Anastasia’s, since I’d come to regard her as my first protégée. Croaker himself had forsaken me, to squat by the night-glass against his master’s further orders.
“I don’t feel well at all,” I said.
“Do you want a woman?” Dr. Eierkopf asked at once. “I’ll have Croaker bring up a Dairy Science co-ed.”
I declined the offer.
“An aspirin, then? Or a sandwich? I’ll have to ask you to eat it in the bathroom, though.”
These too I declined, observing that perhaps it was sleep after all that I needed most, next to Max’s counsel.
“Whatever you please,” said Eierkopf. “Croaker fixes you a cot, and we see to it you’re up in time to register. I really am grateful to you for bringing him home, I suppose.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. “You’re welcome, sir.”
“You know …” He dandled his head on the other side, and his magnified eyes rolled merrily. “I almost wish you were the GILES, George—may I call you George? And you call me Eblis, if you like …” He sighed briefly, whereupon as if commanded Croaker came and set him on his shoulders. Eierkopf seemed quite at home there, but I was surprised to see what looked like tears shining behind his spectacles.
“You see? He’s always getting things mixed up, like my
eggs a while ago. Nothing ever gets done just the way I intended. But what can I do? And I cramp his style, too, I’m sure …”
Forgetting then the subject—his wish that I were the true GILES—not to mention the proposal of an end to conversation, he launched into a recounting of the nature and history of his connection with Croaker, which I attended with what imperfect wakefulness and patience I had left.
“I’d just been brought to New Tammany,” he began, resting his little chin on Croaker’s skull—a white spheroid perched on a great black pedestal. “They had just begun to use WESCAC to pair up roommates, and refugee research-people were handled just as students were in the regular dormitories. Verstehst? You’ll see tomorrow morning …”
At matriculation-time, he continued, everyone’s attributes had been coded onto cards, which then were matched automatically on the basis of complementation—a homely farm-girl with a chic young piece from Great Mall, and so forth. This was before the days of Prenatal Aptitude Testing, and Eierkopf allowed that it wasn’t in itself a bad system.
“But show me the programme without hitches, Goat-Boy!” He had come to this campus with bad eyesight and false teeth, he declared; was never robust; could hardly stand on his legs (they were stronger then)—all this was duly punched into his card, he’d signed the loyalty-oath, got his clearance-papers, watched WESCAC’s card-sorters riffle and click. Going then to the lodging assigned him he found there not the clear-eyed, practical, gemütlich young engineer he’d rather expected (himself being subject to sick headaches and “too busy in the head” to bother with housekeeping), but Croaker, the famous athlete—All-Campus candidate in football he was then, before they named him Frumentius’s delegate to the University Council, for his own protection.
“Imagine, Goat-Boy! A mindless brute that ate raw hamburger at the Coach’s order, wore nothing but a loin-cloth, picked his nose, took what he pleased, urinated in the showerbath, danced and farted, rolled his eyes, bared his teeth, and had his way with a parade of co-eds!”
Often and often, he said, when he’d had equations to think through or wanted only to rest his mind, he would come home to discover Croaker at his business with one of the girls—perhaps a cheerleader, with crimson letter on the breast of her pullover. Naturally Croaker never troubled to draw the blinds, and in those days the spectacle gave Eierkopf headaches: from his perch on the outside stairway he was obliged, so he complained, to watch the pair at their rut: how the little pink beast feigned displeasure, even threatened alarum; how her ape-of-the-woods merely croaked, and naked himself already, had at garter and hook, put her in a trice to the fearsome roger—whereat, coy no more, she’d whoop.
“And the worst was, we had to share the same bed!” Hard enough to relax, he said, in the odors of perfume and sweat; more than once, when sleep at last had granted respite from all thought, he would be roused by Croaker’s heavy arm flung over him; caught up in prurient dreamings the Frumentian mistook him for the prey, and must either be waked (no easy task) or his hug suffered till the dream was done.
I clucked sympathetically, and Eierkopf hastened to assure me that even so, his roommate had not been all bad. “I never begrudged him his salary, you know; brains aren’t everything; studentdom must have its circuses. The whole body attended the games; I watched them myself through binoculars, cheering with the rest.” Croaker was, he allowed, a splendid supple animal after all, full of power and grace; it could lift even Eierkopf’s spirits to see him leap about the room or chin on the shower-rod or lay waste half a sorority. They were not always at odds, I must understand. Though the smell of raw hamburger retched the frail scientist, Croaker saw to it he never starved, and except in most obstreperous humors fetched and carried at his roommate’s command, even as he’d done for me. In return, Eierkopf had filled out Croaker’s scholarship-forms, reconciled his financial statements, schooled him in the simplest etiquette and hygiene—not to defecate in classrooms, not to copulate on streetcorners—and did his homework.
“I devised little tasks to make him feel useful and regimens to keep him fit. Sometimes I even chose his girls: leave him to himself, he’d as likely hump somebody’s poodle or the Dean of Studies! I was still interested sometimes in women then; let a pretty baggage from Theater Arts refuse me her company or make fun of my eyeglasses: I’d point her out to Croaker on the sly, and one night soon I’d have the joy to see her boggle at his awful tup!”
In sum, Croaker could not have survived long on the campus without Eierkopf’s help, and the scientist in turn would have found life insupportable had Croaker been shot to death, say, by the father of some ruined sophomore, or lynched by the White Students’ Council. However much, then, he might despair at Croaker’s grossness, and Croaker perhaps at his roomate’s incapacity and frailness; however much they each might yearn at times to live alone or with a partner more congenial—which yearning Maurice Stoker had lately played upon, for mischief’s sake—at their best they muddled through, strange bedfellows, who in any case were bound by the strictest of leases, which could not be broken before its term. And so strong a thing is custom, Eierkopf declared, he soon could scarcely recall having ever lived alone; it was as if he and Croaker had been together from the beginning, for better or worse. What was more, if their connection was at best uneasy, they’d come more and more to depend on each other as terms went by. Eierkopf’s affliction worsened; he took to a wheelchair and gave up sleeping; Croaker delivered him to and from laboratories, even learned to take dictation and type out reports—except during seizures like the one that had lately fetched him to George’s Gorge. As for the Frumentian, he had got along previously by a kind of instinct, which, when he saw how better he fared with Eierkopf’s assistance, he either put by or clean forgot.
Again tears welled into Eierkopf’s eyes, whether of affection or chagrin I could not decide. “I even learned the art of football for his sake, and lectured him between matches on his specialty, the Belly Series! All which, my friend, the athletic directors, the student boys and girls, and my colleagues came to accept, grudgingly or not: to get Croaker they had to take me; to get me”—he chuckled or sobbed—“who had my own kind of fame, you know—they must put up with Croaker.”
Did his head fall in despair, or did he kiss the grinning giant’s pate?
“It was a package deal, not so? And still is; it still is. Croaker and Eierkopf—we are inseparable as two old faggots, or ancient spouses!”
He said more; indeed he may have talked the night through, but further than this I knew nothing until Croaker waked me with a gentle touch. My first thought was that I’d dozed off for half a sentence—Dr. Eierkopf sat on Croaker’s shoulders as before, and resumed the conversation as soon as my eyelids opened—but I discovered that I was lying on a cot, and a large clock on the wall read four and a half hours after midnight. Croaker set a folding screen before me and served up a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, pancakes, and sausage; while I dined (I could not of course stomach the sausage, any more than Eierkopf could abide the sight of my eating anything at all) my host spoke on from behind the screen:
“It is extraordinary how many things point to your being the GILES, except the one thing that proves you’re not. And it’s almost a pity. You’re an interesting young man, a pleasant young man—but that’s not the point.” What he meant was that although he assumed the Cum Laude Project to be a cause forever lost, it intrigued him to imagine what WESCAC might have produced had it indeed fertilized some lady with the GILES. Moreover, while he felt certain that he knew what Graduation is, and that he was himself a Graduate, there were admittedly moments when he could almost wish it were something else—something miraculous after all, as the superstitious held it to be.
“What is Commencement?” I asked him through the screen. Croaker fried a decent pancake.
“Commencement is a conclusion,” he replied at once. “There’s nothing mysterious about it: when you’ve eliminated your passions, or put them absolutely under control,
you’ve Commenced. That’s why I call WESCAC the Grand Tutor. I can prove this logically, if you’re interested.”
I did not deny that I was interested, but pled shortness of time. Not to be discourteous, however, I asked him whether, when a man had reasoned his way to Commencement Gate, as it were, he truly felt Commencèd—for I had often heard Graduation described as an experience, but never as a proposition.
“Bah! Bah!” my host cried, with more heat than I’d seen him display thitherto. “That question leaves me cold!” The ejaculation confused Croaker, who mistaking it for some unclear but urgent command, galloped wildly about the Observatory for some moments, knocking down the screen and upsetting a tray of watch-glasses before he could be calmed.
“There, look what he’s done!” Eierkopf pounded him feebly on the head and wept a single tear. Like a frightened horse, Croaker still rolled his eyes and fluttered at the nostrils. “I would be a Graduate, if it weren’t for him! I can’t pass with him, and I can’t live without him! Feel, feel, that’s all people think of! There’s feeling for you!” He indicated Croaker, who, quite placid now, had set his rider on a stool and was doing his best to tidy up the spilt watch-glasses. “If Commencement were a feeling, he’d be the Graduate!” Now Dr. Eierkopf laughed until a rack of coughing stopped him. “Maybe he is, eh?”
I said to soothe him that I could not imagine Croaker as a Candidate yet, much less a Graduate, though to be sure I admired his physical prowess; nor could I on the other hand accept the notion that Graduation was merely the end of a dialectical process. But in any case, I felt bound to remark, Croaker was not altogether devoid of reason, however imperfectly he employed it, nor was Dr. Eierkopf absolutely without emotion or appetite. Even as I spoke, tears flowed freely from his lashless eyes, a surprising sight, which he acknowledged as support of my observation.
