Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “I’m okay!” he laughed. “It don’t matter anyhow. Misplaced my durn card!”

  I saw it lying at his feet and snatched it up for him as the scanner descended. Just as I pressed it into his hand the gadget buzzed, and the great stile turned a few degrees to release him. The crowd and shrill officials pressed in; there was no time to scale the standing teeth; as Greene stepped out I slipped behind into the angle he’d been trapped in. A guard snatched at me, caught hold of the bouncing shophar; I ducked out of its sling and left it in his hands. The Turnstile turned back to catch me just as I reached its axis. I pressed there into the vertex, where a little space was between the shaft and the standing teeth. No one could reach me, but I thought I might be crushed in the machinery, and desperately told myself what the heck anyhow, it didn’t nothing matter, so to speak. If I came through and attained that grander Gate, well and good for studentdom! If I passed away then and there, I would be saved one later pain, and the loss was studentdom’s, not mine; let them attend their Harold Bray, and all of them fail! I was in short okay.

  What happened in fact was that the bald eye of the scanner scanned in vain, the stile moved on, and I was squeezed past the points of the standing teeth, which I cleared so narrowly that one ran into the armhole of my wrapper, another under my amulet-of-Freddie. I was inside then, but caught fast, and twisting to unhook myself managed only to catch my collar on a third tooth. No one could touch me: some laughed, others clapped hands, Peter Greene’s voice behind me cried, “By George, He done it, fair and square!” and officials whom I couldn’t turn to see fussed about, berating Murphy. Again the scanner dipped to face me; I smiled politely, but had no card to show. The Turnstile clicked and ground on, either to trap the next athlete or to deal with me. Girls squealed; the next row of teeth came through and pressed so hard against my back, I thought I must be sliced like Eblis Eierkopf’s hard-boiled eggs. But that foreseam I had started (wrestling with Croaker in George’s Gorge) now gave way with a rip from neck to hem, my knit-wool liner with it; the stile jerked on, the thong of my amulet parted, and for the second time those hides as dear to me as my own were sacrificed. Clad now in mine alone I was propelled onto Great Mall and into the arms of two sooty patrolmen who rushed up.

  “Get thee hence, Dean o’ Flunks!” the voice bid from the loudspeakers. “Let this man be matriculated!”

  Not impossibly he referred to Harvey or some other athlete caught outside as I was caught in; I didn’t look back, but seized the chance to demand imperiously of the Gatekeepers (so labeled by their armbands), “Take me to the Chancellor!”

  At once they fell to disputing whether I should be fetched off to Main Detention as a gate-crasher or ushered into the Assembly Room as a matriculated student. It was agreed I could not be permitted to stand there indecently exposed, but the crowd beyond the gate grew so uproarious, especially when I turned to retrieve my watch (whose neck-chain too had caught on the Turnstile and been snapped), that the Gatekeepers abandoned self-control and scuffled with each other. I saw fit to wave through Main Gate to the crowd as I undid my watch-chain, and they responded enthusiastically, whistling and sailing laurel-wreaths over the gate. Miss University stood openmouthed; when I blew her a kiss, she hid her eyes. My wrapper and amulet I regretfully abandoned as too enmeshed to salvage—indeed, they had so jammed the Turnstile that Trials were ended and both side-gates flung open for general admission, either automatically by WESCAC or upon executive order. Too soon off the goat-farm to be abashed by nakedness, I crowned myself with a wreath of laurel, took my watch and stick in hand (along with the two small batteries, which only now I noticed I still clutched), bowed first to the crowd and then to the grappling Gatekeepers in the dust, and followed a guide-rail rightwards to the nearest door of the Gatehouse. To show my composure as another pair of Stoker’s guards approached, I even took a moment to glance at the sun, now fully risen and already eclipse-bitten at its edge. Then I leaned on my stick and once again demanded, before they could speak: “Take me to the Chancellor!”

  7.

  One growled, “Sure we will.”

  “No police brutality, Jake,” the other cautioned, and said to me more pleasantly as each took an elbow: “We’ll all see the Chancellor soon, bud. First we got to get some nice clothes on, don’t we?”

  “I’m okay,” I declared. Following Max’s advice I reminded them that I had done the unexampled in passing the Trial-by-Turnstile and was therefore a fully matriculated Candidate—not for any paltry Certification of Proficiency but for bonafide Graduation—who ought to be ushered at once into the Chancellor’s presence.

  “Sure you are,” the first guard said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if you was the Grand Tutor Himself. Come along nice, there won’t be no brutality.”

  “Fact is,” said the other, more cordially, “everybody comes through the Gate has got to be okayed by the Health Office before he registers. Ain’t that so, Jake?”

  Jake agreed it was, adding that without Dr. Sear’s stamp on the Matric Card (as the ID-card was called after formal admission) not even a Harold Bray could schedule course-work in the College. At mention of that former name I consented to go with them—which was just as well, since in any case they propelled me strongly up the Gatehouse steps into a large room striped with desks and tables. Men and women working over card-files stood to nudge one another and stare as we came in.

  “That’ll be okay,” I was saying. “I know Dr. Sear.”

  Jake nodded gravely. “Figured you might, son.” To the onlookers he cried, “Okay, back to work, folks; this ain’t any vaudyville show.” And the other guard cleared our way past long tables over which hung signs—LIBERAL ARTS; ENGINEERING; BURSAR: HAVE RECEIPTS READY—to a side-room marked X RAYS. Hustled in without ceremony, I saw Dr. Sear himself turn angrily from a large machine on whose glass face a singular spectacle glowed: the lower torso of a transparent woman, large as life, her bones and organs darkly visible inside her. What’s more, she was alive: before our eyes her phalanges toyed with something not far from her pubic symphysis, and her voice continued a rhythmic murmur for some seconds after our entry, as if she had been singing to herself.

  “Get out of here!” Dr. Sear cried, hurrying towards us. “I’m examining a patient, for Founder’s sake!”

  The guards apologized but pled the unusual nature of the situation-no more able than I to turn their eyes from the startling screen. The hand and voice there quit now; the pelvis turned away, and from a curtained stall behind the machine emerged a woman—middle-aged, untransparent—tying a white-cotton gown about her waist.

  “Crashed through the Turnstile,” the guard not named Jake was explaining. “Some kind of nut. You better handle him …”

  “Just wait outside!” Dr. Sear said crossly. He frowned at my nakedness as he herded them doorwards, and was too discomposed to return my greeting or even acknowledge yet that he knew me. But the woman’s eyes unsquinted now, and crowing, “It’s the Goat-Boy, Kennard!” she lurched in my direction. I recognized then the puff-eyed brittle face of Hedwig Sear, who had so relished mating me with Anastasia in the Living Room.

  “Georgie darling!” But she stumbled into a chair-arm and thence into its seat, her legs immodestly sprawled; something seemed wrong with her balance. We looked on astonished.

  “My wife’s having an attack, as you see,” Dr. Sear said impatiently. “My nurse isn’t here today, and she was preparing herself for treatment. For pity’s sake leave this chap here and wait outside!”

  The guards apologized and withdrew, promising to stand by in case their help should be required. The one’s expression was resolutely sober, but Jake grinned and winked as he closed the door.

  “Beasts,” Dr. Sear muttered. Yet his composure had quite returned. “What on campus are you up to, George? Get him a gown, Hed.” Before I could explain my naked presence he pressed upon me an explanation himself, of the extraordinary scene I’d interrupted. A portable X-ray unit was set up in the Gatehous
e at registration-time, he declared, to provide free tuberculosis examinations for any who wished them. Ordinarily Anastasia assisted him, but since her services had been commandeered for the morning by Harold Bray Himself, at the Grateway Exit, Hedwig had volunteered to take her place.

  As he spoke, Mrs. Sear toyed with herself shamelessly, humming the while.

  “Unhappily, my wife is subject to spells of uncontrolled behavior,” he went on to say. “She came here this morning in the condition you see, and I was attempting to calm her by radiation-shock when you interrupted. I trust your discretion.”

  I assured him he might depend on me not to tell tales out of school. Dr. Sear shook his head. “Treatment didn’t work, I’m afraid.”

  “Balls!” called Hedwig. Not sufficiently conversant with modern literature to have mastered obscene slang, I nonetheless guessed by her tone that she meant the term otherwise than literally; thus I judged it witty of me to pretend to mistake her, and said: “I lost Freddie’s in the Turnstile, ma’am.”

  Whether or not she appreciated the humor, she scrambled at me on all fours like a crippled doe.

  “No, now, Hed!” her husband chided. I retreated a step, but Dr. Sear restrained me with a look of whimsical despair.

  “Indulge her for a second, would you, old boy? There’s a good chap.”

  I stood nonplussed while the woman knelt before me.

  “I wish she’d be less indiscreet,” her husband sighed. “But if you don’t humor the poor thing’s spells she carries on dreadfully.” He patted his wife’s cropped head with one hand and caressed me frankly with the other. Yet something in the lady’s manner left me limp; though I had no particular wish to be unaccommodating, their joint endeavor could not rouse me. After a moment Mrs. Sear remarked, “He needs Stacey,” and then gave over the business with a shrug, stood up, straightened her hair, and seemed entirely normal once again. I apologized.

  “Quite all right, darling,” she said. “Kennard’s made me such a wreck I can’t even get Croaker excited. I’ll get you a gown.”

  “Really, my dear,” her husband protested; but he seemed amused by her remark. “You’ll have George thinking we’re perverted.”

  “Hah,” said Hedwig. From the curtained booth behind the fluoroscope she fetched a white hospital gown like her own for me to wear until “something more suitable could be arranged.”

  “You must come to dinner,” she chattered on; the two of them fussed and patted my gown into place. “I’ll be a shepherdess and you’ll be a buck, and Kennard can be the jealous shepherd.”

  “Excuse me?” I could not imagine shepherds in connection with goats; the notion was almost obscene.

  “We could have Stacey in, too, and do it à quatre!”

  Dr. Sear tut-tutted this proposal as extravagant and gently asserted to his wife that it was just such overeagerness on her part that chilled her male companions.

  “But look here, George,” he added, “we have no secrets from you, and you’re obviously a man-of-the-campus, so to speak. It would be a lark for Hed and me both if you’d care to stay with us till this business about Max is resolved. You see we’re agreeable people; you could live as you please.”

  I thanked him for his invitation, the hospitality of which was clear, however obscure the promised entertainment. But his mention of Max put me sharply in mind of more pressing business. I requested their address, promising to call on them in any case that same evening or the next to speak of Max’s arrest and the GILES program. And I admitted that in fact I had made no arrangement yet for eating and sleeping, nor had any clear idea how such arrangements were made in human studentdom.

  “But you must excuse me now,” I concluded. “I have to see Chancellor Rexford yet about my Candidacy and then go through Scrapegoat Grate. And I want to have a talk with Anastasia, too, if I can find her.”

  They expressed their surprise that Max had made no dormitory reservation for me or even provided me with funds, and so I explained very briefly the unusual circumstances of my departure from the goat-farm, adding Max’s observation that Grand Tutors and the like never as a rule packed even a sandwich in advance, though their hero-work might want nine years to complete. I had had, for example, no ID-card, yet I’d got through the Turnstile all the same, and was confident I’d find a way through Scrapegoat Grate.

  “Think not of next period …” Dr. Sear marveled. “I was telling Bray last night at Stoker’s what an extraordinary chap you are, and what a really miraculous string of coincidences your life has been. Look here—” He glanced at his watch. “You’ve a good half-hour yet till Rexford’s address; they’ve got all the regular admissions to process, and the Assembly-Before-the-Grate is just across the way from here … Have you an advisor?”

  When I told him I had not, since Max’s false arrest, he volunteered to fill the role himself, declaring that although he could not share my antagonism for Harold Bray, he respected the grounds of my own claim to Grand-Tutorhood, admired me personally, and would be pleased to assist me through the tedious ordeal of registration.

  Mrs. Sear, who was lighting a cigarette, remarked, “He wants to blow you, too.”

  “Really, Hed.”

  I begged their pardon.

  “We all want to, dear,” she said, shrugging at one or the other of us. “Novelty’s our cup of tea. Isn’t it, Kennard?”

  Dr. Sear smiled. “You’ll give George the wrong impression.”

  The woman pinched my cheek. “Georgie’s no dunce. He knows what was going on when he came in.” Her husband, she declared, had long since lost his taste for ordinary coupling, whether conjugal or extra-curricular, and even for such common perversions as sodomy and flagellation. Watching others still amused him, but only when the spectacle was out of the ordinary, as in Stoker’s Living Room; she herself, since she’d lost both novelty and youth, could interest him only by masturbating before the fluoroscope.

  “That’s very curious,” I said. “Do you enjoy it, too?”

  Dr. Sear had seemed bored by her recital, but here he laughed aloud. “There you are, Hed! She claims I’ve corrupted her, George, but she’s as tired as I am of the usual tricks. You put your finger right on it.”

  “I wish he would,” said Hedwig. She was bored with sophistication, she maintained, and yearned to be climbed in the exordinary way by a simple brute like Croaker; but catering to her husband’s pleasures had so defeminized her that her effect on men was anaphrodisiac, as I had seen.

  “Hedwig exaggerates,” her husband said patiently. “It’s true we’ve done everything in the book, but nobody forced her. She likes women and won’t admit it.”

  I could have wished to hear more on this remarkable head; also perhaps to question Croaker’s alleged simplicity, which his art-work on my stick belied, and compare Dr. Sear’s optical pleasures with those of Eblis Eierkopf, to learn how prevalent such tastes were among well-educated humans. But it seemed more important to get back to my advising, and when I reverted to that matter, Mrs. Sear changed her tone completely. I could not do better, she declared seriously, than to have Kennard Sear for my advisor, as he was the most knowledgeable man on campus; in fact, he knew all the Answers, despite his perversions.

  “Not despite, my dear: because of. George understands the tragic view.”

  They kissed most cordially. The mixture of affections in the Sears’ marriage relation I found quite as curious as their amatory whimsies, since life in the goat-barn had left me open-minded in that latter regard. But their goodwill towards me was evident. Gratefully I put myself into their charge, stipulating only that in view of the urgent work at hand we forgo any further embraces—à deux, trois, or quatre, on-screen or off—for the present.

  “I quite agree,” the doctor said. The important thing, in his opinion, was for me to by-pass the ordinary machinery of registration and deal only with the highest authorities; otherwise—since Bray’s advent had put the campus into such confusion, and my status in the College was irre
gular—I might be dismissed to the goat-barn by any minor official on some such technicality as my lack of a surname. “You’ve got through the Turnstile somehow; we can use that as grounds for admitting you as a Special Student, if Tower Hall authorizes it. I’ll give Rexford’s wife a call: she’s a patient of mine. Meanwhile I’ll look you over and write you a Clean Bill of Health; maybe that’ll do instead of an ID-card to get you through registration.”

  “Why don’t I go see Bray in the Grateway Exit?” Mrs. Sear asked him. “He might intercede for George with Rexford. He could even register him himself, I’ll bet.”

  “You want to see Stacey again,” Dr. Sear teased. But they obviously enjoyed planning my strategy together.

  “And you can hardly wait to see George’s insides,” she retorted. Then they both laughed and agreed that the idea was a good one. To my objection that Bray was a false Tutor from whom I wanted no assistance even if he wished to provide it (which struck me as unlikely), Dr. Sear answered, “False or not, he’s in a strong position and he’s awfully acute, and it’s part of his stance to affirm people who deny him. Last night at Stoker’s I told him that I’d never pass the Finals because I know too much to answer simple questions, and the rascal Certified me with a line from the Founder’s Scroll: Be ye nothing ignorant, saith the Founder. Then I told him very frankly that I had no morals at all in sexual matters, and he quoted Enos Enoch: Who knoweth not Truth’s backside, how shall he pass? Awfully clever chap!”

  As he spoke, Mrs. Sear left by a back door on her errand. “Poor thing,” he said after her, “she really is a simple Home-Ec. type at heart, and I suppose she’s on her way to the Asylum from living with me. But flunk it all, George, it’s a big University! How can we understand anything without trying everything? When Harold Bray compared me last night to Gynander, he understood me better than Hed does after fifteen years of marriage.”