by John Barth
“You’re not my Giles!”
It was Mother, crazy-eyed and pointing from behind the ex-Chancellor. In vain the young receptionist tried to coax her back into the farther room; in vain Reginald Hector said, “Whoa down, Gin”—his own eyes still flashing wrath at me. She pushed past him with her claws out and would have attacked me if they’d not caught her arms.
“You’re not my Billy!” she cried. I froze before the hatred in her face. More shouts came from outside, disorganized and fearsome. She struggled now not at me but towards the office window, shrieking, “They’re killing him!”
“What’s she talking about?” her father demanded. The receptionist, herself verging on hysteria, replied that it was that George-fellow, the so-called Goat-Boy, that the crowd had discovered somewhere and dragged to the front gate. “She says it’s her son, sir! And I think—they’re lynching him …”
I ran for the porch, flunking myself for not having put off all disguise long since. The doorguard snapped to attention, ignoring the horror at the gate. There on hands and knees in the torchlight some poor wretch was indeed not long for this campus: blows and kicks rained upon him; the host of his attackers snarled like Border Collies at a wolf; those not near enough to strike with briefcase, umbrella, or slide-rule shouted imprecations and threw weighty textbooks. Already a noose was being rigged from a lamp-post, and Telerama crews were exhorting the crowd not to block their cameras. The victim’s tunic, though rent now and bloodied, I recognized as Bray’s; but his hair was gold and curled, not black and straight—and the face he raised, when the mob hailed the sight of me, was my own!
“Stop!” I commanded. “Stop in the name of the GILES!”
They did actually pause for a moment, weapons poised, and Reginald Hector (a more seasoned hand than I at giving orders) bellowed at them from the doorway to fall back before he horsewhipped the lot of them. “You heard your Grand Tutor: let the bastard go!”
“Billikins!” my mother screamed behind me, and had I not caught hold of her, would have run to the gore-smeared likeness of her son. “You’re not the GILES!” she shrieked at me, and strove ferocious at my eyes. “Billy is!”
Did I see Bray smile through his mad disguise? A half-second I had to wonder what, if not an EATen mind, could have led him to so fatal a mask, and where anyhow he’d got it. In that same half-second, as the mob faltered, another woman squealed forth round a shrubberied corner of the mansion. I let go my mother in horror at sight of Anastasia herself, scarcely less abused than Bray: her sandals were gone; her hair was wild, her cheek bloody, her white uniform ripped down the front and everywhere grimed!
“What in thunder!” Reg Hector shouted. My mother, instead of assaulting me, ran weeping to embrace whom she thought her son. Like the crowd, I stood dumbfounded; Reginald Hector, half-mad with alarm, caught his granddaughter in his arms and shouted questions at her: What had happened? Who had attacked her? But she shook away and ran to me. Forgetting my mask I held out my arms—ah, Founder, she was worse mauled than on the night Croaker beached her!—but she halted just before me and screamed at me to “keep my promise.” Men with microphones came running.
“You swore!” she cried. “You swore you’d pass Him if I slept with you!” Beside herself, she snatched a microphone and pointed to the man she thought was I, his wounds being kissed by my mother. “That man is a passèd Grand Tutor!” she shouted into it. “Don’t dare kill your own Grand Tutor!” To me again then she cried, “I kept my promise! You keep yours!”
I was dizzy with shock. Reginald Hector ran in small circles with his hands upon his ears. The Telerama people signaled one another furiously, and spotlights fingered all about us. To perfect the confusion a squad of Stoker’s motorcycle-guards now roared around the corner of the house whence Anastasia had appeared; they drew up near the gate, sirens a-growl, cursing the crowd from their way. Stoker himself led them, black-jacketed, booted, and grinning as of old, soot on chin and teeth a-flash. In his sidecar—manacled, disheveled, bruised, and glum—Peter Greene, with Stoker’s pistol at his head! Anastasia ran from him, to hug my knees. Everyone milled about; the lynching was temporarily forgot.
“Please don’t let them hurt George!” My Ladyship begged me. “We’ll try again tonight, if you want to. The whole night!”
A dreadful thought occurred to me as she spoke, so that only later did I realize what she’d said.
“Did Greene attack you?” Even as I asked I groaned with the certainty that he had, brought to it by disillusionment at my hands.
She pounded my kneecaps with her fists. “It doesn’t matter! Please do what you promised, Mr. Bray! I’ll find some way to have a baby with you; I swear it!”
My eyes blinded—with tears of chagrin that would not, however, fall—and I pushed through to where my mother knelt kissing the semblance of myself. Restive now, the crowd were arguing with Stoker’s men and unabashedly restringing the noose. I tried to say “Wait!” but the cry lodged in my throat. Bray smiled through his bloody mask expectantly; upon his chest my mother wept. I pointed at him and managed at last to say: “That man’s an impostor!”
“You’re telling us, sir?” his captors laughed, and made to fetch him noosewards. I blocked their way.
“Look!” I seized his hair and my own—which was to say, my own and his—and yanked both masks away, wondering what face Bray would show beneath. It was his own—that is, a semblance of the one I doffed—and people cried astonishment. My mother looked wailing from one to the other of us and clutched her head.
“I’m George the Goat-Boy!” I declared bitterly to the crowd. “My diploma’s false; I’ve failed everything—”
I could say no more for grief; anyhow they were upon me—seized me by the hair, and, seeing it was real, commenced to kick and pummel. Mother screamed, and was fetched from me. My diploma (the erstwhile Assignment-list) they stuffed into my mouth and bade me eat—as willingly I would have, in self-despite, had it not been retchy sheepskin. When they hoist me to a sidecar-top and readied the noose, I could see Bray moving porchwards on the shoulders of the faithful. From the mansion-steps Reginald Hector held out his arms to welcome the true Grand Tutor—nay, more, tore off his own shirt to staunch Bray’s wounds, nor would accept the new one his aides fetched forth, until the spotlights swung from him to My perjured, ruined, ruinous Ladyship. Anastasia tugged at Bray’s ankle, tore at her already open blouse as if to show him his reward, and screamed to him what she’d screamed to me, I did not doubt; he made a circle of his thumb and forefinger but could not calm her, nor moved at all to stay the lynch.
Neither did the guards: Peter Greene they held from the crowd (who were inspired to hang us both), on the ground that no formal charge of rape had yet been brought against him; but they only grinned and stood by as I was beaten with my own stick, my black purse pulled like a death-mask over my head without regard for its contents, and the tip of the shophar thrust into my rump. No matter: I yearned for the end; welcomed the hemp onto my neck; stepped off the sidecar before they could push me. A vile cheer rose; I heard Stoker laugh at my strangling. “Blow it!” someone yelled—and I thought I might have, so fiercely did I strain to die; indeed there came a far-off shrieking whistle, blast upon blast from Founder’s Hill; a sound I knew. As I let go reins and breath and all I heard a man cry, “Founder help us; we’ll all be EATen!” And another, almost matter-of-factly: “It’s the end of the University.”
Second Reel
1.
Students pass away; not so studentdom, until the campus itself shall perish. And at that term of terms, when the student body is no more, shall its mind not persist, in other universities than ours?
I couldn’t at once adjudge, from where I woke beyond the noose, whether the EAT-whistle had blown for my sole succumbing or all studentdom’s, as my chamber was isolate except from the cry and reek of fellow flunks. But that I was in Nether Campus I could not doubt: the heat, the shrieks and mad laughter, the stink—all attested i
t. I lay in foul straw in an iron stall with padded walls, lit by the red-orange glow from a port in the ceiling—the one apparent aperture. That I should abide there among the flunked forever I did not question: I had failed everything, everyone, in every sense; was as flunked as any other of Bray’s passees; had flunked myself as I had flunked them; was flunked at the outset for craving ardently to pass, just as that patch-eyed Nikolayan had been selfish in his yen for perfect selflessness. “Passage is failure”: I saw now in my black box what truth was in that remark, and prepared to suffer till the end of terms.
Two things alone surprised me: that the old West-Campus images of the mind’s fate after death should turn out, evidently, to be literal truth instead of vivid metaphor—real iron, real dung, real fire and screams, and elsewhere, I presumed, real harps and passèd madrigals!—and that my punishment, so far at least, was in strictly human wise. I had been raised in straiter stalls than this, had slept for years in urinouser peat; surely the Founder knew I must find these quarters less loathesome than another human would. Was it that under the aspect of eternity all punishments were equal, being infinite every one? Or that in His wisdom the Founder chose so goat a lot for mine the smartlier to sting me for playing at human Tutorhood? No matter, these or any things: it was finished. My neck hurt; otherwise I was comfortable, sweetly tired in every limb. Naked, besmeared, I rested in the black heat and balmy absoluteness of my fall. I had failed all, then, passed nothing! Relief—from aspiration, doubt, responsibility, fear of failure—it flooded through me, drowned remorse and dread, swept me into most delicious sleep.
Hours later—semesters, centuries—I woke to earnest conversation and realized I’d been hearing two male voices for some time.
“He wouldn’t!”
“Excuse, Classmate sir: wouldhood!”
“Indeed, I think he would not …”
“Impossibleness not!”
“You truly believe he would, my boy?”
“Yes. No! Bah, I give it up!”
The latter voice, its accent and locutions, was exotic, much in the matter of that same Nikolayan defector’s. The former—exotic too, but gentle, old, and wondrously familiar—was Max’s. Had they been Shafted, then, and was there company in Dunce’s College? I opened my eyes: I was on a bed now, of sorts—a sweet straw tick on an iron-wire platform—in a chamber better lighted than the one before, though no less warm. The floor and ceiling were of concrete, and the wall to which my steel-pipe bedframe was attached; the other walls were comprised of parallel vertical bars in the manner of detention-cells I’d read of. It was, after all, Max and Leonid Alexandrov I heard: they faced each other on the cell-floor, gesticulating as they argued.
“What about the other question?” Max demanded.
“Same like, turned around,” Leonid said: “Would go.”
“Maios didn’t, when he had a chance to.”
“Was vanicy, then. Playing heroness.”
“Playing! He died for it!”
“More famous so! Big advertise, name in historybooks!”
I feared to speak, lest the vision of my keeper vanish; for aught I knew, dear dreams might be my torment. But they saw me stir; Max hurried to me; real tears dropped into his beard and onto mine; material the arms that hugged me, mortal the hand that felt my brow, and I learned I was alive, in Main Detention. Leonid, though we’d met only once before, embraced me also, in the Nikolayan manner, and seemed as pleased as Max to see me wake. They had become friends, it appeared—as were too the Nikolayan and his former adversary Peter Greene, who saluted me glumly from the next cell!
“Thank the Founder you’re okay!” Max cried. His late reserve with me was gone; beside my cot he closed his eyes and thumped his forehead against my chest.
“Nothing’s okay,” grumbled Peter Greene, and was cheerily bid by Classmate Alexandrov to go flunk himself.
“I didn’t mean him,” Greene said. “Y’know durn well what I mean.”
I didn’t, nor cared just then to learn. Enough to be alive and on campus, however incarcerate and disgraced. Responsibility! Remorse! Dishonor! I welcomed their sting now as evidence that, among my other failures, I had failed to pass away.
There is no time in Main Detention—under Stoker’s wardenship, not even night and day. We slept or woke irregularly without regard to the lights, which went on and off at unpredictable intervals. Meals were served at any hour, apparently, sometimes in such close succession that one had no appetite, sometimes at so great a lapse of time that chants of protest rose from the detained. One had the impression that there was in theory a fixed routine, which however was whimsically administered: we would be routed out for exercise after “lunch,” say, and find ourselves doing push-ups under the stars; or we might go for (what seemed like) days without leaving our cells, then be sent to the prison shops or reading-room for so long a stretch that we’d sleep and eat upon the work- or library-tables. In this disorder I saw Stoker’s hand, as in our random assignment to cells. Main Detention itself, as I’d gathered from that chart in Stoker’s office, was scrupulously laid out as to the location among its tiers of the several sorts of offenders; there was evidence, even, of a moral logic in its architecture. But in practice we were assorted by no discernible plan: I for example had been taken from the noose at Stoker’s direction and detained for impersonating a Grand Tutor; the cells for that species of error were in the fourth block of the third, or bottom, tier, counting downwards; yet I had waked first in an observation-chamber for the criminally mad and later in the company of an alleged murderer, an alleged spy, and an alleged rapist (such was the charge against Peter Greene, who after reviving from Dr. Sear’s sedation had on the evening of my fall tracked Anastasia into an alleyway behind the Old Chancellor’s Mansion and there, by his own dour admission, flung My Ladyship upon the pavement and forced her virtue “redskin style”), no two of whom belonged in the same stratum. Moreover, at each return from work or exercise there was no telling where one would be confined, or with whom: I might be lodged alone or crammed into a cell with ten others in an empty tier; my companions might be fellow-impostors—false dons and pretended sophomores—or some of the many grafters, gamblers, pornographers, and prostitute co-eds detained under Lucius Rexford’s far-reaching program of campus reform (of which more presently), or any other combination of the flunked.
Yet among the inconsistencies of our detention, by the logic of our warden’s illogicality, we were not invariably assigned a cell at all. On occasion it was every man for himself at lock-up time; my objectives then would be to elude the predatory faggots (who collared the unwary to ruthless buggering) and share a cell with Max, Leonid, Peter Greene—or Croaker, when soon afterwards he joined our company. From them, from Stoker himself, who now and then toured his domain, and from the regular visits of Anastasia and my mother, I learned the unhappy state of things among my erstwhile Tutees, as well as in the upper campus generally. And that news, those developments, were my one real punishment in this interval of my life: sad postings in a desert of dead time.
I was not uncomfortable. When meat was served, or cowsmilk, I contented myself with water and mattress-straw, and gained strength and trim from that buckly fare. I cannot say that I was never abused by guards and prisoners, who sometimes took advantage of my sticklessness, or that I never made use of the restless whores who climbed upon the bars to sport. In general, however, except for the pleasure of atonement with Max and the pain of learning what catastrophe my Tutorship had wrought, my season in Main Detention was as numb as it was timeless. So much so, I reconstruct with confidence neither the order of the several disclosures and events which follow nor my reaction to them. They took place, I see now, over a period of some forty weeks, but for aught I felt or valued time it might have been forty years, forty days—or one long night.
The EAT-whistle that had postponed my end was a false alarm—rather, a true alarm falsely construed. When Classmate X had broken off the Summit Symposium and in such dudg
eon left the U.C. building, the Nikolayan and New Tammanian border-guards were each alerted to expect trouble from the other. Later that same day, on Lucius Rexford’s orders, units from the School of Engineering had moved up to begin the task of relocating the NTC Power Line a full kilometer west of its former position and mounting extra floodlight-towers in the widened gap between East and West Campus. The Nikolayans, thinking themselves menaced by this activity, had actually sent short-order EAT-waves crackling to the very Boundary (at least EASCAC had transmitted them; whether at its own discretion or on orders from the Student-Unionist First Secretary was not clear), which WESCAC had detected and duly reported. Ordinarily in such circumstances no general alarm would have been sounded until the enemy’s hostile intentions were unmistakable; but Chancellor Rexford being unavailable for consultation (he was in fact drafting the first of his “Open-Book Test” bills, and refused to be disturbed), the New Tammany professor-generals had blown the whistle. They may or may not have ordered a counter-attack as well: they themselves denied it, but the Nikolayans claimed—predictably, yet perhaps not incorrectly—that New Tammany was calling EASCAC’s defense-transmissions aggressive in order to justify counter-aggression; and Stoker himself (from whom I learned all this) maintained that WESCAC had indeed set about to EAT Nikolay College, either by its own AIM or at the direction of the professor-generals; only the drain on its power-supply—caused by Stoker’s unwonted absence from the Furnace Room and a sudden frenzy of power-consumption by the Library CACAFILE—had prevented Campus Riot III. The situation remained critical: Chancellor Rexford’s sudden insistence on “open-book diplomacy” had made practical negotiation impossible between East and West; the separation of the Power Lines ended the defection of malcontents; the Nikolayans maintained that NTC’s apparent retreat was a prelude to “loudening” the Quiet Riot, and Tower Hall replied that the Nikolayans were advancing their Power Line under cover of darkness—the new floodlights were barely usable for want of power. The only casualties thus far were among New Tammany’s border-guards, numbers of whom fell to their deaths each week from the Power Line because of the poor light and the new “heads-up” collars which the Chancellor obliged them to wear on duty; but pressures were mounting and tempers shortening on both sides, and at any hour the EAT-whistle might sound again, this time in earnest.
