Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “They fooled it with masks.”

  “Masks can’t fool it,” Max would then point out, and review the possible explanations of my passage through the Belly with Bray: “It might be Georgie was spared because Bray was with him, or vice-versa. It might be they’re both Grand Tutors, different kinds. Or it might be they both were EATen—but only crazy, not to death. Or it might be the Grand Tutor wasn’t EATen and the other was, so one’s crazy and the other not …”

  “Or they’re both fakes and WESCAC’s on the fritz,” Stoker taunted. “Or it changed its own mind about the Spielman Proviso and doesn’t EAT anybody these days. Maybe it’s in love with EASCAC and lost its appetite.”

  But Max would cheerfully agree instead of arguing, and point out moreover that either Harold Bray or the defector Chementinski might in some wise have altered WESCAC’s AIM, recently or many terms ago, if the computer hadn’t “noctically” reprogrammed itself. Nor could one query WESCAC on the matter, as it might have grown quite capable of lying to or misleading an interrogator.

  “Which all proves,” he would conclude, “you take or leave on faith a Grand Tutor, don’t ask it should be on His ID-card who He is. Even if He says His own self He’s a fake, and people call Him crazy, He might be the real thing, you got to decide. I believe in George.”

  Stoker feigned disgust. “Then you must believe he’s not the Grand Tutor and Bray is, since that’s what George says himself.”

  Undismayed, Max explained what I’d not fully realized I felt until I heard him: first, that all I claimed for Bray was that he wasn’t simply flunked, as I’d previously believed: there was something extraordinary, out of the merely human, about him—as about myself, in both my parentage and my kidship. Second, that my admitted failure applied only to my efforts at Tutoring before I myself had passed the Finals and thus had no bearing on my present authenticity. If indeed those efforts were failures, which had successfully revealed to my Tutees such flunkèd aspects of themselves …

  “Me it sure did!” Leonid cried dolefully. “Such a selfiness I never thought! But I don’t care!”

  “Nuts,” said Stoker. “A man that tells me I should pimp for my wife is a Grand Tutor? And tells her to spread her legs for the whole campus?”

  Max nodded, unimpressed. “You he tells that, you should do like the Dean o’ Flunks, and hope to pass on account you show others what it is to be flunked. Only you’ll flunk on account you lead them to think Pass and Fail aren’t two sides the same page. Which they are. So dear Anastasia, that she has a little touch nymphomaniac, she’s got to express it instead of suppress, she should Commence. Not so, George?”

  And I would merely nod, for though I followed these explications with care and often saw flaws in them (which I couldn’t always have articulated), I did not choose to defend or explain myself to Stoker—or to anyone else except myself. My whole concern was to feel a way through the contradictions of my new Answer, in order to apply it to the several problems of my Tutees when I should leave Main Detention. Therefore I gravely listened, but spoke only now and then to clarify a point or correct a misunderstanding. When for example Stoker asked why I didn’t simply walk out of his prison, since I seemed able to open any door, Max’s reply was that I wouldn’t work wonders at the tempting of the Dean o’ Flunks.

  “That’s not quite so,” I corrected him, “as Stoker knows. If it were, he could control me absolutely by tempting me to do the right thing.” The fact was, I said, I hadn’t the least idea how I’d opened those doors, though I felt obliged to Leonid for the ability. All I knew was that for me, just then, they’d been unlocked, as for Leonid all locks ever seemed to be, and that once I wondered how the thing was done, I couldn’t do it. It was Anastasia who would set me free, I said … and Classmate X.

  “What’s this?” Max exclaimed. “Chementinski sets you loose?”

  Leonid happily squeezed the breath from me, thinking I planned to defect, then frowned and wondered if such “selfishness” (his current interpretation of the move, and a term of approval by his recentest transvaluation) weren’t flunkèdly unselfish: “Like I, I can’t get rid of selfish, I’m wear it like a uniform: hooray Me! Spy for New Tammany or take Shaft for Max sir, whichever is selfestest.”

  I praised his resolve, which like the contradiction of his suicide-attempt had lit the way for my late insight into the secret of the University. But he must not worry, I added, whether my program or his own might lead to “failure”: as the author of Taliped Decanus understood, there is only failure on this campus—but as Enos Enoch and the original Sakhyan knew further, Failure is Passage.

  In any case, I wasn’t thinking of defection. I didn’t suppose I could defect, actually, since I was only a kind of visitor in New Tammany in the first place. What I was thinking of I demonstrated some time later, when Stoker came down with my stick, my purse, Peter Greene, and pieces of news.

  “It won’t do you any good,” he said, “but I’m supposed to give you your things and turn you loose if you clear your ID-card. Which of course you can’t.”

  I took my possessions joyfully. The other condition, then, had been met?

  “It’s been arranged,” Stoker said dryly. “My wife will meet Bray in the Belfry at eleven o’clock tonight.”

  Max groaned, but nodded affirmation. “Failure is Passage. A-plus!”

  Tears stood in Leonid’s eyes. “Commencedomship!” He put his arm around me and declared that while he could not but adore, with each breath he drew, the woman who’d inspired him from the grave, he would no longer dream that she might requite him, but rather that she and I would one day wed. “Never mind you!” he roared at Stoker, whose grin suggested to me that he himself might have arranged My Ladyship’s engagement. Anastasia, said Leonid, deserved no less a husband than the very GILES, whom in turn no mate would serve but the passèdest.

  I listened uncomfortably. “The fact is, Leonid—”

  “You mean the flunkèdest,” Peter Greene interrupted. “Durnedest floozy in the whole flunking College. Not that I care!”

  The change in Peter Greene’s manner, which had begun with his attack on Anastasia and grown during his detention, was now in full flower. So far from admiring My Ladyship for not pressing the charge of rape, he took her admissions as proof of her depravity, and had decided that all women were trollops at heart, and he himself an “All-U failure, know-thyselfwise.” Thus persuaded, he’d advised his wife’s attorneys of his intention to forsake her permanently, and invited her to divorce him on the grounds of adultery if she preferred not to wait the required two semesters; he supplied her with full particulars not only of his rape of Anastasia but also of his current activities, sexual and otherwise, and that catalogue, perhaps, had fetched her back into the Infirmary. Though he’d not after all defected to the Nikolayans, he was become a Student-Unionist “fellow scholar” and something of a Beist as well. He smoked hempen cigarettes, went barefoot and unbarbered, carried a guitar on which with rude skill he played songs of lower-form protest, and said of The Living Sakhyan: “Man, he’s the gosh-durn most, what I mean wisewise.” He had even taken a Frumentian lady roommate, Stoker’s secretary Georgina, whom he claimed to admire for her straightforwardness: she enjoyed fornication for its own flunkèd sake, he said, but loathed him personally, as he loathed himself, and slept with him mainly to relish the spectacle of his impotence. For where in the past he had been of limp manhood with Miss Sally Ann (so much so that he now feared their children were of extramarital paternity), and potent only with “the likes of O.B.G.’s daughter,” currently he found himself prone to failure with the wanton Georgina, but tumesced at the mere idea of a proper faithful wife, such as once he’d fondly thought was his.

  “She weren’t nothing but a floozy, though,” he would declare, “like Stacey Stoker and all the rest. Onliest decent gal I ever knew was old O.B.G.’s daughter—which I went and drug her in the muck anyhow, back in the old days. She’d of been pure as snow, that gal, if I hadn’t
made a black whore of her.”

  Whether Georgina was G. Herrold’s daughter, and G. Herrold and “Old Black George” were the same person, was still unclear, as was the extent to which the woman’s present motives were actual admissions of hers or Greene’s own conjecture. For though he declared himself pleased “to of had his eyes opened,” as he put it, to the flunkèdness of New Tammany, the female sex, and his own sorry past, he was an unhappy man, become sullen and surly; and his grudgy speech was laced with slang so pied and shifting, I shook my head as much at his words as at what I gathered of their sense. Withal, though, he seemed more changed in mood than substance: his soap- and shoelessness, beard and guitar, said Billy-of-the-Hills as much as Beist; and the disenchantment was clearly but a change of spells. His acne, which he had hoped to cure with dirt, was purulent as ever; hemp-smoke but guaranteed what had used to visit him unsought. Bray he called now an outright fraud for having passed him as a “kindergartener”; me he credited with “true-blue Beistic vision” for having shown him his former blindness. Leonid he regarded, with glum goodwill, as half mistaken, eye-to-eye-with-himselfwise: right about New Tammany’s decadence, wrong about Nikolay’s superiority; right about My Ladyship’s unchastity, wrong about her passèdness, and so forth.

  “Balonicy!” scoffed Leonid. “She’s passèd Graduate! If I believed in!” He shook his fist then at our warden, who was idly prodding Croaker with my stick through the bars of an adjacent cell, where the huge Frumentian lay bloat and helpless from overeating. “You turning flunked again, like before! Let go Mrs. Anastasia, should marry George! I don’t mind!”

  Stoker replied, with a measure of his former energy, that Leonid had never had a mind to mind with, or he’d have walked out of prison long since instead of trying to get himself Shafted in Max’s place. As to divorcing his flunkèd wife—

  “Not flunkèd!” Leonid shouted. “Is Passessness!”

  “Be durn if she is!” Greene shouted back.

  “Who cares?” Max cried. “Fail is pass, altogether!”

  Croaker set up a clamor next door, prompted either by the argument or by sight of my stick, which he snatched from Stoker’s hand and examined with a deal of lick and jabber. I let them all shout on, attending their debate but not joining it, and measured their several stances against the Answer until I’d found what I sought and done what I desired. From the bottom of my purse—under Sakhyan’s phial, the shophar, my damaged watch, the pocket-torch, and my partly chewed Assignment—I fished forth my ID-card, wrongly signed, and from my jail-coat the bottle of Classmate X’s all-round eradicator, snatched from Leonid in the nick of time. A few drops were undrunk; I poured them on the card.

  “Argue while you can,” Stoker said to Greene and Leonid, as if casually. “Two halfwits make a whole wit. Pity we can’t Shaft the lot of you tomorrow, instead of just Max.”

  Leonid blanched; Greene also. Max clutched his beard and sat down quickly on a bunk. Only Croaker continued to gibber, in my direction, as if having seen the stick he recollected who I was.

  “Did you say tomorrow?” Greene asked.

  Stoker grinned. “Four-thirty in the afternoon.” The appeal had been rejected, he announced, on the ground that Max, though refusing to plead, had affirmed his confession of the crime. The only recourse left was petitioning the Chancellor to commute the sentence to permanent detention; unless such petition was made (by the prisoner himself) and granted—against all odds, considering Rexford’s late sentiments—Max would be executed at next day’s dusk. “Makes a pretty light as the sun goes down,” Stoker said. “Especially an old dry Moishian.”

  “Pig dog monkey!” Leonid shouted. Stoker chided him for using such language in the presence of other animals: a goat, an ape, and three jackasses. This taunt so got to the Nikolayan that he was seized by one of his fits and had to be bunked. When he had ceased to flail I inspected my card and said to Stoker: “Open the door.”

  He cheerfully replied, “Go flunk yourself.”

  “I intend to,” I assured him, “as soon as I’m free. Here’s the card.”

  The remarkable liquid had caused to vanish entirely every name on the card except the George I’d penned in Ira Hector’s ink, and even that had been eradicated to the point where none but myself could mark its traces.

  “I’ll thank your stepfather for his help when I see him,” I promised Leonid. “I’m going to complete my Assignment now.”

  Overjoyed for my sake, Leonid sprang from his bunk, threw open the cell-door, kissed Max, shook both hands with Peter Greene, snarled at Stoker (who had no keys with him), and opened his arms to welcome me into the aisle. “Love Mrs. Anastasia!” he roared at me. “Defect her to Nikolay College, have lots rebyata! Peace to whole Universtity!”

  But I insisted that Stoker fetch keys and release me, to make the thing official. In the meanwhile I bade Leonid come in and relock the door, and Peter Greene linger, as I had things to say to them.

  “Don’t matter none,” Greene said, and even joined us in the cell. “Whole durn campus is a jail, far’s I’m concerned.”

  So it was, Max agreed, if one thought it so; but he declared his joyful suspicion that just as freedom might be detention to the flunkèd of mind, so to the passèd might detention be true freedom—the more so since failure, understood rightly, was passage.

  “You want to stay there and rot, that’s your business,” Stoker said, and went away.

  “Bring the key yourself!” I called after him. “I have advice for you, too.”

  His answer-fart rather heartened than dismayed me, as proof of his ripeness for new counsel. When Max, concerned for Greene’s and my sake, urged me to employ Leonid’s secret, or let Leonid himself usher me through the bars, I expressed perfect confidence in Stoker’s return, and saw no need to add that I had none in my ability to repeat the trick, or in the mercy of the guards, who were permitted to shoot escaping prisoners.

  “I hate cops,” Greene muttered, and, thumbing his guitar, began to sing a tune he called Greene’s Blues:

  Self-pitying as were the sentiments, and wrong-headed, the melody was affecting. I embraced and bade farewell to Max.

  “What I told you before was all wrong,” I said.

  He nodded gently. “You’re telling me?” By which he meant no sarcasm, but an affirmation of what we both now understood. He had been a love-lover, hating hate, and I’d thought him flunked for being not free of that latter passion after all, and vain in his choice to suffer.

  “Don’t worry you made a mistake your first time Tutoring,” Max said. “A beginner is bound to.” And holding his testicles he vowed thenceforward to eschew the delusion that Love and Hate were separable; he would affirm them both; he’d be a love/hate lover—more accurately, a love/hate lover/hater—if he could.

  “Then you mustn’t regret killing Herman Hermann,” I advised him.

  “Who regrets?”

  What I had wrongly flunked him for—that secret yen to be for once the aggressor, the persecutor—I now exhorted him to acknowledge, to embrace, even to assert. Greene and Leonid frowned their doubts, but Max agreed.

  “Because what’s the difference, pass and fail?” he asked rhetorically. “A trick of the mind, like it says in Sakhyan.”

  “Pass you, Max!” I exclaimed, stirred to the heart. “You know what I mean.”

  “Pfui on categories!” cried my keeper. “Not only I don’t regret killing the Moishiocaustnik: I wish I’d shot him myself!”

  Peter Greene and Leonid had resumed their favorite quarrel, about My Ladyship, but at this remark of Max’s Leonid leaped to us.

  “What’s this words, sir! You didn’t shot?”

  “Not my own self,” Max admitted.

  I too was astonished. At our insistence he confessed what had really happened in the woods near Founder’s Hill that night—though he and I agreed that such distinctions as Guilt and Innocence, Truth and Falsehood, were as flunking as the distinction between Passage and Failure. The poi
nt-faced guard, he declared, upon overtaking him on the road, had steered and throttled his motorcycle with the plain intent of running him down, and drawn his pistol as well, no doubt to guarantee the murder. But attempting to steer and shoot at the same time, in the dark, he’d lost control of the vehicle and crashed into the ditch.

  “So I go look is he hurt,” Max said, “and there’s the pistol in the mud, and the Bonifacist he’s got his boot caught under the sidecar, he can’t get loose. So I pick up the gun, it shouldn’t get rusty—he shouldn’t shoot me either!—and I say to him, Tell me where’s Georgie, did Maurice Stoker flunk him yet?” He smiled at me. “Such a dummy I was, about pass and fail!”

  He had guessed, Max went on, that Stoker’s aide was a former Bonifacist, by his manner and speech, and had surmised further that he must have been a man of some flunkèd consequence to choose exile and disguise at the Riot’s end, when so many who surrendered were prosperous again soon after. But he didn’t imagine the guard’s identity even when he said, in Siegfrieder accents, “Shoot straight, old man; you don’t kill professor-generals every night.” Pfui on kill, Max had replied; that was not his line, whatever his inclinations.

  “So I get him loose and tell him go home, he should drop dead without my help. This makes him angry; he says he won’t be patronized by a flunkèd old Moishian, that he wouldn’t have used to light a cigarette with back in his extermination-campuses: I should shoot him or he’ll set fire my beard. Then he walks at me with his cigarette-lighter, I can see his face by it, and I realize he’s Herman Hermann the Moishiocaustnik!” Whereupon, instead of shooting, Max had been smitten with despair, not alone because of the Bonifacist slaughter, but for the fate of studentdom in a university where Grand Tutors falter, and the flunkèd thrive. Assuming that the last slim hope of the campus had been traduced by Stoker’s blandishments, and remembering the countless Amaterasus who’d not have been EATen had he himself stayed behind to die in Siegfrieder College with Chaim Schultz and the rest, Max could imagine no fitter end than to perish, however belatedly, at the same grim hand that had sent the Chosen Class to Commencement Gate.