Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “Nonsense.”

  “Right!” I cried again. “Embrace nonsense! Be immoderate when you feel like it! Don’t always be reasonable with your wife! Make the guards look down so they can see what thin air they’re standing on, just like Entelechus! Go hug your brother!”

  “Hug my brother!” Rexford blushed hotly—but not, I thought, in anger.

  “You know as well as I do that he is your brother. Go have a drink with him! And next time you see Anastasia—”

  “He’s not actually my brother,” the Chancellor put in hastily. “Some kind of half-brother or foster-brother, I think …”

  “What’s the difference? Embrace him!” It occurred to me that the difference, in Rexford’s mind, might be between adultery with a blood-brother’s wife and adultery with an adopted brother’s wife, and so I didn’t press the indistinction further. Nor did I itemize the ways in which I’d have him repudiate my former Tutelage and assert its contrary. He was, I saw, strongly tempted by Stoker’s presence just outside the gate, and by despair, which flooded in on him almost visibly once I’d got through his equilibrium. Therefore I contented myself with advising that the “Open Book” be shut forthwith, and that an amnesty be declared for everyone detained under its reforms.

  It was the Chancellor now who strode about, shaking his head. “This is crazy!” He stopped and grinned; the famous forelock fell. “I know: it’s supposed to be crazy. All the same—” He laughed aloud at this additional irony, throwing back his head and flashing his fine teeth. “Wouldn’t that make them sit up, though, if I went out there and called Maury Brother! Or told X to bring his Line as close as he wants!”

  Unsettled by the tempting outrageousness of that idea, he flung open the curtains of a double glass door leading from the office onto a terrace, and squinted and chuckled in the glare. Beyond the low wall of the terrace was the driveway-gate where Stoker lingered with some of his sooty crew and a few reporters.

  “One thing at a time,” I cautioned. He caught me up brightly: who was being the prudent one now? But delighted as I was by his respiriting, I felt obliged to warn him that there were photographers about.

  His blue eyes twinkled. “What difference does that make? Anyway their pictures haven’t been turning out lately. No flashgun batteries.” But he grew grave for just a moment at the terrace door. “You say you’re not the Grand Tutor, George; but I understand you really are the GILES.”

  I shrugged. “That’s what WESCAC says.”

  He smiled again. “I’m not as crazy as you might wish. But I take you seriously, and I think I see your point: it’s worth risking some kind of long-shot to change my luck and brighten up my image a little. It had better not fail, though.”

  Before one could say “Failure is Passage” he stepped outside, topcoatless in the winter air, and vaulted lightly over the terrace wall. I saw the reporters rap one another’s arms as he strode up, brisk as a sophomore track-man, and Stoker scowl at the wrought-iron gate. Aides burst into the office, looked about in wonder, and thrust past me without a word. Then, shedding their topcoats and rumpling their hair, they vaulted after him. What the Chancellor said I couldn’t hear from the terrace, but he grabbed Stoker’s hand through the gate and pumped it vigorously. Once only he seemed to wince, when flashbulbs popped after all—the Powerhouse-Director had no doubt been horsetrading—then he grinned his grin, flung open the gate, and clapped an arm about Stoker’s leathern shoulder. Reporters and cameramen tumbled and called; microphones appeared; Stoker glowered and shook his fist at a Telerama-boom. But Lucky Rexford laughed, would not unhug him, and saying something into the microphones, pointed first to Stoker’s black forelock and then to his own sand-white one. His hand was sooty.

  More than content, I went back into the entrance-hall; rather than disturb the reunion I would walk the few kilometers to the Infirmary, where I hoped to find Dr. Sear and perhaps Anastasia as well. There was a bustle on the wide central staircase: Mrs. Rexford, crisp and elegant, came down with a gaggle of scribbling ladies and a phalanx of suitcase-bearing young men. Coolly she moved in their van, a slim-legged, doe-eyed, soft-mouthed beauty, with the high-strung grace of careful breeding—truly a Hedda among lady girls (though deficient of udder). She regarded me and my detention-suit with brief disdain while one of her female companions informed her that her husband was at the front gate, and that the press wanted to photograph them together before she left on her vacation-trip. She glanced somewhat petulantly towards a fellow in her retinue, who, though dressed like a chancellor’s aide, had not gone with the others; I thought I saw him nod.

  “All right,” she said, daintily vexed. I considered warning her of Mr.Rexford’s changed attitude—but her cool and powdered elegance I found not approachable. I felt ungroomed, less washèd even than I was, a stinkish bill-buck; and though a moment later I put by that feeling with some annoy, I let her go uncautioned, a-whisper in the gray-suit fellow’s ear, and left the Light House by a different path. Crossing Great Mall I heard lady-shrieks and other commotion behind me, and was tempted to run with the others to the Light-House gate, to see what was happening. But already my faint shadow fell east of north; the hour was later than I’d supposed, and work remained to do.

  Gimping hospitalwards, I scolded myself further for having let human upperclassness put me down. GILES, son of WESCAC, maternal grandson of Reginald Hector; laboratory eugenical specimen of the Grand-Tutorial ideal (no less rare even if false); protégé of Maximilian Spielman—and a goat, by George: a brawny-bearded bigballed buck! Stepkid of Mary Appenzeller; stallmate of Redfearn’s Tom; lover of Hedda of the Speckled Teats; familiar of that late legendary sire of sires, Brickett Ranunculus, the very dean of studs—I should deny my pedigree and heritage, my gait my garb my scent? Infirmity! My one infirmity, I saw now, was having thought such goatly gifts in need of cure, and that infirmity was overcome. Studentdom it was that limped: hobbled by false distinction, crippled by categories! I returned unflinchingly the stares of male and female undergraduates thronging the sidewalks, and reasoned one strong step further: my infirmity was that I had thought myself first goat, then wholly human boy, when in fact I was a goat-boy, both and neither: a walking refutation of such false conceits. If I chose, withal, to comport me goatly now awhile, it was not to deny my humanness (of what was the GILES decocted if not the seed of the whole student body?) but to correct it, in the spirit of my new advisings. To that end, as I drew near the Psychiatric Annex of the great Infirmary I goated it the more—“went to the bathroom” where no bathroom was, as in pasture days; bleated twice or thrice at the passersby’s dismay; and skipped up the marble entrance steps on all fours—the point being that I wasn’t just Capra hircus, any more than the white-coat pair of watchers at the top were simply Homo sapiens.

  “A wise guy,” one of them said.

  “I don’t know, Bill,” said the other.

  “George Giles the Goat-Boy,” I announced, rising proudly to shake hands.

  They exchanged glances. “Come off it, pal,” Bill said. “Let’s see your matric card.”

  Pleased at the chance to demonstrate my point, I displayed the blank ID-card with a smile. “What difference does a name make, classmates? I am, that’s all.”

  “What’d I tell you,” his colleague said to him. Bill grunted.

  I was surprised and pleased. “You’ve thought of it before? That none of us really has a name?”

  “Some stinks worse’n others, though,” Bill said. The two each took an elbow, and they led me inside. When I understood that the jacket they called for was for me, and strait, I protested I’d only come to visit Dr. Sear. Bill acknowledged again, grudgingly, that his companion’s guess had been correct. “I knew he treated lots of them animal ones,” he said in his own defense. “But I thought that there goat one was in Main Detention.”

  “He is,” the other said, and explained patiently; “what there is, though, Bill, there’s some thinks they’re the ones that thinks they’re anima
ls! It’s in their heads.”

  “You reckon Sear treats them ones too?”

  Proud of his knowledge, Bill’s companion pointed out that Dr. Sear was a diagnostician, not a therapist. “He just sees what bin they belong in, is all.”

  The waistcoat was fetched—a cross-armed canvas thing—but they offered not to bind me in it if I’d come quietly to Dr. Sear’s office. I agreed, delighted to infer that the doctor had recovered from his dread affliction as well as from his suicide-attempt, and I endeavored to Tutor my gruff escorts no further.

  Other orderlies waited with patients in Dr. Sear’s corridor. One of the latter growled and snapped at me as he and his keeper took our place in the lift; I lowered my head to butt, bleated a warning, and hoofed the terrazzo floor. The disturbance brought Anastasia hurrying from the Reception Room with dog-biscuits.

  “George!” Her eyes widened at sight of the strait-jacket. Refusing to hear the orderlies’ story, she scolded them sharply for treating the Grand Tutor as a madman; they were flunkèd as her husband, she said, who’d detained me as a common felon. They grumbled apologies and unhanded me, cowed by her temper if not persuaded by her representation; still flushed with outrage, she nevertheless agreed not to report their misjudgment to Dr. Sear, and dismissed them.

  “A regular nut-house,” Bill said disgustedly to his colleague.

  Anastasia led me into the Reception Room (where I was surprised to see my mother, placidly knitting) and at once hugged me and made tears—not at all the chilly woman she had been being! “I’m so glad You’re out of Detention,” she exclaimed, and although she added, “everything’s so mixed up, I don’t know what to do!” I was pleased to believe her glad of my release apart from any aid she might require. And her recaptured warmth so gratified me that I kissed her mouth. Nibbled her even, ardently, whereupon she drew back with her usual wonder, but did not oppose my doing it again.

  “Don’t just allow me!” I rebuked her—still holding her against me. “Either stop me or join in.”

  She looked fretfully to Mother, who however regarded us with blank benignity and went on knitting.

  “It doesn’t come naturally to me, George,” she complained. “And I’m all upset just now …”

  Bracing my heart I asked whether Bray had serviced her. More tears ensued, and blushes; she wrung in her hands the forgotten biscuits. He had not, she thanked the Founder, summoned her as yet, owing to his busy schedule of appointments for Certification. But their rendezvous was set for the coming midnight, in the Belfry; he was to fetch her from the Living Room at eleven o’clock.

  “No,” I said. At once she flung her arms about my neck for joy. But I continued: “You go to him, Anastasia. You do the servicing.”

  She wept: she could not, not ever. Task enough to submit to every creature’s lust, as I had bid her; if she could manage it at all, it was only at my order, and because I’d taught her how responsible she was for the lust she helplessly provoked; but she besought me not to make her take the initiative.

  “You must,” I said. “And not only with Bray. I want you to seduce people—even Stoker.”

  “Maurice?” If she was anguished before, now she was simply shocked. “You mean … make love to my husband? What would he think!”

  His thoughts, I told her, were not important; her Commencement was, and it depended on her overcoming the false distinctions I had formerly burdened her with. Yes, she must seduce her own husband, overwhelm him with carnalities of every description, even Conscious Depravities. Moreover, for both their sakes she must cuckold him; commit fornications without his knowledge and against his wishes.

  “That’s impossible!” she protested. “You know how Maurice is!” But her eyes refilled as she remembered, visibly, that he’d been neither brute nor pander since my first false Tutoring, but so chaste and docile a spouse he’d often made her cross. “That would be adultery, George!”

  This last was more plea than refusal, and setting the teeth of my spirit I insisted she deceive her husband, not only with Bray but with for example Dr. Eierkopf and any other creature who crossed her fancy or her path—male or female, human or hound-dog, even animate or inanimate. All discrimination must go by the board.

  She shook her head. “That’s flunkèd!”

  “Failure is Passage,” I reminded her. She objected no more, but admitted tearfully that Dr. Sear had just finished telling her the very same thing, apropos of “the Peter Greene business,” and though she’d understood it from him no more clearly than from me, even when he applied my reasoning to his own case, she guessed she had no choice but to acknowledge her stupidity and try to obey without understanding, repugnant as was the notion of such lewdness. I asked what business of or with Greene she meant, as she seemed not to be alluding to the spring-term rape—and also how my advice to her had applied to Dr. Sear, for while I was pleased to see he saw my point about her “charity” and the need to invert my former Tutoring, I had not myself considered what ought to be his new prescription. By way of answer, she locked the hall-door and bade me come with her into the Observation Room. As we passed in front of my mother, that lady caught and kissed my hand, the first indication that she knew I was there, and smiled slyly to herself as always. I kissed her hair, and she put down her knitting to make Enos Enoch’s hand-sign on her fallen chest.

  “What are you knitting, Mother?” I asked gently, and looked to Anastasia for reply; between her spells of reliving our season in the hemlocks, my poor Lady Creamhair spoke not at all except in confidential whispers to My Ladyship, whom she stayed with constantly, as it seemed.

  Anastasia colored. “It’s a baby-sweater, George. Mom—Your mother thinks I’m going to have a baby.”

  I considered her belly. “Are you?”

  “Of course not!”

  Mother nodded to the wee blue wrapper. “Bye Baby Billikins.”

  Anastasia colored further. “Sometimes she thinks it’s that WESCAC business again, and her that’s pregnant.”

  But my mother resolutely shook her head.

  “You do, sometimes!” Anastasia scolded her; but then confessed what I took to be Mother’s commoner delusion; “other times she seems to think I’m Your wife or something …”

  I smiled and kissed again Mother’s poor mad hair, and to humor her folly drew Anastasia near, patted her fine flat gut, and nodded.

  “That’s cruel, George!” In a little temper My Ladyship went into the Observation Room. “I’m not even able to have babies, and You know it!”

  My apology seemed rather to encourage than to mollify her petulance; she maintained a more or less injured air while recounting Peter Greene’s strange forenoon invasion of the office. But though I was much interested in her tale, I forgot her vexèd tone when I looked through the one-way glass into the Treatment Room and saw a shirtsleeved man, his head swathed in bandages, lying on the leathern couch—and Peter Greene, white-coated, in the chair at its head!

  5.

  “Don’t ask me,” Anastasia said, before I’d thought to. “Kennard took him in there to calm him down, and next thing I knew it was like that. They’ve been at it since before lunch.”

  From her account I gathered that the bandaged man was Dr. Sear; his malady was no curabler than before, but surgical excision of his nose had abated its progress, temporarily, enough for him to resume a limited practice. Anastasia had returned to assist him on the conditions that she be obliged no longer to offer sexual therapy to anyone, even Mrs. Sear, and that her “mother” be permitted to stay with her in the Reception Room. Indeed, it was Mother, I was startled to learn, who in her own recent therapy-sessions had by some means conveyed to Dr. Sear the first reports of my new programme—perhaps by the same fortuitous quotations from the Syllabi that she’d inspired me with. In any case, with his usual acuity Sear had seen my point, and when shortly afterwards Anastasia had come to him, distraught, with word of my strange new advice, he’d not only approved it, but fortified my paradoxical argument wi
th a dozen quotations from Footnotes to Sakhyan and other works of “unitary expletivism,” none of which My Ladyship could make heads or tails of.

  “ ‘He is a Grand Tutor!’ ” she said he’d said of me. “I told him You said You weren’t, and he said, ‘That’s the point! That’s what I mean!’ ” She sighed (still a little poutish): thereafter Sear had pressed her in vain to return to the practice of sexual therapy; and it was he, I now learned,who had suggested that she might secure my release by promising to become Bray’s mistress (he’d also persuaded Bray to release me on the strength of her pledge without waiting for its consummation—not to mention the siring upon her of the child Bray craved). Further, Sear had acknowledged to her that he himself had been desperately flunkèd thitherto, even as I’d said; was flunkèd still, as he’d seen too plainly at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. Hence the decision to end his life. Rescued willy-nilly from the sleeping-capsules, he’d tried to relish the horror of his disease, but the physical decay, it seemed, drove out the intellectual, and he’d found himself terrified instead of diverted by death’s approach. Anosmia was followed by exophthalmos, and as his eyeballs began to pop, the cancer spread to and obstructed his lacrimal ducts, with the result that tears ran from them almost constantly. But it was as much for as from his condition that he wept. Greatly as he loathed mutilation, now he feared death more, and consented to radical surgery: the tears disappeared, along with his nose and a portion of the sight of both eyes.

  With what vision remained to him he’d striven to imagine how my new Answer fit his case. Clearly I would not advise him to refine his amusements or otherwise attempt to become more campusly—the end of that road he’d reached already, at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. From my advice to Anastasia he inferred correctly that he should assert whatever it was he had vainly tried to rid himself of; further, he’d concluded that that must necessarily be some kind of ingenuousness or ignorance of himself, inasmuch as he’d devoted his whole life to their opposites. That he could see no defect in his insight proved to him that the defect existed, since perfect insight would see its imperfections; had he not been naïve to think himself not naïve? His first prescription, therefore, had been to commit himself to the custody of his wife, who had regressed to the psychological age of five. But much as he’d enjoyed playing “Doctor” with her in the sandbox of the chronic-ward playground, he’d come to realize that however correct his diagnosis and prescription, they were invalid perforce, as he’d arrived at them himself.