Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  This seemed doubtful to me, since the fertilest and most amorous does in the herd, to my knowledge, were strangers to the phenomenon she described: wag their pretty tails they might to call for love, and hunch some seconds after service (maiden goatlings in particular) if the buck was strong; but of “transports” and “climaxes” they knew nothing, I was certain. Mary Appenzeller, to cite but one example, an infallible breeder, was inclined to munch hay calmly even when topped by Brickett Ranunculus himself! As for infertility, there had been few cases of it in the barns that could not be “cured” by two dessertspoonfuls of soda dissolved in a liter of warm water and administered vaginally prior to mating, to neutralize uterine acidity—and I would have told Anastasia so forthwith, but I had come to learn, not to teach.

  “Why are you unhappy, then?” I asked her. “What do you want to be dead for? If there’s nothing wrong with your organs you’ll surely be in kid one of these terms, by somebody …”

  “George …” She drew the name out protestingly, and seemed about to weep again. To forestall her I acknowledged the truth of what she’d charged earlier—that with regard to human ladies, at least, I understood nothing. I asked her to remedy my ignorance with plain statements.

  “Is there anything you have to do this afternoon? Dr. Sear’s closed the office.”

  She glanced apprehensively at the one-way mirror. I assured her that no one was watching, and wondered why she cared, since we were only talking.

  “Your mother wants to be home when Uncle Reg arrives,” she said. “But that won’t be until dinnertime.”

  “Then I’m going to get to know you,” I said. “Inside out, in every way. Even if it takes the rest of the afternoon.”

  Her eyes doubted. “I’ve told You my whole flunkèd past, George: all the terrible things I’ve done thinking they were right. You know as much about me as I do.”

  “I don’t know why you wish you were dead,” I observed. “Stoker isn’t cruel to you any more. And he could inseminate you artificially if you can’t conceive in the normal way. Out in the barns, we—”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to have a baby! Not by him. George …” Her expression was awed. “There’s something wrong with my marriage.”

  Recalling that Stoker had expressed a similar apprehension, I asked her what might be their trouble.

  “I don’t really love my husband!” she said, as if frightened by her own candor. And then all reticence left her; in a tearful rush she confessed herself more flunkèd than I supposed. Her lack of love for her husband, she declared, was not new, and had nothing to do with his pleasure in seeing her serviced by other men, not to mention women, dogs, inanimate objects, and Dr. Eierkopf’s eggs, Grade-A Large; the truth was, she had never loved him; indeed, she feared she’d never loved anyone—male, female, or whatever. Of all Bray’s Certifications, she felt hers to be the falsest, for though she most certainly had sympathized with her classmates and done her utmost to gratify their needs, loved them she had never, she knew now. And the proof of it was that while she’d never said “no” (except since my spring-term directive), she’d never said “yes,” either. With her sex, perhaps, but not with her heart of hearts.

  “That’s very interesting,” I said. “I think I’m getting to know you better already.” What she said fit nicely too with my recent advice to her, I pointed out: saying yes to her classmates was, in effect, what I meant by actively servicing rather than passively receiving them.

  “You don’t understand!” she wailed. “How can I say it? I’m not supposed to have to say it!”

  I frowned. “Say what, Anastasia? If I don’t understand, teach me.”

  She closed her eyes and pounded the couch-cushion with one fist. “Why do You think I see these things about myself now, and never did before?”

  I admitted that I hadn’t any idea, unless it was that my mistaken first counsel to her and Stoker had led her to see that his abuses had nothing to do with her want of feeling for him.

  “No, You idiot!” She gasped at her outcry, then wept freely and pounded the cushion with both fists. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Oh, Founder, You of all people … I can’t say any more …”

  “Now listen here, Anastasia,” I said; “I’m a little tired of all this mystery. I’m not the Grand Tutor, but—”

  “You are, George!”

  I shook my head firmly. “I’m not; that’s almost certain. But either way, I want you to take my advice and assert yourself. If I’m not the Grand Tutor, then what I tell you now is right because it’s the opposite of what I said before, when I thought I was; if I am (which I doubt), then it’s right because I am. You must assert yourself.”

  “I want to,” she said, “because that’s what You want …”

  “Then stop beating around the bush. What is it you can’t tell me?”

  She looked at me, stricken. “I love You, George!”

  I sat up. Her eyes brimmed over again.

  “I don’t understand it any more than You do; we hardly know each other …”

  “What do you mean, love?” I demanded, much unsettled. She asked me shamefacèdly what I had meant when I’d said I loved her. “I don’t know!” I cried. “The words just came out. I don’t even know what it means!” She began to weep. I apologized for hurting her feelings again—but, flunk it all, I was alarmed, dismayed, I could not myself have said why; titillated of course, and flattered, certainly flattered—but equally appalled, oddly frightened, and for some reason cross. “In the herd, it means being in heat. For anybody. Everybody.”

  She whipped her head from side to side.

  “Don’t you really mean you’re just convinced I’m the Grand Tutor?” I asked gruffly. “You loved Bray, too …”

  “No!” It was true she had once believed in Harold Bray’s Grand-Tutorship as well as mine, she said indignantly, and that now she believed in me exclusively, whether I did or not; but she had never loved Bray, only honored and obeyed him, and her love for me had nothing to do with her acknowledgment of my Tutorhood. In fact, the two sentiments were at cross-purposes: “I want to do what You tell me to, much as I hate the idea of other men,” she said, “because You’re the Grand Tutor, and what You say must be right. But the reason why I hate the idea is that I love You, George!” She looked at me straight, and took a breath. “I want You to make love to me!”

  I strode about the Treatment Room, greatly excited.

  “You told me to assert myself,” she said.

  “I know! I know!”

  “I want to do what we did in the Living Room!” she cried. “You shouldn’t just say ‘I know, I know’!”

  “I understand, Anastasia. The trouble is—”

  “You think I’m a—floozy!” she exclaimed.

  “No, no, no.” I could not myself say why her profession of love, so gratifying to my vanity and destructive of my composure, did not also infuse me with desire.

  “Service me!” Covered with shame and desperation she took the position she’d once assumed in the Powerhouse. “Don’t make me beg You!”

  “Please, you don’t understand.” Nervously I stroked her cleft with the tips of my fingers. But roused as I was, at last, by the dainties thereabouts and her pretty sounds when I touched them, my mind grew clearer. I nuzzled her in the way of the friendly goats; but I would not mount her, I declared, love or no love, until she’d carried out my new directive. She kissed my mouth.

  “Can’t I start with You?”

  Though her heat was real, taking the initiative was plainly an effort for her, and her attempts to provoke my ardor rather cooled than fired it.

  “I do want to know you carnally too,” I said, “but not until you’ve serviced your husband and Bray, at least …”

  “I don’t want them.” On her knees upon the cushion now, she would assert herself further, draw my face into her bosom, offer her navel to my nose—all which I craved, detumescent as I was. Speaking with difficulty into her lower abdomen, I decl
ared that that was exactly why we would not mate until she’d fulfilled her assignment and made good the pledge that freed me.

  “But even then you shouldn’t love me the way you mean,” I added. “If by some chance I turn out to be a Grand Tutor, I doubt if I ought to have a particular mistress, especially someone else’s wife. And if I’m not—I won’t be here to love.” The idea disclosed itself to me in an instant, full-blown; I took my gold beard from her darling dark and addressed her gravely: “I left Main Detention for two reasons, Anastasia: to correct the mistakes I made last spring, and to flunk WESCAC. That’s why I’m here—to Overcome My Infirmity and See Through My Ladyship. In a little while I’m going to find Harold Bray and go down to the Belly with him, without any mask on, and if WESCAC doesn’t EAT me first, I’m going to destroy it.”

  She had started to protest; then she listened, her face stricken as when she’d said she loved me. At the end she drew her uniform together and kissed me chastely on the brow.

  “Excuse me for acting so crazy, George,” she said. “You see how hard it is for me to be aggressive.” She sat down and smoothed her skirt. “If You get EATen, I’ll get EATen too. I’m going with You.”

  “No.”

  She smiled firmly. “Yes I am. If I can’t be Your sweetheart, I’ll pass and be Your first protégée. You promised me that.”

  At once now I was inflamed with desire, by her return to demureness more than by her words, which were troubling enough. Now she didn’t press it on me, the idea that I was loved stirred me to the bowels with warm amazement. To keep her from WESCAC’s Belly was one thing; could I keep her from my heart as well? What in Founder’s name was this thing from Sub-Departments of Sentimental Literature, this love? I was baffled, and felt now towards myself the same queer strangership I’d felt towards Anastasia, and erst towards Max: a loveless, gingerly, wrinkle-nosed curiosity.

  “Is there something else You need to do with me for Your Assignment-task?” she asked determinedly. “Or shall I go home and service Maurice right now?” Her mind was made up, I saw, and my backbone tickled. My voice would not come; I shook my head. Her eyes shone with a kind of passionate reservation; she was mine, they said, in all particulars save one: I could not will her out of love.

  “What else is there to learn about me, then?” she asked herself brightly, for my benefit. “You know my history, and how I feel about things. I know what!” She jumped up and rummaged through a filing-cabinet. “I can show You my medical records and my psychological profile! My academic transcript’s on file in Tower Hall, of course; I’ll send for a photocopy. Let me think …”

  “Anastasia—” My voice was thick. She turned from the file.

  “It’s not—I don’t want just information.”

  She ignored my emotion and pretended to consider deeply. “Let’s see, then: See Through Your Ladyship.” She snapped her fingers. “The fluoroscope!”

  I waved my hand, but she turned switches and stepped behind the ground-glass screen. Within the supple shadows of her flesh I saw dark bones and dusky organs.

  “I’m not anything to love,” I found myself saying. “I don’t even know what I am …”

  “This is my duodenum,” she said crisply, as if lecturing, and pointed with a finger-bone. “These are my right and left kidneys here, and down here somewhere You may be able to see my ovaries. Come closer if You can’t.”

  “Stop, Anastasia.”

  “I want You to see everything, George. It’s all Yours.” She turned sideways; despite my odd anguish I gazed fascinated at her innards. “I’m asserting myself,” she reminded me. “Hold on: I’ll use a light the way Heddy used to; You can see right through to it. Is that flunkèd enough?” There was no sarcasm in her tone, only lovingest resolve.

  “Please, Anastasia!”

  She applied to herself despite my murmurs an illuminated Lucite rod.

  “Do you want to work it? Kennard likes to …”

  “I’m not Kennard!” I cried. I took her hand and put an end to the illumination. “I’m not anybody!”

  “You’re the person I love,” she replied, and laying aside the rod, hugged me softly. Notwithstanding her queer behavior, she seemed altogether at ease. I was most uncomfortable! “I’m sorry I complained about Your advice,” she said calmly. “I kept thinking of it in the ordinary way, as Kennard or Maurice would, instead of seeing that the idea is to test my love, the way the Founder tested people in the Old Syllabus.”

  “Anastasia …” The name seemed strange to me now, and her hair’s rich smell. What was it I held, and called Anastasia? A slender bagful of meaty pipes and pouches, grown upon with hairs, soaked through with juices, strung up on jointed sticks, the whole thing pulsing, squirting, bubbling, flexing, combusting, and respiring in my arms; doomed soon enough to decompose into its elements, yet afflicted in the brief meanwhile with mad imaginings, so that, not content to jelly through the night and meld, ingest, divide, it troubled its sleep with dreams of passèdness, of love …

  She squeezed more tightly; I felt the blood-muscle pumping behind her teat, through no governance of Anastasia. My penis rose, unbid by George; was it a George of its own? A quarter-billion beasties were set to swarm therefrom and thrash like salmon up the mucous of her womb; were they little Georges all?

  I groaned. “I don’t understand anything!”

  6.

  “I’m asserting myself,” she said quietly. “I think that the Ladyship part of Your Assignment means You’re supposed to know me so well that we’ll be the same person.”

  These words so fit my recent Answer, I could not protest when she disrobed. But coitus was not necessarily what she had in mind, ready as she was (and saw the nether George to be) for that ultimate merger of two into one. She removed not only her uniform and underclothing but the pins from her hair, the wedding-ring from her finger, and the cosmetic from her face, then turned from the wash-basin to face me. Her legs were slightly apart, her hands on her hips, her cheeks flaming. Inspired no doubt by Dr. Sear’s new relation to Peter Greene, she ordered me to make her person as familiar to me as my own. I asked her what she meant.

  “Examine me,” she said. Her voice wavered, but not for an instant her extraordinary resolution. She was a changed woman.

  “Examine you how, Anastasia? If you mean play Doctor, I don’t see—”

  “Let me do the seeing.” She closed her eyes for some moments, as if gathering strength to proceed with her remarkable, nonplussing self-assertion. Lifting herself onto an examination-table near the fluoroscope, she said grimly, “Come here, George.”

  I went. She leaned back on her arms.

  “Look me over,” she ordered. “Don’t mind if I blush or act embarrassed. Examine me, every square millimeter. Don’t touch me yet; just look.”

  I am not made of stone: breathing heavily, and assisted by my flashlight and the various lenses of my stick, I inspected every pore, hair, fold, crease, protuberance, process, and orifice of her. I learned that the hairs of Anastasia’s limbs, head, armpits, and pubes grew darker and thicker in that order; that her brown irises were flecked with black and green; that her scalp was more white, her labia minora more tan, than I’d have supposed. Her nostrils were not quite a pair; there were silver fillings in three of her molars and one bicuspid. Her nipples, examined closely, were mottled, and more cylindrical than hemispheric. A total of seventy-four tiny moles, all brown, were disposed about her epidermis, five of them bearing at least one hair. Her earlobes were extremely small, scarcely pendant; a thumbnail-size café-au-lait birthmark was half concealed, when she stood, in the crease below her right buttock. Her anus—unlike her lips, tongue, nipples, clitoris, and urethra-was neither rosy nor granular, but of the same smooth beige-pink as the skin of her hams. Her navel, shallowly recessed, was bilobular, not unlike the East-Campus symbol for polarity.

  “Measure me,” she said. With the aid of several kinds of scales, a tape, calipers, and other devices lying about the room, I dis
covered that the total weight of Anastasia’s body was 50.4 kilograms, of which her head and neck accounted for 2.25, her arms for a kilo apiece, her breasts for less than a half-kilo each, and her legs for almost six together. Her height was 1.63 meters standing, about six millimeters more reclining; an average hair on her head was twenty-three centimeters in length, on her armpit (not recently shaven, she said) one centimeter, on her mons veneris three. The girth of her forehead was fifty-nine centimeters, of her neck thirty-one, of her chest ninety, of her waist sixty-five, of her hips eighty-eight, of her upper arms twenty-three. Her forehead was seven centimeters high. The maximum arch of her eyebrows was half a centimeter; she could elevate them by three times that amount. Her eyes measured 1.7 by 3.2 centimeters and were set eight centimeters apart from pupil to pupil. The span of her smile was six centimeters, of her shoulders forty-one, of her fingers twenty, of her arms one hundred sixty-seven. Her right arm was longer than her left by a centimeter, measured from armpit to fingertip. Her lips projected from the plane of her face by the same amount; her ears from the side of her head by slightly more. Her breasts were not easy to measure, owing to their resiliency; their projection from the plane of her chest, for example, varied from four and a half centimeters supine through six standing to nine bent over, and there appeared to be a centimeter’s difference in pendulosity between them, as between the length of her arms; the distance from nipple to clavicle was seventeen centimeters when she stood with her arms at her sides, not quite fifteen when she raised them; from nipple to nipple, twenty-three standing and twenty-five reclining. Finally, what one might call the standing compressibility of her udder was five centimeters, and their side-to-side play twelve. Her nipples when aroused had a diameter of seven millimeters and a projection of fifteen; their tranquil dimensions, though visibly smaller, I could not measure accurately, for they sprang to attention at sight, so to speak, of the calipers’ approach, as did the erectile tissue of her clitoris. Nor could I, lacking Dr. Eierkopf’s gauges, measure in real numbers the strength of her anal and vaginal sphincters, though my digital impression was that the former had easily twice the constrictive power of the latter.