Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “Get in here, woman! I’m taking you home!”

  Demurely she refused; she would stay with me, whether I wished her to or not. She apologized for having forsaken her wifely vows and tried to explain that while she sympathized with Stoker and was even beginning in a way to love him, she had a higher obligation as a Grand Tutee; a higher love, not in conflict with her marriage, she declared, but transcending it; a passèd Assignment from the Founder, scarcely dreamed of even by myself, to the fulfillment whereof she was now utterly dedicate …

  “Hogwash!” Stoker raged. All this while I’d been contemplating Max, who, wizeneder than ever, sat oblivious to the fuss. But at Stoker’s oath, unfamiliar to me, I started, for it put a notion into my head, or rather disclosed to me in an instant one that had grown unnoticed there almost to ripeness. In half a second I was studying Max again (who also studied me), ignoring Stoker’s jealous oaths and the general furor; but it was as if the Founder had seen to it he would cry Hogwash on that occasion rather than Horse-manure or Sheep-shit (other of his pet ejaculations), just in order to inspire me with a plan.

  Max held out a thin hand. “Bye-bye, Georgie.”

  How to tell him that I grasped now, among much else, the hub of his Cyclology; that I had completed my Assignment, passed the Finals, and come through to bonafide Grand-Tutorship? There was no need: he saw what I’d seen and had become; from his eyes, hid deep behind their brows like an owl’s in snowy brake, understanding glowed. I gripped his hand. “You don’t have to die this afternoon, Max. I’ve got a secret: Leonid’s key. I can take you right out of this.” I studied his face as I spoke. He touched the amulet-of-Freddie. The true scapegoatery, I reminded him, was not to die for studentdom’s sake, but to take their failings upon oneself and live. “You misunderstood the amulet-of-Freddie.”

  “Ach,” he said, “not only that. You know why I been an all-round genius, George?” He smiled. “Because I never knew my real major. But I found out now what my life’s-work is.”

  I asked what.

  “To die,” he said, delighted by the joke. “In studentdom’s behalf, selfish or not, and even if it don’t make sense.”

  “Are you a love-lover nowadays, Max?” I earnestly inquired. “Or a hate-hater, or what?”

  Promptly, as if he’d expected the question, he replied: “Na, I don’t hate hate any more. But I love love more than I don’t hate hate.”

  “You’re going to the Shaft?”

  He nodded.

  “Even though you might be playing martyr?”

  He shrugged. “So I’m playing. The game’s for keeps.”

  I placed my fingertips on both his temples and declared him a Candidate for Graduation.

  “Ach!” he said, hoarse with pride. “You know what’s ahead for you, Georgie? At the end of the circle?”

  I smiled and gently mocked his accent. “A circle has an end? Auf wiedersehen, Max.”

  Yet a moment he clung to my amulet. “One favor you can do me, Georgie: blow your horn when the time comes, I want to hear it on the Shaft.”

  I promised I would, thrilling again at the way all chance seemed fraught with meaning and instruction. The original shophar, no longer blowable, I’d left in the Belly with Mother’s purse and all my collected tokens except the stick and watch, the rest having done their job; but its mate (old Freddie’s left) still lay, I trusted, in a certain tool-locker out in the barns, where I meant to go anyway before the Shafting.

  “I’ll drive you out,” Anastasia said firmly, turning from her husband. “We’ll use one of Maurice’s cycles.” I glowed at the miracle in her words, and agreed. Unable to speak for rage, Stoker fired both pistols into the air and raced his motor. His troopers laughed at his discomfiture. I beamed at him.

  “You!” he roared at me, and turning then to the demonstrating students he shouted that the Grand Tutor was Harold Bray, who even then was on Founder’s Hill preparing to do wonders at the Shafting, while I was a gross and treacherous impostor whom no committee in the College would condemn them for lynching. The half-dozen grinned appreciatively, and some of their classmates looked at me now with a new respect, which infuriated Stoker the more. As he harangued them I touched his temples from behind and declared him a Candidate for Graduation. My six were startled; even Max and Anastasia looked surprised.

  “Wah!” Stoker bellowed, too paroxysed now to speak intelligently. “Wah! Wo! Wah!” Anastasia being nearest his reach, he clouted her with his helmet, knocking her into my arms. The sight drove him wild; actual tears stood in his eyes; he seemed about to shoot the pair of us.

  “Maurice,” Anastasia warned. “Don’t you dare shoot. I’m pregnant.”

  “Wah! Wo!”

  “I’m eight hours pregnant,” she affirmed, in utter earnest. “By the Grand Tutor.”

  The troopers and students guffawed and cheered; Mother murmured, “A-plus.” I marveled at My Ladyship’s extraordinary conviction, wondering all the same whether the EAT-wave mightn’t have got to her after all. As for Stoker, this declaration on the heels of my Certifying his Candidacy made him truly berserk: he wrenched the motorcycle into gear, cursing, babbling, snarling at once, while tears coursed over his grimèd cheeks. Demonstrators sprang in all directions as he tore through; Max clutched the sidecar-wales. The rest of the troop, still laughing, straggled after—all save one, whose vehicle Anastasia commandeered by the simple expedient of threatening to tell Stoker that he’d forced her virtue. The trooper sneered, shrugged, growled something about Pantoffelheldentum—but climbed up behind a smirking colleague, leaving his own motorcycle idling. Anastasia donned the helmet her spouse had swatted her with, passed Mother into the keeping of the forelocked aide (who seemed, like most of the student body, on familiar terms with My Ladyship), and bade me mount behind her, the vehicle being sidecarless.

  “All’s fair that ends well,” Mother murmured to the air.

  6.

  Stoker meanwhile, hurtling cornerwards, careered into a second motorcade—this one in perfect file, upon white engines—which had wheeled round from the Mall. The confusion obliged both parties to halt.

  “Oh dear,” Anastasia said, and blushed. “It’s Mr. and Mrs. Rexford.”

  An expert driver, she would thread us out of the traffic-jam and away from the scene. But I directed her to take me to the Chancellor, whom Stoker, springing from his vehicle, had found shrill speech enough to mock.

  “Wife-beater!” I heard him jeer, among other things. The Chancellor’s white-helmeted escorts drew polished pistols, and two or three professor-generals came running from the Belly-port, which I noticed had reclosed. Rexford, though he reddened at the taunt, seemed in control of himself again, and showed little sign of last evening’s debauch: his eyes were bright, if slightly bloodshot; his hair was groomed but for the one unruly lock, his face clean-shaved, his light coat pressed and spotless. His wife, though her left cheekbone was something moused, seemed not displeased to contradict with her presence the reports of their separation; she glared at Stoker angrily, as if he were responsible for her husband’s truancy as well as for the present embarrassment. The Chancellor himself, though he frowned at the disorder, seemed not alarmed, and vetoed the request of his professor-generals to have Stoker shot.

  “Put him in irons, then,” one of them ordered the Chancellor’s escorts. “We’ll get him for disorderly conduct and conspiracy to overthrow.”

  “No no,” Rexford said. “I’ll let him go on to the Powerhouse.”

  Stoker beamed contemptuously. “That’s my brother!”

  The professor-generals, who, it was rumored, had been talking anyhow of impeaching the Chancellor on charges of conduct unbecoming a Commander-in-Chief, exchanged meaning looks, which Rexford obviously saw and was as amused by as was Stoker, if for different reasons.

  “He’ll be allowed to pass outside Main Gate between the Powerhouse and Main Detention,” he said—addressing the p.-g.’s but observing Stoker. “If he sets foot on Great Mall aga
in, arrest him. If he enters Tower Hall or the Light House, shoot him.”

  Stoker laughed as if in mocking triumph, but his effect was diminished by the tear-tracks still on his face. He thrust out his hand. “Put her there, Brother!”

  At that moment the Chancellor remarked our presence, Anastasia having drawn us near at my insistence. He flashed us a quick smile before returning to deal with Stoker; his wife stared dangerously at My Ladyship, who lowered her head. Calmly, almost respectfully, Rexford pushed away the proffered hand, wiping his own afterwards on a white linen handkerchief. Good-humoredly he scoffed, “Brother indeed! Go back where you belong.”

  The professor-generals brightened. “You deny he’s your brother, Mr. Chancellor? Once and for all?”

  Rexford coolly reminded them that professor-generals did not address their Commander-in-Chief as if he were a miscreant recruit. Then he added with a wink: “Do I look like the rascal’s brother?”

  Stoker flung back his head and laughed, again as if meaning to mock; but I thought I detected wet streaks among the dry. Catching sight then of us, he bellowed, “Wah! Wow!” leaped back upon his motor, and throttled off. The professor-generals took counsel with one another; one of them I saw slip a Light Up With Lucky button out of his pocket and repin it on his tunic, above the riot-ribbons. Stoker’s men having left to try to overtake him, the white-helmeted escorts realigned their positions, discreetly raced their engines, and made ready to proceed. But the Chancellor had turned to me, with a kind of bright hesitation, as if certain of his desire but not of protocol. I dismounted and stepped towards him, whereupon with a grin he sprang from the Chancellory sidecar and met me halfway.

  “Glad to see you without the rope,” he said, and expressed his regret that my former keeper had chosen not to take advantage of the recent general amnesty, as his freedom would have been its one happy consequence. “The way the varsity situation is,” he confided sadly, “and the way I’ve carried on the last few months, I don’t dare stay his execution now; I’d have a mutiny in the Military Science Department. But I love that old man. It’s things like this that make you wish you weren’t the flunkèd Chancellor.”

  I listened attentively, studying his bright eyes. His admiration for Max was entirely sincere, and his regret for the Shafting; but that he wished not to be Chancellor, his whole presence denied.

  “How is it you’re not angry with me for the trouble I’ve caused, Mr. Rexford?”

  “Who says I’m not?” His smile was shrewd. “I think I see what you were trying to teach me. But I guess Commencement isn’t for administrators.” In painful sobriety after his debauch, he said, he had resolved to abandon his yen for Graduation and merely “do his flunkèd best” for his alma mater, by his own lights, however benighted. To this end he had reopened secret economic dealings with Ira Hector, much as he deplored that necessity, and made covert overtures to new negotiations with the Student-Unionists. The Power Lines would in all likelihood be restored to their “original” locations, and the Boundary Dispute, he hoped, resumed on its former terms without too great loss to West Campus because of his recent vacillation. Having learned, thanks to me, that Classmate X was the defector Chementinski, he supposed he would put that knowledge to a use less passèd than I would approve of: blackmailing the Nikolayans back to the conference-table. “It’s all very well for proph-profs to be above these things,” he said amiably; “but the man with the power can’t always keep his hands as clean as he’d like to.” Folding his handkerchief neatly as he spoke, he caught sight of the Stoker-smudge on it and laughed.

  “What about the Power-Line guards?” I asked carefully. Stepping back into the sidecar, he declared he’d given orders that all special head- and neck-gear be made optional for them, if not discarded altogether.

  “If they look down, they fall,” he said cheerfully; if they don’t look down, they fall too. They’ll have to learn to see without looking!”

  My heart rejoiced. But I administered a final test by greeting his wife (who regarded me chillily) and expressing my regret for the accidental injury to her cheek. Her face flashed anger, as for an instant did the Chancellor’s.

  “For a man to strike his wife is a flunkèd thing,” he declared firmly. “We don’t live in the Dark Semesters any more. And we’re not Furnace-Room mechanics.”

  “I should say not,” Mrs. Rexford snapped. “And I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Giles, while we’re on the subject: my husband might be the Chancellor, but—”

  She stopped with a look of fright, for Rexford had suddenly raised his hand. In fact he only signaled the advance-guard to proceed, but even Anastasia gasped, and Mrs. Rexford never finished her sentence.

  Her husband grinned. “See you on Founder’s Hill this afternoon, Mr. Giles.”

  I reached to touch his temples, declaring him a Candidate for Passage and Commencement. But he shook his head and cordially declined. For one thing, he said, the gesture might be looked upon by his political enemies as some sort of bribe, or at least an endorsement of my authenticity, a matter too controversial for him to take a public stand on unless he had to; for another—his grin was melancholy—he reminded me that as Chancellor his first allegiance was to the College, whose best interests he would pursue at whatever cost—enlightenedly, he hoped, and in the final service of all the Free Campus, even all studentdom. But if circumstances forced the choice (“Which Founder forfend!”) between repudiating me and breaching the vows of his office, he would consent even to my Shafting, as he had to Max’s. That Remusian vice-administrator of the Moishian quads in terms gone by, who had winked at Enos Enoch’s lynching, was to Rexford’s mind a tragic figure, unjustly maligned by simplistic Enochists unaware of the responsibilities of power.

  “You’d Shaft me if you had to, sir? For teaching administrative subversion, say, if I had to?”

  He gave me a level look. “It might flunk me forever. But I’d do it.”

  The professor-generals clapped one another on the back; the military escort cheered. For just a moment Rexford surveyed them with an expression of distaste, even loathing; then he flashed the famous grin, mischievously winked at Anastasia while embracing Mrs. Rexford, and sped away.

  “Is he a Candidate or not?” Anastasia asked me.

  “You’re a Graduate,” I replied; “what do you think?”

  Flushing with pride, she considered the matter at length as she steered us out onto the highway, through the dormitory-quads and faculty-residence areas, and along the Founder’s Hill road towards George’s Gorge. In that vicinity, having grappled with the pluses and minuses of the case for more than an hour, she said at last, “I think he is, George. Not a Graduate, but a real Candidate for Graduation.”

  “I see. Why is that, Anastasia?”

  “I’m not good at words,” she reminded me seriously. “But embarrassed as I was to see him, after last evening (especially with Mrs. Rexford, who must hate me, much as I like her), it seemed to me there was something important about that hitting-her business. You know?” After a pause she tried again: for the Chancellor of a college to disavow and deplore such things as espionage, cheating, and secret negotiations, she seemed in her fashion to be saying, while yet not disallowing them, was in itself doubtless mere hypocrisy, like condemning wife-beating on principle while striking one’s wife; yet she could imagine an elevated version of this modus operandi, so sincere and second-natural that what had been flunkèd Contradiction became passèd Paradox. And she believed that should Lucius Rexford attain that state—which was betrayed and falsified even by talking about it, as she was doing—he would be Commenced.

  “Is that right, George?” she asked at the end. Inasmuch as I was obliged in any case to clasp her from behind in order to keep my seat, I smiled, patted her belly, and called her my first Graduate Assistant.

  “You’re teasing me!” she said, a little crossly, but abandoned the throttle to press my hand against her a moment. “If what I said is wrong, tell me so!”

>   But we had come to a fork in our road, some kilometers beyond George’s Gorge; I caught my breath, recognizing suddenly where we were and what lay just past the next bend. A moment later my heart leaped up, and over My Ladyship’s shoulder I pointed out the gambrels and cupolas of home.

  The day being fine, though chill, the herd was outside in the pounds, officially supervised by one of Reginald Hector’s aides. But that fellow (chosen by lot, I learned later, when the ex-Chancellor forsook the independent life) was either irresponsible or incompetent, and nowhere in sight. Once I’d got over my surprise at how much smaller everything seemed than in my kidship, I groaned at the evidences of neglect: the barn and fences needed whitewash; the pounds were filthy, the feed-cribs bare. Worst of all, the herd itself was depleted by half—owing, I could only hope, to ignorant neglect and not some keeper’s bloody appetite—and the survivors were ragged and pinched as inmates of a concentration-campus. In vain I looked about for Hedda O.T.S.T., for Becky’s Pride Sue or Tommy’s Thomas: I recognized no one. Anastasia hung back, not to intrude upon my grief. With smarting eyes I rushed into the pound; the does scattered like wild things. Could that be B.’s P. Sue, a pinched and gimpy crone? As I wept at the likelihood, and with chagrin that they knew me no more than I them, a strong bleat came from the barn, a bucky challenge; and after it—head couched and hooves a-pound—Redfearn’s Tom, charging from the dead! Stick in hand I stood, as years before, transfixed this time as much by wonder as by fright. I had retraced my way; had I also, in some wise, rewound the very tape of time? The buck was young and full of juice, despite his leanness—younger than R.’s Tom had been on the day I slew him, or Tommy’s Thomas when I’d set out for Great Mall. In the instant before he was upon me I guessed he was no ghost, but Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom: that Triple-T who saw the light not long before my departure! Joyfully I sprang aside; he cracked the fencerail—splendid son of splendid sires!—and neither dazed by the collision nor tempted to escape through the broken fence, spun about and recharged me at once. Anastasia squealed. Out of practice as I was, slackened by my terms in Main Detention and the life of human studentdom, I durstn’t try to pin him; I parried, passed, and fended as I could, calling him all the while by name and giving him to smell, between charges, my wrapper and the amulet-of-Freddie. These intrigued him, and when at last I stripped myself (retying the a.-of-F. about my loins) and flung the wrapper over his head, its scent stirred in him some deep ancestral memory. His mood changed altogether; he permitted me to scratch his head, licked Anastasia’s hand when I introduced them, and appreciatively snuffled her escutcheon.