Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  4.

  Though entirely sensible of the edge in his inquiry, whether it was the Infirmary proper or the Psychiatric Annex I wanted chauffeuring to, I ignored it and supposed aloud that my friend Dr. Sear, being a practicing radiologist and psychotherapist as well as director of the Psych Clinic, might have offices in both places. I would try the main building first, in hopes of a directory; he need not wait.

  “Need not need not,” the surly fellow grumbled, and sped off almost before I’d climbed out onto the sidewalk in front of the Infirmary. But I was in too fine spirits to report him. By contrast with the first two articles of my Assignment, this third seemed to me now light work both to interpret and to satisfy: having seen such demonstration in the past few days of the infirmities of others, moral and intellectual as well as physical, I could quite agree that a bonafide Graduate must be free of them, and a Grand Tutor exemplify their opposites. The injunction to overcome my infirmity had thus a ready allegorical sense, such as I’d sought in vain to discern in its fellows: just as passage was passage and failure failure, defined each by strict distinction from the other, so was it with their corporal emblems, health and infirmity. That I was physically in good condition my Clean Bill of Health would be proof enough, which Dr. Sear had written for me early that same day; I needed but to fetch it from his office, or a copy if Mrs. Sear had delivered the original to Harold Bray at Scrapegoat Grate. As there was no infirmity to be remedied, I could be said to have overcome at least that part of the Assignment at once, in no time. But not to leave anything to chance, I went so far as to acknowledge that the term might be regarded metaphorically, or that WESCAC’s standards might be narrowly human—in which cases any residual “goatliness” in my character, say, might by an effort of bigoted imagination be considered an infirmity; or my “limp,” though it ceased to exist when I reverted to all fours. With the former I could not reasonably be taxed, it seemed to me: I’d left the herd in spirit long before my physical departure. But as I floated up to Dr. Sear’s offices in the Psychiatric Annex, I resolved to consult him about my old leg-injuries, if only for an affidavit that they were neither “correctable” nor “crippling,” properly regarded.

  This aim fled before confusion a moment later, when I stepped from the lift into a dim hallway down which a young man scrabbled at me on hands and knees—in itself no very alarming spectacle to one of my history, but the fellow barked most savagely besides, and growled, and bared his teeth. Old instincts seized me: with a panic bleat I sprang onto the back of an upholstered chair nearby, and when the creature nipped at my ankles I flung my stick at him. At once he scrambled after it, clamped it in his jaws, and trotted back (the word is a flattery: his gait had neither grace nor rhythm), waggling his hindquarters. He seemed content enough; indeed, as if in invitation to further romp, he dropped the stick before the chair and sat up bright-eyed, lolling his tongue. But I was too frightened yet to give up my perch. There were two others seated along the hallway, to whom I appealed for help now I had a moment: alas, the one (an elder gentleman) sprang down on all fours himself and darted for the stick as soon as my harasser dropped it; and when the ensuing barky tussle fetched them up against the chair of the other (a co-ed lady girl), she turned side to them, arched her back, threatened with her nails, and hissed.

  I made use of the diversion to dash across the corridor (on all fours myself, for speed’s sake, being stickless) into an office marked with Dr. Sear’s name. It was a Receiving Room, empty, at the rear of which a little hallway was, opening, I presently learned, into the doctor’s treatment- and observation-chambers. To this latter I retreated from the dog-men, who tumbled through the entrance-door I’d neglected to close, and I was distressed to find the dim room occupied by a long lean lunatic: what but madness would lead one to stand with his face cupped against a wall? Even as I called to him for help my heart misgave me—then leaped up, when he turned my way, to behold that he was Peter Greene, and that he had been peering through a little window into the adjacent room. My pursuers bounded at him; I cried warning; but Greene, undismayed, said, “Down, fellows,” and pacified them with bone-shaped biscuits from his pocket. The creatures retired each into a corner to gnaw their prizes, and I retrieved my stick, which they’d fetched in.

  “They don’t bite,” Greene assured me—in an offhand tone, as though preoccupied. They and the female in the hall, he said, were patients of Dr. Sear’s awaiting diagnosis, whom Anastasia had asked Greene to mind for a moment while she assisted the doctor with an emergency case. To this end he’d been supplied with dog-biscuits—the cat-young-lady was not troublesome, it seemed, unless rubbed the wrong way—and instructions to keep the patients in sight; but the alarming behavior of Mrs. Sear, whose appearance in the office constituted the emergency, had so intrigued him that he’d neglected his duty in order to watch through the one-way glass of the Observation Room.

  “Sear’s going to have a chat with me soon’s he finds time,” he reported. “But he’s been busy all afternoon, so I been sitting here watching Miss Stacey work, and too dum lovestruck to say a word to her, conversationwise.”

  “Mrs. Stoker,” I reminded him. I had been going to wonder aloud how came it that human studentdom considered it a sign of madness for one of their number to behave caninely, and a sign of intelligence in a dog to act like a human, for though I had no love at all for dogdom, I suspected a snobbery in this attitude that for aught I knew might extend even to goats. However, Greene’s invincible obtuseness provoked such annoyance in me, and the news of Mrs. Sear’s condition such curiosity, I put that wonder by and went to the observation-window, less dim now than formerly.

  “She come in a-flailin’ and a-flounderin’,” Greene confided, “and a-sayin’ things would curl your hair. First off I took her for some kind of nut, the way she carried on—said the durnedest things to me you ever heard! But Miss Stacey explained it was Sear’s own wife, that had a mental illness, and they took her in there to calm her down.”

  The square of glass I had pre-empted was too small to serve us both. Greene added hopefully, “Last I looked, they couldn’t hold her still on the sofa.”

  A glance revealed to me that this objective had now been attained; Hedwig Sear lay calmly on the leather couch embracing Anastasia, while the doctor petted them both. A sexualler connection was plainly to come, and I was a little stung, not by jealousy, disgust, or indignation, such as a normal undergraduate might have been, but by unhappy surprise that it was Anastasia who seemed to be taking the initiative. Fidgeting beside me, Peter Greene flipped a wall-switch, and voices from the Treatment Room rustled through a loudspeaker above us.

  “I’ll get the door,” Dr. Sear said briskly, “before some idiot barges in.”

  Anastasia called over her shoulder: “Better see that Mr. Greene’s all right, too, don’t you think?” Her voice, at least, was mild as always.

  Peter Greene jubilantly punched my shoulder. “What’s that if it ain’t pure love?”

  “Look here, Greene …”

  “Pete. Okay?”

  I had meant expostulation, not invitation to the window—indeed, though I turned to him, wondering how the situation was to be handled, I endeavored to block the scene from his view with my head. Then above Mrs. Sear’s moans, ever more amorous, Anastasia nervously asked, “What about the window, Kennard? Do you think anybody might look in?” and the doctor’s wry response—that it would disabuse Greene of an illusion or two if he did happen to watch—inspired me to turn the uncomfortable situation to pedagogical account.

  “I think you should stay here and keep your eyes and ears open,” I told him, as if I were the doctor and he my patient. “I have an idea.” He consented readily, and I made haste to leave the observation-chamber, closing its door behind me as he stepped to the window and Dr. Sear into the Receiving Room.

  “Founder’s sake, George!” The doctor’s brows drew down around his little bandage at sight of me, but his frown was amused. He looked back quickl
y to assure himself that he’d closed the door, and glanced about at the empty office.

  “Greene’s in there with the dog-people,” I said; “I’m not sure about the cat-girl.” As he searched my expression for a hint of how much I knew, I smiled and apologized for once again interrupting his wife’s therapy. Hastily then I explained why I had sent Greene to him for sophisticating, especially in the matter of Anastasia’s innocence, and echoed his own suggestion that the treatment-in-progress might be as therapeutic for Greene to witness as it no doubt was for Mrs. Sear to receive—the more so in view of Mrs. Stoker’s new forwardness.

  “Frightfully irregular,” Dr. Sear said, apropos equally of my proposal and Anastasia’s behavior. “Officeful of patients …” But when I volunteered to assist the proceedings in any way I could, in return for his advice on the matter of my alleged infirmity, he admitted that the idea was too entertaining to resist, therapeutic or not.

  “It’s five o’clock anyhow,” he said; “I’ll send for an orderly to take the patients back to their wards.” He proposed further, in an offhand tone, that I join his wife and Anastasia in the Treatment Room while he shared the observation-chamber with Greene, the better to interpret for him what he saw and translate his reaction into therapy. It wanted no great sophistication to discern something more in this suggestion than disinterested goodwill: so much the better, I decided, for Greene’s education in the ways of the campus. As for me, inhibition in matters erotic was one infirmity, at least, which kidship had spared me: though my experience was small, shame and shyness in such affairs were emotions I knew chiefly at secondhand, from books and hearsay. Leaving Dr. Sear to his business, I strode therefore unabashedly into the Treatment Room, bid the ladies a very good evening, and inquired of Anastasia, not without irony, whether I could assist in any wise her charitable nurse-work.

  She made a sound and leaped from her labors; batted at her blouse and Mrs. Sear’s skirt; snatched up a cast-off underthing—then reddened and defied me, balling the dainty in her hand.

  “The nerve, George!”

  She would have bolted, I daresay, but that she felt responsibility for Mrs. Sear, who, still upon the couch, groggily bade her back to love. I begged her to continue the therapy as if I were Dr. Sear; I quite understood, I assured her, that in medical emergencies common restraints must be put by, and that her present connection with the patient was as impersonal as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, for example.

  Mrs. Sear raised her head to squint at me and said: “Balls.” Then she flopped chuckling onto her belly and thrust up her haunches. “I’m a nanny!”

  “Oh, Heddy!” On the edge of tears, Anastasia hastened to pull the woman’s skirt-hem down; but Hedwig frisked it up again and bleated into the couch-cushion.

  “Please go!” Anastasia cried to me.

  Dr. Sear spoke from a loudspeaker: “No no, Stace, it’s quite all right. Would you just service Hed once, please, George? Do her a campus of good.”

  “Ba-a-a, ba-a-a,” said Mrs. Sear—presumably mimicking a doe, though the noises were meaningless. Anastasia looked with nervous indignation at a dark mirror on one wall, which I took to be the observation-window.

  “I’d really rather not,” I said in that direction. “I’m not a goat, you know: that’s one of the things I wanted to discuss with you. Shouldn’t Mrs. Stoker go on with the treatment?”

  “Ba-a-a!” Mrs. Sear now wriggled; and bald as was her rump compared to any doe’s, and gaunt next to supple Anastasia’s, I had not unlearnt my buckish indiscrimination, and was stirred a little.

  “This is awful!” Anastasia cried. “I’m going home, Kennard!”

  But I caught her elbow as she swept doorwards. “Please don’t leave. I’m sorry if I spoke unkindly; it surprised me a little to see you taking the lead for a change.”

  Perhaps forgetting that what she held was no handkerchief, she dabbed with the underthing at her splendid eyes and declared: “It’s your fault; I’ve never done it before.” By it I assumed she meant taking the initiative, since the therapy itself I understood to have been common practice in Mrs. Sear’s case. And I was the more inclined to believe her because she so readily now gave over the initiative to me: made no attempt to break my light hold on her and even permitted me to stroke her flank with my stick-hand until I remembered to put that pastoral habit behind me. Two things (she sniffled through the silk) had prompted her present shamelessness: my rebuke to her before Scrapegoat Grate, when she’d only been trying to distract Harold Bray for my sake, and her husband’s “behavior at luncheon.” Upon this latter she did not then elaborate—I supposed Stoker had put her to some fresh indignity. In any case, coming on the hooves of my reprimand, it had led her in despair, she said, to become what we’d unjustly taxed her with being: a flunkèd nymphomane.

  “Bah,” said Mrs. Sear—more impatient now than lustful, as I thought. “Some stud you are.” Indeed her obscene waggling was so deliberate as to have finally chilled me—as did her strange advances at our previous encounter—had not Anastasia’s fine person been so near. When I comforted that girl’s hair upon my shoulder, my amusement grew.

  In vain Dr. Sear entreated his wife from the Observation Room to respect my anticaprine sentiments (a misrepresentation, but I let it pass) and either couple with me in some humaner fashion or permit Anastasia to resume the original therapy: she stubbornly rejected both alternatives, and Anastasia seconded her, declaring them equally repugnant. I was flattered to imagine a note of jealousy in her veto—but it fretted me to see so little getting done in the way of Peter Greene’s education. For that reason I was receptive to Dr. Sear’s next suggestion despite the prurience of his tone, which the intercom did not conceal.

  “About this goat-business, George: you want some sort of voucher from me that you’re strictly human, is that it?”

  “I think that’s what I want,” I said. “My Assignment says Overcome Your Infirmity, and it might just be that—”

  “Conscious depravity,” Dr. Sear said crisply. I begged his pardon.

  “Conscious depravity,” he repeated. “What could be humaner?” I believed he must be alluding—with a tisk of the tongue, as it were—to the behavior of his wife, who now besides waving her brittle posteriors was nibbling a memorandum-pad between bleats, and winking lewdly. But he went on to ask, rhetorically, when a goat, or any other animal than Homo sapiens, had ever done a flunkèd deed from simple relish of its flunkèdness. If in the history of studentdom, he maintained by way of illustration, a goat had ever humped a lady girl (as Halicarnassides records in his old Histories, for instance), it was no naughtiness on the stud’s part, but mere unconscious lust. The girl, however, must needs have been queer of appetite—unless, like Anastasia with Stoker’s dogs, her motives were uncommonly benevolent, or (as when Croaker beached her) she’d had no option …

  I started to protest: was even a man of Dr. Sear’s intelligence and wide experience too bigoted to allow for simple love between the species? But I saw the principle beyond his misapplication of it, and supposed besides that among his motives was the exposition of Anastasia’s past. Therefore I agreed, for Greene’s benefit, that of the scores of males and females with whom the dear girl beside me had coupled, some at least had surely been inspired not alone by lust but by the conscious urge to exploit her submissiveness—a pleasure unknown outside the human species.

  “Go on and say it!” Anastasia challenged me. “Tell me I’m flunked, like Maurice does!” She shook off my arm and went to Mrs. Sear, who in a fresh fit of disequilibrium seemed about to roll off the couch.

  “That isn’t what I meant,” I assured her, though privately I was not at all convinced that it wasn’t at least partly true: when she bent to steady Mrs. Sear, for example, and that surprising person at once thrust a hand into her crotch, Anastasia wept for sheer distress at this new unpleasantness, but would neither leave the importunate woman nor remove the hand.

  “Demonstrate your humanity, George,” urged Dr
. Sear. “If the goat-thing’s not to your taste, do something à trois. Mrs. Stoker will let you.”

  I saw his point, and was not unwilling to implement it in some measure for the sake of my several objectives. But I was less assured than he of Anastasia’s readiness to cooperate in a display of Conscious Depravity, and therefore I told her straightforwardly what was ahoof:

  “Peter Greene’s watching along with Dr. Sear, Anastasia.”

  At this news she would indeed have fled had I not gripped her pretty shoulders from behind, and Mrs. Sear her escutcheon from before.

  “Peter schmeeter,” said Mrs. Sear.

  I held Anastasia long enough (against Mrs. Sear’s best efforts to tumble us onto the couch) to tell her of Greene’s mad conviction that she was virginal; his resolve to wed her despite both their spouses, and his inability to see the flunkèd aspects of his own nature—such as the “innocent” voyeurism he was enjoying presently as on certain past occasions. In addition I informed her of the third and fourth articles of my Assignment—Overcome Your Infirmity and See Through Your Ladyship—and declared she could abet my completion of both projects, and do Peter Greene an ultimate service as well, by granting me a certain immediate license in the Conscious-Depravity way. All this in her ear, as I gripped her around the chest.

  “Oh, George!” she complained—and pinched, perhaps, by Mrs. Sear, she jerked back against me. Very nearly I ejaculated, at touch of those perfections; feeling me against them she flinched away, but did not otherwise endeavor to wrest free.