Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “How does he do it, Goat-Boy? Show us the trick!” Stoker’s tone was half jeer and half dare, but perhaps there was something else in his eyes. I turned my back on him and the others who now looked to see my reaction; bidding Anastasia to remain where she was with T.’s T.’s T., I made my way around to the opposite viewing-stand. Though not inconspicuously attired and scented, I was able to move without attracting great notice, owing to the crowd’s preoccupation. As the guards led Max forth, Bray’s cloak changed color with each rich chord the trumpets sounded: black to brown, brown to iridescent green, green to a white so like the Shaft’s that the cloak seemed transparent, if not vanished—even the mortar-lines were replicated on it! Next he stepped from the ledge onto the surface of the pool and with a kind of sliding gait, as if the water were frozen, walked across to meet my keeper. The guards, no less amazed than the spectators, dismounted and examined the pool, even poked it with their billies to prove that there was no walkway just under the surface.

  “Ja ja!” I heard Dr. Eierkopf cry, and his applause was taken up by the others. Even the Chancellor shook his head, much impressed; the professor-generals behind him elbowed each other excitedly; Telerama-men chattered wide-eyed into their microphones. Max looked about under his burden, perhaps for me, as the guards placed a portable walkway over the moat. Catching his eye or nose, I waved a discreet bye-bye and held up the shophar to reassure him that his last request would be honored. He nodded, but some dismay at Bray’s performance still wrinkled his brow. Bray saw me then, if he had not before, and as if to taunt me with his prowess, uttered a sound not unlike choiring brass. The musicians put by their instruments, dumbfounded; everyone murmured astonishment except Anastasia and myself, who exchanged calm glances across the space between us, and Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom, browsing contentedly among discarded candy wrappers and cola cups.

  Max was now strapped by his escorts into a kind of canvas diaper or bosun’s-breeches on the ledge, his tackle-ropes rigged to those that ran up the face of the Shaft to its flaming tip. His seat-belt was secured, the gangplank removed; the crowd grew still. Again drums rolled; the Chancellor gave a reluctant signal; and as two of the guards hauled upon the halyards to the stroke-call of the third, Max slowly rose. Even the professor-generals most pleased to see him go, like my grandfather, were hushed by the sight.

  Bray then glided, as it seemed, to the central space between the stands, turned to face the Shaft, and raised his arms. Though the light was failing fast (shadow, in fact, went up the column as the sun went down, and determined the rate of Max’s ascent), he began another series of metamorphoses more remarkable even than the earlier: not only did the color and apparent cut of his vestments change at each halyard-heave, but his face and form as well. Stroke: he was Max himself! Stroke: pretty Anastasia! Stroke: the late G. Herrold! At every transformation the crowd roared Hurrah (sometimes Olé), the band saluted, and Max went up another measure on the Shaft, blowing kisses and pulling his beard. Now Bray was The Living Sakhyan, now great black Croaker, and then in rhythmic series Maurice Stoker, Kennard Sear, Eblis Eierkopf, Lucius Rexford, the brothers Hector (both at once), hat-faced Classmate X, Leonid Alexandrov, and my passèd lady mother! Last of all he assumed the semblance of myself, complete with stick and shophar—and in this guise, as Max neared the blazing tip, proclaimed: “Dear Founder, pass our classmate Maximilian Spielman, who has finished his course in faith and would rest from his labors.” Though no public-address system was in sight, his voice carried as if amplified. “A-plus,” he said at the end, resoundingly, and from somewhere Mother’s voice gave back the echo: “A-plus!”

  The moment was at hand. As Max went waving to the peak I put the buckhorn to my lips and blew with all my strength. Teruah! Teruah! Teruah! My keeper, whose dear wise like this campus will not soon see again, combusted in a glorious flare—by the light whereof I saw Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom race unleashèd toward my semblance. His head was high; joyously he bleat! Bray buzzed and flapped; literally he shed my guise (stick and horn attached), and holding his nose, flung the limp shed at Triple-T. Underneath he was gleaming black, his face hid under a cowl; seeing it was not I, T.’s T.’s Tom lowered horns and charged. Dreadful the hum, horrid the foetor Bray now gave out! He bounded mewards from Tom’s creosoted horns; I drove him back with horn and odor of my own. Thus caught between us, he spread his cloak for half a second; more loud his hum than Stokerish engine! Then from under his tunic-front a thing shot forth, shortswordlike, as Tommy struck. The buck shrieked, fell kicking, lay still. I snatched the black vestment, slick as oilskin; Bray flapped it off, face and all (underneath was a blacker), and fled—nay, vanished—in the crowding dark. A glance told me there was no helping T.’s T.’s T.—his legs stuck out stiff, his eyes were filmed over, his belly swelled. I had at shadow, ground, and moat with my stick, lest Bray be camouflaged against them; waded through the icy pool (at great cost of goat-dip) and attacked the Shaft itself. The crowd had watched, dumbstruck; now as I thwacked the pillar they seemed to wake. A voice very like Peter Greene’s cried, “What’s that I hear a-flapping and a-flying, Leo?”

  “Nothingcy!” a Nikolayan voice replied. “I don’t hear!”

  “Look once by the Shaft-tip!” squealed Dr. Eierkopf. “Der Grosslehrer ist jetzt ein Fliegender!”

  I looked up. In the pall above my flaming keeper something large and obscure appeared to rise, rolling and spreading like the smoke itself. The crowd’s dismay turned into panic: people leaped from the stands, swarmed over the barricades in both directions, fell upon their knees and girlfriends, clouted neighbors, clutched loved ones. Bravely the band played New Tammany’s anthem until overrun. Guards scrambled into the moat, either to arrest or to protect me; at their head grinned Stoker, cursing as he came. His wife I discerned high up in the bleachers, one hand upon her belly, watching with anxious love above the crowd; Mother knitted placidly beside her. And upon us all, gentle ashes—whose if not my gentler keeper’s?—commenced to fall. Another term, surely, they would be mine; not now, for though my youthful work was done, that of my manhood remained to do. What it was I clearly saw, and what it would come to. Nonetheless I smiled, leaned on my stick, and, no troubleder than Mom, gimped in to meet the guards halfway.

  Posttape

  Today, at thirty-three and a third, I record indirectly into WESCAC’s storage the last of these tapes—at my protégée’s behest, as always, but not, this final time, in her presence. She awaits my coming daily in the Visitation Room, with a pair of youngsters who had far rather be out romping in the lovely spring than languishing in this cagèd, sunless place. Let her wait.

  My self-wound watch runs fast; anyhow I have small time left, and so futile is this work now approaching its end, I am sore tempted to abandon it unfinished and go gambol in the April air myself. She thinks it done already, whose notion it was I render my tale during this my recentest and last detention. Her great nagging faith has alone sustained me, for better or worse, through the monstrous work—this “Revised New Syllabus,” as she calls it, which she is convinced will supersede the Founder’s Scroll. I smile at that idea, as at the olive lad she calls our son, and in whom I see as much of Stoker, of Croaker, indeed of Bray, as of myself. Supposing even that the Scroll were replaced by these endless tapes, one day to feed Him who will come after me, as I fed once on that old sheepskin—what then? Cycles on cycles, ever unwinding: like my watch; like the reels of this machine she got past her spouse; like the University itself.

  Unwind, rewind, replay.

  No matter. Futility and Purpose, like Pass and Fail, themselves have meaning only for her sort, and her son’s (in whose dark eyes I see already his mother’s single-mindedness). For me, Sense and Nonsense lost their meaning on a night twelve years four months ago, in WESCAC’s Belly—as did every such distinction, including that between Same and Different. Thus it is, and in no other wise, I have lingered on the campus these dozen years, in the humblest capacity, advising one at a time undergradua
tes to whom my words convey nothing. Thus it is I accept without much grumble their failings and my own: the abuse of my enemies, the lapses of my friends; the growing pains in both my legs, my goatly seizures, my errors of fact and judgment, my failures of resolve—all these and more, the ineluctable shortcomings of mortal studenthood. And thus it is—empowered as it were by impotence, driven by want of motive—I record this posttape (which she will not know of), in order to speak of the interval between my “triumph” of twelve years back, just recounted, and my present pass. Perhaps too to speak to myself of what is to come: the end Max saw from the beginning; the “Commencement” I saw at the end.

  To begin with, my original “Tutees”: of the two I Graduated out of hand—my mother “Lady Creamhair” and “My Ladyship” Anastasia—the latter I’ve spoken of already and will surely return to (as I will return to the Visitation Room where she waits, go out releasèd with her once again into New Tammany, and abide with her until that last release of all, whose imminence she little dreams); the former passed away not long after her grandson’s birth, the EAT-rays having got to her more sorely than at first appeared. She died smiling, I understand, with Reginald Hector, Anastasia, and the infant named Giles Stoker at her bedside—but then, she had lived smiling, too, since the day I shocked her out of sense, and, as the effect of her EATing spread, had lapsed unhappily into a more or less constant chuckle. Anastasia’s conviction, therefore, that Mother died happy in the knowledge of her “gift to studentdom,” I take in the spirit of her other convictions: that “Gilesianism” (her term, for her invention) will cure the student body’s ills, and that “our” son will establish “the New Curriculum” on every campus in the University. I long since ceased attempting to explain—never mind what. It is terms now since I raised an eyebrow or even sighed. Not impossibly dear Anastasia was a little EATen herself, that gorgeous night; not impossibly I was too, either in infancy or in one or more of my descents into the Belly. How would I know? Not impossibly (as Dr. Sear once speculated) all studentdom was EATen terms ago—by WESCAC, EASCAC, or both—and its fear of Campus Riot III is but one ironic detail of a mad collective dream.

  No matter.

  Sear himself is dead too, of course; was so, it turned out, even as I affirmed his Candidacy that afternoon on Founder’s Hill. It was his cancer killed him—but alas, not directly. Persuaded, in his clear delirium, that he had achieved not only fatherhood but total illumination, his old sympathy with Gynander became obsessive: blind already, he saw his generative organs as all that stood, as it were, between him and proph-profhood, removed them in the nurse’s absence with a shard of tumbler, and expired of massive hemorrhage. No doubt he would have smiled like Mother at the end, had he not lacked at the time a great part of his face. Hedwig, too old and weakened by their past to bear children safely, did indeed prove to be impregnated (as did Anastasia: a circumstance I keep in mind when tempted to protest her extremer convictions); but the birth of her child—a fine strapping girl the hue of dark honey—ruined both her health and her brief lucidity. She and Mother died a week apart in the room they shared for their last term on campus, in the NTC Asylum. Stoker even has it they were sweethearts at the end—but that’s Stoker. One never knows. When he says with a grin, “What the flunk, George, love’s where you find it,” I neither agree nor disagree.

  Of the others whose Candidacies I affirmed—or would affirm, or was held to have affirmed—three more are dead now also, not counting Max: Reginald Hector, Classmate X, and Leonid Alexandrov. Of Grandfather the fact was that I neither affirmed nor denied him: were it not for him I’d never have been born; on the other hand, had his will been done I’d have perished at birth—I regard both circumstances with mixed feelings, but in any mood they cancel each other. Reciprocally, as it were, he neither affirmed nor denied my Grand-Tutorship, for though his real preference, like most other people’s, was for Bray (insofar as he concerned himself at all with such questions), he never openly supported those who called for my expulsion on the grounds of Grand-Tutorcide. Family loyalty it was, I suppose, or the kind of affection sometimes displayed by old professor-generals for those they once tried and failed to kill. He passed away not long ago, after an extended invalidity, with his belief unshaken that he was beholden to none. His faithful receptionist—who for many years had written all his speeches, managed his affairs, and warmed his old flesh with her young—arranged a splendid funeral at the joint expense of the Military Science Department and the Philophilosophical Fund.

  Leonid Alexandrov redefected immediately after Max’s Shafting, making his way by some unknown means, blind though he was, through the steel-mesh partition in the Control Room. I never saw him again, nor heard anything of his activities for some years after, during which the Boundary Dispute alternated (as indeed it does yet) between crisis and stalemate—each crisis a little more critical, each stalemate a quantum uneasier, than the last. Then one day two Nikolayans, one old and one not, were caught wrestling at midnight in the Control Room. How they’d managed to open the locked and electrified partition, no one knew. Their tussle gave the alarm; guards from both sides ran to the scene in time to see the younger man push the older through to the NTC side, intentionally or not, and electrocute himself in the process. The older man—who turned out to be Classmate X—might then have made good his own defection, if that was his object, had he not attempted to reclose the door behind him. But the Nikolayan guards were at his heels, and Chementinski (as he called himself again thereafter), uncertain whether they meant to shoot him or defect themselves, kicked the mesh-gate shut, and was immediately shocked to the point of death. Summoning me to the Infirmary before he expired (I was working, between detentions, as a free-lance freshman advisor), he told me among other things that his stepson had helped dozens of undergraduates on each side of the Power Line to transfer illicitly to the other, risking his life in the two-way enterprise again and again without remuneration; in the end he had given his life to save that of a secret agent assigned to kill him, but who in fact so admired him that he’d resolved to kill himself instead. The agent, you will have guessed, was Classmate X, to whom Leonid had repeated a hundred times in vain my advice, as he understood it: that the special vanity of suicide was, in X’s case, permissible, even passèd, affirming as it did the self that destroyed itself—which self, being anyhow inescapable, had to be got beyond instead of suppressed. The nature of the conflict in the gate I never did get clear—who was trying to do what to whom, and why—but Chementinski seemed convinced of two things: that his stepson perished in his behalf, wrongheadedly or not; and that he himself, in closing the gate on guards from both sides who possibly meant to defect, had committed suicide twice over (because the act was impulsively selfish, and hence fatal to the selfless character called X; and because Chementinski, whose self was thus reaffirmed, was dying of the consequent shock—“by his own hand,” he vowed, not altogether consistently or accurately). His final word to me, as he expired, he declared had been Leonid’s to him, upon their recognizing each other and themselves on that fatal threshold: “Gratituditynesshoodshipcy!”

  When I repeated this story to Stoker during my next term in Main Detention, he pointed out with a sneer that the dying man had been as delirious as Kennard Sear, and consequently that his account, whatever it signified, was probably mistaken. The young man in the mesh had been burned beyond recognition; his older classmate, also badly seared, was bandaged as a mummy. One had only his feverish word for both their identities, and Nikolayan administrators, for example, maintained that Classmate Alexandrov had never redefected in the first place, and that Classmate X had been executed many terms earlier for membership in a forbidden ID-cult.

  “That’s all quite possible,” I agreed—but no longer with a smile, as I would have in terms gone by. Anastasia at once took up the cudgels in behalf of Chementinski’s and Leonid’s Graduation, and so browbeat us both upon that head (her tongue grew wondrous sharper every year), I was as glad to leave t
he Visitation Room as was Stoker to fetch me to a cell.

  My confinement on that occasion had to do with the tenth anniversary of Bray’s rout (others called it his Elevation), just as my present one, ending today, had to do with the twelfth of his initial appearance in the Amphitheater. Both times I had been sought out, in my obscurity, by journalism-majors with long memories, who asked whether I still maintained that I was the Grand Tutor; that I knew the “Way to Commencement Gate” (one could hear quotation-marks in their tone); and that Harold Bray, in whom hundreds and thousands believed as against the handful of my own Tutees, had been a flunked impostor. Patiently both times I had replied: yes, I was the Grand Tutor, for better or worse, there was no help for it; yes, I knew what studentdom was pleased to call “the Answer,” though that term—indeed the whole proposition—was as misleading as any other (and thus as satisfactory), since what I “knew” neither “I” nor anyone could “teach,” not even to my own Tutees. As for Bray, I had not called him flunkèd, I declared: his nature and origin were extraordinary and mysterious as my own; all that could be said was that he was my adversary, as necessary to me as Failure is to Passage. I.e., not only contrary and interdependent, but finally undifferentiable.

  “You say you’re Bray in a way, hey?” the reporter would ask, in the flip idiom of his fraternity. I would say no more, having said too much already; but the interviews, when broadcast, so inflamed the mass of studentdom against me that my loyalest Tutees (including Lucius Rexford) had me detained for my own protection. I was indifferent—Freedom and Bondage being etc.—so long as I might meet with my current advisees in the Visitation Room. But I shall answer no more questions, even from closest protégés. That much is dark is clear. Did Bray really fly away? they ask me. Who or what was he, and will he reappear? (Some of his many followers believe him still on campus, in one or other of his infinite guises; because at the Maxicaust he took my semblance, some—like Grandfather in his dotage—have even alleged that I am he, and it is by exploiting this uncertainty that Lucius Rexford preserves my life.) Was WESCAC really bested, they want to know, or did it plan the whole thing, including its own short-circuiting? Could there have been two or several “Brays,” whereof one was a true Grand Tutor, who for that matter might have taken my semblance to rout me in his? If the GILES is WESCAC’s son, and a Grand Tutor, is not WESCAC in a sense the Founder? Might being EATen not be equivalent to “becoming as a kindergartener,” and hence the Way to Commencement Gate? Perhaps WESCAC doesn’t EAT anyone; or if, as Sear conjectured, everyone has been EATen already, might not everyone be a Graduate, even a Grand Tutor? These things they ask in faith, despair, or hecklish taunt; I make no reply.