John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Forgetting then the subject — his wish that I were the true GILES — not to mention the proposal of an end to conversation, he launched into a recounting of the nature and history of his connection with Croaker, which I attended with what imperfect wakefulness and patience I had left.

"I'd just been brought to New Tammany," he began, resting his little chin on Croaker's skull — a white spheroid perched on a great black pedestal. "They had just begun to use WESCAC to pair up roommates, and refugee research-people were handled just as students were in the regular dormitories. Verstehst? You'll see tomorrow morning…"

At matriculation-time, he continued, everyone's attributes had been coded onto cards, which then were matched automatically on the basis of complementation — a homely farm-girl with a chic young piece from Great Mall, and so forth. This was before the days of Prenatal Aptitude Testing, and Eierkopf allowed that it wasn't in itself a bad system.

"But show me the programme without hitches, Goat-Boy!" He had come to this campus with bad eyesight and false teeth, he declared; was never robust; could hardly stand on his legs (they were stronger then) — all this was duly punched into his card, he'd signed the loyalty-oath, got his clearance-papers, watched WESCAC's card-sorters riffle and click. Going then to the lodging assigned him he found there not the clear-eyed practical, gemütlich young engineer he'd rather expected (himself being subject to sick headaches and "too busy in the head" to bother with housekeeping), but Croaker, the famous Athlete — All-Campus candidate in football he was then, before they named him Frumentius's delegate to the University Council for his own protection.

"Imagine, Goat-Boy! A mindless brute that ate raw hamburger at the Coach's order, wore nothing but a loin-cloth, picked his nose, took what he pleased, urinated in the shower-bath, danced and farted, rolled his eyes, bared his teeth, and had his way with a parade of co-eds!"

Often and often, he said, when he'd had equations to think through or wanted only to rest his mind, he would come home to discover Croaker at his business with one of the girls — perhaps a cheerleader, with crimson letter on the breast of her pullover. Naturally Croaker never troubled to draw the blinds, and in those days the spectacle gave Eierkopf headaches: from his perch on the outside stairway he was obliged, so he complained, to watch the pair at their rut: how the little pink beast feigned displeasure, even threatened alarum; how her ape-of-the-woods merely croaked, and naked himself already, had at garter and hook, put her in a trice to the fearsome roger — whereat, coy no more, she'd whoop.

"And the worst was, we had to share the same bed!" Hard enough to relax, he said, in the odors of perfume and sweat; more than once, when sleep at last had granted respite from all thought he would be roused by Croaker's heavy arm flung over him; caught up in prurient dreamings the Frumentian mistook him for the prey, and must either be waked (no easy task) or his hug suffered till the dream was done.

I clucked sympathetically, and Eierkopf hastened to assure me that even so, his roommate had not been all bad. "I never begrudged him his salary, you know; brains aren't everything; studentdom must have its circuses. The whole body attended the games; I watched them myself through binoculars, cheering with the rest." Croaker was, he allowed, a splendid supple animal after all, full of power and grace; it could lift even Eierkopf's spirits to see him leap about the room or chin on the shower-rod or lay waste half a sorority. They were not always at odds, I must understand. Though the smell of raw hamburger retched the frail scientist, Croaker saw to it he never starved, and except in most obstreperous humors fetched and carried at his roommate's command, even as he'd done for me. In return, Eierkopf had filled out Croaker's scholarship-forms, reconciled his financial statements, schooled him in the simplest etiquette and hygiene — not to defecate in classrooms, not to copulate on streetcorners — and did his homework.

"I devised little tasks to make him feel useful and regimens to keep him fit. Sometimes I even chose his girls: leave him to himself, he'd as likely hump somebody's poodle or the Dean of Studies! I was still interested sometimes in women then; let a pretty baggage from Theater Arts refuse me her company or make fun of my eyeglasses: I'd point her out to Croacker on the sly, and one night soon I'd have the joy to see her boggle at his awful tup!"

In sum, Croaker could not have survived long on the campus without Eierkopf's help, and the scientist in turn would have found life insupportable had Croaker been shot to death, say, by the father of some ruined sophomore, or lynched by the White Students' Council. However much, then, he might despair at Croaker's grossness, and Croaker perhaps at his roommate's incapacity and frailness; however much they each might yearn at times to live alone or with a partner more congenial — which yearning Maurice Stoker had lately played upon, for mischief's sake — at their best they muddled through, strange bedfellows, who in any case were bound by the strictest of leases, which could not be broken before its term. And so strong a thing is custom, Eierkopf declared, he soon could scarcely recall having ever lived alone; it was as if he and Croaker had been together from the beginning, for better or worse. What was more, if their connection was at best uneasy, they'd come more and more to depend on each other as terms went by. Eierkopf's affliction worsened; he took to a wheelchair and gave up sleeping; Croaker delivered him to and from laboratories, even learned to take dictation and type out reports — except during seizures like the one that had lately fetched him to George's Gorge. As for the Frumentian, he had got along previously by a kind of instinct, which, when he saw how better he fared with Eierkopf's assistance, he either put by or clean forgot.

Again tears welled into Eierkopf's eyes, whether of affection or chagrin I could not decide. "I even learned the art of football for his sake, and lectured him between matches on his specialty, the Belly Series! All which, my friend, the athletic directors, the student boys and girls, and my colleagues came to accept, grudgingly or not: to get Croaker they had to take me; to get me" — he chuckled or sobbed — "who had my own kind of fame, you know — they must put up with Croaker."

Did his face fall in despair, or did he kiss the grinning giant's pate?

"It was a package deal, not so? And still is; it still is. Croaker and Eierkopf — we are inseparable as two old faggots, or ancient spouses!"

He said more; indeed he may have talked the night through, but further than this I knew nothing until Croaker waked me with a gentle touch. My first thought was that I'd dozed off for half a sentence — Dr. Eierkopf sat on Croaker's shoulders as before, and resumed the conversation as soon as my eyelids opened — but I discovered that I was lying on a cot, and a large clock on the wall read four and a half hours after midnight. Croaker set a folding screen before me and served up a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, pancakes, and sausage; while I dined (I could not of course stomach the sausage any more than Eierkopf could abide the sight of my eating anything at all) my host spoke on from behind the screen:

"It is extraordinary how many things point to your being the GILES, except the one thing that proves you're not. And it's almost a pity. You're an interesting young man, a pleasant young man — but that's not the point." What he meant was that although he assumed the Cum Laude Project to be a cause forever lost, it intrigued him to imagine what WESCAC might have produced had it indeed fertilized some lady with the GILES. Moreover, while he felt certain that he knew what Graduation is, and that he was himself a Graduate, there were admittedly moments when he could almost wish it were something else — something miraculous after all, as the superstitious held it to be.