John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

I assured him he might depend on me not to tell tales out of school. Dr. Sear shook his head. "Treatment didn't work, I'm afraid."

"Balls!" called Hedwig. Not sufficiently conversant with modern literature to have mastered obscene slang, I nonetheless guessed by her tone that she meant the term otherwise than literally; thus I judged it witty of me to pretend to mistake her, and said: "I lost Freddie's in the Turnstile, ma'am."

Whether or not she appreciated the humor, she scrambled at me on all fours like a crippled doe.

"No, now, Hed!" her husband chided. I retreated a step, but Dr. Sear restrained me with a look of whimsical despair.

"Indulge her for a second, would you, old boy? There's a good chap."

I stood nonplussed while the woman knelt before me.

"I wish she'd be less indiscreet," her husband sighed. "But if you don't humor the poor thing's spells she carries on dreadfully." He patted his wife's cropped head with one hand and caressed me frankly with the other. Yet something in the lady's manner left me limp; though I had no particular wish to be unaccommodating, their joint endeavor could not rouse me. After a moment Mrs. Sear remarked, "He needs Stacey," and then gave over the business with a shrug, stood up, straightened her hair, and seemed entirely normal once again. I apologized.

"Quite all right, darling," she said. "Kennard's made me such a wreck I can't even get Croaker excited. I'll get you a gown."

"Really, my dear," her husband protested; but he seemed amused by her remark. "You'll have George thinking we're perverted."

"Hah," said Hedwig. From the curtained booth behind the fluoroscope she fetched a white hospital gown like her own for me to wear until "something more suitable could be arranged."

"You must come to dinner," she chattered on; the two of them fussed and patted my gown into place. "I'll be a shepherdess and you'll be a buck, and Kennard can be the jealous shepherd."

"Excuse me?" I could not imagine shepherds in connection with goats; the notion was almost obscene.

"We could have Stacey in, too, and do it à quatre!"

Dr. Sear tut-tutted this proposal as extravagant and gently asserted to his wife that it was just such overeagerness on her part that chilled her male companions.

"But look here, George," he added, "we have no secrets from you, and you're obviously a man-of-the-campus, so to speak. It would be a lark for Hed and me both if you'd care to stay with us till this business about Max is resolved. You see we're agreeable people; you could live as you please."

I thanked him for his invitation, the hospitality of which was clear, however obscure the promised entertainment. But his mention of Max put me sharply in mind of more pressing business. I requested their address, promising to call on them in any case that same evening or the next to speak of Max's arrest and the GILES program. And I admitted that in fact I had made no arrangement yet for eating and sleeping, nor had any clear idea how such arrangements were made in human studentdom.

"But you must excuse me now," I concluded. "I have to see Chancellor Rexford yet about my Candidacy and then go through Scrapegoat Grate. And I want to have a talk with Anastasia, too, if I can find her."

They expressed their surprise that Max had made no dormitory reservation for me or even provided me with funds, and so I explained very briefly the unusual circumstances of my departure from the goat-farm, adding Max's observation that Grand Tutors and the like never as a rule packed even a sandwich in advance, though their hero-work might want nine years to complete. I had had, for example, no ID-card, yet I'd got through the Turnstile all the same, and was confident I'd find a way through Scrapegoat Grate.

"Think not of next period…" Dr. Sear marveled. "I was telling Bray last night at Stoker's what an extraordinary chap you are, and what a really miraculous string of coincidences your life has been. Look here — " He glanced at his watch. "You've a good half-hour yet till Rexford's address; they've got all the regular admissions to process, and the Assembly-Before-the-Grate is just across the way from here… Have you an advisor?"

When I told him I had not, since Max's false arrest, he volunteered to fill the role himself, declaring that although he could not share my antagonism for Harold Bray, he respected the grounds of my own claim to Grand-Tutorhood, admired me personally, and would be pleased to assist me through the tedious ordeal of registration.

Mrs. Sear, who was lighting a cigarette, remarked, "He wants to blow you, too."

"Really, Hed."

I begged their pardon.

"We all want to, dear," she said, shrugging at one or the other of us. "Novelty's our cup of tea. Isn't it, Kennard?"

Dr. Sear smiled. "You'll give George the wrong impression."

The woman pinched my cheek. "Georgie's no dunce. He knows what was going on when he came in." Her husband, she declared, had long since lost his taste for ordinary coupling, whether conjugal or extra-curricular, and even for such common perversions as sodomy and flagellation. Watching others still amused him, but only when the spectacle was out of the ordinary, as in Stoker's Living Room; she herself, since she'd lost both novelty and youth, could interest him only by masturbating before the fluoroscope.

"That's very curious," I said. "Do you enjoy it, too?"

Dr. Sear had seemed bored by her recital, but here he laughed aloud. "There you are, Hed! She claims I've corrupted her, George, but she's as tired as I am of the usual tricks. You put your finger right on it."

"I wish he would," said Hedwig. She was bored with sophistication, she maintained, and yearned to be climbed in the exordinary way by a simple brute like Croaker; but catering to her husband's pleasures had so defeminized her that her effect on men was anaphrodisiac, as I had seen.

"Hedwig exaggerates," her husband said patiently. "It's true we've done everything in the book, but nobody forced her. She likes women and won't admit it."

I could have wished to hear more on this remarkable head; also perhaps to question Croaker's alleged simplicity, which his art-work on my stick belied, and compare Dr. Sear's optical pleasures with those of Eblis Eierkopf, to learn how prevalent such tastes were among well-educated humans. But it seemed more important to get back to my advising, and when I reverted to that matter, Mrs. Sear changed her tone completely. I could not do better, she declared seriously, than to have Kennard Sear for my advisor, as he was the most knowledgeable man on campus; in fact, he knew all the Answers, despite his perversions.

"Not despite, my dear: because of. George understands the tragic view."

They kissed most cordially. The mixture of affections in the Sears' marriage relation I found quite as curious as their amatory whimsies, since life in the goat-barn had left me open-minded in that latter regard. But their goodwill towards me was evident. Gratefully I put myself into their charge, stipulating only that in view of the urgent work at hand we forgo any further embraces — à deux, trois, or quatre, onscreen or off — for the present.

"I quite agree," the doctor said. The important thing, in his opinion, was for me to by-pass the ordinary machinery of registration and deal only with the highest authorities; otherwise — since Bray's advent had put the campus into such confusion, and my status in the College was irregular — I might be dismissed to the goat-barn by any minor official on some such technicality as my lack of a surname. "You've got through the Turnstile somehow; we can use that as grounds for admitting you as a Special Student, if Tower Hall authorizes it. I'll give Rexford's wife a call: she's a patient of mine. Meanwhile I'll look you over and write you a Clean Bill of Health; maybe that'll do instead of an ID-card to get you through registration."