John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"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 quickly 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 arousement 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.