John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"It's your sex-life I had in mind, sir. I believe you should freshen Mrs. Sear."

He had been going to sip his coffee, and looked up with the cup poised before his mouth. "I beg your pardon?"

"Service Mrs. Sear yourself, sir, in the ordinary way. Breed her again. She's not past bearing age, I suppose?"

He was too astonished to reply, but as I was considering whether I'd possibly got the terms wrong for human husbandry, Anastasia came exclaiming from the hallway.

"That's a perfect idea!" she cried, and made it so with a kiss on my temple. "It's just what Hedwig needs, Kennard! Especially now!"

Dr. Sear scoffed: his wife's infirmities, her imminent widowhood, her beginning menopause — not to mention the parlous state of the University, ever worsening, and the general absurdity of existence… Anastasia clung to his arm, nestled into his shoulder, clasped his dry hand for very rapture at the thought of procreation; for such a coaxing I'd have studded Mrs. Sear myself, and I knew as well — so transparent to me now was My Ladyship — that Anastasia would gladly have taken the man's seed into her own unfruited womb, from sheer access of solicitude, or permitted any husband or most-treasured lover of her own to impregnant Mrs. Sear, if the doctor could not.

"Just imagine, Kennard!" she fairly wept; "a baby for Hedwig!" She rushed to me again; her excitement stirred even Peter Greene to grunt through his stupor. I drew her boldly to my lap this time, confident in my knowledge; sure enough, she let herself be set upon me, as she would upon any other who knew how to touch her, and my heart flagged even as my blood bucked at the feel of her.

Dr. Sear put down his cup with a clatter and strode this way and that.

"Ridiculous! It's unthinkable!" He laughed harshly. "Why do you suppose we've had no children all these years, for pity's sake? Besides — but what difference does it make! Absurd!" So he expostulated, slapped his arms to his sides, sniffed and fulminated, laughed and adjusted his spectacles atop the little bandage, while Anastasia wept and hugged me for delight: quite the most reaction I'd provoked thus far by my Tutoring (for Tutoring it was, I recognized now with a stir of awe, that I'd been at since Scrapegoat Grate, no less than completing my Assignment).

"Mom and Dad Sear!" he snorted, and bit on his foreknuckle.

"Yes!" Anastasia clapped her hands. "It's the absolute answer! You're a genius, George!"

Sear stopped pacing and narrowed his eyes at me with whimsical respect. "He's a tougher man to please than Harold Bray, I'll vouch for that. Hedwig and I!"

At every such allusion to my proposal, Anastasia bounced; I was relieved now that Peter Greene showed signs of rewaking, for had she not got off me (anxious to begone lest the sight of her do him further harm), I must soon have bespermed myself. She would telephone her husband from downstairs, she said — should have done earlier, he'd behaved so queerly at lunch — and either hail a taxi or wait for a Powerhouse-guard if Stoker cared to dispatch one to the Infirmary. Dr. Sear, it was hurriedly agreed, should keep Greene under his surveillance, either there or at home, until the man's trauma could be assessed and directed to the positive end of mature self-knowledge.

"Nothing à trois, I promise," he said to me, and shook his head once more in dismay at what I'd proposed. "You're quite welcome to spend the night too, you know; we never did get to talk about Max and the rest, and I want to look at that mad Assignment you mentioned… or were you going with Stacey?"

I had not of course considered my next move, much less where I'd spend the night; a clock on Dr. Sear's wall showed seven, my own watch six — in either case it was early evening, and tired as I was there were tasks remaining to be accomplished. I stood up and fished the Assignment from my purse.

"There are some important things I want to discuss with you," I told Anastasia. "Very important. Let me see what's next on my list… It says Re-place the Founder's Scroll. Have they lost it, do you suppose?"

Dr. Sear and Anastasia agreed that the so-called Founder's Scroll (a recently-excavated assortment of Old- and New-Syllabus fragments presented to New Tammany by the Chancellor of New Moishe College, where the parchments had been discovered, in gratitude for the help New Tammany's Moishians had given their symbolic alma mater) was not to their knowledge missing from its temporary display-case in the Central Library. Dr. Sear, however, remembered having read that the Cataloguing Office was experiencing some difficulty in the matter of filing it permanently: CACAFILE, WESCAC's automatic classification and filing facilities, he recalled, which operated from definitions originally programmed into it by various scholars and then improved by its own self-scanning techniques, could not decide (as it were) whether the precious relic should be classified under Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Archeology, Art, or History — each of which departments claimed it. When Library officials had presented it physically to the CACAFILE as a last resort, hoping to force a mechanical arbitration, the Scroll had disappeared for some anxious hours into the automatic book-stacks and been finally returned as unclassifiable.

"Yet it says re-place, doesn't it?" he mused. "Not just place. Intriguing task." His mind was not much on the matter, I perceived; though he remembered to give me the Clean Bill of Health I'd asked for, and suggested to Anastasia that she direct me to the Library on her way out, it was my advice that still absorbed him.

"Have a nice weekend," Anastasia bade him pointedly as we left.

His vellum cheeks actually colored. "Ridiculous!"

"Please, Kennard: Heddy'd love it, I know!" Even more, I saw, would she, who as our lift came was inspired with a further proposal: "Take her to the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, Kennard!"

"Oh, Stacey!" He turned away and closed the office door, for Greene was stirring loudly now. But even Anastasia acknowledged with a giggle that his impatience with us was of the embarrassed kind, and that what disconcerted him was his real fascination with the idea.

"You're a darling to think of it!" she said, and hugged my arm. Her plain arousement did nothing for my buckly cramps of love; but though I re-entered the lift more gimpish than I'd left it some time earlier, I rejoiced at being two steps nearer Commencement Gate.

Once we were alone in the little compartment her self-consciousness returned: she let go my elbow and turned her eyes from the poked-out front of my gown. To put her at ease I said, "Pardon my erection," and assured her that despite my obvious desire, to which Love must positively now be added, I did not intend to mount her.

"Don't talk that way!" she pleaded.

"There's no help for it," I declared sadly; "in fact, I doubt very much that we'll ever mate again. Not because you're married — I haven't decided quite what to make of marriage yet. But I think we might be brother and sister, so we probably shouldn't copulate."

I had been going to recommend in addition that she forsake all other bedmates as well, in order to remove any doubts about the motives of her famous sympathy; but she paled so at mention of our possible relation that I judged it prudenter to postpone further counsel. Her lovely face was stricken; with welling eyes she heard WESCAC's account: that inasmuch as she was Virginia R. Hector's daughter, if I was truly the GILES we must have the same mother; and that if, as was the common report, Miss Hector had had but a single accouchement, we were actually twins.