John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

I was dizzy with shock. Reginald Hector ran in small circles with his hands upon his ears. The Telerama people signaled one another furiously, and spotlights fingered all about us. To perfect the confusion a squad of Stoker's motorcycle-guards now roared around the corner of the house whence Anastasia had appeared; they drew up near the gate, sirens a-growl, cursing the crowd from their way. Stoker himself led them, black-jacketed, booted, and grinning as of old, soot on chin and teeth a-flash. In his sidecar — manacled, disheveled, bruised, and glum — Peter Greene, with Stoker's pistol at his head! Anastasia ran from him, to hug my knees. Everyone milled about; the lynching was temporarily forgot.

"Please don't let them hurt George!" My Ladyship begged me. "We'll try again tonight, if you want to. The whole night!"

A dreadful thought occurred to me as she spoke, so that only later did I realize what she'd said.

"Did Greene attack you?" Even as I asked I groaned with the certainty that he had, brought to it by disillusionment at my hands.

She pounded my kneecaps with her fists. "It doesn't matter! Please do what you promised, Mr. Bray! I'll find some way to have a baby with you; I swear it!"

My eyes blinded — with tears of chagrin that would not, however, fall — and I pushed through to where my mother knelt kissing the semblance of myself. Restive now, the crowd were arguing with Stoker's men and unabashedly restringing the noose. I tried to say "Wait!" but the cry lodged in my throat. Bray smiled through his bloody mask expectantly; upon his chest my mother wept. I pointed at him and managed at last to say: "That man's an impostor!"

"You're telling us, sir?" his captors laughed, and made to fetch him noosewards. I blocked their way.

"Look!" I seized his hair and my own-which was to say, my own and his — and yanked both masks away, wondering what face Bray would show beneath. It was his own — that is, a semblance of the one I doffed — and people cried astonishment. My mother looked wailing from one to the other of us and clutched her head.

"I'm George the Goat-Boy!" I declared bitterly to the crowd. "My diploma's false; I've failed everything — "

I could say no more for grief; anyhow they were upon me — seized me by the hair, and, seeing it was real, commenced to kick and pummel. Mother screamed, and was fetched from me. My diploma (the erstwhile Assignment-list) they stuffed into my mouth and bade me eat — as willingly I would have, in self-despite, had it not been retchy sheepskin. When they hoist me to a sidecar-top and readied the noose, I could see Bray moving porchwards on the shoulders of the faithful. From the mansion-steps Reginald Hector held out his arms to welcome the true Grand Tutor — nay, more, tore off his own shirt to staunch Bray's wounds, nor would accept the new one his aides fetched forth, until the spotlights swung from him to My perjured, ruined, ruinous Ladyship. Anastasia tugged at Bray's ankle, tore at her already open blouse as if to show him his reward, and screamed to him what she'd screamed to me, I did not doubt; he made a circle of his thumb and forefinger but could not calm her, nor moved at all to stay the lynch.

Neither did the guards: Peter Greene they held from the crowd (who were inspired to hang us both), on the ground that no formal charge of rape had yet been brought against him; but they only grinned and stood by as I was beaten with my own stick, my black purse pulled like a death-mask over my head without regard for its contents, and the tip of the shophar thrust into my rump. No matter: I yearned for the end; welcomed the hemp onto my neck; stepped off the sidecar before they could push me. A vile cheer rose; I heard Stoker laugh at my strangling. "Blow it!" someone yelled — and I thought I might have, so fiercely did I strain to die; indeed there came a far-off shrieking whistle, blast upon blast from Founder's Hill; a sound I knew. As I let go reins and breath and all I heard a man cry, "Founder help us; we'll all be EATen!" And another, almost matter-of-factly: "It's the end of the University."

Students pass away; not so studentdom, until the campus itself shall perish. And at that term of terms, when the student body is no more, shall its mind not persist, in other universities than ours?

I couldn't at once adjudge, from where I woke beyond the noose, whether the EAT-whistle had blown for my sole succumbing or all studentdom's, as my chamber was isolate except from the cry and reek of fellow flunks. But that I was in Nether Campus I could not doubt: the heat, the shrieks and mad laughter, the stink — all attested it. I lay in foul straw in an iron stall with padded walls, lit by the red-orange glow from a port in the ceiling — the one apparent aperture. That I should abide there among the flunked forever I did not question: I had failed everything, everyone, in every sense; was as flunked as any other of Bray's passees; had flunked myself as I had flunked them; was flunked at the outset for craving ardently to pass, just as that patch-eyed Nikolayan had been selfish in his yen for perfect selflessness. "Passage is failure": I saw now in my black box what truth was in that remark, and prepared to suffer till the end of terms.

Two things alone surprised me: that the old West-Campus images of the mind's fate after death should turn out, evidently, to be literal truth instead of vivid metaphor — real iron, real dung, real fire and screams, and elsewhere, I presumed, real harps and passèd madrigals! — and that my punishment, so far at least, was in strictly human wise. I had been raised in straiter stalls than this, had slept for years in urinouser peat; surely the Founder knew I must find these quarters less loathesome than another human would. Was it that under the aspect of eternity all punishments were equal, being infinite every one? Or that in His wisdom the Founder chose so goat a lot for mine the smartlier to sting me for playing at human Tutorhood? No matter, these or any things: it was finished. My neck hurt; otherwise I was comfortable, sweetly tired in every limb. Naked, besmeared, I rested in the black heat and balmy absoluteness of my fall. I had failed all, then, passed nothing! Relief — from aspiration, doubt, responsibility, fear of failure — it flooded through me, drowned remorse and dread, swept me into the most delicious sleep.

Hours later — semesters, centuries — I woke to earnest conversation and realized I'd been hearing two male voices for some time.

"He wouldn't!"

"Excuse, Classmate sir: wouldhood!"

"Indeed, I think he would not…"

"Impossibleness not!"

"You truly believe he would, my boy?"

"Yes. No! Bah, I give it up!"

The latter voice, its accent and locutions, was exotic, much in the matter of that same Nikolayan defector's. The former — exotic too, but gentle, old, and wondrously familiar — was Max's. Had they been Shafted, then, and was there company in Dunce's College? I opened my eyes: I was on a bed now, of sorts — a sweet straw tick on an iron-wire platform — in a chamber better lighted than the one before, though no less warm. The floor and ceiling were of concrete, and the wall to which my steel-pipe bedframe was attached; the other walls were comprised of parallel vertical bars in the manner of detention-cells I'd read of. It was, after all, Max and Leonid Alexandrov I heard: they faced each other on the cell-floor, gesticulating as they argued.

"What about the other question?" Max demanded.

"Same like, turned around," Leonid said: "Would go."

"Maios didn't, when he had a chance to."

"Was vanity, then. Playing heroness."