John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Playing! He died for it!"

"More famous so! Big advertise, name in historybooks!"

I feared to speak, lest the vision of my keeper vanish; for aught I knew, dear dreams might be my torment. But they saw me stir; Max hurried to me; real tears dropped into his beard and onto mine; material the arms that hugged me, mortal the hand that felt my brow, and I learned I was alive, in Main Detention. Leonid, though we'd met only once before, embraced me also, in the Nikolayan manner, and seemed as pleased as Max to see me wake. They had become friends, it appeared — as were too the Nikolayan and his former adversary Peter Greene, who saluted me glumly from the next cell!

"Thank the Founder you're okay!" Max cried. His late reserve with me was gone; beside my cot he closed his eyes and thumped his forehead against my chest.

"Nothing's okay," grumbled Peter Greene, and was cheerily bid by Classmate Alexandrov to go flunk himself.

"I didn't mean him," Greene said. "Y'know durn well what I mean."

I didn't, nor cared just then to learn. Enough to be alive and on campus, however incarcerate and disgraced. Responsibility! Remorse! Dishonor! I welcomed their sting now as evidence that, among my other failures, I had failed to pass away.

There is no time in Main Detention — under Stoker's wardenship, not even night and day. We slept or woke irregularly without regard to the lights, which went on and off at unpredictable intervals. Meals were served at any hour, apparently, sometimes in such close succession that one had no appetite, sometimes at so great a lapse of time that chants of protest rose from the detained. One had the impression that there was in theory a fixed routine, which however was whimsically administered: we would be routed out for exercise after "lunch," say, and find ourselves doing push-ups under the stars; or we might go for (what seemed like) days without leaving our cells, then be sent to the prison shops or reading-room for so long a stretch that we'd sleep and eat upon the work- or library-tables. In this disorder I saw Stoker's hand, as in our random assignment to cells. Main Detention itself, as I'd gathered from that chart in Stoker's office, was scrupulously laid out as to the location among its tiers of the several sorts of offenders; there was evidence, even, of a moral logic in its architecture. But in practice we were assorted by no discernible plan: I for example had been taken from the noose at Stoker's direction and detained for impersonating a Grand Tutor; the cells for that species of error were in the fourth block of the third, or bottom, tier, counting downwards; yet I had waked first in an observation-chamber for the criminally mad and later in the company of an alleged murderer, an alleged spy, and an alleged rapist (such was the charge against Peter Greene, who after reviving from Dr. Sear's sedation had on the evening of my fall tracked Anastasia into an alleyway behind the Old Chancellor's Mansion and there, by his own dour admission, flung My Ladyship upon the pavement and forced her virtue "redskin style"), no two of whom belonged in the same stratum. Moreover, at each return from work or exercise there was no telling where one would be confined, or with whom: I might be lodged alone or crammed into a cell with ten others in an empty tier; my companions might be fellow-impostors — false dons and pretended sophomores — or some of the many grafters, gamblers, pornographers, and prostitute co-eds detained under Lucius Rexford's far-reaching program of campus reform (of which more presently), or any other combination of the flunked.

Yet among the inconsistencies of our detention, by the logic of our warden's illogicality, we were not invariably assigned a cell at all. On occasion it was every man for himself at lock-up time; my objectives then would be to elude the predatory faggots (who collared the unwary to ruthless buggering) and share a cell with Max, Leonid, Peter Greene — or Croaker, when soon afterwards he joined our company. From them, from Stoker himself, who now and then toured his domain, and from the regular visits of Anastasia and my mother, I learned the unhappy state of things among my erstwhile Tutees, as well as in the upper campus generally. And that news, those developments, were my one real punishment in this interval of my life: sad postings in a desert of dead time.

I was not uncomfortable. When meat was served, or cows-milk, I contented myself with water and mattress-straw, and gained strength and trim from that buckly fare. I cannot say that I was never abused by guards and prisoners, who sometimes took advantage of my sticklessness, or that I never made use of the restless whores who climbed upon the bars to sport. In general, however, except for the pleasure of atonement with Max and the pain of learning what catastrophe my Tutorship had wrought, my season in Main Detention was as numb as it was timeless. So much so, I reconstruct with confidence neither the order of the several disclosures and events which follow nor my reaction to them. They took place, I see now, over a period of some forty weeks, but for aught I felt or valued time it might have been forty years, forty days — or one long night.

The EAT-whistle that had postponed my end was a false alarm — rather, a true alarm falsely construed. When Classmate X had broken off the Summit Symposium and in such dudgeon left the U.C. building, the Nikolayan and New Tammanian border-guards were each alerted to expect trouble from the other. Later that same day, on Lucius Rexford's orders, units from the School of Engineering had moved up to begin the task of relocating the NTC Power Line a full kilometer west of its former position and mounting extra floodlight-towers in the widened gap between East and West Campus. The Nikolayans, thinking themselves menaced by this activity, had actually sent short-order EAT-waves crackling to the very Boundary (at least EASCAC had transmitted them; whether at its own discretion or on orders from the Student-Unionist First Secretary was not clear), which WESCAC had detected and duly reported. Ordinarily in such circumstances no general alarm would have been sounded until the enemy's hostile intentions were unmistakable; but Chancellor Rexford being unavailable for consultation (he was in fact drafting the first of his "Open-Book Test" bills, and refused to be disturbed), the New Tammany professor-generals had blown the whistle. They may or may not have ordered a counter-attack as well: they themselves denied it, but the Nikolayans claimed — predictably, yet perhaps not incorrectly — that New Tammany was calling EASCAC's defense-transmissions aggressive in order to justify counter-aggression; and Stoker himself (from whom I learned all this) maintained that WESCAC had indeed set about to EAT Nikolay College, either by its own AIM or at the direction of the professor-generals; only the drain on its power-supply — caused by Stoker's unwonted absence from the Furnace Room and a sudden frenzy of power-consumption by the Library CACAFILE — had prevented Campus Riot III. The situation remained critical: Chancellor Rexford's sudden insistence on "open-book diplomacy" had made practical negotiation impossible between East and West; the separation of the Power Lines ended the defection of malcontents; the Nikolayans maintained that NTC's apparent retreat was a prelude to "loudening" the Quiet Riot, and Tower Hall replied that the Nikolayans were advancing their Power Line under cover of darkness — the new floodlights were barely usable for want of power. The only casualties thus far were among New Tammany's border-guards, numbers of whom fell to their deaths each week from the Power Line because of the poor light and the new "heads-up" collars which the Chancellor obliged them to wear on duty; but pressures were mounting and tempers shortening on both sides, and at any hour the EAT-whistle might sound again, this time in earnest.