John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"A certain married couple known to us both," Stoker said, still with no sarcasm at all, "were spending the weekend at that motel, it seems, on the advice of the Grand Tutor. What happened between them isn't very clear — Kennard's in the Infirmary now, and Hedwig's in the Asylum — "

I groaned.

"— but whatever it was, it must've unhinged poor Heddy entirely. Ever heard of a woman attacking a man?" Mrs. Sear, it appeared, had accosted Croaker in the motel lobby (whose occupants had fled when he strode naked through the glass door and commenced to make love to a soft-drink dispenser), removed her clothing, and leaped upon him, shouting lewd encouragements. Alas, what the vending-machine had mustered, she dismayed; so addled and unmanned him (of course, his stomach was troubling him by this time too) that he stood like ravished Truth while patrolmen shackled and sedated him. Mrs. Sear, altogether distraught, skipped circles about the lobby, chanting He was my bashful, barefoot beau in uncertain contralto, until the white ambulance-cycle arrived. It had been summoned in fact for Dr. Sear, who during the furor in the lobby was found by a chambermaid to be unconscious and discolored in his room, overdosed with sleeping-capsules. Thus husband and wife had left the motel together, neither aware of the fact. Mrs. Sear was committed and had subsequently regressed to the behavior of a five-year-old girl, according to Stoker; Dr. Sear had his stomach pumped in the out-patient wing of the Infirmary and so was spared for the Cancer Ward, where he presently languished in preparation for palliative surgery. Croaker himself, once subdued, became ill, incontinent, and helpless: went on all fours, forgot how to feed himself, and finally huddled day and night in one corner like a distempered beast. When presently the fever had passed and his appetites began to re-waken, he'd been transferred to Main Detention rather than to the NTC Asylum because of a dispute among the psychiatric faculty as to whether insanity was possible in sub-rational animals. The alternative proposed by the negative faction, composed largely of South New Tammanians — that he be exhibited in the Zoologipal Gardens — was rejected by the Office of Intercollegiate Relations lest it give offense to the emerging colleges of Frumentius, whose political support the Office was courting. Of Dr. Eierkopf's fate there was no word.

I touched the head of my sick black classmate, who, weak from regurgitating mattress-straw, collapsed now between his supporters. Yet before the pupils of his eyes rolled up he smiled at me and grunted.

"He's worse off now than he was the time I turned him loose," Stoker observed. "Even a wild animal won't eat what's not good for him."

"My fault," I said, and shook my head. In counseling Croaker to put by all things Eierkopfian and become indeed a beast of the woods, I'd not allowed for the atrophy of instinct, I suppose; or perhaps student rationality and brute unconscious will were not separable, so that plucking the blossom killed the root. My heart I had thought too numbed by other failures to feel new grief, but so formidable a wreck stung it afresh. Mistutoring Croaker in such wise, I had I felt subverted my own origin and base: the easy beasthood that must have accounted for our rapport.

"He might be dangerous when he gets well," Stoker said to Max and Leonid. "Want to move next door?"

Those two glanced at each other.

"You go on," Max grumbled. "Me he knows already; I should stay here in case."

Leonid considered, flung his arms about for some moments, then replied as if casually: "Not."

"More heroics," Max said. Stoker, who saw what was coming as clearly as I, shrugged and departed, leaving me (as sometimes happened) the barred aisle for my cell — small boon, as its length was cotless and potless. He was not enough reformed to insist on removing my friends from danger; the old Stoker, so far from even suggesting it, would have stayed to watch the mayhem.

"Vice-versity!" Leonid shouted at my keeper. "You're the heroics, sir!"

They took up then the other great topic of debate: the one they'd waked me with at the first and put me to sleep with many times since — and which, after Greene's release, entirely supplanted the issue of My Ladyship's character. It took numerous forms, or rather was provoked by several particular questions like the one here disputed — which of them would risk his welfare by attending Croaker — but inevitably it reduced to the same terms. Max I had accused of a special vanity, the yen for martyrdom; Leonid of a selfish ambition not dissimilar to my former craving for Commencement: the desire to be a perfect Student-Unionist. No good my withdrawing those criticisms now, as bad-tempered, specious, logic-chopping; no good my repudiating all of that flunkèd March-day's work, false counsels of a false Grand Tutor. What they'd denied when I proposed it, they all affirmed, every one of my "Tutees," it seemed, now I would recant; and the more I disavowed Grand-Tutorhood, the strongerly they countered, by word and deed, that disavowal. Max, Leonid, Anastasia, Peter Greene, the Sears, Croaker, Chancellor Rexford — and for aught I knew, Eblis Eierkopf, the brothers Hector, and Classmate X — all seemed to agree now that they had been flunked, Bray's Certification to the contrary notwithstanding, even as in my ignorance I had declared — and that Stoker had been less so, or less truly aspirant to that condition, than he'd claimed to be. In the cases of Max and Leonid this had led to a bind. As to principle they were agreed: if the desire to sacrifice oneself, whether by martyrdom or in perfect selflessness, was selfish, and thus self-contradictory, then to attain that end one must not aspire to it. Further, they agreed — sometimes, at least — that not- aspiring, if conceived as a means to the same end, was morally identical with aspiring, and that imperfect selflessness, when deliberately practiced to avoid the vanity of perfection, became itself perfect, itself vain. Therefore, as best I could infer, they aspired to not-aspire to an imperfect imperfection, each in his way — and found themselves at odds. Would an unvain martyr stay on in Main Detention, Maios-like, even unto the Shaft, as Max was inclined to, or escape, given the chance, to continue his work in studentdom's behalf? Leonid insisted, most often, that the slightly selfish (and thus truly selfless) choice was the latter, and offered "daily" to effect my keeper's freedom by secret means.

To do this, I came to learn, was part of the assignment given him by his stepfather; but our conversation in the U.C. building and his discussions with Max had impaired Leonid's singleness of purpose. His mission had been first to feign defection and then to get himself detained as a Nikolayan agent by discovering, as though inadvertently, an intent to kidnap some unnamed New Tammany scientist; this much he had accomplished before my eyes, on the Black Friday of my Tutorhood. But this apparent frustration of his objective was part of the plan — for it was Max they wanted! Reasoning that his arrest for Moishiocausticide would turn Max against New Tammany, if his original cashiering hadn't, the Nikolayan Department of Intelligence had chosen Leonid Alexandrov, because of his notorious way with locks, to rescue him from the Shaft and transport him across the Power Lines — yielding up his own life, if necessary, in the process. Not only had Leonid accepted the task enthusiastically, seeing in it a chance to redeem his errant past and earn Classmate X's respect by proving his selflessness; he still maintained that the idea had been his own. But my remarks and Max's moral speculations had led him to doubt. Leaving aside the merits of the collective Student Self and its ambitions, ought a truly selfless agent of that Self to carry out its wishes, knowing the vanity and selfishness of his motives in so doing? Or ought he to spoil the assignment, by merely setting Max free in New Tammany or returning empty-handed, and thereby achieve the selflessness of self-disgrace? That Max himself, whom he'd come to love second only to Classmate X, had no desire to work for Nikolay College or even to leave Main Detention, compounded the difficulty.