John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"So I get him loose and tell him go home, he should drop dead without my help. This makes him angry; he says he won't be patronized by a flunkèd old Moishian, that he wouldn't have used to light a cigarette with back in his extermination-campuses: I should shoot him or he'll set fire my beard. Then he walks at me with his cigarette-lighter, I can see his face by it, and I realize he's Herman Hermann the Moishiocaustnik!" Whereupon, instead of shooting, Max had been smitten with despair, not alone because of the Bonifacist slaughter, but for the fate of studentdom in a university where Grand Tutors falter, and the flunkèd thrive. Assuming that the last slim hope of the campus had been traduced by Stoker's blandishments, and remembering the countless Amaterasus who'd not have been EATen had he himself stayed behind to die in Siegfrieder College with Chaim Schultz and the rest, Max could imagine no fitter end than to perish, however belatedly, at the same grim hand that had sent the Chosen Class to Commencement Gate.

Two paces from him Hermann had halted, put his hands on his hips, and said, "Shoot, Moishian!" But Max with a shrug had returned the pistol, butt-foremost, and replied, "Shoot your own self."

"What I meant," he told us now, "he should kill me, he wants a killing. It's a Moishian way of talking…"

Peter Greene nodded admiringly. "You Moishians are the most, what I mean in wise. Moishians and darkies, y'know?"

But either this final charity from Max had driven Hermann mad, or his Siegfrieder training made it impossible for him to flout a direct order from any source. He'd muttered, "Ja wohl," clicked his boot-heels, and shot himself accurately through the head.

"Magnificence!" Leonid cried, and did a hopak. "George tells this Rexford, you don't get Shaft!" He hugged Max carefully. "Stupidly, sir, you didn't say before!"

Max shook his head. When the shock had passed, he said, he'd seen his guilt. Even if he'd not directly ordered Hermann's suicide, he was the cause of it; moreover, so far from feeling remorse, he found himself trembling with satisfaction over the dead Moishiocaust. Having dragged the body into the woods, he would even have burned it, to complete his revenge, but Hermann's lighter had got soaked in blood and refused to catch. He'd gone then to the roadside and brooded until Croaker and I overtook him next day, by which time he'd come round to seeing he was flunked, and choosing to suffer for the crime of murder.

He smiled. "Then Georgie told me what he told me, up in the Visitation Room, and I wouldn't listen, I didn't believe him since the Powerhouse, also since Bray." Nevertheless, my criticism of his motives had taken root in his mind and grown, further nourished by debate with Leonid, until he'd despaired of choosing either death or liberty for the right reason.

"Ah, Max!" I said warmly. "You're passed already, Shaft or no Shaft! You see that now, don't you?"

He did. "So it's vanity I take the Shaft or I don't: so flunk me! What matters is the right choice, not the right reason. Pfui on Entelechus."

"Pfui on the right choice, too," I said, and he saw my point at once, so clearly that his application of it to Leonid left me little to add:

"You should stay or go, which you please," Max told him; "go back to Chementinski or transfer to New Tammany, and don't worry what's selfish what's not. Assert your self! Embrace! You got to suppress something, suppress unselfishness."

Leonid objected that he had in his late frustration tried just that course, but felt no passèder than before.

"Forget Passèder!" Max advised.

Leonid scratched his beard, but I affirmed Max's counsel enthusiastically. Their recent bind I compared to the cell in which the Nikolayans had once detained him, pointing out that in this case too the door was open; he need but shut his eye to Reason and stride forth. Hadn't he given me the Pass-key himself?

"It mysteries me, that talk!" he said. "But never mind! You I open door for; go make wife of Mrs. Anastasia!"

I replied that he must put by self-effacement and vie for her himself, without scruple or restraint; certainly without deference to me. For not only was marriage incompatible with Grand Tutorhood, in my opinion; passionate love was too, adulterous or not, by reason of its exclusiveness. If I had allowed myself any such emotion in the past (especially on discovering that My Ladyship was not my sister), I was to that extent flunked; if I should in the future, it would be purely because failure is passage. In any case, let all try for her who would, and the best man win; I was too sensible now of my faults to join the contest.

"By George!" Leonid cried — a kind of pensive shout. "My head spin! I'm such a dumb, I have to think about!"

No less did I — about my last words in particular, whose truth I realized only as I spoke them. Desire I understood, and Camaraderie; to Friendship, Respect, and Loyalty I was no stranger, either in the goat-pens or on Great Mall; certainly not to buckly Rut. I had "loved" Hedda and Redfearn's Tom, Lady Creamhair, Max my keeper, dead G. Herrold; I "loved" studentdom and Truth, and Anastasia's dear escutcheon. But what did I know of Love between human men and women, that emotion held to include and yet transcend these others? My connection with Anastasia — the sidecar-bite, our Memorial Service, my former jealousy on Bray's account, and the rest — seemed merely odd to me now: at best an intimation of what that much-sung Love might be, and a flunking measure of my distance from it. What she "saw in me," had ever seen, I could not see, since failure had opened my eyes. Anastasia: the name, like the lady girl, went stranger and more dark as I considered it. What thing was Anastasia? The mystery's nub, it seemed to me now, was a phenomenon I'd taken for granted before my fall, but which since baffled, even appalled me: I mean her continuing high regard for me, however indiscriminate and quirked. Why did she heed my flunkèd counsels? Why had she mated with Harold Bray, or pledged to — on my account but against my wish — back when she'd thought him the true Grand Tutor and but pitied me? Why had she pledged to now again, to free me, and declared belief in me against my own denial? I couldn't fathom her at all, not at all. And under my assertion, however sincere, that a Grand Tutor (not that I was one) oughtn't to permit himself the luxuries either of loving or of being loved, in the passion-way, there lay a dark suspicion that I was incapable of both.

"She needs a proper human man, not a goat-boy," I said to Max, who acknowledged the possibility with a shrug of his hand.

Peter Greene said "Haw," and popped a pimple. Since the night of the rape his aversion to mirrors had changed into gloomy fascination. Throughout his detainment he had used to stare at his reflection in anything shiny, growling oaths and making horrid faces. Now he had managed to get my stick from Croaker, and aided by the mirror near its tip was bursting pustules on his cheek, cursing himself with every pinch. "Y'all don't see through her the way I do. (There, you ugly bastard!) Didn't she admit she brought it on her own self, out in the alley? A flunker like me!"

He would have embarked then on his usual lament: that all his life he'd been a gosh-durn baby, knowledge-of-the-campuswise; that he'd thought himself a fine fellow, even a Graduate, his marriage a success, his self-education and career things to be proud of, his alma mater the gem of the University, Anastasia the flower and pattern of maiden girlship — until I and Dr. Sear had opened his eye to the truth. But as he began that drear recital, Max made inquiry of me with a glance, as if to ask "Him too?" I nodded, and broke into Greene's complaint.