John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Look here… Pete," I said, "you're okay."

"You durn tootin'," he grumbled, thinking I'd affirmed his condemnation-in-progress of New Tammany's Quiet-Riot policies. "Lawless academical adventurism, is what it is."

"I mean you," I persisted. "I was wrong before. You were okay, until you took my advice."

"And what the heck altogether?" Max said smiling. "Like you used to say, it doesn't matter nothing."

Greene regarded us suspiciously, yet with a rueful expression, as if afraid we were baiting him but admitting he deserved no better use. I took my stick from him and suggested cordially that it was time he stopped looking in mirrors.

"Can't see much in that one anyhow," he admitted. "All pussed up."

Leonid grunted amiably. "You got face like old whore's behind."

"Say what you want," Greene sadly invited us. "I know I'm flunked."

I declared then my conviction that he was not — or hadn't been until I'd flunked him. My interpretation of Bray's Certificate, I wanted to tell him, had been as mistaken in his case as in the others. Enos Enoch said Become as a kindergartener, and I'd flunked Peter Greene on the grounds that beneath his sentimental illusions lay much guile, much guilt, much that was failed. How tell him now that he was blinder than before — or as blind, but faileder? Better to deceive himself about the worth of things than about their want of it! That Miss Sally Ann had several times horned him I was fairly sure; but that she was no "floozy" I was certain. New Tammany College, as best I could judge from much reading and a little observation, was neither a Graduate School on the one hand nor a Dunce's College on the other; in its history and present state there was much to wince at — and much to take pride in: a few Ira Hectors, a few Lucky Rexfords, and many Peter Greenes, for better and worse. Whom too I thought him wronger about than before: he was not "all right," surely not "all wrong," but in his former error he'd at least been generous, cheerful, energetic, and on the whole more agreeable than not, whereas now…

But there was no time for such analysis, nor did I think it would much touch him. Stoker approached with a jingle of keys and a mocking whistle. Therefore I repeated Bray's quotation from the Founder's Scroll — Passèd are the kindergarteners — and declared my suspicion that kindergarteners were neither innocent nor simple except to sentimental eyes; only ingenuous, as Greene had been, was yet, and doubtless ever would be.

Max rolled his eyes. "You said that right."

Greene squinted. "You're pulling my leg, George. Not that I don't have it coming, 'As-ye-sow'wise."

I assured him of my sincerity, though in fact I used a small lie to make my point. Didn't he know, I asked him, that his acne had actually been clearing up before he overcame his thing-about-mirrors? "When you saw your own pimples you started squeezing them all the time" — so much was true — "and that made more of them. Even so they're not as bad as you think; you see the spots on the mirror as spots on your face."

This unpleasant argument impressed him; he would clean Sear's mirror and make a count. But I insisted he have no more to do either with mirrors or with Kennard Sear, should that unfortunate man survive.

"I don't get you," Greene protested. "You told me your own self — "

"Never mind what I told you. I was wrong." Of two false arguments that came to mind then, I chose one and was pleased to see Greene supply the other himself.

"Suppose a man's nearsighted," I said. "Things two meters off will be twice as blurred as things one meter off. Right?" I hurried on before he could answer. "So he learns to allow for that error, and he's okay. Now he looks in a mirror from one meter's distance he corrects the image for a meter of error, either in his head or with his eyeglasses, and thinks he's seeing clearly — but he's not, because the image he sees is really two meters distant, a meter each way…"

Max closed his eyes until Leonid began to make noises of dissent, whereupon he went to confer with him in whispers. Greene frowned. Stoker had paused a few cells from ours to accept certain bribes from a shameless co-ed, before whose eyes he dangled the key-ring. I pressed on to the shakiest part of my argument before he should overhear it.

"So anything he sees in a mirror twenty meters from him will be distorted forty times. He couldn't recognize it at all! Put a mirror up to life, you get a double distortion."

"Quadruple," Max corrected, very gravely. "On account the image is also backwards."

"I hate!" Leonid said, and although his glare suggested he meant deception as well as distortion, he shook Greene's shoulder with rough goodwill. "You wrong about you! I like okay!"

Greene cocked his head, much moved. "I don't know. I swear to Pete… That durn window by the funhouse that I told you-all about — you know what I decided a while back, when I was in jail here?" He looked from one to the other of us. "Come to me it weren't any window at all, but a gosh-durn mirror!"

Max pretended astonishment.

"It was me talking dirty to Sally Ann!" Greene said bitterly. "I chunked that rock at my own self, that I thought was the Peeping Tom!"

Leonid feigned horror. "Impossity, Peter Greene!"

"Sure it is!" Greene laughed and sprang up with more vigor than he'd displayed since the rape. "Couldn't nobody see their own reflection so far off, all that distortion!"

"Night-time too," I reminded him — relieved, but not unappalled, that he'd taken my bait so readily and swallowed it whole.

"Plus a funhouse mirror yet," Max added, "that it's made to distort things."

This too Greene seized uncritically, disregarding its implications. "I could've been right in the first place!"

"You were," I encouraged him. "Till I misled you."

Leonid pounded his back. "Okayship! No more hate! Mrs. Anastasia too!"

Stoker had come to our door at last, and grinned malevolently through the bars — waiting, I guessed, to refuse to unlock me. But I saw in Leonid's reference to My Ladyship a chance to complete the re-Tutoring of Peter Greene, in whose eye stood tears already of relief; and Stoker's mock, I was willing to gamble, would abet me.

"Don't you realize," I said to Greene, "that Anastasia dismissed the complaint because she loves you? She knows how much you admired her, and how upset you were at what you saw in Dr. Sear's office — or thought you saw, through the one-way mirror…"

Greene blinked strongly. "By jimmy gumbo, George! Do you mean to stand there on your two hind legs and tell me — "

Thinking he saw what was afoot, Stoker joined in happily: "You didn't think it was really Stacey you jumped on, did you? My wife's a virgin, Greene!"

" I be durn," Greene said stiffly. "You can't fool me."

"No, I swear it!" Stoker cried, and feigned a whisper. "I was born with no balls, see, and Stacey's got a thing about dildos. Look, I'll show you." He seemed prepared to open his trousers for our inspection — whether in earnest or not I never learned, for Greene professed disbelief and disgust, at the same time blushing with hopeful doubt.

"You can't tell me she's a virgin!" he said. "Not after what I done to her!"

His tone implied that he could nonetheless entertain the fantastic idea of her having been unserviced thitherto — despite what he'd seen and heard! I considered suggesting that he himself had deflowered her in the alley. But I hesitated, uncertain whether that notion would please him or burden him with new guilt. Either way, I decided, the responsibility might involve him with My Ladyship in a manner not conducive to restoring his marriage, and my object was merely to revive his esteem for Anastasia, as for himself and the other things he'd valued in time past. While I considered the problem, Stoker solved it, thinking only to make further sport.