John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"What are you knitting, Mother?" I asked gently, and looked to Anastasia for reply; between her spells of reliving our season in the hemlocks, my poor Lady Creamhair spoke not at all except in confidential whispers to My Ladyship, whom she stayed with constantly, as it seemed.

Anastasia colored. "It's a baby-sweater, George. Mom — Your mother thinks I'm going to have a baby."

I considered her belly. "Are you?"

"Of course not!"

Mother nodded to the wee blue wrapper. "Bye Baby Billikins."

Anastasia colored further. "Sometimes she thinks it's that WESCAC business again, and her that's pregnant."

But my mother resolutely shook her head.

"You do, sometimes!" Anastasia scolded her; but then confessed what I took to be Mother's commoner delusion; "other times she seems to think I'm Your wife or something…"

I smiled and kissed again Mother's poor mad hair, and to humor her folly drew Anastasia near, patted her fine flat gut and nodded.

"That's cruel, George!" In a little temper My Ladyship went into the Observation Room. "I'm not even able to have babies, and You know it!"

My apology seemed rather to encourage than to mollify her petulance; she maintained a more or less injured air while recounting Peter Greene's strange forenoon invasion of the office. But though I was much interested in her tale I forgot her vexed tone when I looked through the oneway glass into the Treatment Room and saw a shirtsleeved man his head swathed in bandages, lying on the leathern couch — and Peter Greene, white-coated, in the chair at its head!

"Don't ask me," Anastasia said, before I'd thought to. "Kennard took him in there to calm him down, and next thing I knew it was like that. They've been at it since before lunch."

From her account I gathered that the bandaged man was Dr. Sear; his malady was no curabler than before, but surgical excision of his nose had abated its progress, temporarily, enough for him to resume a limited practice. Anastasia had returned to assist him on the conditions that she be obliged no longer to offer sexual therapy to anyone, even Mrs. Sear, and that her "mother" be permitted to stay with her in the Reception Room. Indeed, it was Mother, I was startled to learn, who in her own recent therapy-sessions had by some means conveyed to Dr. Sear the first reports of my new programme — perhaps by the same fortuitous quotations from the Syllabi that she'd inspired me with. In any case, with his usual acuity Sear had seen my point, and when shortly afterwards Anastasia had come to him, distraught, with word of my strange new advice, he'd not only approved it, but fortified my paradoxical argument with a dozen quotations from Footnotes to Sakhyan and other works of "unitary expletivism," none of which My Ladyship could make heads or tails of.

" 'He is a Grand Tutor!' " she said he'd said of me. "I told him You said You weren't, and he said, 'That's the point! That's what I mean!' " She sighed (still a little poutish): thereafter Sear had pressed her in vain to return to the practice of sexual therapy; and it was he, I now learned, who had suggested that she might secure my release by promising to become Bray's mistress (he'd also persuaded Bray to release me on the strength of her pledge without waiting for its consummation — not to mention the siring upon her of the child Bray craved). Further, Sear had acknowledged to her that he himself had been desperately flunkèd thitherto, even as I'd said; was flunkèd still, as he'd seen too plainly at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. Hence the decision to end his life. Rescued willynilly from the sleeping-capsules, he'd tried to relish the horror of his disease, but the physical decay, it seemed, drove out the intellectual, and he'd found himself terrified instead of diverted by death's approach. Anosmia was followed by exophthalmos, and as his eyeballs began to pop, the cancer spread to and obstructed his lacrimal ducts, with the result that tears ran from them almost constantly. But it was as much for as from his condition that he wept. Greatly as he loathed mutilation, now he feared death more, and consented to radical surgery: the tears disappeared, along with his nose and a portion of the sight of both eyes.

With what vision remained to him he'd striven to imagine how my new Answer fit his case. Clearly I would not advise him to refine his amusements or otherwise attempt to become more campusly — the end of that road he'd reached already, at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. From my advice to Anastasia he inferred correctly that he should assert whatever it was he had vainly tried to rid himself of; further, he'd concluded that that must necessarily be some kind of ingenuousness or ignorance of himself, inasmuch as he'd devoted his whole life to their opposites. That he could see no defect in his insight proved to him that the defect existed, since perfect insight would see its imperfections; had he not been naïve to think himself not naïve? His first prescription, therefore, had been to commit himself to the custody of his wife, who had regressed to the psychological age of five. But much as he'd enjoyed playing "Doctor" with her in the sandbox of the chronic-ward playground, he'd come to realize that however correct his diagnosis and prescription, they were invalid perforce, as he'd arrived at them himself.

"So this morning he asked me to tell him what to do!" Anastasia exclaimed. "As if I were the doctor! I said he'd better talk to You, that I didn't understand this crazy business — and the way he thanked me, you'd think that was exactly what he wanted to hear! As if he couldn't have thought of it himself!"

"I see." And I did see, dimly, his general reasoning, I believed: Sear needed to come to me at the behest of someone else, preferably someone who didn't understand the situation. It had seemed to bother him, though, Anastasia continued, when she reminded him that she was only a nurse. But before she could suggest that he consult a professional colleague, their conversation had been interrupted by Greene's visit.

"You won't believe what he came to tell me!" The memory so renewed her astonishment, she forgot her pique at my having pretended she was pregnant.

I smiled. "He apologized for confusing you with your flunkèd twin sister."

"How did You know? He's crazy, George! And I hate to say it, but I'm afraid Kennard's mind has been affected, too. By the cancer…"

I followed her account as well as I could, for it was more arresting and suggestive than I'd anticipated. But my attention was sorely divided: not only was I listening at the same time to the conversation in the Treatment Room, which I'd remembered could be overheard at the flip of a switch; I was also sharply interested in observing through the glass what appeared to be a new development in the strange relation between Greene and Sear.

" I thought he wanted to apologize for last spring," Anastasia said. "In fact, I was going to offer to explain the whole thing to his wife, in case she thought it was his fault, what he'd done to me. But when he started in on this sister business, and how he was sorry he'd ever thought it was me that wasn't a virgin…! He got more excited all the time, saying his wife was the dearest little wifey on the Founder's green campus and I was the dearest little sister, and women like Maurice's secretary and my sister were floozies that ought to be horsewhipped! Kennard was right there listening to the whole thing, and when Mr. Greene started saying he'd defend my honor to the death, and pawing me at the same time, I thought Kennard would help me! Because it wasn't the first time, You know, that a patient ever got fresh, and I really think Mr. Greene thought he was protecting me, or something… But do You think Kennard helped? He was listening to Mr. Greene as if it were the Grand Tutor talking, and when Mr. Greene tried to lay me down on the desktop, all Kennard said was 'Remember what George told you, Stacey'!"