John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"I don't want them." On her knees upon the cushion now, she would assert herself further, draw my face into her bosom, offer her navel to my nose — all which I craved, detumescent as I was. Speaking with difficulty into her lower abdomen, I declared that that was exactly why we would not mate until she'd fulfilled her Assignment and made good the pledge that freed me.

"But even then you shouldn't love me the way you mean," I added. "If by some chance I turn out to be a Grand Tutor, I doubt if I ought to have a particular mistress, especially someone else's wife. And if I'm not — I won't be here to love." The idea disclosed itself to me in an instant, fullblown; I took my gold beard from her darling dark and addressed her gravely: "I left Main Detention for two reasons, Anastasia: to correct the mistakes I made last spring, and to flunk WESCAC. That's why I'm here — to Overcome My Infirmity and See Through My Ladyship. In a little while I'm going to find Harold Bray and go down to the Belly with him, without any mask on, and if WESCAC doesn't EAT me first, I'm going to destroy it."

She had started to protest; then she listened, her face stricken as when she'd said she loved me. At the end she drew her uniform together and kissed me chastely on the brow.

"Excuse me for acting so crazy, George," she said. "You see how hard it is for me to be aggressive." She sat down and smoothed her skirt. "If You get EATen, I'll get EATen too. I'm going with You."

"No."

She smiled firmly. "Yes I am. If I can't be Your sweetheart, I'll pass and be Your first protégée. You promised me that."

At once now I was inflamed with desire, by her return to demureness more than by her words, which were troubling enough. Now she didn't press it on me, the idea that I was loved stirred me to the bowels with warm amazement. To keep her from WESCAC's Belly was one thing; could I keep her from my heart as well? What in Founder's name was this thing from Sub-Departments of Sentimental Literature, this love ? I was baffled, and felt now towards myself the same queer strangership I'd felt towards Anastasia, and erst towards Max: a loveless, gingerly, wrinkle-nosed curiosity.

"Is there something else You need to do with me for Your Assignment-task?" she asked determinedly. "Or shall I go home and service Maurice right now?" Her mind was made up, I saw, and my backbone tickled. My voice would not come; I shook my head. Her eyes shone with a kind of passionate reservation; she was mine, they said, in all particulars save one: I could not will her out of love.

"What else is there to learn about me, then?" she asked herself brightly, for my benefit. "You know my history, and how I feel about things. I know what!" She jumped up and rummaged through a filing-cabinet. "I can show You my medical records and my psychological profile! My academic transcript's on file in Tower Hall, of course; I'll send for a photocopy. Let me think…"

"Anastasia — " My voice was thick. She turned from the file.

"It's not — I don't want just information." She ignored my emotion and pretended to consider deeply. "Let's see, then: See Through Your Ladyship." She snapped her fingers. "The fluoroscope!"

I waved my hand, but she turned switches and stepped behind the ground-glass screen. Within the supple shadows of her flesh I saw dark bones and dusky organs.

"I'm not anything to love," I found myself saying. "I don't even know what I am …"

"This is my duodenum," she said crisply, as if lecturing, and pointed with a finger-bone. "These are my right and left kidneys here, and down here somewhere You may be able to see my ovaries. Come closer if You can't."

"Stop, Anastasia."

"I want You to see everything, George. It's all Yours." She turned sideways; despite my odd anguish I gazed fascinated at her innards. "I'm asserting myself," she reminded me. "Hold on: I'll use a light the way Heddy used to; You can see right through to it. Is that flunkèd enough?" There was no sarcasm in her tone, only lovingest resolve.

"Please, Anastasia!"

She applied to herself despite my murmurs an illuminated Lucite rod.

"Do you want to work it? Kennard likes to…"

"I'm not Kennard!" I cried. I took her hand and put an end to the illumination. "I'm not anybody!"

"You're the person I love," she replied, and laying aside the rod, hugged me softly. Notwithstanding her queer behavior, she seemed altogether at ease. I was most uncomfortable! "I'm sorry I complained about Your advice," she said calmly. "I kept thinking of it in the ordinary way, as Kennard or Maurice would, instead of seeing that the idea is to test my love, the way the Founder tested people in the Old Syllabus."

"Anastasia…" The name seemed strange to me now, and her hair's rich smell. What was it I held, and called Anastasia? A slender bagful of meaty pipes and pouches, grown upon with hairs, soaked through with juices, strung up on jointed sticks, the whole thing pulsing, squirting, bubbling, flexing, combusting, and respiring in my arms; doomed soon enough to decompose into its elements, yet afflicted in the brief meanwhile with mad imaginings, so that, not content to jelly through the night and meld, ingest, divide, it troubled its sleep with dreams of passèdness, of love …

She squeezed more tightly; I felt the blood-muscle pumping behind her teat, through no governance of Anastasia. My penis rose, unbid by George ; was it a George of its own? A quarter-billion beasties were set to swarm therefrom and thrash like salmon up the mucous of her womb; were they little Georges all?

I groaned. "I don't understand anything!"

"I'm asserting myself," she said quietly. "I think that the Ladyship part of Your Assignment means You're supposed to know me so well that we'll be the same person."

These words so fit my recent Answer, I could not protest when she disrobed. But coitus was not necessarily what she had in mind, ready as she was (and saw the nether George to be) for that ultimate merger of two into one. She removed not only her uniform and underclothing but the pins from her hair, the wedding-ring from her finger, and the cosmetic from her face, then turned from the wash-basin to face me. Her legs were slightly apart, her hands on her hips, her cheeks flaming. Inspired no doubt by Dr. Sear's new relation to Peter Greene, she ordered me to make her person as familiar to me as my own. I asked her what she meant.

"Examine me," she said. Her voice wavered, but not for an instant her extraordinary resolution. She was a changed woman.

"Examine you how, Anastasia? If you mean play Doctor, I don't see — "

"Let me do the seeing." She closed her eyes for some moments, as if gathering strength to proceed with her remarkable, nonplussing self-assertion. Lifting herself onto an examination-table near the fluoroscope, she said grimly, "Come here, George."

I went. She leaned back on her arms.

"Look me over," she ordered. "Don't mind if I blush or act embarrassed. Examine me, every square millimeter. Don't touch me yet; just look."

I am not made of stone: breathing heavily, and assisted by my flashlight and the various lenses of my stick, I inspected every pore, hair, fold, crease, protuberance, process, and orifice of her. I learned that the hairs of Anastasia's limbs, head, armpits, and pubes grew darker and thicker in that order; that her brown irises were flecked with black and green; that her scalp was more white, her labia minora more tan, than I'd have supposed. Her nostrils were not quite a pair; there were silver fillings in three of her molars and one bicuspid. Her nipples, examined closely, were mottled, and more cylindrical than hemispheric. A total of seventy-four tiny moles, all brown, were disposed about her epidermis, five of them bearing at least one hair. Her earlobes were extremely small, scarcely pendant; a thumbnail-size café-au-lait birthmark was half concealed, when she stood, in the crease below her right buttock. Her anus — unlike her lips, tongue, nipples, clitoris, and urethra — was neither rosy nor granular, but of the same smooth beige-pink as the skin of her hams. Her navel, shallowly recessed, was bilobular, not unlike the East-Campus symbol for polarity.