John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"How are you, Anastasia?"

She palmed her brow. On the floor between her legs, a thick green puddle.

"George…"

"Ma'am?"

She caught her breath; her eyes grew awed. "It wasn't what You think. I know now why Dr. Bray never tried before! He's… different!"

"Different how, Anastasia?" I'd squatted before her; now with a wail she flung her arms about my neck and wept into my fleece. Once she'd managed between shudders to explain, as best she grasped it, that her ravisher was altogether lustless, craving only her reproductive assistance; that his private construction was not like that of any male in her large experience; and that in the nature of his case it was highly doubtful, even unimaginable, that she would conceive by those glaucous gouts of his rank stuff — most of which, thanks to my timely appearance and her collapse, had anyhow missed their mark — I advised her that she needn't loathe him. She wiped her eyes.

"I guess I don't, George, now that I know. But, ugh!"

"I have to drive him out of the Belly now," I said, "and sooner or later off the campus. Part of my work. But I don't have any feeling about him, one way or the other."

She sniffed and shivered. "Me neither. But, George…"

"Yes?"

Again she hugged and wailed. "I love You!" Then at once she drew away. "What are we going to do?"

I begged her pardon. Three hours and eight minutes previously, when so much had suddenly come clear in George's Gorge, I'd seen — as it were in the general light — that marriage was not for such as I, nor any amorous relationship; the bonds of desire, the ties of wife, mistress, children, like every other bond, I would cast off, eschew, abjure — eradicate, if necessary, like the names on my ID-card. And adultery, in particular, I perceived — given the student situation and the fabric of campus life — was flunkèd in the Founder's eyes, so to speak, at least for His Grand Tutors. Of these things I no longer held opinions; I knew them to be the case, as I'd been given in that instant to know much else. Yet in all this clarity — which so surely had lit my way back to Great Mall and up to the Belfry, and would beyond, from Tock to Tick, where presently I must go — one shadow remained. I detected it most plainly in the pupils of Anastasia's eyes, and inferred therefore that what it shrouded was myself.

"You must love your husband," I earnestly advised her. "Stoker's in critical shape just now. He's actually jealous."

"I'm a complete failure!" Anastasia cried, and repeated what she'd told me earlier, on, and which her Living-Room debauchery had confirmed for her: she still felt compassion for the student body's needs and a particular obligation to please her husband (for whom she had discovered in herself that day, for the first time, a kind of affection, when she'd seen his distress in the Living Room); moreover, she craved with all her heart to practice my instructions, as she believed absolutely in my Grand-Tutorhood. But she had failed, she wept; was failed, because what her deliberate promiscuities and self-servicings had taught her was that she was in love — - an entirely novel experience! And the object of her passion was myself.

I fretted. "Anastasia…"

"I don't care about anything," she said quietly. "I don't care what Maurice thinks, or You think, or even the Founder thinks. I know I'm flunked, and I don't even care." She'd come to the Belfry, she declared, against her husband's express prohibition (the first such of their marriage), knowing she might have to submit to Bray and then letting him do his will upon her even when she saw the horror of it, all in the conviction that I would appear — as indeed I had, though I'd not decided to until three hours and fifteen minutes past (the clock chimed as she spoke), and had even supposed in the Treatment Room that we'd see each other no more. Thus was her faith vindicated. What she wanted now, and was resolved upon with the same formidable confidence, was to engender and bear a child by me — an idea obviously planted by Mother — and to this end she was prepared to flunk herself forever with the prerequisite adultery. If I refused (and she would not "assert herself," she said; no more of that; I must come to her), she meant to go down in the Belly with me and there expire.

"I know You don't love me," she concluded. "I guess You can't, and still be a Grand Tutor. But I love You."

Her manner was the more disturbing for its perfect calm. I was touched with wonder and, at first, a really dispassionate curiosity. My nature and function, it seemed to me, I understood (since eight o'clock) quite clearly and disinterestedly. Certain misconceptions and imperfect notions had fallen from me, like blindfolds from the eyes or handcuffs from the wrists; I knew now I was meant for Grand-Tutorhood, and saw my way, work, and fate with sure indifference — as, for instance, that I would drive out Harold Bray, but with neither rancor nor relish, only as part of my larger Assignment. A knife cuts; a fish swims; a Grand Tutor, among other things, drives from the campus such as Bray. There was no glamour to the work, nor any longer to the term: Grand Tutor, WESCAC, fountain-pen — - all names of neutral instrumentalities. Thus also even Bray, impostor, troll : as he himself had once suggested, albeit guilefully, it was his function to be driven out; on the Founder's transcript, so to speak, his A and mine would be of equal value.

"Anastasia," I began again, and would have told her of these things — that the fact of my Grand-Tutorhood, for example, in itself made me no more lovable than the fact of assistant-professorship, say; and that for pointing the way to Commencement Gate, as surely I would do, studentdom owed my person no more love than one owed an Amphitheater-usher, for instance, or museum-guide, who also merely discharged their functions. To be sure, a certain kind of love for studentdom was prerequisite to my work — but so was a love of plants to the horticulturalist's, whose crop was nowise obliged thereby to reciprocation. Love me? I didn't love myself!

But I got no further than her name, at sound whereof she opened to me her fine clear eyes. They gave back my image, luminous, and another shadow disappeared — the last but one.

"Show me the way to the Belly, Anastasia."

She understood, evidently, that the lobby-lifts were under guard, and that in any case we could not resummon the elevator Bray had used. My hope was that like the nameless Information-girl, she would know of a hidden stair or other seldom-used route: her "mother," after all, had worked in Tower Hall throughout her adult life. But under this hope and conjecture was a certain knowledge, in view whereof I directed instead of asking her. She paled a little, then quietly got up. We went through the trap-door and down the ladder and stairs to the bottom landing — one level below the Circulation Room, but still a long way from the Belly. Taking my hand then, she led me through a low door into a maze of unlit bookstacks, through which she threaded as surely as if she dwelt there. More than once our way was barred by locked mesh doors, increasingly formidable, marked RESTRICTED: NO ADMITTANCE — which however she opened easily with a hairpin by the light of my pocket-torch. At last we came to a cul-de-sac, in whose blind wall was a large dumbwaiter in a steel-screen shaft. A sign above it warned the few whose rank in the College might open all those intervening doors. DANGER: DIET-TAPES ONLY. I understood where I was, that I had been there once before. She gripped my hand.

The tapelift door was bossed with assorted keyholes and combination-dials, proof equally against hairpins and blows of stick. But when in exasperation I merely pulled, it swung open, as if unlatched from the beginning. A steel box one meter square at most, scarcely large enough for one person; however, Anastasia climbed in at once, unhesitant, and drew me after. Knees to chin and arsy-turvy — like two shoes in a box, or that East-Campus sign of which her navel had reminded me — we had not room to move a muscle; yet in some fashion I crooked the door shut with my stick, and Anastasia, using flashlight, mirror, and magnifying lens from my purse, and the curved tip of the shophar, contrived to reach through the mesh and press the red button marked Belly. The lift gave a jerk, shearing off many centimeters of horn-tip and further tangling My Ladyship and myself; we began a slow descent in total darkness. Yet had there shone upon us all the lights of the Power Line, I'd have been blind as Greene or Leonid, blind as Gynander; for such was my involvement with Anastasia, my eyes pressed into what had been my first sight of her (G. Herrold's last), upon the broken bridge. Hers me likewise, and through my curly blindfold I began to see a light.