John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

I acknowledged that it was.

"So you're not the least bit tempted. How about Hedda's niece here, though?" He crooked to him a fine black-and-white doeling named Becky's Pride Sue — still a kid, really — and cradled her in his lap to soothe her alarm. "Wouldn't she be sweet?"

Somewhat shocked — Max had never spoken so with me before — I reaffirmed my disinclination for the charms of she-goats. "Anyhow," I added somewhat sternly, "it would hurt her, wouldn't it? She's just little."

Max nodded; evidently I'd said what he wanted to hear. "So even if you wanted to, you shouldn't. Since you don't want to and don't need to, the only reason you'd have for doing it would be flunkèd. You'd have to enjoy it because you know it's wrong, which is flunkèd, or because it hurts her, which is even flunkèder. No good man could do such a thing, don't you think? Especially not a Grand Tutor."

"You talk as if I'd done it!" I protested, and patted Sue's head. "I'd never dream of such a thing!"

"Ay, well, that's good; I wouldn't either. Anybody did, he'd have some Dean o' Flunks in him all right. Let's don't talk any more about it."

I readily concurred, and the three of us ate our evening meal. Afterwards, though I went dutifully to my books, I found it impossible to attend them. Our discussion of flunkèdness remained on my mind: the legend of the first man and woman in the Founder's Pomological Test-Grove now appalled me, which thitherto had seemed merely charming and a bit unreasonable. I understood for the first time evil, and was so impressed by the horror of it that though I couldn't look at Becky's Pride Sue without an inward shudder, my glance turned and returned to her. To rend that dainty girl — despite her cries, out of simple brutehood — it was a thought unthinkable! I could not get it out of my mind.

That night I dreamed again. I was a goat, a splendid stud; I tossed my head and gloried in the weight of horn there, struck my sharp hooves on the ground. Season was upon me: my eyes rolled, I was fury at the balls. Against them what gate could prevail? I exploded from my stall into pastures of human girldom; Chickie was there, as once in the buckwheat, a score of pink and fleeceless Chickies, clamoring to Be. "Come, Billy!" they implored. A dashing, smashing goat I was, and tireless servicer; I found it light labor to give them joy, inasmuch as my powers were unremitting even when my lust was long since slaked. It amused me the more when Chickie had got her fill of Being and would flee. No matter that I had no hands to clutch with: down the hemlock-aisles I thundered in pursuit — hunh! hunh! my breath came — and her gauzy wrapper was briared off her up the way; I had only to stand rampant and impale her, over all that space, upon my lancing majesty. Instead I crooked her in with it, held her fast down. Somewhere distant the buckhorn blew — Tekiah! Sherbarim! Teruah! — — for me, and urgent. But I could do anything I wished, not as before because the girl was willing, but because she was altogether in my power, subject absolutely to my will.

"Oh, how you'd injure me!" my victim wept. "A goat upon a lady girl!"

"I would that," I agreed, and not to hear the buckhorn once more summoning ( Tekiah! Shebarim! Teruah! ), I loudly volunteered, "Don't think I need to do anything flunkèd!"

"How's that?"

"I say, don't think — the truth is, it's terribly important for me to wake up right now."

"I'm only a kid," the girl pleaded. "Wait till my older sister comes along."

"I could if I cared to," I said. "The passèd thing of course would be to let you go."

Her first cry was for joy: "Oh, thank you, sir!" Her second not, for as the horn called out penultimately, I did her upon each blast a grievous harm. Tekiah. Teruah. Tekiah.

I woke — and jerked from a squealing creature at my chest! A kid (as sometimes happened) had curled against me while I slept; I'd rolled upon her accidentally and, I now realized, squeezed her in my arms as well. There was commotion in the stalls; it seemed her outcries had roused the herd. I sat up sweating and was dismayed to find myself not only ejaculated but observed: Max sat by the pen-gate, his head a-bob in reflected moonlight.

"You were dreaming," he said calmly. "Nothing to worry about. It wasn't Becky's Pride Sue."

I lay down dazed and soon reslept. When I woke in the morning the episode burst to mind at once: for an instant I imagined that Max at the pen-gate was a part of the dream; then the pinch of dried lust on my thigh told me, heart-sinking, he was not. I heard him now directing G. Herrold in the chores, and lay for some minutes awed by memory, by the spectacle of my soul laid out to view.

That morning Max was solicitous, even one would have supposed half-afraid to speak; it went without saying that our normal program was dispensed with; no mention was made of the night's events — indeed not of anything — until at the end of a wordless breakfast he ventured to touch my hand.

"You haven't really done any flunkèdness, you know. You were just a kid before, and now you've learned you got badness in you like we all do. It don't have to come out."

"Cruelness and folly," I said. "It'll come out."

"So maybe a little here and there. Who's perfect?"

I looked him in the eyes. "Enos Enoch was."

" Ja ." Max bobbed his head, as he had in the moonlight. "Then swallow once and be done, dear boy: are you another Enos Enoch?"

I shook my head.

My teacher could not contain his delight: he squeezed my hand in both of his and nodded furiously, frowning and smiling together.

"Pass you, boy! Pass you for admitting that!" Tears sprang; his syntax faltered. "All that talk of Eierkopf's about a GILES — just madness. I knew it! Every chance, Founder knows! I went right by the book, and not once but two and three times, knowing all along — ah, Georgie!" He came round and embraced me, put off not at all by my stiffness. "Say it again yet, to make an old man happy — what you said."

"I'm no Enos Enoch," I repeated. "I've got as much billy-goat in me as Graduate. And as much Dean o' Flunks as anything else."

"And never mind that! Don't be sorry you're a plain human student, okay?"

I assured him levelly that I was not disappointed by the revelation of my nature's darker aspects, only sobered and intrigued; but that in view of those same aspects I most certainly no longer regarded myself, even potentially, as Wisdom and Goodness incarnate. Max all but hopped about the barn for pleasure.

"I knew it from the first!" he cried. "But there was that tapelift thing, and crazy Eierkopf and his stories. GILES pfui! I bet he put you there himself!"

Upon my pressing him to explain himself more clearly, Max confessed that he had for many years entertained a certain hypothesis about my parentage, which till now — by reason first of my tender years and latterly of my misguided ambition — he had kept to himself, not to injure my feelings.

"I been all my life a bachelor," he said. "All work! No time for ladies! But in New Tammany once, when Eblis Eierkopf and I were working on the WESCAC, I got to know the Chancellor's daughter, that was the tape-librarian in Tower Hall. Miss Hector was her name — Virginia R. Hector, what it said on her nameplate. And Eblis and I, we were fighting then about Wescacus malinoctis and the Cum Laude Project; we were fighting about everything… but we both admired very much Miss Hector. She was a Shiksa, don't you know, with light hair and all wrong politics; in Siegfrieder College she'd have been a Bonifacist like those co-eds in the Reichskanzler's stud-farms, I knew that; it's what Eblis loved about her, she was such a plump and blond one. 'A perfect Frigga!' he used to say — and how he said it made your heart sink, Georgie. Because Eblis, all he had on his mind was the Cum Laude Project! He didn't care about her, but only what sperms should go with what eggs to make a Hero …"