John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Mr. Greene!" I protested.

He winked and cocked his head. "Now, don't get het up; I don't hold it against him if he is! And I guess I think Reggie Hector's about the greatest man in New Tammany."

Max closed his eyes.

"But what I was saying," Greene went on, "I don't mean to boast, now, but what I figure — By jingo, I'm okay!" He bobbed his head sharply. "When all's said and done! If I do say so myself!"

I begged his pardon.

"I figure I'm passèd because good old NTC is passèd," he said. "The passèdest doggone college in the doggone University!"

"You've taken the Finals, then?" I asked with interest. It occurred to me that I ought to have been asking that question of everyone — of Anastasia, of Maurice Stoker, of Dr. Sear, of Max himself. Why had he not advised me to?

"When they call me flunkèd," Greene declared, "they call the whole darn college flunkèd, that's what I'm getting at. And any man that's willing to flunk his own alma mater — well, he's a pretty poor New Tammanian!"

He thrust forth his chin and opened the throttle wider, perhaps without realizing it, so that I had to urge Croaker to a swifter trot. Max I observed had drawn a hand over his face before this curious logic, which even I saw the several flaws in, or else had turned to brooding upon other matters. He was not the Max of yesterday!

"Well, are you a Graduate, or not?" I insisted. "What were the Finals like? Why are you going back to register again?"

"I got no secrets," Greene said stoutly. "I'll lay my cards on the table. Don't believe everything you read in the papers. My life is an open book. I'm okay."

I assured him that I'd read nothing about him in the newspapers, uncomplimentary or otherwise, not ever having read any newspapers, and that what I'd seen of his resourcefulness and gathered of his enterprise quite inclined me to assent to his okayness, whatever the term implied. That there was nothing hostile or even skeptical in my questions, but only the general curiosity of one who had the Finals still before him, and the special curiosity of one whose mission it was eventually to teach others the right Answers.

He replied with a most-warm, open smile. "You're okay too, George: I can tell by your face. Goat-boy or not, it don't matter. I had a friend once name of George."

He volunteered to review for my benefit the aforementioned book of his life: a tome, he acknowledged, not without a dark page here and there, but which taken all in all was nothing shameful, by gosh. However, the afternoon was waning; there was an eating-place not far ahead where he would be pleased to grub-stake us in return for picking him up and hearing him out; his story would keep until we reached it. We had for some minutes been climbing a gentle rise behind which the ruddy sun had already descended. Before us now the woods stopped, where the road went over the ridge; the tree-limbs there were finely lit.

"You never saw New Tammany proper before?" Greene asked. I shook my head. He topped the rise a few meters before me and, braking the cycle, called over his shoulder, "Well, there she sets, friend!" There was reverence in his voice; he had removed his fur cap, and his orange hair and outstretched hand gleamed like the tree-limbs in the light, which lit me too when Croaker came up beside him. "How 'bout that, now!"

What had I imagined a great college would look like? I cannot remember. Photographs I had seen, descriptions I'd read, but with only the livestock-barns and the branch library for scale, I must have conceived the central campus of New Tammany as a slightly larger version of our stalls and pastures. Certainly I was not prepared for the spectacle before and beneath us. Sparkling in the purple dusk, it stretched out endlessly, endlessly. Avenues, towers, monuments; corridors of glass and steel; lakes and parks and marble colonnades; bridges and smokestacks, blinkers and beacons! Hundreds of messages flashed in every color, from here, from there, on roofs and cornices: FIND FACTS FAST — ENCYCLOPEDIA TAMMANICA; DON'T BE SAD — STUDY BUSINESS AD.; YOUR ROTC KEEPS THE RIOT QUIET; ALWAYS A HIT: LATE MEDIEVAL LIT. Thousands of motorcycles, bicycles, scooters swarmed along the boulevards, stopped at traffic signals, flowed into roundabouts, threaded into residential mazes; the mingled roar of horns and engines hung like a pall of smoke or the echo of a shout. In truth I could scarcely draw breath in face of such tremendousness; before the ignorance of what lay in store for me there and the knowledge that I would go down to meet it, my heart sank in my breast. And New Tammany was but one college of the many in West Campus, and West Campus far less than half the University — smaller both in area and population than its Eastern counterpart or the aggregate of "independent" colleges! And Max maintained — but how was one to swallow it? — that our whole University was but one among an infinitude of others, perhaps quite similar, perhaps utterly different, whose existence in the fenceless pastures of reality, while as yet unconfirmed, had perforce to be assumed. And those hundreds of thousands of human people below there, in New Tammany alone — each with his involvements and aspirations, strengths and weaknesses, past history and present problems — I was to be their Tutor, show them the way to Commencement Gate?

"Fetches you up, now, don't it?" Greene demanded proudly. I shook my head, couldn't answer. He identified Tower Hall, its belfry floodlit in the distance, and pointed out the brilliant string of lights that followed the Power Line eastwards from that building to the Boundary and behind us to Founder's Hill — the string whose other end I'd glimpsed from the Powerhouse. WESCAC was there — the storied Belly, the awful EATer; and there too, somewhere beneath that high-spired dome, was the fabled Central Library and a certain particular booklift where my journey had begun. The ambiguous thrill brought tears to my eyes; I leaned down and touched Max's shoulder for comfort, and he briefly put his brooding by to share my feeling.

"Twenty years since I went over this hill," he said.

"Lots of things have changed since then," Greene said cheerfully. "They're all the time tearing down old ones and putting up new."

Max pointed out the Lykeionian-revival porch of the Chancellor's Mansion, the Remusian pilasters of the Old Armory, the flying buttresses of Enoch Hall. I inquired about what appeared to be, after the Stadium, the largest building of all, a floodlit multistoried cube of enormous dimension with a featureless limestone facade.

"Military Science," Max said grimly. "And out past Tower Hall, the last big building to the south — see those four turrets with the searchlights? That's Main Detention, where I spent my last night before they sent me away."

"Ain't it grand?" said Peter Greene. "We got the biggest detention-hall in the University!" What was more, he added, the clock-tower of Tower Hall was the tallest structure on the campus; and there were so many kilometers of hallway in the Military Science Cube that the professor-generals pedaled bicycles from office to office; and nine out of every ten NTC staff-members (and eleven out of every twelve students) owned his own motorbike-a ratio triple that of Nikolay College and well ahead of any of our West-Campus colleagues. The total power expended in a single day by all these engines equaled the energy of a hundred EAT-waves of the latest type…

"And make the most important poison in the atmosphere," Max added, "except for the drop-outs from EAT-wave testing."

"Say what you want," Greene chuckled. "If it weren't for all them drivers there wouldn't be no drive-ins."

We came down then from the overlook into the stunning traffic of a main highway ("Hit 'em right at the evening rush," Greene remarked — and hit them he very nearly did on a number of occasions, by driving through traffic lights at intersections or misjudging the distance of approaching headlamps. In addition to his color-blindness, it seemed, he was unable to perceive depth with his single eye; I was to learn later that he was subject to certain photisms, or optical hallucinations, as well, but fortunately was spared that extra cause for alarm during this first experience of vehicular traffic). The noise took my heart out; I was terrified by the rush and by the confusion of lights and signals. Arrows flashed this way and that; signs commanded one on every hand to stop, to go, to turn. I spurred tireless Croaker to his utmost gallop; even so the slowest of the vehicles sped past as if we stood still. Not the least of my astonishments was that we drew so little attention: horns would blow and insults be shouted if we strayed off the shoulder onto the pavement or trespassed inadvertently against the right-of-way; otherwise, however, young and old roared past without a curious glance — as if a fleeced goat-boy, astride a black giant and accompanied by a bearded old Moishian, were to be seen at every interchange!