Giles Goat Boy (18 page)

“Yes?” Max asked politely. “You remember something else in the dream, Georgie?”

“No. And I won’t tell you any more dreams if you’re going to turn them into something ugly.” The fact was, I suspected Max had guessed more of that particular fiasco than I cared for him to know. Several times I’d seen his face grow thoughtful as I wound my silver watch: no doubt he thought I’d
stolen
it from Lady Creamhair (which was more nastily
human, the concept or the suspicion?) and in his teasing spiteful way had concocted this cynical dream-theory for the purpose of trapping me into some confession.

I drove my tines deep into the hay. The way Max watched annoyed me further: meekly, warily, yet stubbornly, as if expecting violence—as if
inviting
it. I pitched more than was necessary into the crib.

“Flunk this
psychology
of yours!” I cried. “Can’t anything I do be just innocent?”

The retort caught me with my fork poised—at shoulder-height!—to drive again into the hay. I leaned upon it instead (for though I’d learned to stand and even work erect without assistance, I was never to walk far unsupported), and, blushing briskly, made some apology. I was to report in mornings to come more heinous dreams (indeed, once I’d got the hang of interpretation I saw there was no wickedness my night-self didn’t revel in, the grievouser the better, so that where several explications seemed plausible I chose without an eyeblink the flunkingest, as most in character, until Max pointed out to my distress that “
a priori
concession of the worst,” as he called it, may be as vain a self-deception as its opposite) but none more troubling; in the red light of my blush I saw, not the dream’s full significance yet, but at least the guile and guilt of my bad temper. Blushes and apologies, apologies and blushes—in the monkish book of my tutelage they illuminate every chapter-head and -foot!

Max, of course, only shrugged. “So what’s the maxim for this morning? What it says in the Founder’s Scroll:
Self-knowledge is always bad news
.”

Our text determined by this or other means, we would discuss over breakfast its manifestations in literature and history, its moral and psychological import, or its relevance to earlier lessons. Such a one as the foregoing, for example, could well have introduced me to the “tragic view of the University,” to the Departments of Philosophy and Drama in ancient Lykeion College, to the Enochist doctrine that thoughts are as accountable as deeds on one’s final Transcript, even to the provinces of medicine or mathematics—for my tutor was nothing if not resourceful, and synthesis, it goes without saying, was his particular genius.

Where in fact it happened to lead us I can say confidently, for it was this same morning, when breakfast was done and we repaired to the pasture for more formal instruction, Max first brought up the fateful subject of Cyclology and Grand-Tutorhood. I have placed the day in my twenty-second spring, very near the end of my preparatory education. Redfearn’s Tom was seven years dead; his dainty Hedda—now middle-aged, plump, and beribboned for her butterfat-yield—had conceived
a son by their sole unhappy union, which son himself (“Tommy’s Thomas”) was grown to primy studship: the image of his dad and a champion in his own line, as the late great Brickett Ranunculus had been. In the fullness of time and the freshening schedule it was perfectly in order that the two prizewinners be bred—I had been pleased to assist G. Herrold myself with the first of their matings, just five months previous—and so it came to pass that on the very midnight of this dream there was born into the herd a male kid who would be registered as
Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom
. None who saw him as we did next morning could have guessed the role “Triple Thomas” was to play in my future—indeed, in the history of West Campus. He was unprepossessing enough then, all hoof and knee and scarcely dry from Hedda’s womb. But see in retrospect how our lives engaged from the first: it was his mother’s labor-cries, very possibly, that set me to dreaming of nannies in distress, and the tragedy of his grandsiring has its place among the dream’s significances; it is the entry of his begetting in the stud-books that establishes a date for this conversation; and it was this conversation—occasioned in its turn first by the dream and again by the relevance of Hedda’s own past to its interpretation—it was this day’s conversation, I say, that like the original crime of my dear pal’s murder, turned me round a corner of my life. The very white-ash staff I chucked the new kid’s beard with, and hobbled upon out to my lesson; this walking-cane that supports me as I speak these words, and will to the hilltop where I shall want no more supporting: you have guessed it was the same I laid about with in my dream. Will you not cluck tongue to learn further, then, that I had whittled this same stick from a broken herdsman’s crook which once lay out in the pens? Dark ties; thing twined to thing!

“Self-knowledge,”
Max repeated to begin our lesson, “is
always bad news
.” But he paused a moment. “You sure there wasn’t something else in the dream?”

Not prepared to bring up Creamhair’s name, and unable to recall anything else, I shook my head.

“So, well,” he said pleasantly. “You thought you couldn’t wish a flunkèd wish; now you know you can. There is a piece of knowledge about yourself,
ja?
” He began then to describe the contradiction between the old Founder’s Scroll, which exhorted students to accept their ignorance and repose their trust in the Founder’s wisdom, and the dialogues of Scapulas, wherein the tutor Maios declares to his protégés that the end of education is to understand oneself utterly. But he must have observed my inattention, for in the midst of raising the question whether the search
for truth remained desirable if the truth was that the seeker is flunked forever, he stopped short.

“You’re not listening, George.”

In truth I was not, and with tingling cheeks confessed as much. After my initial protest against the interpretation of my dream, I remained quite agitated by its several images. Now it was not alarm, distaste, or shame I felt, but a vast
ennui:
a restlessness which though vague seemed rooted somewhere in what I’d dreamt. I was unable to think about self-knowledge or anything else; it seemed to me that the seven years since I’d struck down my friend had been one long class-period, from which now suddenly I craved recess. Then I had known nothing; now my eyes were open to fenceless meadows of information; I felt engorged to bursting with human lore. This George who dreamt upon a cot and figured logarithms over lunch—he was a stranger to that Billy who had used to prowl the pasture on moonlit nights. And yet some things were the same. Ah, I wondered now whether anything had really changed at all. If my kidship seemed itself a half-remembered dream, the years since were no waking but a deeper sleep, which only now perhaps I had commenced to stir in. My tutor’s voice seemed alien; Max himself did. That old face so familiar I could not have summoned it to my imagination—since our argument over the dream I found myself
seeing
it, as if for the first time. In particular that stubborn cringe, which suddenly I recognized was characteristic. Here was this growth called Max, utterly other than myself, with shaggy white hair and withered body and quiet old voice; with feelings and life of its own, whose history, nearly finished, consisted of such-and-such events and no others. He had done
A, B
, and
C; X
and
Y
had been done to him;
Z
, his little fate, lay just ahead. Max … existed! He was, had been, and would for a while yet be a
person
, truly as I. Very nearly I shivered at his reality, and that of the university of objects which were not myself. The dream had something to do with it: was it that I lingered yet in its sleepish margent? I was filled with an overwhelming sense of the queerness of things, a woozy repugnance, and a flashing discontent.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me!” I said more urgently than I’d meant to, and was alarmed to feel a stinging in my throat. Why, was I going to weep, then?

“Something I don’t understand is this,” I said carefully. “How can a person stand it, not to be … marvelous?”

Max frowned sharply and demanded to know what I meant. But I scarcely knew myself.

“The reason I’m glad I’m not a goat,” I began, “is that I couldn’t ever be like Brickett Ranunculus. But I swear I don’t see any point in being human either if all I can be is a regular person like the ones that come out to the fence. I wouldn’t like being G. Herrold, either, or Dr. Mankiewicz …”

“So who
would
you like to be like?”

I blushed again, assuming he wanted me to say “Max Spielman” and unable to. For all my spite and ill temper I had no wish to hurt Max’s feelings; neither on the other hand did I want my life and character to resemble his. Indeed it might be said that my spells of contrariness stemmed in part from this frustration; I admired my keeper above all mortal men I’d seen or heard of, and yet in curious ways despised him as a model. Who could I wish to have been? I could not say Great William Gruff or Enos Enoch the Shepherd Emeritus; I answered, “Nobody I know of.”

Max nodded with some impatience. “
Ja
, sure, and Nobody’s who you’ll be, with that attitude.” If I was bored with my studies, he said, it was because I was losing sight of their relevance; rather, for want of a clear vocation on my part they
had
no measurable relevance. Let me but find a life-work, and the problem of boredom would solve itself.

“Never mind what your major is, just so you got one that matters over everything else. Study medicine; study poetry; study road-building—it don’t much matter what a man spends his life at, as long as it’s suited to him and he loves it …” As was his wont, he delivered this observation with a raised finger—the index, necessarily, since it was his maimed right hand. Happening here to catch sight of the mutilation he paused, lowered hand and voice together, and added: “And as long as he don’t hurt people with it.”

Nor should I imagine, he went on to declare, that devoting myself to one project would of necessity cut me off from the rest of the course-catalogue, as it were. On the contrary: the most encyclopedic geniuses in West-Campus history—Entelechus the philosopher, for example, or Leonardi the Professor of Art and Invention during the Rematriculation—had been passionate specialists in their way; their greatness consisted not in declining to commit themselves to specialized projects, but rather in pursuing such projects intensively wherever they led: from ethics to politics to biology; from painting to anatomy to engineering. He himself, Max reminded me, had begun as a student of the violin in Siegfrieder College; his interest in music had led him to study acoustical physics, mathematics, and the psychophysiology of sensation, from which background
it had been but a short step—with momentous consequences!—to the sciences of artificial thought and automatic regulation. His flight from Bonifacist anti-Moishianism and his consequent involvement with WESCAC had fetched him deeply into politics and military science; the pressing of a fateful button had plunged him thence into philosophy, proctology (by a route not clear to me then), eventually into herdsmanship, and finally (which was to say currently) into the pedagogical problem of making a Phi Beta Kappa out of a goat-boy. Nor would he regard his career as finished when I left him to commence my own: for one thing, the experience of tutoring me had suggested to him unsuspected avenues in education and epistemology, which he looked forward to pursuing in the future; for another, he did not regard his past as a journey whose each new step left the earlier ones behind, but as the construction of a many-chambered house, in whose “finished” rooms he dwelt and tinkered while adding new ones.

“And all the doors are open, Georgie,” he concluded. “You can’t go through every one at the same time, but they don’t ever close unless you close them yourself. I’m still finding out things about the violin.” He set about to discourse then upon the acoustical properties of a fiddle-box lacquer he had made from the whites of grouse-eggs, but I would not hear him out.

“Max—”

“You keep interrupting.” He seemed less annoyed than uneasy; indeed it appeared to me that he spoke to prevent me from speaking.

“I
do
know what I want to major in,” I pressed on. “It’s not anything you’ve ever studied.”

“
Wunderbar!
Now, well—” He cocked his head and pretended to search his memory. “That leaves open-channel hydraulics, school lunch management, coalmine ventilation … and the history of baseball. Unless they’ve changed the New Tammany Catalogue since I was fired. Which is it?”

“I’m going to be a hero.”

Max’s little gaiety vanished. Thrusting out his lips he turned away and plucked a straw of buckwheat.

“What’s this
hero?
What kind of hero?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. Quietly, but with a kind of fierceness and still averting his eyes, Max explained that a lifeguard at the college pools, for example, was called a hero if he risked his life to save his fellow students, whereas a professor-general of military science might be similarly
labeled for risking his life to destroy them. Which sort of hero-work did I plan to take up?

I admitted that I had no particular project in mind. “A hero doesn’t have to know ahead of time what he’ll do, does he? All he knows is who he is—”

“You don’t know that much yet,” Max grumbled.

“I don’t mean my name!” His strange ungentleness vexed me. “I mean he might know he’s a hero before he can prove it to anybody else. Then when he finds out the thing that needs doing, that nobody but the biggest hero can do, he goes there and does it. Like the old dons-errant and wandering scholars—they didn’t know what adventures they’d have when they started out, but they knew it was adventures they were starting out for, isn’t that right? Well, that’s how I feel.”

Max shook his head. “You’re wrong, George.”

“I’m not!”

“Na, please—” Gentle again, Max held up his hand. “What I mean, you’re wrong I haven’t studied herohood. I know more about herohood than anybody.” This remark my keeper made in the tone of a plain statement of fact—he never boasted. “I’m not a hero myself and wouldn’t want to be. But I sure do know what the hero-work is.”