Giles Goat Boy (92 page)

“Generostness!” Leonid wept later, when he heard the news. “GILES-hoodhood!”

At the counsel-table Greene muttered: “I knew she weren’t no better’n she should be, drive-a-man-to-drinkwise. They’re all of a feather.”

But Stoker, like myself, could accept neither of these interpretations.

“It’s what you’ve said about her all along,” I reminded him; and he agreed, but pointed out with a troubled sigh the same irony that puzzled me: her admission was—perhaps for the first time!—not true at all.

“Flunk if I know what’s come over everybody,” Stoker said. “Maybe you
are
the Grand Tutor.” I observed him narrowly: there was in his tone and expression no trace of his usual tease—nor did he lately, as of old, prompt one’s least-passèd aspects to the fore. For example, his remark did not tickle my vanity or ambition, as formerly it would have, but rather shamed me, and I answered calmly: “I don’t know any more whether Bray’s the Grand Tutor or not; there’s something extraordinary about him. But I know I’m not. I’m a total failure.”

My warden smiled. “Maybe Failure is Passage.”

The cell that Peter Greene had vacated I found occupied now by Croaker, fetched there from the Infirmary while I’d been in court.

“He’s diplomatically immune,” Stoker said. “We’re just boarding him till they fetch him back home.”

My black friend did not look well. Max and Leonid held his head as best they could while he vomited through the bars. He too was charged with rape, Stoker explained to us, and though he could not be prosecuted he had been declared
non gratis
in New Tammany College and was being held against his recall at the request of his Frumentian alma mater. Following my advice, it seemed, he had mutinied against Dr. Eierkopf:
eaten every egg in the Tower Hall Belfry, fresh and otherwise, then jammed home the Infinite Divisor into the escapement of the clockworks and abandoned his master between Tick and Tock. Putting by all restraint, he had deflowered two co-eds, one male freshman, a trustee’s maiden aunt, a blue-ribbon gilt, and a cast-bronze allegorical statue in heroic scale of Truth Unveiled. In addition he had consumed indiscriminately raw chipmunks, aspen catkins, toadstools, dog-stools, and the looseleaf lecture-notes of his third victim, an economics major. The campus patrol had overtaken him at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel; yet they doubted they’d ever have subdued him, unless fatally, had not a remarkable occurrence quite nonplussed him.

“A certain married couple known to us both,” Stoker said, still with no sarcasm at all, “were spending the weekend at that motel, it seems, on the advice of the Grand Tutor. What happened between them isn’t very clear—Kennard’s in the Infirmary now, and Hedwig’s in the Asylum—”

I groaned.

“—but whatever it was, it must’ve unhinged poor Heddy entirely. Ever heard of a woman attacking a man?” Mrs. Sear, it appeared, had accosted Croaker in the motel lobby (whose occupants had fled when he strode naked through the glass door and commenced to make love to a soft-drink dispenser), removed her clothing, and leaped upon him, shouting lewd encouragements. Alas, what the vending-machine had mustered, she dismayed; so addled and unmanned him (of course, his stomach was troubling him by this time too) that he stood like ravished Truth while patrolmen shackled and sedated him. Mrs. Sear, altogether distraught, skipped circles about the lobby, chanting
He was my bashful, barefoot beau
in uncertain contralto, until the white ambulance-cycle arrived. It had been summoned in fact for Dr. Sear, who during the furor in the lobby was found by a chambermaid to be unconscious and discolored in his room, overdosed with sleeping-capsules. Thus husband and wife had left the motel together, neither aware of the fact. Mrs. Sear was committed and had subsequently regressed to the behavior of a five-year-old girl, according to Stoker; Dr. Sear had his stomach pumped in the outpatient wing of the Infirmary and so was spared for the Cancer Ward, where he presently languished in preparation for palliative surgery. Croaker himself, once subdued, became ill, incontinent, and helpless: went on all fours, forgot how to feed himself, and finally huddled day and night in one corner like a distempered beast. When presently the fever had passed and his appetites began to rewaken, he’d been transferred to Main Detention rather than to the NTC Asylum because of a dispute among the
psychiatric faculty as to whether insanity was possible in sub-rational animals. The alternative proposed by the negative faction, composed largely of South New Tammanians—that he be exhibited in the Zoological Gardens—was rejected by the Office of Intercollegiate Relations lest it give offense to the emerging colleges of Frumentius, whose political support the Office was courting. Of Dr. Eierkopf’s fate there was no word.

I touched the head of my sick black classmate, who, weak from regurgitating mattress-straw, collapsed now between his supporters. Yet before the pupils of his eyes rolled up he smiled at me and grunted.

“He’s worse off now than he was the time I turned him loose,” Stoker observed. “Even a wild animal won’t eat what’s not good for him.”

“My fault,” I said, and shook my head. In counseling Croaker to put by all things Eierkopfian and become indeed a beast of the woods, I’d not allowed for the atrophy of instinct, I suppose; or perhaps student rationality and brute unconscious will were not separable, so that plucking the blossom killed the root. My heart I had thought too numbed by other failures to feel new grief, but so formidable a wreck stung it afresh. Mistutoring Croaker in such wise, I had I felt subverted my own origin and base: the easy beasthood that must have accounted for our
rapport
.

“He might be dangerous when he gets well,” Stoker said to Max and Leonid. “Want to move next door?”

Those two glanced at each other.

“You go on,” Max grumbled. “Me he knows already; I should stay here in case.”

Leonid considered, flung his arms about for some moments, then replied as if casually: “Not.”

“More heroics,” Max said. Stoker, who saw what was coming as clearly as I, shrugged and departed, leaving me (as sometimes happened) the barred aisle for my cell—small boon, as its length was cotless and potless. He was not enough reformed to
insist
on removing my friends from danger; the old Stoker, so far from even suggesting it, would have stayed to watch the mayhem.

“Vice-versity!” Leonid shouted at my keeper. “You’re the heroics, sir!”

They took up then the other great topic of debate: the one they’d waked me with at the first and put me to sleep with many times since—and which, after Greene’s release, entirely supplanted the issue of My Ladyship’s character. It took numerous forms, or rather was provoked by several particular questions like the one here disputed—which of them would risk his welfare by attending Croaker—but inevitably it reduced to the same terms. Max I had accused of a special vanity, the yen for
martyrdom; Leonid of a selfish ambition not dissimilar to my former craving for Commencement: the desire to be a perfect Student-Unionist. No good my withdrawing those criticisms now, as bad-tempered, specious, logic-chopping; no good my repudiating all of that flunkèd March-day’s work, false counsels of a false Grand Tutor. What they’d denied when I proposed it, they all affirmed, every one of my “Tutees,” it seemed, now I would recant; and the more I disavowed Grand-Tutorhood, the strongerly they countered, by word and deed, that disavowal. Max, Leonid, Anastasia, Peter Greene, the Sears, Croaker, Chancellor Rexford—and for aught I knew, Eblis Eierkopf, the brothers Hector, and Classmate X—all seemed to agree now that they
had
been flunked, Bray’s Certification to the contrary notwithstanding, even as in my ignorance I had declared—and that Stoker had been less so, or less truly aspirant to that condition, than he’d claimed to be. In the cases of Max and Leonid this had led to a bind. As to principle they were agreed: if the desire to sacrifice oneself, whether by martyrdom or in perfect selflessness, was selfish, and thus self-contradictory, then to attain that end one must not aspire to it. Further, they agreed—sometimes, at least—that not-aspiring, if conceived as a means to the same end, was morally identical with aspiring, and that imperfect selflessness, when deliberately practiced to avoid the vanity of perfection, became itself perfect, itself vain. Therefore, as best I could infer, they aspired to not-aspire to an imperfect imperfection, each in his way—and found themselves at odds. Would an unvain martyr stay on in Main Detention, Maios-like, even unto the Shaft, as Max was inclined to, or escape, given the chance, to continue his work in studentdom’s behalf? Leonid insisted, most often, that the slightly selfish (and thus truly selfless) choice was the latter, and offered “daily” to effect my keeper’s freedom by secret means.

To do this, I came to learn, was part of the assignment given him by his stepfather; but our conversation in the U.C. building and his discussions with Max had impaired Leonid’s singleness of purpose. His mission had been first to feign defection and then to get himself detained as a Nikolayan agent by discovering, as though inadvertently, an intent to kidnap some unnamed New Tammany scientist; thus much he had accomplished before my eyes, on the Black Friday of my Tutorhood. But this apparent frustration of his objective was part of the plan—for it was Max they wanted! Reasoning that his arrest for Moishiocausticide would turn Max against New Tammany, if his original cashiering hadn’t, the Nikolayan Department of Intelligence had chosen Leonid Alexandrov, because of his notorious way with locks, to rescue him from the Shaft and
transport him across the Power Lines—yielding up his own life, if necessary, in the process. Not only had Leonid accepted the task enthusiastically, seeing in it a chance to redeem his errant past and earn Classmate X’s respect by proving his selflessness; he still maintained that the idea had been his own. But my remarks and Max’s moral speculations had led him to doubt. Leaving aside the merits of the collective Student Self and its ambitions, ought a truly selfless agent of that Self to carry out its wishes, knowing the vanity and selfishness of his motives in so doing? Or ought he to spoil the assignment, by merely setting Max free in New Tammany or returning empty-handed, and thereby achieve the selflessness of self-disgrace? That Max himself, whom he’d come to love second only to Classmate X, had no desire to work for Nikolay College or even to leave Main Detention, compounded the difficulty.

The truth was, neither doubted the way of his inclination, only its ultimate passèdness. Seeing liberty and the Shaft as equally vain, Max obviously preferred the Shaft—witness his remaining in jail even after he was convicted and sentenced. Leonid just as obviously wanted to rescue him, for all his concession that the wish might not be unselfish. Similarly, each claimed now that the other should have withdrawn to safety and left Croaker’s care to
him
, while freely acknowledging that it might be being “selfish” (that is, unselfish) to take the risk alone.

“For Founder’s sake, stop!” I cried to them when I could bear no more of this casuistry. “You’re both locked in anyhow. What difference does it make?”

“Bah, Goat-Boy!” Leonid shouted back at once. “Excuse! I love! But bah to you!” He was not angry, only vehement as always. For it must not be imagined that these endless debates were conducted coolly, in a spirit of logical exercise: Max, though calm, was intensely serious—it was, after all, a question of life or death for him—and Leonid was given to crushing embraces, respectful pummelings, shouts, tears, and loving lurches to accompany his reasoning. Now, in demonstration of his contempt for locks (they it was he bah’ed), he sprang to the cell-door and instantly had it open—the first such exercise of his talent in Main Detention. He stepped into my aisle, red-faced and triumphant.

“So!”

At once the other prisoners set up a clamor.

“Could release all!” he roared at them. “Simplicitity! Would like! But not!” Because, he confided to me at the top of his voice, he was merely a visitor in New Tammany College, and much as he objected to its curricular policies, he did not wish to act discourteously—besides, he’d not
forgotten the consequence of his spree in the Nikolayan Zoo. “Come out, Dr. Spielman! Escapeness!”

Max shook his head, and in the end all three of us ministered to Croaker until his strength and appetites returned, whereupon we fled for safety to an adjoining cell. Thereafter Croaker alternated between reasonless animality and mindless vegetability. In the latter intervals we fed him his meals; in the former we bewore lest he make a meal of us. But whether because, stickless, I had no authority with him, or because like the others he’d taken to heart my disastrous first lesson, I could by no means control or even communicate with him. And so ill-ordered was Main Detention, we all might have perished at Croaker’s hands between lock-up times had there not been hosts of passive pederasts and suicidal drop-outs eager for abuse, who diverted him at great cost of limbs and fundaments, not all which Max’s skill could repair without medical equipment.

No point now in sifting causes why my old advisor was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting of Herman Hermann and sentenced to the maximum penalty. True it is that while Max himself would plead neither guilty nor otherwise to the charge (which would have gone uncontested but for our protests to his court-appointed lawyer), he affirmed in court his full confession, not only of the deed but of what he called “virtual” premeditation—by which adjective, lost I fear upon the jury, he seemed to mean a prior yen to persecute unknown to him until the crime (and whereof the deed was the single proof, I vainly testified). Moreover, he asked for the Shaft as the only palliative of his conscience—of the Moishian conscience!—which, he told the court, had centuries of flunkèd pride to atone for …

“We Moishians,” he testified, “we’ve had it coming, on account we’ve known all the time we
are
the Chosen Class!” Protests rose among the spectators, Moishians and non-Moishians alike. The Judge rapped his gavel. “Why passèder than the rest?” Max demanded, unimpressed. He touched his fingertips together and rocked his head. “On account we’re the only class knows how flunked we are!” The irony was too nice for most to follow and exasperating to the others; absent-minded with impatience, I chewed the straw fans issued us against the summer heat. The effect of such testimony as this was that reactionary, even Bonifacist elements in West Campus, who approved of capital punishment and had little use for Moishians, rallied to Max’s defense, arguing in effect that having condemned himself and his class, he might be let go. Their sympathy, of course, Max repudiated, and since only the most self-flagellant liberals could
accept his notions of “guilty victimship” and “flunkèd passèdness,” he was left without effectual supporters—almost without sympathizers—and may be said to this extent to have chosen his fate.