Giles Goat Boy (71 page)

“Pisscutter, ain’t she?”

I agreed that it was an extraordinary machine, if that was what he meant. It proved a shocking fast one, too, and happily so loud (thanks to a lever marked
Cut-Out
) that he couldn’t speak of Anastasia or anything else during the dash to Main Detention. Greene knew the route, and by means of simple gestures which we agreed upon before we started, I was able to distinguish for him between the few actual stop-signs along the way and the many he imagined he saw, and to function as his rear-view mirror also. We were halted at the somber gate of the outside wall by a uniformed guard, recognizable as one of Stoker’s by his beard and dog, though sootless. I requested an audience with Max, identifying myself and explaining that I had Chancellor Rexford’s authorization to go anywhere on the campus. The guard prepared to unleash the dog.

“Hold on!” Greene cried. “Pete Greene’s my name: ‘Keep-Our-Forests Greene,’ you know? This here’s a pal of mine. Look at my ID-card.”

To prove that his card was not forged or stolen he wrote out a matching signature, this one on a personal check payable to the bearer, and insisted the guard retain it “as proof.” Before this evidence the man relented and telephoned a companion inside the walls, who, given a similar affidavit of our sincerity, ushered us to the Warden’s Office. For all my unease in those bleak courts and gray stone corridors, I might have voiced my doubt about the correctness of Greene’s procedure; but the sound of Maurice Stoker’s
laugh distracted me. It issued from an inner office into the empty outer one where we were told to wait until the Warden was finished dictating letters to his secretary, and did not sound terribly businesslike. A female voice said something indistinct. The guard winked and left us. Peter Greene—chuckling, blinking, blushing—supposed aloud that a fellow with a stick with a mirror on its point could peer over the transom without being seen, if he had a mind to and no thing about mirrors. I didn’t reply. More impatient at the delay than annoyed or intrigued by what Stoker might be up to, I tapped my sandal-toes and frowned at the floor-plan of the building, framed on one wall. It revealed Main Detention to be much larger in fact than I had supposed, for in addition to the single floor at ground-level there were three successively smaller ones beneath. The ground floor, as best I could discern, was given over mainly to administrative offices and living-quarters for the staff, but included combination detention-and-counseling facilities for two sorts of mild offenders as well: a large exercise-room for loafers, procrastinators, and students who refused to choose a major or whose transcripts showed straight C’s; and a courtyard for the mentally defective and the invincibly wrong-headed. On the floor below were detained four classes of miscreants: first, students who spent their evenings amusing themselves with classmates of the opposite sex instead of studying, and professors who turned their sabbatical leaves into honeymoons or participated in faculty wife-swapping parties; second, those who abused their dining-hall privileges, scheduled more than the normal credit-load, or stayed awake all night reading; third, those who read and researched but would neither teach nor publish, and contrariwise those who spent so much time publishing and lecturing that none was left over for reading and research; and fourth, professors who browbeat their students and students who circulated angry petitions against their professors. The second subterranean floor was divided into three cell-blocks, smaller than the ones above but like them containing chambers for both students and instructors: one block was reserved for anti-intellectuals, insubordinates, and those who refused to sign the College loyalty-oath; a second was for textbook writers who published revised editions to undercut the used-book market, padders of essay examinations, proliferators of unnecessary footnotes and research, and unscrupulous dispensers of grants-in-aid; the third was itself divided into sub-blocks: one (where I guessed Max was held) for murderers, rapists, extorters of answers by duress, and destroyers of library-books; another for droppers of courses and leapers from dormitory windows; the third for faggots, dykes, and teachers employed in the same departments from which they held degrees.
The bottom floor, though smallest in area, was most complexly laid out: in wedge-shaped sections around a central sinkhole were incarcerated (clockwise from the top of the floor-plan) “make-out artists” (sic); “apple-polishers and brownies”; purveyors of “cribs” and “ponies”; impostors and charlatans; sellers of rank, tenure, absentee-excuses, and false ID-cards; users of academic distinction for social, political, or mercenary ends; cribbers and plagiarists; malicious faculty advisors and dormitory counselors; organizers of panty-raids, interfraternity brawls, and departmental cliques; and what the chart called “bullslingers and snowmen.” In rings around the sinkhole itself were ranked those who’d tattled on classmates, roommates, or colleagues; who’d given classified military-science data to hostile colleges; and who’d exploited the naïveté of exchange-students or visiting professors. Finally, poised as it seemed over the sinkhole itself, was a single cell reserved for any who undid in flunkèd wise his professor, department-head, dean, chancellor, or—most heinous treason!—his Grand Tutor.

Though not all of the penciled labels were meaningful to me, I was much impressed by the size and layout of the institution—much more orderly, at least on paper, than the Powerhouse. Had not other matters pressed, I’d have asked Maurice Stoker to guide me through the place and explain how the several sorts of malefactors were punished, and for what term. Specifically I wondered whether Stoker determined and administered their sentences on his own authority or as agent for the Chancellor, and fervently hoped that the latter was the case.

The inner-office door opened behind me, and a handsome dark-skinned woman came forth, tucking in her blouse.

“You all have an appointment with Mr. Stoker?”

Even as she asked—patting her hair into place the while—Stoker bellowed greetings at me from inside and emerged, also tucking his shirt-tails in. But now the secretary and Peter Greene had noticed each other, and he clutched his orange hair and cried, “Flunk my heart!”

“I beg your pardon?” the Frumentian young woman said. Stoker grinned.

“What you doing here, gal?” Greene exclaimed. “You’re s’posed to be home taking care of Sally Ann!”

She donned a pair of glasses and looked questioningly at Stoker. “Should I know this gentleman? I don’t understand what he’s talking about.”

“This is Georgina,” Stoker said. “My new secretary. Georgina, Mr.
George, the Goat-Boy.” We exchanged polite greetings. “And Mr. Greene,” Stoker added.

“That ain’t her name!” Peter Greene said indignantly. “She’s old O.B.G.’s daughter! You get on back to the house, doggone it; Sally Ann might need you!”

Georgina smiled and appealed to us: “He must be mistaking me for someone else …”

“Don’t set there and deny you’re O.B.G.’s daughter!”

“I’m sure I don’t know those initials at all,” she said a little impatiently. “My father’s name was the same as this gentleman’s.”

Peter Greene would be durned if it was. “His name was O.B.G., and you know it!” To us he declared, “Him and me was thick as thieves when I was a boy—built us a raft together!”

Stoker’s secretary replied that her father had been an assistant librarian until his recent death, and that that was that. Then Stoker added gaily, just as I was coming to it myself, that Georgina’s maiden name had been Herrold. Having heard news of her long-lost father’s death and cremation, she had sought out Stoker for more details; the conversation had turned into an interview—which our arrival had interrupted—and finding her qualifications satisfactory, Stoker had employed her on the spot. His teeth flashed in his beard. “Small campus, isn’t it?”

“You gosh-durn hussy!” Greene exclaimed to Georgina, who having coolly replaced her lipstick was making room for her purse in a desk drawer. But his tone now seemed as much impressed as angered. Stoker suggested with amusement that perhaps Mr. Herrold had had
two
daughters—if indeed he’d been the man whom Greene called O.B.G. I myself was uncertain what to think: the woman’s composure appeared more deliberate than natural, and she either was ignorant of G. Herrold’s actual job or chose to exaggerate its importance; on the other hand I had small confidence in Peter Greene’s eyesight, though his indignation was convincing. In any case her identity mattered little to me, much as I grieved the loss of my companion; I stated my business to Stoker, who knew it already, and he proposed with a wink that Georgina and Peter Greene clear up their misunderstanding over coffee, in his inner office, while he took me down to see Max. They were both reluctant, but Stoker insisted; he would serve the coffee himself; something stronger, perhaps, if they wanted it; the guard in the corridor could take me to the Visitation Room as well as he.

“Maxie’s coming on so with the ‘Choose me’ business, it makes me sick to hear him anyway,” he said. “The old fool can’t wait till we Shaft him.”
He summoned the hall-guard and gave him instructions, pinching Georgina as he passed behind her. She pursed her mouth; Peter Greene snickered. I went out with the guard, first offering condolence to the young woman for her bereavement, and Stoker closed the door behind us.

We passed along a balcony overlooking the exercise-court, where the Procrastinators and C-students appeared to be playing some sort of tag or chasing-game under the supervision of their guards; thence to a small empty room divided by steel screens into three parallel sections: in the first was a row of stools, on one of which I sat; the guard then entered the middle one to see that nothing except conversation passed between me and Max, whom another guard presently escorted into the third. A small bleat of pity escaped me at sight of him: thin to begin with, he had lost more weight overnight, and in the ill-fitting garb of detention looked frail as straw. Yet his face, so troubled all the previous day, was tranquil, even serene. He ignored my inquiries after his condition and commended me for having passed successfully through the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate. His tone was more polite than truly interested; he asked what courses I had enrolled in, as one might ask the casualest acquaintance, and when I described my encounter with Bray at the Grateway Exit and my perplexing Assignment, his mild comment was that my watch-chain had possibly short-circuited WESCAC’s Assignment-Printer, for better or worse. Or possibly not.

“You sound as if you don’t care!” I cried. Formerly he might have shrugged, or scolded me; now he said serenely:

“My boy, remember who I am, and why I’m here.”

“You didn’t do anything!” I said. “You’re here because Stoker or somebody is out to get you!”

Max shook his head. Stoker was beyond doubt a flunkèd man, he said, and a flunking influence on everyone about him, myself included; yet his flunkèdness was necessary, for like the legendary Dunce he revealed to those with eyes to see the failings of their own minds and hearts—an invaluable if fatal lesson.

“You didn’t kill Herman Hermann!”

But he nodded. “
Ja
, I did, George. In the woods that night by Founder’s Hill. It was his motorcycle Croaker found.”

“You couldn’t kill anybody!” I insisted. “You’re too passèd!”

But as the news-report had said, Max declared he was not passèd, never had been—until just a few hours previously. True, he had thought himself a charitable man and a gentle lover of studentdom, to whose welfare he had ostensibly dedicated all his works: thus he had invented the
EATer, to protect men from being EATen; sheltered and raised me as a goat, lest I succumb to human failings; rejected Grand Tutors in favor of ordinary schoolteachers, believing education could lead men from their misery to a better life on campus. And he had been proud to be a member of the class least subject as he thought to hating, because most often hated.

“That’s all true!” I protested. “You’re a hate-hater! You’re a love-lover!”

“I used to think,” Max went on quietly, as if dictating a confession, “if Graduation meant anything at all, it meant relieving human suffering. Not so. Suffering
is
Graduation.”

“Bray’s been talking to you!” I charged. “Why didn’t you send him away?”

“The Moishians have a name for Shafting Grand Tutors,” Max replied. “That’s one of the things I want to be Shafted for.” He went on to say, as sadly and serenely as ever, that whereas he once had believed in the rejection of Grand Tutors whether “true” or “false,” it now appeared to him to make little difference how questionable might be the authenticity of Bray, for example: the important thing was to see one’s own abysmal flunkèdness. Since conversing with Harold Bray he had come to see clearly that nothing in his life had been done altogether passèdly: hating hatred, from which passion no man was free, he had perforce hated all studentdom, thinking he loved them. Thus his work with WESCAC and the consequent Amaterasuphage—

“Self-defense!” I broke in. “That was collegiate self-defense!”

But the self must not be defended by the suffering of others’ selves, Max responded. And his foster-fathering of me, so apparently praiseworthy: was it not to revenge himself on Virginia R. Hector—nay, on studentdom in general—that he had raised me as a goat? And to revenge himself on New Tammany that he had at the last encouraged my delusion of Grand Tutorhood? Bray having confirmed for him these flunkèd possibilities and certified that only suffering could expiate them, he must believe that Bray was after all what He claimed to be (with stinging heart I heard the pronoun shift to upper-case); Max’s encouragement of me, a mere common foundling, must be but one more instance of his perverse Moishianism …

“Stop this!” I said. “This is hateful!”

He shrugged. “So hate me, I got it coming.”

Stoker thrust his grin through a small square panel at one end of the
middle space. “Got so there was a crowd upstairs,” he said, as if confidentially. “Mind if I sit in? Maxie breaks me up.”

I was too hurt and appalled by my erstwhile advisor’s declarations to acknowledge the intrusion, though as always Stoker’s grin filled the room like a sound, or odor, or change of temperature.