Giles Goat Boy (58 page)

“I don’t feel well at all,” I said.

“Do you want a woman?” Dr. Eierkopf asked at once. “I’ll have Croaker bring up a Dairy Science co-ed.”

I declined the offer.

“An aspirin, then? Or a sandwich? I’ll have to ask you to eat it in the bathroom, though.”

These too I declined, observing that perhaps it was sleep after all that I needed most, next to Max’s counsel.

“Whatever you please,” said Eierkopf. “Croaker fixes you a cot, and we see to it you’re up in time to register. I really am grateful to you for bringing him home, I suppose.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. “You’re welcome, sir.”

“You know …” He dandled his head on the other side, and his magnified eyes rolled merrily. “I almost wish you
were
the GILES, George—may I call you George? And you call me Eblis, if you like …” He sighed briefly, whereupon as if commanded Croaker came and set him on his shoulders. Eierkopf seemed quite at home there, but I was surprised to see what looked like tears shining behind his spectacles.

“You see? He’s always getting things mixed up, like my eggs a while ago. Nothing ever gets done just the way I intended. But what can I do? And I cramp
his
style, too, I’m sure …”

Forgetting then the subject—his wish that I were the true GILES—not to mention the proposal of an end to conversation, he launched into a recounting of the nature and history of his connection with Croaker, which I attended with what imperfect wakefulness and patience I had left.

“I’d just been brought to New Tammany,” he began, resting his little chin on Croaker’s skull—a white spheroid perched on a great black pedestal. “They had just begun to use WESCAC to pair up roommates, and refugee research-people were handled just as students were in the regular dormitories.
Verstehst?
You’ll see tomorrow morning …”

At matriculation-time, he continued, everyone’s attributes had been coded onto cards, which then were matched automatically on the basis of complementation—a homely farm-girl with a chic young piece from Great Mall, and so forth. This was before the days of Prenatal Aptitude Testing, and Eierkopf allowed that it wasn’t in itself a bad system.

“But show me the
programme
without hitches, Goat-Boy!” He had come to this campus with bad eyesight and false teeth, he declared; was never robust; could hardly stand on his legs (they were stronger then)—all this was duly punched into his card, he’d signed the loyalty-oath, got his clearance-papers, watched WESCAC’s card-sorters riffle and click. Going then to the lodging assigned him he found there not the clear-eyed, practical,
gemütlich
young engineer he’d rather expected (himself being subject to sick headaches and “too busy in the head” to bother with housekeeping), but Croaker, the famous athlete—All-Campus candidate in football he was then, before they named him Frumentius’s delegate to the University Council, for his own protection.

“Imagine, Goat-Boy! A mindless brute that ate raw hamburger at the Coach’s order, wore nothing but a loin-cloth, picked his nose, took what he pleased, urinated in the showerbath, danced and farted, rolled his eyes, bared his teeth, and had his way with a parade of co-eds!”

Often and often, he said, when he’d had equations to think through or
wanted only to rest his mind, he would come home to discover Croaker at his business with one of the girls—perhaps a cheerleader, with crimson letter on the breast of her pullover. Naturally Croaker never troubled to draw the blinds, and in those days the spectacle gave Eierkopf headaches: from his perch on the outside stairway he was obliged, so he complained, to watch the pair at their rut: how the little pink beast feigned displeasure, even threatened alarum; how her ape-of-the-woods merely croaked, and naked himself already, had at garter and hook, put her in a trice to the fearsome roger—whereat, coy no more, she’d whoop.

“And the worst was, we had to share the same bed!” Hard enough to relax, he said, in the odors of perfume and sweat; more than once, when sleep at last had granted respite from all thought, he would be roused by Croaker’s heavy arm flung over him; caught up in prurient dreamings the Frumentian mistook him for the prey, and must either be waked (no easy task) or his hug suffered till the dream was done.

I clucked sympathetically, and Eierkopf hastened to assure me that even so, his roommate had not been all bad. “I never begrudged him his salary, you know; brains aren’t everything; studentdom must have its circuses. The whole body attended the games; I watched them myself through binoculars, cheering with the rest.” Croaker was, he allowed, a splendid supple animal after all, full of power and grace; it could lift even Eierkopf’s spirits to see him leap about the room or chin on the shower-rod or lay waste half a sorority. They were not always at odds, I must understand. Though the smell of raw hamburger retched the frail scientist, Croaker saw to it he never starved, and except in most obstreperous humors fetched and carried at his roommate’s command, even as he’d done for me. In return, Eierkopf had filled out Croaker’s scholarship-forms, reconciled his financial statements, schooled him in the simplest etiquette and hygiene—not to defecate in classrooms, not to copulate on streetcorners—and did his homework.

“I devised little tasks to make him feel useful and regimens to keep him fit. Sometimes I even chose his girls: leave him to himself, he’d as likely hump somebody’s poodle or the Dean of Studies! I was still interested sometimes in women then; let a pretty baggage from Theater Arts refuse me her company or make fun of my eyeglasses: I’d point her out to Croaker on the sly, and one night soon I’d have the joy to see her boggle at his awful tup!”

In sum, Croaker could not have survived long on the campus without Eierkopf’s help, and the scientist in turn would have found life insupportable had Croaker been shot to death, say, by the father of some ruined
sophomore, or lynched by the White Students’ Council. However much, then, he might despair at Croaker’s grossness, and Croaker perhaps at his roomate’s incapacity and frailness; however much they each might yearn at times to live alone or with a partner more congenial—which yearning Maurice Stoker had lately played upon, for mischief’s sake—at their best they muddled through, strange bedfellows, who in any case were bound by the strictest of leases, which could not be broken before its term. And so strong a thing is custom, Eierkopf declared, he soon could scarcely recall having ever lived alone; it was as if he and Croaker had been together from the beginning, for better or worse. What was more, if their connection was at best uneasy, they’d come more and more to depend on each other as terms went by. Eierkopf’s affliction worsened; he took to a wheelchair and gave up sleeping; Croaker delivered him to and from laboratories, even learned to take dictation and type out reports—except during seizures like the one that had lately fetched him to George’s Gorge. As for the Frumentian, he had got along previously by a kind of instinct, which, when he saw how better he fared with Eierkopf’s assistance, he either put by or clean forgot.

Again tears welled into Eierkopf’s eyes, whether of affection or chagrin I could not decide. “I even learned the art of football for his sake, and lectured him between matches on his specialty, the Belly Series! All which, my friend, the athletic directors, the student boys and girls, and my colleagues came to accept, grudgingly or not: to get Croaker they had to take me; to get me”—he chuckled or sobbed—“who had my own kind of fame, you know—they must put up with Croaker.”

Did his head fall in despair, or did he kiss the grinning giant’s pate?

“It was a
package deal
, not so? And still is; it still is. Croaker and Eierkopf—we are inseparable as two old faggots, or ancient spouses!”

He said more; indeed he may have talked the night through, but further than this I knew nothing until Croaker waked me with a gentle touch. My first thought was that I’d dozed off for half a sentence—Dr. Eierkopf sat on Croaker’s shoulders as before, and resumed the conversation as soon as my eyelids opened—but I discovered that I was lying on a cot, and a large clock on the wall read four and a half hours after midnight. Croaker set a folding screen before me and served up a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, pancakes, and sausage; while I dined (I could not of course stomach the sausage, any more than Eierkopf could abide the sight of my eating anything at all) my host spoke on from behind the screen:

“It
is
extraordinary how many things point to your being the GILES, except the one thing that proves you’re not. And it’s almost a pity. You’re
an interesting young man, a pleasant young man—but that’s not the point.” What he meant was that although he assumed the Cum Laude Project to be a cause forever lost, it intrigued him to imagine what WESCAC might have produced had it indeed fertilized some lady with the GILES. Moreover, while he felt certain that he knew what Graduation is, and that he was himself a Graduate, there were admittedly moments when he could almost wish it were something else—something miraculous after all, as the superstitious held it to be.

“What is Commencement?” I asked him through the screen. Croaker fried a decent pancake.

“Commencement is a conclusion,” he replied at once. “There’s nothing mysterious about it: when you’ve eliminated your passions, or put them absolutely under control, you’ve Commenced. That’s why I call WESCAC the Grand Tutor. I can prove this logically, if you’re interested.”

I did not deny that I was interested, but pled shortness of time. Not to be discourteous, however, I asked him whether, when a man had reasoned his way to Commencement Gate, as it were, he truly felt Commencèd—for I had often heard Graduation described as an experience, but never as a proposition.

“Bah! Bah!” my host cried, with more heat than I’d seen him display thitherto. “That question leaves me cold!” The ejaculation confused Croaker, who mistaking it for some unclear but urgent command, galloped wildly about the Observatory for some moments, knocking down the screen and upsetting a tray of watch-glasses before he could be calmed.

“There, look what he’s done!” Eierkopf pounded him feebly on the head and wept a single tear. Like a frightened horse, Croaker still rolled his eyes and fluttered at the nostrils. “I
would
be a Graduate, if it weren’t for him! I can’t pass with him, and I can’t live without him!
Feel, feel
, that’s all people think of! There’s
feeling
for you!” He indicated Croaker, who, quite placid now, had set his rider on a stool and was doing his best to tidy up the spilt watch-glasses. “If Commencement were a feeling,
he’d
be the Graduate!” Now Dr. Eierkopf laughed until a rack of coughing stopped him. “Maybe he is, eh?”

I said to soothe him that I could not imagine Croaker as a Candidate yet, much less a Graduate, though to be sure I admired his physical prowess; nor could I on the other hand accept the notion that Graduation was merely the end of a dialectical process. But in any case, I felt bound to remark, Croaker was not altogether devoid of reason, however imperfectly he employed it, nor was Dr. Eierkopf absolutely without
emotion or appetite. Even as I spoke, tears flowed freely from his lashless eyes, a surprising sight, which he acknowledged as support of my observation.

“So maybe I’m not myself Commenced yet,” he admitted. “But what else can Commencement be? You want spooks and spirits? Bah, George Goat-Boy! We look with our microscopes and telescopes, and what do we see? Order! Number! Energies and elements! Where’s any Founder or Grand Tutor?” He tapped his gleaming skull. “In here, no place else. And in Tower Hall basement. That’s all there is!”

I rose from the cot, where I’d been sitting with my coffee, and politely shook my head.

“
I’m
the Grand Tutor, sir. I’m going to ask Max and Dr. Sear about this GILES business as soon as I get through Scrapegoat Grate. But GILES or no GILES, I’m the Grand Tutor.”

“I like you, Goat-Boy!” Eierkopf cried. “But how can you say such a thing?”

I admitted that I couldn’t explain myself, and even that I had as yet no clear conception of what Graduation was; I acknowledged further that my conviction as to my Grand-Tutorhood was not unremitting—that I was subject to lapses of confidence and moments of bad faith, as well as errors of judgment and waverings of policy, just as Anchisides, Laertides, and for all I knew Enos Enoch had been. Yet it was persistent and prevailing, this conviction. I
was
the Grand Tutor, as surely as I was George the Goat-Boy! I had no ax to grind; I craved neither fame nor deference except in poor moments; I had come from the goat-barns to Pass All Fail All and would most surely do so, whatever that injunction might turn out to mean.

“And I promise you this, sir,” I declared, stirred by my own rhetoric; “if it ends up being that Commencement is a miracle, then keep your night-glass and day-glass on me, and you’ll see a miracle one day with your own eyes. Don’t ask me how I know!”

Those same eyes squinted at me now behind their lenses, and either he shook his head or it dandled of its own accord.

“What a fellow you are!” he said—more pitying than awed. “Everybody has his weaknesses, and you know you can make me think of mine by speaking of yours, not so? So I don’t believe in hocus-pocus, any more than Max Spielman did before he got senile. But what do I do in weak moments?
I try to take nature by surprise!
I try to catch her napping once!” He laughed at his own folly, which it nevertheless plainly excited him to confess. He would sometimes stare at the furniture of his
observatory for hours on end, he declared, at the familiar books and instruments in their accustomed places, and contemplate the inexorable laws of nature that held them fast, determined their appearance and relations, and governed his perception of them. And he would find himself first fretting that the brown pencil-jar on his desk, for example, could not suddenly turn green, or stir of its own inexplicable volition; from a fret that such wonders could not be, he would come to a wish that just once they might, thence to a vain and gruntsome willing that they be—as if by concentration he could bring the miracle to pass. And this coming naturally to nothing, he would lapse at last into a melancholy of several days’ duration, after which, as a rule, he was fit to take up once more the orderly business of his life.