Dillamond's was foremost a life devoted to Human conservation, although he didn't know it at first. He didn't have to. In his upstart days (those of shabby tweed jackets, not yet elbow patches – not for a few years) it wasn't the daunting task it would eventually become. Students of every land and clime surged into the lecture hall, passionate in excess, and he relished it. He stood at the podium twisting timelines into cycles, basking in the glow of interested eyes, placing into their hands the past that determined the future and trusting them with it. Not because they could recite Ozmas Arid to Zany or because they would one day come into the very fortune that had installed them at Shiz, but because they knew enough to challenge and empathized enough to care. They exercised their potential. They were Animals; their peers Human.
As years accumulated, when he reflected on this quaint little epoch he often wondered whether or not nostalgia had glossed over the bitterer details, and just as often dismissed the notion. The fundamentals were unchanging – bluestone buildings swathed in ivy, the distant thunder of Railway Square, the high temper of the examination period – but Oz and, by extension, his dear old Shiz had nothing to protect it from outside powers tactful enough to take advantage of a weak system further weakened by conflict and drought. Soon, too soon, that vile yellow snake uncoiled across the map of Munchkinland, the freshly Ozmaless Ozmatown took on a new defining trait, and education – his life's work, his pride and joy – became not an opportunity, but a commodity. For select few.
By this time, it was not the students' fault that they alighted on the platform so caked in themselves that they were unable to notice the degradation of diversity around them. Their kid-like suggestibility had them steeped in tales of braverism, of balloons and colour and pageantry, and who were they to question it? They were sent to school to bide time until they were fit to be welcomed into the trivializing world of affluent society. They could hardly be expected to stand up; the poor things could hardly stand out. They were only human.
However, when the Animal Adverse movement gained enough momentum to earn itself a name – the Banns – Dillamond's teaching efforts took a turn for the redundant. Urgency forced him to assume the mantle of agitator and persist in it, for nothing put marginalization into perspective quite as well as history did. Or so he hoped, as he absorbed the headlines: migration restrictions, loss of employment, random arrests. The Oz once rife with possibilities for those great and small was now backing its Animals into a corner, drawing out some suppressed feral instinct to engulf the refined intelligence that had bought them their citizenships in the first place – their voices. They were coming, it was said. They'll come for you next, it was said. Always, he thought, with the ominous they, who, albeit disconcerting, were not enough to cow him into silence. Until, of course, they infiltrated his classroom.
Animals should be seen and not heard.
What the message lacked in originality, it made up for by merely being in existence. It had hit home, for Shiz was home, and undermined him in front of his students no less. With a fit of blustering he managed to dismiss them: a futile attempt to limit their exposure to such malice; to such failure – though on whose part, he couldn't say. Would word of this spread? No, surely not. The students were unfazed. They were overjoyed, in fact, because they hadn't done their readings and now had seven more days to avoid doing them. So the failure was largely his own. He had failed to rally them, to inspire them, as his professors had once done, as professors were supposed to do. And now he would hardly be able to muster the credibility to pry open their stubborn eyes. This was the future of Oz. Empty laws, empty heads, empty classrooms.
And yet, "Animals should be seen and not heard," said a voice, audibly puzzled. The voice, he placed upon turning, of Elphaba Thropp – a student with much family history and still more personal reputation, who, in spite of all, had swiftly proved that she was neither the blistering know-it-all nor the cunning troublemaker she had been made out to be. He found, rather, that she was willing to admit to that which she did not understand and far too conspicuous to accomplish any overt troublemaking. What's more, she was always prepared and always attentive; a tad defensive perhaps and given over to outburst, but a delight to teach.
That all taken into account, Dillamond did not register who Elphaba was exactly until she plopped herself down on the bench, radiating concern, and offered him a greasy, crinkled wad of paper to feast on. Even through his frustration he was able to recognize the tendency for genuine compassion that prompted him to confide in her his heightening fears. He told her of the Ox from Quox dragged out of his own lecture on classical bovine philosophy, the Owl from Munchkin Rock isolated from his congregation, the Chimp who had penned The Second Species gone ape and, lowering his voice conspiratorially, he disclosed that outside of Animal circles such information was little more than rumour. This elicited a range of reactions from Elphaba, who was at once appalled, livid, and then determined, reassuring him with a sincerity the likes of which he'd never known.
It was just as Morrible swept in, sending her flitting away with empty threats, that Dillamond formulated his idea to tutor Elphaba privately. He believed she had much to learn from him, but also that there was much to be learned from her – from this peculiar Girl who poked fun at herself despite hardly knowing who herself was or why it was so important. For, being green surely wasn't easy, but it would be this quality that would help her appreciate the plight of the Animals and the necessity of meeting indifference with difference. With his assistance, he believed, she would acquire something to say and come into her voice.
He became more and more certain of this as the weeks wore on. True, she was still sheepish around the edges and too inherently Elphaba to accomplish anything with subtlety, but she never failed to astound him. To see her honing her talents and stumbling into new ones, to see her taking up the cause and funnelling so much of herself into it and, strangely, to see her with friends (more or less evidenced by Galinda Upland's sudden aptitude for punctuation), smiling, accepted and accepting, filled him with the joy and the dread he imagined he would have experienced had he a family of his own.
When they finally came for him, it was Elphaba who helped Dillamond keep his head. She herself was frantic, gesticulating and beseeching and floundering in overlooked distress, but he had enough confidence in her to know that his absence would not curb her ambitions and would, if anything, strengthen them. There would be changes and she would be behind them and he would be behind her, distantly, ever the devoted advisor. Besides, it was a sign. A violent, infuriating, humiliating sign, but a sign. His work at Shiz was done and it was time to expand, perhaps into his hometown in northern Gillikin or straight to the Emerald City, where Animals were being displaced in droves. All was losing, all was not lost. With this in mind, he refused to struggle.
Only, when they passed the stone lions that distinguished the history building, the men in trench coats did not unhand him. Dillamond was prodded toward the gaping back doors of a blacked-out carriage, hearing goat one too many times for comfort, and so he began to resist. He beat his hooves to draw attention and swung his head, feeling every bit the animal he would become. More men hurried in to overpower him, restraining him while a blindfold was slung over his eyes and he dropped onto all fours, and realized bad had been an understatement.
The goat was dimly aware of a world beyond the bars. It was where the good green man appeared after the clinking. There was the clinking and the rattling, followed sometimes by a this damn lock, then the count of three hoofbeats, then the hay if he had been a good goat – and he almost always was these days, because he was a clever animal and had caught on fast. A silent goat was a good goat. Silent goats ate.
Silent goats, however, were not always inwardly sound goats. Every once in a while he would forget to forget and he would recall some sort of entitlement, some sort of otherness. On those days the good green man was a guard – moreover, he was a massive, inconvenient shadow positioned just in front of the entirety of light and freedom – and silence was not equated with goodness. The goat welled up with a strange burning that was triggered by the echo of alien things (he thought of them as this, for lack of a better thing) from an outside place or, perhaps, a previous life. He found that he could piece together these things to make them coherent. And when this happened he did not want to be fed and he did not want to be reprimanded for bleating. He wanted to refute the green men's harsh things with his own things, because they certainly had not had much more than a grammar school education to puncture their thick skulls so who were they to bully him – and then he wanted out. He wanted back into their world. His world.
The problem remained that goats were incapable of such communication. He could only make the things in his head and so the empty wants ricocheted off the bars and off each other, bombarding him and filling him with contempt. These things couldn't be more important than the meal he'd lose for the misbehaviour, yet they were and he didn't know why. He started pacing. He didn't move at all. He choked on nothing. He grieved. He was neither good nor bad. Then he would drift into a fitful sleep and wake up good. Or famished, rather.
On these recovery days he found that losing his grip on the things did not stifle his ability to be curious. He invested less energy into clearing the barriers of his mind and more into thwarting the clanging metal cell of the green men. It was a game. How far could he push them before they condemned him to badness for the day? Aggression was a sure-fire way to lose a handful of stale hay. Noisiness, too. But other things were not so transparent. Nudging open the iron grate left ajar by the distracted green man, for example, and venturing out into the dark corridor was an action of hazy consequence. He did it anyway.
It was clear that incarceration had wreaked havoc on his perception as soon as he encountered the wall of chaos. Loud, obtrusive chaos, out of sight but vaguely palpable. He never knew there was a creature that could produce such unholy screeching. And then a lesser, more chilling screeching – one made of things. No green men present, since he could hear the pounding of their boots going the wrong way, presumably to congregate with the other packs of green men. But thumping, shattering, flapping. It was with heavy apprehension that the goat continued on, barely noticing the world unfolding before him.
When he came upon the source of the commotion he knew it would be the end. If it wasn't those hairy, leaping, winged monsters, it would be starvation imposed on him by one of their masters – the cringing old one, the hysterical wild one chasing them about. Having seen enough almost as soon as having seen any, the goat slipped beneath the blanket – his only token of the safety of the dank world of the green men – in a pathetic last effort to protect himself from the denouement of the horrific scene and his inevitable discovery.
He did not wait long. The blanket was torn away and a green man who was not a green man hovered over him. She reached out to touch him and he cowered, not understanding what she required of him, seeing her excitement fizzle into confusion. It filled him with remorse, for he realized immediately that what he had witnessed a moment before had been a show, a matter of competing predators. This was a gentle one; a courageous one who, by the look of it, hadn't had the benefit of a day of goodness or its complimentary square meal in months. This was one caught in a world of foolish old men too dense to see that young ones had to be nurtured.
She moved closer, spouting far too many things for him to process – though he tried, by Oz, he tried – and he was run through with a pang of familiarity. Then another deeper, stronger, scarier pang when she called upon that which hadn't been made available to him in a span of years. A hidden dignity, an identity, a title.
So it wasn't a figment of his imagination. All those snippets of the other life, of being more. He had had a name, a career, glory days. A purpose. Pupils. Things that could not be stolen from him. And this girl, had he known her? Yes, because that explained his impulsive yearning to reassure her that he was not lost, not completely.
But no, certainly not, because she was rising and her features spelled out sorrow. He had taken this baseless hope too far and she was projecting his guilt back to him. She was disappointed, so it couldn't be true, none of it could be true. He was a goat, and not even a good one at that.
The regimen was three words a day.
Three, she decided, was enough to compel improvement without wearing through the threadbare fibres of her patience, which was – to put it mildly – sorely tried. She often felt she was dealing with a toddler (or two, because Fiyero's idea of wedded bliss had not involved being nibbled at by his old history teacher) and she frequently resorted to stalking the Goat around the meadow, haranguing him until he coughed out a few syllables to shut her up, if nothing else. After this happened she had no choice but to swallow her frustration and trudge back towards the cottage, where Fiyero would laugh and pat her hand and do his best to appease the smoldering rage in her gut. Even made of burlap and dead to the world, he couldn't wrap his shiny new brain around the concept of seriousness. It both amazed and enraged her, and left her scrambling to think of a way to explain to him the torment of being confined to one's own head.
That's why she refused to be defeated in this, she wanted to say, because there had been days, weeks, when she hadn't used her voice and had gotten so used to what people said for her that she forgot to fight it. Now she was here, Elphaba again and hardly the wiser for it, and tired, so tired. At times she feared one more failure would topple her for good, but she truly (irrationally, obstinately and – on bad days – mistakenly) believed she could unlock the full scholastic competence of Doctor Dillamond and revive the ancient mid-day tradition of harping on the past.
Because that's what Doctor Dillamond was. He was the past – her past and Fiyero's, everyone's past, a past worth harping on. She looked at him and she was seated on a bench amidst those awful, awful people with the feeling of endlessness and belonging and chalk dust between her fingers. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Boq peeking at her test answers and caught Nessa peeking at Boq. There was Galinda's essay on Ozma the Scarcely Beloved splayed before her at midnight with all the scarcely beloved curlicues driving her to madness. Fiyero approached from behind, annoyingly handsome though she would never admit it, poised to scare the living daylights out of her. And she was anxious about the future, but it glowed with promise. There were hopes and dreams and countless afternoons spent reliving the follies of distant figures so as not to become one of them. She, the loner, the degenerate, the green freak, had been invincible. She had been believed in.
So three words a day, that's what she pushed for. It was tedious and she could hardly hold her own attention at times – shut up, Fiyero, I can see that he's eating the tablecloth – but it was done every morning and this day was no exception, although it did yield an unusual term.
Elphaba, despite having been scorched worse than anyone by sentimentality, had woken up waist-deep in despair and decided that her life was not over.
The world was still and the clouds blurred the outline of the sun above the trees and she was freezing and her life was not over.
And so she confronted the mute husk of her one-time mentor, palms flat on the table, stammering, embarrassing the hell out of herself, trying to define hope before it eluded her again and realizing that she couldn't because it was already gone. Defeat tugged her downward. She surveyed the Animal. "You were the first to have it in me," she said finally, tragically, as if there was any more room for that under this roof, "and I'll be the first to acknowledge that I failed mightily, but I intend to be the last to have it in you, Doctor Dillamond. Neither of us has the capacity to speak out anymore, but we can speak, can't we? At least?"
One last glance – nothing, vacancy – and she rose to leave. Having a somewhat sturdy hold on her life saddled her with the task of making a living, which meant she was on a schedule. Domesticated, how bizarre, but at least she could sink her boiling red shame in the greyness of the day's menial duties. She didn't notice Fiyero in the doorway until she collided with him and he whirled her around, pointing to Doctor Dillamond, who looked as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.
This was it, she thought, this was what it had come to. Not only was she to watch the final deterioration, but the attempts against it – the writhing, the silent screaming, the suffocating – as if fate hadn't had enough of pinning her down in front, but just out of reach, of all the calamity and cruelty that the world had to offer. Reminding her always that there was so much to be done that she couldn't do, so much left behind, so much to...to...
"Miss...Elphaba," the Goat said, labouring, prolonging the last syllable. "Lunch?"
Silence.
A wave of awe. Strong enough to bowl her over if not for the arms propping her up from behind.
Good silence, swelling with excitement. The silence of progress.
A tear, because she couldn't help it.
"Yes," Elphaba agreed when she was able, allowing herself a rare smile. She couldn't be sure whether he was articulating a twinge of hunger or sympathy or memory, but she did not care. All was losing, all was not lost. "We'll do lunch."