by John Barth
“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.
I glanced uneasily at the clock.
“Who wants to see the Founder, or the Founder’s son?” Eierkopf exclaimed. “No! But what if some little messenger-spook should drop once out of the sky—not to bring you a personal message, but maybe just to ask directions … Or what if you discovered even his footprint in the grass, where he’d lit for a moment? Less than that, even!” He indicated the shelves of the room with a roll of his eyes. “Just to see a sign once, that things were thinking their own thoughts. A little voice in the air, ja? One little leaf to move the wrong way all by itself, that’s all it would take; I’d know right away … But bah!” He waved away such speculation. “I got to get ready for the eclipse. Croaker shows you where to go.”
There was indeed little time; but when I’d thanked him for his hospitality and frankness, and expressed my hope that we might see each other another time under less upsetting circumstances, I couldn’t resist asking him what exactly it was he’d “know right away” if, to use his expression, he should once catch nature napping.
“Forget I said it,” he replied, as gruffly as his piping voice permitted. “There aren’t any mysteries; just ignorance. When something looks miraculous it’s because we’re using the wrong lenses. Ja, that reminds me …” He said something in another language to Croaker, who, smiling grandly, brought me my stick. At various places along its length now had been affixed little lenses, concave and convex, mounted in shiny steel rims that swung on pivots. Moreover, the stick had been cleverly drilled through from tip to tip, and slotted transversely in such a fashion that certain of the lenses could be swung down into the bore.
“A little matriculation-gift to go with Croaker’s,” Eierkopf said. “Mirrors and lenses are my favorite things.” He showed me, when I’d thanked him for the gift, how by selecting the proper lenses and sighting through one end or the other, I could use my stick as either a telescope or a microscope, and make fire with it as well.
“Look all around the University,” he advised me. “You’ll see stars and planets you didn’t know about, and girls undressing and doing things with their boyfriends. You’ll see your blood cells and your crablice and your spermatozoa. Some things that look alike you’ll see to be different, and some you thought were different will turn out to be the same. But you can look from now until the end of terms, and you won’t see anything but the natural University. It’s all there is.”
I thanked him again most sincerely, quite touched by his generosity despite my reservations about his opinions, and promised to apologize, once I’d verified his impotency-claim with Dr. Sear, for accusing him in the Virginia Hector affair. Then I set my silver watch and begged his leave to go on Croaker’s shoulders to the Main-Gate Turnstile. He could not so far oblige me, he begged pardon, as he needed Croaker to adjust the astronomical apparatus and perform sundry other chores before the eclipse. But the Gate was neither distant nor difficult to find, he assured me—a ten-minute trot on Croaker; at most a twenty-minute limp for me; there was ample time to get there before sunrise. He bid me auf wiedersehen and promised he’d watch on his telescreens the Trial-by-Turnstile ceremony; if I should contrive to pass through the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate—a feat never before managed outside of legend, and to all appearances physically impossible—my claim to Grand Tutorhood would warrant more systematic and detailed refutation; until then, I had his good wishes but by no means his credence. I smiled and shrugged my shoulders, whereat, almost crossly, Eierkopf said goodbye, turned on his stool, and peered into his night-glass. Croaker led me downstairs to set me on the right road. As the Observatory door opened automatically, Dr. Eierkopf’s voice piped from a speaking-tube on the jamb.
“Listen here, Goat-Boy,” he said crisply. “A bulletin just comes in that Harold Bray will enter WESCAC’s Belly and change its AIM. Can you hear? But he must have something up his sleeve, because Chancellor Rexford has officially recognized him as Grand Tutor to New Tammany College, on the strength of his pledge. The Military Science Department would never allow that if he meant to disarm the EAT-system.”
My heart constricted.
“You know what this means, Goat-Boy?” Eierkopf went on. “It means he’s automatically in charge of Admissions to Candidacy. He’ll oversee the Trial-by-Tumstile this morning. You won’t succeed, my friend!”
I put my mouth to the brass tube and replied, “Keep your eyes open, and you’ll see.” But I felt less confident by half. The air was fresh, the sky moonless now and just lightening, the grass drenched. Croaker pointed out across the dark lawn, grunted something, tapped my stick, and squinted through thumb and forefinger as through a glass. I aimed the stick where he directed and tried several combinations of lenses, but saw nothing. Then I tried another, and darkly before my eye a distant building wobbled, around whose corner a procession of cyclists and pedestrians turned out of sight.
“That way to Main Gate? Behind that building?”
But when I looked from the lens I found Croaker gone and the door shut, both without
a sound. Gooseflesh pricked my forearms; I legged off through the dew no comfortabler for knowing that a night-glass surely watched me go. Did another, less hospitable, see me coming?
6.
A motorcycle snorted behind me, and I was hailed: Peter Greene, on our borrowed vehicle, mounted up behind its owner, who throttled down and grinned through his beard at me in the dim light.
“Told you it was a goat-boy!” Greene said triumphantly to him. “And me only one eye!”
“Flunk me for not recognizing an old friend!” Stoker laughed. He offered his hand, which I shook before recalling that I did not consider him a friend. “Pity you left so early the other night,” he said easily. “Spoiled the party for Stacey. She sends her love.”
“By George, that’s a gal, that Stacey!” Greene cried reverently. “I swear if she ain’t!”
I walked on. Stoker idled the machine alongside. “Last night was the real party,” he said. “Randy-Thursday affair. Could’ve used your act. Oh, say—” He touched my arm; I drew away. “Too bad about Max. I’ll have to prosecute, of course, but it is awkward that my man turned out to be Herman Hermann.”
I clenched my teeth at this confirmation of my suspicions. “Max didn’t do it.”
Greene applauded. “Attaboy!” His manner—and Stoker’s too, who seconded his approval of my pronouncement—said that I did admirably to stand by my friend, who however was most certainly guilty as charged.
“No question!” Stoker scoffed. “Herm was my aide, you know—the rascal I sent to catch up with Max the night of your visit.” He’d been aware, he said, that the man was an ex-Bonifacist—no doubt others of his staff were also; he didn’t know or care about their ID-cards or histories as long as they did their work—but he’d not known it was Herman Hermann himself whom he’d dispatched to “take care of” my advisor, or he’d not have risked so valuable a man. I set my lips. Stoker’s declared opinion was that Hermann had overtaken Max along the road and that my advisor had recognized and killed him; whether in a spirit of revenge for the exterminated Moishians or in self-defense remained to be established.
“Could of been an argument and then a scuffle,” Greene offered. “Seen it happen a dozen times, fellows get to squabbling.” His tone, I noted, was deprecatory and pacific: obviously he was on cordial terms with Stoker and wished to mollify my hostility.
“Max would never fight,” I said. “Not even to defend himself. I know.”
Stoker chuckled. “Oh, you know, do you?” He pointed out then in an amiably serious way that he too was surprised at Max’s breach of his avowed principles, though he’d assumed all along that the Moishians were as capable of flunkèdness as any other group in studentdom, given the opportunity. “But really, George, you mustn’t believe I’m behind this—as I understand you told Sear and the chap at the sub-station desk.” Max, he reminded me, had turned himself in after the news bulletin, and freely confessed to shooting Hermann. “ ‘Overcome by vengefulness,’ he said he was, as soon as he realized who the man was. Most normal human thing he ever did, I told him myself! Now, of course, he’s gone Moishian again—says he wants to pay his debt to studentdom, all that rot.”
“They’ll never convict him,” Greene said stoutly. “Begging Mr. Stoker’s pardon, the man’s a hero if you ask me.”
Stoker grinned. I vowed I would believe nothing except from Max’s own lips. But the story of his surrender and confession did not strike me as being so fantastic as I could have wished; it squared uncomfortingly with his late remarks about the Bonifacists’ being outside the pale of charity, and about implacable, irrational varieties of flunkèdness which must be neither accommodated to nor forgiven.
“Let’s run over to Main Detention and see him now,” Stoker proposed.
Greene reminded him that it was getting on to Trial-by-Turnstile time; we must all make haste if he and I were not to be late for Registration and Stoker for his ceremonial role of Dean o’ Flunks.
“I’ll drop you off,” Stoker answered him pleasantly. “But I’m sure George is more concerned with his keeper’s trouble than with his own little ambitions. Especially now the Grand-Tutor thing’s all settled.”
The taunt stung me to reply, more heatedly than I intended, that nothing was settled by the theatrical advent of the person called Harold Bray, who, whatever his spurious official backing, was a patent fraud, as I meant to prove in due course. And I added that eager as I was to confer with Max—both on the matter of his arrest and on certain other subjects—I had his own word for it that it was imperative for me to matriculate on time. I checked my watch: Tower Clock should chime five-thirty any moment. Hobbling faster I declared my suspicion that our encounter was in fact probably not coincidental, but part of a scheme to prevent or delay my registration, and I warned Stoker not to attempt to stay me, as I did not share Max’s commitment to non-violence.
“You needn’t tell me!” Stoker laughed. “I’ve heard what you can do with that stick of yours when somebody gets in your way!” Then, as if to atone for that unhappy allusion (how he’d heard of Redfearn’s Tommy’s death I couldn’t imagine) and at the same time to give proof of his goodwill, he bade me climb up behind Peter Greene and be transported post-haste to Main Gate. Full of suspicion, I nonetheless agreed, choosing the possibility of kidnaping over the certainty of being late if I continued on foot to a place I’d yet to locate. I straddled the rear fender and we sped off, Stoker explaining at the top of his lungs that the vehicle we rode was the same we’d found ditched the day before, and was in fact the one Herman Hermann had set out upon from the Powerhouse. He had already thanked Greene for salvaging it, he said, and now he thanked me also. I was not to worry about discarding the sidecar, removing evidence from the scene of a capital crime, and using a vehicle without license or authorization, all which misdemeanors he could charge me with if he chose to, along with imposture; he was pleased enough to have the motorcycle back, especially as it was now unmistakably linked with Max’s movements just after the murder. Already he had given Greene certain modest tokens of his gratitude, which it was his desire I should share.
“Ain’t he the durnedest?” Greene demanded with a shake of the head. “Look here what he give me to split with you, just for a joke.” From his coat pocket he withdrew four small black cylinders and pressed two of them into my hand. “Flashlight batteries!” He laughed, blinked, and exclaimed as at some splendid piece of foolery.
“What was I supposed to give you?” Stoker shouted over his shoulder. “You’ve got everything already, and Grand Tutors don’t need anything. There’s about two million more where they came from.”
“You are the durnedest,” Greene declared, and flung his batteries, to Stoker’s delight, at early pigeons purring upon a seated statue of some former chancellor. I might have discarded mine also, as I had no conception of their use and wanted anyhow no beneficences from Maurice Stoker; but even as the ruffled pigeons flapped we rounded that corner I’d spied through my lenses and entered the square before Main Gate—a place of such unexpected throng and pageant, I forgot that my hand clutched anything. Floodlit in the paling twilight, thousands of young men and women filled the square. Many were seated in temporary grandstands erected during the night, which flanked a broad central aisle leading straight to the Turnstile; others milled freely about, some riding pick-a-back for a better view; a bright-uniformed band played martial airs; a double row of policemen kept the aisle clear.
Stoker paused smiling at the edge of the square. “Look here, George, Bray’s down in WESCAC’s Belly this minute, so that takes care of that. Hadn’t you better go see Max?”
The news shocked me until I realized that I needn’t believe it. Even if it were true, as Greene now assured me, that Bray had disappeared at 3 A.M. from the Randy-Thursday festivities at Founder’s Hill (where he’d gone in triumph with the host of his “Tutees”), declaring his intention to descend into WESCAC’s Belly before dawn; even if it were true that subsequent bulletins from To
wer Hall, allegedly read out by WESCAC, confirmed that he’d successfully entered that dread place; even if it were true that Chancellor Rexford had in consequence proclaimed him official Grand Tutor to New Tammany College and named him to preside over the Trial-by-Turnstile—it could be all an elaborate hoax, a political stratagem to turn the Grand-Tutorship into an agency of the Quiet Riot, or to forestall the necessarily revolutionary consequences of a genuine Grand Tutor’s appearance. On the other hand, perhaps he really had entered the Belly, in which case he must be EATen alive, and that was that.
“I’m the Grand Tutor,” I told Stoker, and noted crossly that in his company I seemed always defensive, overambitious, and foolish.
“Well, now,” Greene said—his expression so fatuous it made me hot with impatience—“maybe you and Him both is Grand Tutors.”
I wouldn’t acknowledge his remark, though I saw Stoker watching with amusement for my reaction. Greene was twice my age, a wealthy and powerful figure to whom, moreover, I was in a small way obliged, yet I found myself almost contemptuous of him this morning, and not knowing quite how, I felt certain that Stoker was responsible. His presence either made me intolerant or actually transformed Greene’s otherwise agreeable simplicity into simple-mindedness—as it seemed to turn my own pride into vanity, and had made Anastasia’s martyrdom on the beach into something perverse. I strode off without a word towards the far end of the aisle or track, where a bare-chested group of athletes were loosening their muscles for the Trial; Greene called goodbye to Stoker and hurried after me. Sure enough, my irritation was left behind like a patch of nettles, and once out of that mocking influence Greene’s ingenuous good nature seemed again more winning than annoying. He clapped his arm about my shoulder and cheerfully flunked himself for “always saying the wrong durn thing.” Then with surprising insight he declared that because he had never met a man he didn’t like, and himself craved frankly to be liked by everyone he met, he not infrequently made enemies of his friends by making friends of their enemies—as in the case of Bray and myself.
