by John Barth
I flung away the schema, unpalatable even literally, and fetched a morning newspaper from a trashcan near the exit, thinking to tide myself over until lunch with its inklesser pages. But bannered across the top was the headline SPIELMAN CONFESSES, followed by two columns that confirmed what Stoker had told me: Max had surrendered himself to the Campus Patrol and declared himself guilty of the murder of Herman Hermann, substantiating the confession with exact details of the scene, time, and circumstances of the crime. He had been sitting by the roadside not far from Founder’s Hill, the news-report said, when he was accosted by a man in the uniform of a Powerhouse guard, astride a motorcycle, who offered him a ride. The two shortly afterwards fell to quarreling over political matters, and upon recognizing the guard as Herman Hermann, the Bonifacist Moishiocaust, Max had been so overmastered with desire for revenge that he had shot the man with his own pistol. Nay, further: “according to the Grand Tutor,” who had interviewed him at some length in Main Detention, Max admitted to having harbored for years a secret yen not merely to settle a part of the Moishian score against the Bonifacists, but, for a change, to be the persecutor instead of the victim. Yet once he had arrogated this position (so Bray claimed) a wondrous change had come over my advisor’s heart. “The fact that Dr. Spielman cannot, by his own admission, repent of the murder, has had a remarkable effect on his spirit,” Bray was quoted as saying. “The secular-studentism which he had always formerly espoused assumes that the heart is essentially educable and ultimately Passable; faced with the revelation of his own failing, however, Dr. Spielman now sees that the heart is flunkèd, desperately flunkèd; that what it needs is not instruction but Commencement; not a professor but a Grand Tutor, to Graduate it out of hand and with no Examination; otherwise all is lost, for however we may aspire to the state of Graduateship, we may never hope to deserve it.” And Max himself had allegedly said to Bray, “By me the only way to pass is to pass away,” and had requested capital punishment “as a Make-Up for his failure.” Campus sentiment, I read, was even more sharply divided than before; the old issues of Max’s former leftish connections and his opposition to the “Malinoctis” program had been revived, though with far less virulence than when they had led to his dismissal. Liberal sentiment, as always pretty generally in his favor, was embarrassed by his confession of violence; right-wingers, on the other hand, while inclined to despise him on principle (and to view the murder as evidence of a Student-Unionist conspiracy to assassinate all ex-Bonifacists now doing important work for New Tammany), were much impressed by the humble tone of his confession, in which they seemed to hear a recantation not only of Student-Unionism in favor of Informationalism, but of Moishianism in favor of Enochism. “Go now, and flunk no more,” appeared to be their net reaction, whereas the liberals’ was just the contrary: that Max had formerly been among the persecuted Passed, but now had flunked himself. The argument had grown in tenser, I read, since early morning, when the prisoner had been Certified for Candidacy by the new Grand Tutor—who, however, emphasized to reporters that the Certification by no means implied that Max was innocent of the murder or deserving of mitigated punishment: “Passèd are the flunked,” Bray had quoted from the Founder’s Scroll, “who repent and suffer for their failings.”
What alarmed me, other than Max’s confession itself, was not that Bray had Certified him—he seemed to be Certifying everyone—but that Max had evidently accepted the Certification, as if Bray were qualified to give it! And how had Bray found time to visit Main Detention in addition to the hundred other things he seemed to have got done since the previous evening? Pressing as was the deadline for my Assignment, I resolved to go to Main Detention at once and hear from Max’s lips that all these allegations were false. For that matter, he might advise me how to attack most efficiently my list of labors, as he had pre-counseled me so valuably through the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate.
How to get to Main Detention? My first impulse was to look up and down the mall for Peter Greene. Had I appreciated the size and populousness of New Tammany I’d never have bothered—but I did not, and espied him at once. Four elms up and one over, he was doing calisthenics on the grass, almost the only person in sight. A kind of stationary jog: I heard him panting “Right! Right! Right!” in rhythm with his step as I approached, not alone to mark the cadence, it turned out, but in some wise to reassure himself as well; it was in fact the motto he’d lent me at Turnstile-time, reaccented for its present use:
“I’mallright! I’mallright! I’mallright!”
It developed, however—when I saluted him and hove in range of his working eye—that he was not all right. From the Assembly-Before-the-Grate, where I’d last seen him, he had proceeded dutifully to a first-period lecture in a course very close to his concerns, Problems of Modern Marriage, hoping to learn something useful; for though he was still resolved to put by Miss Sally Ann and pay court to Anastasia, he was much afflicted with bad conscience and wanted to satisfy himself that his union really was unsalvageable—and that his wife was chiefly to blame for its disintegration. But he’d “plumb fergot,” he told me, how tiresome it was to be a schoolboy. As the lecturer (on closed-circuit Telerama) had droned on about such matters as “contemporary role-confusion and attendant anxieties,” he had first fallen asleep, then diverted himself by making spitballs and carving initials in his desktop, and finally left the building on the pretext of visiting the toilet.
“It’s over my head,” he complained to me. “Durn if it ain’t!” How ever he would pass without going to school, he confessed he had no idea, any more than he knew how he could live without the woman he loved but could not live with. “Weren’t for Bray’s diploma I’d swear I was flunked, interpersonal-relationwise,” he admitted. “Figured I’d come out and get me a breath of air, take a little pill, try ’er again.”
I could not discern whether by The Woman He Loved But etc. he meant his wife or Anastasia; I did not inquire. Indeed, for all my good fortune at finding him so readily, it was with some misgiving that I asked him to transport me to Main Detention, for I feared he’d hold me to my promise of intercession with Anastasia’s mother. But though he was delighted by the errand and “the chance to get to know Stacey’s family better”—as if Maurice Stoker were her father!—he made no mention of that mad embassy; it did his spirits a campus of good, he declared, to learn that I too had cut my first class. Much of his eagerness to oblige me, I presently observed, stemmed from his pride in a new motorcycle he’d acquired just after registration, and had yet to try out on the open road. He showed me it, parked nearby: an astonishing contraption, all chromium plated, larger-engined than any of Stoker’s, and equipped with every manner of accessory: headlights, fog-lights, spotlights, signal-lights, Telerama, air-horns that blasted the opening phrase of Alma Mater Dolorosa, a liquor cabinet, three dozen dials and control-knobs, an air-conditioned sidecar, and upholstery of stripèd fur. It was so new he’d not had time even to remove the mirrors (of which there were half a dozen); they were merely turned away from him. He bobbed his head happily.
“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 instruc
tions, 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.”
