by John Barth
“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.
“I do hate it when you talk that way!” I cried to Max. “You make people hate you. It’s like Anastasia, and people taking advantage of her!”
“That’s what Herm used to say,” Stoker offered. “About the Moishians in his extermination campuses.”
“So hate, hate,” Max invited us.
“That diploma from Bray is a fake!” I said angrily.
“All along I hated the Bonifacists,” Max repeated. “I wanted to burn them up, and never realized it. We Moishians, we suffer and suffer, and then we Shaft us a Grand Tutor to get even. I want them to Shaft me instead.”
Stoker chuckled. “Didn’t I tell you?”
In a wondrous exasperation then, I declared to Max that not only his Certification but his whole view of things was false and flunking, the effect I could only hope of his age, and the shock of false arrest, and Stoker’s perverse influence. The very grounds on which Bray had Certified his Candidacy, I maintained, were in fact the flunking of him: it was not any hidden urge to persecute studentdom’s persecutors that he must atone for, but his pride in suffering—a scapegoatery as misconceived as Enos Enoch’s, to my mind, and vainglorious as well.
“Give it to him,” Stoker urged.
“I don’t have to be a Grand Tutor to know a false goat from a real one,” I went on. It was the motive that made the true scapegoat, I said, not the deed, and it might be that Max’s motive lifelong had in truth been selfish, but not in the manner he confessed to. Vanity was his failing: the vanity of choosing himself to suffer for the failings of others, and of believing that his own flunkèd aspects (overrated, in my estimation) could be made good by that suffering. “You say I should hate you for falsely encouraging me,” I concluded; “but the truth is, you’re calling your encouragement false because you want to be hated!”
This accusation, which I thought rather acute, did not move him. “So add that on the bill.”
“Flunk you!” I shouted. “You’re not a Candidate yet, and you never will be if you let yourself be Shafted with that attitude! Passèd are the passed and flunkèd are the flunked, and that’s that! I am the Grand Tutor—I will be, anyhow—and I will do my Assignment! I’ll pass everything and not fail anything, and then I’ll run Bray off the campus!”
I might have said more—I could in fact have re-reviewed my keeper’s whole life for him from my new and unexpectedly clear view of it, and showed him that his conception of the amulet-of-Freddie, for example, was quite mistaken—but he had got up from his stool and was indicating to the guard his wish to return to his cell.
“Max,” I pleaded, “I need advice, and I want to get you out of here, and all you can think about is your old suffering. That’s selfish!”
For just a moment his irritating calm gave way, and I heard him say, “Ach, I hate it too.” Then the guard led him out and Stoker came around to fetch me.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“It’s your doing as much as Bray’s, I’ll bet,” I said. “Passèd are the flunked! What kind of an idea is that?”
He shook his head sympathetically. “Isn’t it a scream? You and I, George—we’re the only ones who see what a phony Bray is. He’s even Certified me!” From his jacket pocket he drew the inevitable sheepskin, on which over Bray’s signature was, as always, a quotation from the Founder’s Scroll—in this case, Verily the railer against Me shall fetch himself in fury to My feet, while the light yea-sayer standeth off a respectful way. Presume, if ye would Pass.
“Doesn’t that beat all?”
I turned away. “You’re no Candidate.”
Stoker laughed and herded me to the lift. “Of course I’m not! I’m the flunkèdest flunker on campus! So Bray’s a fake, right? Or else”—he swatted me in the back—“only the flunkèd are really passed, hey? And the passèd are all flunked!”
I remarked grimly, as we ascended, that passage by so cynical a pretender as Bray, at least, was most certainly failure; and in my discomfort at being so of a mind with Stoker I added that he tempted out his own failings as well as other people’s. “I’ve seen how it pleases you when people call you the Dean o’ Flunks. I’ll bet you hope there really is a Founder, and that He’ll pass you for driving so many people to disagree with you. You want to pass by acting so flunked that you pass other people.”
“Oh, come on!” he teased. “You’re as balled up as Max is.”
We went up and down a number of
times, for Stoker liked to push the elevator buttons and close the automatic doors in his employees’ faces. I continued to challenge him, mainly from the surplus of my distress at Max’s condition: his hope, I charged, was that Failure, deliberately elected, would somehow be equivalent to Passage, as the considered choice of a negative could be said to be an affirmation. But there was only Failure in the human university, so far as I had seen, and thus it would remain unless I could in some wise complete my Assignment and bring order and Answers to the campus.
“There is order!” Stoker scoffed. “Everywhere but in my brother’s head!” His argument (which I assumed was meant simply to bait me) seemed to be that the opposition and tension of extremes—East and West Campuses, Passage and Failure—was itself a kind of harmony, and that moderationists like Chancellor Rexford, who regarded themselves as realistic, were actually deluded (“Not that Lucky’s really what he pretends to be,” he added with a wink: “If he’d let me get near him I’d show you his wild side!”) But Stoker’s reasoning was no more orderly than the rest of his character: having asserted in effect that Disorder was the only true order, and Contradiction the only harmony, he went on to maintain, always grinning, that in fact the alleged passèdness of such people as his “brother,” his wife, and my advisor, if true, was false, inasmuch as it not only gave meaning and reality to his own flunkèdness, for example, but induced it into being—as I had myself admitted. Anastasia’s submissiveness was a vacuum into which the air of his abuse had no choice but to press; and inasmuch as that which causes flunkèdness is flunked, to be passèd, as everyone agreed she was, must be to be failed!
“That’s nonsense,” I said. “What you really hope is just the opposite. You hope your flunkèdness will pass you because it gives Anastasia a chance to be passèd. You call Chancellor Rexford your brother so that nobody’ll believe he is.”
“Right!” Stoker cried delightedly. “So Failure is Passage and Passage is Failure! Let’s have a drink on it after we spy on Greene and Georgina.”
I shifted my ground then (not quite certain whether the argument was still intelligible, and more in hopes of unsettling my adversary than of instructing either him or myself): refusing to peep through the keyhole of the outer-office door, whence issued muffled noises of pursuit, I declared that the first reality of life on campus must be the clear distinction between Passage and Failure, the former of which was always and only passèd, the latter flunked. “The truth about you is that you’re not the Dean o’ Flunks,” I said. “You act like him because you have such a high opinion of Commencement that you’re afraid you can’t make the grade.”
“Ha!”
But I believed I had touched him, as in the Assembly, and thanks to Max’s tutelage in logical manipulation I was able to press home my purely improvised position. The real ground of Stoker’s failure, I told him (he was squatting at the keyhole now, pretending not to hear me), was this equation of Passage and Failure; but even by his own paradoxical reasoning he was not “truly” flunked, and was therefore truly flunked. By this I meant that if he really believed that Rexford’s calm reasonableness and Anastasia’s submission to abuse were flunkèd—because of their passèdness or however—and also that he himself could in a manner pass from very flunkèdness, then he should pursue a policy just contrary to his present one: deny that Lucky Rexford was his brother, but emulate the ordered normalcy that he regarded as a perilous delusion; be a gentle loving husband to Anastasia, even a submissive one; give over his sprees and orgies, all his mad mischief—in short, turn his personality inside out, and flunk by his own transvaluated terms instead of by the usual ones. It was a challenge born of my distress and bad temper, and riddled with equivocations; yet giving it voice I felt once again some murky, valid point in Stoker’s life, which I could not as yet assimilate: obscurely I suspected that however flunking were his treatment of Anastasia and his repudiation of every passèd thing, there was another side to them.
Georgina burst into the hall, nearly upsetting her new employer, and took indignant cover behind him. After her came Peter Greene, but stopped short and reddened at the sight of us.
“For pity’s sake leave her alone,” I said crossly—as if I were the forty-year-old and he the twenty-. And he responded appropriately:
“Shucks, I was only playing I’d paddle her if she didn’t ’fess up who she is.”
“I declare,” Georgina said—not very upset. “Some people’s children!”
I advised him testily to leave such games to Stoker—if Stoker still cared to play them—and drive me back to Great Mall, as I had work to do: in addition to my Assignment I meant to take up that very day, if possible, the Chancellor’s invitation to discuss Max’s case with him; and I had business with Anastasia also, if and when my third task took me to the Infirmary. The truth was (though I didn’t care to discuss it further before Stoker), I felt an urgent need to show everyone whom Bray had Certified the invalidity of their Certification, lest like patients falsely prescribed for they turn their backs on honest medicine. And I meant to begin with Greene himself, whose case seemed grave enough. As if to illustrate my simile, while agreeing eagerly to chauffeur me anywhere if Anastasia was along the route, he popped a flaming pimple on his chin, and then complained that the salve Stoker had loaned him the night before had made his acne worse instead of better.
“Is that a fact?” Stoker said. “It does a fine job of scaling our boilers.” I heard distraction in his gibe, and hoped that my sarcastic words to him, if they were striking some unsuspected target, had more point than I could find in them. He ushered Georgina back inside without wink or pinch, and though he answered with a fart my parting plea that Max be treated gently, I thought it significant that he made no promise to the contrary.
“I swear if that ain’t O.B.G.’s daughter!” Greene marveled as we crossed the stone courtyard. “Couldn’t be two such uppity ones in the entire cottonpicking College!” He prodded an elbow into my side. “Ain’t she a hot one, though—what you might say teasewise?”
2.
“Indeed she is not,” I said. “Excuse me, but I wonder sometimes about the way you see things.”
“You don’t believe her, do you?” At my request he forwent the Cut-Out lever so that we could talk as we returned to Great Mall. I replied that the issue of whether or not Georgina was “O.B.G.’s daughter” seemed less to the point in my opinion than his appraisal of her, which struck me as altogether unwarranted.
“A durn floozy’s what she is,” he insisted, “Tease the bejeepers out of a feller.”
“Not sweet and modest like your wife, I suppose.”
“I should hope to kiss a pig!”
“And not pure, like Anastasia?”
Greene closed his eyes and bade me please not to speak in the same breath of darky harlots and passèd maiden girls. “Speaking of which,” he added slyly, “don’t forget what you promised me, Stacey’s-motherwise; I’ll see if I can fix up Dr. Spielman’s prosecutor.”
“For pity’s sake!” I cried. “Look here, now—” He did, beaming and squinting, and very nearly steered us into a horse-chestnut tree. “No no! Look where you’re going!” He returned his attention to the road in time to misread a sign directing us leftwards. He was sure it had pointed right, and turned that way; when I insisted it had pointed left, he reminded me that Stoker was a great hand at altering direction-signs, and that in any case the motorcycle’s speed and power would compensate for misdirections. He opened the throttle to demonstrate his point, and cried, “Yippee!” as we swept through a busy intersection. I told him sharply to stop behaving like a kid.
“Dr. Bray says be like a kindergartener if you want to pass,” he answered—pouting a little, but to my great relief halving our speed. I pointed out to him that Enos Enoch’s advice had been to become as a kindergartener, not to remain one, and that Bray was anyhow wrong to Certify him on that ground.
“You’re plain jealous,” Greene teased.
“Nev
er mind that,” I said. “Whatever it is that’s passèd about kindergarteners, it isn’t their childishness. Or their ignorance.”
Here he grew stubborn, if no less cheerful: “Say what you want how I’m just a simple-head country boy; there’s a thing or two I know for sure. I’d rather be me than a educated slicker like Dr. Sear.”
I agreed that Enos Enoch might have had in mind a certain kind of innocent simplicity such as Dr. Sear could not be said to share. “But you’re not innocent or simple either, it seems to me. You just like to see yourself that way.”
“I guess I’m okay,” he grumbled. “What the heck anyhow.”
“You might be,” I declared, “if you’d open your eyes a little. Pardon me for criticizing you like this, but I hate to see everybody believing what Bray tells them.”
“It’s a free college, George. Say what you want.” Now he pouted in earnest, and flushed red as his fresher pimples. “I’m right used to getting knocked, imagewise, by Sally Ann and everybody else.” His manner suggested nevertheless that he was curious to hear what I had to say, even eager, though apprehensive.
“Tell me one thing honestly,” I said; “you did used to service O.B.G.’s daughter, didn’t you?”
He snorted. “Which ain’t to say, mind you! Durn uppity woman! Said she’d tell Sally Ann if not!”
“Tell her what?”
“That I’d been in the woods with her.” He squinted his eye at me. “Which ain’t to say!”
“But you did service her, didn’t you? And put her in kid?”
“That don’t matter!” He thumped the handlegrip with his fist. “It’s the principle of the thing. Could just as well been one of them redskins.”
“The ones you let service her, so they wouldn’t scalp you?”
He jerked his head. “I soon learnt them a lesson: Only good red’s a dead red! Who d’you suppose opened up the New Tammany Forest Preserve?”
“And drove out the redskins …”
“Yeah!”
