by John Barth
I touched the head of my sick black classmate, who, weak from regurgitating mattress-straw, collapsed now between his supporters. Yet before the pupils of his eyes rolled up he smiled at me and grunted.
“He’s worse off now than he was the time I turned him loose,” Stoker observed. “Even a wild animal won’t eat what’s not good for him.”
“My fault,” I said, and shook my head. In counseling Croaker to put by all things Eierkopfian and become indeed a beast of the woods, I’d not allowed for the atrophy of instinct, I suppose; or perhaps student rationality and brute unconscious will were not separable, so that plucking the blossom killed the root. My heart I had thought too numbed by other failures to feel new grief, but so formidable a wreck stung it afresh. Mistutoring Croaker in such wise, I had I felt subverted my own origin and base: the easy beasthood that must have accounted for our rapport.
“He might be dangerous when he gets well,” Stoker said to Max and Leonid. “Want to move next door?”
Those two glanced at each other.
“You go on,” Max grumbled. “Me he knows already; I should stay here in case.”
Leonid considered, flung his arms about for some moments, then replied as if casually: “Not.”
“More heroics,” Max said. Stoker, who saw what was coming as clearly as I, shrugged and departed, leaving me (as sometimes happened) the barred aisle for my cell—small boon, as its length was cotless and potless. He was not enough reformed to insist on removing my friends from danger; the old Stoker, so far from even suggesting it, would have stayed to watch the mayhem.
“Vice-versity!” Leonid shouted at my keeper. “You’re the heroics, sir!”
They took up then the other great topic of debate: the one they’d waked me with at the first and put me to sleep with many times since—and which, after Greene’s release, entirely supplanted the issue of My Ladyship’s character. It took numerous forms, or rather was provoked by several particular questions like the one here disputed—which of them would risk his welfare by attending Croaker—but inevitably it reduced to the same terms. Max I had accused of a special vanity, the yen for martyrdom; Leonid of a selfish ambition not dissimilar to my former craving for Commencement: the desire to be a perfect Student-Unionist. No good my withdrawing those criticisms now, as bad-tempered, specious, logic-chopping; no good my repudiating all of that flunkèd March-day’s work, false counsels of a false Grand Tutor. What they’d denied when I proposed it, they all affirmed, every one of my “Tutees,” it seemed, now I would recant; and the more I disavowed Grand-Tutorhood, the strongerly they countered, by word and deed, that disavowal. Max, Leonid, Anastasia, Peter Greene, the Sears, Croaker, Chancellor Rexford—and for aught I knew, Eblis Eierkopf, the brothers Hector, and Classmate X—all seemed to agree now that they had been flunked, Bray’s Certification to the contrary notwithstanding, even as in my ignorance I had declared—and that Stoker had been less so, or less truly aspirant to that condition, than he’d claimed to be. In the cases of Max and Leonid this had led to a bind. As to principle they were agreed: if the desire to sacrifice oneself, whether by martyrdom or in perfect selflessness, was selfish, and thus self-contradictory, then to attain that end one must not aspire to it. Further, they agreed—sometimes, at least—that not-aspiring, if conceived as a means to the same end, was morally identical with aspiring, and that imperfect selflessness, when deliberately practiced to avoid the vanity of perfection, became itself perfect, itself vain. Therefore, as best I could infer, they aspired to not-aspire to an imperfect imperfection, each in his way—and found themselves at odds. Would an unvain martyr stay on in Main Detention, Maios-like, even unto the Shaft, as Max was inclined to, or escape, given the chance, to continue his work in studentdom’s behalf? Leonid insisted, most often, that the slightly selfish (and thus truly selfless) choice was the latter, and offered “daily” to effect my keeper’s freedom by secret means.
To do this, I came to learn, was part of the assignment given him by his stepfather; but our conversation in the U.C. building and his discussions with Max had impaired Leonid’s singleness of purpose. His mission had been first to feign defection and then to get himself detained as a Nikolayan agent by discovering, as though inadvertently, an intent to kidnap some unnamed New Tammany scientist; thus much he had accomplished before my eyes, on the Black Friday of my Tutorhood. But this apparent frustration of his objective was part of the plan—for it was Max they wanted! Reasoning that his arrest for Moishiocausticide would turn Max against New Tammany, if his original cashiering hadn’t, the Nikolayan Department of Intelligence had chosen Leonid Alexandrov, because of his notorious way with locks, to rescue him from the Shaft and transport him across the Power Lines—yielding up his own life, if necessary, in the process. Not only had Leonid accepted the task enthusiastically, seeing in it a chance to redeem his errant past and earn Classmate X’s respect by proving his selflessness; he still maintained that the idea had been his own. But my remarks and Max’s moral speculations had led him to doubt. Leaving aside the merits of the collective Student Self and its ambitions, ought a truly selfless agent of that Self to carry out its wishes, knowing the vanity and selfishness of his motives in so doing? Or ought he to spoil the assignment, by merely setting Max free in New Tammany or returning empty-handed, and thereby achieve the selflessness of self-disgrace? That Max himself, whom he’d come to love second only to Classmate X, had no desire to work for Nikolay College or even to leave Main Detention, compounded the difficulty.
The truth was, neither doubted the way of his inclination, only its ultimate passèdness. Seeing liberty and the Shaft as equally vain, Max obviously preferred the Shaft—witness his remaining in jail even after he was convicted and sentenced. Leonid just as obviously wanted to rescue him, for all his concession that the wish might not be unselfish. Similarly, each claimed now that the other should have withdrawn to safety and left Croaker’s care to him, while freely acknowledging that it might be being “selfish” (that is, unselfish) to take the risk alone.
“For Founder’s sake, stop!” I cried to them when I could bear no more of this casuistry. “You’re both locked in anyhow. What difference does it make?”
“Bah, Goat-Boy!” Leonid shouted back at once. “Excuse! I love! But bah to you!” He was not angry, only vehement as always. For it must not be imagined that these endless debates were conducted coolly, in a spirit of logical exercise: Max, though calm, was intensely serious—it was, after all, a question of life or death for him—and Leonid was given to crushing embraces, respectful pummelings, shouts, tears, and loving lurches to accompany his reasoning. Now, in demonstration of his contempt for locks (they it was he bah’ed), he sprang to the cell-door and instantly had it open—the first such exercise of his talent in Main Detention. He stepped into my aisle, red-faced and triumphant.
“So!”
At once the other prisoners set up a clamor.
“Could release all!” he roared at them. “Simplicitity! Would like! But not!” Because, he confided to me at the top of his voice, he was merely a visitor in New Tammany College, and much as he objected to its curricular policies, he did not wish to act discourteously—besides, he’d not forgotten the consequence of his spree in the Nikolayan Zoo. “Come out, Dr. Spielman! Escapeness!”
Max shook his head, and in the end all three of us ministered to Croaker until his strength and appetites returned, whereupon we fled for safety to an adjoining cell. Thereafter Croaker alternated between reasonless animality and mindless vegetability. In the latter intervals we fed him his meals; in the former we bewore lest he make a meal of us. But whether because, stickless, I had no authority with him, or because like the others he’d taken to heart my disastrous first lesson, I could by no means control or even communicate with him. And so ill-ordered was Main Detention, we all might have perished at Croaker’s hands between lock-up times had there not been hosts of passive pederasts and suicidal drop-outs eager for abuse, who diverted him at great cost o
f limbs and fundaments, not all which Max’s skill could repair without medical equipment.
No point now in sifting causes why my old advisor was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting of Herman Hermann and sentenced to the maximum penalty. True it is that while Max himself would plead neither guilty nor otherwise to the charge (which would have gone uncontested but for our protests to his court-appointed lawyer), he affirmed in court his full confession, not only of the deed but of what he called “virtual” premeditation—by which adjective, lost I fear upon the jury, he seemed to mean a prior yen to persecute unknown to him until the crime (and whereof the deed was the single proof, I vainly testified). Moreover, he asked for the Shaft as the only palliative of his conscience—of the Moishian conscience!—which, he told the court, had centuries of flunkèd pride to atone for …
“We Moishians,” he testified, “we’ve had it coming, on account we’ve known all the time we are the Chosen Class!” Protests rose among the spectators, Moishians and non-Moishians alike. The Judge rapped his gavel. “Why passèder than the rest?” Max demanded, unimpressed. He touched his fingertips together and rocked his head. “On account we’re the only class knows how flunked we are!” The irony was too nice for most to follow and exasperating to the others; absent-minded with impatience, I chewed the straw fans issued us against the summer heat. The effect of such testimony as this was that reactionary, even Bonifacist elements in West Campus, who approved of capital punishment and had little use for Moishians, rallied to Max’s defense, arguing in effect that having condemned himself and his class, he might be let go. Their sympathy, of course, Max repudiated, and since only the most self-flagellant liberals could accept his notions of “guilty victimship” and “flunkèd passèdness,” he was left without effectual supporters—almost without sympathizers—and may be said to this extent to have chosen his fate.
But it is also true, alas, that both the issue of capital punishment itself and the question of Moishiocausticide had been being hotly argued in New Tammany just prior to the Hermann killing: the former on account of the then-rising crime-rate, which some attributed to “coddling the flunks”; the latter because two other former Bonifacists had been mysteriously kidnaped and killed since the expiration of Siegfrieder College’s statute of limitations for the trial of “crimes against studentdom.” Chancellor Rexford himself had formerly been inclined against the ancient practice of Shafting condemned men, but since initiating his Open Book reforms he’d ceased to press for repeal of that penalty. Conservative opinion, slow to condemn the Moishiocausts themselves and skeptical of the post-facto law forbidding “crimes against studentdom,” was quick to condemn the Moishiocausticides. The liberals—pro-Moishian and anti-Bonifacist—were deeply divided, for though they abhorred capital punishment generally and lynching in particular, they could not bear that the legal safeguards they themselves had struggled for over the terms should make it possible for Moishiocausts to escape retribution for their awful crimes. Much as they revered Max from terms gone by, they deplored his deed, and the manner of his “defense” even more; the whole matter anguished and embarrassed them; they fell out among themselves, husband and wife, teacher and pupil; in the end they stood by painfully, rather hoping Max would be acquitted, or at least not Shafted, but unable to come to his defense when he would not defend himself.
At the trial’s end everyone expected a verdict of guilty and the minimum sentence, in view of the defendant’s age and fame: a few terms’ detention followed by parole. Before the summation Max’s lawyer once again begged him to plead insanity and was of course refused. The jury retired, deliberated only a minute or two, and returned the expected verdict. Max stroked his beard, nodding assent; his lawyer, long out of patience with so uncooperative a client, clicked and clicked his ball-point pen. We looked Judgewards and were horrified to see him raise the black cowl, emblematic of capital sentence. Mildly, as if making a procedural point or recessing for lunch, he said to Max: “It is the sentence of this Court that you be taken from here to Main Detention and thence to Founder’s Hill, and the life Shafted out of you. Founder have mercy on your mind.”
Most were surprised; a few shocked. But who (Leonid excluded) could protest, when the defendant himself had asked for that sentence?
“Beside-the-pointcy!” Leonid shouted at me, back in our cells. “He wants Shaft like Mrs. Anastasia wants rapeness! Inside-outhood! Passitude!”
Before my own failure I would have agreed, and wept Leonidlike with frustrate love. But I could no longer judge anyone—except myself—or hold opinions on any head, or feel strongly any emotion but a dumb acknowledgment that I’d Failed All. “I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“Selfish, pfui!” Leonid cried at Max, in the idiom learned from him. “I take you to Classmate X! Old friend of you; him you listen! I take Shaft! Exchangeness!”
Max shook his head, adding that he’d never met Leonid’s stepfather.
“Don’t say!” the Nikolayan bellowed, grinning hugely, and commenced to flap his arms and pound us all upon the back. Was saving, he declared, for big surprisehood or last resortity, as the case should warrant: his stepfather was no native Nikolayan (Had we thought? Ha ha on us!), but a New Tammany Moishian whose parents had transferred out of Nikolay in the bad old days before Student-Unionism. What his original name was, no one knew except the Department of Intelligence, but as best Leonid could infer, he had worked with automatic computers in their infancy, during Campus Riot II; and subsequently, when New Tammany refused to share its electroencephalic secrets with its colleagues, he had defected to Nikolay College, liquidated his former self, and designed a counter-computer to preserve studentdom’s peace of mind from aggressive Informationalism.
Max’s face clouded as he listened, and my skin tingled; recalling now Classmate X’s curious emotion in the U.C. building at mention of my keeper’s name, I realized who he must be.
“Your old friend What’s-his-name!” I exclaimed to Max. “The one that helped you EAT the Amaterasus and then defected …”
“Chementinski?” Max frowned and plucked angrily at his beard. “Ach, impossible! Chementinski had no head for politics: a smart scientist, but a silly man.”
“Not silly!” Leonid shouted, and plunged to his knees before the bunk where Max lay resting.
“Silly and flunkèd, Leonid,” Max insisted quietly. “If he is your stepfather, and he sent you here to take my place, so I should defect like him—pfui, that proves it!”
“Untruthery!” Leonid’s protest was more distressèd than indignant. That Classmate X was indeed Max’s former colleague seemed beyond dispute: no one else in East Campus had had the practical knowledge required for EASCAC’s development, which Leonid knew his stepfather had directed. His later forsaking of mathematical for political science, and his formidable success in that department, was to be explained by the utter eradication of his earlier self (which might indeed have been silly and flunkèd); the successful replacement of his personal, fallible will with the Will of the Student Body, impersonal and infallible. So Leonid explained it, roaring earnestly; that one of his idols should dislike the other clearly anguished him as much as the capital sentence had, and I was surprised at the sternness with which Max refused to soften his opinion.
“What does Chementinski want me for?” he demanded. “He knows I’ve been out of Tower Hall all these years. I got no secrets any more; he knows that too. Why do you think he told you to get me instead of somebody useful, like Eblis Eierkopf?”
Tears streamed from Leonid’s eyes. “Loveship, sir! He loves, like me! Like George! Never mind Eierkopf!”
Max shook his head. “It’s not love.” More gently then, but uncompromisingly, he declared that the principal difference between himself and Chementinski was that the latter, while professing to love studentdom, had always been more or less repelled by individual students; whereas Max, devoted as he was to individual people, had always regarded studentdom in general as more stupid
, brutal, and vulgar than otherwise—or else a meaningless abstraction. The weakness of Max’s position, as he readily admitted, was that, since EATing the Amaterasus, he was unable to sacrifice anybody to the Common Good, in which he could no longer believe; thus he was unfit for administration. “But your Chementinski, this Classmate X: he could sacrifice everybody, himself too!”
“Not!” Leonid objected; but I confirmed Max’s opinion with Classmate X’s own statement to that effect, made to me in the U.C. building.
“How else could he sacrifice you?” Max demanded. “A son he should kill his own self for!”
“Good of the Union! My idea! Make-up test, for past!”
Max put a hand on Leonid’s shoulder and once more shook his head. Chementinski, he said sorrowfully, had ever been a most unstable fellow, driven by a succession of ideals in which he’d passionately wished to believe, and never satisfied with the genuineness of his commitment. His whole attitude during the EAT-project, Max remembered, had been a fierce self-justification: It was EAT or be EATen, wasn’t it? Better a few thousand Amaterasus in ten minutes than another two years of riot! It was for the sake of peace, freedom, and culture, wasn’t it? Not to mention pure science, and the deterrent against future campus riots … The effect of this constant questioning was that he’d talked himself out of his beliefs, come to regret his contribution to WESCAC (as had Max, for other reasons), and decided that only by arming both schools of thought with ultimate weaponry could peace of mind now be preserved. Hence his defection.
