by John Barth
“What happened since, I don’t know,” Max concluded. “But he knew I didn’t believe what he did, and it always upset him when I thought he was wrong. If Chementinski thinks we got to EAT the Amaterasus once, he can’t stand it anybody smart should disagree; if he defects to East Campus, we all got to defect, so he shouldn’t wonder was it flunked or passed. That’s why he wants me there, Leonid; he can’t convince himself he did right.”
“Unselfnessness!” Leonid bawled. “He’s most unvainestest there is!” He glared imploringly at me. “Talk once, George!”
“I think Max is right,” I said. I told him then what I’d learned from Classmate X himself: that he had deliberately led his stepson to believe that he was not forgiven for the zoo-escapade, and could redeem himself in his stepfather’s eyes only by expending himself to capture Max. I expected angry denials—would scarce have dared the information had we not been in separate cells, and was prepared, in self-defense, to force his agreement, if necessary, by reminding him that it would be vain to claim the inspiration himself. But Leonid came to the bars, cheeks wet, and asked merely: “Is it true, Goat-Boy? He didn’t hate? Ever since?”
“I swear it. He only pretended. He knew you’d do anything to please him …”
“His own son!” Max snorted. “To prove his selflessness! Ach, that Chementinski!”
But Leonid cried, “Passèdhoodness!” and, indifferent to his gulling, danced a wild step about the cell, so relieved was he that his stepfather had not been angry with him after all. It was some time before Max could declare his conviction that any man who sacrificed his own son thus calculatingly, for whatever cause, was incapable not only of anger but of any emotion whatever, especially love. I might have agreed, with some reservations (for while Classmate X had revealed himself to me as far from cold-blooded with regard to his stepson, the deliberate sacrifice of him in the name of Selflessness seemed to me therefore all the more monstrously vain)—but Leonid was seized at this point with a new violent emotion.
“I love!” he shouted tearfully. “Full of selfity, me!” His problem, from what I could make of his exclamations, was that despite his best efforts he was yet a million versts from the impersonality he aspired to, and of which Classmate X was the faultless exemplar. He loved his stepfather, Max, Anastasia, me—he loved everyone he’d ever met, except a few whom he hated, and thus despaired of ever earning Classmate X’s love—which of course it was but further selfishness for him to crave!
“Hopelesshood!” From the pocket of his prison-trousers he suddenly snatched a little bottle, not unlike the container of disappeared ink bestowed on me by Sakhyan’s colleagues. But this was full of a realer fluid, some of which he swallowed and began at once to strangle triumphantly upon.
“Hooray! Eradicationness! Goodbye me!”
Max made feeble haste to stay him as soon as we realized what he was doing, but Leonid worked his skill upon the doorlock and deftly slipped out into the aisle, where once again he tipped the bottle to his lips. His face purpled.
“No more me!” he croaked. “Tell Mrs. Anastasia I love!” Max and other prisoners shouted for a guard; as was sometimes the case, none was about. Leonid fell; yet even curling on the floor he made to drink again that deadly draught, to insure his end.
“Verboten!” Max pleaded, hopping like a cagèd dwarf. “Stop him once, George, he shouldn’t swallow!”
Leonid, supine, had decided to wave one arm and sing as he expired. “Releasedom! Freehood! Death to Selfity!” He put the bottle to his mouth.
Distressed as I was to see him perish, I would I fear have only watched, and that not merely because I was locked in. But something in his words, more than the emergency itself, got through the torpor I had dwelt in since my noosing. My head cleared miraculously; I saw not just Leonid’s plight but his error—and more! In no time at all I was beside him in the aisle; had seized the bottle and was forcing air into his mouth—for he had ceased to breathe. Then, thinking better, I released Max for that work and went to fetch help, running four-footed for speed and letting myself without hesitation through half a dozen barred doors on the way. No guards were on duty; so lax was their warden’s discipline, and so many the obstacles to our freedom, they often loitered in the exercise-yard or gathered in the cells of wanton lady girls. The first official I encountered was Stoker himself, and that not until I’d climbed to the highest tier of cells, at ground-level: those reserved theoretically for apathetic C-students and professors too open-minded to have opinions. At sight of me Stoker smiled, stepped aside, and indicated with his arm the final gate, which opened into the Visitation Room and thence to the offices and freedom, as if inviting me to continue on my way.
“It’s you I was looking for,” I said.
“How droll. I was just coming for you. You have visitors.”
I explained the emergency. Amused, Stoker sniffed the deadly bottle, now only half full, and returned it to me.
“Ink eradicator,” he scoffed. “How’d you ever get past all those locks, George?”
I dashed impatiently to the barred door of the Visitation Room, resolved to find a doctor myself if Stoker would not send one. Inside I saw my mother, accompanied as always by Anastasia. But whether because this last lock was different from the others or because Stoker’s question made me realize that I had no idea how I’d got where I was, I found myself unable to pass through.
“Help me, man!” I demanded. “Were those other doors unlocked?”
Stoker winked and replied lightly, “No door’s locked if you’ve got the key.” He found the correct one on his ring. “Stop fidgeting: my wife knows what to do until the doctor comes.”
I had forgot My Ladyship was a nurse. Gravely she greeted me, coolly Stoker, who reported the news and solicited her aid in a manner so full of dears and pleases that I thought he mocked her. But her reply was frosty and overbearing—“Don’t just stand there while the fool dies; get him up here!”—and Stoker hastened so to oblige her, I could only conclude that their relations really had changed character. She took charge of the situation, ordering Stoker to bring Leonid to the prison infirmary while she prepared an emetic and summoned a physician. I was told to stay with “Mother” (as Anastasia still called Lady Creamhair, out of habit) and reluctantly consented: someone had to be with her, her mind had failed so, and Anastasia was grown very cross indeed when opposed, especially by a male. Besides which, I was the only one of us not necessary to Leonid’s rescue—a sore consideration, as I had got him into his bind and felt on the verge now of understanding how he might be set free of it. Off went the pair of them on their errands, Anastasia scolding her husband out of earshot. The barred partitions of the Visitation Room were left open; I might have exited from Main Detention even without that gift of Leonid’s which momentarily I’d seemed to possess, or Bray’s proffered amnesty. But though my new clarity persisted, like a light in an empty room where something is about to appear, and my intellectual coma happily showed no signs of returning, I did not leave, not just then, but sighed and turned to Mother, whom I knew I would find watching me with reverent joy. Crossleggèd on the floor, black-shawled and -dressed, the New Syllabus on her lap as always, she flapped at me her thrice-weekly peanut-butter sandwich and crooned, “Come, Billy! Come, love! Come!”
Anxious as I was for my Nikolayan cellmate, I laid my head in her lap, pretended to hunger for the ritual food, and chewed the pages of antique wisdom she tore out for me, though they tasted sourly of much thumbing.
“Now then, love, let me see …” She adjusted her spectacles, brightly licked her forefingertip, and opened the book to a dogeared page. “People ought to use bookmarks!” she fussed. “And there’s a verse marked, too. People shouldn’t mark in library-books.” Her tone softened. “Oh, but look what it is, Billikins: I’m so proud of the things you write!”
Such was her gentle madness, she thought me at once Billy Bocksfuss in the hemlock-grove, the baby GILES she’d Bellied—and, alas, the long Co
mmencèd Enos Enoch.
“Passèd are the flunked,” she read, very formally. “My, but that’s a nice thought. Don’t you think?”
I didn’t answer, not alone because my tongue was peanut-buttered, but because those dark and famous words from the Seminar-on-the-Hill brought me upright. As lightning might a man bewildered, they showed me in one flash the source and nature of my fall, the way to the Way, and, so I imagined, the far gold flicker of Commencement Gate.
2.
I sprang from Mother’s lap. “Passèd are the flunked, Mom!”
Like an old Enochist at the end of a petition, she touched her temples, closed her eyes, and murmured, “A-plus, dear Founder!”
Commencèd woman; womb that bore me! No matter, how much she grasped of her own wisdom: Truth’s vessel needn’t understand its contents. When I said—to myself, really—“Bray’s not the enemy; WESCAC is!” she replied, “Your passèd father, Gilesey; and He loves me yet,” as if I’d praised instead of blamed that root and fruit of Differentiation. Yet when I exclaimed, “They were all passed, every one, and didn’t know it—but I failed them!” she repeated, “Passèd are the flunked. A-plus!” and one more scale fell from my eyes. I yearned to be alone, to study the paradox of my new Answer; then to begone, that I might set right my false first Tutoring. Frustrate, I hugged her whom I could not leave, and she bade me comfortably: “Never mind Pass and Fail. Hug your mother.”
Commencèd dame! I laughed and groaned at once. There in a word was the Way: Embrace! What I had bid my Tutees shuck—false lines in their pictures of themselves, which Bray in his wisdom had Certified—I saw now to be unshuckable: nay, unreal, because falsely distinguished from their contraries. Failure is passage: Stoker had said wiselier than he knew that dire March morning; had spoken truth, and thus had lured me to my error—that distinction of Passage and Failure from which depended all my subsequent mistakes. Even him I’d failed, then, by his own dark lights, inasmuch as the receipt for flunkage I’d laid on him, opposite of my other counsels, was perforce the one true Passage-Way. Embrace!
When at last My Ladyship and Stoker returned, he skulking long-faced as she nagged, I hurried to embrace them both at once. Stoker grunted; Anastasia was as unbending as a herdsman’s crook. When I bussed at her she turned her cheek; I let go her husband and kissed her full in the mouth, pricked with desire for the first time since my failure. She struck my face—as I rather expected she might in her recent character—and I cuffed her in return such an instant smiling square one, to her whole surprise, that she whooped and lost all poise: wet her uniform, and went slack when I hugged her soft again.
“Really, old man,” Stoker complained. “My wife, you know. What’s come over you?”
Intoned my mother: “A-plus!”
“I’ve been wrong about everything!” I declared happily. “Never mind! Is Leonid all right?” Before anyone could answer I kissed whimpering Anastasia again—she was quite glasseyed now and limp—and might even have mounted her, so full I was of yen and new plans for her passage. But her menses were on her, my buckly nose reported, and other business pressed, so I forwent lust for exposition. Leonid’s drink, Stoker said, was a multipurpose eradicator used by spies in the falsification of credentials and the elimination of either their enemies or themselves, as the case should warrant. It had been pumped out of him in time, and except for a headache, and the delusion that Anastasia had kissed him back from death, he was quite recovered.
“Some nerve!” Stoker said. “I had to talk her into doing that mouth-to-mouth business, and then he says a thing like that.”
Anastasia, dumb, now sat in her pissèd dress beside my mother. I seized and kissed her hand, whereat she wept for very fuddlement.
“Leonid’s right about you!” I told her warmly. “You were passèd before I Tutored you. You should love him!” She shook her head. “You should love everybody, even more than before! Never mind what they’re after! Forget what I said last time!”
She shut her eyes and wailed.
“Open your legs again, like the old days!” I commanded her. “Let the whole student body in! I thought I saw through you before, but I’ve got to start from scratch!”
Stoker protested that I’d have to scratch someone else’s wedded roommate, not his—unless of course Anastasia wanted to oblige me, in which case he must regretfully defer to her wishes.
“Stop that passèd talk!” I cried, and laughed and struck his arm. “That bad advice I gave you was the best on campus! Passage is failure, just as you told me—but Passèd are the flunked, too! Thinking they’re different is what flunked me!” He was far from convinced, but I would say no more on the matter then. I asked whether Bray’s offer to pardon me still stood.
“I should say not,” Stoker answered. There had been, it seemed, two conditions attached to my release, one presumably impossible for me, the other repugnant to Stoker: all the signatures would need to be deleted from my ID-card, including those in indelible ink, and Anastasia would have not only to submit to the “Grand Tutor” (I used the imaginary quotation-marks uncynically now) but to bear a child by him. “ ‘A real little human kindergartener,’ he said he wanted,” Stoker said angrily. “I should’ve horsewhipped him!”
“You should have!” I cried joyfully. “And you would have, before I misled you. But listen—” I knelt and embraced My Ladyship once more, despite her wails and wet. “I was as wrong about Bray as I was about you. There is something special about him … In any case you must let him service you, no matter what his terms are—and everybody else, too! Take on the whole University!”
She may not have heard me above her bawling. Mother clapped her hands and cried “A-plus!” after each of my injunctions, rocking in a rhythm. Stoker fussed.
“Don’t act so passèd!” I exhorted him. “Hit me, if you want to! Pimp for your wife! Set dogs on Mother!”
“A-plus!” that lady said, whom I would not for the campus have seen harmed.
“You’re stir-crazy,” Stoker grumbled, nonetheless plainly unsettled. “You talk as if True and False were different Answers.”
“And they’re not!” I cried. “That’s the Answer! My whole mistake was to think they were different—so that’s what you’ve got to think, if you really want to flunk!”
We spoke no more then, because Stoker, to my great satisfaction, lost his temper and collared me cellwards. “Pass All Fail All!” I cried to the tiers of flunks. “It’s the same thing!”
Stoker took a billy from a passing guard and clubbed me dumb.
As if, in that timeless cave, time’s lost track had doubled on itself, I woke again to the voices of Max and Leonid arguing:
“Would-notship, Classmate, sir!”
“Na, my boy, you’re mistaken …”
“But you think was wrong, that suicideness?”
“That’s what George thought, Leonid. Why else should he stop you? And I agree: to kill yourself it’s selfish.”
“Flunkhoodship, then! I be a big selfish! I defection! Big spy for Informationalists, Ira Hector pays me! And bribe Lucky Rexford you don’t get Shaft!”
“You see, my friend? Still being unselfish! And if I escaped I’d still be playing the Moishian martyr, like Georgie said.”
“So bah!” Leonid cried. “So I be vain my own self; you defect, I get Shaft, my name in all Nikolayan historybooks! Hooray me!”
“By you it wouldn’t be vanity, never mind how you say. By me it would, whether I take the Shaft or don’t. I got Moishian motives either way. Ach, I hate this!”
“Me too.”
I rubbed my head and sat up. “Never mind motives.”
As before, they welcomed me back to the waking campus.
Max especially was devoted thereafter, and respectful in a way I found unsettling as much as gratifying: as if, now I no longer thought myself Grand Tutor, he was finally able to imagine I was. My other Tutees, those I’d seen and heard of who had inclined to Bray and doubted me, appeared to have
reversed their attitudes in view of the flunkèd state I’d led them to, or led them to see, and doubted now the one who’d called them passed. Their problem, as some saw and others didn’t, was complex: if Bray’s Certifications were false, how reconcile his Certifying me for having declared them so? And if I was true, how assimilate my self-flunkage and late defense of Bray? Only Max was untroubled by the conundrum: “All the better it don’t make sense,” he would say to Leonid, My chill Ladyship, or Peter Greene, who sometimes now visited. “So it’s a mystery, you shouldn’t analyze.”
He was become my best apologist, if not my best Tutee. For though Anastasia wept and protested my new counsel, especially regarding her connection with Bray, it was not long before Stoker told me (with a wink, as in former times) that the two conditions of my release might soon be reduced to one: he’d observed his wife against the bars on another level, tearfully urging the foul-mouthed inmates to have at her, and while they’d been too awed and suspicious to go to it, there could be no doubt but her attitude had changed. Whereas Max, who explained me better than I could myself, had trouble practicing the new preachment he so well glossed. Stoker I was pleased to see become once more a kind of Dunce’s advocate; he came down frequently now to bait us and found in Max a willing fish, who however was by no means easy to land.
“They’re both fakes,” Stoker would declare of Bray and me.
“Falseness!” Leonid would reply. “WESCAC didn’t EAT, yes?”
