by John Barth
But Leonid pointed with great emotion to his trouserfly and said distinctly: “I have screw Mrs. Anastasia my own self! Passèdness her! Flunkhood me!”
Greene leaped at him with a groan and they wrestled to the floor, Leonid cursing Greene for a blindness fool and Greene Leonid for a patch-eyed liar, nose-on-his-facewise. In vain Max and I hauled at them, lest they carry their new Tutoring too far; despite his recent fat and sloth Greene was formidably strong, as was his adversary. By the time Stoker unlocked the cell and nonchalantly fired his pistol near their heads, each had a thumb at the other’s good eye.
“No-good Student-Unionist!” Greene muttered as we drew them apart. “Telling filthy lies about the sweetest gal in New Tammany College!”
“Oy,” Max said.
“Blind other eye!” Leonid jeered. “Can’t see anyhow!”
“You’re the one’s blind,” Greene retorted. “Can’t tell a virgin from a flunking floozy!”
They would have set to again, but Stoker and I got between them and pushed Greene into the aisleway. Not that he gave a flunk which fool killed which, Stoker assured them; but he thought it a pity to waste the spectacle on so small an audience. “It’s time I threw another party at the Powerhouse,” he said. “I’ll let you fellows entertain us with an eye-gouging contest. Winner gets Stacey, loser gets Lacey.”
“He couldn’t tell the difference nowhow!” Greene said. “I wish I could give him my gosh-durn eyeball, let him see how blind he is!”
Leonid glared from the cell. “Me too you, if George didn’t say selfish like Ira Hector.”
“Say what you want!” Greene shouted. “Anyhow he’s not a Founderless Student-Unionist. Ira’s okay, when all’s said and done!”
“Like you, hah?”
“When you come right down to it! What the heck anyhow!”
“Goodbye, Georgie,” Max interrupted, and I realized that the cell was relocked, with only him and Leonid inside. “Founder help you, you should pass all now and don’t fail anything.”
I pressed the hand that fetched my purse and stick to me, urged him to remember that Failure and Passage were inseparable and equally unreal, and exhorted him to choose between the Shaft and freedom without considering the purity of his motives. Leonid too, his quick wrath gone, I shook warm hands with, and repeated my advice to him.
“All confuse,” he sighed. “But I ask Dr. Spielman. Good luck you, Goat-Boy!”
Stoker acted surprised. “Did you think you were going somewhere, George?”
I smiled. “I’m going to visit your brother Lucky, among other things, to show him how to pass. Will you drive me to the Light House?”
Stoker threw his head back to hoot as in term past, but his laugh, owing perhaps to the iron acoustics, rang shrill. And he strode off, Greene trudging after, without attempting to rejail me. I wished Max and Leonid final peace of mind, and requested of them also that they do what they could to curb Croaker’s appetites, either by instruction or by directly intercepting his food. For I saw the error of my flunking the “Eierkopf” in him and the “Croaker” in Eierkopf—as if the seamless University knew aught of such distinctions!—and therefore I would that he embrace and affirm what I’d bade him suppress, if he could be taught to.
“Yes, well,” Max said dryly. “I think of something. I got a whole day.”
3.
“Want me to stick him in Solitary on bread and water?” Stoker had come part-way back after all, smirking, to hear me. I waved bye-bye to my cellmates and walked past him towards Peter Greene, who waited in the open gate at the end of the aisle.
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said over my shoulder. “But you shouldn’t do it.” In fact, I added lightly when he overtook me, he should rather try to thwart my plans for Croaker than further them, just as he should refuse the embrace which I hoped the Chancellor would soon proffer him.
“You don’t need a pardon,” Stoker said. “You need a strait-jacket, like Heddy Sear’s!”
I smiled. “You shouldn’t even drive me to the Light House, actually. Pete can do it. Anyhow, your brother will come to you, if he takes my advice.”
Greene allowed as how he’d count it an honor to chauffeur me, I’d so eased his mind; but he begged leave to seek out Anastasia first and apologize for having confused her with her flunkèd twin. As for Georgina—
“Bugger Georgina!” Stoker said impatiently.
Greene drew a pill from his jeans, swallowed it with dignity, and replied that he was happy he’d not sunk to such unnatural practices, nor for that matter succumbed in any other wise to the carnal blandishments of O.B.G.’s naughty daughter, since he knew it to be written somewhere in the Old or New Syllabus that whites and blacks belonged in different classes. Did we suppose he could look his Sally Ann straight in the eye, reconciliationwise, or salute the College pennant at the next Junior Enochist cookout, if his conscience weren’t clean as a hound’s tooth? Sure, he’d raised his share of heck, as what fellow hadn’t, but—
Stoker fired a bullet into the air (we were crossing now the twilit exercise-yard) and promised to put another between Greene’s eyes should he not at once close his mouth and vanish. He then reminded me—as Greene sprinted zigzag toward the main gate—that he himself was neither blind like Gynander nor half-blind and half-witted like my former cellmates; he saw quite clearly what my game was and had no mind to play it.
I wiped my stick-mirror clean with the sleeve of my detention-coat and pretended to hide a smile. “You mean my playing Dean o’ Flunks with you back in March? I didn’t expect that old trick to work once, much less twice.” I took him to mean that I was advising him not to chauffeur me to Great Mall in order to tempt him, Dean-o’-Flunks-like, to do it, since to follow my counsel would pass him, presumably, and I knew he wished to flunk. No such idea had in fact occurred to me; but once he suggested it I decided to pretend I’d done the like (that is, the opposite) in my earlier “Tutorship”—as truly I had, but by no means a-purpose.
Guards opened the gate for us, and I prickled with joy to step outside the walls, for the first time in I knew not yet how long. Greene’s motorcycle roared from a row of parked ones and up the road—in what seemed to me the wrong direction, though I couldn’t read the roadsign in the dim light.
Stoker squinted. “You’re telling me you tricked me before so I’ll think you didn’t,” he said carefully. “But the joke’s on you.”
“Oh?”
“I knew all along that Pass and Fail aren’t opposites—didn’t I tell you Passage is Failure?—but I also knew you knew I’d try to trick you into flunking. So I told you they were the same so you’d believe I thought they were different and come to think so yourself. Why else do you think I pretended to take your advice?”
“I know why you took it,” I replied, and grinned, hoping to confuse him with inversions-of-inversions long enough to work out the right ones for myself. “What you don’t know, when I tell you Failure is Passage, is whether I want you to believe it is because it isn’t or isn’t because it is.”
Stoker grinned also—not easily, it seemed to me—and added as though carelessly: “—or is because it is, eh? Or isn’t because it isn’t …”
I perspired, and he exploited his advantage at once. “Don’t forget, boy: whichever you believe, you may believe because I tricked you into it.”
Grimly I retorted: “And if you did, the joke may be on you.” But it was not a confident riposte, and I could only hope he’d think its lameness deliberately feigned.
“Always assuming I don’t want the joke to be on me,” he mocked. I’d have lost my hold entirely at this point had it not swept suddenly, bracingly through me, like the frigid breeze we stood in, that if Failure and Passage was in truth a false distinction, as I’d come to believe, then it made no difference whether that belief was true or false, as either way it was neither. How hopelessly innocent I’d used to be! Instead of trying to outwit Stoker, therefore—by replying “Exactly,” for example—I
resolved to outwit him by not trying to. I paused beside the first parked motorcycle and said without expression or emotion: “Take me to Great Mall.”
He hesitated for the briefest moment—during which, I imagined, a herd of pluses and minuses locked horns—then he mounted the cycle, started the engine … and surprised me after all by moving off, not only impassively but without a word! In a cold sweat of doubt I sprang on behind him, and desperately bet everything on candor.
“You’ve got me so mixed up I’m sweating!” I called as we throttled away. He said nothing. But a few seconds later I smelled another sweat besides my own.
The air was freezing, the campus brown and bare; I shivered for want of fleece. I’d thought it dusk, but a pale day dawned as we raced along: a winter’s morning, then, and Max had thirty-six hours of life unless he defected. Had I been three seasons in Main Detention, or three-years-and-three? An hour we rode, without a word, through fallow research-arable and shuttered residential quads. Few people were about. Preoccupied with wondering whether I was headed for Great Mall or being taken deliberately out of my way, I gave no thought to any order of business until a familiar scene surprised me: under a great bare elm sat The Living Sakhyan, oblivious to the weather, looking for all the campus as though He’d not moved since the day of my fiasco. And a few trees on, a black-furred man upon a bench alternately cowered and shook his thin fist at a gang of male students, who pressed about him in sheepfleece coats and belabored him with placards stuck on sticks.
I tapped Stoker’s back. “Stop here a minute, would you?”
He would not, until I accused him of trying mistakenly to flunk me because he mistakenly believed in my Grand-Tutorhood—“As if you weren’t right!” I added with a chuckle, just in case. He slowed down, perhaps only to deliberate, but when I jumped off he stopped the engine and waited, a-scowl and a-twitch.
“Help!” Ira Hector called. But I went directly to The Living Sakhyan, squatted before Him in His wise, and unpursed my chewed Assignment.
“Robbery!” Ira cried.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said to The Living Sakhyan. “I want to thank You for the disappeared ink You gave me some terms ago, and apologize for criticizing You before.”
His expression did not change, nor did He give any other indication of having heard me. Except for His smile, and my vast new understanding, I might have thought Him dead.
“Help me, Goat-Boy!” Ira shrieked.
“I know this sounds foolish,” I went on, “but I actually used to think I was the Grand Tutor! And I couldn’t understand why You didn’t try to save my friend G. Herrold—remember the fellow in George’s Gorge?—or why You didn’t help Anastasia when Croaker was attacking her, or Ira Hector when those Beists were bothering him. I thought You must be as bad off as Dr. Eierkopf, up in the Belfry; that’s how naïve I used to be!”
The Living Sakhyan made no sign, even when I leaned closer and explained that I understood Him now that I’d abandoned my claim to Grand-Tutorship. Since Passage and Failure were not different except as the deluded mind of studentdom made them so, what booted it to snatch a man from the torrent, a woman from the tup? As if passèd works brought the mind any closer to Truth! To withdraw from the trials and errors of this campus, sit under an elm, and meditate upon the unutterable Answer—that was the way to Commencement Gate, I saw now, the sole Way, and I meant to follow His example as soon as I flunked WESCAC.
“That’s why I’ve come to You, sir,” I declared: “I suspect Dr. Bray might be a Grand Tutor, but I know You are, and I’d like to check out my Assignment with You, if You don’t mind. I think I see why I failed it before …”
I took His silence for permission. Behind me I heard running footsteps and Ira Hector’s feeble curses. “Did you get it?” a student called, and another shouted that he had: “When the sun comes up it’ll be 7 A.M., Saturday, December 20!”
“It’s a lie!” cried Ira. “Arrest them, Stoker!”
“Hey, a cop!” the same student warned, apparently seeing Stoker for the first time. “Go limp!” The others rebuked him for having extorted by force the information they needed, not because robbery was against the law—everybody knew that the laws were made to protect the privileged—but because the use of force was contrary to the principles of their group. “So I’m a Student-Unionist infiltrator,” the fellow laughed. “We got what we wanted, didn’t we?” He warned Stoker not to touch him or he’d shout Brutality.
“Go flunk yourself,” Stoker growled, still evidently preoccupied with our debate. “The day I touch you, you’ll have plenty to holler about.”
Some of the students then fell to arguing whether the forcible expulsion of violent elements from their ranks would violate the principle of non-violence; others, whether non-violence as a means had not become an end in itself with them, and thus a contradiction of its own premise that ends never justified means. The dispute was heated but peaceful; no agreement was reached.
“Hey, look,” someone interrupted: “it’s the GILES! Let’s go limp over there and ask Him.”
It seemed that my lynching and detention, so far from shaking their confidence in me, had redoubled it. In fact (as I observed when they flopped around The Living Sakhyan’s elm), I was now as much their hero as He—perhaps more so, considering their emulation. Beards they’d had before, but now they all wore sandals like mine and fleecy coats—sheepskin, admittedly, and cut too short to be worn without trousers, but the closest they could come to a mohair wrapper. What’s more, they leaned upon their staves as upon a crook, as well as using them to carry placards. These last were blank.
They greeted me respectfully but enthusiastically. Had the Administration seen its error and pardoned me? they wanted to know. Was I aware how many folksongs and free-verse poems my lynching had inspired, despite the Administration’s efforts to suppress them on grounds of obscenity? Did I know of the “sleep-ins” staged in my behalf and wrongfully slandered by the right-wing press as “sleep-arounds,” though the only fornication had been by neo-Bonifacist provocateurs of both sexes? Did I approve of Carte-blanchisme, their current cause, which aimed at nothing less than Freedom From Everything?
“That’s not what it means to me,” objected one of their number. “To me, Carte-blanchisme is a blanket protest against the great Nothing.”
This interpretation struck many of his classmates as heretical and was therefore warmly applauded, though one bright fellow remarked that “the great Nothing” was exactly what Sakhyanism aimed at, and a brighter observed that, since the great Nothing was equivalent to Everything, and Freedom From Everything meant Freedom For Everything, the two interpretations of their cause were not mutually exclusive.
“Syncretist,” someone muttered.
“Look here,” I said cordially, and they fell silent at once. “I’m much obliged for your good opinion of me, even though you’re mistaken. I’m not the Grand Tutor; I failed my Assignment before because I took WESCAC on its own terms. That’s what I want to consult The Living Sakhyan about, if you’ll excuse me …”
They withdrew a little way, but begged permission to listen in on the dialogue, and I found the lot of them too lively and agreeable, on the whole, and their admiration too flattering, to refuse them. I was surprised to see that my denial of Grand-Tutorhood disturbed them not at all; of course I denied it, they exclaimed in whispers; Grand-Tutorhood was a concept, like any other; if I didn’t deny it I wouldn’t be Grand Tutor! Didn’t my criticism of WESCAC make that clear? They alluded to the parable of Milo and Sophie the heifer: to pass, one must flunk the Examiner …
As at our previous encounter, I was impressed by their acuteness; indeed, I remembered now that some of their remarks in that earlier term could be said to have anticipated my present position. They’d understood some things better than I—though perhaps less well than I did now—and their commentary on my remarks invariably enlarged my understanding—to the point where I felt that same commentary vaguely deficient.
“Didn’t I tell you?” someone whispered triumphantly. “Attack the terms of the problem!” And before his classmates could shush him he alarmed me (since the slogan he quoted was exactly what I had in mind) by adding, “But isn’t it only WESCAC’s old MALI circuitry that that would apply to? How can Wescacus malinoctis be a symbol of Differentiation?” It was an objection I’d not myself considered. Fortunately another student hissed, “So what’s this MALI and NOCTIS? Another set of arbitrary categories!”
This silenced the troubled one, and eased my own mind. “He’ll reinterpret the terms of His Assignment,” the same fellow said confidently. I decided to do just that, with The Living Sakhyan’s aid.
“It says Fix the Clock,” I began. “Before, I thought fix meant ‘repair,’ but Dr. Eierkopf’s gadget seems to have stopped the clock completely, so I guess I was mistaken. What does it mean?”
My admirers fell again into the disputation they could never resist, and with the help of The Living Sakhyan’s silence I was able to overhear them. My spring-term fiasco, they understood, had been a deliberate bad example, for pedagogical purposes; it went without saying that I’d known all along that fix could as easily mean “fix in position,” for example, to one not bound by conventional assumptions—was that not what my pretended failure to repair the clock had in fact accomplished? I listened amazed. Moreover, they pointed out to each other, by thus fixing the escapement in position I’d been able to complete my Assignment “in no time,” so to speak; surely the implications of the metaphor were clear!
“But if it goes without saying that He knew all this,” the troubled fellow inquired, “why’s He asking The Living Sakhyan?”
“Because it does go without saying!” another said. “You don’t hear The Sakhyan answering, do you?”
Delightedly I pressed on: “End the Boundary Dispute: Now obviously I was wrong to think that meant make our Power Lines clearer, wasn’t I? Did WESCAC mean some other kind of Boundary?”
