John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"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 instructions, 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."

"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.