John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"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 flunkèd, 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.