John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

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 Similarly, each claimed now that the other should have withdrawn to safety and left Croaker's care to him, while freely acknowledging that it might be being "selfish" (that is, unselfish) to take the risk alone.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. "Simplicity! 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 of 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!"