John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"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 caged 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. Cross-legged 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-Commencèd 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.

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.