John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Which all proves," he would conclude, "you take or leave on faith a Grand Tutor, don't ask it should be on His ID-card who He is. Even if He says His own self He's a fake, and people call Him crazy, He might be the real thing, you got to decide. I believe in George."

Stoker feigned disgust. "Then you must believe he's not the Grand Tutor and Bray is, since that's what George says himself."

Undismayed, Max explained what I'd not fully realized I felt until I heard him: first, that all I claimed for Bray was that he wasn't simply flunked, as I'd previously believed: there was something extraordinary, out of the merely human, about him — as about myself, in both my parentage and my kidship. Second, that my admitted failure applied only to my efforts at Tutoring before I myself had passed the Finals and thus had no bearing on my present authenticity. If indeed those efforts were failures, which had successfully revealed to my Tutees such flunkèd aspects of themselves…

"Me it sure did!" Leonid cried dolefully. "Such a selfiness I never thought! But I don't care!"

"Nuts," said Stoker. "A man that tells me I should pimp for my wife is a Grand Tutor? And tells her to spread her legs for the whole campus?"

Max nodded, unimpressed. "You he tells that, you should do like the Dean o' Flunks, and hope to pass on account you show others what is it to be flunked. Only you'll flunk on account you lead them to think Pass and Fail aren't two sides the same page. Which they are. So dear Anastasia, that she has a little touch nymphomaniac, she's got to express it instead of suppress, she should Commence. Not so, George?"

And I would merely nod, for though I followed these explications with care and often saw flaws in them (which I couldn't always have articulated), I did not choose to defend or explain myself to Stoker — or to anyone else except myself. My whole concern was to feel a way through the contradictions of my new Answer, in order to apply it to the several problems of my Tutees when I should leave Main Detention. Therefore I gravely listened, but spoke only now and then to clarify a point or correct a misunderstanding. When for example Stoker asked why I didn't simply walk out of his prison, since I seemed able to open any door, Max's reply was that I wouldn't work wonders at the tempting of the Dean o' Flunks.

"That's not quite so," I corrected him, "as Stoker knows. If it were, he could control me absolutely by tempting me to do the right thing." The fact was, I said, I hadn't the least idea how I'd opened those doors, though I felt obliged to Leonid for the ability. All I knew was that for me, just then, they'd been unlocked, as for Leonid all locks ever seemed to be, and that once I wondered how the thing was done, I couldn't do it. It was Anastasia who would set me free, I said… and Classmate X.

"What's this?" Max exclaimed. "Chementinski sets you loose?"

Leonid happily squeezed the breath from me, thinking I planned to defect, then frowned and wondered if such "selfishness" (his current interpretation of the move, and a term of approval by his recentest transvaluation) weren't flunkèdly unselfish: "Like I, I can't get rid of selfish, I'm wear it like a uniform: hooray Me! Spy for New Tammany or take Shaft for Max sir, whichever is selfestest."

I praised his resolve, which like the contradiction of his suicide-attempt had lit the way for my late insight into the secret of the University. But he must not worry, I added, whether my program or his own might lead to "failure": as the author of Taliped Decanus understood, there is only failure on this campus — but as Enos Enoch and the original Sakhyan knew further, Failure is Passage.

In any case, I wasn't thinking of defection. I didn't suppose I could defect, actually, since I was only a kind of visitor in New Tammany in the first place. What I was thinking of I demonstrated some time later, when Stoker came down with my stick, my purse, Peter Greene, and pieces of news.

"It won't do you any good," he said, "but I'm supposed to give you your things and turn you loose if you clear your ID-card. Which of course you can't."

I took my possessions joyfully. The other condition, then, had been met?

"It's been arranged," Stoker said dryly. "My wife will meet Bray in the Belfry at eleven o'clock tonight."

Max groaned, but nodded affirmation. "Failure is Passage. A-plus!"

Tears stood in Leonid's eyes. "Commencedomship!" He put his arm around me and declared that while he could not but adore, with each breath he drew, the woman who'd inspired him from the grave, he would no longer dream that she might requite him, but rather that she and I would one day wed. "Never mind you!" he roared at Stoker, whose grin suggested to me that he himself might have arranged My Ladyship's engagement. Anastasia, said Leonid, deserved no less a husband than the very GILES, whom in turn no mate would serve but the passèdest.

I listened uncomfortably. "The fact is, Leonid — "

"You mean the flunkèdest," Peter Greene interrupted. "Durnedest floozy in the whole flunking College. Not that I care!"

The change in Peter Greene's manner, which had begun with his attack on Anastasia and grown during his detention, was now in full flower. So far from admiring My Ladyship for not pressing the charge of rape, he took her admissions as proof of her depravity, and had decided that all women were trollops at heart, and he himself an "All-U failure, know-thyselfwise." Thus persuaded, he'd advised his wife's attorneys of his intention to forsake her permanently, and invited her to divorce him on the grounds of adultery if she preferred not to wait the required two semesters; he supplied her with full particulars not only of his rape of Anastasia but also of his current activities, sexual and otherwise, and that catalogue, perhaps, had fetched her back into the Infirmary. Though he'd not after all defected to the Nikolayans, he was become a Student-Unionist "fellow scholar" and something of a Beist as well. He smoked hempen cigarettes, went barefoot and unbarbered, carried a guitar on which with rude skill he played songs of lower-form protest, and said of The Living Sakhyan: "Man, he's got the gosh-durn most, what I mean wise wise." He had even taken a Frumentian lady roommate, Stoker's secretary Georgina, whom he claimed to admire for her straightforwardness: she enjoyed fornication for its own flunkèd sake, he said, but loathed him personally, as he loathed himself, and slept with him mainly to relish the spectacle of his impotence. For where in the past he had been of limp manhood with Miss Sally Ann (so much so that he now feared their children were of extramarital paternity), and potent only with "the likes of O.B.G.'s daughter," currently he found himself prone to failure with the wanton Georgina, but tumesced at the mere idea of a proper faithful wife, such as once he'd fondly thought was his.

"She weren't nothing but a floozy, though," he would declare, "like Stacey Stoker and all the rest. Onliest decent gal I ever knew was old O.B.G.'s daughter — which I went and drug her in the muck anyhow, back in the old days. She'd of been pure as snow, that gal, if I hadn't made a black whore of her."

Whether Georgina was G. Herrold's daughter, and G. Herrold and "Old Black George" were the same person, was still unclear, as was the extent to which the woman's present motives were actual admissions of hers or Greene's own conjecture. For though he declared himself pleased "to of had his eyes opened," as he put it, to the flunkèdness of New Tammany, the female sex, and his own sorry past, he was an unhappy man, become sullen and surly; and his grudgy speech was laced with slang so pied and shifting, I shook my head as much at his words as at what I gathered of their sense. Withal, though, he seemed more changed in mood than substance: his soap- and shoelessness, beard and guitar, said Billy-of-the-Hills as much as Beist; and the disenchantment was clearly but a change of spells. His acne, which he had hoped to cure with dirt, was purulent as ever; hemp-smoke but guaranteed what had used to visit him unsought. Bray he called now an outright fraud for having passed him as a "kindergartener"; me he credited with "true-blue Beistic vision" for having shown him his former blindness. Leonid he regarded, with glum goodwill, as half mistaken, eye-to-eye-with-himselfwise: right about New Tammany's decadence, wrong about Nikolay's superiority; right about My Ladyship's unchastity, wrong about her passèdness, and so forth.