John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Balonicy!" scoffed Leonid. "She's passèd Graduate! If I believed in!" He shook his fist then at our warden, who was idly prodding Croaker with my stick through the bars of an adjacent cell, where the huge Frumentian lay bloat and helpless from overeating. "You turning flunked again, like before! Let go Mrs. Anastasia, should marry George! I don't mind!"

Stoker replied, with a measure of his former energy, that Leonid had never had a mind to mind with, or he'd have walked out of prison long since instead of trying to get himself Shafted in Max's place. As to divorcing his flunkèd wife —

"Not flunkèd!" Leonid shouted. "Is Passessness!"

"Be durn if she is!" Greene shouted back.

"Who cares?" Max cried. "Fail is pass, altogether!"

Croaker set up a clamor next door, prompted either by the argument or by sight of my stick, which he snatched from Stoker's hand and examined with a deal of lick and jabber. I let them all shout on, attending their debate but not joining it, and measured their several stances against the Answer until I'd found what I sought and done what I desired. From the bottom of my purse — under Sakhyan's phial, the shophar, my damaged watch, the pocket-torch, and my partly chewed Assignment — I fished forth my ID-card, wrongly signed, and from my jail-coat the bottle of Classmate X's all-round eradicator, snatched from Leonid in the nick of time. A few drops were undrunk; I poured them on the card.

"Argue while you can," Stoker said to Greene and Leonid, as if casually. "Two halfwits make a whole wit. Pity we can't Shaft the lot of you tomorrow, instead of just Max."

Leonid blanched; Greene also. Max clutched his beard and sat down quickly on a bunk. Only Croaker continued to gibber, in my direction, as if having seen the stick he recollected who I was.

"Did you say tomorrow?" Greene asked.

Stoker grinned. "Four-thirty in the afternoon." The appeal had been rejected, he announced, on the ground that Max, though refusing to plead, had affirmed his confession of the crime. The only recourse left was petitioning the Chancellor to commute the sentence to permanent detention; unless such petition was made (by the prisoner himself) and granted — against all odds, considering Rexford's late sentiments — Max would be executed at next day's dusk. "Makes a pretty light as the sun goes down," Stoker said. "Especially an old dry Moishian."

"Pig dog monkey!" Leonid shouted. Stoker chided him for using such language in the presence of other animals: a goat, an ape, and three jackasses. This taunt so got to the Nikolayan that he was seized by one of his fits and had to be bunked. When he had ceased to flail I inspected my card and said to Stoker: "Open the door."

He cheerfully replied, "Go flunk yourself."

"I intend to," I assured him, "as soon as I'm free. Here's the card."

The remarkable liquid had caused to vanish entirely every name on the card except the George I'd penned in Ira Hector's ink, and even that had been eradicated to the point where none but myself could mark its traces.

"I'll thank your stepfather for his help when I see him," I promised Leonid. "I'm going to complete my Assignment now."

Overjoyed for my sake, Leonid sprang from his bunk, threw open the cell-door, kissed Max, shook both hands with Peter Greene, snarled at Stoker (who had no keys with him), and opened his arms to welcome me into the aisle. "Love Mrs. Anastasia!" he roared to me. "Defect her to Nikolay College, have lots rebyata! Peace to whole Universtity!"

But I insisted that Stoker fetch keys and release me, to make the thing official. In the meanwhile I bade Leonid come in and relock the door, and Peter Greene linger, as I had things to say to them.

"Don't matter none," Greene said, and even joined us in the cell. "Whole durn campus is a jail, far's I'm concerned."

So it was, Max agreed, if one thought it so; but he declared his joyful suspicion that just as freedom might be detention to the flunkèd of mind, so to the passèd might detention be true freedom — the more so since failure, understood rightly, was passage.

"You want to stay there and rot, that's your business," Stoker said, and went away.

"Bring the key yourself!" I called after him. "I have advice for you, too."

His answer-fart rather heartened than dismayed me, as proof of his ripeness for new counsel. When Max, concerned for Greene's and my sake, urged me to employ Leonid's secret, or let Leonid himself usher me through the bars, I expressed perfect confidence in Stoker's return, and saw no need to add that I had none of my ability to repeat the trick, or in the mercy of the guards, who were permitted to shoot escaping prisoners.

"I hate cops," Greene muttered, and, thumbing his guitar, began to sing a tune he called Greene's Blues:

Self-pitying as were the sentiments, and wrong-headed, the melody was affecting. I embraced and bade farewell to Max.

"What I told you before was all wrong," I said.

He nodded gently. "You're telling me?" By which he meant no sarcasm, but an affirmation of what we both now understood. He had been a love-lover, hating hate, and I'd thought him flunked for being not free of that latter passion after all, and vain in his choice to suffer.

"Don't worry you made a mistake your first time Tutoring," Max said, "A beginner is bound to." And holding his testicles he vowed thenceforward to eschew the delusion that Love and Hate were separable; he would affirm them both; he'd be a love/hate lover — more accurately, a love/hate lover/hater — if he could.

"Then you mustn't regret killing Herman Hermann," I advised him.

"Who regrets?"

What I had wrongly flunked him for — that secret yen to be for once the aggressor, the persecutor — I now exhorted him to acknowledge, to embrace, even to assert. Greene and Leonid frowned their doubts, but Max agreed.

"Because what's the difference, pass and fail?" he asked rhetorically. "A trick of the mind, like it says in Sakhyan."

"Pass you, Max!" I exclaimed, stirred to the heart. "You know what I mean."

"Pfui on categories!" cried my keeper. "Not only I don't regret killing the Moishiocaustnik: I wish I'd shot him myself!"

Peter Greene and Leonid had resumed their favorite quarrel, about My Ladyship, but at this remark of Max's Leonid leaped to us.

"What's this words, sir! You didn't shot?"

"Not my own self," Max admitted.

I too was astonished. At our insistence he confessed what had really happened in the woods near Founder's Hill that night — though he and I agreed that such distinctions as Guilt and Innocence, Truth and Falsehood, were as flunking as the distinction between Passage and Failure. The point-faced guard, he declared, upon overtaking him on the road, had steered and throttled his motorcycle with the plain intent of running him down, and drawn his pistol as well, no doubt to guarantee the murder. But attempting to steer and shoot at the same time, in the dark, he'd lost control of the vehicle and crashed into the ditch.

"So I go look is he hurt," Max said, "and there's the pistol in the mud, and the Bonifacist he's got his boot caught under the sidecar, he can't get loose. So I pick up the gun, it shouldn't get rusty — he shouldn't shoot me either! — and I say to him, Tell me where's Georgie, did Maurice Stoker flunk him yet?" He smiled at me. "Such a dummy I was, about pass and fail!"

He had guessed, Max went on, that Stoker's aide was a former Bonifacist, by his manner and speech, and had surmised further that he must have been a man of some flunkèd consequence to choose exile and disguise at the Riot's end, when so many who surrendered were prosperous again soon after. But he didn't imagine the guard's identity even when he said, in Siegfrieder accents, "Shoot straight, old man; you don't kill professor-generals every night." Pfui on kill, Max had replied; that was not his line, whatever his inclinations.