John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Bugger Georgina!" Stoker said impatiently.

Greene drew a pill from his jeans, swallowed it with dignity, and replied that he was happy he'd not sunk to such unnatural practices, nor for that matter succumbed in any other wise to the carnal blandishments of O.B.G.'s naughty daughter, since he knew it to be written somewhere in the Old or New Syllabus that whites and blacks belonged in different classes. Did we suppose he could look his Sally Ann straight in the eye, reconciliationwise, or salute the College pennant at the next Junior Enochist cookout, if his conscience weren't clean as a hound's tooth? Sure, he'd raised his share of heck, as what fellow hadn't, but —

Stoker fired a bullet into the air (we were crossing now the twilit exercise-yard) and promised to put another between Greene's eyes should he not at once close his mouth and vanish. He then reminded me — as Greene sprinted zigzag toward the main gate — that he himself was neither blind like Gynander nor half-blind and half-witted like my former cellmates; he saw quite clearly what my game was and had no mind to play it.

I wiped my stick-mirror clean with the sleeve of my detention-coat and pretended to hide a smile. "You mean my playing Dean o' Flunks with you back in March? I didn't expect that old trick to work once, much less twice." I took him to mean that I was advising him not to chauffeur me to Great Mall in order to tempt him, Dean-o'-Flunks-like, to do it, since to follow my counsel would pass him, presumably, and I knew he wished to flunk. No such idea had in fact occurred to me; but once he suggested it I decided to pretend I'd done the like (that is, the opposite) in my earlier "Tutorship" — as truly I had, but by no means a-purpose.

Guards opened the gate for us, and I prickled with joy to step outside the walls for the first time in I knew not yet how long. Greene's motorcycle roared from a row of parked ones and up the road-in what seemed to me the wrong direction, though I couldn't read the roadsign in the dim light.

Stoker squinted. "You're telling me you tricked me before so I'll think you didn't," he said carefully. "But the joke's on you."

"Oh?"

"I knew all along that Pass and Fail aren't opposites — didn't I tell you Passage is Failure? — but I also knew you knew I'd try to trick you into flunking. So I told you they were the same so you'd believe I thought they were different and come to think so yourself. Why else do you think I pretended to take your advice?"

"I know why you took it," I replied, and grinned, hoping to confuse him with inversions-of-inversions long enough to work out the right ones for myself. "What you don't know, when I tell you Failure is Passage, is whether I want you to believe it is because it isn't or isn't because it is."

Stoker grinned also — not easily, it seemed to me — and added as though carelessly: "- or is because it is, eh? Or isn't because it isn't…"

I perspired, and he exploited his advantage at once. "Don't forget, boy: whichever you believe, you may believe because I tricked you into it."

Grimly I retorted: "And if you did, the joke may be on you." But it was not a confident riposte, and I could only hope he'd think its lameness deliberately feigned.

"Always assuming I don't want the joke to be on me," he mocked. I'd have lost my hold entirely at this point had it not swept suddenly, bracingly through me, like the frigid breeze we stood in, that if Failure and Passage was in truth a false distinction, as I'd come to believe, then it made no difference whether that belief was true or false, as either way it was neither. How hopelessly innocent I'd used to be! Instead of trying to outwit Stoker, therefore — by replying "Exactly," for example — I resolved to outwit him by not trying to. I paused beside the first parked motorcycle and said without expression or emotion: "Take me to Great Mall."

He hesitated for the briefest moment — during which, I imagined, a herd of pluses and minuses locked horns — then he mounted the cycle, started the engine… and surprised me after all by moving off, not only impassively but without a word! In a cold sweat of doubt I sprang on behind him, and desperately bet everything on candor.

"You've got me so mixed up I'm sweating!" I called as we throttled away. He said nothing. But a few seconds later I smelled another sweat besides my own.

The air was freezing, the campus brown and bare; I shivered for want of fleece. I'd thought it dusk, but a pale day dawned as we raced along: a winter's morning, then, and Max had thirty-six hours of life unless he defected. Had I been three seasons in Main Detention, or three-years-and-three? An hour we rode, without a word, through fallow research-arable and shuttered residential quads. Few people were about. Preoccupied with wondering whether I was headed for Great Mall or being taken deliberately out of my way, I gave no thought to any order of business until a familiar scene surprised me: under a great bare elm sat The Living Sakhyan, oblivious to the weather, looking for all the campus as though He'd not moved since the day of my fiasco. And a few trees on, a black-furred man upon a bench alternately cowered and shook his thin fist at a gang of male students, who pressed about him in sheepfleece coats and belabored him with placards stuck on sticks.

I tapped Stoker's back. "Stop here a minute, would you?"

He would not, until I accused him of trying mistakenly to flunk me because he mistakenly believed in my Grand-Tutorhood — "As if you weren't right!" I added with a chuckle, just in case. He slowed down, perhaps only to deliberate, but when I jumped off he stopped the engine and waited, a-scowl and a-twitch.

"Help!" Ira Hector called. But I went directly to The Living Sakhyan, squatted before Him in His wise, and unpursed my chewed Assignment.

"Robbery!" Ira cried.

"Excuse me, sir," I said to The Living Sakhyan. "I want to thank You for the disappeared ink You gave me some terms ago, and apologize for criticizing You before."

His expression did not change, nor did He give any other indication of having heard me. Except for His smile, and my vast new understanding, I might have thought Him dead.

"Help me, Goat-Boy!" Ira shrieked.

"I know this sounds foolish," I went on, "but I actually used to think I was the Grand Tutor! And I couldn't understand why You didn't try to save my friend G. Herrold — remember the fellow in George's Gorge? — or why You didn't help Anastasia when Croaker was attacking her, or Ira Hector when those Beists were bothering him. I thought You must be as bad off as Dr. Eierkopf, up in the Belfry; that's how naïve I used to be!"

The Living Sakhyan made no sign, even when I leaned closer and explained that I understood Him now that I'd abandoned my claim to Grand-Tutorship. Since Passage and Failure were not different except as the deluded mind of Studentdom made them so, what booted it to snatch a man from the torrent, a woman from the tup? As if passèd works brought the mind any closer to Truth! To withdraw from the trials and errors of this campus, sit under an elm, and meditate upon the unutterable Answer — that was the way to Commencement Gate, I saw now, the sole Way, and I meant to follow His example as soon as I flunked WESCAC.

"That's why I've come to You, sir," I declared: "I suspect Dr. Bray might be a Grand Tutor, but I know You are, and I'd like to check out my Assignment with You, if You don't mind. I think I see why I failed it before…"

I took His silence for permission. Behind me I heard running footsteps and Ira Hector's feeble curses. "Did you get it?" a student called, and another shouted that he had: "When the sun comes up it'll be 7 a.m., Saturday, December 20!"