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.
“Really, old man,” Stoker complained. “My wife, you know. What’s come over you?”
Intoned my mother: “A-plus!”
“I’ve been wrong about everything!” I declared happily. “Never mind! Is Leonid all right?” Before anyone could answer I kissed whimpering Anastasia again—she was quite glasseyed now and limp—and might even have mounted her, so full I was of yen and new plans for her passage. But her menses were on her, my buckly nose reported, and other business pressed, so I forwent lust for exposition. Leonid’s drink, Stoker said, was a multipurpose eradicator used by spies in the falsification of credentials and the elimination of either their enemies or themselves, as the case should warrant. It had been pumped out of him in time, and except for a headache, and the delusion that Anastasia had kissed him back from death, he was quite recovered.
“Some nerve!” Stoker said. “I had to talk her into doing that mouth-to-mouth business, and then he says a thing like that.”
Anastasia, dumb, now sat in her pissèd dress beside my mother. I seized and kissed her hand, whereat she wept for very fuddlement.
“Leonid’s right about you!” I told her warmly. “You were passèd before I Tutored you. You should love him!” She shook her head. “You should love everybody, even more than before! Never mind what they’re after! Forget what I said last time!”
She shut her eyes and wailed.
“Open your legs again, like the old days!” I commanded her. “Let the whole student body in! I thought I saw through you before, but I’ve got to start from scratch!”
Stoker protested that I’d have to scratch someone else’s wedded roommate, not his—unless of course Anastasia
wanted
to oblige me, in which case he must regretfully defer to her wishes.
“Stop that passèd talk!” I cried, and laughed and struck his arm. “That bad advice I gave you was the best on campus! Passage
is
failure, just as you told me—but
Passèd are the flunked
, too! Thinking they’re different is what flunked me!” He was far from convinced, but I would say no more on the matter then. I asked whether Bray’s offer to pardon me still stood.
“I should say not,” Stoker answered. There had been, it seemed, two conditions attached to my release, one presumably impossible for me, the other repugnant to Stoker: all the signatures would need to be deleted from my ID-card, including those in indelible ink, and Anastasia would have not only to submit to the “Grand Tutor” (I used the imaginary quotation-marks uncynically now) but to bear a child by him. “ ‘A real little human kindergartener,’ he said he wanted,” Stoker said angrily. “I should’ve horsewhipped him!”
“You
should
have!” I cried joyfully. “And you would have, before I misled you. But listen—” I knelt and embraced My Ladyship once more, despite her wails and wet. “I was as wrong about Bray as I was about you. There
is
something special about him … In any case you must let him service you, no matter what his terms are—and everybody else, too! Take on the whole University!”
She may not have heard me above her bawling. Mother clapped her hands and cried “A-plus!” after each of my injunctions, rocking in a rhythm. Stoker fussed.
“Don’t act so passèd!” I exhorted him. “Hit me, if you want to! Pimp for your wife! Set dogs on Mother!”
“A-plus!” that lady said, whom I would not for the campus have seen harmed.
“You’re stir-crazy,” Stoker grumbled, nonetheless plainly unsettled. “You talk as if True and False were different Answers.”
“And they’re not!” I cried. “That’s the Answer! My whole mistake was to think they were different—so that’s what
you’ve
got to think, if you really want to flunk!”
We spoke no more then, because Stoker, to my great satisfaction, lost his temper and collared me cellwards. “Pass All Fail All!” I cried to the tiers of flunks. “It’s the same thing!”
Stoker took a billy from a passing guard and clubbed me dumb.
As if, in that timeless cave, time’s lost track had doubled on itself, I woke again to the voices of Max and Leonid arguing:
“Would-
not
ship, Classmate, sir!”
“Na, my boy, you’re mistaken …”
“But you think was wrong, that suicideness?”
“That’s what George thought, Leonid. Why else should he stop you? And I agree: to kill yourself it’s selfish.”
“Flunkhoodship, then! I be a big selfish! I defection! Big spy for Informationalists, Ira Hector pays me! And bribe Lucky Rexford you don’t get Shaft!”
“You see, my friend? Still being unselfish! And if I escaped I’d still be playing the Moishian martyr, like Georgie said.”
“So bah!” Leonid cried. “So I be vain my own self; you defect, I get Shaft, my name in all Nikolayan historybooks! Hooray me!”
“By you it wouldn’t be vanity, never mind how you say. By me it would, whether I take the Shaft or don’t. I got Moishian motives either way.
Ach
, I hate this!”
“Me too.”
I rubbed my head and sat up. “Never mind motives.”
As before, they welcomed me back to the waking campus.
Max especially was devoted thereafter, and respectful in a way I found unsettling as much as gratifying: as if, now I no longer thought myself Grand Tutor, he was finally able to imagine I was. My other Tutees, those I’d seen and heard of who had inclined to Bray and doubted me, appeared to have reversed their attitudes in view of the flunkèd state I’d led them to, or led them to see, and doubted now the one who’d called them passed. Their problem, as some saw and others didn’t, was complex: if Bray’s Certifications were false, how reconcile his Certifying me for having declared them so? And if I was true, how assimilate my self-flunkage and late defense of Bray? Only Max was untroubled by the conundrum: “All the better it don’t make sense,” he would say to Leonid, My chill Ladyship, or Peter Greene, who sometimes now visited. “So it’s a mystery, you shouldn’t analyze.”
He was become my best apologist, if not my best Tutee. For though Anastasia wept and protested my new counsel, especially regarding her connection with Bray, it was not long before Stoker told me (with a wink, as in former times) that the two conditions of my release might soon be reduced to one: he’d observed his wife against the bars on another level, tearfully urging the foul-mouthed inmates to have at her,
and while they’d been too awed and suspicious to go to it, there could be no doubt but her attitude had changed. Whereas Max, who explained me better than I could myself, had trouble practicing the new preachment he so well glossed. Stoker I was pleased to see become once more a kind of Dunce’s advocate; he came down frequently now to bait us and found in Max a willing fish, who however was by no means easy to land.
“They’re
both
fakes,” Stoker would declare of Bray and me.
“Falseness!” Leonid would reply. “WESCAC didn’t EAT, yes?”
“They fooled it with masks.”
“Masks can’t fool it,” Max would then point out, and review the possible explanations of my passage through the Belly with Bray: “It might be Georgie was spared because Bray was with him, or vice-versa. It might be they’re both Grand Tutors, different kinds. Or it might be they both
were
EATen—but only crazy, not to death. Or it might be the Grand Tutor wasn’t EATen and the other was, so one’s crazy and the other not …”
“Or they’re both fakes and WESCAC’s on the fritz,” Stoker taunted. “Or it changed its own mind about the Spielman Proviso and doesn’t EAT anybody these days. Maybe it’s in love with EASCAC and lost its appetite.”
But Max would cheerfully agree instead of arguing, and point out moreover that either Harold Bray or the defector Chementinski might in some wise have altered WESCAC’s AIM, recently or many terms ago, if the computer hadn’t “noctically” reprogrammed itself. Nor could one query WESCAC on the matter, as it might have grown quite capable of lying to or misleading an interrogator.
“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 it is 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.