Giles Goat Boy (98 page)

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!”

“It’s a lie!” cried Ira. “Arrest them, Stoker!”

“Hey, a cop!” the same student warned, apparently seeing Stoker for the first time. “Go limp!” The others rebuked him for having extorted by
force the information they needed, not because robbery was against the law—everybody knew that the laws were made to protect the privileged—but because the use of force was contrary to the principles of their group. “So I’m a Student-Unionist infiltrator,” the fellow laughed. “We got what we wanted, didn’t we?” He warned Stoker not to touch him or he’d shout Brutality.

“Go flunk yourself,” Stoker growled, still evidently preoccupied with our debate. “The day I touch you, you’ll have plenty to holler about.”

Some of the students then fell to arguing whether the forcible expulsion of violent elements from their ranks would violate the principle of non-violence; others, whether non-violence as a means had not become an end in itself with them, and thus a contradiction of its own premise that ends never justified means. The dispute was heated but peaceful; no agreement was reached.

“Hey, look,” someone interrupted: “it’s the GILES! Let’s go limp over there and ask Him.”

It seemed that my lynching and detention, so far from shaking their confidence in me, had redoubled it. In fact (as I observed when they flopped around The Living Sakhyan’s elm), I was now as much their hero as He—perhaps more so, considering their emulation. Beards they’d had before, but now they all wore sandals like mine and fleecy coats—sheepskin, admittedly, and cut too short to be worn without trousers, but the closest they could come to a mohair wrapper. What’s more, they leaned upon their staves as upon a crook, as well as using them to carry placards. These last were blank.

They greeted me respectfully but enthusiastically. Had the Administration seen its error and pardoned me? they wanted to know. Was I aware how many folksongs and free-verse poems my lynching had inspired, despite the Administration’s efforts to suppress them on grounds of obscenity? Did I know of the “sleep-ins” staged in my behalf and wrongfully slandered by the right-wing press as “sleep-arounds,” though the only fornication had been by neo-Bonifacist
provocateurs
of both sexes? Did I approve of
Carte-blanchisme
, their current cause, which aimed at nothing less than Freedom From Everything?

“That’s not what it means to
me
,” objected one of their number. “To me,
Carte-blanchisme
is a blanket protest against the great Nothing.”

This interpretation struck many of his classmates as heretical and was therefore warmly applauded, though one bright fellow remarked that “the great Nothing” was exactly what Sakhyanism aimed at, and a brighter observed that, since the great Nothing was equivalent to Everything, and
Freedom From Everything meant Freedom For Everything, the two interpretations of their cause were not mutually exclusive.

“Syncretist,” someone muttered.

“Look here,” I said cordially, and they fell silent at once. “I’m much obliged for your good opinion of me, even though you’re mistaken. I’m
not
the Grand Tutor; I failed my Assignment before because I took WESCAC on its own terms. That’s what I want to consult The Living Sakhyan about, if you’ll excuse me …”

They withdrew a little way, but begged permission to listen in on the dialogue, and I found the lot of them too lively and agreeable, on the whole, and their admiration too flattering, to refuse them. I was surprised to see that my denial of Grand-Tutorhood disturbed them not at all; of
course
I denied it, they exclaimed in whispers; Grand-Tutorhood was a concept, like any other; if I didn’t deny it I wouldn’t be Grand Tutor! Didn’t my criticism of WESCAC make that clear? They alluded to the parable of Milo and Sophie the heifer: to pass, one must flunk the Examiner …

As at our previous encounter, I was impressed by their acuteness; indeed, I remembered now that some of their remarks in that earlier term could be said to have anticipated my present position. They’d understood some things better than I—though perhaps less well than I did now—and their commentary on my remarks invariably enlarged my understanding—to the point where I felt that same commentary vaguely deficient.

“It seems to me, sir,” I said to The Living Sakhyan, “that WESCAC really
is
the Dean o’ Flunks, as I used to think when I was a kid …”

“Didn’t I tell you?” someone whispered triumphantly.
“Attack the terms of the problem!”
And before his classmates could shush him he alarmed me (since the slogan he quoted was exactly what I had in mind) by adding, “But isn’t it only WESCAC’s old MALI circuitry that that would apply to? How can
Wescacus malinoctis
be a symbol of Differentiation?” It was an objection I’d not myself considered. Fortunately another student hissed, “So what’s this MALI and NOCTIS? Another set of arbitrary categories!”

This silenced the troubled one, and eased my own mind. “He’ll reinterpret the terms of His Assignment,” the same fellow said confidently. I decided to do just that, with The Living Sakhyan’s aid.

“It says
Fix the Clock
,” I began. “Before, I thought
fix
meant ‘repair,’ but Dr. Eierkopf’s gadget seems to have stopped the clock completely, so I guess I was mistaken. What
does
it mean?”

My admirers fell again into the disputation they could never resist, and with the help of The Living Sakhyan’s silence I was able to overhear them. My spring-term fiasco, they understood, had been a deliberate bad example, for pedagogical purposes; it went without saying that I’d known all along that
fix
could as easily mean “fix in position,” for example, to one not bound by conventional assumptions—was that not what my pretended failure to repair the clock had in fact accomplished? I listened amazed. Moreover, they pointed out to each other, by thus fixing the escapement in position I’d been able to complete my Assignment “in no time,” so to speak; surely the implications of the metaphor were clear!

“But if it goes without saying that He
knew
all this,” the troubled fellow inquired, “why’s He asking The Living Sakhyan?”

“Because it
does
go without saying!” another said. “You don’t hear The Sakhyan answering, do you?”

Delightedly I pressed on: “
End the Boundary Dispute:
Now obviously I was wrong to think that meant make our Power Lines clearer, wasn’t I? Did WESCAC mean some other kind of Boundary?”

I managed to catch just the words “…  
all arbitrary
” behind me, but that was enough. I demanded of The Living Sakhyan (“
Rhetorically
, man,” they said, “rhetorically!”): “Could it mean that the boundary between East and West Campuses is arbitrary and artificial, and ought to be denied? Should we abolish the Power Line?”

They applauded this suggestion as vigorously as limpness permitted. I was emboldened to ask whether they understood that had The Living Sakhyan answered either yes or no, He’d have affirmed the Boundary’s reality, and thus answered falsely. Several nodded, and were at once rebuked by their cleverer classmates, who snapped, “Don’t answer!” I had just presence enough of mind to smile and say no more.

In like manner I reviewed the whole of my Assignment with T. L. Sakhyan’s aid.
Overcome Your Infirmity
, we decided, must mean
affirm
my limp and goatliness—a happy imperative!
See Through Your Ladyship
was more difficult, since the students knew nothing of my connection with Anastasia; but their whispers of “revisionist psychology” and “normal bisexuality,” though meaningless to me, put me in mind of Dr. Sear and his fluoroscopic diversions. Should I literally make My Ladyship transparent? In any case, when I said, “I’ll see Dr. Sear about that one,” they laughed knowingly. In theory, the fifth task was also problematical:
Re-place
, because of its curious hyphen, seemed still to me to mean “Return the Founder’s Scroll to its place” and not, as the students suggested, “Replace it with something better”—though “it’s place” clearly
meant its
source
rather than its proper location in the Library stacks. However, by interpreting
source
to mean, not the sandy Moishian cave where the Scroll was found, but the mind and body of studentdom whence its teachings sprang, I was able to satisfy both the students and myself: recalling to them the East-Campus table-grace about “eating Truth,” I asked The Living Sakhyan whether I should make a meal of the Founder’s words!

Someone whispered, “ ‘… not bread alone’!” Another, “To make way for the new!” And a third asked, “Eat instead of EAT; is that it?” I did not reply.

The sixth and seventh tasks, on the other hand, were clear: to
Pass the Finals
could only mean to by-pass WESCAC; perhaps not to
destroy
it, as the students urged (who regarded it as the emblem of much that they objected to in the University), but certainly to frustrate or circumvent it by way of denying its authority. This established, the final task, like the first, was already accomplished: I myself was my Examiner; I had no proper father, nor was there anyone save myself to whom my ID-card need be presented. I read the seventh task aloud and asked The Living Sakhyan: “What signatures do I need on my card? And who are the ‘proper authorities’?” His silence was my Answer.

I bid goodbye to the students then, who thanked me for Tutoring them and hoped I wouldn’t judge their group by its non-non-violent members; they’d needed the time of day from the “Old Man of the Mall” in order to schedule a protest march to Main Detention in behalf of Max and me.

“That’s not what I was protesting,” said one of them. “I was protesting Saturday-morning classes and the Open Book rules.”

Some applauded his deviation and maintained that both protests could be served by a general demonstration in the name of
Carte-blanchisme
. Others protested this indiscrimination, but most certainly didn’t want to be thought to favor the opposite; still others contended that repudiating such distinctions was the first principle of Beism (as well as the last, since All was One). And so I left them, some protesting, some protesting the protest, and a few protesting that to protest protest was either to affirm
Carte-blanchisme
and hence (by Beistic paradox) to deny it, or to deny it and hence affirm it—which was perhaps to say, deny it …

Stoker slouched beside Ira Hector on the bench. Ignoring the old man’s scolding, he grinned contemptuously as I approached.

“You’re supposed to protect the right of private information!” Ira berated him. “What do I pay taxes for?”

“You never paid taxes in your life,” Stoker said, not bothering to look at him. “Did you think they’d
thank
you for cutting off their scholarships?”

Drawing his head into the collar of his topcoat, Ira retorted that he didn’t give a fact for their opinion of him, but he did have more right to be protected from robbery than anyone else in New Tammany College; precisely because he had withdrawn all support from his former tax write-offs, the Philophilosophical Fund and the Unwed Co-ed’s Hospital, he now paid the highest taxes on campus. In fact, he declared (glaring at me with his shellèd eyes) the Administration was bleeding the golden goose to death, and thus cooking its own; he was on the verge of intellectual bankruptcy, thanks to my bad advice, and the daily robberies and copyright infringements perpetrated on him would soon put him over the edge if the campus patrol refused him the help he’d bought and paid for—with his ward Anastasia as well as with his ruinous taxes.

“Buy your own bodyguard,” Stoker said. “You can afford it.”

“Why didn’t you help me, Goat-Boy?” he demanded.