"The Moishians have a name for Shafting Grand Tutors," Max replied. "That's one of the things I want to be Shafted for." He went on to say, as sadly and serenely as ever, that whereas he once had believed in the rejection of Grand Tutors whether "true" or "false," it now appeared to him to make little difference how questionable might be the authenticity of Bray, for example: the important thing was to see one's own abysmal flunkèdness. Since conversing with Harold Bray he had come to see clearly that nothing in his life had been done altogether passèdly: hating hatred, from which passion no man was free, he had perforce hated all studentdom, thinking he loved them. Thus his work with WESCAC and the consequent Amaterasuphage —
"Self-defense!" I broke in. "That was collegiate self-defense!"
But the self must not be defended by the suffering of others' selves, Max responded. And his foster-fathering of me, so apparently praiseworthy: was it not to revenge himself on Virginia R. Hector — nay, on studentdom in general — that he had raised me as a goat? And to revenge himself on New Tammany that he had at the last encouraged my delusion of Grand Tutorhood? Bray having confirmed for him these flunkèd possibilities and certified that only suffering could expiate them, he must believe that Bray was after all what He claimed to be (with stinging heart I heard the pronoun shift to upper-case); Max's encouragement of me, a mere common foundling, must be but one more instance of his perverse Moishianism…
"Stop this!" I said. "This is hateful!"
He shrugged. "So hate me, I got it coming."
Stoker thrust his grin through a small square panel at one end of the middle space. "Got so there was a crowd upstairs," he said, as if confidentially. "Mind if I sit in? Maxie breaks me up."
I was too hurt and appalled by my erstwhile advisor's declarations to acknowledge the intrusion, though as always Stoker's grin filled the room like a sound, or odor, or change of temperature.
"I do hate it when you talk that way!" I cried to Max. "You make people hate you. It's like Anastasia, and people taking advantage of her!"
"That's what Herm used to say," Stoker offered. "About the Moishians in his extermination campuses."
"So hate, hate," Max invited us.
"That diploma from Bray is a fake!" I said angrily.
"All along I hated the Bonifacists," Max repeated. "I wanted to burn them up, and never realized it. We Moishians, we suffer and suffer, and then we Shaft us a Grand Tutor to get even. I want them to Shaft me instead."
Stoker chuckled. "Didn't I tell you?"
In a wondrous exasperation then, I declared to Max that not only his Certification but his whole view of things was false and flunking, the effect I could only hope of his age, and the shock of false arrest, and Stoker's perverse influence. The very grounds on which Bray had Certified his Candidacy, I maintained, were in fact the flunking of him: it was not any hidden urge to persecute studentdom's persecutors that he must atone for, but his pride in suffering — a scapegoatery as misconceived as Enos Enoch's, to my mind, and vainglorious as well.
"Give it to him," Stoker urged.
"I don't have to be a Grand Tutor to know a false goat from a real one," I went on. It was the motive that made the true scapegoat, I said, not the deed, and it might be that Max's motive lifelong had in truth been selfish, but not in the manner he confessed to. Vanity was his failing: the vanity of choosing himself to suffer for the failings of others, and of believing that his own flunkèd aspects (overrated, in my estimation) could be made good by that suffering. "You say I should hate you for falsely encouraging me," I concluded; "but the truth is, you're calling your encouragement false because you want to be hated!"
This accusation, which I thought rather acute, did not move him. "So add that on the bill."
"Flunk you!" I shouted. "You're not a Candidate yet, and you never will be if you let yourself be Shafted with that attitude! Passèd are the passed and flunkèd are the flunked, and that's that! I am the Grand Tutor — I will be, anyhow — and I will do my Assignment! I'll pass everything and not fail anything, and then I'll run Bray off the campus!"
I might have said more — I could in fact have re-reviewed my keeper's whole life for him from my new and unexpectedly clear view of it, and showed him that his conception of the amulet-of-Freddie, for example, was quite mistaken — but he had got up from his stool and was indicating to the guard his wish to return to his cell.
"Max," I pleaded, "I need advice, and I want to get you out of here, and all you can think about is your old suffering. That's selfish!"
For just a moment his irritating calm gave way, and I heard him say, "Ach, I hate it too." Then the guard led him out and Stoker came around to fetch me.
"Didn't I tell you?"
"It's your doing as much as Bray's, I'll bet," I said. "Passèd are the flunked! What kind of an idea is that?"
He shook his head sympathetically. "Isn't it a scream? You and I, George — we're the only ones who see what a phony Bray is. He's even Certified me!" From his jacket pocket he drew the inevitable sheepskin, on which over Bray's signature was, as always, a quotation from the Founder's Scroll — in this case, Verily the railer against Me shall fetch himself in fury to My feet, while the light yea-sayer standeth off a respectful way. Presume, if ye would Pass.
"Doesn't that beat all?"
I turned away. "You're no Candidate."
Stoker laughed and herded me to the lift. "Of course I'm not! I'm the flunkèdest flunker on campus! So Bray's a fake, right? Or else" — he swatted me in the back — "only the flunkèd are really passed, hey? And the passèd are all flunked!"
I remarked grimly, as we ascended, that passage by so cynical a pretender as Bray, at least, was most certainly failure; and in my discomfort at being so of a mind with Stoker I added that he tempted out his own failings as well as other people's. "I've seen how it pleases you when people call you the Dean o' Flunks. I'll bet you hope there really is a Founder, and that He'll pass you for driving so many people to disagree with you. You want to pass by acting so flunked that you pass other people."
"Oh, come on!" he teased. "You're as balled up as Max is."
We went up and down a number of times, for Stoker liked to push the elevator buttons and close the automatic doors in his employees' faces. I continued to challenge him, mainly from the surplus of my distress at Max's condition: his hope, I charged, was that Failure, deliberately elected, would somehow be equivalent to Passage, as the considered choice of a negative could be said to be an affirmation. But there was only Failure in the human university, so far as I had seen, and thus it would remain unless I could in some wise complete my Assignment and bring order and Answers to the campus.
"There is order!" Stoker scoffed. "Everywhere but in my brother's head!" His argument (which I assumed was meant simply to bait me) seemed to be that the opposition and tension of extremes — East and West Campuses, Passage and Failure — was itself a kind of harmony, and that moderationists like Chancellor Rexford, who regarded themselves as realistic, were actually deluded ("Not that Lucky's really what he pretends to be," he added with a wink: "If he'd let me get near him I'd show you his wild side!") But Stoker's reasoning was no more orderly than the rest of his character: having asserted in effect that Disorder was the only true order, and Contradiction the only harmony, he went on to maintain, always grinning, that in fact the alleged passèdness of such people as his "brother," his wife, and my advisor, if true, was false, inasmuch as it not only gave meaning and reality to his own flunkèdness, for example, but induced it into being — as I had myself admitted. Anastasia's submissiveness was a vacuum into which the air of his abuse had no choice but to press; and inasmuch as that which causes flunkèdness is flunkèd, to be passèd, as everyone agreed she was, must be to be failed!