Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  “No. No.”

  He put his arms around her and drew her to him. She tried to fight down the sobs, he stroked her shoulder. Her body was lithe and compact, she was thirty-six now but with no suggestion of flabbiness or sag in her flesh. Not skimpy, breasts full and firm, hips gently swelling, a roundness in the thighs; still, unlike the more typical women of the village, she had a slender and hard-packed quality. Concentration. A blowtorch blazed inside, consuming all excess tissue and tempering what remained, whereas the complacent ones, the sleepy ones, often ran to fat. Definitely somatotonic physique, with a touch of the cerebrotonic. Very much like himself, although he was more clearly the cerebrontonic with a touch of the somatotonic. If the mixtures were slightly different (he lived more in the nerves, she in the muscles), the ingredients were the same. They were birds of a mottled feather. A taboo feather.

  “Monkey,” he said, “while I’m away you must not smoke any more. It could be serious.”

  “No more bed,” she said. “No more talk. No more ganja. I am to stop living when you go. And you always go. Somewhere, where I am not to follow.”

  “You must be careful. You know that you have a need to be very active when you are feeling bad, that in itself is dangerous in the village. When you smoke the need is greater.”

  “That is my business.”

  “Mine too. When I’m here I can protect you but there are many who don’t like you, even fear you, as they fear all who are different. Many were sent for Mandunga only because they smoked, before I came.”

  “When you go, the knives go,” she said bitterly. “I do not fear the cave.”

  “If you are found smoking it will go badly with you, even without Mandunga. They will find ways to hurt you. The mild ones often make the best torturers.”

  “What is the use to save myself? You will not come back.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? There’s nothing there to keep me.”

  “Something will keep you. Another woman with her orgasms, something.”

  He could not help laughing. “Jealousy too? You know the normal ones consider themselves above that sort of thing, it’s much too violent an emotion.”

  “Jealousy. Another word you taught me. Another hurt.”

  “That’s so, isn’t it? I guess my real contribution to your life was a vocabulary of distress. But not only that. Also a vocabulary of joy.”

  “Jealousy. Happy, unhappy. Orgasm. All the up-and-down things.”

  “But remember.” He propped himself up on one elbow and tried to see her face in the dark. “Listen and remember this: you were up-and-down before I came. All I gave you was a language to describe the swings of the seesaw. You can blame me for the words, not the seesaw. And to be on a seesaw is not the worst thing.”

  “You make it the worst. You lift me up very high and then you go away. Always you are going away a little. Even in bed. . . . Ah, sometimes I hate you. All this talk. I could scratch your eyes out.”

  “Fine Mandunji sentiment. People have lost all of Region Nine, and a good part of the thalamus too, for less.” He began to run his fingers down the fine warm curve of her back, down to the compact haunches. “I’m sorry, monkey. I haven’t always been good to you. Sometimes . . . . There are many things that trouble me, now with these queer-limbs—”

  He stopped: sound of footsteps outside.

  “Father?”

  It was Rambo. He slipped into his shorts and went out.

  “I did as you said.”

  Martine nodded.

  “Many things were happening in their camp. Some were using long poles and jumping over trees with them. Others were leaping in the air, twenty and thirty feet, and turning many somersaults each time. Others were picking up whole trees they had cut down and throwing them as though they were only spears. All this they were doing for Mr. Theo, he told each one of his mistakes and how he could do better.”

  “How did they act toward you?”

  “Very friendly, we talked and I learned some words. They call themselves amps, from amputee. The arms and legs they wear are pros, that is short for pro, uh, prosthetics. In their country most of the younger men are amps and almost all wear the pros but there are quite a few men of your age, men over forty, who are not amps. There are different kinds of amps, it depends on how many arms and legs are gone—uni-amps, duo-amps, tri-amps, quadro-amps. Then they also have the word Immob—”

  “Good, good.” He was annoyed by the nonsensical word, made an impatient gesture to cut Rambo short. “What else?”

  Rambo went on to give a full report, running in sequence through the items his father had outlined. Martine listened attentively: some of the information was astonishing, nearly all of it was good. The trip was not only feasible, it promised to be a cinch.

  “One thing more,” Rambo said. “I do not know the meaning of it. When I was going to the camp I heard noises from the jungle.”

  “What sort of noises?”

  “I could not identify them so I left the path and went to look. I was very careful, no one saw me. The thing I found was strange. They have made their camp down at the low end of the island, near a place where there are many rocks and boulders and high walls of stone. Many of the queer-limbs were at this place, some had instruments in place of their arms, high-speed drills and scoops and other things for digging and breaking stone. These men chipped out little pieces of stone and others took them to some machines, they poured chemicals over them and examined them under special lights and things like that. After a while I left and went on to the camp.”

  “This begins to make sense,” Martine said. “Oh, a whole lot of sense.”

  “What does it mean, Father?”

  “They say they’re interested on in sightseeing and in collecting flora and fauna, but the first day they begin to examine rocks. A much more meaningful hobby. . . . You did well, Rambo. This news only proves what I’ve thought right along: I must go.” He looked at the boy. “You know I’m going away?”

  “Yes,” Rambo said soberly.

  “How do you know?”

  “Ubu has arranged a special feast in the eating room, they are all there now.”

  Martine looked across the clearing toward the large communal mess at the other end of the village: it seemed more brightly lit than usual, people were going in and out with baskets on their heads.

  “They are eating some peculiar stuff,” Rambo said. “Very cold and sticky. Theo sent it in return for the cassava.”

  “It must be the ice cream he promised. What color is it?”

  “Green. With little solid pieces in it.”

  “Pistachio ice cream!” Martine said. “Very, very good for the bowels.” He thought hard for a moment. Then, in a whisper: “Two more things I want you to do, Rambo. In back of the machine shop, in the shed, I have some valises packed and some baskets of food. Get a couple of the boys to help you and carry everything down to the boat—I’m taking the blue-and-white power catamaran. Then visit all the students and assistants and nurses, take them aside and tell them one by one to slip away in an hour’s time and go to the lecture room in the cave. Only the young ones, understand, only those who have worked with me, no others. You will come yourself, of course, I want you to hear.”

  “All right, Father.”

  Martine watched the boy disappear around the side of the hut, then went back inside. As soon as he rejoined Ooda he reached out and touched her thigh: her first response was to move away. He caught hold of her leg and pulled her back toward him, desire began to stir in him as he increased the pressure. The miracle of flesh: pliant on the outside, steel inside; one learned that at the breast. A surface of giving wrapped around a core of denial (if you wanted to take it that way: it could also be taken as a simple, neutral, structural fact). She lay back without moving, yielding to his superior strength but implying that she would defeat him by another stratagem—indifference.

  “Passivity?” he said. “Oh, no. It doesn’t become you. You’re not that n
ormal.”

  The more he caressed her, the more he sensed the tension in her body as she strained to keep from reacting. His mind, not fully involved yet, still partly a bystander, went racing on. It could be put in cytoarchitectonic terms, of course. One cluster of linkages in the cerebral mantle and the corresponding thalamic areas was firing the erogenous zones and impelling her with neuronic pitchforks to spread her legs and beg for release from the ache within. But superimposed on that libidinous network was a contrary one, aggressive, temporarily activated by anger and grief over his leaving, working to outwit the want. Result: a simultaneous excitement and freezing. Out of which came a lust-in-loathing, a need-and-nausea. Sex and aggression in a bear hug. But did anybody ever reach except in recoil? Wasn’t it old Freud who had had the courage to suggest that there is a fringe of distaste around every human desire, even under the best of circumstances? That—putting it another way—it is the prohibition which lends enchantment to the desire, totem must be flecked with taboo? After Freud (if it had needed him) it was impossible to look at any emotion without seeing its opposite crouching just behind it, he had made it starkly clear that the tenderest love comes with an inflexible spine of hate.

  This was the twoness which the Mandunji couldn’t stand. These pacifists required a love which would hold up without a spine, impossible. The calm ones, they had driven the undersides of their emotions so far down that with them had gone the emotions themselves. That was the danger in trying to outlaw doubleness, try to be monolithic and you turn into a monolith. Maybe, after all, the depth and inensity of feeling came, not from the strength of this unilinear urge or that unilinear urge, but from the strength of the conflict between urges—the surfacing of opposite drives simultaneously, a cortical-thalamic No befuddling every Yes. Undeniable: the river rages most at the point where it is dammed up most, a trickle never becomes a flood until it meets an obstacle. Trouble with the calm ones: since they shunned tensions—the emotional dams—their lives consisted of trickles, no gushes. . . .

  Without warning, no putting up of storm signals, there was some kind of rumpus in her. She had been arching away from him, steeling herself against the erotic propaganda of his hands; to let her desire break through her disdain the moment he crooked a finger would be more of a defeat than she could stand, it would make her a mechanism which could be turned on and off at his whim. (Sometimes he sang a song: “Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.”) He was asserting himself brutally with his insistence on leaving her, the supreme rejection, one big dramatic one to dwarf the long procession of little ones; the blow had sent her reeling, what she needed now to restore her own bruised sense of worth was an equally brutal assertion of her own. It was not good to be nothing but a faucet. So she would not rise to the sensuous bait; it must be established that she was not an automaton tied to his urges. Who was he to say when she should turn off her venom and turn on her warmth—did he give her the right to tell him when to trot off in wanderlust and when to stay put in devotion, was she even consulted? This emotional tyranny made her taut with misery, and when she felt her body quicken under the reconnaissance of his hands, some mutineer in her conspiring with his hands, that only made it worse.

  “You devil, devil,” she said.

  She jerked into a sitting position, swiveled, began to pummel him. On the legs, on the shoulders, on the rib-cage—her fists avoiding the genitals and the eyes and other parts of the face; even as a berserker she chose her targets carefully. Her muscles chortled, her nerves chirped, this was what she had needed all evening. The good feel of his obstinate flesh giving under her knuckles. The retreat of his stubborn bone and cartilage. The stinging impact of skin against skin. This was her will on parade. Good, good, good.

  He lay with his body tensed against the attack, it hurt but he did not try to stop it. He knew that she had never felt so much torment before and he had no pain-killers for her. Besides, within this hate there was a firm skeleton of love, he knew that too. There were times when to love meant to be a punching-bag for the one you loved. Especially if it was your taste to love a somatotone.

  All of a sudden her belligerence caved away in an unaccountable landslide: one, two, it was gone. The rigid cylinder of her body collapsed and she was all concave and receptive, a bowl of yearning. Her arms went imperiously around him. “Martine,” she whispered. “Ah, yes, I want you.”

  For the first time tonight she was speaking to him in Mandunji. It was their language of intimacy, they fell into it automatically when they were closest. The first night he had made love to her, months after he came to the island, at the height of it he had found himself whispering to her in his faltering Mandunji, wildly, in a gust of feeling. It had given him a strange, triumphant glow. He had thought: I am speaking to her in her language, I am reaching her, for the first time I am reaching a woman. (For him, he now speculated ironically, the breaking through to a woman really meant learning a foreign language!) After that they had fallen into an easy pattern of talk, English for the day-to-day things, Mandunji for the times of the night when there was nothing but a jabbering schizoid jungle and they were burrowed in it, holding on tight to each other in their pooled loneliness. . . .

  “As I want you.”

  All ease. All soft and giving way. The one and the other locked, limp, riding on the softness. No effort, no fight, soft waves and no need to go against the waves. Rippling, ride with the crests, bobbing, being bobbed, some metronomic “It” having its liquid undulant way with the world, everything in synchronization, perfect, the one in phase with the other, a coming and going, the meeting and the gliding away and the meeting again, minuet of the one and the other, opposites linked, bobbing together, being bobbed, being done, everything being done, a magnet pushing and pulling, periodicity of two and one, without effort the halves seeking and shunning, the swayings and shrinkings dictated by the source of all waves, the activating “It” in the center and the ripples spreading in circles out from it and on the ripples outward softly riding, everything arranged, the gentle thrust and the gentle tug, the twoness and the oneness, nothing to do, a yielding to the crests, the surges, the prearranged rises and falls, peace of being moved, ease of going along with the movements, trance of being rocked in the cradle of the Mover, the swings subtly growing faster, taking on momentum, energizing of the lazy movements, the waves beginning to surge, the trance being shredded, strain, a tightening, limpness gone, lulling gone, alertness coiling upwards in an expanding spiral, wider and wider arcs of awareness, swinging with the stronger waves, the quickening surges, stirrings within, bobbing, jogging, jouncing, awareness bulging up in the center, the center no longer outside but inside at the core of awareness, surge becoming a rush becoming a torrent, the surge not outside but inside, at the center, seething, geyser welling up inside at the center with every wave and awareness clamped over it, fighting it down, stuffed, swelling, ballooning, drift giving way to drive now, the Mover not far away but invading awareness now, becoming awareness, the done-to becoming the doer with faster and faster tug and stronger and stronger thrust, “It” becoming “I,” outside becoming inside, the magnet inside, the metronome inside, the waves inside, the swayings and shrinkings inside, the cradle inside, surge become self, “I” become the center and doing and commanding and domineering the softness and forcing the way, the effort pounding, inside the pressure battering and awareness full only of the pressure, ready to burst with the pressure, the other (feeling what? a yielding? a fighting?) caught up like a leaf on the battering waves thrust out by the Mover the Doer the “I,” lost on the sea churned by the Arranger the Self the All-Aware, and now, trickling now, creeping now, surging now, seething, now, at last, the heave, the hoist, the shudder, finally the spurt of the geyser at the center exploding the clamp sending the skin of awareness flying in shreds, “I flooding into the sea becoming the sea becoming the waves becoming everything becoming nothing, and ah, ah, swimming now, drowning now, in the other, deep in the center of the other (feeli
ng what? a doing, a being done to? a giving, a taking?), stirrings, quakes, pulsings, spasms, throbs, a clutching, a surge, waves surging up to mingle with his own, willed by his own, dictated by his own, echoes of his own, the waves and the echoing waves meeting now and the sea all a swirling and seething and for a moment the one and the other (feeling what?) drowning in it, in each other, the two immersed in one, in the melting and the softness and the ease. . . .

  A long time later: “Martine, Martine. Stay with me. With you I am used, I use myself. All that there is in me.”

  “It will be that way again. I will come back.”

  Something teasing him, for all the elation: tonight, as on too many nights before this, his love-making had been burdened, he sensed, with vague sidetracking irrelevancies—a rush of rhetorical shadows, soggy metaphors, bumbling poetry, on the outskirts of awareness. Head stuffed with lame images from a hundred bad novels, preventing total immersion in the flood of feeling: a smokescreen of words. And it was too good, too complete with Ooda to be damped with literature. Besides, there was something jarring, mockingly offkey, about the images, they were not only inadequate, in some taunting way they were grotesquely wrong—

  He raised his head from her shoulder.

  “I want you to know. In my country a long time ago I had a wife. It was bad. She was like the normal ones here in the village, even worse—the normal ones here are not supposed to feel anything and they do not pretend to feel. It was a game. I knew all the time that she pretended but I never told her that I knew, I pretended that I had been fooled by her. That was my part of the game. Very often it happened this way in my country, and not only in my country. Here they say you are not normal, but you are very lucky to be as you are and not to know about this.”