Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  Of course, a simple answer could be made to this line of reasoning: the brain which emerged from such therapeutics was the brain considered healthy in this village. The village defined a healthy mind as precisely one which inhibted imagination and alertness and egoness, which shunned any intense emotionality, did not produce much tonicity or orgasm or sexuality.

  A simple answer indeed; much too simple. Because there were no grounds other than wishful thinking for the belief that the brain defined as normal locally was, ipso facto, the ideally healthy brain. Other villages defined the normal brain very differently, and each one believed that its norm was synonymous with health. They could not all be right. At least, some had to be more right than others. Or less wrong.

  Is deviation from the locally approved norms always and everywhere to be taken as disease? Is it possible that in some communities the norms are defined too narrowly and severely, thus placing the onus of sickness on what are often nonpathological individual variations? Couldn’t many of these variations, stemming from unique subjective powers, enrich the life of a village, give it a stimulating complexity, if the village were tolerant enough to see them as differences rather than diseases? Doesn’t the rigidity and narrowness of a village’s norms often drive a deviant from difference into disease?

  “What do I think?” Martine said. “I must study more too, much more. But I have arrived at a certain credo. Primum non nocere: Above all, do no harm. I think that it is vicious and evil for one man to do damage to another, or even to wish to very intensely. But I think that flabbiness can be a vice and an evil too. Sleep destroys human beings as much as war. Sleep is self-imposed damage, and I think it is evil for a man to do damage to himself as well. . . .”

  His voice faltered, died away. Why, suddenly, did he have the sickening feeling that, behind the mask of the Olympian lecturer, he was really talking about himself? That, maybe, he had been sleeping, curled like a foetus, for well over eighteen years in this cave? Sleep—sleep was a steamroller too. Immobilization—self-immobilization, that was the worst steamroller of all. . . .

  “And if it is wrong to do damage to another, what if Mandunga should turn out to be a damage? In the months ahead, you can find out for yourselves: add up all the data in our thousands of case histories and make a statistical summary. And keep this last question in mind: If Mandunga is a damaging, what are we to say of those who inflict it on others? Are they not carrying on, under the slogan of pacifism, a war of their own, a surgical-magical war? Then are these pacifists not the subtlest kind of aggressors? I leave it to your statisticians to give us the answer.”

  A long time ago, Martine said, a poet had asked a very pointed question: “Are there other lives?” And he had answered the question for himself: “It seemed to me that to every creature several other lives were due.” Could it be that here, in their own village, other lives, lives that were not bland incognitos, were both possible and due? The same poet, sensing that what a village calls out from a man may not be his whole or even his best potential, had thundered a warning: “Don’t be a victim.” Martinet’s credo was a slight elaboration of that: Don’t be a victim—of the outside or of yourself—and don’t victimize anybody else.

  He had to leave now, for a while. In his absence, he wished them peace—with alertness. He wished them long life, and the energy to live it hard and fully.

  He hoped that the war would stay on the other side of the river. But he hoped that some of the ego push which war stirs up in men and puts to terrible use, some of the greed for experience and zest for the new, would come to their side of the river. Some of the cerebrotone and somatotone tension of war, without war.

  If that happened, there might be a third date in Mandunji history. That would be something to anticipate—perhaps without too much anxiety.

  Rambo went first down the narrow winding path, carrying the searchlight. No sign of the queer-limbs about. It was a long climb, but finally they came to the little dock alongside which dozens of fishing boats were tied up—in an inlet whose mouth was almost entirely hidden from outside view by a thick overhang of branches and vines. The trim blue-and-white catamaran with its gawky pontoons, the biggest of the vessels, rode peacefully in the moonlight; Rambo stopped when he reached it, and a moment later Martine joined him on the dock.

  “Did you understand my lecture?” Martine asked.

  “Some, I did not know all the words. I shall understand more, I shall study.”

  “Good.” The moonlight filtered down into the basin, he could see Rambo’s bronzed, solemn face. “Don’t study just the serious things. Try to understand the jokes too.”

  The boy nodded; his eyes sparkled too much, he was near tears.

  “I want to tell you something, son. The poet I mentioned in my talk, he was a Frenchman, his name was R,i,m,b,a,u,d, pronounced Rambo. You were named after him.”

  The boy was startled. “Why? Was he a man to imitate?”

  “No. No, it was not that.” Martine spoke slowly, he wanted to get this very straight, it was important to make Rambo understand but first he had to understand. “He was not a man to imitate. But, you see, when he was only two years older than you he decided that he could have other and better lives than Europe would allow him, he thought Europe was dead and finished and he ran away to Africa. And when I came to the island a hundred years later I was running away from the West too, from its wars, and I felt that what I had left behind was hopeless too. So I thought a lot about Rimbaud. And a little later, when you were born, I decided to name you after him, it was just a romantic gesture against my past.”

  “But what was good about this man?”

  “His life was not good. You see, when you have to spend your whole life attacking and running away from something, you are no better off than those who spend their whole lives uncritically defending that thing. A man who is driven to flee from a village is no more free than those who are driven to stay and support it’s ways. One is as compulsive as the other, and so long as you are pushed by compulsions you are not free. Some ‘It’ is riding you, the ‘I’ is not in control and that’s the big thing. . . . But if this man could not be free in his life, he sometimes through his agony saw things, important things that others did not see so clearly. Although he was all his life a victim of his compulsions, he saw that the worst thing was to be a victim. And to be asleep. . . . It is a good name to have. His book is in my hut, take the time to read it.”

  “I shall, Father.” Then: “Is—is some ‘It’ riding you now?”

  “Maybe so.” Martine put his arms around the boy and kissed him on both cheeks. “You are intelligent and alive,” he said. “It is a good feeling to look at you and to know you are my son. If I leave nothing behind me in the world but you, I will be satisfied.”

  He climbed down into the catamaran and started the motor. It coughed a couple of times, then began to hum smoothly.

  “Your mother is suffering very much,” he said. “It would only give her more pain if I went back to see her again. Say good-bye to her for me, Rambo—and take care of her, she has no one else.”

  “I shall do my best.”

  “Tell her there will be no more going away. I will not come back until I am sure of that.”

  The boy’s eyes were very wet now, pools of bewilderment and hurt.

  “You’ve got to understand!” Martine said, more loudly than he had intended. “I have to go, I have to, for more reasons than I know myself. Maybe it doesn’t have much to do with these damned queer-limbs at all—maybe it’s just that I’ve been living here incognito all these years, feel that I have, and now the time has come to go looking for my real self. Something like that. Something’s been stirring in me ever since these damned queer-limbs first showed up—even before. . . . But I will do everything to come back. So long as I am alive, I will try to come back. If I don’t, you will know that I am dead—but that until I died I kept trying.”

  He cast off the rope. Rambo leaned over, tears were runni
ng down his cheeks, he said excitedly, with a quaver in his voice, “I do not know what you are going to look for out there, Father. But may you find it.”

  “Thanks, son. I hope I find it too. Whatever it is.” He waved, the boat began to move.

  from dr. martine’s notebook

  (mark ii)

  MAY 30, 1990

  Diego Suarez, Madagascar

  Three days to get here. Sea calm as tapioca all the way.

  Town’s a junk yard, just about as I remember it from my last trip (not long before my plane fell apart: 1947?). Deserted except for a few old Afrikanders—they run a small airstrip, a rickety dock, and a fleabag called, in a splash of anachronism, the Royal Dutch Inn.

  No curiosity about me. They swallowed my story without batting an eyelash. I’m Dr. Lazarus, parasitologist, been studying tropical diseases in the area, going home now to report my findings. Pleased with that—nifty incognito.

  The catamaran will be safe here, they’ll look after it until I pick it up. Paid them a year’s rent and maintenance fees in advance. Reaction to my old greenbacks: Royal Dutch glee.

  Boat for Mozambique due in five days.

  Growing a beard to go with my moustache.

  MAY 30, 1990

  Mozambique, Mozambique

  Pretty much the same setup here: airstrip, few warehouses, dock, flophouse-hotel, handful of inward-turned old Afrikanders. There’s one ancient tub, apparently, that shuttles between here and Durban. Scheduled to pull in about four days from now, it’s pretty erratic in its movements.

  Place hasn’t changed much. Flowers, vines, creepers sprout on everything: the branch office of Lloyds’ of London, an old automobile pump, a first-aid kit, an equestrian statue of General Smuts, a tarnished silver box containing a pessary.

  Walked along the waterfront this morning, dodging the craters. Few blocks from the hotel: a Cadillac convertible (‘69 model) covered, inundated from radiator to rear bumper, with bougainvillaea.

  Awake all night thinking about Ooda.

  JUNE 5, 1990

  Durban, Union of South Africa

  Another coastal whistle-stop. Everything the same here, except the old folks are Belgians. Still not a sign of a plastic leg. Another wait of a few days, for the prewar freighter that limps between here and Cape Town.

  My greenbacks received with great enthusiasm here too. Glad I thought to pick some up during my scavenging days: must have somewhere between 400 and 500 million in old American bills back in the cave, plus about half that amount in other currencies, plus Christ knows how much in bullion. Mother always told me to lay aside a little something for a rainy day.

  Seems I can catch either a plane or a ship at Cape Town. Guess it’s the ship for me. Slower, give me time to get my beard under way.

  Rambo certainly got the straight dope about passports: people seem to have forgotten there ever was such a precious hunk of paper. From the looks of things anybody can hop onto any kind of ship and go anywhere in the world, with no questions asked. Hurrah for the Brotherhood of Man.

  What about this business of destiny? Thinking of my mother a minute ago reminded me of it.

  Of course, everybody has moments of grandiosity in which he likes to think that he’s something special—that some special force is hovering over him, taking charge of his affairs and seeing to it that he glides through his charmed life. Destiny, in that sense, is just one more word for the “It” which people, panicky over being responsible for themselves, dream of in flurries of nostalgia for the blessed passive state: a self-propelled Womb-Cradle which carries the quiescent “I” down the greased tracks of Kismet and Karma to some benign End.

  Still—wasn’t there some kind of putty-nosed destiny that steered me to the Mandunji?

  If my end doesn’t clinch the thing, consider my beginnings. Here I can call upon my mother as witness. As she reconstructed it for me many times, she was already over three months pregnant when my father was summoned from Salt Lake City (where he was connected with the medical school at the University, as professor of radiological medicine) to Alamogordo. At first he was to stay there for just a month or so, planning some of the medical tests to be used in the first experimental atom-bomb explosion. But it stretched into two months, then three, then four, and finally it looked as though he would have to stay right through the explosion and for some time after. Since he didn’t want mother to be by herself he sent for her and she was installed in a cottage in Los Alamos.

  Came the morning of July 16, 1945. Mother was in the parlor, knitting baby socks. There was a tremendous flash of light in the skies outside, the windows clattered, soon a wild wind rushed through the room. My mother blinked, swallowed hard, gave a deep sigh, and almost immediately went into labor. I was born an hour later, almost two months before my time.

  Was there some Fate that arranged for me to make my debut under the Sign of the Mushroom? Whisked me from July 16, 1945 (Los Alamos), to October 19, 1972 (the Mandunji cave)—from the Sign of the Mushroom to the Sign of the Scalpel?

  Destiny? Or what the surrealists used to call l’humeur noir? (Rough translation: “a crepe-hung gag.”)

  Crazy thought: maybe my mother’s still alive? No, no, that would be too much l’humeur noir. . . .

  JUNE 7, 1990

  Durban

  Something bothering me: why have I started to keep a notebook again? It’s an asinine schoolboy’s trick, haven’t done it since the war, 1972.

  Seems that in big moments I’m moved to eloquence. Strange, considering that I never did put much stock in words—always twitted politicos like Helder because they gabbed so much, spouted such a mucky sloganizing lingo—as though words were anything but dust in the eyes, lures, decoys.

  Do I consider my words so remarkable? At least markable? Is the diary a mealy-mouthed way of trying to make a mark, of telling the world: Mark my words? Maybe I ought to label my notebooks the way cyberneticists used to label the successive versions of a guided missile or a robot brain: Mark I, Mark II, Mark III. . . .

  Last time it was more understandable, in a way. I was a lot younger and I’d been off to the EMSIAC wars for well over a year, operating day and night. It was really getting me down (Helder seemed to take it better than I did), and at odd moments I would huddle up in my bunk in the barracks plane and make jottings in my notebook just to hold on to whatever shreds of sanity I had left.

  Wonder what happened to that old journal of mine? I beat it in such a hurry that I didn’t stop to round up the odds and ends.

  Still, why fool with a notebook? You could say it’s just a diversion, way of passing the time, but the motive is more devious than that: some furtive itch for immortality or whatever. (For that matter, why “go along” with Mandunga? Same itch?) Back in the war, though, I wasn’t conscious of writing my notes for anybody’s eyes but mine. Nor am I now.

  Correction: just looked back to yesterday’s entries and saw that when I mentioned my father I added a parenthetical phrase identifying him as a professor of radiological medicine, etc. I could hardly have slipped in this biographical tidbit for my own eyes, I know damned well the old man was professor of radiological medicine. For whose eyes, then?

  My God, maybe I have some megalomaniacal myth about being a man of destiny after all. Maybe I’ve hung on to some tattered idea that my life is somehow significant and star-ridden—that I’m fated to have an impact on the world, heaven help us. (Through Mandunga, if nothing else offers itself?) The Western ego has a hell of a tough time shaking off its sense of mission. . . .

  Just thought of General Smuts back in Mozambique, lying on his side without arms, knees still clutching his legless horse, covered with banyan creepers and lichens. Immediately restored my sense of balance. . . .

  JUNE 9, 1990

  Durban

  Still waiting for that lackadaisical freighter.

  Went poking around the outskirts of town today, on the other side of the bomb craters. Came across a little neighborhood library in pret
ty fair condition. Just inside the door, hunched under a desk, a human skeleton, female, about forty-five I’d say, quite brachycephalic (wish I could forget that word). Most likely she’d tried to hide when the bombers came over but the radiological dust got her: tortoise-shell eyeglasses still hugging the skull (once a librarian, always a librarian), a rubber stamp with the date “August 23, 1972” still between the bones of the thumb and index finger of the right hand. Over in the corner a pile of books, the wooden shelves had rotted away and they’d all tumbled to the floor. One book lying off to the side covered with red ants, brushed it off and picked it up. French edition of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which I read several times over when I was a medical student in New York and hanging around the Village a lot. (Time I was rooming with Helder.) As I remember, the story is devoted to the theme that twice-two-equals-four is an evil proposition. Theme that’s been carved in my hide. (Helder hated the book, wouldn’t read it; but he was the one who suggested the tattoo.)

  Case of Notoa: psychiatric teaser, and it’s important. Not just because it would be nice to have good books and paintings around—that’s relatively unimportant, people can live without the esthetic frills. No, what’s crucial about the sick artist is that he merely dramatizes the plight of the average person in the community. With everybody the problem is to wrest energy away from the masochistic compulsions (the “It” inside) and make it available to the “I” for creative work. Mandunga begs the whole question, just goes after every sign of energy with a knife.