Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  He had to smile at his upsurge of pique, the moment he was reminded of Irene he recaptured a touch of his old martyred feeling. No doubt he was feeling a bit put out because this girl, although she wore her superficial heat like a sandwich board, hadn’t deigned to notice him. But personal feelings aside, he was curious to know whether this aggressive girl was typical of the new Inland Strip woman. If so, it might conceivably be that a real sexual revolution had taken place, at least that an old one had at last been completed. Such women, among other things, might have acquired such a taste for the upper hand that they would insist on it in bed too—it had happened before, shades of Irene. Which could lead to some positional alterations. He would have to make some cautious inquiries, as part of his research. Excuse me, madame, I don’t mean to intrude but I have come to inquire about a position. . . .

  He had wondered if the girl’s obvious play for the two men hadn’t been prompted by the fact that they were dignitaries; but no. Across from Martine was a young quadro-amp with the face of a petulant boy scout; when she approached him her wiles were just as lavish and blunt as they had been with the East Union duos. Obviously there was something erotically enticing about an amp, Martine simply was not in the running. Except that with these amps the running seemed to be in the wrong direction: a furious skedaddle, not a chase.

  “Are you being met at the airport, sir?” she said, bending so low that her breasts were not only in the boy’s line of vision but almost in his line of mastication.

  “I am not,” he said curtly, looking out the window.

  “The copter might be crowded. Tell you what, I’ve got my car parked at the port. . . . I’d be glad to give you a lift.”

  There was murderous hostility in the amp’s voice as he said, “Get this straight—I don’t care to be given a ‘lift,’ by you or anybody else. I’m not a cripple.”

  So these amps hadn’t managed to keep all wars on the other side of the river; the war between the sexes was very much with them. In some pretty spectacular forms. Phuh, garbage, etc.

  As the plane backed down into the airport Martine, filled with anticipation and more than a little anxious, looked out. Several cigar-shaped objects in the sky some distance off, in the direction of New Jamestown: dirigibles, with signs on their sides that flashed on and off. Too far away to make out the letters.

  chapter nine

  THERE WAS A reservations desk in the roof-top solarium of the Gandhiji, for the convenience of those who arrived by copter. Martine had no trouble getting a room.

  “Do you intend to stay long, Dr. Lazarus?” the clerk asked.

  “Hard to say. I’m a parasitologist, I study parasites. When a new one turns up somewhere they send for me.”

  The clerk looked concerned.

  “Don’t worry,” Martine added, “I’m not at the Gandhiji on business. It looks like you run a nice, clean place here.”

  “Oh, you won’t find any parasites here, Doctor,” the young man said emphatically, “The Gandhiji caters to a very exclusive clientele.”

  “Parasites are extremely democratic,” Martine said. “They have much less class prejudice than people. A cat can only look at a king but a bedbug can dine on him for weeks. Henry the Eighth—”

  The clerk’s face was polite, interested, sober, clerkish. . . .

  It was early, hardly more than dinner time, he was looking forward with excitement to his first glimpse of the city’s street life, once he’d cleaned up and changed into some fresh clothes. But after showering he found that a numbing weariness had seeped through his body; the trip had been much more exhausting than he’d suspected, especially the last tropospheric leg of it.

  Lethargy. He lay back in his shorts (excellent raw-silk ones from Switzerland, with the distinguished label of the House of Espuma-Rumpf inside the waistband) and let his thoughts wander. Somewhere in the sugar-candy city a clock boomed the hour: seven strokes.

  Seven. On the Mandunji island it was way past midnight, everybody snoozing. But if there were any insomniacs still awake (Ooda?—smoking?—Rambo?—reading?) very few of them would be aware of the time as “past midnight.” On the island, sunup to sundown was reckoned as day and the stretch of darkness as night, and no finer calibrations were needed. So long as you did the same thing all day long, shucked and ground maize or pulled in fishing nets, what reason was there to chop the day up? That had become necessary only for the young ones who had embraced the machine.

  The moment the machine appeared in a community the clock appeared too, it was inevitable. And the machine had launched a real class struggle among the Mandunji: between the inert old with their lulling rhythm of day and night (calendar-oriented: each indivisible day like the day before) and the anticipatory young with their tense and jerky rhythms of hours and minute and seconds (clock-oriented: each striated day unlike the day before). Of course, mechanization had not yet swamped life on the island, men had not yet been made adjuncts of the machine. When that happened, when the Industrial Revolution was completed, life for all but the managers became a nightmare of metronomic monotony, a series of Pavlovian twitches—witness the Ford plant and Taylorism.

  He slipped on a robe and went out on the balcony. Directly to his left and two stories below, in another tier of sundecks, a young quadro-amp was stretched out on a couch, reading.

  As Martine watched, a pretty and buxom girl came out, wearing high heels but dressed only in a brassiere and a pair of skimpy, clinging panties. She stood at the side of the couch for a time, looking down at the boy and tapping her foot, but he wouldn’t raise his eyes. Then with a determined movement she pulled the book from his gleaming hands and dropped it on the floor, sank down beside him and stretched out so that her almost nude body was pressed against the whole length of his.

  He made no movement. After a time she curled her arms around his shoulders and squirmed about until she was lying on top of him, her lips pressed ardently into his neck. She began to whisper something to him; she freed one hand, with a deft twist unplugged his left arm and put it on the floor.

  For the first time the amp showed some sign of life. An expression of peevish rage on his face, he placed his remaining hand on the girl’s back and with one powerful heave—Martine could hear the clicking—sent her sprawling across the floor. Then, his face frozen again, he retrieved his arm and plugged it back in, picked up the book and went back to his reading. The girl sat on the floor, rubbing her shins and glaring at him.

  The girls seemed to be getting pretty forward, all right. Forward, upward, topward. Maybe position had become everything in life, at least in love. The girls seemed to have become positively disarming, preferred their lovers handsome but without hands—all this would take some looking into. But—the more the girls panted, the more the boys pouted.

  What could the amp’s book be: War and Peace? . . .

  He leaned on the balustrade, looking down at the glittering Christmas tree of a city some fifty floors below. There were skyscrapers on every side, bright ones, peppermint sticks. Why? Why this devotion to the imperishable up-and-down, this anachronistic hunching and cramping? Strange, now that an atomic can-opener had pried the horizons open again and there was more elbow room on the continent than anybody had felt since Columbus and Cortez. Maybe all this, too, was dictated by a time-sense which was like a traffic cop, presiding over the instincts with a stop watch.

  Clearly, when the ethos of a people was dominated by a fidgety awareness of the goose stepping minutes, the “play” minutes had to be carefully tagged so as not to become jumbled with the “work” minutes. There was only so much energy available to each organism: the bulk of it was permanently trapped in the “culture” networks, against which the frailer “instinct” networks struggled in vain—the top-sergeant frontal lobes saw to that. When schedules permitted a bit of a sensate romp it could only be fleeting, momentary, and then the instincts were not really unleashed, the dog collars remained on them. One was allowed, at best, a quick pause for brea
th between sobrieties. But if play couldn’t encrouch on work, work butted in on play: men often made love as though it were an assignment, a job to be done, another bit of robot routine. A metronome in every cortex. An old medical book statistic (Kinsey?): three-quarters of American men reached the climax in less than two minutes, the bulk of them in less than thirty seconds; Johnny-Come-Earlys! Time must have no stop! Music, the art whose medium was time, through moods of resignation (metronomic regularity) or revolt (syncopation).

  The instincts, in short, were verticalized: hasty soarings, even hastier plunges back to earth. The instincts on a high-speed elevator. And any symbol which stressed the verticals would be far more impregnated with meaning for such a people than one which proliferated horizontally, hugged the earth and bowed to gravity, meandered in the lateral stretches, shunned compression and thrusting rigidity in favor of bohemian flow—smacked of the feminine rather than the masculine. Not by accident that the instinctual, the emotional, had always been equated with the feminine. . . . And this instinctual verticality came all the more easily to a puritanical people who feared and mistrusted their bodies and could acknowledge them only in hasty surrenders—who shuttled between the ups of the “lofty” spirit and the deeps of the “lowly” flesh. Calvin had begun to preach his metronomic morality in Geneva only when Geneva had become a city of watchmakers. . . .

  Wasn’t jazz, too, part of this time-saddled picture? In its syncopated play with time, what was jazz but a toying with the idea of disrupting schedule and smashing the metronome—a toying, a nihilistic charade, but never the complete breakthrough? The trumpets and clarinets kept promising to desert the thumping four-four rhythm section and fly off anarchically into timeless, chaotic, unmetronomic space: that was the thrill in improvisation. But the promise was never fulfilled, any more than it was in Notoa’s paintings. Jazz, with its abrupt orgasmic spasms and its split-second frenzies, was nothing but emotional verticality transmuted into sound, and what seemed like joy in it was really anguish. The soloist made a pretense of evading the clock-ridden musical community in a brief blast of willful subjectivity—then sank back again into the harmonic and rhythmic traps of the community. . . .

  Yes, what dictated motives was echoed in motifs. People with verticality in their instincts would cotton to verticality in their architecture, their sculpture, their playthings, their music. They would build trylons at their fairs, parachute drops and loop-the-loops in their Coney Islands; they would invent the airplane and jazz. And after a disaster, in a state of shock, they would perhaps draw inland too, close to the mountains and away from the sea—the sea is all a sideways flowing, ease and extension that knows no boundaries; the mountain is crammed and effortless upness, monument to tonus. And so: skyscraper equates with jazz equates with mountain equates with metronome equates with metronomic instincts: Eros punching the time clock. When would all this be plotted on the cytoarchitectonic map, when would the overzealous metronome be located in the cortical-thalamic networks so that something might be done to—?

  A dirigible floated into sight over the skyscrapers and wheeled slowly around the hub of the city. The electric signs on its sides flashed on and off, Martine studied the words in astonishment:

  Dodge the steamroller!

  Dodge the steamroller!

  Dodge the steamroller!

  Just that, over and over; nothing more. Gibberish. Why not, with equal logic, dodge the cyclotron? The player piano? The giraffe?

  Still there was something tantalizing about the slogan. It had some slippery aura (error: horror) of meaning. The word “steamroller” set up reverberations—some unco-operative net of neurones shuddered. He remembered his farewell lecture in the cave: Why had he kept on using the silly word and being upste by it?

  He turned from the epigrammatic dirigible and wandered inside again. He sang,

  Knots are very hard to cut with an adze.

  They blunt the edges of the adze. . . .

  He stopped at the bureau and examined his face in the mirror, murmuring irrelevantly, “Dodge the skyscraper.” Beard coming along nicely, he had trimmed it down into a neat Van Dyke.

  What was it Abraham Lincoln had said about the human face? Something like this: Every man past forty is responsible for his own face. He was forty-five now. Was he ready to take responsibility for that bewhiskered oblong casing him from the mirror? Well, take the eyes (blue as a baboon’s butt). They were a little wary and too bright, pulling back into their sockets as though to avoid being dazzled too easily: not too good but not too bad. Or take the lips. They were full, suggesting that their owner might be a bit of a voluptuary; but they dissolved in ambiguous shadows at the corners, suggesting that for all his plunges into the sensual he wondered if, finally, sensuality itself wasn’t something of a joke, a dodge, a diversion, loaded with ironies as every human ardor eventually was, because the human being couldn’t quite bring off the animalistic: he looked too ridiculous on all fours. Lips that poked fun at themselves, ends negating middles. But the real tug-of-war was between the eyes and the lips. The eyes hovered editorially over the lips, making their own sardonic comments on every smacking and nuzzling and guzzling—they were Peeping Toms on every lust which transpired below, through their windows the prefrontal lobes peered out, interpreting and labeling the whole gamut of greeds the mouth was slave to. Not entirely good, not entirely bad either, maybe. . . .

  But there was something else in the too intent blue eyes that wasn’t so good, something more chesty than cheeky. Some of the brightness came, not from leeriness and irreverence, but from a sense of dedication, mission. It was the gleam of the messianic.

  But at least there was mischief in the face to dilute the missionary. A good old American trait too. Only it seemed out of place in this new America. If his first quick impressions were correct, nobody bellylaughed around here any more. These people had suddenly become as dour as certain Middle Europeans of the old days. . . . All that had been in Lincoln’s face, certainly: terrible naked melancholy, sure, but mingled with it an ineradicable mischief. No mischief in these amps. Every time he’d tried a joke on somebody, Jerry, the desk clerk, it had fallen flat on its face. Queer: back among the Mandunji the kids were beginning to learn how to chuckle, here they had suddenly dropped into a grinless and gagless sobriety. . . .

  There was a thin volume lying on the night table, he noticed it for the first time. He picked it up and examined the dust jacket: BASIC IMMOB TEXT NUMBER TWO, said the type across the top, and all around the borders ran a design of triskelions filled with running prosthetics. The book was a handsomely designed edition of William James’s The Moral Equivalent of War, and appended to it was a long essay by Mahatma Gandhi on the philosophy of nonviolence and passive resistance. He flicked the pages. Across the bottom of each page were printed three words in boldface caps: DODGE THE STEAMROLLER!

  Martine reached for his notebook and slipped it into the jacket of the James-Gandhi volume. He placed it on the night table, the original book he put away in the drawer.

  Over the bed there were several knobs fixed to a large wall panel—switches, as he could see from the labels, for the radio loud-speaker and the television screen which were fitted into the opposite wall. He turned on the radio and played with the tuning dial until he found some music.

  Program of jazz recordings; he recognized the tune being played as Louis Armstrong’s “Four Or Five Times.” After that came other Hot Five classics of the twenties, “Didn’t He Ramble,” “Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” “Jelly Roll,” “Beale Street Blues.” An all-Satchmo program! Maybe New Orleans had come back still another time to a world it had never made but somehow inseparably belonged to. . . .

  When the disk-jockey program was over he fiddled with the television until he got a clear image on the six-foot-square, full-color screen. A young quadro-amp was giving a lecture to the young Immobs of the Olympic athletic clubs. On a large table before him were all parts of a disassembled pro leg, he wa
s explaining the structure and function of each.

  “With the Games coming up,” the lecturer said, “all of us ought to brush up on the design of our pros—you can’t appreciate the Games at all, fellows, unless you understand something about pro engineering. Now, kids, what say we take a look at the insides of this doodad. . . .”

  Number One: the element he was holding now, he explained, was the socket. This was fitted permanently into the stump by cineplastic surgery, connected up with all the muscles and nerves of the stump. Designed so that any kind of limb could be snapped into it and immediately be hooked in with the musculature and the neural system. . . . Number Two: the atomic-energy capsule, the power source of the mechanism. The movements of the limb were guided and controlled by neural impulses relayed from the brain through the central nervous system, but they were powered by this built-in plant. Which made the artificial limb infinitely stronger than a real one. . . . Number Three: this gadget, consisting of a wire coil and a metal rod which moved in and out of its electrical field, was a solenoid. Translated electrical into mechanical energy. Equipped with a system of levers and linkages which did the work of the original muscles and tendons but with much more power and control. There was a solenoid for each muscular unit of the original leg: one in the thigh, one in the calf, one for each of the toes. In the arm, of course, the setup got a lot more complicated. . . . Number Four: all these tiny objects were thyratron vacuum tubes and transistors. Hundreds of them in each limb, laid out in relays they converted neural impulses into electrical ones to operate the solenoids. . . . Number Five: the oleo-strut shock absorber, in which compressed air, oil and springs were combined to cushion the impact of a fall. . . . Number Six: the gyroscopes, which controlled balance. . . . Number Seven: the strain gauges. Attached to pads on the fingertips, they duplicated the sense of touch by converting pressure into neural impulses. . . . Number Eight: the thermo-couples, which converted temperature stimuli into neural impulses. . . . Number Nine: the cooling system. . . .