Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  Theo was sitting up straight now, talking earnestly. It was incredible: his voice trembled, it had a real ring of sincerity—either he was a consummate actor (this babyface?) or it was all a hopeless muddle. . . .

  “A few more facts. There was no ulterior purpose for my cruise. To put it baldly, I was dog-tired, pooped. When the Olympic team was kind enough to invite me along on its trip I was delighted—maybe you know that the Games have always been my first love. And all we did on this trip was what you saw in my films a little earlier—trained, got some sun, visited various places and met various people, and collected quite a few odd plants and animals for our museums and zoos and botanical gardens. Brother Vishinu’s correspondents no doubt meant well, but their reports weren’t very accurate. All I can say is that it behooves Immobs, above all, to make sure their information is, ah, first-hand.” He smiled at the joke, then reached into his drawer. “Here, folks, is the columbium we imperialists came back with.” He held an object up: a tremendous iridescent butterfly, floated in a slab of transparent plastic.

  “As for the talk about monopoly, cartels, and all that—well, let me put it this way. I was surprised to hear Brother Vishinu use such antiquated words. In the old days, of course, such phrases used to fly about all the time: his forefathers were constantly accusing ours of Wall Street imperialist plots, ours were forever accusing his of Comintern-Cominform-Soviet imperialist plots. And every so often the accusations would break out into open warfare. Well, communities bound together by Immob don’t talk about each other that way. There’s no room for talk of greed, plots, bad will, and all that rotten old junk. Our only competition is a fraternal one, symbolized by the Games.”

  The tremolo again: he looked as though he were about to bawl.

  “Soon the Games will be with us again. Let’s go forward in the happy unity they represent and forget this momentary misunderstanding between brothers. . . .”

  “It’s a lie, Babyface,” Martine said drowsily. “A god-damned lowdown dirty unmitigated monstrous cerebrotonic-somatotonic bitch of a lie. You weren’t butterfly hunting. You were digging.”

  “Immob”: he was quite sure now that the nonsensical word had something to do with immobilization, with the idea of immobilization, with some thoroughly obscene and improbable absurdity involving the idea of immobilization; quite sure, too, without knowing why, that hidden somewhere in that idea was some incredibly ghastly joke. Code word. Thoroughly inedible.

  He switched off the television and turned over on his stomach, closed his eyes, saw Ooda’s face, saw her high full breasts. His fingers curled around the pillow, he remembered from somewhere the phrase, “a soft merchandise.” Then he slept.

  Part Three

  THE IMMOBS

  chapter ten

  THE SUN, amuck, splashed through the open window. A frisky breeze spilled over his face. He had bolted out of sleep with such a sense of exhilaration that he felt light-headed; now he lay still, in a room all sheen and soft ferment. Marvelous to feel surge of tone through muscles again, the sudden clamor of appetites. Nerve strands bursting with hosannas, opening their yaps and beginning to crow; his—

  He sat up and began to laugh. To pinpoint himself in time and space, he had forced his mind to focus on the scene—the Inland Strip—and then the date—July Fourth, 1990. It was Independence Day! At least what used to be called Independence Day.

  Well, he’d already had a king-size Independence Day in his life. His own personal Declaration of Independence had been signed with a flourish just about eighteen years ago. Darting supersonically out of the jaws of the EMSIAC trap, he’d been stunned to find that the world, until then shriveled in death convulsions, had suddenly flared open again with hope and possibility. The same sense of remove from all external compulsion, no doubt, was responsible for his giddy mood now. Of course there were atrocities waiting for him all up and down the Strip—but ghastly though the spectacle might be, he would be less than aghast. It would have nothing to do with him. Or—

  Dancing under the icy needles of the shower, gasping, he found himself weighing another possibility. True enough, he would observe the cyberneticized fauna of the Strip much as an interplanetary tourist might explore the craters of the moon. Still, there might be a deeper source for his euphoria than detachment. It might be that this Fourth of July marked the second subjective Declaration of Independence in his life. Because, it had to be confessed, despite his stand-offishness he had been sucked pretty deeply into the emotional orbit of his hosts, engulfed by their projects, commmitted to their ends. (Or: was it that some obscure—messianic—end of his own had been involved?) Maybe he had merely exchanged one EMSIAC for another. Maybe he was now snapping out of the second long cataleptic trance of his life, an eighteen-year snooze of acquiescence disguised as moral neutrality (“they started this lobotomy”) and simple humanitarianism (“might as well teach them anatomy and asepsis”). Maybe he’d gotten involved, willy-nilly. And maybe that was why, the moment an excuse presented itself, he’d felt such a strong compulsion to run away from the island—a compulsion he hadn’t been able to explain adequately to Ubu or Ooda or Rambo, for all his glibness.

  His Bond Street—Champs Élysées duds were so impeccable that when he emerged from the elevator and began to pick his way through the crowded lobby nobody seemed to suspect the psychic loincloth underneath. Nobody even noticed him. With one exception: an extraordinarily beautiful girl with jet black hair and marvelously full lips and an aura of lolligag and mash about her. Dressed in a pink-and-blue diagonally striped dirndl and a low-cut off-the-shoulders peasant blouse, she sat in an armchair facing the elevator doors, busying herself with a sketch pad in her lap; when Martine passed she raised her eyes and studied him coolly for a long moment, then quite unhurriedly went back to her work.

  In all his life he had never seen a less coy or more calculating look on a woman’s face. Her eyes had not only undressed him but had then gone on, in an access of book-keeper’s thoroughness, to measure each portion of his anatomy and record the more or less vital statistics in some amatory card-index. And he, of course, had replied in kind: measure for measure. At once intrigued and disconcerted by the semaphore of come-on passing between them, he slackened his pace so that he might keep her in sight a moment longer. Sure enough, she raised her eyes and stared again, boldly and unequivocally. He began to address himself urgently: no, no, foreign entanglements were out.

  Stopping at the newsstand to buy a paper, he glanced over his shoulder. A real stunner, with some tantalizing suggestion of the Oriental—Mongolian? Indonesian? Malayan?—in her exotic, slightly tilted eyes and the rich rose-olive tint of her skin. The fact probably was—he tried half-heartedly to console himself with the thought-that this girl, with her jutting Eros and propositioning eyes, was just as cold and ersatz as he’d decided most of the women hereabouts were. Profile of the Immob female: first-rate frustrate irate ingrate castrate. Shades of Irene, etc.

  He went into the hotel restaurant, ate a big breakfast, and over his coffee began to examine his paper. Pictures of both Vishinu and Theo were plastered over the front page. BRANDS INLAND ATHLETES “IMPERALIST” AGENTS, one streamer announced, while directly underneath another read: THEO: VISHINU CHARGE “SEMANTIC MISUNDERSTANDING.”

  “He’ll eat his words,” Martine whispered mechanically.

  His eye wandered to the masthead of the paper. Just above the name, NEW JAMESTOWN DAILY HERALD, was the tastefully executed slogan: DODGE THE STEAMROLLER!

  Staring at the smears of egg yolk left on his plate, Martine felt his throat muscles tightening. They were clamped so rigidly that it was hard for him to swallow when he sipped his coffee.

  “Steamroller”: word to stick in the craw. Why on earth did he find this nonsensical admonition staring him in the face again and for no reason at all think of the equally nonsensical phrase, “He’ll eat those words”? Why did his lips go dry and his gullet contract? He pushed his chair back and went out without looking at
the paper again.

  When he re-entered the lobby he found himself face to face with the dark-haired girl: she had shifted to a seat directly in front of the restaurant door. He headed for the barber shop to get his hair trimmed. Twenty minutes later, when he came out, she was still sitting in the lobby, still sketching. Now she was in a chair which commanded a view of the barber-shop entrance.

  He was tempted to sneak up behind her and get a look at what she was drawing, but he decided it would be a waste of time unless he was prepared to follow up with some kind of pass. And Dr. Lazarus was not a bird of that kind of passage. Mustn’t be. Well, he probably wasn’t missing much anyhow.

  He pushed through the rotary door, gloomed unexpectedly by the whimwhams, went out into the sparkling sunlight.

  There were amps everywhere on the boulevards, all of them young, most of them in their twenties. Very few men with all their limbs intact were under forty, and those who were seemed to be wearing the scarlet letter of some enormous turpitude: they invariably had a hunched, hunted, defensive look about them which suggested that they were in ill repute and knew it, felt the disdain which bellowed at them from all eyes as they skulked along. These untruncated heretics were obviously the troubled ones—slackers? Immob’s 4-F’s?—around here.

  First observation: a man with his own legs had no footing here; if past forty he was a dotard, if in his twenties or thirties a pariah. And it was equally striking that those who had the maximum number of artificial limbs also had what, for lack of a better word, might be called the best standing: the quadros were gazed at worshipfully and with palpitating greed by all the women, from tremulous teen-agers to maudlin-eyed matrons. From the way these amps lazed around, from their air of having infinite time on their Plexiglas (or whatever) hands, it was a fair guess that the quadros, as well as many of the tris and even the duos, had few workaday affairs to occupy them: they were the leisure class.

  Once this idea occurred to Martine he found evidence to substantiate it on all sides. Those who did the menial jobs—tossing flapjacks in restaurant windows, clerking behind store counters, running elevators, driving busses and taxis—were non-amps; most of them, in fact, were women, and more than a few were Negroes.

  So it was clear: there was a ladder of status with a carefully measured quota of eliteness doled out to those perched on each rung. All of which, to be sure, had been true of Martine’s people for as far back as he could remember, but in pre-Immob times the marks of social standing had been different ones. There had been many standard indicators of one’s degree of Jonesness, from the conspicuousness of one’s consumption and the whiteness of one’s collar to the telltale shape of one’s proboscis and the generation in which one’s ancestors got up off their emaciated and much-booted European rusty-dusties and took it on the westward lam. Now everything was simplified, there seemed to be just one spectacular badge of status: the number of plastic arms and legs displayed. Conspicuous consumption had apparently given way to conspicuous mortification of the peripheral flesh (a good old American practice), conspicuous maimery. (Where to locate the maimery glands in the human anatomy?)

  And before long Martine observed something else. These sidewalk charades of sahibism and pariahdom unfolded in an atmosphere drenched with slogans. There were slogans everywhere, assaulting the eyes and eardrums: they blared from loud-speakers, they were lettered on buildings, on store fronts, on newspaper vans, on women’s scarves and bandanas and dresses, on lapel pins and scatter jewelry, on banners strung across the boulevards like the electioneering signs Martine remembered from the old days. These Immobs were the sloganizingest people since the invention of the catchword, which no doubt occurred simultaneously with the invention of the word. And what slogans they had spewed up!

  HE WHO HAS ARMS IS ARMED, one slogan proclaimed.

  WAR IS ON ITS LAST LEGS, shrilled another.

  MAKE DISARMAMENT LAST, a third advised.

  As a prosthetic footnote to that idea, the public was also advised that DISARMAMENT MUST BE TOTAL AND PERMANENT.

  TWO LEGS SHORTER, A HEAD TALLER, one sign said provocatively.

  ARMS OR THE MAN, was the flat statement on another.

  PACIFISM MEANS PASSIVITY, boomed the speaker in front of a radio shop.

  NO DEMOBILIZATION WITHOUT IMMOBILIZATION, Martine read from the inscription on a girl’s blouse, directly over her breasts.

  That one startled him, it seemed to be the clue to something. Now that he allowed himself to think about it (and why, why, hadn’t he thought about it until now: it had been a full month since he’d first heard Theo speak the evocative syllables?) he realized that the word “Immob” had overtones too: Immob, immobilization, there was certainly a connection. . . .

  And everywhere, leering down from roof tops and yapping up from inlaid sidewalks, the schizoid motif: DODGE THE STEAMROLLER! It was far from unpleasantly hot but he found himself sweating profusely. By the time he sighted the park, a huge circular patch of greenery at the hub of the city, his shirt was soaked through around the shoulders and he felt rivulets trickling down his armpits.

  In the center of the park was a statue, a fifty-foot-tall marble enormity perched on a great slab of concrete. The bold geometer’s lines of this stone mammoth were strongly reminiscent to Martine, they seemed the caricatured end-product of the massive-monumental-modern style, the cartoony gigantism, which for so long had been the keynote of both American advertising and display and Soviet propaganda.

  Martine was standing alongside the statue now. It was a many-times-life-size replica of a machine: a steamroller, unmistakably a steamroller. Stretched out supinely in front of it, his legs crushed by the great cylindrical roller right to the hips, right to the gentials, was the oversized body of a man. An agonized expression contorted the face, the neck muscles stood out like guy wires, the arms were flung beseechingly into space, almost like—except for the nails: the steamroller took the place of the nails—those of Christ on the Cross. Cut into the base of the statue were the exasperating, belly-tightening, throat-shrinking words: DODGE THE STEAMROLLER! . . . .

  And somebody was shouting the words. “Dodge the steamroller! Oh, yes! Fine ideal But how can we minorities dodge anything so long as we’re denied our full amp rights?”

  It was a beefy red-faced woman in a severe tweed suit; she was standing on a platform to one side of the statue, addressing a small crowd through a microphone. Above her was a banner reading, LEAGUE FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF IMMOB WOMEN: EQUAL AMP RIGHTS FOR ALL!

  “We minorities,” the haranguer continued, “have to get together in a united front and fight this thing through! Women, Negroes, all the victims of discrimination. Unless we go to real extremes we’ll never get rid of our extremities. . . . Now it’s a real pleasure to introduce our guest speaker—Brother Bethune of the N.A.A.C.P.—he’s going to say a few words about the Negro problem. Brother Bethune!”

  A tall, lathy colored man came up the steps and took his place at the microphone. “We’re in this united front with the League all the way,” he boomed. “We of the National Association for the Amputation of Colored People know what it means to be denied all human rights. If all the locked-out minority groups can get together like so many fingers to form a mighty, invincible fist, we will smash through the wall of discrimination and gain our full amp rights, the great good fight will be won. . . .”

  So democracy had not quite triumphed: it remained a set of old saws even after surgery had come along with its new saws—

  “Doc!”

  He was so absorbed in his thoughts—rather, in his utter, appalling lack of them—that at first the voice which came from behind him did not register. But it was insistent.

  “Hi! Dr. Lazarus!”

  Of course: he was Dr. Lazarus, parasitologist extraodinary, plagued now by a most extraordinary parasite of a word which had bored into his brain and wriggled there. He turned and saw a mono-amp coming toward him, unruly red hair blazing in the sun, stack of books under one a
rm.

  “Jerry!” Martine said. “How in hell did you get here?”

  They shook hands and the boy explained. So many passengers had left the S.S. Wiener at Miami that the skipper had decided to cancel the seaboard leg of the cruise and proceed to dry dock for some long overdue repairs; many of the stewards had received extended vacations; Jerry had hopped a plane last night and here he was, with three months in which to attend lectures and bone up for his civil service exams.

  “It’s a real break,” Jerry said. “This means I’ll be here for the Olympic Games. I would have given my, well, the nose off my face to see the Games.”

  “I thought you were going to say—you would have given your right arm.”

  “I started to,” Jerry said sheepishly. “Some of those old-fashioned sayings still come up now and then, no matter how much linguistic reconditioning a guy has. It’s awful hard to erase old words from the brain.”

  “Yes. Words aren’t amputated as easily as arms or legs.” Hardly aware of what he was saying Martine added: “Maybe the only way you can really get rid of bothersome old words is to eat them. . . . Look, tell you what, if you’re going somewhere I’ll walk along with you for a while. I’m just getting some air.”

  “You planning to go to the Games?” Jerry asked as they cut across the park.

  “If I’m here. Unless they’re called off or postponed because of that business last night.”

  “You mean Vishinu’s speech? Aw, not a chance. Those Union guys have been talking like that, only not so rough, for years now, my pop says. It doesn’t mean anything much.”

  “It used to mean a lot in the old days.”

  “That was before Immob,” Jerry said. “Immob really unites people.”

  “Vishinu didn’t sound very united to me.”

  “When Vishinu talks that way, beating his gums about imperialism and monopoly and all that, why, it’s just a verbal hangover from the time of wars and armies and all. It’s like my almost saying I’d give my right arm for something.”