Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  BABYFACE: I don’t follow your references to infancy and the nursery.

  ME: It’s nothing complicated. What was thrown off in infancy—the feeling of puniness, of being a defenseless object—creeps back on the battlefield. With a difference. The resentful infant—resentful because it feels, usually quite without justice, that it’s been denied and cruelly mistreated—could only yowl and bite and scratch a bit by way of expressing its rage. Pretty harmless. The soldier, resenting the same enforced passivity, can do something more: he can kill. In a sense, war is an institution which allows men-regressed-to-infants to murder their mommies, the job they muffed in the nursery. The irony, of course, is that the helplessness in the nursery wasn’t brought about by the infant—it’s just a neutral, objective fact that the kid can’t accept neutrally and objectively. But war is man-made, self-imposed helplessness. This is a passivity not dictated by nature but manufactured by those who fume against it. That is the surest sign that the deepest emotional undercurrent in war is a masochistic one, for all the show of bluster and outward-turned aggression: for the thing about it that most infuriates men is really produced by them. They must have a dim realization that they brought this state of affairs about themselves, and that must make them more furious than ever—and more determined to pin the blame on someone or something else.

  BABYFACE: What you’re saying is, people resent being steamrollered, in war or any other way—even though, or, rather, because, they engineered the whole thing themselves—and have to take out their resentment on somebody. If only to prove that they do resent it, don’t really like what’s happening to them.

  ME: That’s just about it. People have to prove that they’re not passive victims but active doers and managers. They have to prove that they don’t like being mauled just because, deep down, they keep the nursery myth alive—so much so that they go on perfecting more and more efficient instruments to do the mauling. That’s why they fight. The enemy’s a convenient scapegoat. War not only humiliates people, it provides easy targets for them when they get elaborately and fumingly sore about being humiliated. . . .

  BABYFACE: That figures, all right. People secretly turn pain into pleasure—and reach for the brass knuckles to prove they don’t enjoy it. It’s kind of a startling idea, but it figures.

  ME: The baby and the gangster are Siamese twins. Obviously, then, the important thing is to avoid the feeling of being victimized, set upon from the outside, shoved around—the myth mustn’t be propped up by a stage-managed reality, by itself it’s enough of a steamroller. Right?

  BABYFACE: It makes sense. Suppose I’m huddled up in a foxhole and a remote-controlled buzz bomb starts to swoop down on me. If it comes right on without a by-your-leave and clips off my left leg, I’m bound to feel that I’ve been pretty badly treated. If I were given even a tiny bit of choice, I’d immediately feel a whole lot better.

  ME: There’s no denying it. If you’ve got to make some sort of sacrificial offering to the steamroller, it would take a lot of the sting out of it to be allowed to name what it’s to be—arm, leg, ear, nose, testicle, or what-have-you. As the existentilists used to say, within a determined situation you retain some dab of freedom. . . . But let’s go a step further. Can’t the amount of choice be expanded?

  BABYFACE: I see what you’re getting at. Say, this is really an idea. Maybe you could work out a new way of fighting war in which there weren’t any victims at all, no steamrollers. In which all the casualties volunteered for their wounds.

  ME: That’s it! Just to bring the individual will back into the picture. Give the “I” some stature alongside the “It” again.

  BABYFACE: Lets’ see now. What disturbs a clippee, obviously, is that he had no choice. Maybe he would rather have lost an arm than a leg? But there’s more to it. Maybe there was some other guy around who would have welcomed this maimed state because it seemed to him to offer a whole lot of advantages—no work, the security of a pension and three squares a day, an excuse to be passive in a socially approved way and have women waiting on him, and so on—whereas the guy who did get clipped doesn’t care for it at all, having a taste for other things like work, earning his keep, and lording it over women instead of being dependent on them. Well, if the population had been polled, the amputeeism and paraplegia and all other damagements could have been distributed to each according to his need.

  ME: Neat! Marx corrected by Freud. To each according to his need—not his economic need but his masochistic need. Because some people have a special taste for suffering and should obviously be allowed the lion’s share of it.

  BABYFACE: Very democratic. Takes the individual into account. Real human dignity to the thing.

  ME: Nobody could then say: I was clipped. Exit the steamroller.17

  BABYFACE: How, exactly, would you get people to volunteer? What kind of pitch would you use?

  ME: That’s a cinch. As you yourself pointed out, there are plenty of guys who would be quick to see the advantages—by which I mean, there are plenty of guys who are that self-damaging, who revel that much in mistreating themselves, especially when they are officially encouraged to do so. Of course, you wouldn’t put it on the basis of mistreating oneself—that would be giving the game away. It would have to be suggested that the volunteers wouldn’t be hurting themselves but actually doing themselves and the world some good. You could easily do that with a few well-chosen slogans, such as—oh, I don’t know, slogans to the effect that there’s no demobilization without immobilization, pacifism means passivity, arms or the man: anything that makes a wound into some kind of boon. And then, of course, as you’ve suggested, you could offer special inducements to the recruits: cash awards, bonuses, pensions, hero status, medals and decorations, membership in exclusive clubs, leisure, women, all in proportion to the degree of amputation or other forms of crippling. How many men were actually clipped in World War II—25,000, 30,000 on our side alone? How many in World War III—many hundreds of thousands around the world? Hell, you could round up millions and millions of volunteers if you just put a heavy enough stamp of social approval on it and offered enough juicy come-ons. You’d get precisely the same results that you get from war now, except that everybody would be happy and feel himself the dignified master of his own fate. And, secretly, revel in the enormous amount of pain he’d arranged for. That way, maybe a sorehead word like clipped would never even be thought of. Not when the guy’s a voluntary amputee. A vol-amp. We might call these guys vol-amps. Short snappy catchwords like that always go over big. Vol-amps. Immobs. Limbo—we might call our brave new world Limbo. The great moral equivalent of war might be vol-ampism. You know William James’s essay, The Moral Equivalent of War? That might be the new Bible in Limbo.18

  BABYFACE: Eventually you might bring about universal disarmament that way. You might even go the whole hog and make up a slogan about disarmament being impossible with arms around.

  ME: The human race would finally come out of its trance, straighten up, push its shoulders back. Maybe even puff its chest out and begin to strut a bit. The battering’s over with.

  BABYFACE: No more quaking in the cellar, waiting for the bomb to land. No, sir. You just step up to the operating table after plenty of deliberation and say very deliberately, “Just chop off one arm, Doc, the left one, just up to the elbow, if you don’t mind—and in return put me down for one and two-thirds free meals daily at the Waldorf and a plump blond every Saturday.” Or whatever the exchange value for one slightly used left arm would be—that would have to be worked out by the robot actuaries.

  ME: Oh, it would be conducive to self-esteem, all right. Death to sluggish fatalism. Matter of fact, we’d have to revise our whole traditional concept of tragedy, which has been poisoned by fatalism and a sense of steamrollering menace. Without any more Fates harrying you than you’ve applied for, all the old-time dramas of people being tormented by circumstance will look downright silly. Without the steamroller, Sophocles begins to look like a calamity-howler.
Now all the steamrollers are within.

  BABYFACE: Wouldn’t the whole American novel in its usual form become passé? The standard American novel is mostly sociological, not psychological—it shows people being overwhelmed by circumstances over which they have no control, rather than seeking out and manufacturing the circumstances that overwhelm them.

  ME: It goes without saying. Take just the theme of amputeeism in the American novel. It makes its first spectacular appearance in Melville’s Moby Dick—Captain Ahab has lost one leg to the White Whale, a pretty crude prototype of the steamroller, the nineteenth-century EMSIAC, and he’s so consumed with rage that he goes back and gets himself chewed up altogether. Well, in our new society of voluntary amputeeism, Ahab wouldn’t be able to feel one iota of rage, because he would have volunteered his body to the whale—openly and directly, not ambiguously and with a false-face of indignation, as in the old novel. . . . Skip a hundred years. When the same theme shows up in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—incidentally, remember the anti-war book he wrote called A Farewell to Arms? Maybe there’s a slight suggestion there of the same idea we’re getting at—it’s now pegged to the steamroller of war: the hero has been accidentally castrated in the First World War, which complicates his love life a good deal and makes him feel very sad. Well, such a low version of tragedy will be impossible under the new rules. The unconscious yearning for castration—the ultimate amputeeism—which the success of such a book proves, will be dragged out into the open, and everybody who has it will be allowed to indulge it and be rewarded for it. There won’t be any more accidental castrates around, or self-arranged cases of castration disguised as accidents; they’ll all be volunteers, and knowing themselves for such they won’t be always trying to have their Lady Bretts and eat them too. Oh, the air will be cleared considerably.

  BABYFACE: It’s bound to liberate all the optimistic energies of man. Even the worst masochists and self-pityers will turn a new leaf. Instead of getting a little beating every day, piecemeal, in dabs and driblets, they get a hell of a big beating all at once. So they can afford to relax and cheer up, the damage is done.

  ME: Just by deliberately losing one or more extremities per man, we’ll all be a head or two taller overnight. Say, that might do for another slogan.

  BABYFACE: Sure, there’ll be a whole new race of men, fully human men. It’ll be real inspiring to watch it being born.

  ME: But there’s a slight matter we’ve got to attend to first. We’ve got to stop this war, and I don’t see how we can do it without putting the present EMSIACS out of business—after all, there’s no way to talk this thing over with the present EMSIACS and get them to see things our way, the actuarial way. So here’s what I propose. You’ll be sent home as soon as you can be moved. When you’re well again, and fitted with artificial limbs, take a look around. You’ll be a great hero then, the bigwigs’ll do just about anything for you. Find out where our EMSIAC is—and then get yourself a plane, go up and drop all the H-bombs you can get hold of on it. Just to clear the air, you see. Then when the shooting’s stopped, we can start talking up our new pacifist program, it’ll catch on like wildfire.

  BABYFACE: All right, Doc, I’ll do that little thing. I wish, though, that while I’m off saying no to EMSIAC, you’d find a way of saying no to it too—I’d feel a whole lot better if I knew you were risking something too. . . . O.K., I’ll knock EMSIAC out if I can. Then I’ll sit back and watch this new race of men being born. And while I’m watching I’ll be eating—swilling tons of food, I understand amps work up a bitch of an appetite. And while I’m watching and stuffing myself, I’ll keep on having fantasies. I’ll think, maybe I eat so much because something weird and sensational is happening to me. Maybe, I’ll think, I need all that energy, more than I ever did when I was all in one piece, because an unbelievable biological process is taking place inside me—maybe all that energy is being stored up behind my stumps, big reservoirs of protoplasmic fuel, and that’s why the stumps itch so much—sure, maybe when the stores of distilled steaks and chops and pastries get big enough the miracle of the ages will take place in my body—regeneration! While the human race is being regenerated, my legs will be regenerated, it’s a time of progress and miracles all around! Limbo everywhere! The stumps will grow and grow, drop down like a kid’s testicles, forced into budding by all the excess grub I eat, and I’ll have two fine legs again! While the whole human race learns to stand on its own two feet, against all the steamrollers! Sure, I see it now. I keep slipping off my pajama bottoms to examine the stumps, especially when they hurt or itch. I think, I’m going to have two first-rate legs again and this time I’ll decide, all by myself, entirely on my own, standing on my own two legs, just what I’m going to do with them. By the time they’re full-grown again there’ll be a new fully human society without steamrollers, a new society specifically designed with a statistical revulsion for willy-nilly amputeeism and a statistical preference for voluntary amputeeism, so as soon as they’re alive and kicking again I can just walk down to the recruiting station on the corner and have them sawed off again—of my own free will now, just to save my dignity and prop up my ego. . . . I contract my abdomen as I lie there, I clamp my intestinal muscles hard, straining to give birth—to force those leg-buds out like you force toothpaste out of a tube, so I’ll be ready for the new vol-amp adulthood of man when man reaches it finally. I want them so goddamned much, just so’s I can walk up to EMSIAC and yell, see, I got them back, I willed them back, and this time no son-of-a-bitch is going to tell me what should be done with them, this time I’ll make up my own mind, see, and take my own sweet time about it. Then maybe, who knows, maybe I’ll sit down and saw them off myself, right in front of the machine, just for the hell of it. . . . That’s what I’ll be thinking all the time the human race is getting born in Limbo, month after month and year after year. Only there’ll be a little hitch—the legs never will start growing. I’ll keep probing them, measuring, massaging—and all the stumps will do is ache, and itch like hell, while the human race is growing up and amputating itself all over the place. . . . You bastard. All you do is talk, talk, talk. The only thing that would make you into a human being would be for you to say no to EMSIAC, and all you do is talk, talk, talk, while EMSIAC keeps on clicking. I’m sick and tired of it. You’ve got lots of fancy words but what it all adds up to is this—you’re standing there on your own two legs and I’m lying here without legs. I’ll never have legs again. I’ll never stand on my own legs again. I’ve been steamrollered good and proper; it won’t get undone. You dirty fancy-talking son-of-a-bitch—why should you have your legs when I lose mine? Bastard. You dirty bastard. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. . . .

  POSTSCRIPT

  So ends Brother Martine’s notebook. Soon after the last entry was made, at exactly 3:31 A.M., a formation of enemy bombers arrived over our encampment. By 3:33 the H-bombs were going off.

  Some planes survived, among them the one in which I was bunked with Brother Martine and the one in which Brother Theo was lying still unconscious. We had received the alert far enough in advance to put into effect our anti-gamma and anti-blast precautions.

  When I was awakened by the alert I noticed that Brother Martine was gone from his bunk—only his fountain pen and notebook were there. Later, when Theo and I got home, we sat down to study this notebook seriously. We soon realized, of course, that in his usual persiflaging manner our martyr was enjoining Theo to destroy our EMSIAC and thus say no to “It.”

  Brother Theo accepted his historic assignment and carried it out flawlessly: he discovered the location of EMSIAC deep in the Black Hills, hidden behind Gutzon Borglum’s enormous faces of Washington and Jefferson, and bombed it out of existence. Thus was Immob born. But the daring feat had effects which we could not anticipate, although they were undoubtedly a part of Brother Martine’s inspired plan.

  Each EMSIAC, of course, was a chess player and nothing but a chess player; and, as such, it was able to cope with any situatio
n so long as it was confronted with an opponent with similar statistical preferences and revulsions. But neither EMSIAC had been designed to cope with a chess-playing situation in which the opponent was suddenly eliminated from the picture altogether: it was built to play a two-handed game, not solitaire. Therefore, once the American EMSIAC was destroyed, the Russian one was faced with the one predicament it could not anticipate or deal with: a game without an opponent. Its feedbacks were overloaded, it was thrown into a quandary, it had the electronic version of a nervous breakdown.

  When the Russian soldiers and airmen became aware of the fact that their guiding brain had suddenly developed palsy—and there was no ignoring it: the machine was babbling, humming, mumbling schizophrenic nonsense—their sense of awe was immediately dissipated, they realized that even EMSIAC was not infallible. In the turbulence which resulted, a young Russian airman named Vishinu—Theo’s opposite number, the man who destroyed New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington—was encouraged to engage in the same daring adventure which Theo had successfully carried out. He located his own convulsed EMSIAC under the Taj Mahal and bombed it out of existence.

  So, in a matter of forty-eight hours, the war came to a spectacular close, as Brother Martine, with his genius for seeing all things, had no doubt known that it would. And the air was cleared to begin the agitation for the pacifist program which our martyr had so meticulously worked out for mankind’s salvation. Such were the miracles wrought by one man’s “banter”!

  What, however, about Brother Martine? After the bombing there was no trace of him anywhere in the encampment—although all of us were required to wear on our persons certain heat-proof and radiation-proof name plates and other marks of identification. It can be considered established, then, that at 3:33 he was neither in any of our planes nor outside in the encampment area.