Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  More than once Brother Martine confided in me, even during our student days, his fear that, possibly because of his Mormon training and, in a broader sense, because of the whole “barnstorming” Western ethos of which he was a product, he had what he called a “messianic complex,” an urge to be a “world-saver.” (Sometimes he even suggested, in his usual joking way, that I too had a touch of this spirit, perhaps even more than he did! We laughed about it many times. How I wish I had seen through his scoffing manner and realized that, with his delicate indirectness, he was really urging me on to a bolder course.) He need have had no such misgivings—it is glaringly clear now that he was the man fated to save the world—but in his great humility he did have them, and they prompted his ironies and psychoanalytic witticisms. It only remained for us, Theo and myself and the others granted the good fortune to be his faltering disciples, to study this notebook, break through its thin shell of irony and draw from it its glowing humanist premises in their pristine magnificence. As, of course, he intended us to. We did not find it hard; where there is a will there is a way. —Helder.

  18 First appearance in literature of those inspired key words, vol-amp and Immob. The word Limbo, of course is not to be taken seriously—it was one of Brother Martine’s typical jokes, designed to hide his intensely serious purpose. See previous note on the word masochism. —Helder.

  Part Five

  LOVE AND COLUMBIUM

  chapter fifteen

  HE WAS finished reading, at last. He sat on the bench, staring dully at the book in his lap. Everything was clear. He understood now his agitation of the past few hours—of the past week, the past month. Of every minute of every day and night since the man named Theo had first made his brachycephalic way to the Mandunji village.

  It had started there—although a niggling disquiet had come over him weeks before, with the first reports of the queer-limbs who had been sighted off Madagascar. At that moment his memory had begun to grind again, trying to pump long dormant words back into awareness so that he would be forced to eat them. For a month the words had been trying to break through the censorship of his fear and nausea by reminding him of the forgotten pegs from which they dangled: 10:10, scalpel, 17-M, EMSIAC, bunk plane, Helder’s snoring, Helder, pen with which he wrote in notebook, notebook. For the past hour he had been eating all his old forgotten words, every last gallows-humorous syllable—all his moth-eaten old jokes, as mauled into a philosophy under Helder’s parasitic-inspirational aegis. He knew now what united him, tragically, with the giraffe.

  It was all clear now. When Theo had stepped jauntily into the village, he had brought with him some vital fragment of Martine’s buried identity—something that was inextricably entwined with all these forgotten words and their pegs. At that moment Martine had suddenly known, with a knowledge that went beyond all logic, that he had to leave the village. Only for purposes of safety, he had thought then, but actually to follow this trace of his buried personality—like a man poking an aching tooth with his tongue—back across the Atlantic as far as it would lead—fighting against the shock of recognition all the way. Now he had found what he was looking for in this joke-book-become-bible, some essence of himself which had been flickering feebly for nearly eighteen years under the incognitos. Its name? He could not fully recognize it as yet, he did not quite have the name for it. But at least the shock was done with. Somehow, at the death-ridden heart of Immob, he had found himself—was about to find himself. Henceforth, when he closed his eyes, giraffes would do no more demented nibbling on neon.

  He looked up, somebody was watching him. It was a girl on the bench across the way. The girl with the sketch pad: he noticed it without surprise, almost with relief. She had her pad on her lap and she was drawing—glancing over at him from time to time, then going back to her work. She seemed not at all concerned when he caught her eye.

  The thought came to him: he had to have a woman.

  He stood up, no more dizziness, crossed the drive to her bench. She was not disturbed by his approach, did not even bother to close the pad when he leaned over to see what she was drawing.

  It was a charcoal sketch of himself, very cleverly done, showing him reposing in a little basket. He was without arms and legs, there was a beatific, saintly expression on his face.

  To his own surprise, he managed a smile. “A very good likeness,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s a little flattering, though.”

  “I must draw what I see,” she said. Her voice was husky, with only the slightest trace of accent.

  “Do I really look that good? Good enough to be in a basket?”

  “Of course. I look for what is inside a person—I’m not taken in by appearances.”

  “Appearances? You mean I’m an Immob and don’t know it—an ambulatory basket case?”

  “Something like that. You don’t fool me for a minute.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the boys.”

  “The ones who are worth recruiting. Not that there are many past forty.”

  “Recruiting?”

  “Sure. I’m from the East Union—one of the artists over here on cultural exchange.

  “I don’t know too much about all that, I’ve been out of touch with things.”

  “Well,” she said, giving him a queer look, “if you really don’t know about the setup I’ll explain. We’ve had this cultural exchange ever since the Strip and the Union went Immob. Only the Strip artists who visit us are mostly just sightseers, while the Union artists who come over here are more active in a propaganda way, just as we are at home.”

  “It was always more or less that way,” Martine said. “Our tourists used to travel with capital, yours with Das Kapital.”

  “Yes, my people have always been more interested in mass enlightenment.”

  “Does this recruiting really work?”

  “Well, somehow or other it seems to hit people awfully hard when they see a picture of themselves in a basket—especially when it’s drawn by a woman. That alone often does the trick, without any discussion of principles at all.”

  “I see, I see.” Martine rubbed his forehead and frowned. “And so you—you’ve been following me around all day, haven’t you? From the time I passed you in the lobby of the Gandhiji?”

  “You’d make a wonderful Immob, I sensed that from the first. Also—you’re an exciting man.”

  “Maybe I’m what you call an exciting man because you think I’d look so wonderful in a basket.”

  “Every real man would, silly. There’s no contradiction.”

  “A real man,” Martine said, “might prefer a woman to be attracted to him because she’d like to go to bed with him. Not because he brings out the surgeon in her.”

  “The problem is purely semantic.”

  “Oh? Then—come to bed with me now. While I’ve still got my appearances on.”

  The girl’s eyes opened wide. “Go to bed with you? You’re asking me that now—hesitantly, as if it were in doubt? Strange man!”

  “You mean you won’t. You’re offended.”

  “Offended? This gets stranger and stranger! But of course I’m going to bed with you—I thought you understood that when you came over and sat down here.”

  “I—well, I wasn’t sure. There’ve been a lot of changes I don’t know about.”

  “As a matter of fact, you puzzled me this morning in the Gandhiji. I wondered why you didn’t speak to me then.”

  “Good Christ,” Martine said, “you don’t mean that if I’d stepped up and asked you then, out of the blue, you would have said yes?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean at all.”

  “What, then?”

  The girl began to laugh. “You really have been out of touch, haven’t you?” she said. “Why, any fool can see what I mean. I would have asked you. . . .”

  An hour later Martine gulped down the last of an excellent T-bone steak, dropped his knife and fork, and settled back with a sigh. In the park he had mentioned that he was
ravenously hungry, and the girl had promptly led him to this café-restaurant, an enormous basement decorated like the salon of an old Mississippi steamboat—the first touch of architectural nostalgia he had come upon anywhere in New Jamestown. Now he grunted in contentment, doubly happy to find that the turbulence in his gastric affairs was quite gone, and looked up at his companion, savoring her along with the cigar and the Napoleon brandy.

  And still he was not altogether at ease. Sitting opposite a very beautiful woman without a speck of reluctance in her make-up—the adolescent’s dream girl—he was annoyed to feel a trace of reluctance in himself. Maybe because he sensed that, like so many of the girls he’d known in his adolescence, she had such a trigger-quick erotic response because the thing was to her a quite casual business—and he, even in his most flamboyant self-proving days, had never been able to take it quite casually. When the woman was this cavalier in her handouts, the suspicion arose that what she had to offer was less a rare gourmet’s delicacy than a soggy free lunch. (On the other hand, reluctance was no guarantee of a superior bill of fare: Irene had been reluctant, but only because she had not wanted him to find out too soon that in her larder was only a lean snack of cold cuts disguised as boned hummingbirds.) What was wanted in her was not a coldness, to be sure, but some deep wariness, an air of discrimination, so that a man might feel he was chosen because of some special worth and that he had somehow through his special worthiness forced the choice—that the act was not entirely a thing-in-itself which could be performed equally well and with equal meaning, or lack of it, by interchangeable parts and parties. Martine shuddered: he remembered a Greenwich Village girl who, when issued a casual invitation to drop in at his place for a drink, arrived carrying two suitcases. And then he smiled. There was something outrageously funny in the reversal of roles here; he was complaining about the female’s brutalized attitude toward sex exactly as, for centuries, the female had complained about the male’s brutalized attitude. . . .

  “I guess I ought to know your name,” he said.

  “Neen.”

  “Mine’s Lazarus. Dr. Lazarus.”

  “I know. The desk clerk at the Gandhiji told me.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “Nothing much. Just that you’re some kind of medical man. Judging from your clothes and your luggage, you’ve apparently been away from the Strip for some time. And, judging from the questions you ask, you aren’t very familiar with what’s been happening in recent years. At least, you don’t seem to be.” The peculiar, sly look crept into her face again.

  “Do you always compile dossiers on likely bed partners?”

  “I like to know who I’m sleeping with. It helps.”

  “Sure—but a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.”

  “So can a lot of ignorance.”

  There was a bandstand over to one side of the night club, and next to it an elevated dance floor; now a dozen Negro musicians appeared with their instruments, all of them gotten up as traditional plantation darkies and levee roustabouts, in ragged dungarees and with gaudy kerchiefs wrapped around their heads. They seated themselves on the stand and at a signal from their grinning leader—a duo-amp: the only one in the group who was any sort of amp at all—they burst into a raucous, bouncy rendition of “Muskrat Ramble.” It was old-style New Orleans four-beat jazz, religiously patterned, note for note, after the records of Jellyroll Morton and King Oliver and Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet.

  As soon as the band started to blast away, dozens of couples made their way to the dance floor; the platform began to quake under their wild prancing and galloping. Almost all the men who undertook to dance with their partners were quadros—assured, haughty-looking ones: evidently this club was a hangout for the elite—and the gyrations they went through resembled nothing Martine had ever seen, although there were in them echoes of many way-back dances from the Charleston and the triple lindy down to the applejack and the mambo. The men, once they had twirled their women away to one side, did multiple flips and somersaults which they came out of in spectacular splits; they shifted from feet to hands and back again, without missing a beat; they spun like tops, did handstands and lightning-fast cart-wheels; and all the while their partners could do nothing but stand by, swaying gently to keep the rhythm. Now, obviously, the men could perform feats of caperous co-ordination with their plastic limbs which the girls could not hope to duplicate with their real ones; and so a popular dance had come into being in which the man was the fiery, contemptuous show-off and the woman, no matter how expert she might be, essentially a spectator, caught up by her partner at odd moments and then flung aside as he began to strut his cybernetic stuff again. There had been more than a suggestion of the battle between the sexes in old jazz dancing; now it had become the whole thumping spirit of the thing, because of the tremendous anatomical inequity between the partners. More reversal of roles: women had become the aggressors, men, the exhibitionists. This male flashiness, indeed, went beyond kinesthetic stunts, the men displayed their limbs and their clothes were loudly colored. In the end as in the beginning: in most primitive societies, and almost everywhere in the Western world until the eighteenth century, it was the men who got themselves up flashily, preened and strutted. . . . It was an arresting scene—with some seventy or eighty quadro bodies flying about, the whole stage seemed like a fireworks display.

  “That’s quite a dance,” Martine said. “What is it?”

  “It’s called the Cyber-Cyto Hop,” Neen said. “Phuh.”

  “Don’t you do it in the Union?”

  “Certainly not. We like a little more dignity in our amusements.”

  “You don’t go for jazz?”

  “I hate it, we all do. For a long time before Immob, you know, your music and dancing were officially banned from my country, and we still find them offensive. We like sturdy folk dances and songs you can whistle, we reject tics and sounds that seem to come from an asylum. Jazz is degenerate.”

  “Me,” said Martine, “I like a bit of degeneracy now and then. Takes your mind off things.”

  “Immob,” the girl answered, “aims to elevate the mind, not distract it. All this is plain animalism. Were our marvelous pros invented for Immob man in order that he might hop around like a kangaroo with the itch?”

  “Considering how down you are on things animal,” Martine said, “you’ve got some pretty strange notions for this evening’s recreation. Or did you mean that we were going to play mandolin duets and discuss Tolstoy in bed? The collected works of Martine?”

  “Don’t be funny,” Neen said. “Sex is animalistic only when it’s done by animals. For true Immobs it becomes something altogether different.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “You’re afraid,” Neen said, “for the same reason an orangutan is afraid to stop fingering himself and write a sonnet.”

  “Maybe it’s not fear,” Martine said. “Maybe it’s common sense. He may know that once you invent the sonnet you very probably have to go on and invent the hydrogen bomb and policemen and EMSIAC and dementia praecox.”

  “And in the end, Immob.”

  “Yes, in the end, most likely, Immob. His literary reluctance may be based on that too. That may be why he doesn’t even keep a notebook.”

  Martine signaled to the waiter, a pleasant-faced young Negro in a crisp white jacket, and paid the bill. On their way out Neen stopped and pointed to the dance floor.

  “Look at the orang-utans,” she said. “There won’t be many couplets coming out of them. They don’t have the time—they’re too busy fingering themselves.”

  “Is that fun?” Martine said. “With plastic fingers?”

  A tall Negro in a brocaded uniform swept the door open for them, grinning, and they passed out into the street. It was dark now, the prosyletizing dirigible was blinking out its message above, luminous sheets of window gave off a rich milky glow from the store fronts; it was a cheerful, ingratiating scene, taken just v
isually.

  “Something puzzles me,” Martine said idly. “Except for the musicians back there, and a few menials, there don’t seem to be any Negroes around town.”

  Neen snorted. “That surprises you?” she said. “You don’t remember your country very well—if you’re really surprised.”

  “I remember that even in the best of times they were treated pretty much as second-class citizens. Not that that’s any reason for you to feel so superior: your country, even in the best of Soviet times, had some fifteen or twenty million of its second-class citizens in slave labor camps. But, anyhow, there were certainly Negroes around. And some of them, after a hell of a struggle, were even beginning to push their way up a bit. But now, with Immob, I would have thought—”

  “Think again. The reason you don’t see any more of them is that they’re all underground.”

  “What? You mean they’ve started some kind of subversive movement?”

  “Not exactly—most of them are working in industry, which is all underground now. They’re the new proletariat, pretty much.”

  “But how can that be? What with atomic power plants and robot brains, there can’t be many workers needed in industry any more. Even when I was a kid the big plants had been pretty completely robotized.”

  “There’s plenty of dirty work even in a highly mechanized factory. Besides, we have the strong impression that the Strip industrial engineers have avoided mechanizing their plants all the way, precisely so that Negroes and other ‘undesirables’ might be put to work and kept out of trouble—and sight.”

  “Aren’t Negroes eligible for Immob, then?”

  “Oh,” Neen said scornfully, “they’re eligible, all right. According to the law, that is—just as in the old days, according to the law, they were eligible to vote, go to school, run for office, and everything.”

  “Then how do some Negroes get to be Immobs?”

  “By doing what they’ve always done when they couldn’t get what was coming to them—they arrange to do it for themselves as best they can. They’ve set up their own Immob clubs, and along with them their own surgery centers, pro-fitting centers, neuro-loco training centers, and all the rest of the Immob institutions. Some of them, of course, come over to the Union to have the operation.”