Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  He would not relinquish control of the car to the robo-drive, he kept it on manual. Drunk on his misery, he hardly noticed the road, but old habits, long buried, stirred again to keep him going safely and in the right direction. Thirty-five years ago he had traveled this route time after time with his father, his muscles had not forgotten the turns.

  He thought of Martine Senior, his father. Good American father, intense in his work and a bit ineffectual away from it, a bit uncomfortable in the presence of his women, delighted to escape from the too correct too demanding environment of women whenever he could manage a week-end hunting or fishing trip into a falsely exclusive world where men provided and cooked their own food in an orgy of self-sufficient camaraderie. Life for him, as for most of his colleagues and contemporaries, had been dotted with these wistful charades of rough-and-ready masculine brotherhood. . . . Now his, Martine Junior’s, hands, tense with nostalgia, guided the steering wheel along the old and long forgotten escape route into the mountains—like father, like son. . . .

  It was close to two hours before the paved highway ended and the familiar dirt road began the final ascent into the steep mountain range. Automatically, Martine slowed down to navigate the bumps; automatically, when he came to the narrower lane that branched off toward the lake, his hands maneuvered the swerve.

  Several miles more and he was there: the lake, surrounded by a growth of pines thick as a muff, was a sheet of isinglass glinting in the moonlight, exactly as he remembered it. And there, in the little grove beyond which the mountain soared up again, was the cabin.

  When he trained his flashlight on it he saw that it had not been used for a long time: most of the windows were broken, the brick chimney had collapsed, a tree had fallen over on the porch, bashing in the flimsy roof. Chances were that he would be safe here, at least for a time. Five or six months anyhow, with luck.

  It was chilly now, he shivered in his light clothes, but he was well prepared for that. He was safe, from everything but his thoughts. For a time he would provide his own tinned chocolate cake and evaporated milk, handle his own bedpans, nurse his dreams of omnipotence, quake in his nightmares of impotence, the archetypical frontiersman taking to his (electronic) horse in flight from his women. But the hunter’s log cabin was only a thinly disguised baby carriage. Now, to be sure, he was in flight from something a lot more substantial than mom-mythologized-into-monster; still, he had the uncomfortable feeling that, just as in the old days, he was running at top speed from a mirage—from something in himself. Some voyage of self-discovery! One mad scramble after another.

  Dully, he tried to order the events of the last two days in his mind: they were swimming in improbability. He knew from the gnawing in his stomach that he had hardly eaten for the last twenty-four hours, from the ache in his bones that he had hardly slept for twice that long. He could just barely drag himself from the car, he wanted only to flop down and sleep, but he had to eat something first and there were no women about to summon with a cough and a whistle.

  Sweating with the effort, he carried most of his supplies into the cabin, arranged a cot in the corner so that he could crawl into it when he was ready. Then he opened a can of beans and gulped down its contents without bothering to heat them.

  It now occurred to him: he had come close to being killed last night.

  How, the enormity of how it could have happened, still wasn’t clear to him, but there was no blinking the simple fact: he had almost had it. Tomorrow, no doubt, when he was functioning again, he would receive the full impact of that brush with death and quiver—now it was simply one more insipid fact among others: porch staved in, son in a perambulator, mother and ex-wife alive, beans cold, wind blowing in through the broken windows, he had almost been killed by Vishinu and Dai last night. He was no longer capable of reacting, when the nerves were too heavily overloaded they finally stopped oscillating altogether, went dead. Now he wanted only the blessed release, the death-in-installment, of sleep.

  He fell on the cot without removing his clothes and pulled the thick blankets up over his body and closed his eyes. The next moment he started up in a cold sweat, thinking about Neen’s hand poised with the pin in it. He remembered that one of the cartons he hadn’t brought in from the car was the small brown one marked DOTTIE CLARK’S NONPAREIL CHOCOLATE CAKE—he’d noticed it, grimaced, quickly pushed it to the rear of the luggage compartment and forgotten about it. As soon as he’d closed his eyes he’d seen a painfully sharp image of the carton—the lid was slowly rising, sickeningly rising, Pandora’s box on the point of disgorging its horrors—he’d known that something monstrous, a woman’s hand with a murderous sharp instrument in it, was about to emerge from its depths and he’d jerked up in dread.

  With the feeling that it was all a dreary repetition. He’d sat up like this, sweaty, taut, once before. Not long before his fourth birthday, in that Victorian house on a side street of Salt Lake City. He’d been ill for three days, some virus, tossing for hours at a time in delirium, lying there helpless and drenched while his mother bathed his face and tended the bedpans; he’d just passed the crisis the night before, finally, he was still feverish and there were moments of wobbling consciousness. He couldn’t understand what they meant by a virus: somehow, without having words for it, he had felt that this wracking illness was some malevolent thing that had been deliberately done to him. There had been a great unspoken tearful feeling of abuse.

  Waking that morning after the crisis, he had found his mother sitting anxiously at the bedside and immediately, in a weak martyrish voice, he had asked for chocolate cake. His mother had caressed his brow, explained in her niggling sad voice (she had her martyrdoms too, he thought now with surprise) that the doctor would not allow him to eat anything solid yet—she would bring him some beef broth so that he could get strong again and then he could have all the chocolate cake he wanted. That would not do, he refused to listen to her patient medical explanations. He knew only one thing: she was refusing him, she always refused him. He had already been treated badly enough—if “they” put this “virus” in him the least they could do now to make it up to him was to give him some chocolate cake! In a rush of indignation he’d sat up in bed, all his feeble energies mobilized by his fury, and begun to yell at the top of his lungs, demanding—not whistling, not whimpering, but screaming out his imperious-impotent orders. She had not been able to quiet him, in a panic she had finally summoned the doctor. To end the tantrum the doctor had given him an injection of a strong opiate: he still remembered how his mother held him down while the doctor approached his arm with the hypodermic needle, in some hallucinatory perception it had seemed to him that it was his mother who was descending upon him with a murderous needle in her hand, needle, knife, dagger, something, he’d screamed in terror. And after that, in later years, the same theme had recurred many times in his dreams—often there was some ominous figure of a woman padding through his sleep, reaching for him with some needle or knife. And so (oh, yes, this sickening thought had occurred to him once much later, during his analysis: then he’d thrust it away from him), fifteen years later, he had chosen for himself a career of using humanitarian hypos and knives on others: do unto others as ye feel ye have been done to, done in, undone, yourself. And so, years after that, he had huddled miserably in a bunk plane in the Congo, writing down an elaborate dirty joke about people using knives on themselves, of their own volition: whence vol-ampism. . . .

  He’d sat up like this a second time—almost twenty years later, in New York, on a psychoanalyst’s couch in a room overlooking the East River. (A point about compulsive repetition, he thought now in his misery: he, the enemy of compulsion and repetition, advocate of the voluntary and the spontaneous and the unprecedented, had been springing up from the same bad dream all his life long, like a jumping jack.) Throat muscles rope-tight, as before, sweating as before, scream rising from compressed lungs as before. Remembering the scene from his childhood, muscles reminiscing as well as mind. Why the in
tense emotion, the quaver in his voice, the analyst had wanted to know? Because, he’d replied—well, the event seemed to confirm his early feeling of being unloved. Strange that he should find such confirmation in such an event, the analyst had remarked: hadn’t his mother refused him the cake in order to protect him, for his own good? Yes, of course, he’d admitted impatiently; but: if she’d really loved him, given him the sure feeling she did, maybe he would have seen the point. As it was. . . .

  No but’s, the analyst had said. He apparently had gotten oriented from the first to see no point about his mother but the point of a menacing knife. They had seen in the course of his analysis, over and over, that this feeling of being unloved by his mother was his basic myth: one by one the proofs, dredged from the depths of his reluctant memory, had turned out to be phony, based on an insistent misunderstanding and misreading of reality. And what a craftily selective memory he had! From his dismal recitals of hurts one would gather that his early years were one unbroken sequence of denials, rebuffs, no’s, don’ts—that his mother had never changed a diaper for him, dressed a skinned knee, cuddled him, tucked him in—that, utterly indifferent to his needs for food and clothes and shelter, she had callously deposited him on a snowy mountain top to fend for himself or be eaten by wolves. But his total blackout about this side of his mother, the giving side, gave the game away. What he really had against his mother was not this or that real hurt but—her very existence. Her mere existence as Other, her “refusal” to be co-opted and absorbed by him. The gap between his skin and hers. Her living at moments beyond the reach of his tongue and lips and eyes and hands. Her keeping one foot in the world of the “It,” rather than letting herself be sucked totally into his “I”. . . . In the early days psychoanalysis had, more often than not, accepted the patient’s myth of mistreatment by the elders as a fact, and derived from it all his subsequent malaise, confirming his fiction that all his troubles stemmed from bad parental handling; but more and more, in later years, analysts had come to see that this last defensive layer of myth had to be ripped off before the real genetic truth emerged: namely, that emotional distress is something a man inflicts on himself. Because he, or at least his unconscious, has learned to take pleasure in pain. Indeed, the infantile truculence behind such a fiction, flying in the face of all reason and reality, could not be maintained without the expectation of pain—from the outside in the form of punishment, from the inside in the form of guilt and depression—and without some inner mechanism for converting such unavoidable pain into pleasure. It had to be faced: the myth of having been denied would not be nourished so devotedly, and enacted in adult life over and over so compulsively, if under it was not the deeper desire to be refused, to precipitate refusals: under the protest is the yearning—a strategy for courting pain. By and large, the denied chocolate cakes were myths, and when one clung to them one arrived at pain, finally became an addict of pain which, by the fantastic alchemy of the unconscious, is turned into pleasure, secretly crowed over under a cloak of pouting indignation. . . .

  It was true. Nauseatingly, humiliatingly true. Because if a man had really been hurt in infancy by denying parents and if he was not masochistically in need of hurt, he could easily correct things in maturity by arranging for himself the kind of life situation in which he would not be hurt. It was easy enough to pick friends and lovers who would not reject you as your parents had allegedly done. But later he had sought out a cold woman and married her (and cut short his analysis to do it): a good deal of his tension with Irene, some of his worst fights with her, had begun over matters of food, often in the kitchen; he’d complained many times about her being such a terrible cook. It must be—as his analyst had suggested—that he had needed for a wife just such a terrible cook, and terrible bed partner, precisely so that he could cling to the myth of chocolate cakes wanted and never granted: there were women in the world who could make wonderful chocolate cakes and would like nothing better than to give them to him. There was Ooda. Yes; but he had backed off from Ooda, too, a little. Why? Because, even in the best of circumstances, he had to maintain a small flickering fiction that every woman, no matter how giving, came toward him with a needle in the offered pastries? That every lake harbored in its false softness a fist, a steamroller? So that, even in the best of circumstances, a man had to be mountain-stern? Of course, such backing away helped to create the needle, fist, steamroller. To reject Ooda, however subtly, even in her moments of fullest giving, was a sure-fire technique for provoking her into anger and counteraggressiveness. . . .

  Now he was sitting up again, damp, tense, miserable. Thinking about the other two times, trying to recapture their interlocked meanings. He was much too tired, couldn’t think. He fell back again and pulled the blanket over his head.

  Instantly he was floating on a lake, inert. Queer, from this moment on he had the distinct impression that everything happening was in the nature of a pun, even when no words were spoken.

  . . . . floating on a lake, face down, mouth puckered with the burning brine, soured milk, trying desperately to dive under the surface. Useless, it was like batting his head against a bale of cotton, the waters had a will of iron under their lapping softness.

  “Relax,” he ordered. “Give in. We’ll do it my way, don’t go sour on me.”

  “Lie back and float, why fight so hard? You have but become the ocean, now flow,” somebody said mockingly. Neen’s voice, Irene’s voice, Rosemary’s voice, his mother’s voice, impenetrable Lady of the Lake. “Switch from manual to robo. Drink your milk, son, we’ll take care of the bedpan.”

  Suddenly he felt himself helpless, the soft fleecy blanket had turned into a strait jacket, arms were gone, legs were gone, he couldn’t fight any longer, waters too rubbery. He fell over on his back now in the right receptive nursery position which is everything in strife and let himself be carried along at 186,000 miles a second, cork bobbing on the rushing waves, but when his mother reached gently under him for the bedpan she brought out an object that was not enameled at all but leather-covered, a notebook with his name written on the cover and above it the words DODGE THE BEDPAN. While Irene bent closer and closer over him and ran her hands over his inert body and the forefinger jutting pedagogically and surgically from her outstretched hand was a nipple no was a hypodermic needle was a snub-nosed automatic that turned into an enormous glass of milk but when she raised it to his lips he knew from the noxious briny taste of it that it was rotabunga and he gagged and tried to spit it out but she squeezed his throat and he had to swallow. Now she sank down upon him and was straddling him and as he lay there impotent and filled with rage—squatter’s rites for her?—he looked over her shoulder and saw the tower of the Gandhiji rising up like a giant hypodermic needle from among the mountain tops about where Kilimanjaro should be, spouting strychnine, its cap of snow melting and enormous drops big as dirigibles falling from it as it melted and neon letters flashing from their sufaces as they fell—DODGE THE VIRUSAGO—he knew they were glutinous gobs of tapioca and would drown him.

  “Lie father, lie son,” young Tom said in a low authoritative whine from his basket in the corner, swimming in tapioca.

  Rambo leaned over and administered the antidote. Refreshing taste. Real milk. But when he reached out for it his hand began to oscillate wildly with intention traumer and he blushed. The rosier the merrier. Rosemary.

  “A myth is as good as a smile,” he said thankfully to Rambo.

  As the energy flowed back into his limbs he felt better and he blinked three times for maybe. He rolled over again into the position that was nursery-wrong but feeling-right and he was sinking into the lake at last, into sleep, it seemed to him that finally he was freeing himself from the prison of the waters, the waters were parting now before his trust because in good we thrust and now it was right and he began to make easeful and liquid love to Ooda, unresistant parting Ooda, no fists in her acquiescent giving responsive flesh. Over and over as he dove in effortless unencumbered self-propelle
d pelvic sweeps, buoyant and plunging as a catamaran, not wanting to hurt Rosemary now, over and over as she undulated liquidly with him, all protoplasm no skeleton, waters parting, she whispered in his ear, “No bolos, I do not want to fight,” and thankfully he churned to the bottom and came to the bott-Om, thankfully and fulfillingly and without awakening he spilled into the ocean and the ocean now milk churned with him, and he thought, hugging the bottom, “Rambo, yes, there is Rambo. At the storm’s end the Rambo,”

  “You see?” Ooda said gratefully. “That is when it is best, without proving, gangster gone, Rosemarys gone. It does not have to be all eagerness either. Egoness, I mean. Why worry so much about who does it—let it be done, forget about needles and the need for needles and the need to cover up the need for needles, you relax more that way. The less egoness, the less going away. Eagerness, I mean. Otherness. A little tapioca is not so bad at times.”

  “When he wakes up he will be very, very sad,” Vishinu said.

  “There is plenty of precedent,” Irene said. “He always wanted to be precedent. Eat his chocolate cake and have it too.”

  “There are sins of the sons too,” Rambo said.

  He paid no attention. Cushioned in the fistless enveloping flesh of Ooda the Om the doming heavens the clouds like scatter rugs the wind whistling whimpering through the broken panes, feeling the waters finally drained of fight the lake’s legs spread and encircling and will abandoned, Rosemary emptied of screams, come at last to the end of his anguish, he settled thankfully on the bottom of the ocean of ease, Victoria’s peaceful blue waters lapping around him and Kilimanjaro dripping into the waters; curled up against a sunken dirigible soft as a breast but no neon slogans flashing on it now, and slept.