Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  X sensed all this, however dimly. “Maybe you’re right about me,” he said slyly. “But you’d better take a good look at yourself, pal: physician, heal thyself, and so on. It doesn’t strike me that the girl you’re going to marry is exactly the fully giving vaginal type either, to judge from a few things you’ve let drop.”

  “Don’t try to drag me into this,” Y answered angrily. “I’ll give you this much: the struggle between passivity and activity is pretty much the struggle that every man born of woman has to go through every minute of his life, sure—it’s pretty much the human condition. But not many of us get as spectacularly doglike-godlike as you. We don’t rape, we don’t become soapboxing pacifists. . . .”

  In his agitation Y jumped to his feet and began to march up and down. Pretty soon he went on, waving an erudite finger at his roommate: “One more thing, if you’ll forgive another literary allusion—you always seem to bring out the literary in me. You know the section in The Magic Mountain where Hans Castorp gets lost in a snowstorm and has a vision of the City of God? A paradisiacal spot, sunny, people dancing gracefully in the meadows with a kind of sunny solemnity—and back in the temple, in the cave of the temple, in the hidden guts of the community, so to speak, the monstrous cackling witches dismembering the body of an infant and crunching its bones between their teeth, blood slobbering down their withered dugs. You see—at the heart of the City of God, directly behind the scenes, the murderous Bitch-Goddess, man’s enduring myth—yours, and mine too, I’ll admit it. But you, who keep this myth alive in its most harrowing obsessive form, deny that it even exists, you go on plotting a perfectionist world in which there’s nothing behind the scenes—a City of God that’s sun-drenched all through, no caves. That’s your myth, undiluted Godliness, in which there’s no cranny for the mythological Bitch. . . .”

  Even nastier things were said that night, but no matter. The point is that only one person could possibly know the details I’ve recorded here. If you’re not convinced by the handwriting, be convinced by what I’ve written.

  Never mind where I’ve been or how I got here. I am here, and I’ve got to see you. The most important thing in all your life is to see me now. You’re in a pretty bad jam at the moment and I know how to get you out of it. I’ve bailed you out of more than one jam before this, sometimes without meaning to.

  I’ll be waiting at this auto court, Cottage No. 7, the address is on the stationery. Let me hear from you at once.

  Hans Castorp Earwicker

  P.S. I know you like to sleep on things, but don’t do it this time. Aside from the fact that I must move fast, I don’t like the thought of your sleeping on anything—you snore too goddamned much. It may be due to a chronic catarrhal congestion of the upper respiratory tract but it still sounds terrible.

  Writing at top speed, he had taken close to two hours to get the letter done. When he stopped now and read it over he was furious with himself: he had intended to dash off a curt, zippy note, just enough bait for Helder to rise to, and instead he’d composed a half-ass psychoanalytic treatise; even worse, he had meant in his reconstruction of the ancient episode to pillory Helder, and he was not at all sure that he hadn’t wound up pillorying himself at least as mercilessly—it was by no means clear who was the primary target of the heavy Freudian ironies. Obviously his purpose in writing the letter was a lot more than the merely tactical one of tweaking Helder’s memory—he had been trying to get the long-dodged incident straight in his own mind, especially his own shadowy role in it: there, too, was a suggestive hint as to his own identity. Well, he wouldn’t try to rewrite the thing, he was too beat. Sloppy, but it would do the trick; he’d send it as was.

  He wrote Helder’s name on an envelope, down in the lefthand corner he printed in large letters the word PERSONAL and under it added VERY URGENT. He sealed the letter in the envelope, placed it in turn inside a blank envelope, then pushed the service buzzer.

  In a couple of minutes the clerk’s son appeared, a solemn-looking boy of fourteen with a confetti of freckles on his face and ears like landing flaps. Martine impressed him with the importance of the mission, instructed him to enter the capitol building and leave the envelope with some responsible official; he gave the boy a twenty-dollar bill for himself, the youngster gulped and wiggled his ears in ecstasy.

  As soon as he was alone Martine threw himself on the bed and closed his eyes. The question now came to him: Why for a quarter of a century had he been so reluctant to think about the Rosemary episode? Some curdling guilt had no doubt driven the thing away from consciousness—but it was not so easy to define the guilt. Was it simply because, in giving Helder his alibi despite all misgivings, he had allowed himself to become an accessory after the fact—as he had later allowed himself to become an accessory after the fact to Mandunga? No: in some terrible way he had been an accessory before the fact.

  That was it. All men were, in a sense, accessories before the fact to each and every rape. Because all men carried about in themselves some touch of the rapist, as a necessary face-saving camouflage for their ineradicable softness—they sprouted fists to cover their essential flabbiness. Because they all shared with Helder his secret myth of the Omnivorous Denier. But, generally, men kept the myth under better control than did Helder, and thus were able to soften their camouflaging blows down to something resembling caresses. That was precisely why it was so terrible to be confronted with an unruly Helder—he disrupted the solemn-sunny communal dance by letting his myth-Bitch come prowling out in all her stark gory nakedness: and then let fly at her with both deceitful fists. The rapist shed a fearful amount of charisma because he brought out into the glare of day the secret shame of all men, exposed the hidden guilty rapist trapped in all of them. And who could say that, confronted with the vicious act of rape, other men, under their indignation, did not secretly, vicariously, partake of the false brutality, revel in this onslaught at one police-evading remove? Was this not why, for all his contempt, he, Martine, had passively given Helder his alibi instead of turning him over to the police? The thing had happened at the precise moment when he, Martine, was unbearably uneasy about his impending marriage to Irene, was already feeling trapped, smothered. And, after coming close to killing Neen—because of the needle in her hand—he had, absurdly, called her Rosemary. . . .

  One knot, anyhow, was beginning to get cut, at least frayed. . . .

  He slept. . . . Not too long after, three hours at the most, he was awakened by the sound of a car crunching on the drive outside. Squeal of brakes; bang of a car door; footsteps on the loose pebbles; doorbell ringing.

  Martine slid his hand under the pillow, found Neen’s automatic where he had left it. He got up, dropped the gun into his jacket pocket and pushed the safety catch down with his thumb. He crossed the room, took a deep breath, opened the door.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Everloving Babyface. Come in.”

  Theo stepped uncertainly into the room.

  “Brother Helder—he—” he said, then stopped. Hard to say whether the expression crippling his features was terror or adoration, or just three decades’ worth of doubt compressed into a fat second.

  “Helder sent you,” Martine said. He hoped he was keeping his voice even. “All right. Do you know why? You saw my letter?”

  “Letter? Yes. No. Brother Helder got it—he said something about a letter, it was hard to follow him, he was very upset. I know he got it. He had it in his hand when he called me in.” He stopped and stared at Martine, eyes begging for the alms of reassurance. “Oh, dear God, it is possible. I wouldn’t say for sure, still. Of course there would be some changes, eighteen years, but there’s something, even with the beard. . . .” His lips continued to move but no more sounds came.

  “Did Helder tell you to get more proof?” Martine was incredulous.

  “He said there was one other thing that would clinch it. He said—he told me to ask you about another day. A day at Coney Island? Something that happened in Coney Island?”


  Please, the friendly boyish hazel eyes said. For the love of Allah.

  “Coney Island?”

  “Yes. About the afternoon you and he went to Coney Island? During vacation, you had a couple of girls with you, their names were Rosemary and Irene? You’d all been drinking gin-and-tonics at Rosemary’s apartment, then you went out to Coney Island and somewhere, somewhere on the boardwalk, you passed this place?”

  “Wait a minute,” Martine said. “All of a sudden—sure! I’ll be goddamned!” He began to laugh. “Sure! That’s it, exactly! I’m an idiot not to have thought of it myself—that’s the real proof, of course.” His left hand went up, clapped his right shoulder resoundingly several times.

  “You remember?” There was no pleading in Theo’s voice now, just terror.

  “Every last pin prick! Sure! This is how it was—we were pretty drunk, parading down the boardwalk we passed this tattoo artist’s place. Sure! We stopped there, just for the hell of it I dared Helder to get something written on him and he dared me to. After a minute or two the thing got out of hand, it was serious, we were too drunk to control it, see—there was no backing down on either side. So we blustered it through. I said a tattoo was a damned good thing to have—suppose you dropped dead of heart failure on the street or got killed in an auto accident, all they’d find on you would be your name and your name doesn’t tell a thing about you—what a man needs is something emblematic inscribed on his hide, one pithy thing that sums up his whole life, everything he’s been up to. A slogan, maybe, something. That was it exactly, Helder said, but there was a problem: a man doesn’t know himself, it’s only others who see him as he really is, therefore the emblematic slogan that sums him up ought to be picked by another person. That was fine by me, I said, I’d be happy to let him pick my slogan if he would let me pick his. He agreed and we stepped into the place, the girls thought we were crazy and tried to stop us but the thing had gone too far. So the tattoo man wrote Helder’s slogan for me on my arm, and my slogan for him on his. . . . Did he show you his arm?”

  “Yes. Yes, he did. You—”

  “Sure, I’ll tell you exactly what it says on his arm. It says, in fine sweeping Spencerian script—‘Onward and Upward!’ Right?”

  “Small letters. Blue, with a double underlining in red. . . .”

  Releasing the gun in his pocket, Martine slipped out of his jacket, rolled up the shirt sleeve on his right arm. High up, just over the vaccination mark, the lettering came into sight, faded but still legible: “2 × 2 = 5.” Blue, double underlining in red.

  “Of course,” Martine said, “the references are pretty obscure. It’s a pretty obscure joke, like masochism, the references to masochism.”

  “Dear God.”

  Theo spoke the words tonelessly. With a peculiar dipping motion, bent as though he had a stomach ache, he dropped to his knees, reached out for Martine’s hand and pressed his lips to it.

  Martine shuddered. This was the first time he had actually felt a pro, its texture was utterly and abdominably unexpected: the outer layer was soft, soft as skin and flesh, a sheath of softness, it had a yielding rubbery quality but about a quarter inch down the resiliency stopped and it was bone hard. Salt Lake, foam rubber, gangster-baby breast. Still shuddering, he snatched his hand away.

  “Get up, get up.”

  For all his disgust he said it so gently that he surprised himself. There was something about this boy, this perennial boy, something naïve and open in his face, that called out an unthinking kindliness in him, it was the same reaction he’d always had to trusting old Ubu. Now, too, there was a feeling of pity: touching those cadaver-cold plastic hands, he felt a deep wave of sorrow for the owner.

  But he immediately caught himself. Sorry—sorry for this eraser of Parises, this sly mineralogist? “Get up off your knees, you idiot,” he said harshly, almost barking.

  “It’s you, it’s you!” Theo babbled. “You’ve come back to save us, always in the hour of need—” Somehow he got the words out—he was sobbing now, his broad football shoulders bobbing like waterwings.

  “I haven’t come back to save anybody!” Martine shouted. “Any more than I went away to save anybody! Get that through your thick tantalum skull!” There it was, he had only to reach out to touch it—the long jagged scar, under it the tantalum cup he had installed with such loving care. “Although I must say, if I’d known what you were going to be up to I’d have given you one of columbium instead.”

  Theo heard nothing, his gleaming hands were pressed over his face and he kept muttering, weaving from side to side, “You’ve come back, you’ve come back. . . .”

  Martine took hold of Theo’s lapels and jerked him to his feet. He pointed to a chair. “Now listen to me,” he said. “Stop blubbering and act your age. I’m going to acquaint you with the facts of life. Sit—down!”

  Bewildered, Theo dropped into the chair.

  “All right. Now listen. First, we’re going to get you straight about my comings and going on behalf of humanity. These comings and goings are and always have been on behalf of only one very minute segment of humanity, namely, me. Get it? Are you letting it sink in? Eighteen years ago, when I got into that plane and took off from our encampment in the Congo—”

  “It’s a miracle,” Theo said, the stupefied look still on his face. “You went up to fight all those planes. And you came through it. There must be a reason, there was some hand—”

  “You fool! If you’ve got a brain left in that tantalum cage of yours, use it man, use it for once in your life! Listen. You know that I took off in a plane, and you have before you now the living evidence that I got away safely. I was safe, I was in a plane. I could have gone anywhere I wanted, couldn’t I? How come, then, that I never came back? Huh? Doesn’t that bird brain of yours begin to understand that if I didn’t come back for eighteen years, that must say something about why I went away? Think for a minute! Think!”

  “Yes, you got away,” Theo said dully, backward child counting his sums on his fingers. “Miracle, it was a miracle. With a plane. Then—safe, with a plane—eighteen years. . . . But it doesn’t make sense! Where were you?”

  Theo tried to smile, it was like a man gaping his mouth for the dentist.

  “That’s easy,” Martine said. “Do you remember the Mandunji island?”

  “Mandunji island?”

  “Yes—as you put it so succinctly, the Mandunji island. You remember being there with the Olympic team last, let’s see, last May, late in May?”

  “Why—yes, I was. Yes, they have some remarkable Lepidoptera there. I caught some lovely specimens, an unusual Argynnis leto, that’s the Fritillary type, you know, and a really incredible Aglais j-album, that’s the Tortoise Shell. I remember the place well.”

  “You damned well should. That’s where you went butterfly hunting with drills and pickaxes.”

  “Brother Martine!” Theo cried. “Please don’t say those things! You talk just like Vishinu, surely you can’t believe those rotten things about me?”

  It was the same Theo who had appeared on the television over three months ago, on the night of his return, July 3, to make his tearful denial of Vishinu’s charges—lips quivering, hazel eyes two transparent puddles of hurt, voice choked with earnestness. Then Martine had been on the verge of being taken in, had positively wanted to be taken in: how was it possible for this babyface, this congenital boy scout, this beamish sonny boy, to lie about anything? And now, to his infinite disgust, Martine found himself wavering again, it was simply impossible to ferret out anything of the scoundrelly in this wide-eyed do-gooder. One wanted to reach out and pat him gently on the head, as one would a loyal cocker spaniel, but—there were the ineluctable facts.

  “I don’t have to believe anything,” Martine said. “I know. You were seen digging. Not you yourself, actually, but quite a few of your friends.”

  “Seen?” There was nothing but bewilderment on Theo’s face now. “How? We trained, we collected butterf
lies and orchids, we visited with the natives. That’s all we did. For the love of Marti—for the love of heaven, how could we have been seen doing anything else?”

  “Don’t pull that big innocent act with me,” Martine said. “You were seen. Do you remember the native boy who came to your camp the first night with a basket of cassava from Ubu? On his way to the camp he saw quite a few members of your party in the jungle with all kinds of fancy drilling and assaying equipment, examining specimens of rock. Not butterflies, rocks. I got a full report about the operation.”

  “But—some of the boys weren’t with me in the camp, it’s true—but those boys couldn’t have been drilling that night! They weren’t even on shore! They were—the captain told me they were staying on board ship to practice their d-and-d’s, I remember distinctly. . . .” He was a bundle of outrage and hurt.

  “Maybe that’s what they told you. Maybe. I can’t prove you’re lying so O.K., I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But if they told you that, they were lying. They were in the jungle, they were digging.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “The young man who reported it to me, the one who brought you to the tapioca—you remember him?”

  “Very well. I had several nice chats with him.”

  “I’ve had lots of nice chats with him. He’s my son.”

  Theo’s head snapped back, he looked as though he had been struck. “Oh, really,” he said softly. “I don’t see how—”