Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  “Amputation isn’t slow,” Theo said, hands raised. “It only takes an hour.” He sat down across from Helder and fell into what seemed to be his chief pastime this afternoon: he Stared at his hands in a sort of reverie. “So we take everything back,” he said. “It’s a transitional period, we can’t be irrevocable overnight.” He held his hands up. “We take everything back. But suppose I want to take my hands back?” For the first time his voice lost its soft, pleasant modulations, rose almost to a scream. “Who will give me back my hands? Who will give back my hands?”

  “Don’t get so dramatic,” Helder said with disgust. “Remember, I gave my legs too.”

  Martine came over and stood between the two. “I didn’t give anything,” he said, twirling around like a mannikin. “Not so much as a callus or a hangnail. I ask you both to note this carefully, in case anybody’s ever in a position to write any more disarming footnotes.” But then disgust came into his face, a wave of dyspepsia. He looked at his hands as though they were enemies, and said, “But I did give my hands—to the cave. Who will give the lobotomist back his hands?”

  Helder’s face was grim. “I’m not going to be in a position to do much of anything,” he said. “I’m going to be dead.”

  “Dead?” Martine echoed.

  “Sure. Oh, I’m being guarded, all right, but sooner or later, tomorrow, next week, somebody will get to thinking about the Assassination Clause and decide to get me. It would probably have happened years ago, if my colleagues hadn’t taken steps. They’ll get Vishinu too, sooner or later, and a lot of his pals along with him. They’ll keep knocking off the leaders on both sides, one after the other. The war will go on—we’ll win in the end, of course, justice is on our side, but a lot of leaders will fall by the way. It only takes one man, slipping by the guards. . . .”

  “Or maybe one guard,” Martine said. “You’ve got twelve guards. Twelve apostles. There’s usually at least one Judas in every twelve apostles, that’s about the ratio. The figure ought to interest a neat mathematician like you.”

  But Helder seemed bored by the discussion of his own fate. He was absorbed in his own thoughts again, lips pressed tightly together and eyes far away, nose twitching as he sniffed. “The transition is tougher than we’d anticipated,” he said dreamily. “There’s much trouble ahead still—but we’re moving, we’ll get there. We must believe that.” He cocked his head and looked at Martine. “If this didn’t work, even this—then good God, what will? What could? It’ll work, it’s got to.”

  “What else’ll work?” Martine felt the hysteria stirring in him again. “I’ll tell you what else’ll work—I’ve spent nearly eighteen years studing the question! You haven’t asked me where I’ve been all these years, Helder, you’ve been distracted. I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to for over seventeen years! I’ve been on a little island in the Indian Ocean, that’s where, cutting open heads and tracing the aggressions in them. Sitting in a little cave, the Mandunga cave, performing Mandunga lobotomies, Christ only knows how many thousands of skulls I’ve pried open trying to get at the secret of aggression—how many hundreds of thousands of pages I’ve filled with data on where aggressiveness is rooted in the human cortex and how it can be sliced and scissored out—there’s more information on the aggression areas of the human cortex back in that cave, probably, than anybody ever dreamed about. Oh, I’ve become an expert on the subject, I can tell you a thing or two about lobotomizing little rapists down to good little pacifists, I’ve turned out more and better pacifists with my trepans than all your Immob surgeons ever did. . . .”

  When Martine spat the word “Mandunga” at him, Helder stiffened, looked quickly at Theo, then back again. He was suddenly alert and concentrating.

  “I’ll tell you what won’t work!” Martine babbled. “Attacking the human organism with a scalpel won’t work, that’s sure! I can slice up the worst homicidal maniac’s prefrontal lobes and give you a real lamb of a pacifist, sure, the best little basket case you ever saw—but he’s not a human being any more, just a lump! Just like an amp! Ambulatory basket case! For good! No, no, the knife won’t work, you shit, you swine! Look at yourself this moment—the pacifist’s flown out the window, the rapist’s back in action with emergency flashes and Plan B’s! More Rosemarys, eh, you love it! I could have done a hell of a lot better job on you with my scalpel, back in the Mandunga cave. I’d have made your commitment irrevocable, all right—only you’d have become an irrevocable vegetable too! You know what’s wrong with the butcher-boy approach to the problem? I’ll tell you—it just says aggression wherever there’s any sign of violence and goes after it with a knife, not bothering to determine whether the thing’s real or phony. It attacks the pretense as though it were the real thing—so the essential psychological problem’s untouched, the phony rapist’s phony premises become the premises of the psycho-surgeon’s science, he’s operating on the basis of a gigantic lie! There’s only one thing that’ll work, you pig, that has any chance of saving man before he’s annihilated through his own masochism, it’s to get behind his shows of violence and pound it home to him that 99 per cent of them are phony, masochistic in inception and masochistic in aim, born of death and striving for death. That’ll work, only that, all the rest is suicide disguised as science and humanitarianism, you swine, you dirty swine. . . .”

  “Marty!” Helder had risen again, he was looking at Martine in utter disbelief. “Mandunga—why, when Theo came back from Africa he told me about this island and a white man. . . . Marty! This Mandunga thing! You were the white man—you performed all those operations—we haven’t done too much with lobotomy and things like that, of course, the cyber-cyto emphasis is a little different—you’ve been at it for eighteen years, you kept records. . . .” As he talked his eyes narrowed.

  Martine shook his head, trying to get control of himself. “You’re getting that programmatic look,” he said. “Skip it—I’ve talked too goddamned much already. . . .”

  “Marty,” Helder said. “Look, it’s not accidental, your returning like this. The timing’s too neat, there must be a reason. . . . Listen, this thing could still work, there’s time. Even if you pretend not to believe in Immob, hell, you wrote it, it came from you—sometimes a man is picked to convey more than he knows, he’s a vehicle for something bigger than himself. . . .”

  “I’ve been a vehicle,” Martine said slowly, “for something smaller than myself. Smaller, and deader. That was my sin.”

  “It could still work!” Helder insisted, his eyes shining. “You could make it work! Listen, all you’ve got to do is—become a vol-amp! A quadro! We could arrange it in no time. Then right after the surgery we’ll announce your return, it’ll be the most magical charismatic thing that ever happened—it’ll shock people back to their senses, even Vishinu’ll be stopped in his tracks. . . . You can do it, Marty! You could save humanity!”

  Martine glared at Helder. He clamped his palms to his temples as though he had to exert pressure to keep his skull from flying off. And he began to laugh. “Say,” he said, “that would be a pretty good punch line for the joke.” He began to laugh harder. “No, thanks just the same. Maybe I’m one of you in my heart—but all the same, I’ll keep my amble.”

  “Think, Marty!” Helder shouted. “You could save the human race! It would be like the Second Coming!”

  “I’m going to leave now. I don’t think you’ll do anything about it—you know I could spill some pretty unsavory beans. No, I think you’re going to let me walk out of here.”

  “Don’t do it, Marty,” Helder pleaded. “The fate of the world is in your hands.”

  “The fate of your hands is in your hands,” Theo said. He was regarding his own again, bending the fingers slowly.

  “Speaking of ambivalence,” Martine said, “I’d like to make one final point. You’ve both got quite a taste for twice-two’s, this should warm the cockles of your Euclidean hearts. I’ve just figured out another ratio—I’m twice the man either of you
is! You know why? Because I’m two men! I’m both of you, both of you rolled up in one, the neatest little packaging job in history! Yes, I’m Helder, and I’m Theo too—the gangster and the baby, the demon activist and the cherubic passivist, the leader and the follower, the martyrizer and the martyrized, the doer and the done-to, the megalomaniacal ‘I’-pusher and the self-annihilating ‘It’-seeker, messiah and apostle, eye-plucker and cheek-turner, ganja and rota, never mind what that means, Dog and God. Only—I’m both of them, every minute and all day long and far into the night! Never one without the other, you see, I never quite get to the point where my left hand doesn’t know what my right one’s doing, I’ve got the most exquisitely shaky balance. The Hyphen’s snapping between you two, the Hyphen’s still somehow holding within me. Which only means that I’m life’s delicate child, that hypertonic hyphenated wonder of the anthropoid ages, the half-man, half-woman, the ambulatory basket case. But you two, you’re less than human. Because each of you has denied his doubleness. In only one respect are you human—each of you, each in his own way, is the goddamnedest little old masochist the world’s ever seen, the one with the phony aggression of the rapist, the other with the phony mildness and meekness and beatitude of the willingly raped. You two, together, you’re the living example of how all messianic movements got organized. The chunk of full human ambivalence is falsely split down the middle and the two halves become runaways—out of the apparently ambulatory side come the leaders and out of the basket-case side the followers. The real sin is the split. . . . Between the two of you you’d make a human being. You two ought to get together. And have a good long talk. I suggest you get together and have a good long talk about columbium, for instance. . . .”

  He clicked his heels and bowed deeply to Helder. “Mistuh Interlocutuh,” he said. “I hope your sinus is better—you’ll have to do a lot of deep breathing.” He repeated the movement. “Brudder Tambo. May the scalpel stay on the other side of the river—you haven’t got many spare parts left.” He straightened up and waved his hand. “It’s been a real nice fish fry.” He opened the door and went out.

  His face was drenched, his hands fluttering, but he felt an intense exhilaration. Going down the corridor, he skipped once or twice. When he came to the door marked OFFICE OF PRICE CONTROL he stopped and looked through the glass panel again. “What price migraine.” The wholesale price of eggs per gross was now up to $8.276. “What price mushrooms.” To the tune of an old song he sang,

  Too-too-twosie, good-bye,

  Too-too-twosie, don’t cry. . . .

  At the elevator he had to make a decision: go back to the underground cavern or get out at street level? He had to sneak away from the city—he couldn’t think beyond that. Which would be the safer way? Underground he might get lost; and there had been bombs set off in the Industrial Slot, the way might be blocked; all in all, it would be wiser to take his chances in the street, out in the open—there were fires, things must be a mess out there, but he might be able to pick his way through. At least, there was no danger of radiation.

  When he got into the elevator he pressed the button marked “Main Floor.” He hummed to himself, a strain from the Mandunji work song.

  Smoke everywhere, churning black balls ricocheting from the roof tops; the sun was screened off as in an eclipse. Sirens whinnying; shouts; feet slapping excited paradiddles on pavements; growl of trucks in side streets—he heard more than he could see; his eyes smarted from the smoke, he held his hand over them and went along stumbling. At the corner a motorcade of ambulances raced past with a cacophony of moans; a moment later, down the cross street, a clanging fire truck thundered by, some kind of hook-and-ladder affair with men clinging to its sides—quadros, wearing heli-arms in place of the orthodox left ones.

  Rush of scorching wind, some agitated eddying of heat-currents—suddenly the soupy haze cleared away in the area to his right, he could see down the street for three or four blocks. Fire down there, huge flames were licking from a tall building and smoke poured from it as from a giant smokestack. Clutter of fire-fighting apparatus in the street. Up above, all along the face of the building, buglike figures hovering in the air—men, quadros, equipped with umbrella-like heli-arms, bodies and heads swathed in puffy sacks, asbestos probably. Each one with a long thick nozzle tucked under the right arm, and a hose trailing to the ground from it, and a spray of water or some fire-extinguishing chemical flaring from the nozzle’s mouth.

  Fire-fighting—Martine remembered the lectures at the M. E. University—was one of the Immob attacks on the elements, one of the four prime Moral Equivalents for war. Interesting twist: practicing a Moral Equivalent for war in the midst of war. Most peculiar limbo, this, in which all the sizzling Limbodians, hallucinated, imagined that they were in paradise—a paradise with hook-and-ladders and asbestos suits. Angels in asbestos suits.

  Oversight: in this non-Aristotelian paradise the angels had been so busy with their fire-fighting drills, they’d forgotten to invent any cybernetic wings. The cyberneticists could have cooked up some dillies—ram-jet wings, atom-powered wings all fluffy and alabaster and supersonic. But their imaginations had faltered, they’d stopped at heli-arms. For especially high-temperature paradises they might have concocted some asbestos wings—better yet, some columbium-alloy wings, they’d stand up in a real inferno of a paradise. . . .

  People darted here and there, flitted across the street and then back again, chattering, grunting, hallooing. He paid no attention to them—the smoke was swirling down on him again, he groped his way along as best he could, coughing and dabbing at his inflamed eyes with a handkerchief.

  Entering one of the target areas now, apparently: buildings pretty badly wrecked, wisps of smoke curling from windows, streets cracked and buckled. A shattered store front, jumble of wares in it—something moving in the debris, some tiny glistening thing. He stopped and peered in F. A. O. SCHWAB, a sagging sign said—branch of the toy shop he’d seen in New Jamestown.

  Some small bright thing moving. He recognized it: a miniature quadro cut-up, strutting absurdly on its tiny transparent legs and swinging its tiny transparent arms—tripping, rolling over, springing to its feet, marching, tripping again, scattering broken dolls’ heads and torsos before it as it made its slapstick stumblebum way back and forth. Nobody laughing now. Playing to an empty house. More spectacular pratfalls on view elsewhere. . . .

  Diagonally across the street, a building with half its face blasted away. Strands of smoke streaming lazily from some of the windows, here and there a flick of flame. Something sticking from one of the windows, burning with a wavery orgonotic blue glow—pair of cybernetic arms, firearms, burning, blue flames sprouting from the fingers, no telling if a body was attached to them.

  The Greeks, good Apollonians, had had the right idea about the plastic arts: eventually they had to set the world on Dionysian fire. But there were no eyes on these fingers, they blazed in blindness.

  These paradisiac limbs needed more columbium, they weren’t designed to withstand the heat of limbo. The fingers drooped like melting candles, droplets fell from their burning tips, plastic, dripping tears, weeping for their absent eyes. . . .

  Choking, acrid fumes in his mouth, he turned a corner and proceeded down the block. There on the sidewalk, suddenly, slivers of glass all around, was a face staring up at him—Helder’s face. Martine blinked. It was a cheap print, reproduction of a painting: Helder full-face, thin straight lips boldly set and gray eyes hypnotically fixed; on each side of the painting a towering thick-leaved giant sequoia, only the trunk was in the shape of a plastic limb, transparent—pillars of strength echoing the sculpted strength of Helder’s long jutting columnar nose; behind the head and extending beyond it, wings splendidly spread, a regal American bald eagle, the old national symbol reincarnated—and just behind it and not quite overlaid by it another eagle, and behind that a third, a long line of triumphant eagles overlapping like clouded mountains in an old Japanese print. So they had, in a
sense, invented wings for their hero.

  “Parakeets and raffias,” Martine said aloud in disgust.

  He had thought that by taking this course he would skirt the damaged area to the right, but after walking a short distance he saw that he was heading into another one—more fire, smoke, wreckage in the street. Here the streets and sidewalks seemed to have erupted: they had not only buckled, here and there almost impassable holes gaped in the concrete, maybe the effect of an underground explosion, Martine picked his way carefully around these pits; as he was passing a half-toppled store, he froze, there seemed to be human sounds coming from the crumbled and littered window. “Oh!” somebody said obliquely.

  A gurgling sound, something percolating deep in the throat. Another: some incredible smothered hee-heeing, titter or hysterical quaver or cry that went beyond fright, one of them or all three. Somebody saying, without emotion, “Aaaiiiiiiiiiii,” voweling some obscure and drawn-out comment on the unutterable.

  Silence for a moment. Then the first voice croaking: “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

  Hard to tell where the sounds were coming from: beams had crashed down into the window, there was nothing but a welter of mangled steel. But—there was something else. Here and there, hidden under the tangled girders, some small yellow thing—a series of yellow objects, small, compact, yellow baskets. Yellow, dripping red.

  Baskets. Blood trickling from them into the street.

  This is the way a world ends, this is the way a world ends, this is the way a notebook ends: with a bang, a mushroom, and a whimper.

  “Oh. Oh. Oh.” Quietly, no dramatics. Just an observation, neutral.

  Betewen two large holes in the pavement there was a narrow stretch, more or less intact, that led to the window: delicately, testing before each step, Martine made his way across it as he had to—no chocolate layer cakes with him, no glasses of milk, too late for that. There was room for him to stand outside the window, a ledge of solid pavement, spattered with coagulating blood, was left there.