Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  He reached up and unrolled two large sheets of pounded bark which were attached to the edge of the blackboard: both of them diagrams of the brain, showing it in top, side and bottom views and various cross sections. Studying them, he felt a rush of dizziness again, as though his own brain had broken loose from its moorings and started to whir around and around inside its pan, exactly the same swimming sensation he had experienced earlier in the evening when, hidden in his attic, he had stared down at the big blond head of Theo and heard the nonsensical references to Immob.

  Funny: he had only heard the word spoken once or twice, but he had a clear visual image of it—i, m, m, o, b, he was quite sure it had to be spelled that way.

  He took hold of the desk to steady himself, a voice inside reassured him senselessly, “Brachycephalics are very common,” in a moment it was over and he turned back to his audience.

  “I don’t have to tell you about my people,” he said. “You know my story too. . . .”

  Back in the 1960’s Martine had been a medical student in New York, preparing to be a neurosurgeon. By that time insanity had become so frequent among his people—very anticipatory, very anxious, his people—that it was a major health problem, as much as cancer: things had gotten so bad that one out of every fifteen Americans could expect to be a psychotic patient in a mental institution at some time in his life. The situation was all the more upsetting because there were not nearly enough psychiatric doctors, and those who were practicing did not know enough about the diseases of the mind to do much good: there were ways to deal with some of the milder neuroses but the psychoses were very stubborn and hard to treat. Martine himself, when he finished his medical studies at the age of 20-by that time college preparations for the technical professions had been greatly accelerated, and, besides, he had skipped some grades in public school—had been so startled by this situation that he had been tempted to go into psychiatry, but other pressures on him had been too great.

  How did his people react to this growing threat? In their characteristic way: they turned to the machine for help.

  Nothing more natural. His people had been remarkably good with machines, but in the course of their fantastic technological development something peculiar had happened. To oversimplify: the Americans had built themselves remarkable machines to overcome the steamroller of their environment—and then, somehow, the machine had reared up, gotten out of control, and become a new steamroller. People, cowed by the machines that had grown bigger than themselves, could no longer think except in mechanical terms. It was common knowledge, for example, that when a clock stops ticking or a simple electronic calculator develops tremors, it can often be fixed by jiggling it or giving it a kick—the jolt meshes the teeth of the cogs again, or untantangles the short circuits. So, when faced with human beings breaking down in various psychotic dysfunctions, the first thing people thought of was—give the machine a jolt, shake up its gears and circuits a bit.

  This they accomplished at first with a technique called shock treatment. They built electric shock machines, they induced narcotic shock with shots of insulin and metrazol. For a decade or two this was more or less the routine in mental hospitals. And a little later, after the middle of the century, the new fad became lobotomy and related brain operations. Here the principle was essentially the same, mechanical: now the troublemaking cogs and circuits were snipped out of the machine or at least cut off from it.

  This form of Mandunga was the major psychiatric therapy when Martine was a medical student. There was, of course, an acute shortage of lobotomists, and since he had shown promise as a neurosurgeon he was selected to become a practitioner in the new field. He worked very hard at his studies, but as the time approached when he was to join a hospital staff and begin operating on human brains he began to feel uneasy about it. This uneasiness came from an idea that was growing in him until it became an obsession: before you irrevocably remove a portion of the brain you must be very sure that you know everything about that brain, but what medical science actually did know was next to nothing.

  How could you be sure that, in allegedly cutting away some devils from the brain, you were not at the same time cutting away some guardian angels? You could only be sure of that if you knew what every single cell of the brain did, and how it was entwined with all the other cells. But there were 10,000 million cells in the brain. Neurologists knew a tiny bit about a measly few dozen of them, maybe; and about all the possible interweavings between these 10,000 million cells, about the way they act in concert, they were almost entirely in the dark. How, then, could you know what your scalpel was doing when you slid it into the gray matter of someone’s brain? You could dismiss this question and go ahead with your surgery only if you looked upon people, not as unique organisms with unique personalities—unique neuronic tangles, if you liked—but as machines. Machines are expendable and replaceable. One machine is very much like another.

  This had been his dilemma: he was a lobotomist who didn’t dare to go near a human lobe. He solved the problem, at least temporarily, by dodging hospital duty: went into a laboratory where they were conducting brain-surgery experiments on the higher mammals. Here he worked out some new surgical techniques and performed several unusual experiments which won him quite a reputation; his papers were published in many technical journals, he was invited to lecture before learned bodies, and so on.

  But, although he was helping to acquire important new knowledge about the brain, there remained the terrible doubt that this knowledge would ever be solid enough to warrant applying it to human beings via the scalpel. For one thing, he remembered what a very wise neurologist had written in 1946: “most of our present understanding of mind would remain as valid and useful if, for all we knew, the cranium were stuffed with cotton wadding.” For another, he was haunted by the words of Norbert Wiener, the mathematician.

  He had told his students all about this unusual man—the man who during World War II had developed the science of cybernetics, the science of building machines to duplicate and improve on the functions of the animal; the man who understood more about machines and their meaning in American life than any other. Wiener had seen the horror of the mechanistic approach to the troubles of the mind. He had written this about lobotomy:

  “Now, there is no normal process except death which completely clears the brain from all past impressions (among which are the sources of mental trouble); and after death, it is impossible to set it going again. Of all normal processes, sleep comes the nearest to a nonpathological clearing. . . . However, sleep does not clear away the deeper memories, nor indeed is a sufficiently malignant state of worry compatible with an adequate sleep. We are thus often forced to resort to more violent types of intervention in the memory cycle. The more violent of these involve a surgical intervention into the brain, leaving behind it permament damage, mutilation, and the abridgment of the powers of the victim; as the mammalian central nervous system seems to possess no powers whatsoever of regeneration. The principal type of surgical intervention which has been practiced is known as prefrontal lobotomy, and consists in the removal or isolation of a portion of the prefrontal lobe of the cortex. It has recently (1948) been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier. However, prefrontal lobotomy does seem to have a genuine effect on malignant worry, not by bringing the patient nearer to a solution of his problems, but by damaging or destroying the capacity for maintained worry, known in the terminology of another profession as the conscience. More generally it appears to limit all aspects of the circulating memory, the ability to keep in mind a situation not actually presented. . . .”

  There were, in short, many negative sides to lobotomy. Why, then, did the lobotomists feel free to proceed with their knives, quite as though these negative sides did not exist or were irrelevant? In thinking this over, Martine had been forced more and more
to consider the motives of the brain surgeons and of the society which sponsored them. The lobotomists could not be acting purely out of altruistic desire to help the worried. No, they did not know enough to be sure that they were curing or alleviating anybody’s worry. So this was not entirely science; it was magic as well. Any ceremony performed in the absence of reasonable knowledge as to cause and effect is magic. And in magic the need of the victim is less important than the need of the victimizer—medicine man, witch doctor, lobotomist, or whatever.

  What, Martine had had to ask himself, was the need of the lobotomist, and of the whole society backing him up? Was it not the need of an anticipatory and anxious people, harried by the fear of being led away from statistically average behavior by their own errant prefrontal lobes (60 to 70 per cent of these people had one or more headaches a week, every year they consumed an average of twenty-four sleeping pills per person), to remove themsleves momentarily from this threat by punishing those whose “headaches” had, in a sense, run away with them? To show that they were not endangered by this malignancy but, on the contrary, were in control of it? Was this not a therapy designed to comfort, not the one in fifteen who went mad, but the fourteen who were left behind in panic? Just as, among the X-Bantu-Arab-Malays, Mandunga was created out of a sense of overwhelming guilt—a diversionary maneuver?

  While Martine was asking himself such questions, the Third World War broke out. The completely mechanized war, the war of machines turned into steamrollers, the war of EMSIACS. He was almost happy when he was drafted and sent off with a flying hospital unit: it meant he could forget about lobotomy for a while. And then, after two years of war, he had landed on the Mandunji island.

  At first he was horrified by Mandunga and would have nothing to do with it. But time after time he saw that, because of the primitive way in which the ceremony was performed, the patient died. The elders, of course, attributed these deaths to the stubbornness of the devils in the head, but Martine knew differently: they were due to lack of asepsis, gangrene, blood clots, hemorrhaging, a clumsy removal of too large cortical masses, and so on. Could he stand by and let this continue? With or without him, the ceremony would go on; if he participated, at least the patients would not die or be left permanently crippled—crippled, that is, beyond the minimum considered normal among the Mandunji.

  Of course, to anybody with a streak of the messianic in him, the temptation of the cave—the chance to carry out a wild mass experiment in reshaping human clay, with no moral responsibility for the experiment—was almost irresistible. That had to be considered too. He had considered it many times, in private. But this part of his story he had not passed on to his students. . . .

  “You know my story too. So we can turn to the real question: How healthy is the human mind on our island?” He waved his hand at the diagrams of the brain which hung behind him. “There it is,” he said mockingly. “The object of our affections, in the ugly flesh. In it are all the secrets—”

  There was a patter of feet in the corridor. A boy rushed into the room, eyes wide with fright. “Queer-limbs in the Circle!” he panted. “On top of the mountain, in the clearing-jumping over trees, playing games in the air!”

  “I’ll go and see,” Martine said. “The rest of you stay here.”

  He signaled to Rambo to come with him. The boy rose from his seat and followed his father out of the lecture hall.

  chapter six

  HIDDEN IN A clump of raffias on a ridge, they watched the amps, some ten or twelve of them, hopping about in the clearing below. The strangers, all of them wearing short-sleeved sweat shirts with large blue “M’s” pasted over their chests, were playing a Bunyanesque form of leapfrog: each man took off from a crouching position, sailed over the back of the next man effortlessly as a kite, and came to earth again at least fifty feet beyond, shouting exuberantly.

  “All right, fellows.” It was Theo’s voice. “That’s enough horsing around. Let’s do some dexterities and discernments.”

  It was easy to follow the vaulting bodies, as they rose and fell the tubes in their limbs blinked agitated semaphores; the clearing looked like an enormous telephone switchboard gone berserk. And there was more illumination than that. The amps seemed to be carrying powerful searchlights—no, Martine saw now that the index finger on each amp’s right hand was itself a searchlight, from its tip projected a beam of light.

  “Come on, you guys,” Theo said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Your jumping’s fine—it’s your d-and-d’s that are ragged.”

  Shouts of protest from the playful athletes: “Follow the leader! Let’s play follow the leader!”

  The last suggestion seemed to appeal to everybody. “Great idea!” “Follow the leader!” “Come on, Theo, you be leader!” A dozen index fingers pointed at Theo, his bulging-skulled head was bathed in light.

  “All right, men,” he said humorously. “All right. This is no way for humanists to pass the time, but I guess you deserve a little relaxation.”

  The beams of light were still on him. He bent his legs. “Here goes!” he called, and took off from the ground. Up he rocketed, thirty feet or more, caught hold of a raffia branch and whirled around it, the tubes in his limbs leaving trails like miniature comets. Then he let go and dropped, his body twisting so fast that it could be seen only as a twinkling blur. There were whistles, shouts of approval.

  Now the athletes followed suit: one by one they jumped, pinwheeled, spun back to earth.

  Theo laughed. “What a bunch of duds,” he said. “Not one of you made it. Haven’t you noticed anything about my sweat shirt?”

  The lights flashed on him again. He turned around slowly, the young men gasped in surprise: the “M” that had been on his chest was now on his back.

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” he said. “That shows you what you can do when you really concentrate on your dexterities—as I was dropping from the tree I slipped my arms out of my sleeves, twisted my shirt around, and put it on again backwards. You’d better do some woodshedding on your discernments too—if you’d been a little more discerning you would have noticed it. . . . All right, you humanists! Back to camp for some shut-eye—let’s go!”

  He jumped for a high-hanging branch again, described one loop around it, then let go and sailed almost fifty feet to another tree, then to another. One by one the athletes—whooping: “Yippee!” “Wah-hoo-wah-hoo-wah-hoo!”—took off after him.

  The lights flickered through the trees. When they had disappeared into the jungle, Martine patted Rambo on the shoulder.

  “We can go back now,” he said. “I guess they’re gone for the night.”

  On their way to the cave Rambo said, “They do not act like metallurgists.”

  “No, they don’t.” Martine began to laugh. “Funny—some pessimists used to say man would wind up back in the trees, swinging from the branches. But nobody ever thought it would happen this way. In the name of humanism.”

  “What does the big ‘M’ mean?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think it stands for Man.”

  Martine pointed again at the cytoarchitectonic maps.

  “There it is!” he said. “Huddled like a turtle under its mantle, wrinkled, hunched, clamming up. Sometimes it will babble away a mile a minute—you’ve all heard it screeching on the encephalograph—but the moment you ask it a simple question about how well it’s doing, it falls into a sulk and won’t talk. That’s its secret, it intends to keep mum about it, our old brain does. It’s too brainy to be a chatterbox. Examine it well, all of you. Under those wrinkles are all the secrets, and all the answers—to war, orgasm, amuckism, art. But it’s very hard to pry loose any of its secrets and answers. Oh, it’s a taciturn old onion, the brain is.”

  He was feeling a little flushed and giddy again, thoughts darting out in all directions at once, fizzing pinwheels, he had to calm down. Ganja had a tendency to make you too baggy-cephalic, raggy-cephalic, brachycephalic. . . .

  “Very well,”
he said. “Now, we have been opening up skulls in this cave for eighteen years. You all know how many brains we have had exposed before our eyes to study and operate on, how many hundreds of thousands of pages of data we have collected on those brains. I’m pretty sure that here in this cave we have learned and recorded more about the human brain and its workings than is known anywhere else in the world. Much, much more. Look at the evidence.”

  He pointed again to the two diagrams. The one on the left was entitled “Post-Brodmann Cytoarchitectonic Map of the Human Brain (1970),” the one on the right, “Mandunga Cytoarchitectonic Map of the Human Brain (1990).” Both of them had areas outlined and numbered all over the cortical surfaces and in the cerebellum, the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the hypophysis, and other interior parts: in addition, special enlargements traced the paths of certain interconnections between individual cells of the various parts—between hypothalamus and hypophysis, between thalamus and prefrontal lobes of the cortex, and so on.

  “These two diagrams tell the story,” he said. “The first shows how much the neurologists in my world had found out by 1970, the year the Third World War began, following the work of Brodmann and other pioneers. The second shows how we in the cave have added to and corrected this picture. The difference is fantastic. We have discovered things those neurologists hardly dreamed about. But—” He pointed a finger at his hushed listeners, in a sort of pedagogical bluster which he was very far from feeling. He was not sure of anything at this point, he was groping, fumbling, but he had an urge to say something not too negative. “—remember this. Of all the billions of possible brain connections we have tracked down only a few thousand, the simplest of the couplings. The puny knowledge we have wrested from the brain would be just as valid if the cranium were stuffed with cotton wadding—it’s still almost literally true. We try to cut away some tonus, we also cut away the alertness, imagination, memory, sense of self. We excise much of the orgasm, the sexuality. We go after the tensions that come from great emotional ambivalence, we often kill the emotionality altogether—we attack anxiety and wind up smothering anticipation. We don’t know what we are doing, we don’t know. It is ceremonial magic. We must confess: the therapy is more for ourselves, for the village, than for the patient.”