Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  “Why do they bother with Immob at all?”

  “When you’re in Rome—that applies to the pariah too, you know. Especially to him. In a caste society, the bottom dog has very little choice but to follow the example of the top dog: what other example has he got to follow?”

  “Why do you work up such a sweat about the caste system over here? Don’t you have one back home?”

  “Certainly not,” Neen replied spiritedly. “Naturally, some people have better jobs than others. But with us, people don’t get up to the top because their skin’s a certain color or their nose a certain shape, it’s all on a democratic basis. You know, a lot of Negroes have migrated from the Strip to the Union and risen to positions of real importance. For a long time our people have lived by a very simple proposition: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

  “As I remember,” Martine said, “there have been other societies which subscribed to that idea. As I also remember, the principle usually worked out something like this: From each according to his ability to maneuver and scheme and bribe and toady his way into the bureaucracy, to each according to his need for power and special privileges—that is, if he had the aforementioned ability.”

  “We don’t have any bureaucracy. If the important people get where they are because they deserve to, what’s bureaucratic about them?”

  “The fact that they’re important—even if they deserve it, and most important people don’t. Their mere existence is a steamroller to the unimportant.”

  “What nonsense! Take me—as a recognized artist with lots of special privileges, I guess I’m fairly important, but how did I get that way? Because I’m a good artist. Over here my ability wouldn’t get me very far—I’ve got half a dozen different bloods in me. According to your lily-white standards I’m fit only to be a dishwasher or bed-maker.”

  “I wouldn’t say that you’ve entirely dispensed with the bed-making functions,” Martine said. “Couldn’t your success also—couldn’t it have just a little bit to do, too, with the number of beds you’ve managed to make? Your talent for compiling dossiers on worthy bed companions?”

  “I pity you,” Neen said calmly. “Only a person who hasn’t shaken off the old materialistic values could make a remark like that.”

  “It seems to me,” Martine said, “that only a pretty materialistic young woman could sleep around the way I suspect you have. I predict you’ll go far wherever you are: To each according to her agility.”

  It was a silly outburst, of course; he meant the condemnation to indicate a purely esthetic pique, not any lofty moral one, but still, it was silly. The trouble was that he was getting angry: with the girl because she made herself available with a handshake and a brisk exchange of amenities; with himself because he knew this couldn’t be any good and still he was going through with it. For better or worse, no matter how much the prospect annoyed him, annoyed one side of him, he was going to take this girl: all his senses bellowed now for some thalamic excess, to correct the cortical excesses of this complicated day.

  “In any case,” he said more mildly, “the point is that there are hierarchies in both the Strip and the Union. However they’ve come about—in both cases, it seems to me, they’re the products of some pretty old values that have hung over from pre-Immob days. But no matter where they come from, they must still look and feel like steamrollering hierarchies to the bottom dogs. In your country, as here, the cat still cases the king. And spits, when nobody is looking.”

  “Only in the Strip,” Neen said stubbornly.

  “Really? If your people are so high-minded and unmaterialistic, how do they happen to be just as greedy for columbium as my grasping countrymen?”

  “Oh, that” Neen said exasperatedly. “You pretend not to understand anything, don’t you? Obviously we’ve got to interest ourselves in this metal because the Strip is trying so hard to corner a monopoly on the supply. We’ve no alternative—it’s a case of self-defense.”

  “Which, I gather, is exactly what the Strippers say in reference to the Union.”

  “Sure. Only they’re lying.”

  She tilted her head a little to one side, her marvelous dark slanted eyes narrowed, she regarded him once more with that quizzical look. “Ask your dear Theo,” she said. “Ask him what he was doing in the Indian Ocean, in case you don’t know.”

  They had reached the entrance of the Gandhiji, Neen halted there. “I’m stopping here too,” she said.

  “That’s very convenient. Are we going to my place? I don’t have any mandolins.”

  “My rooms are very comfortable. Let’s go there.”

  “I hope you write a good sonnet,” he said, following her through the door.

  chapter sixteen

  UNDER HER skirt she was wearing only a skin-tight pair of briefies, a garment which had started as an abbreviated leotard and atrophied almost to a G-string. Her body was even more exciting than he had imagined. She was not at all dark but there was a suggestion of something-not-quite-white in her complexion, a faint tint of the olive to confound the pallor of the peach.

  Neen came across the room. She was excited, nostrils wriggling like twin caterpillars, full lips parted with the effort of breathing, breasts rising and falling energetically, eyes saucered and too bright. When she leaned down over him he knew immediately what she wanted and he braced against it, determined in a spurt of willful maleness that she was not going to have it her way.

  “What’s the matter, tootsie?” she whispered. “I thought you wanted me.”

  “I do,” he said. “My way. Right now I feel a bit old-fashioned.”

  “But there is only one way.” She was not being funny: she meant it.

  “No. That is a surprisingly animal rigidity for a humanist. Has no one ever taught you your place?”

  “You don’t like it like it like this?” There was real astonishment in her voice.

  “Very much. Sometimes. But not now, not this time.”

  “You must not fight, lollypop. Don’t fight Immob.”

  His hands tightened on her shoulders. “Oh? It’s Immob I’m fighting?”

  “The Immob in yourself. Let yourself go, sex is no more a struggle now. Melt, honey, give in to the melting in yourself. . . .”

  There was nothing to do but kid it: “You don’t recognize hierarchies anywhere,” he said. “Listen, it’s a mistake to take over the man’s role entirely, to try to. There really is a certain difference between us, universal suffrage quite aside. A writer named Thackeray—he was an extremist, of course—once said that the queen has no business to be a woman.”

  She was frigid, of course, a man-eater, a man-displacer; only a frigid woman would have to make such an issue of the top billing—but he had allowed himself to get mixed up with such a woman, and now, against all his foreboding, he was excited too, abominably so. . . .

  “Lie back,” she whispered. “Let it happen, honeybunch. No struggle.”

  So there was a choice to be made: was he man or Immob? He released his hold on her, filled with contempt for himself. All right, he thought. She was used to going to bed with men who didn’t have arms and legs, who removed their arms and legs, that was it. He would just pretend that he was foot-loose and arm-loose and fancy free too. Anything to oblige a man-eating lady. Just to get the feel of the thing, nibble at the oceanic. Position wasn’t everything in life. . . .

  But what happened then was more astonishing still. “Oh, lamb chop,” she sighed and suddenly turned to stone, a figure from an old Corinthian bas-relief, and he was forced to remain still too. They were frozen on the neck of an old Grecian urn, urn from the ice age, deep frieze, but one did not giggle at such a solemn immobilized time.

  “Don’t try,” she whispered. “Just be still, lovey-dovey, be still, honeybun. No effort. Let it happen.”

  And then began something even weirder: still unmoving, Neen now began a powerful rhythm. That was all—a situation of complete petrifaction, joke marbled b
y some misogynist Praxiteles. It excited him strangely—and irritated him too: he did not relish that part of him which could be aroused in this passive way—and he could sense the turmoil growing in her too. . . .

  For long minutes it went on, intolerably, hypnotically. All the while his mind raced through a maze of irrelevancies: he recited a line of poetry to himself, “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole,” remembered a photographic study of the Taj Mahal on a picture postcard, wondered if the lichens were getting bigger in General Smuts’s ears, tried to recall the taste of pistachio ice cream, thought of the numerical value of pi. The excitement was getting more and more feverish, but it was like something spied on by periscope in the next county—there was about all this a horrible frustrating Itness, some interloper tinkering with the body’s engine while the master mechanic squatted pouting and uninvolved on the sidelines. It was unbearable, he despised himself for harboring this standoffish scoffing inner commentator who kept up a steady flow of icy analytic narration while the rest of him was straining with need, he hated himself for fooling with a woman who could involve nothing but his glands and thalamus; and now his heart was hammering madly—

  And a new agitation in her: and she said, in words that seemed to be caught deep in her throat and rasping harshly as they struggled to get out, muffled in her throat, she said, “Yes. Yes. Now, now, lamikins, now.” Suddenly she was not the mover, something in her that was not willed was taking over—it was not intention tremor but the upstart tremor which drowns intention. Holding a man prisoner, beholden to no man for her triumph, involved with her partner only insofar as she had momentarily borrowed him as a necessary prop in the burlesque ritual, herself responsible for everything, the doer, the precipitator, she had brought about the intensest of fulfillments for herself—and without losing his clinical data-hungry eye for a moment, and furious with himself for the eye’s unblinking endurance, he felt the galvanizing effect of it, the pulse somehow flowed over to him and suddenly, in a quick upheaval—“Now, ootsums,” she whispered—trying savagely to free himself, filled too with hysterical laughter that he should be caught in such a trap and so unutterably helplessly done to—now he too felt the fury tearing through him—stampede—

  A shock and a shudder.

  Billowing blackness, the Taj Mahal wavering wanly in the middle of it.

  Then no more swirling and he opened his eyes and watched the room jell into uprights again.

  Burlesque. The most frustrating and humiliating erotic moment of his life, he thought with a grimace.

  Phuh. . . .

  And then, rather amazed at himself, he began to laugh. Neen looked at him in complete bewilderment.

  “Have you gone crazy, dewdrop?” she said.

  “It’s funny,” he gasped. “I just thought of something funny. You know what you were saying about Immobs not being animals in sex? You were perfectly right, you know.”

  “Of course. I told you you’d see.”

  “I do, I do. Where in the whole wide animal kingdom is there a female who pre-empts the whole role of the male? It’s the most unanimal-like thing I ever heard of.”

  “Roles, roles,” Neen said contemptuously. “We are finished with all that reactionary ideology, Adam’s rib and such garbage.”

  “From what part of Adam would you have preferred to spring?”

  “Never mind the jokes. It is a fact, your ideological godfathers treated women like dirt and said they were intended by nature to be slaveys. According to their stuck-up idea a woman couldn’t fulfill herself unless she crawled and catered and cringed before some man, some strutting puffed-up gamecock of a man. All that is finished now in Immob. The Immob woman does not take it lying down.”

  “Maybe there’s no other way to take it. There’s something even deeper than ideology—anatomy—women seem to be made to receive; in that sense, at least, women are intended to be a bit more passive. If they’re to feel like women.”

  “Are you trying to tell me I didn’t feel like a woman just now?”

  Martine yawned, wondered if the Taj Mahal was still standing. “Frankly,” he said, “I think you’d be hard put to it to say exactly what you did feel.” She had had an orgasm, certainly—even in the most difficult of positions, a man-deposing position which for most women would exclude the possibility of any real orgasm at all—a full vaginal one, not a pale clitoridean substitute. But why? Only, he guessed, because she had taken over all the maleness of the thing. The condition for her satisfaction, apparently, was that she play the man, absorb the man, castrate him: expropriation without compensation, her forefathers used to call it. Which was a rather spectacular form of frigidity. If she couldn’t get her sense of male usurpation that way, chances were she would have to get it in the more traditional way, by shifting her erotic center from the vagina to the clitoris, that phantom phallus, and thrusting it back at her partner as though it were the genuine article. Which took some doing. . . . “What you need, obviously, is the feeling that you’re the doer. Maybe the whole purpose of Immob is to give you that feeling. . . .”

  “All garbage. You think about sex as a thrusting belligerent thing done by men to women. Man the subject, woman the object, the old animal double standard.”

  “And you have made them equals?”

  “Of course, puss. By rising above movement.”

  He propped himself up on one elbow and stared at her. “You’re quite mad,” he said. “Let’s take it primer fashion: sex is an ecstasy of friction; friction is a function of movement; man, by anatomical necessity, is the prime frictioneer. There, snooky, is the rub. All you’ve done is to substitute one kind of movement for another—one which allows the man to have his satisfaction only at the price of his manhood. And, I might add, of your womanhood. In this half-ass unacknowledged matriarchy of yours you haven’t eliminated the sex roles, only reversed them. Some call it love but I call it castration. I’m against it.”

  “You don’t understand anything,” Neen said in her best didactic manner. “There is still a modified, reduced form of movement, I’ll grant you—although much less is needed with an Immob man than with you, because he has risen much further above his old animal self. But this is a transitional period. In the end sex will be a mutually oceanic experience with a complete absence of movement. The orgones will leap at each other by themselves. Then there will be no more strife in the world. Movement is strife. The whole idea of Immob is to eliminate all friction between people.”

  “There may very well be no more strife—but only because there won’t be any more people around to have it. Because there’ll also be no more orgasm: that’s a conception to end all conception. Which seems to me a nice proof of Freud’s prediction.”

  “That reactionary. What did he predict?”

  “Well, he once said it’s hard to avoid the impression that sex is a dying function. He meant that civilization encroaches more and more on the animal functions, robs them of their energy, loads them with taboos and uneasy symbolisms that bottle them up and ultimately, maybe, cause their organs to wither away.”

  “Marx once said the state was going to wither away.”

  “He was dead wrong, we know that now. But Freud really may have hit on something—maybe it’s the genitals that will wither away. After a certain time that should more or less automatically take care of the state. . . . Tell me this: don’t the Pros remove their arms and legs when they go to bed with a woman?”

  “There are lots of arguments about that too. The Antis even point to these arguments to show that the Pros are still animals because they often want to keep their limbs on and use them in the old way, to subdue women and lord it over them and all that. Women who have had a real Immob indoctrination and caught the spirit much prefer their partners to take off their pros, of course. The man’s bound to find it a lot more satisfying once he adjusts to it, and it’s a lot more satisfying to the woman, too.”

  “Sure, when she’s frigid. Look, let me poi
nt out something about this oceanic experience of yours. You didn’t exactly merge with me—you were fighting me all the way. You had a full experience, sure, but it took you a hell of a long time to arrive at it: well over thirty minutes, I’d say, whereas the average normal coitus lasts for only a very few minutes. And like all women who achieve satisfaction only with great difficulty, and only under special aggressive circumstances and only after prolonged tension and anxiety, you were determined to be the pace-setter. That’s quite characteristic of frigid women too—the man’s mechanism must be only a passive reflex of theirs. You’ll find this hard to believe, but the normal state of affairs is quite the other way around. And without any trace of competitiveness, either. With a kind of warm melting you don’t know anything about.”

  “Fascinating. But you’re not up to date on your statistics, Doctor. You evidently don’t know that among Immobs, among the Antis, at least, the average coitus—to use your quaint language—lasts from thirty minutes to an hour, even longer. And is repeated several times a night.”

  “You’ve got an explanation for that, of course?”

  “Of course. Our medical researchers have discovered the exact reason. You see, in the old animalistic days men couldn’t sustain themselves for very long, not long enough to satisfy the average woman; the blood would only stay in the genitals for a limited period because it was needed elsewhere. But when the arms and legs are removed more blood is available to the genitals and for longer periods. Especially since the doctors at the amp stations now pump as much of the blood back into the body as they can after an amputation. Besides, a lot of women I know bring their amp husbands back from time to time for transfusions.”

  Martine was staring out the window, watching the illuminated dirigible float by. “I can suggest another explanation,” he said finally. “A most intriguing one. Has to do with masochism.”