Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  “Masochism? What a pecular old-fashioned word. I’ve never seen it used anywhere—except in Brother Martine’s notebook, where he makes a kind of obscure joke out of it.”

  “It was obscure, yes. But here’s my idea. People have potency interruptions for all sorts of reasons—neurotic sex is loaded with all sorts of mocking symbolisms of giving and not giving—but they pretty much boil down to one common denominator—masochism, the desire to feel mistreated and neglected, the unconscious pleasure one takes in pain. Generally speaking, frigidity or impotence is not something done by one person to another, it’s something a person does to himself—with a carefully selected collaborator—because unconsciously he finds frustration—which he can blame on his partner—a greater pleasure than satisfaction would be a conscious pleasure. All right. Let’s take a man bothered with some potency trouble—and not an inability to make love for thirty minutes, because, no matter what you think, that’s pain rather than pleasure to a normal man. All right. This guy submits to an operation which removes all four of his limbs. That’s a pretty solid dose of masochism all at once, isn’t it? Maybe his unconscious pain requirements are satisfied so whoppingly in one big bundle that afterwards he can afford to be not too masochistic in his sexuality. Four symbolic castrations at one stroke—after that the average masochist doesn’t need a fifth, psychic, one. It’s the same story with psychotics after electric shock treatment or lobotomy: they’ve overfulfilled their masochistic quotas so spectacularly that they can afford to let up on their more modest self-damaging symptoms and show some improvement for a while. . . . But there’s a good deal of masochism left in the amp, even so. It’s masochistic to be obliged to remain still, to take all erotic guidance from an aggressive woman, to postpone climax for half an hour, to be used. . . .”

  Neen sat up in bed with an abrupt movement. She was angry now, her eyes were blazing. “You’re fantastic. Fantastic.”

  “Am I?” Then, from out of nowhere, he remembered something the basket case in Marcy’s window had hinted at. It was a shot in the dark, but there was one other clue: the charade he had seen enacted by the young couple on the sun deck at the Gandhiji. “Then tell me—what happens when amps refuse to take off their pros in bed?”

  She seemed puzzled. “Oh, all sorts of things,” she said. “One bad thing is that they have funny accidents with them. They’re tempted to use them the way they used their real limbs, to caress and hug and all that slop, and lots of times they seem to forget their co-ordination completely and—well, you know how dangerous a pro can be when it’s not co-ordinated right. There’ve been some very bad accidents as a result—ribs and jaws broken, eyes blackened, and even worse. Some women have even died from their injuries. It’s all very animalistic, only animals hurt each other in sex.”

  “You see?” Martine said triumphantly. “This passive sex of yours is just too much of a masochistic pill for men to swallow. Too humiliating—they resent the being dominated too much because they really want to be so much, want to smuggle the nursery into the bedroom. That’s why men would rather keep their pros on—and often have face-saving Freudian ‘slips’ with them which land their ladies in the hospital and the morgue. The gangster’s needed to hide the baby. It also explains why the ladies would prefer their lovers in the dismantled state—their instinct of self-preservation tells them they can’t take the upper hand so completely without expecting a few cybernetic uppercuts in payment. . . .”

  Martine began to laugh again. “The next step is for them to deny the physiological facts of paternity, nudge the man out of the conception picture entirely, just as primitive woman does. In the end as in the beginning. . . . It’s the funniest goddamned thing I ever heard of,” he gasped. “It just struck me—that statue, that statue at the hub.”

  “What about the statue, you fool?”

  “It shows a man being flattened by a steamroller. Don’t you see? Immob was supposed to get rid of the steamroller. Instead—oh, it’s unbelievable—you’ve gone and installed another steamroller, in and out of bed. The New World has kept its promise. Woman is the new Immob steamroller, even your soapboxers refer to it as she. . . .”

  When he got over it he sat up and looked at her. He was quite serious now. “Martine was right,” he said. “A man should dodge the steamroller. By all means.”

  He took her by the shoulders; before she could squirm out of his grip he had her pinned down, his fingers digging in until he could feel the bones of her arms through thin casings of compressed flesh.

  He had his own idea of what it was that set human sexuality off from the animal: egoness. Egoness. It was a word that had once been suggested to him many years ago, when he was a medical student, by the psychoanalyst to whom he had been assigned (by that time it was required of all medical students that they complete a minimum analysis before they were eligible for their degrees).

  “With the animal,” this analyst had suggested, “sex is all blind compulsion, mechanism; with man the emotional keynote of the experience is the sense that he is doing this thing himself, willing it, bringing it to pass, calling out response in the partner—reversing the ignominious situation in the nursery, healing the nursery wound, denying the deep yearning for a resurrection of the nursery situation. That sense becomes doubly important to him today, because it’s a counterbalance to what happens to him in his non-erotic life—almost everywhere but in bed he takes an awful beating, is cowed and humiliated and passively manipulated by bureaucracies and overwhelming machines which turn him into helpless instrument and object. In bed the ego takes on new life: in Freudian terms, the sense of injury is overcome a bit by the active repetition of a passively suffered narcissitic wound. A neat switch: Do something to somebody else and you are no more object. Of course, that may represent a great danger. It introduces more self-proving drive into the erotic life than Nature intended. Maybe men will feel so set upon in the end that this lust for egoness will run wild and so distort the sex function as to cripple it altogether. Men may be so masochistic that when they go looking for too many ego-affirmations in bed their malicious unconscious drives may make them—impotent. This may be loading the sex impulse with more irrelevancies than it can bear. . . .”

  Egoness, yes. But not with brutality. Not belligerently, provocatively. Not as against tenderness. . . . Stupid business: he grimaced in distaste for what he was about to do. He had always been bored by the chin-jutting he-man who felt obliged to establish his masculinity by sheer force of main and muscle—why work so hard to prove you’re one thing unless you’re really the other? Of course, he had no taste for it. Gestures, all gestures, were so goddamned silly. And yet—

  “You’ve had your fun,” he said. “It’s my turn now.”

  She fought him, her body writhing with the effort to break his hold, but he was determined. Equal rights—he was not asking much, just equal rights. It was not going to be exactly the best he’d ever had, but it was better than nothing. And didn’t she really want this after all? Rape was a pretty difficult business without a bit of ambivalence in the woman. There was another case: Rosemary. Immediately he dismissed the name from his thoughts. . . . Of course she would not fall in with his movements, allow him the freedom his whole being called out for, but at least he was not entirely tied down by her immobility now, he was able to achieve some caricatured semblance of the act—even against her will it was now something of an act rather than an imposition, a petrifaction.

  Rosemary. . . . There was no responsive yieldingness in her, and yet the feeling of being somewhat in control again was enough—he was, in spite of everything, rising to another climax which was entirely free from her dictates. In a matter of a very few minutes, not the thirty or more minutes of the first time but only three or four, he was there, getting there, filled with the triumph of getting there—and in a kind of terror, trying to ward off the culmination that came from his pace-setting and not hers, sensing no doubt that if his timetable were allowed to fulfill itself it would
make a mockery of hers and all the fine-spun theories built on it, she pressed, resisted, seething with antagonism. Even while he felt the climax coiling in him, he thought with despair and contempt which was also self-contempt that it was all a farce. His whole being cried out now for the feel of Ooda beneath him, the warm and glowingly alive Ooda who went along not in resignation but in response, seeking not to usurp but to blend and mingle, not to resist and oppose but to supplement and react and flow with him. The oceanic! Oh, yes—the closest thing to it he had ever experienced, the closest thing to it that was possible, maybe, was the sense of tantalizing tender togetherness he’d felt with Ooda, the thrill of being mysteriously joined with her even as the irony of ultimate separateness hovered over their heads; the bittersweet ambivalence of unity in alienation, merger across barricades, a momentary ecstatic brush with the oneness—the best that could be hoped for and plenty good enough, something he’d settle for, and prayerfully, for the rest of his life. He wanted only to be with Ooda now. Thinking that, and filled with ghastly laughter to know that he was even capable of thinking at this moment—and with the name Rosemary rattling around somewhere in his head—he came. And it was good in a way, an affirmation. A great abominable joke too, but still.

  It was a bad moment for her, he could sense. It was all beyond her control, it was a reproach. Anything in a man not engineered by her was a reproach. But something wholly unexpected was happening. For the first time she stopped opposing him and crumbled into softness and now she too, against her will, overwhelmed in spite of herself, the engine of her body snatching the controls away from her will—she began to respond, for once passive and open to emotional suggestion from the outside. But it was not the same as before, not at all the same. She could not yield entirely. It started deep within her, a powerful quaking pulse at her core: he could feel it. But—forced to abandon the male role, forced to yield her drawn-out timetable too, she was driven to assert her male willfulness in the only way left—frantically she clapped her body against his, shifting her whole focus from the intaking receiving core of her, driving with her phantom maleness; the last castrate maneuver. The inner throb grew feeble, died away. It was not, although it had started out to be, the genuine full reaction of the wholly yielding, wholly warm woman—she, or her ornery unconscious, had executed a diversion to defeat him at the last moment, at the price of her own full satisfaction. It was a last desperate gesture against passivity, a peculiar double-edged denial-of-frigidity-through-frigidity. “Oh, lamb chop, lamb chop,” she whispered but there was venom in the endearment—and a tortured unspoken question.

  It left her, as it was bound to and intended to, filled with mixed sentiments; Irene, too, when with great difficulty she had reached the same derailed climax, had been emotionally akimbo, ecstatic on the surface, raging with unuttered denunciations just below. She looked up at him now with an uncertain expression in her eyes—the eyes never fully carried off the lie of lustiness—wavering between wonder and hostility; feeling the partial edge contentment of the maimed woman who has had an ersatz pleasure and would like to consider it the real thing, the partial hatred of an unsatisfied woman to whom protest is more important than fulfillment and who would like to hurl the blame for it at her partner. But at this moment it was hard for her to know exactly what to blame him for: the experience had been largely frustrating for her, but it had also been totally new. She had experienced a sudden loss of emotional face and focus. She hardly knew whether to scratch his eyes out or curl her arms around him. Perhaps she would like to do both—she did neither. Something had happened to her, she’d had a touch of the steamroller, it had left her concepts quaking.

  The room was a battlefield, littered with the corpses of gestures and symbols, all sorts of stupid irrelevancies. Rape: Rosemary. He struggled to drive the words from his mind.

  “Maybe we should have stuck to the mandolins,” he said.

  Long silence.

  “You’ve got an awful lot of aggression left in you, patootie,” she said finally.

  Good: she was retreating into ideology.

  “Ain’t it the truth,” he said. “My oceanic quota’s awfully low.”

  “It comes from a lack of Moral Equivalents. Before you get to Immob you’ll need plenty of indoctrination.”

  “I’ll see a doctrine about it first thing in the morning.”

  “Listen, sugar,” she said urgently. “Just what kind of a medical man are you, anyway?”

  “My specialty is peeping-tometry, that’s a branch of optometry. No, seriously, I specialize in tropical diseases. Spent a long, long time doing research in Africa. That’s where I’ve been all these years.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  He stiffened. “I told you. Lazarus, Chester P. Lazarus. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Stop lying!”

  He looked at her in astonishment. “What?”

  “Don’t lie to me—you’ve been playing dumb all evening and I’ve been playing along with you, but there isn’t much time left for games. I know you’ve been off in Africa, but what were you doing there? You were looking for columbium, weren’t you?”

  He was too dumbfounded to answer, he just stared. “Columbium?” he said at last. “You’ve got me mixed up with a couple of other pole vaulters. I don’t even know what the silly stuff looks like.”

  “Listen” She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed; her expression was serious. “Maybe you didn’t understand me, there isn’t much time. You’ve got to tell me the truth.”

  “But that is the truth,” he protested.

  “You’re queer,” she said, looking at him speculatively. “Your head is full of ideas that come right out of the dark ages but I don’t know, there’s something about you. I like you—you irritate me, but I like you. I felt something different with you, screwy, I don’t know whether I go for it or not, I haven’t had time to evaluate it from a non-Aristotelian point of view but it’s intriguing.”

  “You mean I’ve stopped you in your tracts?”

  “Don’t you see, I want to help you. I’ll save you if I can.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

  “Just this. You are connected with Theo. You had something to do with his phony Olympic training cruise in the Indian Ocean. You know plenty. Tell me, otherwise it will be bad.”

  “Do you mean,” he said slowly, “do you actually mean—you followed me around all day, you brought he here and even—it was all because you thought—?”

  “Are you going to tell me?” Her voice was hard now.

  “There’s nothing to tell, you idiot.”

  Shs shrugged. “All right. I gave you your chance. You can’t say I didn’t try.”

  She stood up and walked across the room to a door, not the one leading to the hall but another. Without bothering to put a robe on she opened the door and said, “I can’t get anything out of him. You’d better take over.”

  Two men came into the room: Vishinu and the Eurasian who had been with him on the plane from Miami. They came over to the bed and stood there looking down at Martine.

  “So, Dr. Lazarus,” Vishinu said. He had an automatic in his hand, muzzle fitted with a peculiar sleevelike sort of flange. “Good. You will loosen up your tongue now a little, I’m sure. You will tell us very many things about your friend Theo, oh, yes.”

  chapter seventeen

  VISHINU SAT down on the edge of the bed. His pros crackled, it sounded as though somebody were shelling peanuts. “Cover up, please,” he said, pointing. “We are interested in your viewpoint, not your view.”

  Martine pulled the sheet around him.

  “Better,” Vishinu said. “Now let us sum up. Here is the picture. Theo goes sightseeing around the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria—you are not seen anywhere with him. Then Theo comes home on a liner—you are on board too but you stay in your cabin the whole trip, very ostentatious. You even arrange to board a different plane in Miami so you will not be
seen with him. Unfortunately for you, however, I am passing through Miami the same day and I have reports on you and I begin to get very interested in you. Then you register at the Gandhiji as Dr. Lazarus but there is no record of any Dr. Lazarus in any of the medical directories. Conclusion: either you are a doctor whose name is not Lazarus or your name is Lazarus and you are not a doctor. Conclusion: either way you are concealing something. What? That you were not in Africa to study tropical diseases? But you were in Africa. What, then, were you studying that makes you so secretive? Columbium, perhaps? Like your friend Theo, who you avoid?”

  “Go on,” Martine said. “Your mind fascinates me.”

  “Not as much as yours fascinates me,” Vishinu said. “I am always fascinated by the mind of a man who says he studies bugs when he studies only rocks.”

  “Your research is pretty spotty too. If you’d looked further you would have found that I’m not listed in any of the directories of metallurgists or mining engineers either. I couldn’t tell a piece of columbium from a scoop of pistachio ice cream.”

  “Now, now,” Vishinu saud. “Not necessary to quibble. The members of your Olympic team are never listed as metallurgists or mining engineers either but that is what they are, good ones, too. It is a very clever system, sir. We naturally know all about it—we have been using it for some years ourselves.”

  “You forgot to mention that in your telecast last night. Immob must make you absent-minded as well as absent-legged.”

  “Ah, do not be too harsh on us, my dear unregistered doctor,” Vishinu said humorously. “What can we do? So long as your country insists on playing its old imperialist-monopolist game, we must take countermeasures. However, let us get down to business. Obviously you had no reason to be around Africa unless you were looking for columbium. We can consider that established—very, very few Inland Strippers travel abroad these days unless they are mixed up with columbium some way or another. The same with us Unioneers, of course, you have forced us into it: all our ambassadors, our lecturers, our exchange students, our athletes, our artists.” Here he stopped and waved in Neen’s direction. “All, unfortunately, are either looking for columbium or for their opposite numbers who are looking for columbium. So we will have to face it: you were in Africa because of columbium. From this it follows that you also have something to do with Theo, because he was there for the same reason. Now you will tell us about Theo. Everything. I am afraid we shall have to insist.”