Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  A few carriages away, one of the other quadros coughed delicately. He coughed again. When nothing happened he let out a long, low whistle, his vague eyes still riveted on the ceiling. Both women straightened up, the thin one walked down to the signaling amp, reached under his blanket and drew out a bedpan.

  Dully, uncomprehendingly, Martine stared at her pinched sharp features, then at the puffy wrinkled tearful face of the old woman.

  “My mind’s made up,” the first amp said. “Don’t waste your breath arguing with me.”

  “Stubborn,” the young woman said bitterly. “Just like his father.” She turned and went inside.

  The boy’s face was directly in Martine’s line of vision now. It was like all the other Anti faces he had seen—the face of a somehow wizened baby, fixed in an authoritative scowl that was at the same time an infantile pout, the expression one of mingled hauteur and fret, insouciance and incipient tantrum. It was a sophisticated-suckling face imperiously demanding the universe for a teat and yet filled with rage over the prior knowledge, the dotard’s sour knowledge, that all breasts this side of Paradise must have some frustrating fist buried in them. So, mixed with the childishly headstrong was an infinite senile pique.

  But, for all its stock Antiness, there was something distinctive about this one face, something which set it off from the others. Buried somewhere under the typical was a suggestion of the individual. Martine could hardly bear to look at it, it was the face on the bas-relief outside, the unwhiskered steamroller-subduing Martine face minus melancholy and mischief. His own face. He was back twenty-five years, looking into a mirror.

  “Then go and save the world,” the younger woman said angrily. She was back on the porch, the bedpan gone from her hands. “Be a hero like your father. When do you intend to leave?”

  “For God’s sake, Mother, don’t take on so,” the amp said. “Will you try to understand?”

  “When are you leaving?” the older woman echoed.

  “I leave for L.A. next Tuesday,” the amp said. “They’re sending a plane up for me. Listen, Grandma, you’ve got to make mother understand. That’s your duty.”

  “I’ll do my best, Tom,” the old woman said helplessly. “But I’m not sure I understand. Generation after generation, boys running off and doing silly things just to hurt their mothers—oh, I don’t understand anything any more.” She began to cry.

  “You’ve got to try,” the amp said. “A fellow in my position can’t just turn his back on the world. People expect things of me.”

  “Go right ahead,” the younger woman said. “Run off and get yourself killed. There’s good precedent for it. . . . Oh, honestly, sometimes I just can’t understand why you don’t forget this silly window business and put some arms and legs on and act normal like other boys your age.”

  The amp yawned, his eyes were beginning to glaze. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like another helping of that chocolate layer cake we had for lunch, and a large glass of milk. I’m hungry.”

  “His father just loved chocolate layer cake,” old Mrs. Martine said through her tears.

  “Like father, like son,” Irene said.

  “I hope so,” Tom Martine mumbled. “But it’s a heck of a responsibility.”

  Sins of the fathers—

  Like father like—

  “But he volunteered! If all the wounds of babies—if they volunteer! No other virus!”

  He was just thinking it to himself. But he heard the words, it was more than he could stand, they plowed through the water to him. Somebody screaming the words at him, an electrovox, bellowing, trumpeting under the water. Himself screaming, lips moving against the pressing waters, throat bulging with the words. . . .

  Head spun like a badminton bird, churning the waters. Saw the white lacerated body of Rosemary scudding gently by in the water, trailing strands of kelp, and yelled, “She’s got nothing to do with this! Leave her alone!” Losing support, falling, falling, clutching at the window sill as he went down, afraid that if he fell into the bottomless smothering basket of the lake and the two women bent over him with their niggling and their needling he would have to kill them and—

  The waters closed over his head. Kelp stuffing his nostrils. Limp, floating.

  Odd sense of levitational drift: body being raised, carried up, then up again, then dumped. . . .

  chapter nineteen

  . . . . FOR a long time he lay at the bottom of the lake, flat on his back, unintentioned as a mollusk. Once in a while, thinking it over, he began to resent the indignity of it and started to fight—wanted to bolt up to the surface, up to the top where the surface shimmered and rippled, through the skin of the surface and out into the open where he could breathe. Then lay back meekly in his shell-walled basket and studied the snow-capped mountain rising up proudly and indifferently on the other side of the surface, he could just make out its wavery outlines. Wanting to get up there and stretch. But steel clamps on his arms, malicious fingers, held him back every time. He cried out in his fury, “The program is to be ambulatory! Must run around and round the triskelion! Otherwise, don’t you see. . . .”

  After a time, many rages later, exhausted, he opened his eyes slowly, oysters unbuttoning, lids pushing against the water. It took a while for things to become clear through the soapy silt-sprinkled muck. He began to feel reassured as objects swam through to him: maple bureau against the wall, old browned chromo of Brigham Young just above it, white bookcase with small plastic radio on the top shelf, closet door with its chipped porcelain knob. It was good to be back in his grotto-room. In the closet, on a hook, was his catcher’s mitt, well-oiled, fully broken in; maybe, if it was a nice day, he’d go over to the park after breakfast and play baseball with the kids for a while. Just outside the open window the leaves of the old mulberry tree rustled, stirring up eddies in the gelatinous fluid. It was dark outside, forest of seaweed. How come he was awake at this hour? If the day turned out sunny a fast game of ball, maybe just some batting practice, would be fine—

  No. What day was coming up? Might be Friday. If it was Friday his father might be coming home from the University in the mood for a hunting trip. They might round up their gear and pile into the station wagon, just the two of them, and go off to the cabin in the mountains, up out of the clutching waters, for the week-end: his mother would be at the curb, they’d wave good-bye to her, her lake-face would be kind of tight and sad and something like accusation in her tired washed-out polyp eyes, they were running out on her again. . . .

  Next to Brigham Young’s portrait on the wall, dim in the marine murk, something that didn’t belong there. Some kind of plaque, his eyes strained to pick out the letters: HERE DR. MARTINE SPENT THE FIRST FIFTEEN YEARS OF HIS LIFE. . . . Under water, of course. Ancient sub-mariner.

  Something else in the room that didn’t belong. Some person. His mother, sitting quietly to one side of the bed, shawled with algae. Something wrong with her, she was much grayer and older, years older, she’d aged forty years overnight. It terrified and saddened him and he wanted to cry when he saw her wrinkled flotsam-jetsam face, studded with barnacles, but he understood that this aging was part of the accusation, her way of getting back at him, it bothered him so much he tried again to sit up. Eels held him like ropes.

  “No, no,” she said. “You must rest. You’re very weak.”

  “He was weak too, just a kid,” he said bitterly. “Why did you let him do it? You could have stopped him, tried, anyway. Why didn’t anybody try to stop him? Just because he was weak enough to go and volunteer to get them cut off, volunteer. . . .”

  She didn’t understand the obscenity, just sat there staring at him with shocked accusing agar-agar eyes. She was looking ocean-bed accusations at him, he was screaming fathomsdeep accusations at her. It had to stop, now with the flood.

  “Well, Christ, what’s the sense in looking so hurt, anyhow? If they want to run away from you for a week-end, back away to save face, if they insist on running aroun
d in circles, triskelions, what’s so terrible? It’s their virus, not yours, don’t you see? Always the backing away a little and the accents of remorse, the flaws in the flesh. Why take on so? God, you needn’t age forty years about it. . . .” All he wanted to do was to put his arms around her and kiss her now to show it was all right, the backing away didn’t mean anything, but he couldn’t move against the lake’s pressure.

  “You’re feverish,” she said sympathetically—a little frightened too. “Try to rest, I’ll get the doctor.” Bubbles cascading from her mouth.

  She got up and breast-stroked toward the door, he made another desperate effort to rise through the water, had to explain before it was too late. Important to put his arms around her but the pressure.

  But her nervous harried jellyfish face was gone. He fell back on the bed, arms and legs like sash weights socketed into his body, anchors, he couldn’t move. So easy to reach out across the vicious distance and embrace her, what arms were for, but not with all the viscious waters pressing. Always water there. In a minute she was back, behind her came a quadro-amp doctor with something in his hand and two mono-amp orderlies. Behind them, Irene, with taut beleaguered ruin of a porpoise face.

  “You say he fainted?” the doctor said.

  “Just outside the sun porch,” his mother said. “We heard something—he was shouting something about babies and wounds, he kept repeating a name, Rose something. He was unconscious when we got to him.”

  “We had him brought up here,” Irene said. “It’s the only vacant room.”

  “When he came to he began to talk very excitedly again,” his mother said. “Oh, he’s so upset. . . .”

  “Why won’t you understand!” he said weakly. Every word an effort now, the lake was smothering him, mouth stuffed with sponges. “The joke’s on him, not you! It was voluntary! If he tries to pretend now that you always snatched the cake away. . . . It’s simply not your sin, you must see that! There are sins of the sons too! Addicts of steamrollers and accents of panic. If they go hunting for their wounds, who’s to blame? No matter how many Rosemarys they go after. . . . But oh God, oh God, couldn’t you have stopped him? You might have tried. Maybe you could have held him down before the doctor came. . . .”

  There was no way to make it clear: now he broke down and wept, it was all too late. No way to reach her and comfort her in the seaweed. His body shook with sobs, the waters swirled.

  “He’s delirious, all right,” the doctor said through the bubbling waters.

  “Maybe he’ll snap out of it if he sleeps a little,” Irene said.

  “I’ll give him a shot. It’ll quiet him down.”

  The doctor held up his hand, in it was a hypodermic needle. He signaled to the orderlies, they drifted in from either side as the doctor came close. The two women swam close too, his mother on the left, Irene on the right.

  “No!” Martine screamed. “No tapioca in my veins, absolutely not! Too much rota in the blood stream already, enough robo-drive and scalpels! I almost killed Neen for less, I warn you! If you want to immobilize me you’ll have to cut off my arms and legs, that’s all there is to it! I won’t volunteer! Don’t come near me!”

  As the hands descended on him from both sides he began once more to struggle, tried to, but the waters were tightening on him like a strait jacket now, his cravings basketed, whale-bellied, and far above, on the other side of the surface, there was the snowy mountain top, agonizingly out of reach.

  He was lying back helplessly in the submerged basket, belly, the women were treading water just over him, faces questioning, accusing. Someone was rolling up his sleeve, the needle was drawing near, now the accents of panic and no panic controls for these accents, he was already one of them in his heart.

  “So terribly wounded!” he yelled as the needle went in, sobbing now. “Oh God, God, so voluntarily cut to bits! If only somebody could have stopped him but the sins of the fathers, the mythological cakes, over and over the needles—”

  “. . . . something,” from the bony white-gilled Irene face bending over, it sent gusts of panic through his chest. “What is it about his voice?”

  “There, there,” from his mother’s blotchy plankton face as she patted his drenched forehead and he cringed at the touch. “It’ll be all right. A little sleep. . . .”

  “I want,” he wept. “There are sins of sons too, that’s the only thing that saves us, if it’s voluntary. . . .”

  Then the salty waters, oceans of tears, filled up his mouth and sloshed through his brain and dissolved his spine, gurgling softly into his fingers and toes, and there was no more talk or thought. “I’m glad I didn’t kill Neen,” he glubbed, and that was all for a long time. . . .

  When he opened his eyes there was a white-coated orderly sitting at the side of the bed.

  He felt a pain in his upper arm—where the needle had gone. A sudden fright: if they’d rolled his sleeve up all the way, they must have uncovered the tattoo. Irene would immediately have recognized the tattoo, she knew all about it.

  He sighed in relief. The pain was in his left arm. The tattoo was on his right arm.

  Dark outside. The mulberry leaves rustling.

  “How do you feel?” the orderly said.

  “Pretty good. I’m hungry. How long did I sleep?”

  “Two hours, about. What would you like to eat?”

  “A large glass of milk, please.”

  “You bet. Anything else?”

  “A piece of chocolate layer cake, if there’s any.” But that wouldn’t take him long. “And—maybe a couple of boiled eggs.”

  “Right. Take it easy, I’ll be right back.”

  The white jacket rose, went out. Martine gave him a few seconds, then jumped up, shaking his head to drive the fog away. He found his coat in the closet—automatically looking at the hook in the corner to see if his catcher’s mitt was there: it was—put his shoes on, went into the hall and crept down the back stairs he knew so well. Nobody around.

  Out into the deserted grounds, place entirely dark except for a light in the kitchen. Through the gate, a little wobbly now but all right, out in the open air again, surfaced at last. Afraid that if he didn’t get away from there fast he would rush back into the house, find the two women, throw himself at their feet and tell them everything, begging for forgiveness. . . .

  Sins of the fathers. He got back to the car all right, nobody saw him. Sins of the fathers. Neen had sketched him that way, but it had needed his own son to bring the sketch to life. Sins of the fathers. The phrase caromed through his mind as, purely by reflex, he started up the car and guided it out to the main thoroughfare and then through the deserted center of town. Sins of the fathers—in those four words now was more sickness than he had ever known.

  During most of his adult life he had been caught up in a certain malaise, a modest recurrent nausea with the slimy fetid facts of living, but it had not bothered him especially: he had taken it with only faint queasiness as no more than the normal dole of human distress. What he was feeling now with the intimacy of love, of digestion, was more than that, some misery entirely different in kind from any he knew about—a sickness unto and beyond death, a feeling of being trapped in death and still breathing, of being dead with full lip-curling awareness of it and the stench fuming in his nostrils. His nervous system had grown a special receptor, keen as a taste bud, to savor the poisonous fact. Sins of the fathers. He had seen death in the flesh, his own flesh, his own irremediably maimed flesh, lying impotent and peevish in a perambulator, covered over with a blue baby blanket. Yesterday he had joked about being an ambulatory basket case; today he had seen himself as a perambulatory basket case. Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, sin of his sin, death of his death: he had seen himself lying there, irascible stone, unmanned and frozen in tantrum: messiah in tantrum. He had looked on death’s face in his own face and now he knew its greasy bloated chalky physiognomy. Death was a huddling in ersatz wombs, face fixed in a suckling’s pout. Death was
a cocoon you spun yourself, with synthetic umbilical cords of your own making. A self-crippling, then a tyrannical shouting of orders to the world such as is allowed only to cripples. A hacking off of hands and feet so that the clucking womenfolk must wait on you hand and foot. The peremptory whimper for chocolate cake, the delicate whistling for mamma to come fetch the bedpan. Deadly sins of the death-ridden fathers.

  He was out of town now, approaching the flat salt graveyard again. He pulled up at the side of the road and put his head down and sat for a while, shaking all over, sharp in his mind the image of death the imperishable infant with the babyface of Martine. When the attack had passed he wiped his eyes and drove on again, westward across the crusted alkalis.

  But what, precisely, were the sins of the fathers? What sins, precisely, had he committed that had come to be visited upon his son with the surgeon’s knife? Where did his responsibility begin for this violation of his own flesh—what scurvy paternity was he to claim here? What of himself lay back in Martinesburg, enshrined in that baby carriage? Like father, like son? But how, exactly?

  He did not know. But he did know that the father had carried some undetermined death in his flesh and had passed it on in some undetermined way to the flesh of his flesh, and now in looking on the face of his son had seen there death—and it was himself. And there was sin in it. And he must find the name for that sin which ran in a reeking mucid line from notebook to perambulator or he was nothing but death. Death, some kind of death, was the sin, it had somehow existed in the father’s myth and been bodied forth in the son’s flesh. He, sinful father, had come nine thousand miles in search of himself and found what he was looking for in a baby carriage under a baby blanket, pouting for messiahdom and chocolate cake. Now he had to find out what of himself, exactly, lay in that baby carriage. There, neatly packaged taunt, was the innermost identity he had been moved to seek under all the incognitos. The dredging was done with, the corpse of Martine had been located.