Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  The announcer’s hands were wandering idly up and down his body on a mission of demented exploration. One of them stopped at his collar and fumbled there: it had come into contact with the wire leading away from the lapel mike.

  “Si!” a voice yelled from nowhere. “Si, for Christ’s sake, you’re on the air! Stop mumbling, man!”

  The feel of the wire seemed to bring the man back to reality: he shuddered, then threw his shoulders back, cleared his throat and began to speak in a parody of his professional style. The clichés of the trained verbalizer tumbled out now in monstrous schizoid lack of contact with the enormity of what had happened; but there was hysteria under the glib robot heartiness.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said mechanically; for a moment he forgot himself and experimented with a ghastly smile, then gave it up. “Ladies and gentlemen. You have just witnessed the most remarkable—today we have been privileged to see. . . .”

  He made an obvious effort to pull himself together, he swallowed hard and tried again.

  “Something inconceivable has happened here. We don’t—we don’t understand it any better than you do. It looked as though the Union athletes had pro arms that were weapons of some sort, pistols or rifles or something, at a signal from Vishinu Brother Vishinu they all pointed their arms and fired. Their arms were guns or something. Then they fired. There were sixty or seventy of our top officials sitting in the boxes, then suddenly the arms went off and. . . .”

  His lips began to quiver, he broke down again.

  “Si!” somebody shouted again. “Get hold of yourself, Si!”

  “Oh, God,” the announcer said. “Horrible, horrible, horrible. Oh God, God, oh my God.”

  Another voice, forceful and authoritative, boomed out over the scene. The camera switched back to the formation of planes overhead.

  “This is Vishinu,” the new voice said. “I am speaking to you from my plane. I am now leaving the stadium with my countrymen.”

  “Swine,” Martine said. “Pig. Scum. Swine.”

  “Before I go,” Vishinu thundered, “I have a message for all the oppressed masses of the Inland Strip. Brothers, no need to despair! The warmongering demagogues who are left among you will tell you with their oily words that what we have just done is an act of war. Do not believe this lying propaganda, brothers, it will be just a semantic trick to confuse the suffering masses. There is no warlike element in our actions today. For many years now your false leaders have been provoking us with their imperialist tricks under a demagogic cloak of Immob. They were preparing war against us and plotting to steal all the world’s columbium—plotting to get the columbium to make the war and also to make the war to get the columbium, like true double-dealers. Naturally we reached the end of our Immob patience and we had to defend ourselves. For a long time we waited for you to take care of this matter yourself but none of you dared to invoke the Assassination Clause of your Constitution—or, this I think is the more likely, your fine leaders guarded themselves too well to let you invoke it. Well, today, on Peace Day, we have invoked the Assassination Clause for you, because we saw you needed our help.”

  “Can you hear me, Si?” the unseen announcer bellowed. “Get a grip on yourself, man! We’ve got a job to do—drag your ass over to the officials’ box and see if you can find out anything. Si!”

  “We do not want war,” Vishinu said. “We make no wars with the abused and oppressed masses of the West. Listen to me, little people of the Strip. This very minute, while I speak, many many Unioneers are landing from ships on both the coasts of your country, they are already beginning to march toward the Strip. Do not fear them, they are not armies, they are liberators coming to throw off from your backs your imperialist masters and free you to return to Immob. That is why they do not drop down from the skies on you suddenly, with hydrogen bombs and such things; they come slowly to give their brothers here the chance to do the job themselves. Oppressed Negro masses of the Strip! You especially, brothers, must work with the Union liberating forces because you are doubly oppressed. Among the liberators you will find many Negroes from your own country who ran away from the segregation and discrimination of the West to take refuge in our democratic lands, where a skin that is not lily-white does not mean the man inside is all garbage. You will have a people’s Immob democracy at last. You will be free at last. Be of good courage, comrades, soon the masses everywhere will live in peace in the true spirit of Martine!”

  “Pig,” Martine said. “Oh, the pig.”

  The planes began to shift now, soon they were aligned in four long rows which came together to form an enormous “M.”

  “Long live peace!” Vishinu shouted. “Long live Martine!”

  The formation of planes started to move, it passed over the rim of the stadium and disappeared. The camera swung away from the sky, registered the field again.

  “Si!” the voice blasted. “You got anything, Si?”

  Loud wailing from the bleachers, terrible cacophony of distress, individual screams tearing through the wall of sound. The spectators were no longer huddled in their seats, many of them were scampering through the aisles, leaping up and dashing down on the field to run to and fro in a sudden access of motoric panic.

  The announcer called Si flashed on the screen again. He seemed slightly more in control of himself.

  “Si! Anything happening down there?”

  “Looks bad”, the announcer said. “We have no report so far on how many have been killed and wounded, but it looks bad. I see, though, that some of the Olympics doctors have finally reached the boxes, we should have something for you soon. One of our men is up there now, he’s trying to find out something. . . . Oh, here he comes now, maybe. . . .”

  Another quadro with a large press button on his lapel came up to the announcer and whispered in his ear, wildly excited. The announcer stood in stupefaction, mouth open, eyes bulging.

  “Oh!” he cried. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just found out something incredible, oh, simply incredible! It’s not quite as bad as we thought—almost everybody up there was hit but listen to this! Brother Helder and Brother Theo are not there! Their bodies haven’t been found! They—are—safe! They got away! According to a newspaperman who was sitting just behind the boxes and saw the whole thing, Brother Helder somehow saw what was coming and at the last split second he threw himself on Brother Theo and got him on the floor so the bullets missed both of them! In the confusion which followed they both managed to crawl to the exit and got away! Brother Helder and Brother Theo got away! Most likely they’re on their way back to the capital now, if all goes well, oh God, if all goes well we should be hearing from them at any moment! Folks, let’s all try to mobilize our panic controls and wait, and hope—”

  Martine stood up and switched the television off. He rubbed his sunken cheeks distractedly. “So,” he said. “Assassination didn’t take. Has to be done over again. Naturally.” He walked to the window and looked down at the lake, came back to the center of the room.

  “No getting away from it,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll never get straight with myself, I’ve got to sleep again. R.I.P., Rosemary”.

  A half-hour later he was in his car, hurriedly packed valise in the luggage compartment, careening over the back roads in the general direction of Los Alamos. He was keyed up again, lively as Lazarus, he hadn’t felt this wide awake since 3:39 A.M., October 19, 1972.

  chapter twenty-one

  SOME TWENTY miles north of Los Alamos he turned in at a small motor court: SVIRIDOFF’S CABINS, the lumi-letters said. He signed the register with the name “H. C. Earwicker” and asked the clerk if there was anyone around who could run an errand for him—letter to deliver, he’d make it worth the messenger’s while. The clerk said he reckoned his son could take time out from his chores to make the trip into town. Martine promised to get the message written immediately and went off to his cabin.

  The trip southward, much of it over rundown back roads, had taken all night; it w
as daylight now, he was aching with exhaustion. But as soon as he was settled in his cabin he refreshed himself by running ice-cold water from the tap over his head and neck. Then he sat down at the desk and composed the following letter:

  Dear H:

  You should recognize this handwriting; you’ve read plenty of samples of it in your time. But in case you need another hint, here goes:

  In the middle sixties two medical students, surgeons in training, were rooming together in an apartment in Greenwich Village. Let’s call them X and Y. One night X came home very late. He was in an agitated frame of mind, paced the floor gulping down one drink after another (sour mash, Y always kept a bottle of it around). Under Y’s prodding he finally spilled the story.

  X was pretty complicated in his dealings with women: couldn’t bear them, couldn’t bear to be without them; needed them, kicked them around when he had them. Not an unusual attitude, God knows, but X’s toughness with women wasn’t checked as easily as it is in less tempestuous guys. X never cared to stop and take a good look at motives: he was compulsive rather than reflective, given to acting energetically and precipitately instead of sitting down and trying to figure out what prompts a given action.

  Y was just the opposite. Too reflective, if anything. He was always making trouble for himself, maybe complicated things unnecessarily, by trying to work out all the ambivalent motives behind any act he felt impelled to enter on; so he did a lot more uneasy thinking than acting. He was up to his ears in his own analysis (X resisted the whole idea of analysis, took it on sufferance only because the medical school required it) and wished there were time to pursue it more deeply than his studies permitted. Sometimes Y even wondred if surgery was the field for him: he thought the analytic profession was a lot closer to his real interests and speculated about whether he might not make a switch later on.

  So X talked. Seemed he’d had a date with a girl named Rosemary, a nurse at the hospital adjoining the medical school. As a matter of fact, he’d taken Rosemary to a political rally at Madison Square Garden—a rally of the Peace Pledge Program, the pacifist movement in which X was becoming extremely active. (As I said, he was quite an activist.) After the meeting, at which X himself had made a fiery speech, he’d insisted on going up to Rosemary’s apartment for a drink.

  He’d had several drinks; he’d tried, very energetically, precipitately, actively, to make love to the girl; she’d resisted him just as energetically, at the end even hysterically. Finally, in a kind of blind rage, he had, to put the matter bluntly, raped her. Whatever the complicated act is which is named rape—obviously, more often than not, it involves certain ambivalences on the girl’s part too—that’s what X had come to at the end of the evening. Needing the girl and at the same time furious with her, intent on an act of love which was also a gesture of considerable hate. In any event, it was an act. X was first and foremost an activist. . . .

  While the roommates were talking the phone rang. It was one of Rosemary’s girlfriends: she was calling to let X know, in between sobs, that Rosemary had just committed suicide by slashing her wrists. The police were already on the scene; the girlfriend had been called in and under questioning had revealed that X had been out with Rosemary during the evening; X would probably be hearing from the police, maybe they were on the way to his place right now. It might be pretty messy, Rosemary had been raped and in the process pretty badly mauled, inside and out. The girlfriend was calling for a very simple reason: she herself was an ardent worker in Tri-P and an admirer of X, she was dead sure that a man as dedicated to the pacifist cause as X just couldn’t have done such a horrible thing to anybody, so she wanted to warn him about what was coming.

  Close to hysteria himself, X told his roommate what he had heard over the phone. Y’s reaction was typical. Peculiar, he suggested, that an act of love could do so much damage. Peculiar, too, that in an act of passion a medical student, who knows the anatomical facts of life pretty thoroughly, could be just as inept and brutal as a moronic butcher’s boy.

  But the conversation didn’t get very far—the bell rang, it was the police. Under questioning X admitted readily that he’d been with Rosemary that evening. However, he explained, he’d left Rosemary at her door; whoever had attacked her must have done it long after he’d returned home—his roommate could confirm that he’d come in less than forty minutes after the meeting at the Garden was over.

  The police turned to Y. After some hesitation he corroborated X’s story. Then the police took X’s fingerprints and studied them. How, they wanted to know, could X explain the fact that the same fingerprints had been found on a glass in Rosemary’s apartment? X answered that he had come to pick Rosemary up before the meeting and at that time she’d given him a couple of drinks to bolster him because he was nervous about the speech he had to make.

  The story sounded a little fishy, but there was no evidence to contradict it. And Y had given X an airtight alibi. After a few days the case was officially closed—suicide after rape, the rapist being unknown—and X heard no more about it.

  A lot of unpleasantness developed between the roommates. Some weeks later Y moved into an apartment of his own; the two men had no more contact until the war broke out. X became more and more active in Tri-P, making speeches all over the place and getting his picture in the papers. He was quite an activist.

  On that complicated night, though, there was more talk between the two men; it lasted till sunup. Talk having to do, naturally, with motives—there Y was in his element. He was furious with X for having forced him into the position of lying to the police; even more furious with himself for having been so weak as to have allowed himself to become morally involved—steamrollered into the role of accessory after the dirty fact. So he talked, angrily, accusingly, about X’s motives, and for once X listened. Y insisted on several hammer-blow propositions:

  That, by the nature of the case, the rapist gets absolutely nothing out of the adventure worth having. That, therefore, the rapist, under the pretense of wanting desperately to be loved, really is intent on being most spectacularly denied. That X’s need to be rejected was proved by the fact that his taste in women ran to frigid types: when he came across a girl with a real suggestion of warmth and giving he suddenly became strait-laced and described her as “loose” or assumed the air of a connoisseur and dismissed her as “shallow” and “uninteresting.” That, unconsciously, X knew full well he wanted only rejection from a woman, exactly like the criminal who really wants to be caught or the gambler who really wants to lose. That, to ward off this inner accusation—to prove that his basic drive was not to be the passive helpless baby callously sloughed off by mamma—he was obliged to act the brutal gangster with women: his violence was all phony. That all this cast an interesting light on X’s hyperthyroid politics. That, proceeding from the inside out, X’s characterological onion consisted of the following layers: (a) the passive-feminine mashochistic baby, intent on repeating with all persons and objects in its environment its nursery myth of the denying mother; (b) as defense against that, the extremely active-aggressive tough guy; (c) as secondary defense against that, the humanitarian pacifist, whose two-fisted energies are all expended in altruistic pursuits. That every so often the inner truth erupted and broke through all the flimsy defenses thrown over it—out, on this particular night, came the rapist-in-the-pacifist, and then the baby-in-the-rapist, determined to prove once more that mamma was a bitch. Of course, Rosemary got mauled pretty badly in the process, this baby had big muscles. . . .

  (Prophetic words: thirteen years later X was driven to dramatize his essential babyhood in a really spectacular way, by cutting his legs off. In the name of humanitarianism, of course.)

  “All right,” X said. “Let’s say it’s all so. What do you want me to do about it?”

  “For Christ’s sake, I don’t want you to do anything about it,” Y replied. “But you might occasionally own up to the sleazier motives behind your noble fanfaronading activities.”


  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Look, I was reading Notes from Underground again tonight. Dostoevsky’s a very good case in point. Do you know there’s some evidence that at one time or another, as a young man, he may have brutally attacked a very young girl? A passage about just such an incident was deleted from the original edition of The Possessed and some people believe it was autobiographical. Anyhow, the point is that old Fyodor was capable of some pretty rough behavior with women; whether or not he did actually rape some kid, he certainly wasn’t too nice to his wife, that’s, a matter of record. And as a cover-up for this phony brutality in him he sometimes went overboard in his enthusiasm for humanitarian, Salvationist causes too: he always had a big streak of messianic religiosity, and in his younger days he fooled around with a nihilist group—for which association, interestingly enough, he came within seconds of being mowed down by a firing squad. But—in his writing, at least, he was a hell of a lot more honest than you and your world-saving friends are. Because you, in your theory of human nature, maintain there’s no such irrational thing as a rapist in anybody, that all people are inherently nice pacifists with an infinite fund of good will in them, if only the world would allow them to give free rein to their goodness. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, wrote this fabulous Notes thing which I could never get you to read—a blast against your psychology of all lights and no darks, against the simplistic, ‘enlightened’ sunniness of the nineteenth century. . . . Good God, man—you do a thing like what you’ve done tonight, this monstrous filthy thing, just after you’ve made a speech from the platform at Madison Square Garden about the deep fund of goodness in all men—you do the one thing after the other, hardly stopping to catch your breath, and still there’s not the tiniest worm of a doubt in your mind about the triumphal march of rationality up the straight shiny glory road of history, all that shit. . . .”

  Y really sailed into his roommate. Secretly he already knew that, for all he had begun to suspect about himself in the course of his analysis, he had made up his mind to marry the girl he was engaged to—and, as a necessary preliminary, to discontinue his analysis as soon as he could. His own devotion to the mythological figure of the Bitch-Goddess was pretty extreme too. Naturally, in attacking the self-destructiveness of X, he was at the same time expressing an unacknowledged irritation with the same quality in himself. He was revolted by a brutal caricature of himself. But he was also trying, by some psychoanalytic-rhetorical magic, to cast out the devils from his own prefrontal lobes. . . .