Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  As the rancher told it, a lot of people were pretty badly banged up in the Third—lots of amputees, as well as paraplegics and other kinds of cripples. Even more civilians wounded than vets. All right. Then the pacifist movement took over the government, there was a lot of fancy talk about Martine’s Notebook, the international situation got bad again, there was more talk about the Notebook—then, pop, there was Immob. Suddenly able-bodied kids all over the place were rushing to recruiting offices to sign up for ampism, holy gleam in their eyes. Some people, a lot of people, were horrified. In their own simple-minded way, the war wounded had been thinking that what had happened to them was a dirty rotten kind of deprivement; now here were all these fanatical kids fighting for a place in line so they could acquire the same damage voluntarily.

  Of course, the Theos couldn’t wait to cripple themselves still further. Others, though, couldn’t see making a horror into something holy. . . . Not that the rancher wanted to exaggerate. Not all the anti-Immobs had noble motives; none did, probably. Some, in fact, were moved by pretty low considerations: they’d come by their wounds the hard way, and as a result were the first heroes of the postwar period; now here were all these Johnny-Come-Latelys getting crippled painlessly and threatening to take over the whole hero business. Naturally, some of the vets had a gripe. . . . But, no matter what moved this or that particular guy, a lot of guys objected. Pretty soon they were joined by others with less embattled motives. Young fellows who were just too attached to their limbs to part with them on any basis: the rancher’s eighteen-year-old son was one of them. Mothers and fathers who had sweated to get their sons out of the baby carriage and didn’t care to see them installed there again. Girls—some who were against this thing simply because they weren’t allowed to join themselves; others, not for feminist reasons but just because they didn’t want their men less than men. (The rancher’s wife was one such, his twenty-year-old daughter another.) Minority peoples, Negroes and such; like a lot of women, they saw that the old status system was only taking on a new and more spectacular form in Immob and that they’d be as carefully discriminated against in the new order as in the old. . . . All sorts of people. With all sorts of motives. But with the same urge—to scream no to this final cuddling up to the steamroller. . . .

  They screamed in lots of places. In the Union as well as the Strip. It was bad, they were squelched in more effective ways than by a policeman’s club. The irate citizens mobbed them. First the parents and wives and girl friends of the new heroes: after their darling boys had sliced off their legs they didn’t want anybody going through the streets yelling that it was all a dirty mistake. There were some pretty bloody skirmishes, people were killed. Then it got worse. After a while the cyberneticists invented their new pros and the young heroes were fitted out with super-arms and super-legs. They began to get around. And they attacked the anti-Immob meetings; lots more people killed. In the Union as well as the Strip. In the Union they even began to accuse the oppositionists of sabotage and terrorism, they staged spectacular mass trials, everybody confessing to everything. . . .

  The anti-Immobs went underground, in a way. That is, clammed up. They began to meet among themselves, in little informal study circles, and the circles kept in touch with each other. The Immob world stopped hearing about the opposition. . . . Well, the opposition was still there. In both the Union and the Strip. With their own ideas about what Martine was really getting at; they’d had a lot of years in which to talk it over. They didn’t have any elaborate program to save humanity. Except one thing, maybe: never, in politics, to make anything irrevocable. . . . It was just that they had some notion about integrity. Which, maybe, was a lot closer to what Martine had been driving at than the filthy farce of Immob. . . .

  “That’s about it,” the rancher said. “This afternoon I was at a meeting at L.A. when the attack came. All us vet-amps got away safely because we were in disguise, you see. Reckon modesty does pay. . . . I don’t know. Maybe, when the war’s far enough along, there’ll be a chance for us to do something. We’re discussing it now. We’re waiting to hear from our friends in the Union about it. . . . Of course, we don’t have any big gaudy program to offer people, no sensations. Maybe those of us who don’t buddy up to the steamroller will always be the outcasts, maybe we’ll always have to go around with our eyes cast down and our lips buttoned up. If the war doesn’t eliminate everybody. We’ll see. . . .”

  Several minutes passed by while Martine sat without moving a muscle, concentrating on the shimmer of the desert landscape. His heart was hammering, his throat was parched, his fingers trembled. Twice he opened his mouth as though to speak, then thought better of it—once he even shook his head emphatically. The driver glanced over at him from time to time, curious.

  At last Martine came to life and said, “Thanks.” He thought for a moment, then added: “I want to thank you for trusting me. I think the most important single thing that ever happened to me was meeting up with you today.”

  Another silence, his lips working.

  “You see, I had a son back there—one of the Anti-Pro leaders. He was killed in one of the bombings. I despised everything he represented, but until this moment I never suspected there was anything else left. It’s a good thing to know somebody like you exists—whether you have any impact on events or not. . . .”

  The picture was complete at last. There had been one ingredient missing until now: the opposition. Now he saw the whole thing—the horror, and the opposition to the horror. Of course. He’d been an idiot not to suspect that there must be an opposition. Of coure there was an opposition, the seed of opposition, the potentiality of opposition. Just as, on the island, there were the young people of the cave—beginning to laugh. Just as, in him, some dank cave was opening up, and in it a ghastly laughter was beginning to echo. . . . Life had not yet turned into a stone, even under Immob. It had gone on seething a bit, under the surface of bland benignity. . . . There was opposition. With a program: integrity as intactness, as all-at-onceness: the acceptance of the human condition. Which might, just barely might, be the beginning of a turn, however belated, against the masochistic tide. Out of Immob came anti-Immob: maybe the spiral was whirling downward, but there was still a dynamic and a history. Martine’s Notebook was too confusedly human to be a stone, an epitaph. . . .

  “Thanks,” he said again. “Now there’s something I’d like to tell you. You’re interested in Martine?”

  “Well—sure. Not as an authority—we’ve had a bellyfull of authorities—just as a man. I’ve got a feeling he and I might have had something in common. . . .”

  “You would have. That’s not just a guess—I used to know him, there were periods when we were very close.”

  The green eyes when they turned to Martine were bright, startled, brimming with questions. “What was he like?”

  “Confused! Let’s establish that first—no angel, no messiah, no savior, just stumbling and quaking and confused as hell! Whatever he was, he wasn’t a perfectionist. He had too much of a sense of humor for that.”

  “Still, the Notebook, parts of it. . . .”

  “Confused too, like it’s author. Sure! But it didn’t have any of the meanings Helder read into it—Martine wasn’t confused about Helder’s meanings, at least. . . . No. You see, he’d been stunned by the line he’d once come across in Rimbaud: To every creature several other lives were due—which suggested to him that, just as his analysis indicated, he was a hell of a lot more than what he appeared to be on the surface, he was filled with smothered personalities, everybody was. But he’d also been hit hard by that other line of Rimbaud’s: Don’t be a victim. That meant, as he saw it, that you mustn’t victimize one part of you in favor of another, sacrifice one of your potential lives to another. In other words, he had your idea: integrity, intactness—living with the whole being, trying to bring it all to the surface, never truncating any dimension of personality. He was afraid that pacifism, which no doubt originated in the decent and
civilized impulses of mankind, would never get anywhere at all, only become a partner to catastrophe after catastrophe, so long as it persisted in seeing man as a truncated monolithic thing, all potential goodness. That if the do-gooders saw man as truncated, they’d wind up truncating him—theories have a habit of proving themselves that way.”

  “Funny you never reported that to anybody.”

  “I’ve been away. I didn’t even know—”

  The driver pointed at something up ahead. “There’s the motel,” he said, his voice almost inaudible. He slowed up and turned into the drive, parked the car on the gravel stretch in front of the cottages. He took his hands from the wheel and raised them part way toward Martine, palms up, as though begging for something—it was the Mandunji gesture of greeting, parodied.

  “But then,” he said. “His taking off that way?”

  “Ah!” Martine said. “But how, exactly, did he go? That’s the whole question! Do you really believe that, after writing what he did about masochism, he could have stepped out and taken that plane up to what was certain death—in a silly suicidal gesture that served no sensible purpose at all? You believe that?”

  “But in that case—”

  “Yes, he may have gotten away. There’s a chance he’s still alive, somewhere. If he could get back here and stay, if it were possible for him to come back, I believe he’d be with you and your friends. One way or another. Provided you didn’t go too messianic and programmatic on him.”

  The man stared at him, mouth open. He was breathing hard.

  “What’s your name?” Martine said.

  “Don Thurman.”

  “I’m Dr. Lazarus. Lazare, for short. Nice name for a parasitologist, don’t you think? The leprous victim of the pest, student of pestilences. . . . Look, I’ve got something I want to give you. Wait here a minute, will you?”

  Martine got out of the car and went off to his cabin. He was in a sweat, he sat down and tried to think. Thurman was certainly beginning to suspect. Why not spill everything to him? But there was a danger—if Thurman and his friends knew for sure who he was they might, conceivably, try to keep him in the Strip. There was a choice to be made: do everything to get back to Ooda and Rambo, or tie up with the Strip opposition and very possibly end his life here. For the messiah in him the answer was clear; but not for the man. Was he man or messiah? . . . No, he had to get back to the island, too much unfinished business there, he must not do anything that would interfere. On the other hand, he had a certain obligation: he had written the Notebook, he must do everything possible to undo the damage it had caused. That meant revealing the truth about himself, somehow or other. In some way that would not suck him back into messiahdom. He was coming to know the anatomy of this salvationist bent as he knew the bone structure of his own hand: a technique for self-extinction under the banner of saving others from extinction, for throwing yourself under the steamroller while pretending you were the steamroller. Even when it was entered into queasily and with qualms—when you “went along” with this or that Mandunga “only” to save lives and add to the fund of human knowledge. No more messiahdoms for him: he could no longer be an addict of the glossier “Its,” that range of incognitos, at least, had been snatched from him. . . . Well, he would have to take a chance on Thurman. . . .

  He searched through his valise until he found his worn copy of Dodge the Steamroller; the margins were filled with annotations. He sat down at the desk and opened the book to the first blank page after Helder’s postcript. He took a pen and wrote another entry there;

  OCTOBER 20, 1990.

  Sviridoff’s Motel, Outside Los Alamos

  L.A. bombed couple hours ago. Got away all right. Found Tom in a window, guts ripped to bits by glass: he was castrated: real meaning of Immob. Picked up on the highway by a rancher named Don Thurman. Long talk with him.

  Wish I could stay in the Strip. For one reason: to get to know Thurman better, maybe work with him and his friends. Because they’re the only ones who understand this notebook. But I wouldn’t be true to myself if I stayed here. I am involved in another life, in another part of the world; my job is to return and encourage the opposition there—a job I should have started eighteen years ago. Meeting Thurman has made that clear to me. Every man has some no to say in some place—and some yes too. Unmessianically. My place is not here any more.

  This book should be dedicated to Don Thurman, his wife, his son, his daughter, and his friends. Because if its author could, he would want to live in Bar Limbo with them. Because they are human beings. But I must go to the place that is my home and try to create my own Bar Limbo there. Not for humanity’s salvation. For mine.

  This notebook is now ended.

  Dr. “Lazarus”

  That should do it, Martine thought. To clinch the thing, there were facsimiles of several original manuscript pages in the Notebook; sooner or later it would occur to Thurman to compare them with this last notation. . . .

  Martine stepped into the office and asked the clerk if he had a large envelope. The man was so distraught that he hardly heard the question: he had the radio on, the newscaster was talking: “Late flash. Discontent is growing in the cities of the Union, there are signs that it may result in outbursts against the treacherous Union leadership at any moment. . . .” Martine repeated his question, the envelope was produced, he stuck the book inside and sealed the flap. He returned to the car, stood outside the driver’s window.

  “Here’s a book I want you to have,” he said. “It’s a copy of Martine’s Notebook—I’ve filled the margins with comments containing everything I could remember about Martine, to correct the lies in Helder’s footnotes. You’ll learn quite a bit from it—so long as you hold to your idea that essentially all appeals to authority are a lot of shit. . . . Just promise me two things. Don’t open the book until tomorrow. That’s important. When you do get into it, make sure to read every page. Every one.”

  “O.K.” A long pause, the green eyes searching. “I’m glad to have it. Maybe—” The eyes lit up, lips curved in a smile.

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe—if any of us come out of this alive—maybe we’ll put out another edition of the thing. With your footnotes correcting Helder’s footnotes—they should be very pertinent. . . .”

  And the man began to laugh—his mouth was open wide now, he was panting, the gales of convulsive laughter making his throat quiver, they roared out in a rush of wild sounds. Going beyond gall, spleen, nausea, the trivial titters of mere sardonic disenchantment—a cosmic laughter, big and round, all-embracing: oceanic laughter, the ultimate Om.

  It was infectious. Watching the man shake, Martine found himself caught up in the wave of immense merriment. He began to laugh too—snickered at first, then abandoned himself to it and bent over with the delightful hurt, holding his sides, tears pouring down his cheeks.

  It went on for a long time: the motel clerk came to the door of the office, stuck his frightened drawn face out and stared at the two men. Finally Thurman regained control of himself, wiped his eyes with his arm. Martine followed suit, patting his wet face with his handkerchief.

  “If I could stay here,” Martine said, “we might be friends. We’ve got a lot in common. I feel that.”

  “You’re going away?”

  “If I can manage it—I must go back to Africa. That’s where my home is. I’ve got a wife and son there—without them I’m not alive. Although often, when I was with them. . . . I’ve got to go back.”

  “I’m sorry. We might have worked together.”

  “If there were any way for me to stay,” Martine said simply, “I would work with you. I would try.”

  Thurman held his lean brown hand out and Martine took it. “Good luck to you and your family,” Thurman said. “I hope you get where you want to go. I’ve got to get back to my family too—there’s a lot to do.”

  “Thanks,” Martine said. “Thanks for the lift—it was quite a lift. Good luck to you and your family too.” />
  Thurman started up the car.

  “You’ll be interested in this,” Martine said. “I’ve really got a hunch that Martine’s still alive.”

  The steady green eyes widened, searched.

  “So have I,” Thurman said.

  “When I get back home,” Martine said, “I’m going to look for him. I’ve got an idea where to look for him now.”

  “I think,” Thurman said, “that the most important single thing that ever happened to me was meeting you.” He waved. The car rolled off to the highway, stopped for a moment, turned and sped away to the north.

  Martine stood in the driveway for a moment, watching until the touring car disappeared. Then he went back to his cabin, stripped and sank into bed. He had never been so tired in his life, he was asleep almost before his head hit the pillow. . . .

  Much later—many hours later, he’d slept through the evening, according to the wall clock it was almost one in the morning—he was awakened by a rapping at the door. He bolted out of bed, groped for the gun in his jacket. He went to the door and opened it cautiously.

  Theo stood on the step, swaying like a drunken man. He was dressed in greasy long-legged trousers and a work shirt with the sleeves rolled down, there was a stained felt hat on his head. His face was chalky white.

  “Please,” he whispered.

  He came blindly into the room and sank into a chair. For several minutes he sat there, frozen. Then, at Martine’s urging, he began to speak.

  chapter twenty-four

  IT HAD been hectic after Martine left. Helder, it was clear, was getting ready to put into effect the next phase of his operational scheme, what he had referred to as “Plan C”—a step which, it quickly dawned on Theo, meant a bold swinging over from defense to offense at the psychological moment. Helder himself made it plain: in between conversations with his agents in the field he explained impatiently, as though spelling out the bald verities for a retarded child, that it would be suicidally naïve to stick to purely defensive measures out of some soupy programmatic sentimentality—the best and only really effective defense was offense. . . . So, in the course of one brief afternoon, Helder’s metamorphosis was completed—from irrevocable pacifist to reluctant defensist to a whirlwind generalissimo of the classic combative mold who reminded Theo far more of Hannibal and Napoleon than of the dedicated man who had launched Immob Helder had become EMSIAC.