AFTERDEATH

COMES LIMBO

Limbo was a house of many mansions. Mailer's spirits, while hardly

free-they whipped around his soul like electrons orbiting a ring-
began, nonetheless, to awake. The telling monotonies of Limbo (all
those faceless fornications that rang in the ears, those stupors that
drifted like bad weather, apathies piling on apathies like old newspa-
pers, the crackle of static, and the playback of cocktail gabble, the glut-
iony of red wine taken on top of white wine on top of harshly cooked
food, or the holes in one's memory now plugged by electronic hum,
plus the horror of contemplating falls from heights rvhere one did not
want to find oneself, and all the stations of the cross of feeling empty
while waiting for sublvay trains and airline shuttles and rvaitresses in
busy lunchrooms), yes, all such items had so far been experienced in
Ligbo 39. dlrgct punilhme,!_L Norv, however (as his spirits awake), he
cum. to perceive that if was all part of bad spiritual ecology-exactly
sttclr. a category-bad spiritual ecology. ., '
tjl
Mailer began to believe that thislenforced immersion,in every
sensation, episode, glut, glop, and repellent handle of experience (his ,;!fl1
,,it;
vision filled rvith nothing but the faces of dlgital watches, the smell of r:1i'

pharmacies, the touch of polyester shirts, the wet wax paper of Mc- r,*l
r riiii

Donald's hamburgers, the air of summer when traffic jams and .$

shrieks of stereo as the volume is jacked-up-not to mention the nau- ,[i.
..iif
sea that plastic highball glasses will give to the resonance of booze) was ',$
'trs'
not necessarily a set of items to scortrge_-him around one eternity be- .''ili

:.riif

.,'iil
:lll,

' .1i
 AFTBRDEATHCOMESLIMBO 1273

fore dispatching him ro anorher but might be instead his own narural
field of .expiatio-i) In place of his soui expiring, or sufferin$ ;;
whole damnation norv, he might stilr be puit or i'i. o*r, karmic chain
and going through a purification of those misspent hours before
being thrown back into the contest again. Ajoke returned to his ears.
"It's a great day for the race," said the elevator operator in the acrylic
uniform in the Formica-paneled cage. "what rale?" said the passen-
ger' "The human race," said the elevator operator, and laugired his
way up the ascension.
All rvho died were guilty. In parr, ar least, they were guilty, and
conceivably they were innocent in part, and Limbo, thought Mailer,
might even be the charity to suppose that innocence, if it winted to go
back to the race, was in need of education. Limbo, on the .orrr"_
quence, took all those molal stances embedded in concrete and
wrenched them askew. In the mansion, there was that human, for in-
stance, who held the award for the most faithful church attendance
over two decades in the American Midwest; now he was pissing and
a storm at the injustice of being here. Still, he was guilty.
. rylit]g,up
Th; inhabitants were alljudged by one fine *eurrrre, Uua qfglg1qg:
4-.f 1o1*usted more of the soul's substance th-an y?-";9ql{11il": .t]r9-
exigencies of their life? since his first perception offeied hdre was that
---the most cons'mable substance of the .o.,1 *^, nothing
more than
time, that Tirre) whole and mysrerious bed of light, elJctricity, and
force, was ifr'vdted, like the true fund of the realm, in every soul, it fol-
lowed as a consequence that Time was not to be wasted but rather,
whatever the warp of one's upbringing, was to be spent, all neurotic,
psychotic, screwball, timid, stingy, spendthrift, violent, or fear-filled
habits taken into account, was still to be spent as wittily, cheerfully,
and/or bravely as possible. *-- . _--\.
That was the standard of Limbo. Time was not to be wasted.llt
came over one, even on emerging froni the first stupefying sleep (and
therefore beginning to suffer monotony, apathy, and the boredom
that comes from being out of Time), that this dreadful experience,
these appalling emptinesses of the spiritual gut that came from exist-
ing now in seamless non-dark fionlfiEi=uruts punctuated by no
breath, rvas still a course in orientation over spiritual ills. For instance,
the Midwestern churchgoer now inhabited a cell (in this penitentiary
Of theheaVent)rrcxtto C,nq sldr^s y"vrl.l'o ivurrLLvtrJr 4 rrrolr rvLvrrq+
killed three prisoners before dying himself over the twenty years of
his Lewisbuig stretch lgg the con was here for another kind of
crime-he had put in *ore min-hours watching TV than any other
 1274 THE TIME OF OUR TIME

convict in the federal system. All the same, the two were installed side
by side-theii ciiines against rhe cosmos lvere apparently not dissirni-
lar. They had both was-1ed their stuff, and egregiously. The church-
goer had perperuared this by the brure srerility of his church
attendance: The complacency of his performance (that is to say, the
spiritual stagnation 1t the cenrer of his complacency) had been a po\v-
erful miasma to lay on the spirit of three young miriisters, who in suc-
cession grew old at accelerared rates looking into his professionally
empty eyes-he had certainly spoiled more of exisrence than he had
sustained. The con, in his rurn, had poisoned the livelier possibilities
of many a young rvolf and punk rvhose burgeoning shit-oriented li-
bido would someholv drain out after sauntering past that corner of
the inmates' lounge lvhere the con was ensconced by the set; consid-
ering hoiv immense was his potential violence, just so flattened had
been the prison's rec-room mood by that act of his will that chose to do
time quietly, watch TV, and get out-at which, in fact, he failed, for he
kept killing other convicts. The con's real mission in life, and he knew
it, was to outwit the guards, stifle alarm systems, and climb un-
climbable prison walls. The logics of Limbo were nor easily available,
and yet the message, as one took it through the now non-corporeal
equivalent of one's pores, was that something in the cosmos would
have prospered more if the con had climbed the wall instead oF im-
bibing TV, even as the churchgoer could have stirred beneficial forces
in the universe by catching an X-rated movie or two.
Given the iron law of such logic, Maiidiiirr" i" i".ognize that he
would have done less damage- !o- his being by going ro a church or a
temple once in a while rarher thanTnci6a66 rhe toral o_f .his..appear-
ances on television.
Incleed, it #ai this particular piece of,riroGl krrowi.dge5he was
obliged to ingest right after his emergence froni the first siupefying
sleep-out. Ir was ro recognize thar_e.v-ery-4"yll-fting,9p9.-had done to
the universe (filling our crossword puiZies one did not wish to fill, tak-
ing the Eastern Airlines shuttle when other transportation was avail-
able), every hour one had voided thereby of fresh and keen d.esire to
be used, the air around one, in consequence, suffocated by psychic
eT!-+qqt, had now to be breathed again, rhe iir bfitt. stifled past to be
swallowed, digested, suffered, and then stuffed inro the ongting bag-
gage of one's karma. This mansion of Limbo was here to bring you
face to face with those sins for which there are no lears, even as a hus-
band and wife cannot weep if they lose a potentiaily hearrfelt piece of
ass by watching TV all night; yes, this corner of Limbo (a clean and
 AFTER DEATH COMES LIMBO 1275

well-appointed place suggestive of the interior of a picture tube on a

black-and-white set-that is, all curved, silver, and gray, an odorless
irnpalpability of fluorescence in an eternity of flickering) was now ap-
parently ready to teach him, that is, teach his soul, something new
That meant, on refle,ction, that he might still have a soul. Something
in himself ex-aZtly iiki:-i6e old Ceniei ieemed iertainly nor ro have
ceased, that part at least of himself he had always thought wiser than
the rest of him (that part which took pains to mash an invisible egg on
his head after a rotten remark) was coming to recognize that his_tour
through T imbo (if indeed a tour and not an ongoing punishment)
would ask him to meditate at length and presumably to purpose on
those yaws and palls of his life thit had passed through iV.'H" *r,
going to be obliged to regard his own wretched collaboration with the
multimillion-celled nausea-machine, that Christ-killer of the ages-
television. (Ler us say it takes a Jew not wholly convinced of the divin-
ity of Christ to see that is who the tube is killing.) And he shuddered
through the now-familiar, if minimal, retchings of Limbo while re-
membering how on numerous occasions with each of his nine chil-
dren he had closed the doors of his own resistance to TV and let the
little fuckers keep looking at the screen because lt_p*grfqgl1!em,, which
is to say took the lividity of their five-year-old nerves and slowly (that
is, faster than sight) and buzzingly cauterized their nerve ends just the
right bloody bit, no blood seen. Again the guilt that cannot be allevi-
afed try tears stirred like sludge in his own small part of the great cos-
mic gut.' Yes, there was a malignancy present in the bowels of
existence, and it was video.
From Pi,eces and Pontifi,cations (1982)