Vital Parts (28 page)

Sweet looked up from his documents. “We are of course prepared to do the freezing gratis, but there is no point in reminding them of that. If he offers to pay, it might be considered patronizing if we turn him down. He does get these substantial lecture fees.” Sweet showed his impeccable (false!) teeth.

Reinhart dropped his case. The death of a friend was something else. Reinhart said: “This becomes unbearable when I hear the practical details. I tell you, I knew Splendor. He was a mixture of extreme vulnerability with, at times, inattentiveness to reality. I have had friends die, as well as enemies and slight acquaintances. This strikes me especially hard because I never decided which he was. Over the years I have always had in the back of my mind an intent to get to know him again, and better. But you know how it goes, things we leave undone.”

Sweet said, at his papers again: “Now you're getting mawkish, Carl. Sentimentalizing always has been useless, but now it is outmoded as well. Have you forgotten that through cryonics we are going to
preserve
his life? Instead you are talking like an undertaker.”

If
it works
, Reinhart thought for the first time in quite a while, but seeing Sweet's toupee, false teeth, and corset and recognizing the mess he had made of Eunice, Reinhart's faith had been strained. Sweet pointed past him and he looked and saw Captain Storm coming towards the car with an assured, martial stride. The young man now wore a black-leather belt from which a pistol swung in a closed holster, and a high-peaked, shiny-billed cap approriate to his uniform.

Reinhart opened the door and Storm entered. His broad shoulders made the back seat crowded at the upper level but a good four inches of leather upholstery separated his narrow ass from Reinhart's spill of flesh.

Reinhart breathed deeply and said: “Is it your father who is ill? Splendor Mainwaring? I knew him years ago before you were born.”

“Yes,” the tan young man answered emotionlessly. “He is dying of cancer.”

The dreaded word. The popular designation of Reinhart's astrological sign had been changed to “Moon People” to avoid it. Even “dying” had a preferable sound, because there were options in what it signified, in its means, that is: Reinhart's dad had died in his sleep; others in a trice, by their own hand, for example, in an instant of glare. But “cancer” submitted to no interpretation: the body slowly began to devour itself until it had consumed a vital organ, a process measured in pain-time, by which moments were eternities of agony.

There was no feasible response to this information, and Reinhart accepted it in silence. But Sweet spoke up in an efficient voice from his other side, not even bending across Reinhart to look at Storm.

“Regrettable. I hope he has not been in too much physical agony. That's no joke, of course, but it will end with his clinical death, which for the first time in the history of the human race will be truly a beginning rather than an end. I'm not attacking religion here. There are many concepts regarding an afterlife and I have no quarrel with any of them, including reincarnation. That is one of the beauties of the freezer program. It violates nobody's faith, because it preserves life. It does not bring people back from the past. It keeps them living. Clinical death, you see, is not absolute. Compare the body to an automobile. The fuel pump goes bad, the car stops but is not a total ruin. Replace the failing part, she runs like new. You would be a fool to sell an otherwise perfectly good automobile to the junkman.”

Reinhart was conscious that the Negro had begun to stiffen while Sweet spoke.

Captain Storm said: “Don't feel you have to put it into simple-minded terms for my benefit, please. I have read your literature. I am familiar with your argument and your projected technique, draining of the blood and perfusing the circulatory system with dimethyl sulfoxide and glycerine, then freezing the body with liquid nitrogen.” He cleared his throat. “This has been done successfully with simple organisms and simpler human tissues, but with nothing of even moderate size in human terms or any complexity of function. Therefore don't give me any of your jive. This is not my idea, but my father's. He has always been a Tom when it comes to white so-called science.”

Which happened to be true, Reinhart remembered. Splendor had been addicted to obviously fraudulent theories. Still, Reinhart did not like the implication of these remarks and wanted to tell him: This is the sort of attitude that turns us sympathetic whites away, and you need us. Or did he? After all, he was armed. And as Blaine explained it, the New Blacks wanted to go it alone. But when precisely that had been suggested by the Old Whites they had been called fascists.

To live by the definitions of other people was to be always a swine.

But Sweet naturally took no offense. “Our literature,” he said, “lags behind the research. Necessarily so. New things come in with breathtaking frequency. To keep abreast of continuing developments we would have to publish a daily newspaper. Carl can tell you about Suda's experiments in Japan.”

The Negro grunted. He said: “I could have predicted you would work in a person of color.”

Reinhart looked out the window, past Storm's goatee, and saw three more Black Assassins standing on the porch of the house. They were all armed with long guns and adorned with crossed cartridge belts of the Pancho Villa design.

Storm said: “Shall we get rolling?”

“Which hospital?” asked Sweet.

“I took him out. White medicine was killing him.”

Reinhart could smell the leather of the holster. He asked: “Doesn't your dad live here any more?”

A snort. “No, he has a lovely little house in Whitetown. He is singlehandedly bringing down the real-estate values. I bought it for him, and I'll tell you why. A man ought to achieve his aim before he dies, even if it is to be a lickspittle to white values. I don't blame him. He is a product, not a maker. If you are treated like a thing all your life, you become one. You'll find that in the works of Immanuel Kant.”

Reinhart was stung, less by the anti-white stuff, which was fairly routine these days, than by the characterization of his old friend. If anybody had been an individual to a point well past eccentricity, it was Splendor Mainwaring. Reinhart began to suspect that Splendor's son was a blackfaced version of Blaine. So Negro offspring also turned against their progenitors, demonstrating again the foolishness of drawing fundamental distinctions between races.

It took some courage for Reinhart to speak to this armed young man against a backround of storm troopers.

He stared at the haughty brown face. “Look,” he said, “the Splendor I knew kissed the ass of no man. He stood by and for himself, and he suffered for it before you were born, young fellow. He had a personal vision and pursued it alone. He wasn't backed up by an army. I don't mean to intrude into your family life, but often someone from outside can see things that are missed, especially by sons.”

Captain Storm was sneering at him. “Naturally you would say that. You are white.”

“I'm getting tired of that word,” said Reinhart.

“
You're
getting tired of it!” This was said with what seemed to Reinhart more hurt than anger, however—or perhaps that was merely the interpretation of Reinhart's always ready tendency to sympathize with his vis-à-vis in a social situation.

“I'm sorry,” the fat man said. “This is no time to argue.” He put out his hand. “I'm Carl, by the way.”

The Negro drew away in horror. “
I
don't want to be on intimate terms with you. Christ Almighty.” He made a dramatic grimace towards his comrades on the porch.

Sweet asked for the address, and Captain Storm gave a number and street that were most familiar. Reinhart had grown up there. It was his parents' old house.

In his mind's eye Reinhart still saw the place as it had not been for years, with the willow tree in the front yard, long since a vanished loser to some arboreal malady; the old porch fence of his childhood, between the palings of which he had once got his head stuck and Dad had to saw one off and never replaced it.

The façade had been painted since his parents' residence. He supposed Storm would see something vulgarly significant in the bone-or dead- or lily-white, but in fact it had always been dressed in that color or lack of same, which anyway would turn soot-gray before the painter sent in his bill.

So many emotions were available as the Bentley came to rest at the curb that Reinhart was hard put to make a choice. His childhood home, his old friend, a Negro, moribund, yet getting a crack at eternal life, their hostile sons, the synthetic Sweet and his disturbed daughter—O for a portmanteau response in which he could dump the lot, along with his years, resurrect the willow tree and climb into its topmost branches as he had been wont to do of yore, peeping down at the passing parade, hidden and superior.

Children were swooping and hooting through adjacent yards. In the Negro district Reinhart had been too preoccupied to notice persons other than the Black Assassins, but some must have been abroad because the season was summer. The yards at hand were all of the same size and unseparated by hedge or pickets, and three lawns distant stood a hairy-bellied man, stripped to the waist, gawking shamelessly. At that range Captain Storm might look like a black cop, Reinhart thought. He himself waved at the man, who might turn out to be another old schoolmate, more routine than Bob Sweet. The man did not return the salute. Instead he scratched his navel with one hand and raised to his mouth the beer can in the other. He was the sort who might at any moment say, “Now hear this,” and release some gas. In the other direction stood a spiky-figured woman wearing a droopy playsuit and a science-fiction hairdo of pink plastic curlers, and bitching a little snot.

The arrival of another car diverted Reinhart from the stocktaking of the neighborhood. It was a black Cadillac of ancient vintage and held the contingent of uniformed and armed Negroes last seen on the porch across town. They parked ten yards beyond the Bentley and stayed inside.

Sweet's old chauffeur went to sleep again as the odd threesome of which Reinhart was a member left the car.

Reinhart asked the back of Storm's tunic, which must have been unbelievably hot under the sky's open forge: “Those guys with you?”

“My bodyguards,” the young man said, glancing back and giving Reinhart an angled view of his face that was suddenly reminiscent of Splendor's sister, this boy's aunt, the exquisite Loretta. Where would we all be now if Reinhart had made an interracial marriage? For one, had certain chromosomes dominated, Blaine would undoubtedly have been a Black Assassin.

But a stout walnut-colored woman in nurse's whites opened the door before anyone knocked, and Storm, Bob Sweet, and Reinhart entered the house in that order.

Captain Storm greeted the nurse with a lavish geniality that contrasted interestingly with his gelid manner towards the whites, and he made no introductions. But being plump and in her forties, the woman nonetheless smiled at Reinhart. Whatever anybody said, fat people really were generally good-natured, especially to other adipose types, he supposed because they had their number, like fellow soldiers and ethinic siblings.

Reinhart crossed the threshold, passing his old home door with its familiar bronze knocker, a lion's face frozen in a belch or yawn, but then he saw the hospital bed in the far corner of the room where the superheterodyne had once stood and later the television.

And upon it a wasted old brown man whom it seemed peculiarly indecent to advance upon with one's own pink bulk. Splendor in his prime was tall as Reinhart and more gracefully assembled, strong yet lithe, with sensitive musculature that seemed to have its own consciousness. This wizened creature clawed feebly at the sheet which covered but did not disguise its corporeal ruin of twigs and wire. The face on the pillow was a caricature, a tourist's souvenir, carved into a coconut. No platitude is outmoded when it comes to dying, which is itself a cliché endlessly repeated. Yet Reinhart found himself incapable of utterance. To see his old friend in this situation was another thing than to entertain its possibility while riding hither. “All men die” is easy enough for you to say, but that each actually does, without benefit of quotation marks, cannot be abstracted, represented, or demonstrated by the living.

There was a glitter in the eyeholes of the skull. Reinhart did not expect to be recognized, indeed would have preferred not to be embarrassed by proof of his now irrelevant identity, but a ghastly rictal movement was already under way.

“Carlo,” said the dying man. The pronunciation was astonishingly normal in timbre and volume. “How terribly nice. I am touched by your grief, old fellow. But it is misplaced. I may die, but in the words of the late great militarist, I shall return.”

“You certainly shall, Splendor,” Reinhart was quick to say, wiping his eye—which, judging from Splendor's speech, must have been wet. However, it wasn't; yet he
had
been grieving and perhaps would go on to do even more of it, switching focus from Splendor's terminal illness to his naïve faith in the freezer program. How typical of his old friend to be dying painfully on the one hand and on the other to be so jolly of soul.

It was also rather too grisly an incongruity for Reinhart to bear if he had to look at his friend's visage while juggling the factors, so he stared at a white-enameled table full of glassware filled with liquids and solids which were of course inefficacious, else the patient would not have been where he was: the offensive rubbish of medical science, a good thing on which to take out one's spite against illness.

Reinhart said: “Meet Bob Sweet.”

Splendor put out a terrible appendage, a wiry structure of the sort found in the ruin of burned-out houses, whose late function it took a while to identify: ah, a lampshade frame. Ah, a hand. Sweet shook it forthrightly.