Vital Parts (45 page)

Reinhart was shocked into silence. The fact was not new to him but the motive behind the revelation was.

“That's not the measure of a man, Bob.”

Sweet perversely chose to interpret this statement as mockery. “I don't need your sympathy,” he said, clenching his face as if it were a fist.

Reinhart said: “I didn't mean to be patronizing.” He spat his own dental bridge into the palm of his hand, waved it, and put it back. “I've got this myself, and it doesn't even fit. At least you have the wherewithal to buy the best.”

Sweet returned the teeth to his mouth: impeccable; you could swear—

Reinhart went on: “If I lost my hair I would just go bald. I admire the way you fight back.”

Bob took off his glasses. “My vision is OK. If my eyes needed correction I would wear contacts. That's my style. These are window glass. The frames give strength to my face.” And the champagne seemed to have made him strangely urgent. This was new; still too early to call it a weakness. Not that Reinhart wished to. The bold disclosure of the physical inadequacies of course was evidence of moral force.

Streckfuss at that moment cried, “
Merde!
” and swept a rack of test tubes to the floor. Perhaps he had been influenced by the other breakages. He leaped into the air and landed silently on his rubber soles. From behind he looked like a spring-wound toy.

Sweet said: “I have created myself, Carl, out of very little in the way of raw material. I was born a bastard, you know.”

“No, I didn't.” Reinhart moved beyond ape's arm-length to the other end of the stainless-steel table on which the cage rested, and sat gingerly on the ham-grooving edge.

“I doubt that my real parents were in the top drawer of society,” Bob continued. “I was squirted as a drop of scum out of one tube into another, grew into a blob of humanity, was pulled out, struck, and began to breathe, and was abandoned soon thereafter. I spent my first three years in a public orphanage. The Sweets then adopted me.”

“I never knew that in the old days.”

“Neither did I, for years. And when I did find out, I can't tell you how exhilarated I was. Robert Sweet, Senior, was the original Weak Willie. He actually sang in the Methodist choir. He used to listen to the radio and laugh on the in-breaths. His wife was always knitting. I never wore anything woolen that had been bought in a store. She had a brother who raised chickens, so we never had a turkey at Thanksgiving. I studied the clarinet for a while. I can still taste the reed.” Sweet was saying this in an indignant tone that was gathering momentum to become furious. “Every Saturday morning the two of them would vacuum the
basement!
”

Reinhart said, mollifyingly: “Routine people, with all their little rituals, are what makes the world go round.”

“No, they are not,” Sweet said decisively. “They don't
make
anything do anything. They
are made
. They accept, they endure. I can't tell you how happy I was to learn that I did not owe life to the Sweets. I could afford to ignore rather than hate them.”

Reinhart found this a desolating point of view. He protested: “But that's not all there is to families. My dad was a pretty mediocre guy, too, and my mother has always been something of a crank without an aim, so far as I can see. Not everybody cares about power. It's probably a basic difference in taste. Most people want merely to live. Or anyway they used to. Nowadays you are assaulted from every direction by people who want to do something with or to you. They foist all kinds of responsibilities on you while disclaiming their own. My wife is leaving me because I am not a success at business, though she never encouraged me in any of my efforts. My son blames me personally for the war, poverty, and the Negro problem, and yet when I try to discuss these matters with him he reviles me with obscenities. I catch him in a criminal act, and he falsely accuses me of a worse one.”

“Let's face it, Carl,” Sweet said cruelly. “You have proved my case. It would be better for all concerned if your son were an orphan.”

But pride had a will of its own. Without thinking, Reinhart was moved to strike back. “I don't call Eunice the result of a successful fatherhood.”

Sweet laughed brutally.

Reinhart said: “I envy your detachment.” But he regretted his vengefulness as usual. All unhappy families were no doubt different, as mentioned in the opening lines of
Anna Karenina
. He actually could not picture Genevieve with a lover, as an Anna K. or Emma Bovary. Living persons were never as susceptible of definition as imaginary characters. Sweet for example could shrug off a daughter, and seemed none the worse for it. Perhaps because of this, Reinhart felt no uneasiness at the thought that he had himself been intimate with Eunice; no sense of triumph, either.

Bob said: “The family as an institution will probably have disappeared by the time the frozen are revived, along with war and poverty. The poor may always be with us as statistics, but an impoverished man, as individual, will have centuries in which to improve his lot. Social problems of the kind man has always known will be merely temporary inconveniences. One might be hungry, but no longer can he die from starvation. Wars may still occur, but no longer will anyone be killed in them. They will in fact turn into games.”

Reinhart was conscious of a pressure being applied to him, to what end he knew not, but he reacted to it in the form of embarrassment and turned to look at the monkey.

“Six weeks, you say? Shouldn't you call the newspapers and
Life
magazine?”

“Not till we have our man,” said Bob. “Not till he has been there and come back and can tell about it. The greatest news story of all time. Think of it, Carl. It will make the hydrogen bomb seem like the bursting of a paper bag.”

Reinhart stood erect. “Just a moment, Bob. Aren't you forgetting something? The body will be dead, clinically speaking. Hans will not be dealing with a healthy, living organism like this monkey. Your story will be only that you have taken a corpse and frozen it.”

Sweet nodded vigorously. “Go on, Carl. Pursue that line of thinking.”

“It is only a theory that the body can be revived in the distant future. The fact is that it is stone dead at the moment, by the orthodox definition. In other words, so what? I think you will find that reaction widespread, Bob. Whereas if you had some kind of proof—” Reinhart glanced towards the shelves where reposed the other cylinders allegedly containing frozen small-animal bodies. “Photographs should have been taken from start to finish. If Hans has more monkeys he should film them while they are still in the frozen state, then when they are thawed. Movies, really, are what you should have.”

Sweet said: “I notice you keep saying ‘you,' Carl. Are you dissociating yourself from this project?”

“Just a way of talking,” Reinhart explained hypocritically. “I feel a bit shy at this point. I am beyond my depth when it comes to science.”

“Or anything else,” said Sweet. “One might say bluntly that you are redundant in the logistics of life.”

For a moment Reinhart was charmed with the felicity of the phrase, and even its justice. The military idiom was appropriate to the rock-bottom residue of his morality: the old Stoic
vivere militare:
to live is to be a soldier.

Then he bridled. “I tender my resignation.”

He had never known Sweet to laugh heartily. Bob resembled Genevieve in the trait of humorlessness. It was true of most of the forceful personages Reinhart had come across in four decades. Thus he was struck by the incongruity of Bob's mirth. The man positively howled, with a violence which might have unseated a less precise set of dentures. Reinhart's dad, for example, never guffawed after losing his natural choppers.

Reinhart's indignation surged beyond itself and became self-pity.

“It is shameful,” he said, “to use a man's self-criticism against him. That's the technique of women and politicians. How much humiliation do people want of me? I was once a young man, and I had some good ideas. I have never knowingly been mean or false.” And of course, Jim Jackson's voice was heard in instant rebuttal:
You meanly cut off Blaine's hair and you consorted with a common prostitute, false to your vows of marriage
.

Reinhart backed against the table edge and secured himself with both hands.

Sweet removed his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief, transforming himself into a sort of Dick Tracy villain: Mr. Noface.

“That's a quotation from
David Copperfield
,” said Reinhart. “I forget the rest of it—oh yes, ‘cruel.' ‘Never be false, never be mean, never be cruel.' Davy's aunt told him that.”

Respectacled, Sweet said: “Have you really lived by slogans? Carl, you lack authenticity. You are the product of other people's passions and choices. You might one day be killed by someone else's statement to the effect that you do not exist. Is it really the role of a man to be inoffensive?”

Reinhart stared wildly about, then took a purchase of eye on the point where Streckfuss' neck hair touched the collar of the lab coat.

“I suppose it's preferable to be a Nazi doctor, performing experiments on the inmates of concentration camps.”

“There goes your claim to a lack of cruelty,” Sweet said in disgust.

Further discretion was pointless. Reinhart said: “The Israelis are looking for him, Bob.” Streckfuss had settled down to his apparatus again: he was a monster of coolness.

“Of all things to say.” Bob swiveled his head, eyelids lowered. “Hans was a prisoner for years in Buchenwald. He survived only because the SS officers preferred him to their own doctors.”

Reinhart knew in the clarity of dread that Sweet was not being ironic. He asked pitifully: “He's a Jew?”

Streckfuss turned then. He said: “No, I tried zat once and it almost got me killed. I disclaim any ethnic, national, or political identity.”

Reinhart looked between his own shoes. “What can I say?”

“Nussing which would concern me,” Streckfuss answered. “I take no interest in morality. I regard even myself as an organism, of which the constituent parts are replaceable. I have no desires, and do not understand anyvun who has. I have spent zuh lahst thirty years in that condition and I prefer it.” He put some test tubes into a machine and threw the switch. It whirred.

“Carl,” said Bob Sweet. “How about it?”

Reinhart was still treading water in misery. “Me and my big mouth. But it's more than that. There was a time when I thought the best of everybody until proved wrong. I guess I just can't stand reality any more, because it is both commonplace and unexpected, and whichever comes along I am in the mood for the other. When you are young it is no great tragedy to jump at conclusions. If you still do it in middle age you are a clown.”

“Carl, nothing would be more convenient than if you took a vacation at full pay.”

Mention of money brought Reinhart partway out of his wallow. “I know it's vulgar of me, in view of all this, but I am down to my small change. I do have to pay that room rent soon.”

“There you are,” Sweet said. “Living at the YMCA at your age. Why didn't you book a suite at the Shade-Milton Hotel and charge it to the firm? They have a heated pool and a sun club. You could have met girls there.”

Reinhart inhaled. “Look, Bob, I want to say I have acted like a gentleman with Eunice. I wouldn't want you to think I took liberties with your daughter.”

“My daughter?” Again Bob laughed heartily. “That idiot? If she was my daughter I would freeze her. Her father's Barker Munsing, that psychoanalyst at the end of our office hall. Anyway, Carl, you are a liar. You have been fucking her night and day.” Suddenly Sweet lost his good humor, if indeed it had been such. “You must be sick. Would I tell you my daughter was a nympho?”

Reinhart shook his head violently, but not at the question. “I suppose there would be no pain?”

“Absolutely none,” said Bob. “That's an assurance you could not get if you were to jump off the Bloor Building.” He knew everything.

“There
was
a guy who came looking for Professor Streckfuss,” Reinhart said.

“A dealer in laboratory equipment,” Bob said. “He had our office address. He delivered that new centrifuge that Hans is using right now.”

“You see how I am,” said Reinhart. “I ignored the fellow who turned out to be the sniper, and thought this guy an Israeli undercover agent. But those photographers—who were they? My father-in-law disclaims all knowledge of that stunt. Of course he could be lying.”

“Eunice has a pretty scummy crew of friends,” Bob said negligently. “What did they do, want to sell you some pornographic snapshots?”

“No,” said Reinhart. “They depicted me in some.” He found this admission almost painless.

“There's a lot you would be escaping,” Bob said, “and that's putting it at the worst. At the best there is international celebrity.” He gestured. “There's What's-his-name, the South African dentist with the heart transplant, formerly anonymous, now a household word. And for the book and magazine people you could write your own ticket, not to mention the movies.”

“Yes,” said Reinhart, “‘that undiscovered bourne from which no traveler returns …'” The freezer program would nullify all of Shakespearean tragedy: maudlin slop from the unenlightened time when men lay down and died.

“Let me ask you one question,” he said to Bob. “Was this your plan for me from the beginning?”

Sweet frowned. “Not really. When I saw you at Gino's what I remember thinking of immediately was a vengeful ambition I had as a boy. I always swore I would get you back for that bullying.”

“Goddammit, Bob!” Reinhart struck the table behind him, forgetting about the monkey, who made a sputtering sound. “I am guilty of many things, but that's not one of them, I tell you.” But in a malignant vision he saw himself as a large boy of sixteen, shoving the frail Sweetie away from the drinking fountain, getting him back from Paul Jeckel's push, then sending him again across the circle like a medicine ball. It had been a mindless amusement, innocent of deliberate malice. When Reinhart himself had been very small, a big girl had beaten him up. He doubted that she would remember. Death might be on its last legs, but envy, spite, and vengeance would still make the world go around.