Vital Parts (46 page)

Bob was smiling generously. “Carl, Carl, do you seriously think I have nothing better to do than hold a childish grudge? You are probably right: it was two other guys—”

“I don't know what you'd do,” said Reinhart. “I don't know how you made your money or even where you live. You couldn't prove by me that you own anything but that Bentley.”

“Nor that,” Sweet said pleasantly. “I hire it, in fact, at a hundred dollars a day. I live at the Shade-Milton. I own very little, and lease what I need because of the tax advantages. I speculate in commodity futures.”

The lingo of investors had always been Greek to Reinhart. He had picked up the occasional paperback on how to play the market and ritualistically read the financial page on Sundays but he really understood only the taking of gain from wages or small personal businesses, and of course the simple direct crimes such as pilfering and burglary, not embezzlement.

“That's what I was doing yesterday in Berne. I lease storage facilities there.”

“I see,” said Reinhart, who did not. But it didn't really matter now.

“Cocoa,” said Bob.

Reinhart rallied for a moment, on the strength of suspicion. “I thought you had withdrawn from active participation in the world of finance. I thought you said you had committed yourself wholly to this project, and put your money into the Cryon Foundation. And whether or not you were in Switzerland yesterday, or have extensive deposits in Swiss banks, as Eunice, who is not your daughter, claims, you did meet Professor Streckfuss there, as you yourself assert. And whether or not he is a hero instead of the villain I so foolishly thought for a while, without any evidence, he is not licensed to practice medicine in this country.”

“What are you getting at?” asked Sweet.

Reinhart stood up. His right buttock was asleep. “Merely,” he said, socking it, “that my life exists in all-too precise detail. I am a very literal guy. Are you proposing that I sell you my soul?”

“On the contrary, you are a romantic, Carl,” Bob said. He went to the monkey's cage and began to unfasten the door. Its lock proved much more complicated than had been supposed by Reinhart when he groped at it in a mischievous intent to free the animal. Bob's comment was to the point. “Otto has a certain sense of mechanics. He can open simple bolts and levers, and he is a good mimic of motions. He just struck himself on the behind, imitating you. But a series of fastenings, moving in different axes, bores him. Don't they, Otto, you little moron?”

Otto bared a pink mouth with its circumference of many little teeth, spread-eagled his hairy body across the front of the cage, and plucked at Sweet's fingers with his own leathery digits. But Bob persisted.

Reinhart said: “He's going to be a son of a bitch to catch if he gets out.”

Sweet poked the monkey's pink belly. Otto grabbed himself, and Bob swung the door open. Otto extended his long arm, hooked a finger into the bars, and slammed it shut.

Sweet said: “Come on, Otto. Be free.”

The monkey chittered at him.

“He's mad,” said Reinhart, meaning both “angry” and also referring to the “craziness” imputed to the smaller of the nonhuman primates. Whereas a gorilla was never thought to be nuts in the funny way, probably because he might kill if he went off his rocker. Size really was an important criterion among the whole ape family.

“I'll bet you're the kind of guy who feels sorry for animals in zoos,” Sweet said. “Look: he's fighting to stay inside.”

Otto and Bob were playing a finger game in which each tried to pry the other's hand off the door.

“I'll tell you why I prefer animals to a lot of people,” Reinhart started to say.

“Oh, I know why,” Bob answered. “Because animals act by instinct. That seems healthy, morally clean, nature's way, as opposed to the corrupt practices of human beings.”

“Let me put it to Hans,” Reinhart said, speaking towards the scientist's back. “Name me the animal that operates a concentration camp.”

Streckfuss was taking the test tubes from the centrifuge. “
Les fourmis
,” he said.

“What?” Reinhart applied to Sweet.

“Ants.” Bob had the door open again. The monkey cowered against the back bars.

“I want to prove something,” said Bob. He plunged his arm in and seized Otto by the neck. The monkey grasped the bars with one paw and with the other tore at the stranglehold.

“This is disgusting!” Reinhart shouted. “Let it alone, for Christ sake. It is a poor helpless creature. It has just been frozen and thawed. Isn't that enough?”

Sweet seemed to be enjoying himself. “I've got a tiger by the tail,” he said from a tight jaw. “It's a standoff at this point. If I let him go now he'll bite me. Otto, you are no Patrick Henry.”

“It's a completely false situation,” Reinhart protested. “He's scared of this lab. Be different if we were in a jungle.”

“Otto's never seen a jungle. He was born in captivity. Metal and concrete are as familiar to him as to us, and human speech. Yet he could not build the crudest shelter, nor say a one-syllabled word. He has the hands and the vocal chords, but he doesn't have the will for it, Carl. He does not sow and therefore cannot reap.” Bob's arm trembled with the monkey's efforts to dislodge it. His shoulder-cap was braced against his chin.

Reinhart remembered some old Army jujitsu for use against an assailant who went for the throat: you peeled his fingers back one by one and broke them. If taken from behind you reached back and applied excruciating pain to his genitals. Why did he identify with the monkey?

With a sudden effort Sweet ripped Otto off the bars and brought him out. “There you go, Carl,” he shouted. Then he hurled the monkey at him.

Otto embraced Reinhart with his hairy limbs. He threw his head back and pushed his features forward. There was a little dark vee of hair between his tiny mad eyes. He smacked his lips rapidly.

Reinhart wondered where the bite would come, tip of nose or deep into the jugular. He was helpless against animal irrationality, and the ape could tell, as a dog or horse could smell fear. That is the ethic of the beast: sheer opportunism, the old power play, kill or knuckle under.

But Otto scrambled up Reinhart's chest and began to pluck at his crew cut.

“He's grooming you,” said a chuckling Sweet. “That is a form of placation. He is acknowledging you as the superor animal, Carl.”

Reinhart loved it when the barber massaged his head with fingers or, better, the vibrator, to get the old circulation going, to stimulate the natural oils. Way back in time, Maw used to wash his hair for him, and hold his skull in the rinse until he almost drowned.

“Ouch!” The monkey too vigorously had pulled a hair. Actually, it felt good. He cradled Otto's skinny behind, which seemed to be mainly pointed bones, in one hand, and patted the hairy back with the other.

“As you see,” said Bob, “he's a fine, healthy fellow.”

Otto had a strong but not repellent stench. He inserted a skinny finger in Reinhart's left earhole.

“He will get after all your fleas,” Sweet added.

Reinhart recoiled from the tickle. Perhaps he should have gone into zoology, of which he had taken one course to satisfy the freshman requirement in science, dissecting a huge bullfrog. Its circulatory system was injected with pigment. His partner in lab was a girl named Jackie Heath, who thought the frog's arteries were naturally colored yellow. She had a cast in her eye, was otherwise bodily perfect. While he deliberated on whether or not to take her to a movie, a lecturer in speech got her pregnant, was fired, and she left school—in the last week before exams, because the frog came at the end of the course.

“Maybe I should have gone into a profession that dealt with animals,” he said to Bob. Otto clasped his neck affectionately, reminiscent of Winona as an infant. “Contrary to what you might think, what I like about them is their selfishness.”

“Better watch yourself, Carl,” said Sweet, adjusting the sleeves of his jacket. “Otto is not yet full grown. I doubt he's housebroken.”

Reinhart chortled bitterly. “Oh, everybody shits on—”

“Don't say it!” Bob ordered. “As to when I formulated a plan for you, I did not. I loathe people whose demand for sympathy conceals their wish to be exploited. I will choose my own prey, thank you. I do not feed on the decaying carcass of someone else's kill, like a hyena, who is also noted for its laugh. If you are offering yourself to be frozen, it must be your decision alone. You must sign a legal waiver. We will make no promises whatever. Your blood will be drained and replaced with glycerol, your body will be suspended in liquid nitrogen at minus one hundred and ninety-seven degrees Centigrade, or about three hundred and eighty-six below zero Fahrenheit. You will be dead to the world.”

Reinhart dandled Otto in his arms. The monkey put its face into his neck below the ear.

Bob said: “But do you have any better offers?”

Reinhart did not find the question cruel. It was justified, and literal. He approved of its morally realistic tone. He no longer thought of Bob and Hans as sinister. They were merely doing a job something he had never been able to manage because he had always been obsessed with the existence of other people. For the first time in his life he accepted the commonplace yet terrifying truth that everybody would still be here when he was gone.

“It's tougher than I thought,” he said. “I guess in my heart I had always assumed I would be overpowered. It's true I have toyed with thoughts of suicide, but I actually never went so far as climbing up the barrier on the Bloor Tower. I mean, I could have done that and still been a fake—you know, the way a guy will walk out on a ledge and let some cop talk him in. Meanwhile he has attracted a crowd, who yell: ‘Jump!' That is always deplored in the papers, with the same sort of bullshit they produce after an assassination. Whom are they addressing? Everybody and thus nobody.”

Otto made happy little grunts.

“A crowd can't be indicted for anything,” said Reinhart. “Even in an outright lynch mob there are only a half-dozen persons who touch the victim, and no one was ever killed by yells, however hateful.” He stroked Otto's hair. “I have been alone most of my life, even or especially when accompanied. I have often made that observation. I doubt that it is original. When I was young I had all sorts of exciting ideas about morality, government, business, love. In time I discovered that if they were any good I had plagiarized them from some great thinker. If genuinely original they didn't work.”

Otto gave him a kind of kiss on the earlobe. Were there queer monkeys?

“In fact,” Reinhart went on nihilistically, “they didn't even seem to work when they were the intellectual property of the great philosophers. Socrates was poisoned, if you recall, and Nietzsche lost his mind.”

He wanted to put Otto back in the cage, but the monkey clung to him.

“Otto is an interesting name,” he said. “It's spelled the same in both directions.” He tried to pry him off. “Funny how he likes me all of a sudden. He began by hitting me with that cork. What becomes of him now, Bob? Will you keep him as a pet?”

Sweet grabbed the monkey from behind, and between them they got him back inside the bars. Bob said: “Hans has to run a number of tests on him, not only physical but psychological, to determine whether the freezing has left any effects.” He squinted at Reinhart. “Not only ill effects. Perhaps there are improvements. Who knows? That's what science is, a search for knowledge.”

“And that's what knowledge is,” said Reinhart; “Both good and bad. It seems to come out even in the end. ‘The unexamined life,' said Socrates, ‘is not worth living.' But what is the price of the examined one, if they poison you in the end? After Otto is finished with the colored blocks, etc., Hans will dissect him and look at his brain tissue through the microscope.”

Streckfuss had come up silently on his rubber soles, a fact of which Reinhart had the first inkling when Otto shrank and whimpered.

“Mister Reinhart.” Streckfuss had never used the name before; he pronounced it in the authentic, uvular, Central European style. “No doubt you can sink of many ironies on the subject of monkeys, but they are not actually men. If you prick a monkey he vill bleed, and so on, but they have no potential. Me, I do not deny that Otto was named for an SS officer of my acquaintance twenty-five years in the past, but it may astonish you if I say he was not one of the most bestial: rather, human all-too human, in the vords of the crazy Nietzsche.”

This seemed a paradox, if Reinhart heard it correctly. He said: “I'm sorry I got this crazy idea you might be a Nazi scientist.”

“Your regret is misplaced,” Streckfuss said. “Vot does it matter to me unless you have some serious criticism of my experimental method? Science is not ethical but quantitative. The poison of the
Latrodectus
spider is among the most virulent, but seldom kills an organism as large as a man, becows of the difference in size. Dinosaurs, on the ozzer hand, were too big to lahst. A
baleine
”—he snapped his fingers.

“Whale,” said Bob Sweet.

“A whale must be aquatic, you see, for the water supports its great weight. A land animal cannot be much larger than an elephant and survive, owing to gravity. There
are
natural laws, and zey give us a form and a scale for tings. Nature has worked out its principles slowly, making mistakes of course. One must never sink there is an end to possibility. The moon, for example, with its lesser gravity, would be a sympathetic terrain for the dinosaur and larger, but for the kinds of animals we know now, the atmosphere is wrong.”

Reinhart briefly experienced the splendor of Streckfuss' scope, as if he were watching Cinerama: the thrill without the danger, the satisfaction one derives, in simulation, from the risky ambitions of other people. During the era of 3-D, elephants trampled you in your seat.