Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (39 page)

Heinz stood, and held his glass high, ready for the next step in camaraderie, a toast to the whole human race, of which the Knechtmanns were still a part.

“Here’s to the White Sox!” roared the bartender.

“Minoso, Fox, Mele,” said Sousa.

“Fain, Lollar, Rivera!” said the bartender. He turned to Heinz. “Drink up, boy! The White Sox! Don’t tell me you’re a Cub fan.”

“No,” said Heinz, disappointed. “No—I don’t follow baseball, I’m afraid.” The other two men seemed to be sinking away from him. “I haven’t been able to think about much but the baby.”

The bartender at once turned his full attention to Sousa. “Look,” he said intensely, “they take Fain off of first, and put him at third, and give Pierce first. Then move Minoso in from left field to shortstop. See what I’m doing?”

“Yep, yep,” said Sousa eagerly.

“And then we take that no-good Carrasquel and …”

Heinz was all alone again, with twenty feet of bar between him and the other two men. It might as well have been a continent.

He finished his drink without pleasure, and left quietly.

At the railroad station, where he waited for a local train to take him home to the South Side, Heinz’s glow returned again as he saw a co-worker at the dry-cleaning plant walk in with a girl. They were laughing and had their arms around each other’s waist.

“Harry,” said Heinz, hurrying toward them. “Guess what, Harry. Guess what just happened.” He grinned broadly.

Harry, a tall, dapper, snub-nosed young man, looked down at Heinz with mild surprise. “Oh—hello, Heinz. What’s up, boy?”

The girl looked on in perplexity, as though asking why they should be accosted at such an odd hour by such an odd person. Heinz avoided her slightly derisive eyes.

“A baby, Harry. My wife just had a boy.”

“Oh,” said Harry. He extended his hand. “Well, congratulations.” The hand was limp. “I think that’s swell, Heinz, perfectly swell.” He withdrew his hand and waited for Heinz to say something else.

“Yes, yes—just about an hour ago,” said Heinz. “Five pounds nine ounces. I’ve never been happier in my life.”

“Well, I think it’s perfectly swell, Heinz. You should be happy.”

“Yes, indeed,” said the girl.

There was a long silence, with all three shifting from one foot to the other.

“Really good news,” said Harry at last.

“Yes, well,” said Heinz quickly, “well, that’s all I had to tell you.”

“Thanks,” said Harry. “Glad to hear about it.”

There was another uneasy silence.

“See you at work,” said Heinz, and strode jauntily back to his bench, but with his reddened neck betraying how foolish he felt.

The girl giggled.

Back home in his small apartment, at two in the morning, Heinz talked to himself, to the empty bassinet, and to the bed. He talked in German, a language he had sworn never to use again.

“They don’t care,” said Heinz. “They’re all too busy, busy, busy to notice life, to feel anything about it. A baby is born.” He shrugged. “What could be duller? Who would be so stupid as to talk about it, to think there was anything important or interesting about it?”

He opened a window on the summer night, and looked out at the moonlit canyon of gray wooden porches and garbage cans. “There are too many of us, and we are all too far apart,” said Heinz. “Another Knechtmann is born, another O’Leary, another Sousa. Who cares? Why should anyone care? What difference does it make? None.”

He lay down in his clothes on the unmade bed, and, with a rattling sigh, went to sleep.

·    ·    ·

He awoke at six, as always. He drank a cup of coffee, and with a wry sense of anonymity, he jostled and was jostled aboard the downtown train. His face showed no emotion. It was like all the other faces, seemingly incapable of surprise or wonder, joy or anger.

He walked across town to the hospital with the same detachment, a gray, uninteresting man, a part of the city.

In the hospital, he was as purposeful and calm as the doctors and nurses bustling about him. When he was led into the
ward where Avchen slept behind white screens, he felt only what he had always felt in her presence—love and aching awe and gratitude for her.

“You go ahead and wake her gently, Mr. Netman,” said the nurse.

“Avchen—” He touched her on her white-gowned shoulder. “Avchen. Are you all right, Avchen?”

“Mmmmm​mmmmm?” murmured Avchen. Her eyes opened to narrow slits. “Heinz. Hello, Heinz.”

“Sweetheart, are you all right?”

“Yes, yes,” she whispered. “I’m fine. How is the baby, Heinz?”

“Perfect. Perfect, Avchen.”

“They couldn’t kill us, could they, Heinz?”

“No.”

“And here we are, alive as we can be.”

“Yes.”

“The baby, Heinz—” She opened her dark eyes wide. “It’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Heinz.

(1954)

T
HE YEAR WAS 2158 A.D
.
, and Lou and Emerald Schwartz were whispering on the balcony outside Lou’s family’s apartment on the seventy-sixth floor of Building 257 in Alden Village, a New York housing development that covered what had once been known as Southern Connecticut. When Lou and Emerald had married, Em’s parents had tearfully described the marriage as being between May and December; but now, with Lou one hundred and twelve and Em ninety-three, Em’s parents had to admit that the match had worked out well.

But Em and Lou weren’t without their troubles, and they were out in the nippy air of the balcony because of them.

“Sometimes I get so mad, I feel like just up and diluting his anti-gerasone,” said Em.

“That’d be against Nature, Em,” said Lou, “it’d be murder. Besides, if he caught us tinkering with his anti-gerasone, not only would he disinherit us, he’d bust my neck. Just because he’s one hundred and seventy-two doesn’t mean Gramps isn’t strong as a bull.”

“Against Nature,” said Em. “Who knows what Nature’s like anymore? Ohhhhh—I don’t guess I could ever bring myself to dilute his anti-gerasone or anything like that, but, gosh, Lou, a body can’t help thinking Gramps is never going to leave if somebody doesn’t help him along a little. Golly—we’re so
crowded a person can hardly turn around, and Verna’s dying for a baby, and Melissa’s gone thirty years without one.” She stamped her feet. “I get so sick of seeing his wrinkled old face, watching him take the only private room and the best chair and the best food, and getting to pick out what to watch on TV, and running everybody’s life by changing his will all the time.”

“Well, after all,” said Lou bleakly, “Gramps
is
head of the family. And he can’t help being wrinkled like he is. He was seventy before anti-gerasone was invented. He’s going to leave, Em. Just give him time. It’s his business. I know he’s tough to live with, but be patient. It wouldn’t do to do anything that’d rile him. After all, we’ve got it better’n anybody else, there on the daybed.”

“How much longer do you think we’ll get to sleep on the daybed before he picks another pet? The world’s record’s two months, isn’t it?”

“Mom and Pop had it that long once, I guess.”

“When
is
he going to leave, Lou?” said Emerald.

“Well, he’s talking about giving up anti-gerasone right after the five-hundred-mile Speedway Race.”

“Yes—and before that it was the Olympics, and before that the World’s Series, and before that the Presidential Elections, and before that I-don’t-know-what. It’s been just one excuse after another for fifty years now. I don’t think we’re ever going to get a room to ourselves or an egg or anything.”

“All right—call me a failure!” said Lou. “What can I do? I work hard and make good money, but the whole thing, practically, is taxed away for defense and old age pensions. And if it wasn’t taxed away, where you think we’d find a vacant room to rent? Iowa, maybe? Well, who wants to live on the outskirts of Chicago?”

Em put her arms around his neck. “Lou, hon, I’m not calling you a failure. The Lord knows you’re not. You just haven’t had a chance to be anything or have anything because Gramps and the rest of his generation won’t leave and let somebody else take over.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Lou gloomily. “You can’t exactly blame ’em, though, can you? I mean, I wonder how quick we’ll knock off the anti-gerasone when we get Gramps’ age.”

“Sometimes I wish there wasn’t any such thing as anti-gerasone!” said Emerald passionately. “Or I wish it was made out of something real expensive and hard-to-get instead of mud and dandelions. Sometimes I wish folks just up and died regular as clockwork, without anything to say about it, instead of deciding themselves how long they’re going to stay around. There ought to be a law against selling the stuff to anybody over one hundred and fifty.”

“Fat chance of that,” said Lou, “with all the money and votes the old people’ve got.” He looked at her closely. “You ready to up and die, Em?”

“Well, for heaven’s sakes, what a thing to say to your wife. Hon! I’m not even one hundred yet.” She ran her hands lightly over her firm, youthful figure, as though for confirmation. “The best years of my life are still ahead of me. But you can bet that when one hundred and fifty rolls around, old Em’s going to pour her anti-gerasone down the sink, and quit taking up room, and she’ll do it smiling.”

“Sure, sure,” said Lou, “you bet. That’s what they all say. How many you heard of doing it?”

“There was that man in Delaware.”

“Aren’t you getting kind of tired of talking about him, Em? That was five months ago.”

“All right, then—Gramma Winkler, right here in the same building.”

“She got smeared by a subway.”

“That’s just the way she picked to go,” said Em.

“Then what was she doing carrying a six-pack of anti-gerasone when she got it?”

Emerald shook her head wearily and covered her eyes. “I dunno, I dunno, I dunno. All I know is, something’s just got to be done.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wish they’d left a couple of diseases kicking around somewhere, so I could get one and
go to bed for a little while. Too many people!” she cried, and her words cackled and gabbled and died in a thousand asphalt-paved, skyscraper-walled courtyards.

Lou laid his hand on her shoulder tenderly. “Aw, hon, I hate to see you down in the dumps like this.”

“If we just had a car, like the folks used to in the old days,” said Em, “we could go for a drive, and get away from people for a little while. Gee—if
those
weren’t the days!”

“Yeah,” said Lou, “before they’d used up all the metal.”

“We’d hop in, and Pop’d drive up to a filling station and say, ‘Fillerup!’ ”

“That
was
the nuts, wasn’t it—before they’d used up all the gasoline.”

“And we’d go for a carefree ride in the country.”

“Yeah—all seems like a fairyland now, doesn’t it, Em? Hard to believe there really used to be all that space between cities.”

“And when we got hungry,” said Em, “we’d find ourselves a restaurant, and walk in, bit as you please and say, ‘I’ll have a steak and French-fries, I believe,’ or, ‘How are the pork chops today?’ ” She licked her lips, and her eyes glistened.

“Yeah man!” growled Lou. “How’d you like a hamburger with the works, Em?”

“Mmmmmmmm.”

“If anybody’d offered us processed seaweed in those days, we would have spit right in his eye, huh, Em?”

“Or processed sawdust,” said Em.

Doggedly, Lou tried to find the cheery side of the situation. “Well, anyway, they’ve got the stuff so it tastes a lot less like seaweed and sawdust than it did at first; and they say it’s actually better for us than what we used to eat.”

“I felt fine!” said Em fiercely.

Lou shrugged. “Well, you’ve got to realize, the world wouldn’t be able to support twelve billion people if it wasn’t for processed seaweed and sawdust. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, really. I guess. That’s what they say.”

“They say the first thing that pops into their heads,” said Em. She closed her eyes. “Golly—remember shopping, Lou? Remember how the stores used to fight to get our folks to buy something? You didn’t have to wait for somebody to die to get a bed or chairs or a stove or anything like that. Just went in—bing!—and bought whatever you wanted. Gee whiz that was nice, before they used up all the raw materials. I was just a little kid then, but I can remember so plain.”

Depressed, Lou walked listlessly to the balcony’s edge, and looked up at the clean, cold, bright stars against the black velvet of infinity. “Remember when we used to be bugs on science fiction, Em? Flight seventeen, leaving for Mars, launching ramp twelve. ‘Board! All non-technical personnel kindly remain in bunkers. Ten seconds … nine … eight … seven … six … five … four … three … two …
one! Main Stage! Barrrrrroooom!”

“Why worry about what was going on on Earth?” said Em, looking up at the stars with him. “In another few years, we’d all be shooting through space to start life all over again on a new planet.”

Lou sighed. “Only it turns out you need something about twice the size of the Empire State Building to get one lousy colonist to Mars. And for another couple of trillion bucks he could take his wife and dog.
That’s
the way to lick overpopulation—
emigrate!”

“Lou—?”

“Hmmm?”

“When’s the Five-Hundred-Mile Speedway Race?”

“Uh—Memorial Day, May thirtieth.”

She bit her lip. “Was that awful of me to ask?”

“Not very, I guess. Everybody in the apartment’s looked it up to make sure.”

“I don’t want to be awful,” said Em, “but you’ve just got to talk over these things now and then, and get them out of your system.”

“Sure you do. Feel better?”

“Yes—and I’m not going to lose my temper anymore, and I’m going to be just as nice to him as I know how.”

“That’s my Em.”

They squared their shoulders, smiled bravely, and went back inside.

·    ·    ·

Gramps Schwartz, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen, a news commentator was summarizing the day’s happenings. Every thirty seconds or so, Gramps would jab the floor with his cane-tip and shout, “Hell! We did that a hundred years ago!”