The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  Back when Nathan had first fallen in love with the alphabet and was spelling his way to stardom at school, these Shimmys had already begun to make him uncertain as to whether the real oddball wasn’t going to be him, particularly when he heard of the notoriously unbrainy ways in which they successfully beat back their competitors. Unlike the admirable father who had taken the night-school path to professional dignity, these drearily banal and conventional Shimmys displayed all the ruthlessness of the renegade, their teeth ripping a chunk out of life’s raw rump, then dragging that around with them everywhere, all else paling in significance beside the bleeding flesh between their jaws. They had absolutely no wisdom; wholly self-saturated, entirely self-oblivious, they had nothing to go on but the most elemental manhood, yet on that alone they came pretty damn far. They too had tragic experiences and suffered losses they were by no means too brutish to feel: being bludgeoned almost to death was as much their specialty as bludgeoning. The point was that pain and suffering did not deter them for half an hour from their intention of living. Their lack of all nuance or doubt, of an ordinary mortal’s sense of futility or despair, made it tempting sometimes to consider them inhuman, and yet they were men about whom it was impossible to say that they were anything other than human: they were what human really is. While his own father aspired relentlessly to embody the best in mankind, these Shimmys were simply the backbone of the human race.

  Shimmy and Grossman were discussing Israel’s foreign policy. “Bomb ’em,” Shimmy said flatly, “bomb the Arab bastards till they cry uncle. They want to pull our beards again? We’ll die instead!”

  Essie, cunning, shrewd, self-aware, another sort of survivor entirely, said to him, “You know why I give to Israel?”

  Shimmy was indignant. “You? You never parted with a dime in your life.”

  “You know why?” she asked, turning to Grossman, a far better straight man.

  “Why?” Grossman said.

  “Because in Israel you hear the best anti-Semitic jokes. You hear even better anti-Semitic jokes in Tel Aviv than on Collins Avenue.”

  After dinner H. returns to the office—lab work, he tells Carol—and sits there all evening reading Fodor’s Switzerland, trying to make up his mind. “Basel is a city with an atmosphere entirely of its own, in which elements of tradition and medievalism are unexpectedly mingled with the modern … behind and around its splendid old buildings and fine modern ones, a maze of quaint old lanes and busy streets … the old merging imperceptibly with the new…” He thinks: “What a terrific victory if I could pull it off!”

  “I was there three years ago with Metz,” Essie was saying. “We’re driving from the airport to the hotel. The taxi driver, an Israeli, turns to us, and in English he says, ‘Why do Jews have big noses?’ ‘Why?’ I ask him. ‘Because the air is free,’ he says. On the spot I wrote a check for a thousand bucks to the UJA.”

  “Come on,” Shimmy told her, “who ever pried a nickel out of you?”

  “I asked her if she would leave Jurgen. She asked me to tell her first if I would leave Carol.”

  Herbert Grossman, whose obstinately lachrymose view of life was the only unyielding thing about him, had meanwhile begun to tell Zuckerman the latest bad news. Grossman’s melancholia had at one time driven Zuckerman’s father almost as crazy as Shimmy’s stupidity; he was probably the only person about whom Dr. Zuckerman had finally to admit, “The poor man can’t help it.” Alcoholics could help it, adulterers could help it, insomniacs, murderers, even stammerers, could help it—according to Dr. Zuckerman, anyone could change anything in himself through the diligent exercise of his will; but because Grossman had had to flee from Hitler, he seemed to have no will. Not that Sunday after Sunday Dr. Zuckerman hadn’t tried to get the damn thing going. Optimistically he would rise from the table after their hearty breakfast and announce to the family, “Time to phone Herbert!” but ten minutes later he’d be back in the kitchen, utterly defeated, muttering to himself, “The poor man can’t help it.” Hitler had done it—there was no other explanation. Dr. Zuckerman could not otherwise understand someone who simply was not there.

  To Nathan, Herbert Grossman seemed now, as he did then, a delicate, vulnerable refugee, a Jew, to recast Isaac Babel’s formula and bring it up to date, with a pacemaker in his heart and spectacles on his nose. “Everyone worries about Israel,” Grossman was saying to him, “but you know what I worry about? Right here. America. Something terrible is happening right here. I feel it like in Poland in 1935. No, not anti-Semitism. That will come anyway. No, it’s the crime, the lawlessness, people afraid. The money—everything’s for sale and that’s all that counts. The young people are full of despair. The drugs are only despair. Nobody wants to feel that good if they aren’t in deep despair.”

  H. phones and for half an hour speaks of nothing but Carol’s virtues. Carol is someone whose qualities you can only really know if you’ve lived with the woman as long as he has. “She’s interesting, dynamic, curious, perceptive…” A long and very impressive list. A startling list.

  “I feel it on the streets,” Grossman said. “You can’t even walk to the store. You go out to the supermarket in broad daylight and blacks come up and rob you blind.”

  Maria has left. Terrible tearful exchange of farewell presents. After consultation with cultivated older brother, H. gave her a boxed set of Haydn’s London Symphonies. Maria gave him her black silk camisole.

  When Herbert Grossman excused himself to go get something to eat, Essie confided to Zuckerman, “His last wife had diabetes. She made his life a misery. They took her legs off, she went blind, and she still didn’t stop bossing him around.”

  So the surviving Zuckerman brother passed the long afternoon—waiting to see if Wendy would show up while he listened to the lore of the tribal elders and remembered the journal entries that had not seemed, when he’d written them, to be the doom-laden notes for Tristan and Isolde.

  Maria phoned H. at the office the day before Christmas. His heart began pounding the moment he was told he had an overseas call and didn’t stop until long after she’d said goodbye. She wanted to wish him a Merry American Christmas. She told him that it had been very hard for these six months but that Christmas was helping. There was the children’s excitement, and Jurgen’s family was all there, and they would be sixteen for dinner the next day. She found that even the snow helped some. Was it snowing yet in New Jersey? Did he mind her phoning him like this at the office? Were his children okay? His wife? Was he? Did Christmas make it any easier for him, or wasn’t it that hard anymore? “What did you say to that?” I asked. H.: “I was afraid to say anything. I was afraid somebody in the office would hear. I fucked up, I suppose. I said we didn’t observe Christmas.”

  And could that be why he’d let her go, because Maria observed Christmas and we do not? One would have imagined that among secular, college-educated atheists of Henry’s generation running away with shiksas had gone out as a felony years ago and was perceived, if at all, as a fictitious issue in a love affair. But then Henry’s problem may have been that having passed so long for a paragon, he had got himself ridiculously entangled in this brilliant disguise at just the moment he was destined to burst forth as less admirable and more desperate than anyone ever imagined. How absurd, how awful, if the woman who’d awakened in him the desire to live differently, who meant to him a break with the past, a revolution against an old way of life that had reached an emotional standstill—against the belief that life is a series of duties to be perfectly performed—if that woman was to be nothing more or less than the humiliating memory of his first (and last) great fling because she observed Christmas and we do not. If Henry had been right about the origins of his disease, if it did indeed result from the stress of that onerous defeat and those arduous feelings of self-contempt that dogged him long after her return to Basel, then, curiously enough, it was being a Jew that had killed him.

  If/then. As the afternoon wore on, he began to feel himself stra
ining more and more after an idea that would release those old notes from their raw factuality and transform them into a puzzle for his imagination to solve. While peeing in the upstairs bathroom, he thought, “Suppose on that afternoon she’d secretly come to the house, after they married each other by performing anal love, he watched her, right in this room, pinning up her hair before getting in with him to take a shower. Seeing him adoring her—seeing his eyes marvel at this strange European woman who embodies simultaneously both innocent domesticity and lurid eroticism—she says, confidently smiling, ‘I really look extremely Aryan with my hair up and my jaw exposed.’ ‘What’s wrong with that?’ he asks. ‘Well, there’s a quality in Aryans that isn’t very attractive—as history has shown.’ ‘Look,’ he tells her, ‘let’s not hold the century against you…’”

  No, that’s not them, thought Zuckerman, and came down the stairs into the living room, where Wendy was still nowhere to be seen. But then it needn’t be “them”—could be me, he thought. Us. What if instead of the brother whose obverse existence mine inferred—and who himself untwinnishly inferred me—I had been the Zuckerman boy in that agony? What is the real wisdom of that predicament? Could it be simple for anyone? If that is indeed how those drugs incapacitate most of the men who must take them to live, then there’s a bizarre epidemic of impotence in this country whose personal implications nobody’s scrutinizing, not in the press or even on Donahue, let alone in fiction …

  * * *

  In the living room someone was saying to him, “You know, I tried to interest your brother in cryonics—not that that’s any consolation now.”

  “Did you?”

  “I didn’t even know he was sick. I’m Barry Shuskin. I’m trying to get a cryonics facility going here in New Jersey and when I came to Henry he laughed. A guy with a bad heart, he can’t fuck anymore, and he wouldn’t even read the literature I gave him. It was too bizarre for a rationalist like him. In his position I wouldn’t have been so sure. Thirty-nine and it’s all over—that’s bizarre.”

  Shuskin was a youthful fifty—very tall, bald, with a dark chin-beard and a staccato delivery, a vigorous man with plenty to say, whom Zuckerman at first took to be a lawyer, a litigator, maybe some sort of hard-driving executive. He turned out to be an associate of Henry’s, a dentist in the same office complex whose specialty was implanting teeth, anchoring custom-built teeth in the jawbone rather than fitting bridges or dentures. When implant work was too involved or too time-consuming for Henry to handle in his general family practice, he referred it to Shuskin, who also specialized in reconstructing the mouths of accident and cancer victims. “You know about cryonics?” Shuskin asked, after identifying himself as Henry’s colleague. “You should. You ought to be on the mailing list. Newsletters, magazines, books—everything documented. They have figured out how to freeze now without damage to the cells. Suspended animation. You don’t die, you’re put on hold, hopefully for a couple of hundred years. Until science has solved the problem of thawing out. It’s possible to be frozen, suspended, and then revitalized, all of the broken parts repaired or replaced, and you’re as good if not better than new. You know you’re going to die, you’ve got cancer, it’s about to strike the vital organs. Well, you’ve got an option. You contact the cryonics people, you say I want to be awakened in the twenty-second century, give me an overdose of morphine, at the same time drain me, profuse me, and suspend me. You’re not dead. You just go from life to being shut down. No intermediary stage. The cryonic solution replaces the blood and prevents ice crystallization damaging the cells. They encase the body in a plastic bag, store the bag in a stainless-steel container, and fill it with liquid nitrogen. Minus 273 degrees. Fifty thousand bucks for the freezing, and then you set up a trust fund to pay the maintenance. That’s peanuts, a thousand, fifteen hundred a year. The problem is that there is a facility only in California and Florida—and speed is everything. This is why I want to seriously explore setting up a nonprofit organization right here in Jersey, a cryonics facility for those men like myself who don’t want to die. Nobody would make any dough out of it, except a few salaried people, who are on the up and up, to run the facility. A lot of guys would say, ‘Shit, Barry, let’s do it—we’ll make a buck out of this and fuck everybody who thinks that there’s something to it.’ But I don’t want to muddy it up with that kind of shit. The idea is to get a membership group together of men who want to be preserved for the future, guys who are committed to the principle and not to making a buck. Maybe fifty. You probably could get five thousand. There are a lot of high-powered guys who are enjoying life and have a lot of power and a lot of know-how, and they feel that it’s a crock of shit to get burned or buried—why not frozen?”

  Just then a woman took hold of Zuckerman’s hand, a tiny, elderly woman with exceptionally pretty blue eyes, a large bust, and a full, round, merry-looking face. “I’m Carol’s aunt from Albany. Bill Goff’s sister. I want to extend my sympathies.”

  Indicating that he understood the sentimental obligations of the brother of the deceased, quietly, in an aside, Shuskin muttered to Zuckerman, “I want your home address—before you go.”

  “Later,” said Zuckerman, and Shuskin, who was enjoying life, had a lot of power and a lot of know-how and no intention of being buried or burned—who would lie there like a lamb chop till the twenty-second century and then wake up, defrosted, to a billion more years of being himself—left Zuckerman to commiserate with Carol’s aunt, who was still tightly holding his hand. Forever Shuskin. Is that the future, once the freezer has replaced the grave?

  “This is a loss,” she said to Zuckerman, “that no one will ever understand.”

  “It is.”

  “Some people are amazed by what she said, you know.”

  “By Carol? Are they?”

  “Well, to get up at your husband’s funeral and talk like that? I’m of the generation that didn’t even say such things privately. Many people wouldn’t have felt the same need that she did to be open and honest about something so personal. But Carol has always been an astonishing girl and she didn’t disappoint me today. The truth to her has always been the truth and nothing she has to hide.”

  “I thought what she said was just fine.”

  “Of course. You’re an educated man. You know about life. Do me a favor,” she whispered. “When you have a minute, tell her father.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if he keeps on the way he’s going, he’ll give himself another heart attack.”

  He waited one more hour, till almost five, not so as to sedate Mr. Goff, whose confusion was Carol’s business, but on the remote chance that Wendy might yet appear. A decent girl, he thought—she doesn’t want to force herself on the wife and the children, even if they’re innocent of her great role in all this. He had thought at first that she would want terribly to talk to the only other person who knew why this had happened and what she must be going through, but maybe it was precisely because Henry had told Nathan everything that she was staying away—because she didn’t know whether to expect to be castigated by him, or cross-examined for a fictional exposé, or perhaps even wickedly seduced by the twisted brother, à la Richard the Third. As the minutes passed, he realized that waiting around for Wendy went further than wanting to find out how she’d behave with Carol, or seeing for himself at close range if there was anything there that the photograph hadn’t disclosed; it was more like hanging around to meet a movie star or to catch a glimpse of the Pope.

  Shuskin caught him just as he was heading for his coat in what was now the widow’s bedroom. They walked up the stairs together, Zuckerman thinking, Strange Henry never mentioned his visionary colleague, the implantologist—that in his wild state he hadn’t even been tempted. But probably he hadn’t even heard him. Henry’s delusions didn’t run to living thawed out in the second millennium. Even a life in Basel with Maria was too much like science fiction for him. By comparison he had asked for so very little—willing to be wholly conte
nt, for the rest of his natural days, with the modest miracle of Carol, Wendy, and the kids. Either that, or to be an eleven-year-old boy in the cottage at the Jersey Shore with the faucet at the side to wash the sand off your feet. If Shuskin had told him that science was working on making it the summer of 1948 again, he might have had himself a customer.

  “There’s a group in L.A.,” Shuskin was saying, “I’m going to send you their newsletter. Some very bright guys. Philosophers. Scientists. Engineers. A lot of writers too. What they’re doing on the West Coast, because of their feeling that the body is not what’s important, that your identity is all up here, so they separate the head from the body. They know they’ll be able to reconnect heads to bodies, reconnect the arteries, the brain stem, and everything else all to a new body. They’ll have solved the immunological problems, or they may be able to clone new bodies. Anything is possible. So they’re just freezing the heads. It’s cheaper than freezing and storing the whole body. Faster. Cuts storage costs. They find that appealing in intellectual circles. Maybe you will too, if you ever find yourself in Henry’s shoes. I don’t go for it myself. I want my whole body frozen. Why? Because I personally believe your experience is very much connected to your memories that every cell in your body has. You don’t separate the mind from the body. The body and the mind are one. The body is the mind.”

  No disputing that, not here today, thought Zuckerman, and after locating his coat on the king-sized bed that Henry had exchanged for a coffin, he wrote out his address. “If I wind up in Henry’s shoes,” he said, handing it to Shuskin.

  “I said ‘if’? Pardon my delicacy. I meant when.”