Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  “There are more fanatics around than ever,” said Reinhart.

  “Fanaticism fades away before the prospect of eternal life. True democracy is at last possible if everybody can live forever. A man who considers himself deprived has an eternity in which to redress the balance. Most of the old troubles are the result of envy. A Cadillac is attractive only if most people are driving Fords. To put it another way, he who has a morsel of moldy bread when others have nothing is rich. Life has always until now been comparative.”

  “I can’t see that changing,” said Reinhart.

  “Then eliminate the dimension of Time, by which most social situations are measured. The Negroes are bitter, for example, that after a century they are still not first-class citizens. To put it personally, after forty-four years you are discouraged on reflection that half your life is gone with little to show for it.”

  “I wouldn’t mind freezing my son,” said Reinhart, “and awakening him just a few years hence to show him what an ass he had been.”

  Sweet finally left the support of the capsule. He poked Reinhart in the arm. “No, Carl, no one can make the decision for another, at least not while the other lives. However, there are interesting possibilities in matters of law. Surely prosecution for first-degree murder will be a thing of the past. A frozen victim is not dead. A so-called killer in this state of affairs is rather a thief. He has merely stolen a few years from the other. In time perhaps this will be considered merely as petty larceny. Nothing much has been taken from a man who has forever. The ‘killer’ will be charged for the expenses of freezing and the subsequent replacement of the vital organ that he damaged.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Reinhart.

  “Moreover, all current theories and practices concerning crime and punishment will be rendered obsolete. A persistently antisocial person will be frozen until the day when the surgeons can successfully replace his brain.”

  “If indeed that is the source of his difficulties,” Reinhart observed. He believed that Sweet wanted him to play devil’s advocate.

  “Goes without saying. But we have already disposed of his economic, political, and racial motives, have we not? Under conditions of eternal life all ‘problems’ are by definition minor. Nothing can be done to death, you see. You could still be hungry but you won’t starve. Swimming beyond your depth or incapacitated by cramps, you will not drown. Firemen overcome by smoke will not suffocate. The victims of poison would have spasms but not die—but why would anyone poison another in the first place if he could not eliminate him?”

  Reinhart narrowed his eyes. He had thought of something. “Explosion,” he said. “Referred to earlier by Doctor Streckfuss. Disintegration by blast, everything in fragments. I should say you are never going to abolish the human appetite for destruction. You are going to force it to be more subtle—or more gross, in the case of dynamite or whatever. And aren’t you selling hatred short? I gather a body has to be frozen very quickly after death. The murderer polishes off his victim and hides the body for a week. Haha!”

  “Aren’t you the grisly one,” said Sweet. “You’re being perverse now simply for the sake of argument, I see. Let me tell you something more. There is a very real likelihood that science will one day be able to reproduce an entire organism from one living cell of that organism. That means, simply, that if one microscopic portion is recovered from blast or acid-bath or incineration or you-name-it, a new version of the same being can be regrown.”

  Sweet said this almost wearily. His eyes were stark behind the black-rimmed lenses. For the first time Reinhart noticed that Sweet’s nose was poreless, giving off a dull gloss, very unusual in a man of his age.

  “In fact,” Sweet went on, “this has already been done, in Europe, with frogs. One cell has been grown into a complete animal.”

  Reinhart had a strange feeling about Sweet. “Really?” he murmured, looking for visible seams in the neck, below the mastoid process.

  “Well,” Sweet said, taking Reinhart’s arm again, “I know this is a lot to digest at once, old fellow, even for the sympathetic. You are faced with a complete reversal of everything you have known as fact all your life. It shakes a man up. I have gone through it myself. Along about our age, a fellow begins to sense his days are numbered. Then, when one grows old, he often swindles himself into welcoming an end to it all. This is of course fake. Nobody who is actually near death wants to die, but there is a natural need for human beings to want to feel in control. They must die, so they say they are ready. It’s the old con job.”

  Sweet hooked his forearm through Reinhart’s elbow. It felt like a metal tube. “C’mon,” he said, “let’s relax over a bite to eat.”

  They walked together down the aisle between the stainless-steel tables, electrical equipment, and the glass containers of fleshy nastiness, glimpsed by Reinhart on the way up.

  Streckfuss was peering intensely at a dial above his counter. He made a brisk entry in a ledger and spun around at their approach. He was seemingly in a splendid mood now.

  “Ah, gentlemen!” he cried. “Shall we feed? Moi, j’ai faim, bien sûr! Et vous aussi, mon vieux?”

  He made a jolly, vulpine show of teeth at Reinhart, who smiled in return.

  “Jawohl,” Reinhart answered. “Ich bin sehr hungrig.” He knew a few French phrases, like everybody else. He had gone through France years ago, armed with a U.S. Army phrasebook, on the way to Berlin, where he had known the little German called Schatzi.

  Streckfuss twitched the very end of his long nose. He said to Sweet: “Sometimess Americans sink one foreign language is as good as anozzer.”

  Reinhart said: “It’s your name, I suppose. ‘Streckfuss’ sounds German.”

  Sweet dropped his arm. “Come on, Carl. You’re being pretty offensive, you know, though I’m sure you regard it as a joke. But if you’ve had experience with Europeans it should be no secret that they do not understand this American penchant for kidding around.”

  Streckfuss, however, stayed in good humor. “Ah, have you forgotten about Dreyfus, sir?” he asked playfully, extending his jaw. There was something provocative in his imposture, if such it was, and it definitely was some sort of a, or one, or whatever—Reinhart found his own mental syntax performing awkward gymnastics. How in the world could a man look precisely the same for twenty-three years? On the other hand, was his own memory unchanged? Or at all reliable. He had once argued with Maw as to the location of an elm tree on the edge of Mrs. Bangor’s property across the street from the Reinhart residence. Just after the war, pushing Dad’s stalled auto down the driveway, the then-powerful ex-corporal had put too much beef behind it and the car escaped him, crossed the road, climbed the curb, and smote the elm. Mrs. B., a crotchety widow, had made a stink about it. Now she and Dad were dead, the tree was long since sawed down, and Maw produced a Brownie snapshot, taken during the same years, which clearly showed the trunk erecting itself a good ten feet to the left of where it would have had to stand to catch the car.

  “I could hardly mean it as an insult,” Reinhart. said now. “I am myself of German descent. Though we never made much of it. I mean, we didn’t go to weinfests or anything, let alone join the Bund.”

  “Frankly,” said Streckfuss, grinning, “I do not care about your origins. It is your future which concairns me. Vous êtes dans la merde de l’âge mûr.”

  Reinhart said to Sweet: “Look here, I don’t understand French. I mean, that’s not good manners either.”

  “You can address Hans directly,” Sweet said in remonstration.

  “He seems to be cursing at me,” Reinhart said. “I thought I heard the only dirty word I know in French.”

  Sweet asked: “How would you describe your recent situation in life, Carl?”

  Reinhart got it. “Is that how you say ‘up shit creek’ in French?” So Streckfuss had a sense of humor after all.

  But the little doctor glared at him and asked: “Vy are you lahffing? What is the joke here? American astronow
ts wisecrack in orbit. What are the origins of this state of mind? Merde alors!”

  Sweet winked at Reinhart. To Streckfuss he said: “What’s on the menu today, Hans?” To Reinhart: “Hans is a skilled chef.” To Streckfuss: “Carl has difficulties with his digestion, so none of your hot spices, please.”

  “No,” Reinhart agreed, adding: “I also have some dental trouble. I have to take my meat well done.”

  Streckfuss went to a metal cabinet mounted above a stainless-steel sink featuring those high-looped faucets found in labs.

  “You have a kitchen here?” Reinhart asked.

  “Oh,” said Sweet, “we have everything necessary to a well-balanced life—if you live like Hans. Frankly I find it a bit austere. It just occurred to me, Carl. If you have left home where are you staying now?”

  Reinhart did not want to mention the Y, where though he had Maw’s five grand he was yet registered. He had hoped to put the money in Sweet’s business, but meanwhile he had to exist. All this was changed now by the new arrangement in which he was to pull down three hundred a week and retain the five thousand as well. He was in a position to take a luxury apartment with a wall of windows showing a night sky with a million stars. He could get his own car and have his teeth brought up to standard. He could buy Blaine a natural-shoulder Ivy League suit, a button-down oxford-cloth shirt, and a plain knitted tie, which, with heavy pebble-grain brogues and Argyle socks, was the really soigné costume of college men of his own era. And hire a bully to make Blaine put it on. He could buy Gen a decent mink jacket or an inferior full-length coat though still mink.

  “I’m not settled yet, actually. I’m staying at a hotel for the moment. I’ll probably end up back home when my wife gets over her mad. I’m really a family sort of guy, Bob. The swinging bachelor life never appealed to me even when I was in my twenties. A different girl every night, that sort of thing. Women are a hell of a lot of trouble. You have fewer problems if you stick to one, as big a pain in the ass as she might be. Anyway, generally speaking, I have found any woman is all the rest of them.”

  “I have heard that theory,” Sweet replied sardonically. “The words that losers live by, if you can call it living. ‘What good is money?’ ‘Power corrupts.’ ‘Who wants to live forever?’ ‘The bitch-goddess Success.’ ‘The bubble reputation.’ ‘It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.’ No matter what the established good, it will be disparaged by those who cannot get some of it for themselves. The Christian religion is based on that principle, and some practitioners have become so highly skilled at its manipulation that they seemingly win with it for a time until somebody takes them seriously about turning the other cheek. He sees they really are helpless and blows their brains out.”

  “Have you ever considered this, Bob? That maybe they won, after all. In their own way, I mean. I doubt there would have been a Christian religion if Jesus had not been crucified.”

  “Balls, Carl. All you have is your own life and if you lose it you have lost. The reverse is that as long as you have your life you are winning. That’s the sole truth behind all the complicated lies, all ethical systems, all that has been written or said or dreamed. When the vital spark leaves your body you turn into a lump of decaying matter. There is no serious distinction between a corpse and a turd.”

  Reinhart recoiled. He would not be able to eat lunch if the conversation continued in this vein, or intestine. He altered the direction slightly without seeking to steer away from Sweet’s preoccupation. In the new job he supposed it would have to be his own as well.

  “Speaking of marriage,” he said. “I see all sorts of intricacies arising from the freezer program. Suppose a man dies and is frozen. Is he legally dead? Is his wife a widow? What becomes of his property? He may be revived later, but he is certainly as helpless as if he were dead.”

  “Be assured,” Sweet answered, “that we are aware of these ramifications, and I shall be glad to discourse on them over lunch. Which I see is ready.”

  Reinhart saw with amazement that Streckfuss had done nothing but pull bottles out of the cabinet and shake from them pellets and powders into glass beakers. The little scientist now assembled the vessels on a white-enamel laboratory tray and lifted it, in cafeteria busboy style, fingertips back hand-heel forward, to his ear.

  “La soupe!” he cried. “Messieurs sont servis.”

  Sweet pushed back the apparatus on a steel tabletop. One metal lab stool was nearby. He asked Reinhart to fetch two others. In so doing the stout man saw several smaller versions of the man-sized freezer capsule, demonstration models as it were, ranked upon a wall shelf.

  “I have heard of this sort of instant concentrated nourishment,” he said when seated, at his host’s insistence, at the arbitrary head of the table. “But I haven’t ever tried it.”

  Streckfuss took a handful of pills from one beaker and paid them out, two each, onto three round glass saucers.

  “Fish course,” he said, “accompanied by an unassuming little Sancerre with its typical flavor of unripe apples. There are keen palates which can identify from vich slope of zuh vineyard came the grapes.” He poured an inch of colorless fluid from an Erlenmeyer flask into a beaker containing a pinch of powder and presented it to Reinhart.

  “I’m supposed to drink this?” asked the latter, with a hearty chuckle, looking at Sweet for a confirmation of the absurdity. Reinhart supposed this could be fun. He had seen it in a movie once; the eater, a well-known comic, had been provided with cutlery, carved the little pills, etc.

  “After inhaling the bouquet, of course,” Streckfuss said, reaching to mix liquid and powder with a wooden tongue-depressor from which he first peeled the crackling paper, that funny translucent stuff you saw nowhere else any more. Reinhart always gagged when the doctor shoved one down his throat so as to peer at where it felt scratchy.

  Reinhart twirled the contents under his nose. He scented nothing whatever. He took a bit on the end of his tongue. Nothing. It was certainly not the local water, though, which had the pronounced taste of chlorine.

  Streckfuss hurled his skinny chin towards the ceiling. “Failed again!” said he. But his chagrin was obviously mock. “Try the coquilles Saint-Jacques, or are they fruits de mer?”

  “Swallow whole or bite through?” asked Reinhart.

  “Down zuh hatchway!”

  “Aren’t you guys going to eat?”

  Sweet said: “Of course. I’m famished.” He took the tablets in his palm and threw them into his open mouth, followed by a draft from his own beaker.

  So Reinhart followed suit. If he were poisoned or drugged he would have company. It was precisely like taking two aspirins. Perhaps foolishly he was disappointed. He had more or less expected a flavor, though maybe not fish and wine exactly. Of course it was great in view of his dental problems, and not much less than real fish, which never filled him. Whenever Maw had fed him halibut as a boy he always slipped out and had a hamburger later on. In the early years of their marriage Gen had occasionally prepared tunafish à la king, immersed in a sauce of which catsup was a constituent. It was the memory of such dishes that kept him from being bitter about doing most of the family cooking.

  Streckfuss thereupon poured himself a heaping handful of the same tablets. “Gawd,” said he. “I could eat zis stuff till zuh cows come home.” He threw them down his gullet, which was pale as the throat of a water moccasin.

  Sweet leaned significantly towards Reinhart. “Hans never eats anything else.”

  “Really. You actually live on pills?”

  You could see them going down through his Adam’s apple, in effect, one by one. He had closed his eyes in pleasure. He took a swig from his own beaker of liquid and made a gargling sound. Ah, there went the last tablet.

  “To put it vulgarly,” he answered at length. “Nutritionally speaking, zese tablets contain the same nourishment—vitt-amins, protein, minerals, and so on—as an actual serving of fish. Only the garbage is eliminated, and who misses zat
?”

  Sweet spoke up. “I admit I can’t as yet go along with Hans in that respect. I still love my steak and would hate to have to do without good red meat—”

  Streckfuss interrupted. His long upper lip was keen with pride. “I almost never have to defecate,” he cried. “Iss that not a satisfactory situation? Not to have a long snake of matières fécales coiled in your guts? It is not enough that eating is useless. It is also filthy. Sink of carrying about all that rubbish. Behind zuh average navel lies a cesspool. Good heavens. Have you ever dissected a cadaver?”

  Reinhart took another drink at this point. He was not nauseated, because this was nothing like eating. Another advantage of Streckfuss’ diet was that you could talk of anything while ingesting it. Very utilitarian for a scientist.

  “All right,” Reinhart said. “But what happens to the system if it is not used? Would the intestines not wither up like deflated balloons?”

  Streckfuss displayed some spiky teeth. “So comes the role of the Streckfuss cocktail vich you seem to be enjoying merrily. Combining in the stomach with digestive juices, it is transformed like a type of sludge—actually a semisolid polyester foam—which moves through the bowels, not only supporting zem against collapse but scouring them clean, thus making almost nil the likelihood of noxious and uncomfortable gasses and guaranteeing immunity against hemorrhoids, among ozzer annoying embarrassments. I should suppose you are no stranger to piles?”

  It was an odd but not unpleasant sensation, and thus far only moral. Reinhart could not as yet actually feel the detergent action. Perhaps he never would. If so, something would be lost, maybe not something infinitely precious, but definitely one of life’s rhythms. Some people measured out their days by a schedule of eliminations. His parents used to be like that, Dad especially. And not just old fogies. Guys in the Army, shamelessly perched at stool, wincing in satisfaction—a whole line of them, in the morning, almost touching knees, for the latrines were stall-less—then exchanging jollity with the parallel line of shavers at the washbasins. Dogs however always looked anxious when hunched up: ancient racial memory, no doubt, from when the breed roamed wild and you could get jumped while helpless evacuating. Food was the preoccupation of all creatures in Nature. Only man had systematized its collection and all phases of its tour.