Reinhart answered Streckfuss’ question. “Not one of my major complaints. A cocoa-butter suppository or two and I’m shipshape.”
“Meat course,” said the Swiss, dropping three green-colored capsules on Reinhart’s dish. “I could continue the amusing conceit and ahsk whether your choice iss rare or well done but I sink I shawn’t. My own manner of eating is while at vork to take which nutrients I need. I do not perform zis charade of sitting at table, mind you. I regard the mealtime customs as folly. Europeans still waste hours in zis preposterous ritual. I admire about your country the quick lunch, the instant foods. But they could be made more quicker still. These all-in-one breakfasts now available are a step in the right direction, though still rather vulgar. They are flavored with chocolate, no less.”
The nay-saying John Calvin, Reinhart remembered, had been a Swiss. Yet Swiss chocolate was also famous, and, finally, watches.
“I’ll join Bob,” said Reinhart. “I don’t relish the thought of giving up all pleasant sensory experiences. Though I don’t live to eat, by any means.”
Streckfuss looked at Reinhart’s bulging jacket front and said: “You could have fooled us.”
“The funny thing is that I don’t eat all that much,” Reinhart said. “Honestly. Is it not true, Doctor, that some people because of peculiar glandular—”
“No,” Streckfuss said. “People get fat for one reason alone: gluttony.”
Reinheart looked at Sweet. “I suppose I should take up jogging. That’s the big thing now, isn’t it, Bob?”
Sweet made a fist around his ration of green capsules and carried it to his mouth, swallowing elaborately. He said: “I come here to sit at Hans’s feet, Carl. If he told me to climb into that vat of liquid nitrogen, I would do so without question. I may even come in time to enjoy this sort of meal.”
“No,” said Streckfuss, “not to enchoy it, old chap, but to disregard it.”
“By the way,” Sweet said to Reinhart, “Hans’s title is ‘professor.’ Everybody in Central Europe is a doctor.”
Somebody, or something was smoking. Blue-gray whorls obscured Streckfuss’ head. Reinhart smelled the transformer of the electric train he had owned as a boy, the scent of electricity, equivalent somehow to the music of the spheres, a comparison that made sense only in the reason of the morning half-dreams in which one anticipates, dreaming, the telephone bell which rings on cue in reality. Did I wake you up? the caller asks invariably, and you always lie. The odor of volts was called ozone. Reinhart was not totally helpless in the age of science. He had served in the Medical Department of the Army of the United States, and still remembered the main pressure points. If you get a head wound do you put a tourniquet around the neck? asked some joker, and the sergeant said all right you shitbum wiseguy. Streckfuss reassembled his face and pressed it against Reinhart’s, making owl eyes. Why if he did not eat food was his breath foul? No, that was ozone. Sweet was operated electrically. He had died and was revived as Streckfuss’ creature. He was ageless and immortal. Open his shirt and you would see the wheels and wires. Imagine committing suicide by enclosing your head in a plastic shirt bag. Some did. Therefore the laundry printed a caution on each.
Reinhart knew he had passed out, but he did not know that he knew, and he was really not interested in why. He had never been good at quantitative judgments, barely squeaked through high-school math.
What was notable about his present state was the absolute absence of pain. In ordinary life this would have led only to suspicion or rather suspense, a related word. In the beginning was the Word, the end is silence. This was, impossibly, neither. He certainly must tell his colleagues, when the experiment was concluded, that though in a sleep of ice, the brain made waves. Remembering that, he forgot all else and was resolved into a swirl of smoke or semen or snot and streamed towards a pinhole of light, entered it, and vanished.
Reinhart had a feeling that he had not closed his eyes. Nonetheless he opened them now and discovered himself still at table. The flasks and beakers had been removed, and his luncheon companions were conferring near the large freezer capsule. He checked himself for dizziness: flexed his neck, breathed deeply, seemed to pursue the ghost of a headache, detected nothing more, rose from the stool—had he kept his perch all the while?—took one step, and fell in a jointed, sequential fashion onto the concrete floor: knees, chest, chin.
Oddly enough, he hurt nowhere. However, he did not possess the coordination, or perhaps the will, to get up. From the tops of his eyes he saw a floorscape of metal legs and braces, and finally an oncoming pair of rubber overshoes. A hook or claw seized the neck of his jacket and raised him inexorably.
Having attained his feet, Reinhart said to the little Streckfuss: “Do you know you have just raised a dead weight of two hundred sixty-five pounds?” He felt OK. “With one hand,” he added. Sweet slowly approached. Reinhart said to him: “I don’t know what happened.”
Streckfuss said: “Not by brute strength, I assure you, nor by magic.” But he did not explain.
“Did I, or did I not, pass out at the table?” Reinhart asked Sweet.
“You dozed a bit,” answered his friend. “We decided not to bother you.”
“I might have had a reaction to those pills, might I not?”
“Very unlikely,” said Streckfuss, “if you mean in any organic senssse. I cannot speak for your emotional constituseeyon. Exposure to new knowledge is zometimes exhowsting. But I suspect it is your habit to take a nap after a hearty meal.”
“You know, that’s right,” Reinhart confessed. “But why did I just fall on my face?”
“I should suppose your leg was still asleep. It was twisted about the stool for zum time.”
“Of course, of course. …” He stamped his foot, but the pins and needles, if such there had been, were now gone. Suddenly he felt hale. He leaped into the air and clicked his heels.
Streckfuss chortled.
Reinhart asked: “What did you do, give me a pep pill?” He felt both embarrassed and pleased. He would not have been surprised to find himself turning a cartwheel, something he could never manage as a slender child. “I don’t know what it was I ate, but it worked.”
“Still,” Streckfuss said, “not everysing is possible through nutrition at this point. One as yet does not understand the precise role of adenosine triphosphate in the synthesis of cell protein, though it seems crucial. Ah, zuh fools!”
Reinhart raised his eyebrows at Sweet.
Who explained: “Hans refers to the people who oppose science by simple inertia. If you look at any past era you will see certain active enemies of truth but the mass of any population is merely negative. I have had some experience with the public. I know that if we could start a trend, Hans could have more bodies than he needs. If somehow we can make it attractive, people will so to speak line up to be frozen. Do you know that Pan Am has a waiting list for the first commercial flight to the moon?”
“If I might put in my two cents’ worth,” said Reinhart. He raised his hand in a routine movement and found to his surprise that it flew up over his head quick as a barnswallow. He pretended to yawn, as if he were stretching. “Ahhh. Excuse me. … But you can’t quickly get anyone past the idea of death, even with the promise that it will be nullified—which, as you admit, you cannot even yet promise. If you could freeze and revive an animal, say—”
“Has been done,” said Streckfuss. “Smith, of London, has frozen hamsters. Half the water in the little rodent brains was ice, the tiny bodies hard and rigid. And zese are mammals, mind you, warmblooded creatures. Frozen hard as boards. When tawed, the little ahneemals were back on their wheels, revolving merrily, with bright beady little eyes.”
Reinhart was victim to an access of sentimentality. His daughter had owned a hamster once. The nimble little bastard had run on his wheel all night. Daytimes he sacked in under a pile of rubbish. If Reinhart got up for a nocturnal pee he could hear that wheel squeaking. Winona eventually loved him to death. Silen
tly she came to Reinhart and opened her fat hand.
“Aw,” Reinhart said now. “The cute little devils.”
Streckfuss sniffed. “Chacun à son goût. Kenyon has frozen dogss to the point of arresting all circulation, stopping zuh hearts for some time, bringing about clinical death. Then he revived the animals successfully.”
“Why has this not been publicized?” Reinhart demanded of Sweet.
“A considerable literature is available. Experimentation in cryobiology is by no means new. Hans has been working in the field since the end of World War II.”
“Where did you spend the war?” Reinhart stubbornly asked the professor.
“In Europe, of course. Vere else, for goodness sake?”
Reinhart made a gesture of acceptance, and again he was inadequately extravagant: his hands took wing. He must watch that on pain of looking swishy. “Just asking.” If Streckfuss’ specialty was rejuvenation, then he could be Schatzi from a quarter-century ago and he would not necessarily look older. Some such thought tramped across Reinhart’s brain in muddy boots.
Streckfuss was leering at him through pupils of faceted jet beads with highlights in the shape of accents grave and acute. He had abnormally long earlobes, as if they had once begun to melt. Reinhart could not remember this detail about Schatzi.
“I would say,” said Reinhart, “that publicity was the answer. I myself knew nothing about this whole subject until I saw you on TV, Bob.” He had turned to look at Sweet, too swiftly, spinning on balls of feet like greased bearings, and almost revolved past the target. Whereas he should merely have turned his neck. His body had a will of its own.
Sweet said: “I think this is enough for today, Carl. Suffice it to say that wonders are within reach as of this moment. The situation is in a far more sophisticated state than was the case with aeronautics just prior to the Wright Brothers’ lift-off at Kitty Hawk.”
“Suda,” said Reinhart. He had started to pronounce some other word or phrase. Instead this nonsense sound emerged. It was his own voice all right, and he had felt the breath hiss acrosss his tongue. He proceeded to do it again, with an elaboration: “Suda, Kobe.” He had lost control. Admitting which, in a rush of panic heat, he regained it. “I don’t know why I said that.” He leered redly at the others. “Strains of an old song, maybe. Boopy-doopy-doo.” He pretended to be dizzy and seized Streckfuss’ shoulder. Childish-feeling rubbery bones writhed under his fingers. There was a sensitive nerve-point beneath the shoulder-cap, if he could find it: would make him wince and howl.
But the professor threw him off with only a twitch. “Do not play the fool. Professor Isamu Suda, of the medical college at Kobe in Japan. We are aware of his successful experiment.”
Again Reinhart’s automatic pilot took over. He listened to himself with amazement. “Professor Suda,” said his own voice, “froze a cat’s brain to minus twenty degrees Centigrade.”
Sweet nodded to Streckfuss, and said to Reinhart: “Yes? Go on.”
“That’s all I know,” said Reinhart, less embarrassed by now. He had begun to attain the freedom of the man in a really extreme predicament, so sick, for example, that he will puke in public. Shame is really anticipatory, whereas fact is fact. He could not understand how he had gained the stated information, and thus he felt no responsibility for it.
Streckfuss spoke in a commanding voice. “Proceed.”
“I’m sorry, that’s it,” Reinhart confessed. “You can’t get blood out of a turnip.”
“Ah, you little rogue,” Streckfuss said preposterously, his wildest hair reaching no farther than Reinhart’s breast pocket. “You have been performing your investigations. You have been pooling our legs, you fonny guy you.”
“Wait a minute!” Reinhart cried. “Does the figure 203 mean anything?” He had seen this as if skywritten in the azure of his mind.
Sweet said: “After two hundred and three days Suda thawed the cat brain. The electroencephalograms recorded the resumption of normal brain waves.”
Reinhart felt his scalp. “Gentlemen, I am nonplussed.”
“Well,” said Streckfuss, shaking himself within the laboratory coat. “It could be vorse.” He padded to what looked like a closet door, opened it only far enough to admit his small body, and sidled through.
“What’s in there?” Reinhart asked.
Sweet said: “His austere living quarters. An iron cot, bookshelves, high-intensity reading lamp, a tiny washroom containing a stall shower. I would give Hans anything he wants. That’s it.”
Reinhart saw rosy-fingered dawn. “He hypnotized me, didn’t he? And planted certain suggestions, which I delivered on cue.”
“What difference could it possibly make?” Sweet asked. “Suda revived the cat brain and the electroencephalograms were virtually normal.”
“You mean it was still thinking? I wonder what about? Who knows what goes through a cat’s brain when it is living naturally? I knew a guy once who told me that all cats are by nature schizophrenics. His psychiatrist furnished him with the theory. No doubt it would explain much in the feline temperament, which people sometimes call inscrutable.” Reinhart pointed at the shelves bearing the smaller freezing capsules. “Looks as if the professor has got a few animals of his own.”
“Hans has never published the results of his own work.”
“Are they filled?” Reinhart asked, without much genuine wonder, because he now assumed they were, a small rigid hairy body in each, stiff-whiskered, tight-eyed, perhaps the tip of a yellow canine showing from the sealed lips, only the tail eluding rigor. If you found a deceased rat on the town dump, and you were a boy, or a primitive of any age, you plucked it up by that tapered terminal shoelace and swung it towards a quailing chum. “White mice? Hamsters?”
“Monkeys” said Sweet. “The next step is man.”
7
The characters on the screen were either emotionless or showed some feeling at odds with the circumstances. A bony-faced blonde smiled at a squat brunette who addressed her angrily in a Scandinavian language, a tongue resembling German spoken while orally circulating some soft food, the vowels thus being rendered oval, the consonants bent. A beach full of round flat stones like poker chips, a marbled sky; the subtitles, as always with queer misprints, were flowing in superimposition across the ribs of a derelict skiff at the bottom of the picture: “You see, it is this way with mee. I … well … have never been able to laugh easly—no! That is far from presise—” A large narrow man tramped into view, wearing a thick fisherman’s sweater and an eyepatch. The brunette fixed her square shoulders at his clabbered salutation, untranslated, and failed to reply. The blonde wept silently in tight closeup of a face white as a giant aspirin.
“The birds, have you seen them?” read the rubric, beyond which lay a shot of the sea with its multitude of foamy hiccups. Who spoke, eyepatch or deep-voiced girl? The blonde was out of the running: she had had no lines from the outset, yet was the putative star. Had even, without motive, displayed one pale teat earlier on, then both buttocks, which were suddenly bulbous below elongated necks. She had pulled on slacks over no underwear. The brunette had fastened the blonde’s brassiere hooks while sucking a cigarette and exuding dialogue rumpled in smoke.
Eunice sat on Reinhart’s left, having insisted he precede her into the row. She made a breathy sound at the appearance of the male character, a gasp or cough or hiss. Reinhart had not known her long enough to specify which, nor had he, after an hour’s viewing, oriented himself in the picture. He had not done much moviegoing in recent years. He had heard that commercial films were on the verge of showing the act of coition itself. Perhaps this was the night. He hoped he would not snort in shame.
Why had Eunice wanted him on the wrong side of her? While pondering this he missed something that caused the audience to stir as one. A black dog was racing up a bluff above the ocean. The sound track was empty or the equipment had failed, the latter having been a frequent occurrence with the outmoded machinery of the Majestic
during Reinhart’s term of duty as part-owner. The audience would murmur, growl, and whistle, then stamp its mass foot, which of course led to dangerous structural reverberations. The usher nearest the warning button was supposed to push it and so alert the projectionist, an aged functionary who from time to time even confused the sequence of reels, accidentally defining the work of art as that which had a beginning, an end, and finally a middle. “I preferred it that way,” he would assert arrogantly, armed with his sense that they could not afford a better man. He was also a cough-syrup junkie, a codeine-and-terpin-hydrate-head. All you had to do to get a bottle was sign your name, and in fact the old coot sometimes signed Reinhart’s, as Reinhart discovered once when trying to buy a ration for a legitimate chest cold. One of the ushers, a lad with coltish eyes and maidenly ways, claimed the projectionist would goose him when, delivering the heavy hexagonal film carriers to the booth, he could not defend himself. “And I don’t like that,” he shrilled, rolling his hips and quitting. Many effeminate persons are not queer: rather they are the prey of queers, so Reinhart had read in a book by Dr. Brill years ago when he had been interested in psychiatry. Reinhart had in fact made discreet inquiries when hiring this usher. “Oh, no,” said another boy, already employed, “Ralphie likes his nookie.” Reinhart encouraged his people to talk straight with him, in their own jargon whenever possible. He posed as just one of the guys. This might have led to disciplinary problems had not business fallen away to the point that there was little for anyone to do except brood on his loneliness amid the vast reaches of the theater and thus welcome the quite rare encounter with the boss who found him. In the last months there was no audience with sufficient sense of itself to protest at breaks in sound and discontinuity of narrative.
Vital Parts Page 15
