Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  Reinhart could smell the leather of the holster. He asked: “Doesn’t your dad live here any more?”

  A snort. “No, he has a lovely little house in Whitetown. He is singlehandedly bringing down the real-estate values. I bought it for him, and I’ll tell you why. A man ought to achieve his aim before he dies, even if it is to be a lickspittle to white values. I don’t blame him. He is a product, not a maker. If you are treated like a thing all your life, you become one. You’ll find that in the works of Immanuel Kant.”

  Reinhart was stung, less by the anti-white stuff, which was fairly routine these days, than by the characterization of his old friend. If anybody had been an individual to a point well past eccentricity, it was Splendor Mainwaring. Reinhart began to suspect that Splendor’s son was a blackfaced version of Blaine. So Negro offspring also turned against their progenitors, demonstrating again the foolishness of drawing fundamental distinctions between races.

  It took some courage for Reinhart to speak to this armed young man against a backround of storm troopers.

  He stared at the haughty brown face. “Look,” he said, “the Splendor I knew kissed the ass of no man. He stood by and for himself, and he suffered for it before you were born, young fellow. He had a personal vision and pursued it alone. He wasn’t backed up by an army. I don’t mean to intrude into your family life, but often someone from outside can see things that are missed, especially by sons.”

  Captain Storm was sneering at him. “Naturally you would say that. You are white.”

  “I’m getting tired of that word,” said Reinhart.

  “You’re getting tired of it!” This was said with what seemed to Reinhart more hurt than anger, however—or perhaps that was merely the interpretation of Reinhart’s always ready tendency to sympathize with his vis-à-vis in a social situation.

  “I’m sorry,” the fat man said. “This is no time to argue.” He put out his hand. “I’m Carl, by the way.”

  The Negro drew away in horror. “I don’t want to be on intimate terms with you. Christ Almighty.” He made a dramatic grimace towards his comrades on the porch.

  Sweet asked for the address, and Captain Storm gave a number and street that were most familiar. Reinhart had grown up there. It was his parents’ old house.

  In his mind’s eye Reinhart still saw the place as it had not been for years, with the willow tree in the front yard, long since a vanished loser to some arboreal malady; the old porch fence of his childhood, between the palings of which he had once got his head stuck and Dad had to saw one off and never replaced it.

  The façade had been painted since his parents’ residence. He supposed Storm would see something vulgarly significant in the bone-or dead- or lily-white, but in fact it had always been dressed in that color or lack of same, which anyway would turn soot-gray before the painter sent in his bill.

  So many emotions were available as the Bentley came to rest at the curb that Reinhart was hard put to make a choice. His childhood home, his old friend, a Negro, moribund, yet getting a crack at eternal life, their hostile sons, the synthetic Sweet and his disturbed daughter—O for a portmanteau response in which he could dump the lot, along with his years, resurrect the willow tree and climb into its topmost branches as he had been wont to do of yore, peeping down at the passing parade, hidden and superior.

  Children were swooping and hooting through adjacent yards. In the Negro district Reinhart had been too preoccupied to notice persons other than the Black Assassins, but some must have been abroad because the season was summer. The yards at hand were all of the same size and unseparated by hedge or pickets, and three lawns distant stood a hairy-bellied man, stripped to the waist, gawking shamelessly. At that range Captain Storm might look like a black cop, Reinhart thought. He himself waved at the man, who might turn out to be another old schoolmate, more routine than Bob Sweet. The man did not return the salute. Instead he scratched his navel with one hand and raised to his mouth the beer can in the other. He was the sort who might at any moment say, “Now hear this,” and release some gas. In the other direction stood a spiky-figured woman wearing a droopy playsuit and a science-fiction hairdo of pink plastic curlers, and bitching a little snot.

  The arrival of another car diverted Reinhart from the stocktaking of the neighborhood. It was a black Cadillac of ancient vintage and held the contingent of uniformed and armed Negroes last seen on the porch across town. They parked ten yards beyond the Bentley and stayed inside.

  Sweet’s old chauffeur went to sleep again as the odd threesome of which Reinhart was a member left the car.

  Reinhart asked the back of Storm’s tunic, which must have been unbelievably hot under the sky’s open forge: “Those guys with you?”

  “My bodyguards,” the young man said, glancing back and giving Reinhart an angled view of his face that was suddenly reminiscent of Splendor’s sister, this boy’s aunt, the exquisite Loretta. Where would we all be now if Reinhart had made an interracial marriage? For one, had certain chromosomes dominated, Blaine would undoubtedly have been a Black Assassin.

  But a stout walnut-colored woman in nurse’s whites opened the door before anyone knocked, and Storm, Bob Sweet, and Reinhart entered the house in that order.

  Captain Storm greeted the nurse with a lavish geniality that contrasted interestingly with his gelid manner towards the whites, and he made no introductions. But being plump and in her forties, the woman nonetheless smiled at Reinhart. Whatever anybody said, fat people really were generally good-natured, especially to other adipose types, he supposed because they had their number, like fellow soldiers and ethinic siblings.

  Reinhart crossed the threshold, passing his old home door with its familiar bronze knocker, a lion’s face frozen in a belch or yawn, but then he saw the hospital bed in the far corner of the room where the superheterodyne had once stood and later the television.

  And upon it a wasted old brown man whom it seemed peculiarly indecent to advance upon with one’s own pink bulk. Splendor in his prime was tall as Reinhart and more gracefully assembled, strong yet lithe, with sensitive musculature that seemed to have its own consciousness. This wizened creature clawed feebly at the sheet which covered but did not disguise its corporeal ruin of twigs and wire. The face on the pillow was a caricature, a tourist’s souvenir, carved into a coconut. No platitude is outmoded when it comes to dying, which is itself a cliché endlessly repeated. Yet Reinhart found himself incapable of utterance. To see his old friend in this situation was another thing than to entertain its possibility while riding hither. “All men die” is easy enough for you to say, but that each actually does, without benefit of quotation marks, cannot be abstracted, represented, or demonstrated by the living.

  There was a glitter in the eyeholes of the skull. Reinhart did not expect to be recognized, indeed would have preferred not to be embarrassed by proof of his now irrelevant identity, but a ghastly rictal movement was already under way.

  “Carlo,” said the dying man. The pronunciation was astonishingly normal in timbre and volume. “How terribly nice. I am touched by your grief, old fellow. But it is misplaced. I may die, but in the words of the late great militarist, I shall return.”

  “You certainly shall, Splendor,” Reinhart was quick to say, wiping his eye—which, judging from Splendor’s speech, must have been wet. However, it wasn’t; yet he had been grieving and perhaps would go on to do even more of it, switching focus from Splendor’s terminal illness to his naïve faith in the freezer program. How typical of his old friend to be dying painfully on the one hand and on the other to be so jolly of soul.

  It was also rather too grisly an incongruity for Reinhart to bear if he had to look at his friend’s visage while juggling the factors, so he stared at a white-enameled table full of glassware filled with liquids and solids which were of course inefficacious, else the patient would not have been where he was: the offensive rubbish of medical science, a good thing on which to take out one’s spite against illness.

&nbs
p; Reinhart said: “Meet Bob Sweet.”

  Splendor put out a terrible appendage, a wiry structure of the sort found in the ruin of burned-out houses, whose late function it took a while to identify: ah, a lampshade frame. Ah, a hand. Sweet shook it forthrightly.

  He said: “We all know what has been said on certain historic occasions, Mr. Mainwaring. The ‘What hath God wrought’ sort of thing. Now we can begin to write our script. The responsibility is staggering. It will be quoted forever. How do you feel as the first man to have a crack at eternal life?”

  In spite of himself Reinhart looked again at Splendor, from under whose sheets a rubber tube traveled to an upended bottle hanging on a chromium pole. For a moment Reinhart thought of it that way: that Splendor was being drained, against gravity, into the bottle—certainly not; he was being fed intravenously. But when you were being devoured by cancer, where did your carnal mass go? Matter can neither be destroyed nor created. Splendor had been physically a splendid man. There could be scarcely seventy pounds of him left. Dying was, among other things, a materialistic mystery.

  Reinhart asked: “Should you be talking this much? We don’t want to tire you.”

  Splendor laughed distantly, his sheet trembling. “I’m useless for anything else. … Who can say what the world will be when I awake from that long sleep? Man by then, physically speaking, may be largely synthetic. And what kind of morality he will embrace may be an utterly different thing from what we have seen. All religions have been responses to the fact of death. Those promising an afterlife have generally demanded adherence to a code comprising many prohibitions referring to the weaknesses of the flesh. What does the worship of God have to do with eating pork or not? A great deal, if you were an old desert Jew or Moslem. You might die from tainted meat. …”

  Dying had not changed Splendor. He had always loved this sort of concept-spinning. And now, of course, nobody could say it was not appropriate to his condition, but Sweet had a job to do, one which would certainly benefit Splendor if it worked and would not hurt him if it failed.

  There was a noise at the front door. The nurse opened it to reveal the party of Black Assassins surrounding the small figure of Streckfuss, who was grinning obsequiously.

  “Madame,” he said to the nurse, “I am expected, s’il vous plaît. Could you explain to zese gentlemen—” He looked and saw Sweet. “Ah, Bopp!” Streckfuss coyly clawed the air in salutation and started in, but left the threshold, walking in air, as two guards lifted him at the elbows.

  Sweet turned to Captain Storm, who subsequently made a signal to his stalwarts. The little scientist scampered inside as soon as he was released.

  “You are the afflicted?” he asked the recumbent Splendor.

  “No doubt about it,” Splendor said amiably.

  “Alors!” Streckfuss cried, peering at the ghastly face on the pillow. “Intestinal malignancy?”

  Reinhart’s own bowels squirmed. “Must we talk of these things now?” he asked. “You can go over the whole situation with his doctor.”

  Splendor’s eyes were quick. He said: “You are a principal in this project, Carlo?”

  “Splendor, I would have come as a friend, you know that, but I was not aware until the call came in. May I say this is not a profit-making venture.”

  But Splendor was answering Streckfuss. “You can tell that by looking at my face? Great God, you must be gifted. Yes, it is my colon.”

  “I expect zey wanted to remove it surgically,” Streckfuss said, nodding obsessively. “Surgery has no blace in medicine. I call it carpentry! It is but a hobby, did you know? But practiced on living tissue.” He was developing a fury and glared at Splendor.

  “They were at a loss,” said the patient.

  The little Swiss shouted: “Of course zey were. So anozzer living person is taken to pieces. The large intestine is of course virtually useless. We could do quite well to be born wissout a colon. But having one, we make it of necessity part of our integrity. You do not excize a piece of zuh body without affecting the unity of the whole, threatening the very fine equilibrium of blood, nerves, muscles, the distribution of weight, zuh ahnatomical zymmetry.”

  “Listen to that, Raymond,” said Splendor, putting an eye towards his son, who remained at the rear.

  Captain Storm shrugged. “I am forced to,” he said with evident disgust.

  “Raymond is a mechanistic rationalist,” Splendor explained.

  In the presence of his father he seemed much more of a boy. Reinhart had known Splendor’s own dad slightly, and it was interesting to compare the three generations. Splendor had always been rather loftily superior to his father, a small, lively man who, the first time Reinhart had come upon him, had been burning a car for the insurance. A more practical type than his son. There was a theory that a grandfather’s traits jumped a generation and landed in the grandson. Reinhart was inclined to take Storm’s militarism seriously, not the uniform so much as the gun. Something new in the Mainwaring family was the hostility towards white men. But Storm had displayed less of it since entering the sickroom. Instead he was now sulky. That is why he seemed more boyish than earlier. Reinhart saw that relations with Blaine would probably be less abrasive if he, Reinhart, were dying: a radical solution.

  “Splendor,” said Reinhart, “I think before we proceed, we should get hold of your doctor. He may take some convincing if he is the conservative sort. But if you insist he must finally give way. It certainly helps to find you in such a positive frame of mind.”

  “Carlo,” Splendor said, “we live in a remarkable time. The phony is constantly turning into the real, and vice versa. God knows what the world will be when I am revived.”

  Reinhart felt suddenly impelled to make a sanctimonious utterance. Here he was, a stranger in his boyhood home. If he searched the baseboards he would surely find certain dents he had put there with a toy tractor almost forty years before—the kind of damage too slight to repair, too inconsequential to be noticed by anybody but the maker thereof; the world was full of that sort of evidence, which lasted long after great buildings and massive bridges were pulled down for the erection of other transitory phenomena. Enormous mountains had been leveled for the railroads, for example, and now the latter were on their way out. The trick to survival was to accomplish something of no utility, and so small as to be inconspicuous.

  However, what he said was designed to conceal his actual feelings, which seemed overly personal and perhaps downright racist. He kept telling himself that if his old home had to be occupied by someone else, how nice it was a Negro, to whom it represented progress. And the truth was that Reinhart never missed this place once Dad had died. All the same he found himself hating Splendor for choosing this house to die in.

  Therefore he said: “I hope when you return to the world the people of all races will be living like brothers.”

  From behind him Captain Storm howled. “I knew he’d get around to saying that sooner or later. A black man lies there eaten up by white disease, cheated and lied to by white doctors, in a white house for which we had to pay the white owner three times what it was worth, listening to white quacks promise him eternal life, and sure as shit one of them will talk about brotherhood.”

  All this while Streckfuss had been nosing around the table, peering into bottles and vials, and now he lifted the sheet which covered Splendor and inspected him. Thank God the angle was not one from which Reinhart could see much. Reinhart backed away into the opposite corner, the former site of a drumtop table which for years had borne a picture of himself at twelve. The same was now displayed on Maw’s dresser at Senior City. She was partial to the image, the last on which he would ever be represented with a grin.

  “Raymond,” said Splendor over Streckfuss’ bent head, “if you must use foul language it will not be in my presence.”

  “I’m leaving,” his son said. At the door he blurted boyishly: “I’m sorry, sir.” And went out onto the porch.

  Reinhart was careful to look at t
he floor, but he was most favorably impressed. Also he was astounded. Had he remonstrated with Blaine in this fashion the upshot would have been much worse than the original infraction.

  “He’s a good boy,” said Splendor, “but he is inclined to talk too much.” He shifted slightly under Streckfuss’ examination.

  Reinhart said: “He’s a fine-looking fellow. I didn’t even know you were married, Splendor. We’ve got a lot of personal history to fill in for each other.”

  Splendor seemed detached from Streckfuss’ rummaging about on him. There must not be much left to freeze. The restorers of the future would have their work cut out for them; Reinhart had always assumed the first man they froze would be a stranger to him. He felt now as if he were in the position of a doctor who treated a member of his own family. He himself would be part of Splendor’s memory, arrested in ice: an eerie thought.

  Streckfuss replaced the sheet at Splendor’s chin and straightened up. “I must have a specimen of your your-reen,” he said. “I can make you comfortable meanwhile. Do not please take any more of zeze poisons.” He pointed to the medication on the table. “And zis nourishment is useless.” The hanging bottle. “I shall replace it with something else. But if your physician knows about zis he will undoubtedly object. Therefore discharge him.”

  Splendor said calmly: “In view of my condition that won’t be simple.”

  “It is your damned life, is it not?” Streckfuss asked indignantly. But then he made an abrupt gesture, “Yes, it would look zuspicious. Above all, my presence must not be made known.” He peered violently around the room. So did Reinhart. The nurse was not there at the moment. “Mr. Mainwaring,” the Swiss went on, “I must tell you I am not licensed to practice medicine in this country. Are you troubled by zis disclosure?”

  “Not much,” said Splendor. “You see, I’m dying.”

  Streckfuss narrowed his eyes and looked towards Reinhart. “Perhaps,” he said.

  “Freezing is not illegal,” said Reinhart. “Bob has that all checked out. As far as law is concerned, the body is dead—forgive me, Splendor, talking this way, but—”