“That’s ‘breakfast’ in Urdu,” she said. “I used to know this Moslem hockey player. You know how they say ‘groovy’? Bahote khoob!”
Reinhart had not eaten breakfast, having no money. He took a bite of the doughnut, which was rather clammy from being kept in a closed bag.
“Do you know that Sikhs must live by a number of rules?” she persisted. “For example they must always carry a comb. And they never undress completely their life long. So they bathe with one arm still in their underwear.”
“Eunice,” Rinehart said with a mouthful of glazed, very yeasty doughnut, “this is serious, about my money. I don’t have any.”
“Sorry I drank all the coffee,” Eunice replied. “It’s hard to get a dry doughnut down. Why don’t you make a deal with your wife: you will agree not to contest the divorce if the price is right?”
“How do you know about that?” Reinhart cried forgetfully, in shame, but then remembered, among other things, the private detective who had taken their picture. For which Raven had disclaimed responsibility: something weird about that incident. “Listen, ten bucks from petty cash would help.”
“Our petty cash is down to an airmail stamp and a Brazilian cruzeiro,” Eunice said gaily. “But if you want to talk to Bob, why don’t you?”
“I don’t know where he is!” Reinhart shouted.
Eunice wore a tiny pair of Ben Franklin glasses, with intense green lenses. She looked over them at Reinhart and said gravely: “Are you aware, Carl, how easily you tend to freak out? To lose all control? Really, is it worth it?” She extended two index fingers and brought them simultaneously to the keyboard of her typewriter. “You see, I can’t do it. I can’t jam this machine. Isn’t that fantastic? It simply won’t allow two keys to be struck at the same time.”
In annoyance Reinhart marched into the inner office, slamming the door behind him, and there sat Bob Sweet.
“Back from Switzerland?” Reinhart cried. “In one day?”
“It could be done,” Sweet said. “But of course I didn’t. What are you talking of, Carl?”
“Eunice told me yesterday that you were in Berne.”
“Berne is a little town forty-five miles northwest of this city,” said Sweet. “I have some interests there.”
“Oh yeah. We used to play basketball against their team. I went up once to see a game: a bunch of guys in that old Ford, all painted up, of Billy Wright’s. We had flat pints of drugstore wine and cheap cigars, and Specks Cunningham had to stop and get out to puke.” What stupid amusements had been popular in Reinhart’s high-school days.
Sweet’s eyes narrowed behind the black frames. “Two of the guys who used to pick on me.”
“No,” said Reinhart, “not Specks and Billy. They were idiots, but pretty good guys. Specks got killed in the Army—on the maneuvers in the States, oddly enough. He had apparently camouflaged his sleeping bag so well that a Jeep ran over it with him inside—”
“Spare me the details,” Sweet said. “I couldn’t care less. I don’t collect the disasters of mediocrities.”
Reinhart was slightly stung. He said: “Look, Bob. I hope you won’t think it bad taste if I ask you when I will get paid. I am hard up at the moment. I owe my room rent at the Y, for one thing.”
“I thought you had five grand. Did not you offer to put five grand into the business?”
Reinhart sat on the edge of the desk. “It’s a sordid tale. My son slandered me to my mother, who stopped the check.”
“You stood still for this?”
“What could I do? She was always a harsh critic of me and now she verges on senility.”
“Are you her principal heir?”
“Unless she changes her will, which she probably wants to do now.”
Sweet arose and began to stride slowly about the room. “Carl, I’m going to talk turkey to you. I don’t know if you are aware that nature is ruthless. Animals, for example, with the exception of a few domesticated creatures, are totally self-concerned. There are old pet dogs who allegedly sit by the grave when their masters die and howl endlessly. But even this may be only because they have lost their meal ticket. Horses learn cunning tricks because they are rewarded for doing so. Nothing of the human moral code obtains anywhere in the wild. Kindness, pity, honor, and so on, are purely intellectual constructions, and as we know, beasts are incapable of abstract reasoning. For example, the whole concept of incest is uniquely human. Members of animal families regularly mate with one another. Where did we get our idea of the horror in that?”
“Well,” said Reinhart, “Freud says—”
“OK,” Sweet said. “But then where are you? An ape will still have relations with its sister, and we won’t. But we will deify the illegitimate son of a carpenter whose preaching consists simply of advising us to be losers in every transaction. Can you find an animal who would turn the other cheek? Do you see a lesson in that?”
“Yes,” said Reinhart, “but one that I reject. That old Army saying: ‘If you can’t eat it or fuck it, piss on it.”’ After snickering—Reinhart always found cynicism funny, probably because it scared him—he went on: “We’re not animals, Bob.”
“I quite agree,” said Sweet. “There is no lesson in animals, in fact. I brought up the subject so as to dispose of it. It is a phony argument. There are those who whine about why we have wars when animals don’t. Well, neither do we screw our close blood-relatives. The truth is that men have made themselves from scratch. We have invented our ethical codes from the whole cloth. They have nothing to do with instinct. They are, in the truest sense of the term, unnatural. And have got more so throughout the centuries, arriving at the present when we have at last abolished death.”
Reinhart winced. He asked: “Isn’t that a premature claim, Bob?”
Sweet was near at hand suddenly. He seized Reinhart’s lapels and said: “Yesterday Hans thawed a monkey that had been frozen for six weeks. Last night it ate a banana. This morning it was seen masturbating.”
15
The monkey gave Reinhart a quick, peevish look and then avoided his eyes. In the animal world, Reinhart had read in one of those popular natural-history books, the fixed stare signifies hostility. Beasts peer at one another only when preparing to tangle. Reinhart had once stared at a king cobra, through the zoo glass, and the serpent erected three feet of its length, which when added to the height of the cage above the spectators’ floor brought its flaring hood to Reinhart’s eye-level. They peered at each other, slender snake and fat man: chilling exchange for the latter. Folk wisdom held that a serpent’s gaze could hypnotize. “Looks like a piece of hose,” said Genevieve, coming up alongside, and the cobra wilted and glided away like a stream of water seeking its lowest level.
Bob Sweet was pouring champagne into laboratory beakers.
“I know you don’t drink, Hans, but surely this once.” He handed a vessel to the little scientist and another to Reinhart, then hoisted his own. “To Professor Doctor Johann Streckfuss!” To Reinhart: “You are a man of words, Carl. Here is your opportunity to utter a few that will be historical.”
“I am?” asked Reinhart, who felt irrelevant, displaced. Nevertheless he stared at Streckfuss, who looked away like an animal. Reinhart’s memory whirred, as if a computer in a TV satire, and ejected a card. “‘If he has seen farther than most, it is because he is standing on the shoulders of a giant.’”
Streckfuss’ flecked eyes were on him now. “Isaac Newton, no?” he asked.
“I believe so,” said Reinhart. “No offense. I really don’t know what to say. I really find it incredible.”
“Bottoms up,” said Sweet, and Reinhart was about to comply when he felt his wrist being detained by a weird little agency, a tiny animate manacle. He had lowered his arm while thinking of the quotation, his back to the cage. He now saw a thin limb, all tendons and gray hair, thrusting through the bars. A parody of a human hand clutched his wrist.
“Isn’t that cute,” said Sweet, who had never befo
re, in Reinhart’s presence, displayed his sentimental side. Bob bent over the cage. “Does he have a name?”
“Otto,” said Streckfuss.
Reinhart’s wrist was still in restraint. “Shall I give him some champagne?” he asked. “He has, after all, come back from the dead. What a story he would have to tell, if he could speak.”
“That I doubt,” Streckfuss replied dryly. “Undoubtedly, like most of zuh human race, he would speak in platitudes.” He put his own champagne down untasted and walked to a steel table full of vessels and wire.
“Drink up, Carl!” Sweet cried.
Reinhart plucked the monkey fingers off his forearm, one by one. The last two closed on some of his wrist hair and pulled it painfully. “Ouch!” Reinhart said. “You little bastard.” He had never thought monkeys cute. They were more like dirty old men than charming children (as in fact were, nowadays, many children). He lifted the beaker and put it to his closed lips. He intended from now on to be careful about what he ate or drank in this lab. Seeing Sweet fill his own mouth, however, and having previously watched him uncork the bottle, Reinhart at last admitted the bubbles to his tongue.
Bob poured some more for both of them. “Come on, Carl, live a little.” He put the bottle down and, picking up the mushroom-shaped cork, gave it to the monkey, who examined it gravely, hanging by the other paw from an exercise bar of wood.
Reinhart turned away from the cage. “You couldn’t tell by looking at him, could you?”
“That’s the amazing thing,” Sweet said. “Hans is something else, isn’t he? He is not the least excited by his triumph. Mark my words, he won’t even bother to go to Stockholm for his Nobel Prize. He makes the rest of us seem pretty cheap.”
Reinhart shrugged in secret, while Bob gazed worshipfully at Streckfuss’ back. Reinhart did not feel cheap. For some reason he was jealous.
He heard himself say: “Well, of course, scientific discoveries come so frequently nowadays that they seem almost routine. Since I was a boy—” He was struck in the nape by a small projectile traveling at speed. The monkey had thrown the champagne cork at him.
Sweet did not see, or ignored, the incident. “A point of no return for the human race,” he said quietly. “All the old reality must go.”
Reinhart decided that throwing the cork back would be a degrading action for a superior animal. He kicked it skitteringly across the cement: it had been the little metal cap that hurt. Otto was sitting now, his knuckles on the cage floor, very fine fingers with the opposable thumb of the primate clan, by using which to build bridges and aqueducts man had established his earthly control. Otto used his hands to clutch bananas and play with himself.
Otto was sitting on his furry balls, pretending to reflect. He was medum-sized as his tribe went, about as large as a cocker spaniel, his gray fur tinged with yellow, over pink skin. If, that was to say, he had actually been frozen. Streckfuss had assertedly removed him from the capsule with no witnesses present.
Reinhart had an impulse. He went to the cage, turned his back on it, and lowered the beaker of champagne to the length of his arm, concealing it with his body from Bob.
Sweet swallowed the last of his own portion and gave himself more from the dripping bottle, risen from the disposable paper ice bucket imprinted with a picture of the Eiffel Tower. They had stopped en route at a liquor store to get so outfitted. Reinhart, glancing down, moved the vessel against the bars. He had known it was too wide to go through, but he was now apprised of the equivalent fact that so was the monkey’s head too large to come out, and apes are not equipped with the extensive tongue of a dog.
“I understand Hans’s reluctance to gloat prematurely,” Bob said as if to himself. “He won’t be satisfied until he has frozen a man and thawed him. It’s as simple as that.” He nodded abstractly, not at anyone, and drank.
Reinhart dropped his other hand after rubbing his forehead and sought the sliding bar that opened the door of the cage. Before he found it, Sweet turned to him.
“Let’s have your glass, Carl. You are strangely calm. Some contrast with your usual gung-ho personality.”
Reinhart was forced to bring up the champagne to mouth level, but he did not drink. He asked: “Me?”
“Yes, you. You always had a lot of life, even back in school. Remember how you used to come up and bruise a guy and shout?”
“There you go again, Bob. I tell you you are confusing me with other people. Warren First was the one who did that.”
“Show your shoulder-cap and say, ‘Look where the horse bit me,’ while ramming your knuckles into somebody’s crotch.” Sweet grimaced. He swallowed some champagne, which foamed against his teeth. Reinhart suddenly recalled they were false.
“I tell you that was Warnie First. He died just last year. He was a three-pack-a-day man.”
“You don’t smoke, do you, Carl?” Bob asked, pouring himself the last of the wine. “And you certainly don’t drink much. You may be somewhat overweight, but I imagine that if you haven’t had any indications to the contrary your internal organs are all functioning well.”
Reinhart was rather flattered at this. “Well, seriously, I guess I haven’t done too badly. Whenever I have a bit of heartburn I suspect it’s an ulcer, but the X-rays don’t lie. My teeth could use some work. Sporadically I do a bit of boozing, but switched from bourbon to vodka some years ago. Fewer esters, I read, or a different kind anyway: not as damaging to the system. My blood pressure is high, which is inevitable in a man of my weight, and I don’t get enough exercise. Also should cut down on fats and carbohydrates—” He was jerked backwards. The monkey had seized his coattail. Amazingly his recovery did not cause the wine to spill.
Sweet had glanced away just prior to this contretemps. His glance did not return until Reinhart was again in a normal stance. Bob seemed to be playing the role of a parent who manages to miss his child’s harassment of another individual. Gen used to be like that when Blaine was four and in his shin-kicking phase.
Reinhart lowered the beaker again and the monkey struck it from his hand.
Sweet could not fail to notice the smashing of Pyrex. Yet he did. Damn, there went Reinhart’s plot to get the ape drunk. The champagne bottle was empty, upended in the slush.
“Sorry,” Reinhart said.
“Why? To be in good health, with all your parts functioning?” cried Bob. He hurled his empty beaker at the opposite wall. Before the crash was heard he had plucked out his dentures. “My scalp is false, too,” he said from a funny, rubbery mouth.
Reinhart was shocked into silence. The fact was not new to him but the motive behind the revelation was.
“That’s not the measure of a man, Bob.”
Sweet perversely chose to interpret this statement as mockery. “I don’t need your sympathy,” he said, clenching his face as if it were a fist.
Reinhart said: “I didn’t mean to be patronizing.” He spat his own dental bridge into the palm of his hand, waved it, and put it back. “I’ve got this myself, and it doesn’t even fit. At least you have the wherewithal to buy the best.”
Sweet returned the teeth to his mouth: impeccable; you could swear—
Reinhart went on: “If I lost my hair I would just go bald. I admire the way you fight back.”
Bob took off his glasses. “My vision is OK. If my eyes needed correction I would wear contacts. That’s my style. These are window glass. The frames give strength to my face.” And the champagne seemed to have made him strangely urgent. This was new; still too early to call it a weakness. Not that Reinhart wished to. The bold disclosure of the physical inadequacies of course was evidence of moral force.
Streckfuss at that moment cried, “Merde!” and swept a rack of test tubes to the floor. Perhaps he had been influenced by the other breakages. He leaped into the air and landed silently on his rubber soles. From behind he looked like a spring-wound toy.
Sweet said: “I have created myself, Carl, out of very little in the way of raw material. I was born
a bastard, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.” Reinhart moved beyond ape’s arm-length to the other end of the stainless-steel table on which the cage rested, and sat gingerly on the ham-grooving edge.
“I doubt that my real parents were in the top drawer of society,” Bob continued. “I was squirted as a drop of scum out of one tube into another, grew into a blob of humanity, was pulled out, struck, and began to breathe, and was abandoned soon thereafter. I spent my first three years in a public orphanage. The Sweets then adopted me.”
“I never knew that in the old days.”
“Neither did I, for years. And when I did find out, I can’t tell you how exhilarated I was. Robert Sweet, Senior, was the original Weak Willie. He actually sang in the Methodist choir. He used to listen to the radio and laugh on the in-breaths. His wife was always knitting. I never wore anything woolen that had been bought in a store. She had a brother who raised chickens, so we never had a turkey at Thanksgiving. I studied the clarinet for a while. I can still taste the reed.” Sweet was saying this in an indignant tone that was gathering momentum to become furious. “Every Saturday morning the two of them would vacuum the basement!”
Reinhart said, mollifyingly: “Routine people, with all their little rituals, are what makes the world go round.”
“No, they are not,” Sweet said decisively. “They don’t make anything do anything. They are made. They accept, they endure. I can’t tell you how happy I was to learn that I did not owe life to the Sweets. I could afford to ignore rather than hate them.”
Reinhart found this a desolating point of view. He protested: “But that’s not all there is to families. My dad was a pretty mediocre guy, too, and my mother has always been something of a crank without an aim, so far as I can see. Not everybody cares about power. It’s probably a basic difference in taste. Most people want merely to live. Or anyway they used to. Nowadays you are assaulted from every direction by people who want to do something with or to you. They foist all kinds of responsibilities on you while disclaiming their own. My wife is leaving me because I am not a success at business, though she never encouraged me in any of my efforts. My son blames me personally for the war, poverty, and the Negro problem, and yet when I try to discuss these matters with him he reviles me with obscenities. I catch him in a criminal act, and he falsely accuses me of a worse one.”
Vital Parts Page 34
