Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  “Let’s face it, Carl,” Sweet said cruelly. “You have proved my case. It would be better for all concerned if your son were an orphan.”

  But pride had a will of its own. Without thinking, Reinhart was moved to strike back. “I don’t call Eunice the result of a successful fatherhood.”

  Sweet laughed brutally.

  Reinhart said: “I envy your detachment.” But he regretted his vengefulness as usual. All unhappy families were no doubt different, as mentioned in the opening lines of Anna Karenina. He actually could not picture Genevieve with a lover, as an Anna K. or Emma Bovary. Living persons were never as susceptible of definition as imaginary characters. Sweet for example could shrug off a daughter, and seemed none the worse for it. Perhaps because of this, Reinhart felt no uneasiness at the thought that he had himself been intimate with Eunice; no sense of triumph, either.

  Bob said: “The family as an institution will probably have disappeared by the time the frozen are revived, along with war and poverty. The poor may always be with us as statistics, but an impoverished man, as individual, will have centuries in which to improve his lot. Social problems of the kind man has always known will be merely temporary inconveniences. One might be hungry, but no longer can he die from starvation. Wars may still occur, but no longer will anyone be killed in them. They will in fact turn into games.”

  Reinhart was conscious of a pressure being applied to him, to what end he knew not, but he reacted to it in the form of embarrassment and turned to look at the monkey.

  “Six weeks, you say? Shouldn’t you call the newspapers and Life magazine?”

  “Not till we have our man,” said Bob. “Not till he has been there and come back and can tell about it. The greatest news story of all time. Think of it, Carl. It will make the hydrogen bomb seem like the bursting of a paper bag.”

  Reinhart stood erect. “Just a moment, Bob. Aren’t you forgetting something? The body will be dead, clinically speaking. Hans will not be dealing with a healthy, living organism like this monkey. Your story will be only that you have taken a corpse and frozen it.”

  Sweet nodded vigorously. “Go on, Carl. Pursue that line of thinking.”

  “It is only a theory that the body can be revived in the distant future. The fact is that it is stone dead at the moment, by the orthodox definition. In other words, so what? I think you will find that reaction widespread, Bob. Whereas if you had some kind of proof—” Reinhart glanced towards the shelves where reposed the other cylinders allegedly containing frozen small-animal bodies. “Photographs should have been taken from start to finish. If Hans has more monkeys he should film them while they are still in the frozen state, then when they are thawed. Movies, really, are what you should have.”

  Sweet said: “I notice you keep saying ‘you,’ Carl. Are you dissociating yourself from this project?”

  “Just a way of talking,” Reinhart explained hypocritically. “I feel a bit shy at this point. I am beyond my depth when it comes to science.”

  “Or anything else,” said Sweet. “One might say bluntly that you are redundant in the logistics of life.”

  For a moment Reinhart was charmed with the felicity of the phrase, and even its justice. The military idiom was appropriate to the rock-bottom residue of his morality: the old Stoic vivere militare: to live is to be a soldier.

  Then he bridled. “I tender my resignation.”

  He had never known Sweet to laugh heartily. Bob resembled Genevieve in the trait of humorlessness. It was true of most of the forceful personages Reinhart had come across in four decades. Thus he was struck by the incongruity of Bob’s mirth. The man positively howled, with a violence which might have unseated a less precise set of dentures. Reinhart’s dad, for example, never guffawed after losing his natural choppers.

  Reinhart’s indignation surged beyond itself and became self-pity.

  “It is shameful,” he said, “to use a man’s self-criticism against him. That’s the technique of women and politicians. How much humiliation do people want of me? I was once a young man, and I had some good ideas. I have never knowingly been mean or false.” And of course, Jim Jackson’s voice was heard in instant rebuttal: You meanly cut off Blaine’s hair and you consorted with a common prostitute, false to your vows of marriage.

  Reinhart backed against the table edge and secured himself with both hands.

  Sweet removed his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief, transforming himself into a sort of Dick Tracy villain: Mr. Noface.

  “That’s a quotation from David Copperfield,” said Reinhart. “I forget the rest of it—oh yes, ‘cruel.’ ‘Never be false, never be mean, never be cruel.’ Davy’s aunt told him that.”

  Respectacled, Sweet said: “Have you really lived by slogans? Carl, you lack authenticity. You are the product of other people’s passions and choices. You might one day be killed by someone else’s statement to the effect that you do not exist. Is it really the role of a man to be inoffensive?”

  Reinhart stared wildly about, then took a purchase of eye on the point where Streckfuss’ neck hair touched the collar of the lab coat.

  “I suppose it’s preferable to be a Nazi doctor, performing experiments on the inmates of concentration camps.”

  “There goes your claim to a lack of cruelty,” Sweet said in disgust.

  Further discretion was pointless. Reinhart said: “The Israelis are looking for him, Bob.” Streckfuss had settled down to his apparatus again: he was a monster of coolness.

  “Of all things to say.” Bob swiveled his head, eyelids lowered. “Hans was a prisoner for years in Buchenwald. He survived only because the SS officers preferred him to their own doctors.”

  Reinhart knew in the clarity of dread that Sweet was not being ironic. He asked pitifully: “He’s a Jew?”

  Streckfuss turned then. He said: “No, I tried zat once and it almost got me killed. I disclaim any ethnic, national, or political identity.”

  Reinhart looked between his own shoes. “What can I say?”

  “Nussing which would concern me,” Streckfuss answered. “I take no interest in morality. I regard even myself as an organism, of which the constituent parts are replaceable. I have no desires, and do not understand anyvun who has. I have spent zuh lahst thirty years in that condition and I prefer it.” He put some test tubes into a machine and threw the switch. It whirred.

  “Carl,” said Bob Sweet. “How about it?”

  Reinhart was still treading water in misery. “Me and my big mouth. But it’s more than that. There was a time when I thought the best of everybody until proved wrong. I guess I just can’t stand reality any more, because it is both commonplace and unexpected, and whichever comes along I am in the mood for the other. When you are young it is no great tragedy to jump at conclusions. If you still do it in middle age you are a clown.”

  “Carl, nothing would be more convenient than if you took a vacation at full pay.”

  Mention of money brought Reinhart partway out of his wallow. “I know it’s vulgar of me, in view of all this, but I am down to my small change. I do have to pay that room rent soon.”

  “There you are,” Sweet said. “Living at the YMCA at your age. Why didn’t you book a suite at the Shade-Milton Hotel and charge it to the firm? They have a heated pool and a sun club. You could have met girls there.”

  Reinhart inhaled. “Look, Bob, I want to say I have acted like a gentleman with Eunice. I wouldn’t want you to think I took liberties with your daughter.”

  “My daughter?” Again Bob laughed heartily. “That idiot? If she was my daughter I would freeze her. Her father’s Barker Munsing, that psychoanalyst at the end of our office hall. Anyway, Carl, you are a liar. You have been fucking her night and day.” Suddenly Sweet lost his good humor, if indeed it had been such. “You must be sick. Would I tell you my daughter was a nympho?”

  Reinhart shook his head violently, but not at the question. “I suppose there would be no pain?”

  “Absolutely
none,” said Bob. “That’s an assurance you could not get if you were to jump off the Bloor Building.” He knew everything.

  “There was a guy who came looking for Professor Streckfuss,” Reinhart said.

  “A dealer in laboratory equipment,” Bob said. “He had our office address. He delivered that new centrifuge that Hans is using right now.”

  “You see how I am,” said Reinhart. “I ignored the fellow who turned out to be the sniper, and thought this guy an Israeli undercover agent. But those photographers—who were they? My father-in-law disclaims all knowledge of that stunt. Of course he could be lying.”

  “Eunice has a pretty scummy crew of friends,” Bob said negligently. “What did they do, want to sell you some pornographic snapshots?”

  “No,” said Reinhart. “They depicted me in some.” He found this admission almost painless.

  “There’s a lot you would be escaping,” Bob said, “and that’s putting it at the worst. At the best there is international celebrity.” He gestured. “There’s What’s-his-name, the South African dentist with the heart transplant, formerly anonymous, now a household word. And for the book and magazine people you could write your own ticket, not to mention the movies.”

  “Yes,” said Reinhart, “‘that undiscovered bourne from which no traveler returns …’” The freezer program would nullify all of Shakespearean tragedy: maudlin slop from the unenlightened time when men lay down and died.

  “Let me ask you one question,” he said to Bob. “Was this your plan for me from the beginning?”

  Sweet frowned. “Not really. When I saw you at Gino’s what I remember thinking of immediately was a vengeful ambition I had as a boy. I always swore I would get you back for that bullying.”

  “Goddammit, Bob!” Reinhart struck the table behind him, forgetting about the monkey, who made a sputtering sound. “I am guilty of many things, but that’s not one of them, I tell you.” But in a malignant vision he saw himself as a large boy of sixteen, shoving the frail Sweetie away from the drinking fountain, getting him back from Paul Jeckel’s push, then sending him again across the circle like a medicine ball. It had been a mindless amusement, innocent of deliberate malice. When Reinhart himself had been very small, a big girl had beaten him up. He doubted that she would remember. Death might be on its last legs, but envy, spite, and vengeance would still make the world go around.

  Bob was smiling generously. “Carl, Carl, do you seriously think I have nothing better to do than hold a childish grudge? You are probably right: it was two other guys—”

  “I don’t know what you’d do,” said Reinhart. “I don’t know how you made your money or even where you live. You couldn’t prove by me that you own anything but that Bentley.”

  “Nor that,” Sweet said pleasantly. “I hire it, in fact, at a hundred dollars a day. I live at the Shade-Milton. I own very little, and lease what I need because of the tax advantages. I speculate in commodity futures.”

  The lingo of investors had always been Greek to Reinhart. He had picked up the occasional paperback on how to play the market and ritualistically read the financial page on Sundays but he really understood only the taking of gain from wages or small personal businesses, and of course the simple direct crimes such as pilfering and burglary, not embezzlement.

  “That’s what I was doing yesterday in Berne. I lease storage facilities there.”

  “I see,” said Reinhart, who did not. But it didn’t really matter now.

  “Cocoa,” said Bob.

  Reinhart rallied for a moment, on the strength of suspicion. “I thought you had withdrawn from active participation in the world of finance. I thought you said you had committed yourself wholly to this project, and put your money into the Cryon Foundation. And whether or not you were in Switzerland yesterday, or have extensive deposits in Swiss banks, as Eunice, who is not your daughter, claims, you did meet Professor Streckfuss there, as you yourself assert. And whether or not he is a hero instead of the villain I so foolishly thought for a while, without any evidence, he is not licensed to practice medicine in this country.”

  “What are you getting at?” asked Sweet.

  Reinhart stood up. His right buttock was asleep. “Merely,” he said, socking it, “that my life exists in all-too precise detail. I am a very literal guy. Are you proposing that I sell you my soul?”

  “On the contrary, you are a romantic, Carl,” Bob said. He went to the monkey’s cage and began to unfasten the door. Its lock proved much more complicated than had been supposed by Reinhart when he groped at it in a mischievous intent to free the animal. Bob’s comment was to the point. “Otto has a certain sense of mechanics. He can open simple bolts and levers, and he is a good mimic of motions. He just struck himself on the behind, imitating you. But a series of fastenings, moving in different axes, bores him. Don’t they, Otto, you little moron?”

  Otto bared a pink mouth with its circumference of many little teeth, spread-eagled his hairy body across the front of the cage, and plucked at Sweet’s fingers with his own leathery digits. But Bob persisted.

  Reinhart said: “He’s going to be a son of a bitch to catch if he gets out.”

  Sweet poked the monkey’s pink belly. Otto grabbed himself, and Bob swung the door open. Otto extended his long arm, hooked a finger into the bars, and slammed it shut.

  Sweet said: “Come on, Otto. Be free.”

  The monkey chittered at him.

  “He’s mad,” said Reinhart, meaning both “angry” and also referring to the “craziness” imputed to the smaller of the nonhuman primates. Whereas a gorilla was never thought to be nuts in the funny way, probably because he might kill if he went off his rocker. Size really was an important criterion among the whole ape family.

  “I’ll bet you’re the kind of guy who feels sorry for animals in zoos,” Sweet said. “Look: he’s fighting to stay inside.”

  Otto and Bob were playing a finger game in which each tried to pry the other’s hand off the door.

  “I’ll tell you why I prefer animals to a lot of people,” Reinhart started to say.

  “Oh, I know why,” Bob answered. “Because animals act by instinct. That seems healthy, morally clean, nature’s way, as opposed to the corrupt practices of human beings.”

  “Let me put it to Hans,” Reinhart said, speaking towards the scientist’s back. “Name me the animal that operates a concentration camp.”

  Streckfuss was taking the test tubes from the centrifuge. “Les fourmis,” he said.

  “What?” Reinhart applied to Sweet.

  “Ants.” Bob had the door open again. The monkey cowered against the back bars.

  “I want to prove something,” said Bob. He plunged his arm in and seized Otto by the neck. The monkey grasped the bars with one paw and with the other tore at the stranglehold.

  “This is disgusting!” Reinhart shouted. “Let it alone, for Christ sake. It is a poor helpless creature. It has just been frozen and thawed. Isn’t that enough?”

  Sweet seemed to be enjoying himself. “I’ve got a tiger by the tail,” he said from a tight jaw. “It’s a standoff at this point. If I let him go now he’ll bite me. Otto, you are no Patrick Henry.”

  “It’s a completely false situation,” Reinhart protested. “He’s scared of this lab. Be different if we were in a jungle.”

  “Otto’s never seen a jungle. He was born in captivity. Metal and concrete are as familiar to him as to us, and human speech. Yet he could not build the crudest shelter, nor say a one-syllabled word. He has the hands and the vocal chords, but he doesn’t have the will for it, Carl. He does not sow and therefore cannot reap.” Bob’s arm trembled with the monkey’s efforts to dislodge it. His shoulder-cap was braced against his chin.

  Reinhart remembered some old Army jujitsu for use against an assailant who went for the throat: you peeled his fingers back one by one and broke them. If taken from behind you reached back and applied excruciating pain to his genitals. Why did he identify with the monkey?
>
  With a sudden effort Sweet ripped Otto off the bars and brought him out. “There you go, Carl,” he shouted. Then he hurled the monkey at him.

  Otto embraced Reinhart with his hairy limbs. He threw his head back and pushed his features forward. There was a little dark vee of hair between his tiny mad eyes. He smacked his lips rapidly.

  Reinhart wondered where the bite would come, tip of nose or deep into the jugular. He was helpless against animal irrationality, and the ape could tell, as a dog or horse could smell fear. That is the ethic of the beast: sheer opportunism, the old power play, kill or knuckle under.

  But Otto scrambled up Reinhart’s chest and began to pluck at his crew cut.

  “He’s grooming you,” said a chuckling Sweet. “That is a form of placation. He is acknowledging you as the superor animal, Carl.”

  Reinhart loved it when the barber massaged his head with fingers or, better, the vibrator, to get the old circulation going, to stimulate the natural oils. Way back in time, Maw used to wash his hair for him, and hold his skull in the rinse until he almost drowned.

  “Ouch!” The monkey too vigorously had pulled a hair. Actually, it felt good. He cradled Otto’s skinny behind, which seemed to be mainly pointed bones, in one hand, and patted the hairy back with the other.

  “As you see,” said Bob, “he’s a fine, healthy fellow.”

  Otto had a strong but not repellent stench. He inserted a skinny finger in Reinhart’s left earhole.

  “He will get after all your fleas,” Sweet added.

  Reinhart recoiled from the tickle. Perhaps he should have gone into zoology, of which he had taken one course to satisfy the freshman requirement in science, dissecting a huge bullfrog. Its circulatory system was injected with pigment. His partner in lab was a girl named Jackie Heath, who thought the frog’s arteries were naturally colored yellow. She had a cast in her eye, was otherwise bodily perfect. While he deliberated on whether or not to take her to a movie, a lecturer in speech got her pregnant, was fired, and she left school—in the last week before exams, because the frog came at the end of the course.