Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  Bob removed his glasses. Now Reinhart remembered why he could not earlier remember how Bob had looked while rinsing his spectacles in Gino’s washroom. The face tended to be indistinct, as though looking straight-on you were seeing it from the corner of your eye. Reinhart found it difficult to say why this was so. Only Bob’s hair now had authority, the fuzzy gray sideburns, the rich, virile crest. His features were all very regular, like those shown in learn-cartooning-by-mail manuals, but the composite, which then should have been a Steve Canyon or Smilin’ Jack, was, inexplicably, not.

  Bob said patiently, colorlessly: “I am trying to explain that there will be no charge. This is a nonprofit enterprise.” His fist clenched quickly, then slowly opened like an octopus testing its environment. “I can promise you nothing, but if you permit this experiment to take place, you might have a part in history. …” He lost his voice and raised his eyes hopelessly to Reinhart.

  It was the most extraordinary thing. Reinhart wanted to cry: I’m sorry I thought you were a swindler but there are so many extant and, after all, to talk of abolishing Death—but I see you mean it.

  Did he have a viable process? Reinhart did not know, or at the moment care, because Bob was sincere. Reinhart reached across the desk and seized the mike, a little ball of wire mesh.

  He spoke fervently into it: “You just give us your name and address, and where the patient can be found. We’ll arrange the rest. Let’s set up an appointment. Better have the doctor there. This is a historical occasion. No, that’s putting it too lamely. The Wright Brothers were small-time in this light. Your dad may live again! In a hundred, a thousand years, what do petty details matter? Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander the Great, they are all dust to stop a bung-hole or however the quote goes, for Shakespeare too was a transitory incident. Can you understand, sir? Truth may change and Time itself, Life as we know it. Words, words. I beg of you, don’t put any obstacles in the path. Don’t question, don’t doubt. You cannot lose. It finally comes down to that, does it not?”

  The voice laughed.

  Reinhart joined it, the wind of divine amusement in his sails. “It is crazy and frightening and brave and majestic. Think what man can do without the fear of death. The mind as yet cannot cope with so glorious a concept. But to put it simply: no mistake will be final. The whole idea of termination, of any sort, will be obsolete. Now, where can we find your father? If he is willing, how can you hesitate?”

  The voice, which had continued to laugh in the regular rhythm of a machine whose function was to tumble that which it treated, wet wash or concrete, now stopped with a shudder.

  “Greenwood Cemetery,” it said. “He died in 1956.”

  Reinhart looked questioningly at Bob Sweet. “Well, sir,” he said seriously. “I don’t think … Let me check with my associate.” What a horrible disappointment. Surely the process would not … The man was a crank. Reinhart was shrinking.

  “Don’t bother,” said the voice. “You are as full of shit as a Christmas goose.” And hung up.

  Sweet wore his glasses again. “Not the first hoaxer, and not the last. Don’t give it another thought.”

  Reinhart said: “I can understand an eccentric better than a joker, a demented or deluded person. But how do you explain a guy like this? All that trouble for a laugh?”

  “Well, that’s America, isn’t it?” Sweet noted lightly as he pushed away the gadgets that had made the call public to the room at large, though actually privy only to himself and Reinhart. Why, in fact, had Sweet done that? When just previously he had been showing a definite disinclination to give Reinhart a role?

  Jealously Reinhart said: “I believe he took you in for a while.”

  “He certainly did,” Sweet admitted, seeming not to mind. “You learn to accept these things. One day someone will call who seems bogus, but will be serious. When the police get a bomb threat they have to check it out. The ‘public’ is a collection of individuals though politicians pretend otherwise.”

  Reinhart shrugged knowingly though he still did not quite get it. “Bob,” he said, “is there really a sound scientific basis for this freezing process?”

  Sweet stared at him. “You seemed to have no doubts when exhorting our friend just now.”

  “A lot of that was the excitement of the moment, I guess. It is a wonderful vision when you’re caught up in it. And the really formidable argument is that one cannot lose: he’ll die anyway. Unless his heirs have to put out a lot of money. But you answered that objection, didn’t you?”

  “Not a penny for the first volunteer,” Sweet said. “Now, if that is not an expression of good faith, I don’t know what is.”

  “Especially from a man who understands money,” Reinhart said. “That makes it all the more impressive. Just how did you get into this in the first place?”

  A clout sounded against the door, and the big girl lumbered into the room. Reinhart had been prepared on arrival that morning for a row with her, but impassively she had sent him right in to Sweet. She wore an orange jersey dress, thin as a Navy skivvy shirt and hardly longer than the tail thereof.

  “Excuse me, Bob,” she said. “But I’m dying of suspense.”

  Sweet explained, and she dropped her massive mane in despair.

  “Why are they so square?” she asked the floor. “People are dying every minute. Why can’t we have one, just one?”

  Sweet smiled gently at her, and then said to Reinhart: “Why don’t you make up to Eunice? She’s quite a nice girl.”

  Embarrassing Reinhart, of course. The bad blood between them was scarcely his fault. But, gallant as he instinctively was, he got out of the chair, nodded, murmured, and was prepared to shake hands if she extended hers.

  “An old, old friend of mine,” Sweet told her, leaning back with his hands on his nape, and, for Reinhart, “The best secretary I have ever had.”

  She kept her hands to herself, but peeped sideways through the edge of her hair. Reinhart wished she would wear a brassiere. Her protuberant nipples were large as percolator caps.

  “Hi,” she said, then glanced at her boss.

  Sweet said easily: “Why don’t you guys get to know each other?”

  Why, thought Reinhart, an awful lot of why’s are cropping up, amid a famine of because.

  Sweet said: “People sometimes say cruel things through ignorance. Carl, for example, was being malicious about you earlier, but I’m sure he can revise his opinion.”

  Reinhart froze though not a corpse. Through gelid lips he mumbled: “Not true, miss. A sick joke, believe me.”

  “God,” said she without apparent offense, “I was a little kid when those were in. I had a hula hoop. ‘Can I interest you in a pair of Bermuda shorts, Mr. Toulouse-Lautrec?’ That was one, wasn’t it? I happened to understand it because I had seen the movie played by the man walking on his knees.”

  Sweet was smirking. What a swine he was, in some complicated way.

  “I dote on movies,” Eunice said humorlessly. “They seem to me to present the characteristic atmosphere of our kinetic time, along with rock. Words are out.”

  Reinhart was still humiliated. He sidled away to the window and looked on the characteristic atmosphere of our time, the smog-boa around the city’s neck.

  “Why don’t you guys see a film together?” Sweet persisted. He was some kind of pervert. An air-conditioning outlet below the window was chilling Reinhart’s genitals. He moved away.

  “Look, Bob,” he said. “Can we talk business?”

  “What do you think?” Sweet asked Eunice. “Can we use this big hunk of man?” He smiled at Reinhart. “He is at liberty. He has no other current ties.”

  Eunice deliberately sized Reinhart up.

  Sweet said: “This healthy brute.”

  She frowned and gathered in her gums, as in that device of mimicking the toothless, then released the lip-compression with a pop! “Umm.” A glorious, carnivorous show of teeth. “I happen,” said she, grinning, “to be free this evening.”
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br />   Reinhart’s eyebrows virtually met his cheekbones. He squinted out between.

  “That will be all,” Sweet said to Eunice, who replied: “OK, Bob.” She turned, dropped a pencil on the floor, bent to fetch it with straight legs, and Reinhart saw the cheeks of her behind again. She breezed out.

  Sweet threw his head back and pantomimed a howl of mirth. When the door was shut he leaned forward and said: “Hell, why not.”

  “I just want a piece of the business, Bob. I can put in five grand. That may not be much by your lights, but it does serve to show you I am not a beggar. Now I would be obliged to you if you would take me seriously. If you aren’t interested, then throw me out.”

  “Come on, Carl, loosen up.”

  “You’ve changed since the other day, you know. Do you realize that? Is it a result of the credit check? I thought I had confessed to you already. Did you think I would kid you about my record? It’s hopeless, I admit that freely.”

  “Even boastfully,” said Sweet, shaking his head.

  “I never have been a liar. I am proud of that. And I haven’t been cruel. I don’t think anybody could make that charge.” Except Blaine, but father-son relations were private and, whatever, normal. “Nor am I dishonest.”

  “What strange things to brag about,” said Sweet. “Do you really think that list contains anything to attract me? Even if it were true. Aren’t you lying by implication right now? If precedents have any meaning—and you apparently believe they do—you will make a mess of any enterprise. Is it not dishonest then to offer yourself to me? Is it, in fact, not cruel? Because that is what you are doing.” Bob smiled. “‘Take me though I’m worthless.’ That is supposed to seem like candor, and I am supposed to conclude from it that you might be valuable for your honesty.”

  “No,” said Reinhart. “I see how it looks, but what I meant was that I was straight in my business dealings, to the best of my ability. I never knowingly cheated anyone.”

  “But your creditors were forced to take a forty percent loss. Why would they care whether it was kowingly! These words are meaningless, Carl. And I wouldn’t mind exploding another fixed idea of yours: that you are a good guy.”

  Reinhart shook his head violently. “I never made that claim.”

  “It is implicit, once again, in your whole style. Even when you concede your judgment was bad, you mean instead your luck. Perhaps in some grand way, you put the blame on fate—it is bad luck your judgment is bad. How does that sound?”

  “No,” said Reinhart. “I’m not so childish as to believe in luck. I know a man makes his own. One can trace back to certain turnings in his life, which if not taken—or others which if taken, etcetera. For example, my marriage. I knew Genevieve was a snob when I married her. She got that from her father. I hated his guts on sight, and vice versa. And, farther back, my mother was never proud of me. I guess she loved me in her own way, but even when I got home from the Army she wouldn’t listen to my stories but told me about the service experiences of the neighbor guys. She always acted—well, I know it sounds crazy, but, jealous of me. However, since my dad died she has changed. For one thing she has become, sporadically, a paranoiac. Well, she’s an old lady—”

  “You’re running off at the mouth, Carl, and confirming what I said.”

  Reinhart had sat down again in the leather chair, where he did not feel so big and exposed. Sweet now rose and wandered slowly about in his handsome suit of gray nailhead worsted and supple black oxfords.

  “Let me tell you this, Carl. As long as material success escapes you, you regard it as an end. Women go along with this: getting the ones you want, controlling those you have, and so on. I’m not sneering at materialism, by any means. There are values in it. Art, for example, is certainly materialistic in itself and as to what it depicts. Had I lived a century ago I might have had a great house, full of rich, dusky oils and luxurious bronzes, stained glass illuminating the stairwells, and so on. This is not the time for that sort of thing. You see magazine photos of the apartments of public relations men: whitewashed walls, floor-to-ceiling paper posters, extruded-plastic trash to sit on. Like our reception room here, which incidentally was decorated by Eunice.”

  “Your clothes are certainly fine,” said Reinhart.

  Sweet nipped an inch of lapel between thumb and forefinger. “Forty dollars in Kowloon.”

  “What,” asked wide-referenced Reinhart, “were you doing in Hong Kong?”

  “Business or pleasure?” Sweet rhetorically demanded. “Neither, really. You know the old joke, Do you want to go around the world? No, I want to go someplace else. In Europe one year I took a tour of the world’s tiniest countries, of which the largest was Luxembourg. San Marino is the smallest. It has, if I am not mistaken, a Communist majority in its government, yet women have had the franchise there only since 1964.”

  Reinhart’s right leg had got bored at his crossed-ankle position and gone to sleep. The day was when hearing a progression of apparent nonsequiturs he would immediately label the speaker a halfwit or rascal, but he had trudged into an age of nonlinear expression. He once had seen on the Alp Show a man pull a concertina to pieces while a girl in a bikini and space helmet bullwhipped a dummy and a greasy, squatting youth plucked at a one-stringed instrument imported from Asia. These persons professed academic connections with the fine-arts department of a major Eastern university.

  “In short,” said Sweet, perching his butt on the edge of the desk nearest Reinhart, “nothing makes any sense to me any more but the preservation of life. And if you think this is because I am unusually charitable, you are wrong, though I have placed my fortune at the disposal of this project. I was serious when I said I would freeze the first man at no cost to him. Yet I suspect that underneath it all you still think this is something of a racket.” He thrust his arm at Reinhart. “No, I know you do. And why not? Nobody believes in God any more, but neither is there an ultimate faith in science. I’ll tell you about myself. I used to fear Death. Now my feeling is a vicious hatred. I resent the hold it has over people as a fixed idea. But if you look at history you will find no idea has survived: the divine right of kings, the feudal code, slavery. And the earth was flat as a pancake until Columbus proved it otherwise.”

  Reinhart grinned. “You have to admit that Death is a hard nut to crack.”

  “I wonder,” Sweet said in the tone of a man who does not.

  “What I don’t know,” Reinhart admitted, “is just how you got into this, Bob. But as I look back on my intellectual history, I find that I relate to theories and ideas on the basis of the man who exemplifies them. Perhaps this is not the best way, but personality, in its widest sense, not charm or fluency alone, is what convinces me in the beginning.”

  “It is amazing, then, that you were so eloquent on the phone. Undoubtedly you feel the rightness about this endeavor, and that is important.”

  “What I sense, I think,” said Reinhart, “is your basic selfishness. You do not want to die.”

  Sweet cocked his head. The definite margins between the grayness of his sideburns and the dark hair of the temples made Reinhart wonder whether he dyed one or the other, whether the brown or the gray was false. With this speculation he compensated for his admission of faith, which had been honest enough, but all men are competitive. Reinhart admired Sweet because the latter had done what he would have liked to do in life. He also hated him for it, in a healthy way.

  Sweet said: “I want you to meet our scientific director. Have you got a minute?” He buzzed Eunice and told her to call his car. Then to Reinhart: “Are you serious about breaking up with your wife?”

  “Why would I lie about that? It hardly puts me in a favorable light.” Reinhart realized, when he saw Sweet depress the intercom key, that Eunice might have heard. “You seem to be throwing me at her, or vice versa, for some reason.”

  Sweet said levelly: “She’s a nymphomaniac, Carl.”

  Reinhart’s scalp crawled from nape to eyebrows. “Jesus, I’m emb
arrassed by my embarrassment. Mind you, I’m no prude, but I really haven’t cheated on Gen all these years.”

  He didn’t count of course his occasional visits to Gloria since Genevieve had preferred to sleep alone, because that was a business arrangement. Then there had been some friend of Gen’s in the little-theater group, once back in ’55 or ’56, a neurasthenic, serpentine divorcee. A few kisses and fondling of neighbors’ wives when drunk at parties and waiting in upstairs halls for the bathroom to empty.

  A few other bits and pieces, and some forgotten totally no doubt, the point being that Reinhart had not fallen in love with anybody, something he had done frequently when unmarried, usually, in early youth, with girls of whom he had never gained carnal knowledge. Unlike many persons he never waxed nostalgic about bachelorhood. His lust for teen-agers nowadays was a romantic illusion, mixed with spite.

  “You talk like some women’s magazine article,” Sweet said derisively. “‘Cheating.’ A man has needs.”

  “This really embarrasses me, Bob.” Why, in the Army Reinhart had been wont to talk of pussy for hours. But he had been young then, and it did not matter.

  Sweet shrugged and went out into the reception room, where Eunice was plucking away at a typewriter, by no means competently. As far as Reinhart could see, she was the only employee at Cryon.

  “We’re going out to see Streckfuss,” Sweet told her.

  “Sure, Bob.” She did not look up, being in the act of striking, with a long pale nail, an elusive key. She got the wrong one, tried again, saying, “Shhhh-ugar.” Reinhart had not heard that in years. He wondered whether girls still said “funny-haha or funny-peculiar?” Her robust thighs were bare under the spindly typing table.

  Reinhart was hoping she would not look at him, yet he could not forbear from watching her closely to see if she would. Sweet had probably just been baiting him.

  “Come along, Carl,” Sweet said, holding the door open.

  Eunice glanced up indifferently at him. “You can pick me up here when you come back.”