“Maybe I should have gone into a profession that dealt with animals,” he said to Bob. Otto clasped his neck affectionately, reminiscent of Winona as an infant. “Contrary to what you might think, what I like about them is their selfishness.”
“Better watch yourself, Carl,” said Sweet, adjusting the sleeves of his jacket. “Otto is not yet full grown. I doubt he’s housebroken.”
Reinhart chortled bitterly. “Oh, everybody shits on—”
“Don’t say it!” Bob ordered. “As to when I formulated a plan for you, I did not. I loathe people whose demand for sympathy conceals their wish to be exploited. I will choose my own prey, thank you. I do not feed on the decaying carcass of someone else’s kill, like a hyena, who is also noted for its laugh. If you are offering yourself to be frozen, it must be your decision alone. You must sign a legal waiver. We will make no promises whatever. Your blood will be drained and replaced with glycerol, your body will be suspended in liquid nitrogen at minus one hundred and ninety-seven degrees Centigrade, or about three hundred and eighty-six below zero Fahrenheit. You will be dead to the world.”
Reinhart dandled Otto in his arms. The monkey put its face into his neck below the ear.
Bob said: “But do you have any better offers?”
Reinhart did not find the question cruel. It was justified, and literal. He approved of its morally realistic tone. He no longer thought of Bob and Hans as sinister. They were merely doing a job something he had never been able to manage because he had always been obsessed with the existence of other people. For the first time in his life he accepted the commonplace yet terrifying truth that everybody would still be here when he was gone.
“It’s tougher than I thought,” he said. “I guess in my heart I had always assumed I would be overpowered. It’s true I have toyed with thoughts of suicide, but I actually never went so far as climbing up the barrier on the Bloor Tower. I mean, I could have done that and still been a fake—you know, the way a guy will walk out on a ledge and let some cop talk him in. Meanwhile he has attracted a crowd, who yell: ‘Jump!’ That is always deplored in the papers, with the same sort of bullshit they produce after an assassination. Whom are they addressing? Everybody and thus nobody.”
Otto made happy little grunts.
“A crowd can’t be indicted for anything,” said Reinhart. “Even in an outright lynch mob there are only a half-dozen persons who touch the victim, and no one was ever killed by yells, however hateful.” He stroked Otto’s hair. “I have been alone most of my life, even or especially when accompanied. I have often made that observation. I doubt that it is original. When I was young I had all sorts of exciting ideas about morality, government, business, love. In time I discovered that if they were any good I had plagiarized them from some great thinker. If genuinely original they didn’t work.”
Otto gave him a kind of kiss on the earlobe. Were there queer monkeys?
“In fact,” Reinhart went on nihilistically, “they didn’t even seem to work when they were the intellectual property of the great philosophers. Socrates was poisoned, if you recall, and Nietzsche lost his mind.”
He wanted to put Otto back in the cage, but the monkey clung to him.
“Otto is an interesting name,” he said. “It’s spelled the same in both directions.” He tried to pry him off. “Funny how he likes me all of a sudden. He began by hitting me with that cork. What becomes of him now, Bob? Will you keep him as a pet?”
Sweet grabbed the monkey from behind, and between them they got him back inside the bars. Bob said: “Hans has to run a number of tests on him, not only physical but psychological, to determine whether the freezing has left any effects.” He squinted at Reinhart. “Not only ill effects. Perhaps there are improvements. Who knows? That’s what science is, a search for knowledge.”
“And that’s what knowledge is,” said Reinhart; “Both good and bad. It seems to come out even in the end. ‘The unexamined life,’ said Socrates, ‘is not worth living.’ But what is the price of the examined one, if they poison you in the end? After Otto is finished with the colored blocks, etc., Hans will dissect him and look at his brain tissue through the microscope.”
Streckfuss had come up silently on his rubber soles, a fact of which Reinhart had the first inkling when Otto shrank and whimpered.
“Mister Reinhart.” Streckfuss had never used the name before; he pronounced it in the authentic, uvular, Central European style. “No doubt you can sink of many ironies on the subject of monkeys, but they are not actually men. If you prick a monkey he vill bleed, and so on, but they have no potential. Me, I do not deny that Otto was named for an SS officer of my acquaintance twenty-five years in the past, but it may astonish you if I say he was not one of the most bestial: rather, human all-too human, in the vords of the crazy Nietzsche.”
This seemed a paradox, if Reinhart heard it correctly. He said: “I’m sorry I got this crazy idea you might be a Nazi scientist.”
“Your regret is misplaced,” Streckfuss said. “Vot does it matter to me unless you have some serious criticism of my experimental method? Science is not ethical but quantitative. The poison of the Latrodectus spider is among the most virulent, but seldom kills an organism as large as a man, becows of the difference in size. Dinosaurs, on the ozzer hand, were too big to lahst. A baleine”—he snapped his fingers.
“Whale,” said Bob Sweet.
“A whale must be aquatic, you see, for the water supports its great weight. A land animal cannot be much larger than an elephant and survive, owing to gravity. There are natural laws, and zey give us a form and a scale for tings. Nature has worked out its principles slowly, making mistakes of course. One must never sink there is an end to possibility. The moon, for example, with its lesser gravity, would be a sympathetic terrain for the dinosaur and larger, but for the kinds of animals we know now, the atmosphere is wrong.”
Reinhart briefly experienced the splendor of Streckfuss’ scope, as if he were watching Cinerama: the thrill without the danger, the satisfaction one derives, in simulation, from the risky ambitions of other people. During the era of 3-D, elephants trampled you in your seat.
“As a philosopher,” Streckfuss said, “you must know Aristotle: ‘No one can understand nature fully nor miss it altogether, but as each makes his contribution there arises a structure that has a certain grandeur.’”
“OK,” said Reinhart, who had been brought up on the cocky heroes of the silver screen and now found courage in the echo of their idiom. Perhaps vulgarity was fundamental to all heroism. He would have been scared to say, Yes, you may freeze me. “OK. You got your boy.”
16
In his moment of bravado Reinhart had been ready to climb into the freezer capsule immediately, as the movie pilot leaps into the cockpit and, the point of view necessarily switching from participant to spectator, is soon thereafter seen diving down the smokestack of a Japanese battleship.
But reality, however fantastic, consists in specificities, seen from one perspective only. For example, Streckfuss had on hand insufficient liquid nitrogen to freeze a mouse. An order was long overdue, owing, said Bob, to a slowdown of the deliverymen’s union, perhaps preparatory to an outright strike.
With the new energy derived from his decision to give up, Reinhart seized the phone and called the supplier’s number.
“Listen here,” he said, “this is a scientific institution—”
“And we are a business,” said the spokesman on the other end. “If you will pay for your last shipment, we might consider making another.”
Sweet received this information laconically.
“Jesus Christ,” said Reinhard. “I just don’t understand you, Bob.”
“I’ve had to put up some cash margins,” said Sweet. “No cause for alarm. I can get a loan on the warehouse receipts for my storage at Berne.” He dialed a number and began a conversation that might have been in Urdu or Tagalog, so far as Reinhart could fathom.
Streckfuss shook his head. “Le
ave zese tings to Bopp. I want that in the next fortnight you do not overly excite your nervous system, also that you avoid all ordinary foodstuffs, take no medicines or drugs, exercise moderately but not to the point of fatigue, and sleep as much as possible.”
“Two weeks?”
Streckfuss said: “In fact, you must reside in this place. We will make a bett for you here. Mine, indeed. You may use it. I seldom sleep.”
Bob hung up the phone and said: “That’s settled, then. I’m leaving now to dispose of these matters. I’ll check you out of the Mid-town Y, Carl, and bring back your effects. We’ll get the papers drawn up. Take my advice and do not inform your family. You would have certain rights as a missing person. They won’t be able to get into your safe-deposit box.”
Streckfuss produced a stethoscope from the pocket of his lab coat and said: “Remove your clozing.”
Now, whereas Reinhart had been ready a few moments before to plunge into the quick-freeze, he balked.
“Just a minute,” he cried. “I can’t stay here just like this. I’ve got things to do.”
“What?” Sweet asked coldly. “What things? You would hardly have volunteered if that were so. And you did volunteer, didn’t you, Carl? Nobody tricked you or used pressure of any kind, isn’t that true? You will have to swear to that, you know. Or we can forget the whole thing.”
“There’s no question, Bob, and you know it. But this is a bit abrupt, on the one hand, and long-drawn-out on the other.”
“Like life itself,” said Sweet.
“I’m glad you mentioned that. It’s mine, isn’t it? My own damned life.”
Sweet threw his arms up and made his mouth into an O of mock horror. “Far be it from me, Carl …”
“I don’t intend to live in this mausoleum for what may be the last two weeks of it, either,” Reinhart announced. “I’m going to call you on that offer of a suite in the Shade-Milton, and I also want a good car.” He stopped to catch his breath. His heartbeat was racing—the sort of thing that did not matter now.
To Streckfuss he said: “I intend to eat rich foods and drink expensive wines. The effects are your problem. You can flush me out when I am unconscious.”
“Ah,” muttered the little scientist, elevating his shoulders to the level of his ears. “Ah, ah.” He put away the stethoscope.
Sweet’s neck had gone rigid. “Anything you say, Carl. You’re the boss.”
The word had a lovely, brutal sound. In his various business ventures Reinhart had employed a few persons, yet never had he felt superior to them in power, perhaps because he had not possessed anything they really wanted: they invariably went to better jobs when his enterprises failed.
“Can your tailor make up some clothes for me within a couple of days?” he asked Sweet. “In all my life I have never owned a suit that really fitted. I have always felt like a bundle somebody wrapped up for the Salvation Army.”
He walked to the door. “So long, Hans.” His joviality made metallic and crystalline echoes throughout the lab. Streckfuss was a small, old, almost forlorn figure when seen in perspective. “See you in the funny papers!” That sounded cheap. He must take care not to satiate himself too soon.
In the Bentley’s back seat Reinhart said: “I’ll need some spending money, Robert.”
Sweet’s energy seemed to have flagged. “Sure, Carl. But you can put the car and hotel on the company, and I have accounts at several restaurants.”
“No,” said Reinhart. “I don’t want that. I will pay as I go. I’m sick of bills, installment plans, pay-now-fly-later, credit cards, and all the rest of that shit. I want genuine, hard cash, such as you hardly ever see any more. I want to crumple a twenty-dollar bill and throw it at some insolent headwaiter and have him kiss my ass. I want to overtip the embittered hoodlums who work in parking lots and hear them thank me. I want to be stopped for speeding and bribe the cop and get saluted. And most of all, I’d like to stop some bitch of a teen-ager with legs that are bare up to the cheeks of her behind and naked tits inside a see-through shirt, and ask her price: you name it, five hundred, a thousand—”
“Sure, Carl, sure.”
“—and when I reached it, give her the money and leave her untouched. I’d also like to send Captain Storm a sizable sum for the Black Assassins. Anonymously, huh? What do you think of that? That punk, in his idiotic uniform and phony name, while Splendor lies dying.” A gratuitous slur, in view of the boy’s manifest concern for his father, but Reinhart tended to project his own son into Storm’s jackboots, and vice versa. In time the race problem would vanish, but there would always be failing fathers and succeeding sons.
Call him mad, now that he had guaranteed to be put on ice but he saw the answer to youth. It was Yes. Press on, full speed ahead. Here, spend this on dynamite and drugs. Blow yourself up while out of your skull. Splendid. Anything you want. Utter acquiescence to the demands of all persons who apply, but applicants are urged to act promptly during the fortnight’s amnesty. After which, I personally shall cool it.
“Hey!” Eunice shouted again, gathering herself into the seat and reinforcing the safety belt with crossed arms.
“What’s the matter?” Reinhart asked idly. He controlled the car with his left hand, and with his right felt her thigh, which was rather flabby if the truth be known. “Let’s live a little,” said he.
She pinched her eyes shut. They were overtaking a three-car spread on a tri-laned highway. However, it was one-way and separated from the southbound side by a generous strip of grass defined by concrete curbing, rounded and quite too low to burst Reinhart’s tires as he shot over it, getting nicely past the trio of collateral dolts and cutting back down on the pavement without the use of brakes or the loss of rpms.
“You see,” he said. “No cause for alarm. Fast driving is not necessarily reckless. The great Stirling Moss, who has won many a Grand Prix for England, will go ninety on glare ice and yet maintain more control than a little old lady in her wheelchair. Precision is the answer, Eunice.”
Corrupt politicians, in the pocket of local businessmen, had no doubt been responsible for the battery of traffic lights ahead, which were inexcusable on a superhighway, contradicting its purpose as a high-speed thoroughfare. But a rotten shopping center festered nearby, with entrances and exits at the crossroads. A line of station wagons, full of commodities and spoiled children, eyeglassed fathers at the wheels, smug wives alongside, waited to go in or out. An interminable orange light slowed down the pack of cars at the head of which Reinhart charged. The exiting herd began to edge forward. Reinhart kept his foot to the floor, his left palm on the horn, and blasted through.
A standing cop, in white summer cap and orange Day-Glo weskit, seemed to give him a blurred smile. Reinhart was watching Eunice, who was utterly silent. He poked her.
“I used to be one of those jerks,” he said. “With an open Kleenex box, sliding across the back shelf whenever I turned a corner.”
Surly bitch. She failed to respond. Looking back at the road, Reinhart pretended he was a competitor in the Annual Memorial Day Classic at Indianapolis, that his pea-green Edwardian jacket was a suit of fireproof coveralls. Buster Watkins, Jr., an illiterate but engaging Southern daredevil, had just spun out, hit the wall, and was incinerated. One down. That’s racing.
He poked Eunice again and heard her groan.
“Jesus,” he said, “but you are a drag today.” He shot by a marked police car, the uniformed driver of which touched a finger to the brim of his cap.
People could tell when you were beyond their power. Reinhart had already noticed that when he bought his clothes at Outrageous Foppery, a male boutique. He had the young, lithe, snotty sort of salesman who would have spat upon him but last week, that new species who competed with the customers in attire and lorded it over them in manner, muttonchop sideburns meeting over his mouth, paddlebladed tie, cerise shirt. On his side Reinhart would have detested this half-assed phony. Now he saw him as quite a decent sort, with helpful,
amusing ideas. If we must dress, then why not with verve?
Bob had waited in the Bentley. He had been glum ever since Reinhart had agreed to be frozen—which went to show you something about getting what you wanted. Reinhart chose a purple shirt to match the bell-bottom velveteen trousers, and a scarf of swirling colors instead of a proper tie, and rather than knot it, drew the silken ends through his wedding ring and thus added a smear of verdigris to the psychedelic mélange.
His old-style crew cut was incongruous in the mirror, all the more so in that the Edwardian jacket, with its high neck, tended to squeeze him towards the top. Underneath, a plastic belt, wide as a corset, went through the loops of his low-rise pants, cincturing him below the belly button, above which the excess meat was hidden by the jacket’s flaring skirt. Reinhart discovered to his pleasure that he was made for the styles of the moment.
The tight jacket took fifty pounds off him. The slacks had been troublesome. The largest available waist had missed closure by a good six inches, but the resident tailor had so to speak jumped into the breach, inserting a big vee of extra material in the ass. Also velveteen, but white. It would be hidden by the jacket’s long tail. But the salesman, and several other customers, bearded youths, cheered at the effect, and one boy demanded his own trousers be altered in accord, with not only the rear panel, but another in front giving the effect of a diaper worn over long pants.
Reinhart paid cash for his gear and left everybody in a good mood, indeed almost hysterically agreeable, shouting “Man!” at him. Not all the young were vicious.
But it was the first time Reinhart had ever seen Bob Sweet look startled. When he got into the car, Bob said: “Are you sure about that, Carl?”
Vital Parts Page 36