Vital Parts Page 6

  Winona loyally stuck by him while he washed the skillet, going to sleep again at the table, with a milk-moustache. Looking at her sweet, guileless face, Reinhart remembered how in earlier years she would trot to meet him at the door when he came home, and he would pick her up high and swing her around and require at that moment no further justification for life. He wished he could still carry her to bed. As it stood she was burden enough merely to steer down the hall. A large rag-doll buffoon lay on her pillow. “G’night, Poppy,” she murmured as he kissed her forehead. “I love you.”

  “Likewise, dear,” said Reinhart. “Now remember to take off your dress and put your pajamas on before hitting the sack.” More than once she had lazily slept all night in her street clothes.

  “Promise me,” she muttered, but firmly, “you won’t watch TV now.” Another of her peculiarities, a form of paranoia or merely jealousy: she was troubled by the reception of television into a house where she lay sleeping. At breakfast he did not dare talk of postbed-time viewing to Winona, though one of his joys was to watch late-night showings of ancient movies, made in the time when he was young, and then tell the plots to somebody. Winona was the only member of the household who would tolerate the paraphrasing of a screenplay—but not one from a picture transmitted after she was in bed.

  So he lied, bade her good night for the fourth or fifth time—they had an old game the winner of which said it last—and repaired straightaway to the den or study or office, originally termed in the prospectus as a “utility or service room,” a walk-in closet somewhere between the kitchen and the furnace room in this cellarless house. Reinhart used it as his business HQ. A scarred filing cabinet held the records of several enterprises that had run into the sand, beginning with the real-estate firm he had taken over when the former owner, Claude Humbold, had emigrated to Encino, California. Claude claimed he couldn’t stay in the black if prudish types occupied town hall, his specialty being the elasticization of zoning laws, vending gracious old buildings in prime residential areas to builders who promptly broke them up with a huge iron ball and erected motels, char-broil steak restaurants, and drive-in movies.

  While the set warmed up—a tiny six-inch Sony on which he still owed many payments; it sat on Claude’s old desk, which had had to be disassembled and re-erected to get it in the room—Reinhart swung back in the swivel chair and perused the schedule. Alas, he had seen the two movies: Joan Crawford, playing a female impersonator married to a softy named Craig, and one of those Hercules films starring a cast of weightlifters who reminded him unpleasantly of his own fiberless lard.

  The screen developed a picture of several gnomes sitting on doll furniture. They were less grotesque but more grainy when he leaned over the desk and put his eyes against the glass. One man, seated behind a desk, was conversing with people arranged along a sofa, a young woman bare from the waist down though with her legs crossed so nothing could be seen but haunches, a recognizable actor who played villains, and nearest to the host, an individual in heavy-rimmed glasses and sideburns with a touch of gray: Reinhart’s host at lunch, Bob Sweet.

  The host said: “Bob, may I call you Bob? We want to hear more of this incredible process of yours after Jody’s song.”

  Jody rose from the couch and turned out to be wearing a short skirt which now fell just past her groin. She gave a serviceable rendition of a Broadway show tune, which Reinhart listened to intermittently, dying to get on to Sweet.

  At last, after three endless commercials, the host resumed.

  “Now, Bob, what is this about freezing dead men? Are you putting me on?”

  3

  “No, Mr. Alp,” said Bob Sweet, “this is no joke. Cryonics is a serious science.”

  “Now have I got it right?” asked Alp, joining his brushy eyebrows. “I didn’t have time for more than a glance backstage at the notes taken by a member of my staff, and he was probably drunk as usual.” Alp smirked, and the audience guffawed as a single entity.

  “Simply,” Sweet said, “it is this: if a body is frozen within a certain time after what is known as clinical death—the cessation of heartbeats and brainwaves—but before any cellular degeneration sets in, it can be maintained in that state of suspended animation interminably.”

  The camera pulled back to show the returned Jody’s naked thighs. Alp pointed at them and wisecracked: “Even a body like that?”

  Sweet said soberly: “Any body.”

  Alp’s face grew disingenuously bland. “Well, that’s your theory anyhoo. Why? Explain it to the folks.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “To freeze,” said Alp, between puffs of a cigarette, “a human body. The purpose of it. I gather it’s not for weirdo kicks but a contribution of a serious nature.”

  “Yes, indeed. It begins with the proposition that medicine has made more advances in the past fifty years than in all the preceding centuries. Think of how man in the Dark Ages was helpless against the plague, which decimated whole populations. All of us can remember that only a few years ago polio was a dreaded scourge. Perhaps a cure for cancer is just around the corner, yet people are still dying every day from it. Suppose such a victim, instead of being declared lifeless and lowered into the ground—from which there is no return—is quick-frozen and stored in a facility until the day when science has arrived at a cancer cure. At which time he is thawed out, his tissues still in serviceable condition except for those ravaged by the disease. He is brought to life and treated with the new therapy—”

  Under his nimbus of smoke, Alp said: “Hold on. How easy you say that. ‘Brought to life.’ Well, that’s the rub. What makes you think that basic trick can be pulled off? And without it, like they say, you ain’t got nothin’ for nobody nohow.” He mugged at the camera.

  Sweet smiled calmly. “Fish can be frozen solidly into a block of lake ice, chopped out, thawed, and they swim again. This happens in nature, in fact, every winter. In laboratories chicken hearts, eels, certain insects, and human and animal semen—may I say that on the air?—”

  The camera went to Alp, who said: “Sure, the censors will think it’s sailors.”

  This persistent wiseacre stuff annoyed Reinhart, who grumbled into his tiny screen.

  “Many types of organic material have been tested,” Sweet continued, “and there is more than enough evidence to the effect that life by no means ends at the moment a heart stops beating or lungs take in no more air. Of course we do not yet know enough about these matters. But this is the point. If we can preserve a body against decay and degeneration, we have time in which to look for cues for the ailments that caused this temporary death”—he put up his hand to ward off Alp’s incipient iteration—“and the means for revival from the frozen state.”

  “Aha,” said Alp.

  “I’ll go so far as to admit that if we froze a body today we could not revive it next week. I’m not so sure about the next century.”

  “You’re not?”

  “After another hundred years of research? Who knows what will be possible. Or why stop there? After a thousand years. There is no necessary reason why, once frozen perfectly—at temperatures nearing absolute zero, which is considerably colder than the familiar home freezer. Minus four hundred and fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, actually.”

  “Wow,” gloated Alp. “That would chill your beer.”

  Sweet said: “The refrigeration methods are ready now. Liquid nitrogen is almost two hundred minus zero Centigrade, and liquid helium even colder.”

  “We live in a fabulous time,” Alp said, his pointed chin hovering over the fat knot of his tie as if ready to spear it as he lowered his forehead at the camera. “Eternal life, eh? That is a fantastic concept that bowls you over with its ramifications. Frankly I don’t know that it is desirable. Wasn’t it some sage, Chinese probably, who said that the only justification for life is that it eventually comes to an end.”

  “It’s a matter of personal choice,” said Sweet. “But you seldom find anybody who if conscious a
t the moment of death would not choose life if he could. Frankly, I can imagine a time when your heirs might be charged with homicide if they did not have your body frozen.”

  Alongside him, Jody, the chanteuse, gasped, and in pulling back to catch her expression, the camera also picked up the actor, who played badmen but was in life of course a social meliorist. “I dunno,” he said in necessarily the same voice in which he represented conscienceless brutes. “If we could make living men good and loving and nonaggressive, maybe we should preserve them. But merely to prolong hate—Maybe a committee of leading individuals could be formed—social leaders, clergymen, and so on—to rule on who should be saved. Because there wouldn’t be literally room for everybody I don’t imagine?”

  For a very long time, perhaps three hundred seconds, Reinhart had lingered in a fascinated disregard of himself and the applicable pity. But this expression of the ethics of the ant-world called him back to order. If common good were the gauge, Reinhart would never be spared. The actor expected to be frozen as a reward for his piety. But what about a power failure. The local lights flickered every time the heavens broke wind.

  “It is not my place,” Sweet said, good for him, “to go into the moral questions here. Surely they are complex. Nor can any of us who are working in this field make an absolute promise of success. But think of it this way: what does a corpse have to lose? As things stand, he is dead. If he is frozen and never revived in the future, he has not lost anything.”

  “By golly,” said Alp, looking through the camera into his viewers’ millions of homes, in some of which it was statistically likely that certain persons were dying, as well as others making love, chewing food, quarreling, itching, suffering nonlethally, and even being inert; alone in his little corner of America, a shy clerk played with himself while watching Jody’s thighs; a furious crank began another denunciatory letter to Alp: “Dear Commie Fuck-face …” The universal brotherhood of the mortal; there is no other kind.

  “It makes you think,” said Alp. “It is frightening, it is thrilling. I have a feeling we haven’t really scratched the surface of this topic, and our time is already gone. Can you come back again, Bob? By the way, what’s your part in this? You’re not an M.D., are ya?”

  “No, I am not, Jack. You might call me a publicist, for want of a better word.”

  “Going to make a bundle out of it?”

  Sweet was not offended. Reinhart knew that Alp often spoke in this mock-provocative style.

  “I’m a retired businessman. I arrived at the conclusion that money isn’t enough—”

  “Having made enough of it to afford that sentiment,” Alp noted. “I’m kidding, folks. Mr. Sweet is a true philanthropist. He has endowed this Cryon Foundation, and not a person makes a penny out of it. He is dedicated, he is committed, and I for one think he is a groovy individual in a day when so many of us have hangups and are uptight.” Alp sighed. “Now we’re going to get a lot of cards and letters. You have stirred up a beehive, I’m sure. Please don’t write directly to me, folks, don’t do it!” To Sweet: “You have an address where people can write for information?”

  Reinhart sat in what used to be called deep-brown study while the program was succeeded by the final news reports, a short inspirational message from a sardonic-looking man of the cloth, a rendition of the music accompanying Francis Scott Key’s unsingable doggerel, and a dead screen giving off the hum of a capricious tube.

  It was a dirty racket to exploit man’s natural desire for everlasting life. Also an extraordinarily bold one if announced on national TV. Sweet’s game was one of infinite magnitude. Of course it must be a swindle. No man could seriously take on eternity. The theme staggered the imagination, and for relief Reinhart fled into a memory of his father’s attitude towards death. Himself an insurance man by profession, Reinhart’s dad had been fully covered. One of his many policies paid the expenses of his own funeral; since the age of twenty-one Dad had been buying his coffin in installments. During the Dark Ages, Reinhart had read, certain orders of extremist monks slept every night in the wooden box in which they would eventually be buried.

  A grisly subject, but one with which we must all come to terms. As a merciless kid one sang a ditty: Your eyes fall in, your teeth fall out, worms crawl over your nose and mouth. What Sweet projected were refrigerated catacombs, frozen bodies stacked like ice-cube trays.

  No, of course it was a complete fraud. … What interested Reinhart was not eternal life itself. The one of which he had lived forty-four years was often unbearable enough as it was. A mere continuation would be no answer. But a second chance, another start, was most attractive. Sweet had spoken of a thousand years hence. The mind could not accept that. But suppose one died of some simple accident—self-inflicted, to put it starkly: severed his aorta with an ordinary paring knife found in any kitchen. Heart transplants were still a dodgy affair. The recipient who was shown smiling at the TV camera two days later usually died quietly on the third. But another twenty years should perfect the process, maybe less. One day in July 1988 a clerk pulls open a drawer in the R section of the massive file cabinet wherein lies Reinhart in the sleep of ice. The surgeons plug a new ticker into his chest, thaw out the lot, and send him on his way, no younger than he was but, more importantly, no older, having eaten the cake of suicide and yet possessing the fact of renewed life.

  Reinhart did not actually believe in one iota of this fantasy. But neither did he believe in the reality of his son, who at this moment materialized in the doorway to the study. Though facing the wall above the desk, Reinhart detected this presence by an involuntary rising of his hackles.

  He spun around in the chair. Blaine wore a vest of sheepskin, hair out, over an otherwise naked body. Far below his pinched navel was the waistband of the gangster-striped pants, which flared at the ankles but at the bulge of the crotch were snug as bathing trunks. He stood in reversed-cowhide boots, and a wide-brimmed flop hat, derivative of Greta Garbo’s, finished him off at the top, from under which his pale locks flowed to splash onto his narrow shoulders.

  Reinhart was never prepared to see Blaine after an absence. He was infuriated anew at every audience. It occurred to him now that were he to go through the series he had fancifully projected, his brand-new heart would explode at the first sight of Blaine, who could be relied on not to have changed meanwhile except in incidentals. Whatever his own prospects, Reinhart had no hope whatever for Blaine’s.

  However, his son’s appearance upset him so violently that he forgot for the moment what Blaine had been up to next door, and asked his usual hostile, monosyllabic query: “Well?”

  Blaine stared at his father through pale eyes and under the hatbrim. His right hip was slung high, caressing the doorframe. His languid lily hand rose to toy with a flaxen lock. His left thumb hooked into his belt buckle, not a proper one but an arrangement of two harness rings. He looked like some kind of swishy gunfighter, star of the Pansy Spat at the OK Corral. He continued to stare, in arrogant confidence that he was a master of timing.

  Reinhart at last fired one round. “Have you got something to say, or are you waiting for me to focus the camera?” Sarcasm was never Reinhart’s forte. He always managed to delude himself with it. That cocky little blackguard, he thought now, actually thinking I would want to photograph his costume.

  Finally Blaine said: “I threaten you merely by standing here. That’s fantastic, isn’t it? Merely by living, I give off lethal rays.”

  This argument was an old story to Reinhart. He had heard it from Blaine before, and Gen, and in print from journalists who were sycophants of anybody with enough bullshit to fill a column.

  “I’m trembling with fear,” he answered. “You might strangle me with one of your silken strands.”

  Blaine grinned, showing the tips of both gray canines. It was also switched-on, with-it, and revolutionary not to clean one’s teeth—a blow at the middle-class bacteria which cause caries.

  He probably stank too, but Reinhart h
ad not for a long time got close enough to him to tell. How that girl next door could stand him—All at once Reinhart remembered, and cerebral blood swamped his reason and, spilling over his forehead, flowed down his cheeks just beneath the skin.

  “You look,” said Blaine, “like you’re going to spit catsup.”

  Reinhart’s speech began as a distant belch, like the initial disturbance deep within the volcano’s core, hearing which the Pompeiians might have saved themselves. But Blaine stood his ground, impervious to lava as to common decency. Again and again Reinhart had erupted on him without effect, and now Vesuvius was tired. So he turned back into a fat, sad old father.

  “Son,” he said, “let’s start all over. Hell, it’s not too late. You just became a man a few months ago. A good time for a new beginning for us both.” In this mood of philosophical benevolence his memory swooped back over two decades and plucked up an apposite experience of his own young manhood. “I don’t know that I have ever mentioned being with the first Occupation troops in Berlin.”

  “Not so far today, anyhow,” said Blaine, rubbing his sunken chest self-lasciviously.

  Reinhart declined the provocation. “OK, I guess I have bored you with it too much. My fault,” he hastened to add. “I understand now the old World War I veterans who bored me in my time. Being in a war has an effect on you.”

  “I’m sure it does,” said Blaine. “It makes you into an animal.”

  “All right, I know your feelings on the subject, and I’m not going to argue about it. I’ll just say it might interest you to hear I’m no militarist, but there are times when a man must fight to defend him—”