Vital Parts (14 page)

“But here we are talking of the preservation of the individual self, Maw. That's what fascinates me. Can you conceive what it must be like as an insect? Nature has provided you with very little in the way of individual defense, and everything to the tribe. Or, coming up the ladder to warmblooded mammals—rodents, rabbits. I have always been struck by the failure of nature to give the bunny any weapon except a high birthrate. A particular rabbit will soon perish but the breed survives. But what does that mean to me? To lose all this personal consciousness! It takes many years to make a man, and then, as I believe George Bernard Shaw said, when that is finally accomplished, you die.”

Maw peered at him. “You won't pass away for a while yet, Carlo, if that's what's bothering you. And if you keep on as you have been going, when the time comes to lay down, you will be mighty relieved. I'll tell you this: at your age a person broods more about death than at mine, because you have to stay in the game with impaired faculties. You're too old to retain your youthful vigor, yet too young to quit.”

“Well, leaving me out of it,” said Reinhart, “freezing seems to be the coming thing. Imagine if you had had a chance to put a few dollars on the Wright Brothers.”

“I was waiting for the pitch,” Maw said. “As I see it, you want some of my money to put into a business concerned with the freezing of bodies.”

Reinhart swallowed the remaining puddle of tea. There were no leaves to read; they had probably brewed it from powder. “I had lunch with Bob Sweet recently. He's that guy I went to school with, you know. I have an opportunity to go in with him. He would give me a job, of course, but you know my personality is more of the entrepreneurial sort. I am not cut out for straight salaried work.”

“So much the worse for you,” said Maw, “for nowadays the big thing is not the wage but the side benefits, life insurance and medical.”

“I could stand up on my own two hindlegs if I had something to put into the business, you see. And Sweet is a tycoon, Maw. Everything he does is gilt-edged.” Reinhart had no assurance whatever that Sweet would let him invest in the Cryon Foundation, which furthermore had been described on the
Alp Show
as nonprofitmaking. Reinhart was ignoring these considerations in favor of very serious estimate of his own constitution. He was no natural wage-slave. Perhaps no one was by birth, yet nature drafted the many as worker ants, as rodent gunfodder, for the greater good of the breed. By now Reinhart did not even like people. To preserve them in vast hosts, while at the same time reproduction was increasing madly in all quarters of the globe, was actually a scheme which, had he believed in its feasibility, would have been as repugnant as the reek of Maw's cigarette.

Which was as much as to say that not for a moment did he believe a frozen cadaver would ever be reanimated. If death was not a dependable fact, then life, as it had been lived since the dawn of man, had no form and, indeed, no process. The only thing you could rely on was the established truth that ripening and rot were the same, and the only, gauge of time. And where are you, Reinhart asked God, who might or might not Himself have expired, without time? I ask you. Even Einstein, who dabbled in other measurements as well, was dead.

Therefore if Reinhart made a business of what he saw as an impossible science, he would be by his own definition a swindler. To promise everlasting life: the grandest con game of them all, and the most mean. Terminal syphilis of the morality. He was not the nice boy of Maw's characterization. He had just not had the chance until now to be a dirty rat.

Maw sizzled out her cigarette in the teacup. “If you think you'll freeze me, buddy, you got a hole in the head. I'm not going to lay there in frost for centuries like a Sara Lee cheesecake. But you are probably right that many suckers will go for it. If they shell out for junk to make their hair grow back and for monkey-gland injections in Switzerland and believe in flying saucers and other evasions of reality, why, I guess you can expect them to pay even more to be immortal. And if I ever saw a successful crook, it's that Sweet. But how do you know his prey is not the people who would pay to be frozen, but rather the suckers who want to put money into the scheme to defraud the first?”

Occasionally Maw arranged in her own syntax certain terms from crossword puzzles, such as “evasions,” “defraud,” and, surely, “prey.” Along with what she supposed the vocabulary of a sibyl, she also assumed the mask: slitted eyes, prominent groove of upper lip, high, rippled forehead.

“Of course,” said Reinhart, “nothing is a sure thing. Not even death, now.” What he meant as a chuckle sounded like a gasp of anguish. “Bob has nothing to gain from me. He could see I'm on my uppers.”

“But you're the very type who is victimized,” Maw asserted. “Man is not a wolf to other wolves.”

“I was reading this review of a book about the aggressive instinct,” said Reinhart. “It seems that wolves are not, either.”

“Don't be pseudo-intellectual, Carlo. I don't want to cast my pearls before swine.”

“Do I gather from that that the idea has some merit?”

“Listen,” Maw said, slapping the table, “if I give you any money, it will be for the same reason as I have done so in the past.”

Reinhart nodded. “Blood is thicker than water.”

“Precisely.” She smiled though hiding her teeth. “I might also be afraid you would knock me off and claim the whole bundle before-time.”

“Aw, Maw, don't joke about that sort of thing.”

“Don't be such a fool, Carlo. You are my sole heir. I guess you didn't notice how I switched teacups with you. If you dropped that cyanide pellet you was palming, it's now in your own stomach, pal, and good luck to you.”

Maw used her paranoia not only for fun. Undoubtedly she was on the point of loosening her purse strings now, but would try a few last-ditch maneuvers.

“I just wish I had your cunning,” he said. “You outfoxed me again.”

“Soon your face will turn blue and you'll be gasping for air,” Maw happily predicted. “It's like fire in your gastric linings.”

It is true that Reinhart proceeded sympathetically to feel a few symptoms, probably because of the acidulous tea which was running like sewage through his conduits, but nowadays he often found it difficult even to digest milk. With money in his pocket, however, he would eat nails with impunity. So he persisted, and Maw finally seized her black purse.

“How would five suit you, Carlo?”

“Hundreds, Maw?”

She giggled. “Dollars. Five simoleons.” She waved a wrinkled engraving of Lincoln at him. “You didn't tell me what that hag will demand in the divorce settlement. Whatever I give you, she'll shake you down for, don't you know that? You had best declare yourself a pauper.”

“Gen knows I don't have anything now, and when I make good she'll be glad to see me again. I understand that much about women.”

A doddering old lady was taking forever to pass their table.

Maw called to her: “Hey, Sal. Come and meet my son.”

Reinhart rose and took her claw, which was weightless but suddenly closed like pincers on his hand, as his image drowned in her watery eyes.

“Sal is ninety-two, Carlo. I expect she'll be a candidate for your freezer any day now.”

Sal continued to detain Reinhart with a steel wrist. He did not know what to do with her.

Maw watched this for a while, and then said: “Well, Sal, you got to be going. Say so long.”

Sal mumbled something from a fixed mouth and released Reinhart's hand as though it were a load of gravel and hers an earth-mover.

Reinhart sat down, saying: “Gee, Maw, you can embarrass a person.”

“Not at all, Carlo. Out of sheer vanity Sal won't wear her hearing aid. She ain't as pitiful as she would like to make you think. Talk of being loaded, that old babe has got a hundred grand if a dollar. If you could talk her into freezing you'd have something. The only trouble is, she hates life. But that's the kind who lives longest.” Maw popped out of her chair. “Come on, Carlo, I'll take you on at Ping-Pong. No, leave that five-spot for Pauline. I give her one once a week. Otherwise she gets uppity.”

A veteran of Army dayrooms, noncoms' clubs, and nut-ward recreational facilities, Reinhart was proficient at table tennis, and he won several no-quarter-given-none-asked games with his mother, returning her smashing serves with a cunning Englished ball impossible to strike squarely. She threatened to splinter her paddle on his pate. But in the sequel she was also cowed, as everyone is by any kind of winner.

Reinhart left Senior City, in the rented car which he could now afford to return, with her check for five thousand dollars. Whether death would subsequently be altered, it was certain that he expected life to change for himself. He had fooled with aspects of residence, entertainment, and transportation—real estate, television sets, gasoline—but had never before dealt in fundamentals.

5

Here in the strangely barren office, behind the switched-on reception room starring the big with-it girl, Bob Sweet was another man than the one who had bought Reinhart lunch two days before.

“I've left my wife and moved out of that house,” Reinhart told him, asking approval of the man who traced his own success to an escape from marriage. But Reinhart saw no interest behind the lenses.

“By accident,” Reinhart went on, “I saw your
Alp Show
. So that is what you do. Pretty fabulous.” Sweet continued to go through the papers on his desk. Anybody else's correspondence, especially when seen upside down, looks capricious.

Reinhart suddenly decided to be reckless.

“Hey, Bob,” he called, as Sweet's pen, followed halfway by Sweet's head, fell onto the stack of papers and began here to initial, there to autograph. “You did make me a promise—”

Sweet's pen came up and pointed at Reinhart's nose, though his eyes stayed on the papers sorted by his left hand. “Revise that,” he said.

“All right then, you mentioned you might—”

“Better,” said Sweet. “I owe you nothing. If I chose to be sentimental at lunch, I may since have reviewed my feelings and found them indifferent to you. If you were not one of my tormentors years ago, as you claim, why should I help you now?”

“Excuse me, Bob, but does that make sense?” Reinhart's chair was of red, waxed leather, with brass studs suitable for the childish pretense that they were pushbuttons of a musical instrument or a spacecraft; press the right one and
zoom
, something would sound or ignite.

Sweet looked up from the papers, and in compensation his pen went back down. “Retribution,” he said, “is all the more satisfying when benevolent. Imagine how devastating it would have been if the Israelis had sentenced Eichmann to life among them, giving him a position of trust in the government.” He laughed, then stared bullyingly at Reinhart through the heavy-rimmed spectacles. There was a day when glasses gave one a vulnerable look. Now they seemed to be worn by most powerful people. Weak eyes were an advertisement for the strong will, if indeed the eyes so “corrected” had been at all wrong—without his rims Sweet might be the most undistinguished of men. Reinhart tried to recall how he had looked in Gino's men's room while rinsing the lenses, when reencountered after an absence of a quarter-century, but could not, which might have proved the point.

“My situation has changed dramatically since we last spoke,” Reinhart said. “I've come into some money.”

“You would be wise not to let your wife know about it,” Sweet said, going back to his papers.

“I was wondering whether you might suggest an investment.”

“U.S. savings bonds,” Sweet answered instantly. “Or a mutual fund that specializes in growth.”

“Look here,” said Reinhart. “Will you level with me for old times' sake?”

“That's the way to get yourself lied to.”

A rude note came from the intercom. Sweet threw a switch, and the big girl's voice came croaking: “The calls are building up, Bob,” the use of which diminutive confirmed Reinhart's suspicion that Sweet was laying her—still, it was most unbusinesslike.

“All right,” Sweet said to the box, “I'll be finished in three minutes more.”

You cocky bastard, Reinhart thought, if you think you can dismiss me out of hand—But Sweet had been televised on a nationwide program, and he was rich. Reinhart only had Maw's five grand, little enough these days. That big insolent bitch in the reception room surely pulled down a hundred a week or more.

Sweet said: “I had not forgotten. I had a credit check run on you, Carl. It reads like the bill of indictment at a war-crimes trial.”

Reinhart blanched, though not at the quite fair characterization of his business history. “Turn that damn thing off, will you? I don't want that girl to hear.”

“Of course it's off,” Sweet said quietly.

“She can first-name you all she wants, but I don't want her to hear my misfortunes.”

“Carl …”

“No, you hear me out, dammit. I'm getting the runaround. I don't mind kissing your ass up to a certain point, because that seems to me the role that fate has cast me in—”

“Carl.”

“You've got it all, haven't you? So I have to sit here attending your pleasure.”

“Bitterness is useless unless controlled,” Sweet said kindly. “But I suppose if that were possible one would not be bitter in the first place. … So, anyway, runs the argument of the eventual suicide. Have you ever thought of doing away with yourself?”

“Every day,” Reinhart said. “But then I think of the satisfaction it would give to all the shits, and I don't do it.”

Sweet's pale eyebrows rose above the formidable black frames. “So it is bitterness that keeps you alive.”

“You take that service station,” Reinhart ranted. “My so-called friends could have kept me in business if they had taken the trouble to drive a quarter-mile. You could see me from the thruway, or the rooftop sign, anyway. They wouldn't do it. But they'll drive three miles out of town to patronize that shopping center where we had lunch the other day. They'll go four to the drive-in movie. I guess you also know that not long after the war I had a piece of the old theater in town, the Majestic where we used to spend Sunday afternoons as kids.”