Vital Parts (19 page)

“I'm supposed to drink this?” asked the latter, with a hearty chuckle, looking at Sweet for a confirmation of the absurdity. Reinhart supposed this could be fun. He had seen it in a movie once; the eater, a well-known comic, had been provided with cutlery, carved the little pills, etc.

“After inhaling the bouquet, of course,” Streckfuss said, reaching to mix liquid and powder with a wooden tongue-depressor from which he first peeled the crackling paper, that funny translucent stuff you saw nowhere else any more. Reinhart always gagged when the doctor shoved one down his throat so as to peer at where it felt scratchy.

Reinhart twirled the contents under his nose. He scented nothing whatever. He took a bit on the end of his tongue. Nothing. It was certainly not the local water, though, which had the pronounced taste of chlorine.

Streckfuss hurled his skinny chin towards the ceiling. “Failed again!” said he. But his chagrin was obviously mock. “Try the
coquilles Saint-Jacques
, or are they
fruits de mer?
”

“Swallow whole or bite through?” asked Reinhart.

“Down zuh hatchway!”

“Aren't you guys going to eat?”

Sweet said: “Of course. I'm famished.” He took the tablets in his palm and threw them into his open mouth, followed by a draft from his own beaker.

So Reinhart followed suit. If he were poisoned or drugged he would have company. It was precisely like taking two aspirins. Perhaps foolishly he was disappointed. He had more or less expected a flavor, though maybe not fish and wine exactly. Of course it was great in view of his dental problems, and not much less than real fish, which never filled him. Whenever Maw had fed him halibut as a boy he always slipped out and had a hamburger later on. In the early years of their marriage Gen had occasionally prepared tunafish à la king, immersed in a sauce of which catsup was a constituent. It was the memory of such dishes that kept him from being bitter about doing most of the family cooking.

Streckfuss thereupon poured himself a heaping handful of the same tablets. “Gawd,” said he. “I could eat zis stuff till zuh cows come home.” He threw them down his gullet, which was pale as the throat of a water moccasin.

Sweet leaned significantly towards Reinhart. “Hans never eats anything else.”

“Really. You actually live on pills?”

You could see them going down through his Adam's apple, in effect, one by one. He had closed his eyes in pleasure. He took a swig from his own beaker of liquid and made a gargling sound. Ah, there went the last tablet.

“To put it vulgarly,” he answered at length. “Nutritionally speaking, zese tablets contain the same nourishment—vitt-amins, protein, minerals, and so on—as an actual serving of fish. Only the garbage is eliminated, and who misses zat?”

Sweet spoke up. “I admit I can't as yet go along with Hans in that respect. I still love my steak and would hate to have to do without good red meat—”

Streckfuss interrupted. His long upper lip was keen with pride. “I almost never have to defecate,” he cried. “Iss that not a satisfactory situation? Not to have a long snake of
matières fécales
coiled in your guts? It is not enough that eating is useless. It is also filthy. Sink of carrying about all that rubbish. Behind zuh average navel lies a cesspool. Good heavens. Have you ever dissected a cadaver?”

Reinhart took another drink at this point. He was not nauseated, because this was nothing like eating. Another advantage of Streckfuss' diet was that you could talk of anything while ingesting it. Very utilitarian for a scientist.

“All right,” Reinhart said. “But what happens to the system if it is not used? Would the intestines not wither up like deflated balloons?”

Streckfuss displayed some spiky teeth. “So comes the role of the Streckfuss cocktail vich you seem to be enjoying merrily. Combining in the stomach with digestive juices, it is transformed like a type of sludge—actually a semisolid polyester foam—which moves through the bowels, not only supporting zem against collapse but scouring them clean, thus making almost nil the likelihood of noxious and uncomfortable gasses and guaranteeing immunity against hemorrhoids, among ozzer annoying embarrassments. I should suppose you are no stranger to piles?”

It was an odd but not unpleasant sensation, and thus far only moral. Reinhart could not as yet actually feel the detergent action. Perhaps he never would. If so, something would be lost, maybe not something infinitely precious, but definitely one of life's rhythms. Some people measured out their days by a schedule of eliminations. His parents used to be like that, Dad especially. And not just old fogies. Guys in the Army, shamelessly perched at stool, wincing in satisfaction—a whole line of them, in the morning, almost touching knees, for the latrines were stall-less—then exchanging jollity with the parallel line of shavers at the washbasins. Dogs however always looked anxious when hunched up: ancient racial memory, no doubt, from when the breed roamed wild and you could get jumped while helpless evacuating. Food was the preoccupation of all creatures in Nature. Only man had systematized its collection and all phases of its tour.

Reinhart answered Streckfuss' question. “Not one of my major complaints. A cocoa-butter suppository or two and I'm shipshape.”

“Meat course,” said the Swiss, dropping three green-colored capsules on Reinhart's dish. “I could continue the amusing conceit and ahsk whether your choice iss rare or well done but I sink I shawn't. My own manner of eating is while at vork to take which nutrients I need. I do not perform zis charade of sitting at table, mind you. I regard the mealtime customs as folly. Europeans still waste hours in zis preposterous ritual. I admire about your country the quick lunch, the instant foods. But they could be made more quicker still. These all-in-one breakfasts now available are a step in the right direction, though still rather vulgar. They are flavored with chocolate, no less.”

The nay-saying John Calvin, Reinhart remembered, had been a Swiss. Yet Swiss chocolate was also famous, and, finally, watches.

“I'll join Bob,” said Reinhart. “I don't relish the thought of giving up all pleasant sensory experiences. Though I don't live to eat, by any means.”

Streckfuss looked at Reinhart's bulging jacket front and said: “You could have fooled us.”

“The funny thing is that I don't eat all that much,” Reinhart said. “Honestly. Is it not true, Doctor, that some people because of peculiar glandular—”

“No,” Streckfuss said. “People get fat for one reason alone: gluttony.”

Reinheart looked at Sweet. “I suppose I should take up jogging. That's the big thing now, isn't it, Bob?”

Sweet made a fist around his ration of green capsules and carried it to his mouth, swallowing elaborately. He said: “I come here to sit at Hans's feet, Carl. If he told me to climb into that vat of liquid nitrogen, I would do so without question. I may even come in time to enjoy this sort of meal.”

“No,” said Streckfuss, “not to enchoy it, old chap, but to disregard it.”

“By the way,” Sweet said to Reinhart, “Hans's title is ‘professor.' Everybody in Central Europe is a doctor.”

Somebody, or something was smoking. Blue-gray whorls obscured Streckfuss' head. Reinhart smelled the transformer of the electric train he had owned as a boy, the scent of electricity, equivalent somehow to the music of the spheres, a comparison that made sense only in the reason of the morning half-dreams in which one anticipates, dreaming, the telephone bell which rings on cue in reality. Did I wake you up? the caller asks invariably, and you always lie. The odor of volts was called ozone. Reinhart was not totally helpless in the age of science. He had served in the Medical Department of the Army of the United States, and still remembered the main pressure points. If you get a head wound do you put a tourniquet around the neck? asked some joker, and the sergeant said all right you shitbum wiseguy. Streckfuss reassembled his face and pressed it against Reinhart's, making owl eyes. Why if he did not eat food was his breath foul? No, that was ozone. Sweet was operated electrically. He had died and was revived as Streckfuss' creature. He was ageless and immortal. Open his shirt and you would see the wheels and wires. Imagine committing suicide by enclosing your head in a plastic shirt bag. Some did. Therefore the laundry printed a caution on each.

Reinhart knew he had passed out, but he did not know that he knew, and he was really not interested in why. He had never been good at quantitative judgments, barely squeaked through high-school math.

What was notable about his present state was the absolute absence of pain. In ordinary life this would have led only to suspicion or rather suspense, a related word. In the beginning was the Word, the end is silence. This was, impossibly, neither. He certainly must tell his colleagues, when the experiment was concluded, that though in a sleep of ice, the brain made waves. Remembering that, he forgot all else and was resolved into a swirl of smoke or semen or snot and streamed towards a pinhole of light, entered it, and vanished.

Reinhart had a feeling that he had not closed his eyes. Nonetheless he opened them now and discovered himself still at table. The flasks and beakers had been removed, and his luncheon companions were conferring near the large freezer capsule. He checked himself for dizziness: flexed his neck, breathed deeply, seemed to pursue the ghost of a headache, detected nothing more, rose from the stool—had he kept his perch all the while?—took one step, and fell in a jointed, sequential fashion onto the concrete floor: knees, chest, chin.

Oddly enough, he hurt nowhere. However, he did not possess the coordination, or perhaps the will, to get up. From the tops of his eyes he saw a floorscape of metal legs and braces, and finally an oncoming pair of rubber overshoes. A hook or claw seized the neck of his jacket and raised him inexorably.

Having attained his feet, Reinhart said to the little Streckfuss: “Do you know you have just raised a dead weight of two hundred sixty-five pounds?” He felt OK. “With one hand,” he added. Sweet slowly approached. Reinhart said to him: “I don't know what happened.”

Streckfuss said: “Not by brute strength, I assure you, nor by magic.” But he did not explain.

“Did I, or did I not, pass out at the table?” Reinhart asked Sweet.

“You dozed a bit,” answered his friend. “We decided not to bother you.”

“I might have had a reaction to those pills, might I not?”

“Very unlikely,” said Streckfuss, “if you mean in any organic senssse. I cannot speak for your emotional constituseeyon. Exposure to new knowledge is zometimes exhowsting. But I suspect it is your habit to take a nap after a hearty meal.”

“You know, that's right,” Reinhart confessed. “But why did I just fall on my face?”

“I should suppose your leg was still asleep. It was twisted about the stool for zum time.”

“Of course, of course. …” He stamped his foot, but the pins and needles, if such there had been, were now gone. Suddenly he felt hale. He leaped into the air and clicked his heels.

Streckfuss chortled.

Reinhart asked: “What did you do, give me a pep pill?” He felt both embarrassed and pleased. He would not have been surprised to find himself turning a cartwheel, something he could never manage as a slender child. “I don't know what it was I ate, but it worked.”

“Still,” Streckfuss said, “not everysing is possible through nutrition at this point. One as yet does not understand the precise role of adenosine triphosphate in the synthesis of cell protein, though it seems crucial. Ah, zuh fools!”

Reinhart raised his eyebrows at Sweet.

Who explained: “Hans refers to the people who oppose science by simple inertia. If you look at any past era you will see certain active enemies of truth but the mass of any population is merely negative. I have had some experience with the public. I know that if we could start a trend, Hans could have more bodies than he needs. If somehow we can make it attractive, people will so to speak line up to be frozen. Do you know that Pan Am has a waiting list for the first commercial flight to the moon?”

“If I might put in my two cents' worth,” said Reinhart. He raised his hand in a routine movement and found to his surprise that it flew up over his head quick as a barnswallow. He pretended to yawn, as if he were stretching. “Ahhh. Excuse me. … But you can't quickly get anyone past the idea of death, even with the promise that it will be nullified—which, as you admit, you cannot even yet promise. If you could freeze and revive an animal, say—”

“Has been done,” said Streckfuss. “Smith, of London, has frozen hamsters. Half the water in the little rodent brains was ice, the tiny bodies hard and rigid. And zese are mammals, mind you, warmblooded creatures. Frozen hard as boards. When tawed, the little ahneemals were back on their wheels, revolving merrily, with bright beady little eyes.”

Reinhart was victim to an access of sentimentality. His daughter had owned a hamster once. The nimble little bastard had run on his wheel all night. Daytimes he sacked in under a pile of rubbish. If Reinhart got up for a nocturnal pee he could hear that wheel squeaking. Winona eventually loved him to death. Silently she came to Reinhart and opened her fat hand.

“Aw,” Reinhart said now. “The cute little devils.”

Streckfuss sniffed. “
Chacun à son goût
. Kenyon has frozen dogss to the point of arresting all circulation, stopping zuh hearts for some time, bringing about clinical death. Then he revived the animals successfully.”

“Why has this not been publicized?” Reinhart demanded of Sweet.

“A considerable literature is available. Experimentation in cryobiology is by no means new. Hans has been working in the field since the end of World War II.”

“Where did you spend the war?” Reinhart stubbornly asked the professor.