Vital Parts (20 page)

“In Europe, of course. Vere else, for goodness sake?”

Reinhart made a gesture of acceptance, and again he was inadequately extravagant: his hands took wing. He must watch that on pain of looking swishy. “Just asking.” If Streckfuss' specialty was rejuvenation, then he could be Schatzi from a quarter-century ago and he would not necessarily look older. Some such thought tramped across Reinhart's brain in muddy boots.

Streckfuss was leering at him through pupils of faceted jet beads with highlights in the shape of accents grave and acute. He had abnormally long earlobes, as if they had once begun to melt. Reinhart could not remember this detail about Schatzi.

“I would say,” said Reinhart, “that publicity was the answer. I myself knew nothing about this whole subject until I saw you on TV, Bob.” He had turned to look at Sweet, too swiftly, spinning on balls of feet like greased bearings, and almost revolved past the target. Whereas he should merely have turned his neck. His body had a will of its own.

Sweet said: “I think this is enough for today, Carl. Suffice it to say that wonders are within reach as of this moment. The situation is in a far more sophisticated state than was the case with aeronautics just prior to the Wright Brothers' lift-off at Kitty Hawk.”

“Suda,” said Reinhart. He had started to pronounce some other word or phrase. Instead this nonsense sound emerged. It was his own voice all right, and he had felt the breath hiss acrosss his tongue. He proceeded to do it again, with an elaboration: “Suda, Kobe.” He had lost control. Admitting which, in a rush of panic heat, he regained it. “I don't know why I said that.” He leered redly at the others. “Strains of an old song, maybe. Boopy-doopy-doo.” He pretended to be dizzy and seized Streckfuss' shoulder. Childish-feeling rubbery bones writhed under his fingers. There was a sensitive nerve-point beneath the shoulder-cap, if he could find it: would make him wince and howl.

But the professor threw him off with only a twitch. “Do not play the fool. Professor Isamu Suda, of the medical college at Kobe in Japan. We are aware of his successful experiment.”

Again Reinhart's automatic pilot took over. He listened to himself with amazement. “Professor Suda,” said his own voice, “froze a cat's brain to minus twenty degrees Centigrade.”

Sweet nodded to Streckfuss, and said to Reinhart: “Yes? Go on.”

“That's all I know,” said Reinhart, less embarrassed by now. He had begun to attain the freedom of the man in a really extreme predicament, so sick, for example, that he will puke in public. Shame is really anticipatory, whereas fact is fact. He could not understand how he had gained the stated information, and thus he felt no responsibility for it.

Streckfuss spoke in a commanding voice. “Proceed.”

“I'm sorry, that's it,” Reinhart confessed. “You can't get blood out of a turnip.”

“Ah, you little rogue,” Streckfuss said preposterously, his wildest hair reaching no farther than Reinhart's breast pocket. “You have been performing your investigations. You have been pooling our legs, you fonny guy you.”

“Wait a minute!” Reinhart cried. “Does the figure 203 mean anything?” He had seen this as if skywritten in the azure of his mind.

Sweet said: “After two hundred and three days Suda thawed the cat brain. The electroencephalograms recorded the resumption of normal brain waves.”

Reinhart felt his scalp. “Gentlemen, I am nonplussed.”

“Well,” said Streckfuss, shaking himself within the laboratory coat. “It could be vorse.” He padded to what looked like a closet door, opened it only far enough to admit his small body, and sidled through.

“What's in there?” Reinhart asked.

Sweet said: “His austere living quarters. An iron cot, bookshelves, high-intensity reading lamp, a tiny washroom containing a stall shower. I would give Hans anything he wants. That's it.”

Reinhart saw rosy-fingered dawn. “He hypnotized me, didn't he? And planted certain suggestions, which I delivered on cue.”

“What difference could it possibly make?” Sweet asked. “
Suda revived the cat brain and the electroencephalograms were virtually normal.”

“You mean it was still thinking? I wonder what about? Who knows what goes through a cat's brain when it is living naturally? I knew a guy once who told me that all cats are by nature schizophrenics. His psychiatrist furnished him with the theory. No doubt it would explain much in the feline temperament, which people sometimes call inscrutable.” Reinhart pointed at the shelves bearing the smaller freezing capsules. “Looks as if the professor has got a few animals of his own.”

“Hans has never published the results of his own work.”

“Are they filled?” Reinhart asked, without much genuine wonder, because he now assumed they were, a small rigid hairy body in each, stiff-whiskered, tight-eyed, perhaps the tip of a yellow canine showing from the sealed lips, only the tail eluding rigor. If you found a deceased rat on the town dump, and you were a boy, or a primitive of any age, you plucked it up by that tapered terminal shoelace and swung it towards a quailing chum. “White mice? Hamsters?”

“Monkeys” said Sweet. “The next step is man.”

7

The characters on the screen were either emotionless or showed some feeling at odds with the circumstances. A bony-faced blonde smiled at a squat brunette who addressed her angrily in a Scandinavian language, a tongue resembling German spoken while orally circulating some soft food, the vowels thus being rendered oval, the consonants bent. A beach full of round flat stones like poker chips, a marbled sky; the subtitles, as always with queer misprints, were flowing in superimposition across the ribs of a derelict skiff at the bottom of the picture: “You see, it is this way with mee. I … well … have never been able to laugh easly—no! That is far from presise—” A large narrow man tramped into view, wearing a thick fisherman's sweater and an eyepatch. The brunette fixed her square shoulders at his clabbered salutation, untranslated, and failed to reply. The blonde wept silently in tight closeup of a face white as a giant aspirin.

“The birds, have you seen them?” read the rubric, beyond which lay a shot of the sea with its multitude of foamy hiccups. Who spoke, eyepatch or deep-voiced girl? The blonde was out of the running: she had had no lines from the outset, yet was the putative star. Had even, without motive, displayed one pale teat earlier on, then both buttocks, which were suddenly bulbous below elongated necks. She had pulled on slacks over no underwear. The brunette had fastened the blonde's brassiere hooks while sucking a cigarette and exuding dialogue rumpled in smoke.

Eunice sat on Reinhart's left, having insisted he precede her into the row. She made a breathy sound at the appearance of the male character, a gasp or cough or hiss. Reinhart had not known her long enough to specify which, nor had he, after an hour's viewing, oriented himself in the picture. He had not done much moviegoing in recent years. He had heard that commercial films were on the verge of showing the act of coition itself. Perhaps this was the night. He hoped he would not snort in shame.

Why had Eunice wanted him on the wrong side of her? While pondering this he missed something that caused the audience to stir as one. A black dog was racing up a bluff above the ocean. The sound track was empty or the equipment had failed, the latter having been a frequent occurrence with the outmoded machinery of the Majestic during Reinhart's term of duty as part-owner. The audience would murmur, growl, and whistle, then stamp its mass foot, which of course led to dangerous structural reverberations. The usher nearest the warning button was supposed to push it and so alert the projectionist, an aged functionary who from time to time even confused the sequence of reels, accidentally defining the work of art as that which had a beginning, an end, and finally a middle. “I preferred it that way,” he would assert arrogantly, armed with his sense that they could not afford a better man. He was also a cough-syrup junkie, a codeine-and-terpin-hydrate-head. All you had to do to get a bottle was sign your name, and in fact the old coot sometimes signed Reinhart's, as Reinhart discovered once when trying to buy a ration for a legitimate chest cold. One of the ushers, a lad with coltish eyes and maidenly ways, claimed the projectionist would goose him when, delivering the heavy hexagonal film carriers to the booth, he could not defend himself. “And I don't
like
that,” he shrilled, rolling his hips and quitting. Many effeminate persons are not queer: rather they are the prey of queers, so Reinhart had read in a book by Dr. Brill years ago when he had been interested in psychiatry. Reinhart had in fact made discreet inquiries when hiring this usher. “Oh, no,” said another boy, already employed, “Ralphie likes his nookie.” Reinhart encouraged his people to talk straight with him, in their own jargon whenever possible. He posed as just one of the guys. This might have led to disciplinary problems had not business fallen away to the point that there was little for anyone to do except brood on his loneliness amid the vast reaches of the theater and thus welcome the quite rare encounter with the boss who found him. In the last months there was no audience with sufficient sense of itself to protest at breaks in sound and discontinuity of narrative.

Reinhart was led to observe that it is lack of community which makes for peace. Most theorists have it ass-backwards.

At last the dog, in the current offering, barked. Reinhart suspected the silence had been intentional, to bring about a certain dramatic effect. The device worked on Eunice, who grasping presumably at his left hand, which was plastered like an amoeba on the straining Dacron of his thigh, missed and instead found his member, bunched amidst a crotch-tangle of slippery wash-and-wear trousers and stiff white undershorts newly purchased. Squeezed it painfully. This intrusion was so unwarranted that he could not immediately assign it to his credence, and believed he had neglected to pluck out that last steel pin, concealed deep in the excess groin-stitching by Packer #2547, whose printed chit butterflied to the floor when, hopping on one leg, he donned the boxer-style garment with its continuous elastic waist.

The stocky dark woman was pouring wine for someone off camera, and who damnably might remain so for a half an hour without an identity-establishment. The dog was back, now being kicked by the man with the eyepatch, and the subtitles were suddenly slanted in italics:
Hell, of course, is not when you hungre, but
—
do you remember the Latvian song
—

A grim customer in balaclava helmet and goggles bulleted past on a one-man toboggan.

Reinhart involuntarily laughed aloud, so heartily as soon to infect a few souls widely dispersed and then the mass of the audience, in full diapason from fluty nickering to sousaphone bellow. As it happened what touched Reinhart off was not the picture, which to him was not absurd but irrelevant, but a sudden reflection on this moment, which when joined to a quadrillion others would eventually add up to a destiny. Here he sat, at the end of a day which began with his being thrown out of his home; passed through a laboratory featuring a mad scientist, played by a reputed Swiss, whose ambition was to find a corpse to freeze; to a motion-picture theater in which a large, lush girl whom he scarcely knew interminably clutched his organ of generation.

It was at this sequence that he had laughed, and when the audience joined him for the wrong reasons—if he set a precedent it was invariably unintentional—Eunice let him go.

She proceeded to contribute to the jollity, in a baritone buffola from her deep chest, though her speaking voice was considerably higher. Then the blonde's face appeared, but soon was partially obscured by the back of her head: the old mirror trick. Now raindrops bespattered close-up leaves, but a dry-faced, full-bearded ancient parted them with the rubber tip of his crutch. His nose-hairs were a rich growth. Why had that fad not caught on? Probably because you were nasally sparse-haired until too old to start a trend. Speaking of noses, the blonde at last spoke through hers. “One cannot possible have a motive for wanting to understand unless one is mad.” Or at least so went the subtitle.

The blonde bun lay stolidly against her nape. Her pale eyes, out the other side, were fixed forever in the mirror, the camera ceased to crank, the picture was over.

“What devastating experience,” groaned Eunice, leaving out the indefinite article, as if in mockery of the subtitles' frailties. The lights came on, and Reinhart winced at her. You got only a coming attraction, consisting tonight, meanly, of illuminated stills, and then the feature, at two fucking seventy-five a head. These art-movie houses did not maintain the incessantly bright screen of the Yahoo pleasure palaces and admitted no patrons during the feature. Until Reinhart was old enough to vote he had never seen a motion picture from the beginning but arrived always in medias res, part of the amusement being in orienting yourself. It could be done in a quarter-hour; known actors played predictable roles, and only a half-dozen plots were then extant.

“Do you think,” he asked, modernizing his perspective, “that the dog was an erotic symbol vis-à-vis the girl?”

“I hope not,” answered Eunice, hipping her way out the row though with her face at him, “unless as a put-on, Freud being so thoroughly out.” She too was squinting with little grape-seed eyes.

In the aisle they intermingled with the throng. The population had got much huskier than that of old, or Reinhart had shrunk. Films outside the common run used to be attended mainly by pale, attenuated men and neurasthenic women with tight-pulled back hair and anteater noses, everybody wearing functional eyeglasses. Within twenty square feet he now saw three men as large as himself, all better-tailored, and one of them was a Negro steering a sepia Venus into him from the left: she was some four feet of leg in white satin pants, the waistband of which gave way only to her tiny, perfect breasts webbed in fishnet, and he was a burnished god in paisley tunic adorned with bronze medallion and chain. Reinhart did not mind the new garb when hung on admirable frames. He had a romantic impulse to seize this pair and tell them they were beautiful, but supposed it would be taken for rank patronization. Instead he must take care that his groin did not brush those shiny high buttocks now just before him in the press.