Vital Parts (32 page)

The beast was no longer reluctant to struggle, and its flailing hoofs were superb weapons of which Reinhart had been unaware until he sustained several savage blows, sure to be remembered by blue-green blotches on the morrow.

As might have been expected, Sweet had less trouble with the back end, owing to the nature of the man and the nature of the part. In psychoanalysis the patient traditionally faces away from the doctor, and Reinhart remembered why: Freud could not bear to see those eyes. He shut his own and encircled and subdued the thrashing forelegs with his thick arms. This of necessity brought his face near the goat's, his chest against its shoulder. The animal was on the table, and half of Reinhart with it. They paused together, Reinhart to breathe heavily of the stench, the goat, after a tentative shudder, to accept, with the stoical realism of the beast, the superior power further resistance to which would be quixotic. Simple creatures eat, fuck, fight according to their needs and opportunities, peddle no ideologies and bear no grudges.

Reinhart opened his eye to seek the goat's. They might at this point exchange understanding of a basic kind, two mammals, haired, air-breathing, their females viviparous and milk-secreting. Reinhart did not expect to be loved immediately. He found the goat's eye to be shut, squeezed, pursed like a nonfunctional buttonhole at the cuff of a jacket sleeve.

Streckfuss cried: “Still hold it!”

He had cut its throat with a scalpel and was catching its blood in a pail.

“There is no other way,” Bob Sweet was saying. “Any kind of injection might permeate and corrupt the cells. The living body is an entity, Carl, the internal affairs of which are complicated and subtle. Hans is not a cruel man. He does not torture his laboratory animals. As a trained physician his knife is swift and sure. The goat did not suffer needlessly, and gave up his life to save your friend's. I should say that is sufficient moral justification.”

Reinhart had not fainted like a Victorian heroine. No, he had stayed afoot through the dissection, first maintaining the goat in close restraint until the last quiver—gory from wrists to neck, for Streckfuss was none too precise with either scalpel or bucket and also in the early stages the goat's head was capable of movement; then watching as the Swiss dehaired the belly with a power clipper.

Next Streckfuss made one vertical and one horizontal slash, spread the flaps of skin, and plunged both hands into the squirmy viscera and rummaged around as if he were looking for the odd sock in a laundry bag. Reinhart still assumed this was preparatory to freezing. A massive job of reconstruction would be needed at thawing time—unless the suppositon was that by then the work of this mess would be done by noncorrosive gears and transistors, a single unit dropped in, hooked up.

Reinhart continued not to faint—the goat was after all not human—as Streckfuss serially emerged with severed organs and dropped them into basins which Bob carried away.

At last he had pretty well exhausted the stock of the first-rate parts, the big publicity hounds like heart and liver, most of which Reinhart, a hypochondriac as well as a former medical soldier, recognized. The actual guts, that gooey stew through which coiled a Loch Lomond serpent simulated in vacuum-cleaner hose, Streckfuss passed over, to swoop below and snip off the testicles. Above the gauze mask Bob's eyes were more than businesslike when these slid like oiled olives across his basin.

“There is a test called Aberhalden,” Sweet explained, “performed on the urine of the patient. Hans is one of the few men in the world, and the only one in America at present, who have mastered its analytic intricacies. In brief, this test indicates whether the organs are functioning properly, and if not, which are at fault. Hans has determined that Mainwaring suffers from a malfunction of the liver, specifically in the production of bile, which plays an essential role in the digestion of fats in the intestines.”

Reinhart was feeling better. He was always receptive to reason. “I see,” he said. “This will be recorded on the records that accompany the freezer capsule, so that when the liver-transplant technique has been perfected, Splendor can be thawed, given a new one, and revived.” God, but this still sounded like science fiction—as did space travel only ten years before, and no doubt the telephone in its day. “And also a new large intestine, I suppose.”

“No, no,” Bob said. “We are not going to freeze Mainwaring, at least not yet. Hans thinks he might be able to save him.”

Reinhart shook his fist. “You would never try that on a white man.”

Streckfuss was furiously busy at another table, chopping some organic-looking substance in a glass dish. Making lunch again, no doubt. This was a place in which Hieronymous Bosch would have felt quite at home.

“I tell you, Bob,” Reinhart stated gravely, “if you persist, I will personally call the police.”

Sweet flexed his arms as one does to suggest a hale condition. “God knows I am myself Exhibit A.” He bounced on his toes. He was still wearing the androgynous gown, and there was something osbcene about the demonstration of vigor.

“Did you hear me, Bob?”

Sweet went so far as lustily to gnash his artificial teeth in a grin of braggadocio virility. Then he said more soberly: “Of course Mainwaring's degeneration is well advanced. Too bad Hans couldn't have got to him earlier. But once this biliary malfunction is straightened up, he should be back on his feet, a better man than before—in fact, rejuvenated.”

Reinhart gave up on the warnings: one, because Bob paid no attention to them, and for another, he had heard the magic word, and furthermore pronounced without the smirk which had been its natural accompaniment since Ponce de León explored Florida, finding only alligators and sawgrass. To go back and start all over again, with the faculties of twenty and the memories of forty-four. Of course he was thinking of himself and not Splendor. Could it be serious?

“Do you have to be dying to get this treatment?” he asked.

And now Bob heard him, and answered: “I have tried to tell you a number of times, Carl, that I myself have received Hans's cell therapy, and here I stand as proof: Old age is a disease, and can be arrested right now, cured altogether perhaps still in our lifetimes. In this light
nothing else
is serious—can't you see that? The treasuries of all nations should be put at the disposal of the researchers in this field. Men like Hans, who is alone here and practicing illegally, in fact. But there are several in Europe, some accepted and even honored by their countries, if the countries are small enough. In America especially, which should be foremost in this sacred mission, medical theory and practice persist, ignorantly, cowardly, in the same old negative approach.”

Sweet laughed savagely, his ordinarily dispassionate mask extruding at appropriate points to produce, with the white cassock, the look of a celebrant of a proscribed religion, all the more righteous as well as merciless therefor. “The President,” he cried, “will probably die at no more than eighty years of age. The most powerful man on earth. He can put people on the moon, while his own cells waste away.”

“Chemicals,” said Reinhart, “I know, are the big things now. The emphasis has shifted from the emotional, psychosomatic approach to drugs—”

“No,” Sweet interrupted firmly. “Not chemicals but the basic unit of life, the cell, capable of infinite regeneration. We are not solid, Carl. We are assemblages of cells adhering together.”

“True,” Reinhart agreed. “You take any solid, even inanimate. It is no more than a cluster of molecules. They say that if you were deft enough you could slip your hand through a wall, between the atoms. Anyway, I saw once during the war, in England, Exeter Cathedral, I believe it was, a piece of wood that had been driven into a stone pillar by a bomb blast.”

“Bopp,” Streckfuss called. He held aloft an enormous syringe, of the kind used by veterinarians on people in movie comedies.

Sweet strode to the table. He opened his surgical gown at the back-parting and got his hands inside.

Reinhart saw that the tube of the hypodermic was filled with a suspension of pink globules, a slippery, gooey mess that reminded him in texture and form of that cocktail-party horror, orange caviar.

Bob's pants collapsed around his ankles, followed by his under-shorts. He lifted one side of the gown, revealing a hairy haunch, and Streckfuss drove the needle into the ham so presented and began slowly to depress the plunger.

Reinhart believed it was more polite to go around to the other side of the table, facing Bob, whose neck, however, was twisted and head inclined so that he could watch his buttock ingesting the weird nourishment.

“Which organ,” asked Reinhart, “are you getting?”

“Testicles.” Sweet was very matter-of-fact. He did not bother to look around and check out this statement on Reinhart's countenance, for obviously there was no irony in it. He was having minced goat balls injected into his rump—doesn't everybody? was the implication.

After that was done, over to Splendor's house Streckfuss would go and shoot the poor devil full of chopped goat's liver. Reinhart was not the one to stand in his way. Splendor was dying anyhow.

11

There were various possibilities: that Blaine had lied to Maw, in whole or part; that the girl had lied to Blaine; that each was lying to the other; that Maw was lying deliberately or suffering from senile delusions or merely making a malicious joke in stopping the check.

Blaine of course was quite capable of the bad feeling behind this bit of character-assassination, and he certainly would be in the market for revenge. He was a pretty ugly kid without his long golden locks. To Reinhart's taste he had not been much with them. Up to puberty he had resembled his father. Then for no good reason he had begun to get this ratty look along with the change of voice and a skin condition. At fourteen or fifteen, when acne was still in vogue, he had a faceful of purple welts. Sympathetically Reinhart supplied him with a new type of lotion—advertised on late-afternoon teen dance shows which, during idle periods, Reinhart tuned in on to watch the jouncing thoraxes and sturdy thighs of adolescent girls—the kind that masked the lesions with a beige cosmetic while “hidden medication did its work.” But Blaine was by then already well embarked on his career of defiance—though not as yet openly vile.

Reinhart knew his own trouble as a father resulted from a preoccupation with the ideal which actuality delighted in continually proving impractical. Hence he was ever insecure. To Blaine he could not speak straight without considering the ironies. He had not been able to order him to do his homework, say, without reflecting on a number of considerations which, evident in his voice, vitiated the command to a mere wheedle devoid of sufficient reason. For one, Blaine had always got good grades without apparent study. For another, Reinhart abhorred the idea of enforced learning as illiberal, un-American, antidemocratic, and contrary to the best psychosocial theory. The life of the mind must be pursued by love alone. He had heard often enough that Shakespeare will be hated if read under compulsion. At the same time he was secretly pleased to have had
As You Like It
rammed down his own throat as a high-school freshman, else he would have preserved nothing from those days but memories of
Reader's Digest
accounts of now-outmoded scientific breakthroughs.

Reinhart had always lacked the essential of the commander: the conviction not that his orders were sensible or just, but that they would be carried out.

A brassard labeled
DAD
and a steel helmet, that was what Reinhart needed, nightstick, handcuffs. As one grows older he becomes more of a policeman. Yet his own father had been anything but a cop, and Reinhart could not remember having defied him. They had this instinctive, tacit agreement by which each observed the decencies towards the other. When their needs conflicted, something was always worked out. If Reinhart was supposed to cut the grass, on the one hand, and play ball with his pals, on the other, his custom was to put the situation to Dad, who would always find a civilized exit from the dilemma.

“Why don't you mow the front lawn, Carlo, which shows? That shouldn't take so long, whereas the back, which is larger, you can leave for when it is convenient, on account of nobody sees it as much.”

For his part, Reinhart then would accept only pro rata payment, twenty cents out of the fifty which he got for the whole job, taking the remainder when he completed the back yard, which indeed he would do promptly after the ball game.

It had been so simple, sensible, and just, and both parties habitually acted with honor. Common decency, Reinhart was wont glibly to think as a very young man, is all that's necessary for a world without conflict. He saw a ghost of this theory in the contemporary vogue among youth for “love,” though, typically, exaggerated by the passing of the years. Just as you could not get a lawn mowed any more for fifty cents, so inflation had affected ethics. Decency was not enough, and the English, who seemed to have invented it, no longer had their empire, were in fact virtually bankrupt. Why should you have to love a man to give him justice? Though Reinhart did, of course, love Dad, but he might have done as much for a stranger.

Blaine however, in his day, neither played ball nor cut the grass, though the fee for the latter was now three dollars and the tool, provided by the employer, a gasoline-powered device for which no effort was needed beyond a gentle guidance. A young girl could have run it, and in fact, Winona sometimes did, or came outside, anyway, while Reinhart was making it roar, and “helped.” What had she been then, eight or nine? Always large for her years.

What had Blaine done, if not sports and not work? He had a puppet show of his own making, quite cunning, cardboard theater, finger-puppets suggested by that glove-style hot-dish handler Gen had, the palm of which was decorated as a comic rabbit face in fragments of colored felt. Blaine himself stitched up a cast of characters on his mother's Singer, then manipulated them and spoke in several voices to a script of his own composition. Genevieve naturally believed this a confirmation of the boy's genius, predicted by her father when Blaine had been christened with his own name. Never having been herself a boy, she was not equipped, as was Reinhart, with the experience from which to assess the accomplishment as rather routine. At ten or eleven Reinhart had made his own comic strip, using a set of rubber stamps which, inked on resilient pad and carefully positioned on the paper and pressed, left the representation of circus animals, clowns, bareback riders, and aerialists. It was far from easy to make neat impressions, properly aligned, but the real creativity came in on the writing of the accompanying narration, painstakingly lettered in a box at the bottom of each frame.