The Counterlife (7 page)

If/then. As the afternoon wore on, he began to feel himself straining more and more after an idea that would release those old notes from their raw factuality and transform them into a puzzle for his imagination to solve. While peeing in the upstairs bathroom, he thought, “Suppose on that afternoon she'd secretly come to the house, after they married each other by performing anal love, he watched her, right in this room, pinning up her hair before getting in with him to take a shower. Seeing him adoring her—seeing his eyes marvel at this strange European woman who embodies simultaneously both innocent domesticity and lurid eroticism—she says, confidently smiling, ‘I really look extremely Aryan with my hair up and my jaw exposed.' ‘What's wrong with that?' he asks. ‘Well, there's a quality in Aryans that isn't very attractive—as history has shown.' ‘Look,' he tells her, ‘let's not hold the century against you…'”

No, that's not them, thought Zuckerman, and came down the stairs into the living room, where Wendy was still nowhere to be seen. But then it needn't be “them”—could be me, he thought. Us. What if instead of the brother whose obverse existence mine inferred—and who himself untwinnishly inferred me—
I
had been the Zuckerman boy in that agony? What is the real wisdom of that predicament? Could it be simple for anyone? If that is indeed how those drugs incapacitate most of the men who must take them to live, then there's a bizarre epidemic of impotence in this country whose personal implications nobody's scrutinizing, not in the press or even on Donahue, let alone in fiction …

*   *   *

In the living room someone was saying to him, “You know, I tried to interest your brother in cryonics—not that that's any consolation now.”

“Did you?”

“I didn't even know he was sick. I'm Barry Shuskin. I'm trying to get a cryonics facility going here in New Jersey and when I came to Henry he laughed. A guy with a bad heart, he can't fuck anymore, and he wouldn't even read the literature I gave him. It was too bizarre for a rationalist like him. In his position I wouldn't have been so sure. Thirty-nine and it's all over—
that's
bizarre.”

Shuskin was a youthful fifty—very tall, bald, with a dark chin-beard and a staccato delivery, a vigorous man with plenty to say, whom Zuckerman at first took to be a lawyer, a litigator, maybe some sort of hard-driving executive. He turned out to be an associate of Henry's, a dentist in the same office complex whose specialty was implanting teeth, anchoring custom-built teeth in the jawbone rather than fitting bridges or dentures. When implant work was too involved or too time-consuming for Henry to handle in his general family practice, he referred it to Shuskin, who also specialized in reconstructing the mouths of accident and cancer victims. “You know about cryonics?” Shuskin asked, after identifying himself as Henry's colleague. “You should. You ought to be on the mailing list. Newsletters, magazines, books—everything documented. They have figured out how to freeze now without damage to the cells. Suspended animation. You don't die, you're put on hold, hopefully for a couple of hundred years. Until science has solved the problem of thawing out. It's possible to be frozen, suspended, and then revitalized, all of the broken parts repaired or replaced, and you're as good if not better than new. You know you're going to die, you've got cancer, it's about to strike the vital organs. Well, you've got an option. You contact the cryonics people, you say I want to be awakened in the twenty-second century, give me an overdose of morphine, at the same time drain me, profuse me, and suspend me. You're not dead. You just go from life to being shut down. No intermediary stage. The cryonic solution replaces the blood and prevents ice crystallization damaging the cells. They encase the body in a plastic bag, store the bag in a stainless-steel container, and fill it with liquid nitrogen. Minus 273 degrees. Fifty thousand bucks for the freezing, and then you set up a trust fund to pay the maintenance. That's peanuts, a thousand, fifteen hundred a year. The problem is that there is a facility only in California and Florida—and speed is everything. This is why I want to seriously explore setting up a nonprofit organization right here in Jersey, a cryonics facility for those men like myself who don't want to die. Nobody would make any dough out of it, except a few salaried people, who are on the up and up, to run the facility. A lot of guys would say, ‘Shit, Barry, let's do it—we'll make a buck out of this and fuck everybody who thinks that there's something to it.' But I don't want to muddy it up with that kind of shit. The idea is to get a membership group together of men who want to be preserved for the future, guys who are committed to the principle and not to making a buck. Maybe fifty. You probably could get five thousand. There are a lot of high-powered guys who are enjoying life and have a lot of power and a lot of know-how, and they feel that it's a crock of shit to get burned or buried—why not frozen?”

Just then a woman took hold of Zuckerman's hand, a tiny, elderly woman with exceptionally pretty blue eyes, a large bust, and a full, round, merry-looking face. “I'm Carol's aunt from Albany. Bill Goff's sister. I want to extend my sympathies.”

Indicating that he understood the sentimental obligations of the brother of the deceased, quietly, in an aside, Shuskin muttered to Zuckerman, “I want your home address—before you go.”

“Later,” said Zuckerman, and Shuskin, who was enjoying life, had a lot of power and a lot of know-how and no intention of being buried or burned—who would lie there like a lamb chop till the twenty-second century and then wake up, defrosted, to a billion more years of being himself—left Zuckerman to commiserate with Carol's aunt, who was still tightly holding his hand. Forever Shuskin.
Is
that the future, once the freezer has replaced the grave?

“This is a loss,” she said to Zuckerman, “that no one will ever understand.”

“It is.”

“Some people are amazed by what she said, you know.”

“By Carol? Are they?”

“Well, to get up at your husband's funeral and talk like that? I'm of the generation that didn't even say such things privately. Many people wouldn't have felt the same need that she did to be open and honest about something so personal. But Carol has always been an astonishing girl and she didn't disappoint me today. The truth to her has always been the truth and nothing she has to hide.”

“I thought what she said was just fine.”

“Of course. You're an educated man. You know about life. Do me a favor,” she whispered. “When you have a minute, tell her father.”

“Why?”

“Because if he keeps on the way he's going, he'll give himself another heart attack.”

He waited one more hour, till almost five, not so as to sedate Mr. Goff, whose confusion was Carol's business, but on the remote chance that Wendy might yet appear. A decent girl, he thought—she doesn't want to force herself on the wife and the children, even if they're innocent of her great role in all this. He had thought at first that she would want terribly to talk to the only other person who knew why this had happened and what she must be going through, but maybe it was precisely because Henry had told Nathan everything that she was staying away—because she didn't know whether to expect to be castigated by him, or cross-examined for a fictional exposé, or perhaps even wickedly seduced by the twisted brother, à la Richard the Third. As the minutes passed, he realized that waiting around for Wendy went further than wanting to find out how she'd behave with Carol, or seeing for himself at close range if there was anything there that the photograph hadn't disclosed; it was more like hanging around to meet a movie star or to catch a glimpse of the Pope.

Shuskin caught him just as he was heading for his coat in what was now the widow's bedroom. They walked up the stairs together, Zuckerman thinking, Strange Henry never mentioned his visionary colleague, the implantologist—that in his wild state he hadn't even been tempted. But probably he hadn't even heard him. Henry's delusions didn't run to living thawed out in the second millennium. Even a life in Basel with Maria was too much like science fiction for him. By comparison he had asked for so very little—willing to be wholly content, for the rest of his natural days, with the modest miracle of Carol, Wendy, and the kids. Either that, or to be an eleven-year-old boy in the cottage at the Jersey Shore with the faucet at the side to wash the sand off your feet. If Shuskin had told him that science was working on making it the summer of 1948 again, he might have had himself a customer.

“There's a group in L.A.,” Shuskin was saying, “I'm going to send you their newsletter. Some very bright guys. Philosophers. Scientists. Engineers. A lot of writers too. What they're doing on the West Coast, because of their feeling that the body is not what's important, that your identity is all up here, so they separate the head from the body. They know they'll be able to reconnect heads to bodies, reconnect the arteries, the brain stem, and everything else all to a new body. They'll have solved the immunological problems, or they may be able to clone new bodies. Anything is possible. So they're just freezing the heads. It's cheaper than freezing and storing the whole body. Faster. Cuts storage costs. They find that appealing in intellectual circles. Maybe you will too, if you ever find yourself in Henry's shoes. I don't go for it myself. I want my whole body frozen. Why? Because I personally believe your experience is very much connected to your memories that every cell in your body has. You don't separate the mind from the body. The body and the mind are one. The body
is
the mind.”

No disputing that, not here today, thought Zuckerman, and after locating his coat on the king-sized bed that Henry had exchanged for a coffin, he wrote out his address. “If I wind up in Henry's shoes,” he said, handing it to Shuskin.

“I said ‘if'? Pardon my delicacy. I meant when.”

*   *   *

Though Henry had been a slightly heavier, more muscular man than his older brother, they were still more or less the same size and build, and that perhaps explained why Carol held on to him so very long when he came downstairs to leave. It was, for both of them, such a strongly emotional moment that Zuckerman wondered if he wasn't about to hear her say, “I know about her, Nathan. I've known all along. But he would have gone crazy if I told him. Years ago I found out about a patient. I couldn't believe my ears—the kids were small, I was younger, and it mattered terribly to me then. When I told him that I knew, he went berserk. He had a hysterical fit. He wept for days, every time he came home from the office begging me to forgive him, begging me from down on his knees not to make him move out of the house—calling himself the most awful names and begging me not to throw him out. I never wanted to see him like that again. I've known about them all, every one, but I let him be, let him have what he wanted so long as at home he was a good father to the kids and a decent husband to me.”

But in Zuckerman's arms, pressing herself up against his chest, all she said, in a breaking voice, was “It helped me enormously, your being here.”

Consequently he had no reason to reply, “So that's why you made up that story,” but said nothing more than what was called for. “It helped
me,
being with you all.”

Carol did not then respond, “Of course that's why I said what I did. Those bitches all weeping their hearts out—sitting there weeping for
their man.
The hell with that!” Instead she said to him, “It meant a lot to the children to see you. They needed you today. You were lovely to Ruth.”

Nathan did not ask, “And you let him go ahead with the surgery, knowing who it was for?” He said, “Ruth's a terrific girl.”

Carol replied, “She's going to be all right—we all are,” and bravely kissed him goodbye, instead of saying, “If I had stopped him, he would never have forgiven me, it would have been a nightmare for the rest of our lives”; instead of, “If he wanted to risk his life for that stupid, slavish, skinny little slut, that was his business, not mine”; instead of, “It served him right, dying like that after what he put me through. Poetic justice. May he rot in hell for his nightly blow job!”

Either what she'd told everyone from the altar was what she truly believed, either she was a good-hearted, courageous, blind, loyal mate whom Henry had fiendishly deceived to the last, or she was a more interesting woman than he'd ever thought, a subtle and persuasive writer of domestic fiction, who had cunningly reimagined a decent, ordinary, adulterous humanist as a heroic martyr to the connubial bed.

He didn't really know what to think until at home that evening, before sitting down at his desk to reread those three thousand words written in his notebook the night before—and to record his observations of the funeral—he again got out the journal from ten years back and turned the pages until he found his very last entry about Henry's great thwarted passion. It was pages on in the notebook, buried amid notes about something else entirely; that's why the evening before it had eluded his search.

The entry was dated several months after Maria's Christmas call from Basel, when Henry was beginning to think that if there was any satisfaction to be derived from his crushing sense of loss, it was that at least he had never been discovered—back when the inchoate, debilitating depression had at last begun to lift and to be replaced by the humbling realization of what the affair with Maria had so painfully exposed: the fact that he was somehow not quite coarse enough to bow to his desires, and yet not quite fine enough to transcend them.

Carol picks him up at Newark Airport, after Cleveland orthodontic conference. He gets in behind the wheel at the airport parking lot. Night and a late-winter gale on the way. Carol, all at once in tears, undoes her alpaca-lined storm coat and flips on the car light. Naked beneath but for black bra, panties, stockings, garter belt. For a flickering moment he is even aroused, but then he spots the price tag stapled to the garter belt, and sees in that all the desperateness of this startling display. What he sees is not some wealth of passion in Carol, undiscovered by him till then, that he might suddenly begin to plumb, but the pathos of these purchases obviously made earlier that day by the predictable, sexually unadventurous wife to whom he would be married for the rest of his life. Her desperation left him limp—then angry: never had he ached more for Maria! How could he have let that woman go! “Fuck me!” Carol cries, and not in the incomprehensible Swiss-German that used to make him so excited, but in plain, understandable English. “Fuck me before I die! You haven't fucked me like a woman in years!”