Vital Parts (40 page)

“‘Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile,'” said the guard.

“Hey, I know that one,” Reinhart said. “Only isn't the first word ‘Where'?”

“No,” the guard stated firmly, bringing up from the hip a paper-bound volume into which his right index finger was embedded. He opened the book and read:

“What though the spicy breezes

Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle,

Though every prospect pleases,

And only man is vile.

Bishop Heber, 1782–1826.”

“Is that right. I would have said Dryden or possibly Pope, I don't know why.”

The guard leafed through the book. “Here's the Pope,” he said. “‘The vulgar boil, the learned roast an egg.' I don't get that. … Here's one:

Men, some to business, some to pleasure take

But every woman is at heart a rake.

I don't get that either.

See how the world its veterans rewards!

A youth of frolics, an old age of cards.

I'm a veteran,” he added quizzically, “and that's a crock of shit.”

“Me too,” said Reinhart. “But I don't think he means ‘veteran' in the sense of the American armed forces. He lived a couple of centuries ago and was English.”

“I was in England for a year before the invasion,” said the guard, “and I didn't like one little bit of it. I picked up a whore once in the blackout and when we got to her place and she put on the light, she had two sore eyes. How do you like that?”

He was one of those bitter individuals who are also cryptic. “Who was the other guy you mentioned?” he asked, thumbing roughly through the book. “Drysdale?”

“Dryden,” said Reinhart. “Those names are always linked, Pope and Dryden, like Shelley and Keats.”

“Billy Jones and Ernie Haire, the Interwoven Pair,” the guard said. “I never went to college.”

“Didn't you take advantage of the GI Bill?” Reinhart asked with a lack of sympathy.

“Fuck
that
,” said the guard. He had one long hair growing from his left ear, and several ancient blackheads spotted here and there about his face. Reinhart could never understand the sort of persistent inattention which would permit that.

“I hardly ever get around to reading poetry any more,” he however said. “I guess it is a great thing to kill time with up here.”

The guard flashed the cover of the book. “This isn't poetry,” said he. “It's quotations. Somebody left it here. They leave all kinda things here, you wouldn't believe it, though it ain't as bad as the bus. I used to drive a city bus. I found a truss the other day; you know, for a rupture. You find dirty jockstraps, false teeth, a dozen new shirts still in cellophane, a dead parrot, a live turkey, but the damnedest was once I found a fresh turd, it looked human, could have been a dog's, but that part of the deck was empty for hours.” He suddenly guffawed. “Maybe it was mine!” Stuck his head into the book again. “Hey, here you go, Dryden:

My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires,

My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,

Followed false lights; and when their glimpse was gone,

My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.

Such was I, such by nature still I am.

Be thine the glory, and be mine the shame.”

Reinhart said: “I suppose this fence is to keep people from jumping over?”

“Naw,” said the guard. “To keep jerks from throwing things down. You'd be surprised: drop a penny and it would go through some character's head like a bullet.”

This shed new light on the problem of self-disposal. If Reinhart could get someone to drop a coin while he stood on the sidewalk below.

“Well, we're all alone up here today.”

“It's still early. Towards noon in summer you get the groups, Girl Scouts and such, and they toss their garbage down if you don't stop them. People are pigs. We used to have a mesh with bigger openings and them pigs would push garbage through them. When I drove the bus lots of people would piss in the back seat, especially on the last run at night, and more than once I caught young kids playing stink-finger back there.”

Reinhart was looking northwards, verifying by the subtle curve of the horizon that the earth was truly round.

“Know something?” said the guard. “That isn't bad. When I was younger I used to think nookie made the world go around, but now I get more pleasure out of taking a good old-fashioned dump.”

Why “old-fashioned,” Reinhart wondered. Had youth also somehow corrupted that function? But he doubted that the guard was precise about language.

“You be surprised,” the man went on, “I get a lot of propositions up here.” He leered into space.

“Is that right?” Reinhart asked idly. He supposed he was playing for time. Had the fence not been there he might already be a squash of protoplasm on the sidewalk. What a thing that would be for passersby to see: apropos of nothing, the sudden hurtle, the horrendous smash, the flying parts.

“The young ones are the worst,” the guard went on. He searched for something in Reinhart's eyes. “Know what I mean? They start real young nowadays.” He moved closer, though the deck was windswept and empty.

“I guess prosperity does it,” Reinhart said. “Kids are healthier than when we were children, during the Depression.” He stepped back before the guard could breathe on him. There were certain people you knew had bad breath.

“Ooooah-ugh,” the guard muttered obscenely. “Some of them little Girl Scouts and them fat behinds and bobbing titties already. Mmmmpf. Ohhh.” He gave Reinhart a rolling display of ocular veins. “I had a beaut the other day, a little twelve-year-old fatty who was trying to put a banana skin through the wire. I says, ‘I ought to take your panties down and tan your little keyster,' and she says, cocking that pretty fat butt, with them fresh, soft boobies poking out around her neckerchief—”

The man was a raving pervert.

Reinhart wrinkled his nose. “You better watch yourself, fella,” he said. “They could lock you up and throw the key away.”

“Shit,” said the guard. “Littly pussy like that don't tell their mamas what they do these days. She knows what it's all about. She says, ‘I'll peel your banana for you.' Huh?”

Reinhart stated frostily: “I happen to be a father.”

“Me too,” the guard agreed with enthusiasm.

“I'm going around on the sunny side,” Reinhart said. The filthy swine. He should turn him in, but in any kind of sex thing a person had to be caught in the act. That is, when Reinhart was plaintiff. When he was defendant, however, any fantastic insinuation or outright lie was accepted as evidence, as in the case of his alleged relations with the girl next door, who was far from being twelve and had the build of a brood mare.

The guard trailed him, however, saying: “Hey, should I get her to bring a friend? We could get a bottle of wine—”

Reinhart turned furiously. “Screw you and your rotten perversions, you degenerate. What gives you the right to address me in that fashion? Can't you understand:
I
came up here to jump off
.”

The guard showed a mouthful of discolored fillings: was either smiling or preparing to bite. “OK, guy, we get Boy Scout groups too, if that's your game.”

When you are absolutely in the right, you can stare any man down. This was one of the many useless assumptions on which Reinhart grew up, it being often exemplified in morally instructive novels like Ralph Henry Barbour's
Honor of the School
and movies about the United States Military Academy. However, as expected, the guard refused to quail. He molested underage girls without a hint of self-doubt. Where did everybody else get their assurance?

“You write poetry, do you?” slyly asked the guard, and cocked his arm on his hip as if carrying a large loaf of bread.

“Look,” Reinhart said. “I came up here to kill myself. Why do you persistently ignore that?”

“Because you are a big fat twenty-four-carat pansy,” the guard answered. “This place attracts creeps for some reason, but you take the cake, buster. Now get yourself down to the street pronto or I'll blow the whistle on you.”

The elevator was around on the sunny side. Reinhart walked there at a grave and dignified pace appropriate to a man of his years. Crossing the clean, ruthless angle of shadow, he was smothered by the white blanket of sun. Under an Indian-scout hand across his eyebrows, he saw another patron of the observation deck, a slightly built youngish chap with carrot hair, freckles, and all-American smile,

“Hi there!” cried this fellow.

Reinhart returned the greeting. He noticed that the lad had before him on a high tripod a quite realistic-looking rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. Probably an advertising stunt of some sort. They had the damnedest gimmicks nowadays, often skirting the margins of bad taste.

Reinhart rode the elevator down to the twenty-seventh floor, and entered the offices of the Cryon Foundation.

“How are you making it, Carl?” Eunice asked negligently.

“I was just up on top of the building with an idea of jumping off but was sidetracked.”

“Groovy!” she said, typing away.

Reinhart had no sense of having been physically intimate with her, amazingly enough. Perhaps it had never happened.

He said: “Would you mind telling me what it is you're always typing? We never seem to do any ordinary business.”

“The scenario for a blue movie,” she said soberly, then peeped at him over enormous hexagonal glasses with raspberry-colored lenses. “How does that grab you?”

He nodded silently.

“I'm no swinger, Carl. I'm just a scared little girl.”

“Is Bob in yet?”

“Bob's in Berne.”

“Switzerland?”

“If you say so. I never could read a map.”

“Eunice, are you putting me on again?”

“It's not a film but a play,” she said. “The cast is nude, but the girls wear dildoes and the boys artificial vulvas. You can buy them by mail from California—”

“All right, all right, but when do you expect Bob to come back?”

“Never. I put a bomb in his attaché case. Hey,” she cried, “the silence in here is deafening.” She did something to a little black cylinder, which turned out to be a transistor radio.

“… has not yet been identified,” said a synthetic voice from the tiny speaker.

“Which could be said of us all,” Eunice contributed, and switched to blaring rock.

Reinhart escaped into Bob Sweet's office. He still had no duties, and would have found it strange were he not preoccupied with personal matters. He looked outside in the southwards direction and noted he was colateral with the floor of a neighboring building in which all the windows were broken but one, and saw that shatter before his eyes and a human figure behind it go over like a silhouette of cardboard.

He dashed back and seized Eunice's radio.

“… known dead and sixteen wounded at the latest count. Police snipers have been sent to the top floors of surrounding buildings but none of these is as high as the Bloor Building, forty-seventh tallest edifice in the continental United States and constructed in 193—”

“There's a madman with a rifle on the observation deck,” said Reinhart. “I just talked to him. I thought it was an advertising stunt. I took the elevator and—”

Eunice spilled the contents of a vial onto the bright orange desk blotter. “Take a Librium, Carl,” she said. “You got withdrawal symptoms.”

“No, Eunice, this is real. Listen—” Reinhart turned up the Vol, small as a pimple on this set.

“And now back to our normal broadcasting schedule,” said the radio. “This is your station for news. Roundups on the hour, summaries on the half hour, headlines on the quarter hour, key words every five minutes. The current amount in the Treasure Chest is $16447, the magic phrase for this five-minute segment is: Bloor Building Mass Murderer. If we choose your number from the Fortune Barrel and you can give both Treasure Chest number and the magic phrase, I'll come to your house and punch you in the mouth, yessirree, this is your old D.J. and sex fiend Fats O'Hafey and we're right here for the next twelve hours giving you the best in the squarest sounds this side of heaven—”

“He's killing people from up there!” Reinhart cried. “Mass murderer. Jesus Christ.” He ran around the dial, in a circulation of nonsense sounds, but no further information seemed available on the moment.

“A little, mild-mannered, red-headed young guy, said ‘Hi' to me, looked like he wouldn't say ‘Shit' if he had a mouthful.”

“Look here, Carl,” Eunice said, pointing at him with an enormous index finger. “I don't like that kind of talk. You keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“Huh? People are being shot down in the next building! Which one is that? The Ecumenical Life Insurance? Home office of my dad's old outfit.”

She was staring at him balefully. “You might apologize.”

“Brother, when I think how close I was to him—”

“You cunnilinguist!” Eunice screamed. “You can't swear at me. I don't know you that well.”

“Oh. I'm sorry, Eunice. I beg your pardon. I'm not at my best today. You see, I went up to the roof—”

She laughed till her glasses were wet. “You're really uptight, aren't you? I never knew anybody I could put on so easy. I'm really wild about you.” She rose without warning and engulfed him in an asphyxiating embrace, opening her mouth sufficiently wide to block all his air intakes.

“What brings this on?” he said, positively hurling her to arm's length, forgetting she was mainly mass without weight, a difference between big girls and large men.

“Violence,” she cried, getting free and running into Bob's office, presumably to watch the carnage across the way, but when Reinhart got there she had most of her clothes off and was falling onto the couch.