by Bob Nelson
“From looking at nature, I am hopeful and optimistic. Numerous insects, fish, amphibians, and reptiles freeze for months each winter. These creatures demonstrate that life can be shut down by low temperature until a warmer, friendlier environment returns. Suspending biological activity has saved many species from extinction.”
I continued with evidence that had captivated me, mentioning one of my favorite authorities, the well-known and imaginative Russian scientist V. A. Negovskii. In his experiments he brought hundreds of animals to the brink of clinical death and then resuscitated them to a normal, healthy life. The capstone of his life’s work, Resuscitation, provided lucid comments that certainly apply to human beings: “Death is due to the disturbance of vital mechanisms with irreversible changes in living matter, which disintegrates and decomposes. If the mechanism of life remains intact and its basic structure is not affected, then a complete cessation of life is possible which is not equivalent to death. For life can be restored by a change to more favorable conditions.”
Mary was spellbound. After another half hour, she suggested a lunch break. Her cook produced a startling array, including pâté and chateaubriand. Over lunch our conversation diverted to lighter topics.
Her question following lunch was whether she could guarantee to have money in the future. I explained that this was a major concern. “The law allows people to bequeath money for a ‘life-in-being plus ninety-nine years.’ The life-in-being means you choose a trustee, and after that person’s death, the ninety-nine-year period of the trust commences. Of course logic dictates choosing a young, healthy person. There are other alternatives, but they are more complicated.”
Her following questions were trivial. “What if I don’t like the future? What if I am lonely?”
I indulged her and discussed her concerns by sharing an interview I had done on a television show.
“The host asked if I was married. I replied, ‘Yes.’ Then he asked, ‘What if you died within the year and were frozen and revived fifty years later. Your wife is now eighty and you are thirty, what are you going to do?’ I answered simply, ‘Get a divorce.’”
Mary patted my hand and said, “I feel for your wife.”
I smiled back. “No one is saying everything will be perfect—that’s not the nature of life. Life is full of challenges. As Professor Ettinger has often said, ‘It’s more interesting to be alive than dead.’”
Reveling in my impressive surroundings, I tried a different tack—one I hoped would reach her heart. “Mrs. Goodman, you obviously appreciate beautiful and valuable art. After you are gone, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to see these priceless paintings tossed into a fire.”
She drew back, startled at the suggestion.
“You also are a radiant woman with so much to offer, and yet people think nothing of having themselves cremated. The life of every good person is a work of art. Just like these sculptures and paintings, such beauty as I see here,” I cupped her chin in my hand and looked into her eyes, “should be preserved. That is my life’s goal.”
Mary gazed around the room at her accoutrements, studying them with a fresh perspective. I knew I had reached her, so I forged ahead. “Just as you value art and want to see it appreciated, I value the potential of future technology and abhor the idea of people needlessly going into the ground or the fire.” I gestured to a portrait of a young woman, but I couldn’t tell if she wore Victorian or Elizabethan dress. “Look at this lady. She is stunning, and a painter immortalized her on canvas. We can see something of who she was; however, the painting is just a two-dimensional facade. This isn’t her, and we know nothing of her. Now just imagine if the technology had existed then to cryogenically preserve this lady in the portrait so that she could know the future and future generations could know her. Just imagine the potential and excitement of that! We now have the power to immortalize our very selves, not just in the things we leave behind or in an image made in oils or in stone but ourselves—our memories, our minds. While art indirectly preserves the products and trappings of our minds, cryonics is the next logical step. It allows us to preserve life itself, the essence of our existence.”
We had been talking for several hours, and she asked if I would join her for dinner. I was delighted by her invitation, and we agreed that I would return to my hotel, rest a little, dress, and she would collect me at seven.
Finally I asked her what her thinking was about cryonic suspension. She replied that she definitely saw its logic but needed to speak to some cryobiologists before proceeding. She was bothered that these experts were so strongly opposed to cryonics.
I never heard from her again. I was dismayed and suspected that the long reach of the cryobiologists’ cynicism had won over in her mind.
In later years, I received a small income from cosmetic preservation and storage that helped me fund the nonpaying suspensions for some time. Laura Coronel wanted to preserve the body of her father, Pedro Ladesma, not for reanimation but for some mysterious reason I was never able to learn.
Laura looked Hispanic, with straight black hair to her shoulders, and she always wore very expensive, hand-embroidered outfits. During our meetings she needed to take charge, continuously talked over me, and often seemed not to be listening to me at all.
While her sincerity and love for her father could never be questioned, I certainly wondered about her clearness of mind. Pedro Ladesma had been autopsied and embalmed and had remained for six months in cold storage at Forest Lawn Cemetery. My best guess was that his freezing was simply a cosmetic preservation for some political reason back in his native country.
My first meeting with Laura was so bizarre that I debated accepting her father into the Chatsworth vault. However, my patients needed me and I needed her money, so I ignored the peculiarities. She refused to meet at my office or any public location. Instead she gave exotic instructions to meet on a little street off Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.
I waited about twenty minutes at the street corner before she pulled up slowly in her car and waved me over to her window. She handed me a piece of paper with instructions to go to a second location and wait. After ten minutes at the second spot, she drove by slowly while I looked around for anything suspicious, growing more paranoid each passing moment. These were techniques I remembered from my stepfather’s mobster days. After a few more minutes, she raced up to my Porsche and hopped in, slamming down the lock button.
“Drive! Drive!”
Instinctually, my foot hit the gas. She committed a scant second to smoothing her hair before she devoted her energy to barking directions of right, left, right while scanning the road for trailing cars. When she sidled next to me to look in the rearview mirror, her expensive perfume was overwhelming.
I hoped all this danger was merely her delusions.
Laura’s last direction was to turn right from a left-turn lane. I ignored the honking cars and worried about the real possibility of police sirens behind me. After twenty minutes of this craziness, she finally instructed me to stop in a grocery store parking lot. For some time I white-knuckled the gear shift, feeling light-headed from such a sustained adrenaline rush.
I started slowly, “I’ve got to know about all this cloak-and-dagger maneuvering.”
She leaned in and whispered, “I need to be very careful, since my father was a very important man. He was a very high official in South America. I cannot risk being discovered.”
I groaned and dropped my head to the steering wheel.
This kind of drama was repeated whenever we met so that she could pay for services at the vault. In the beginning, while her father was kept in dry ice, the cost was six hundred dollars a month, payable in three-month increments. Laura always paid in cash that she carried in a brown paper bag. She quickly removed the cash from the bag, looking around very carefully to make sure we weren’t being watched. It was all so strange that it made me feel as though we
were transacting some kind of dope deal. I hurriedly counted the cash and wrote her a receipt; then we talked for about fifteen minutes.
I tried to discover the purpose of all this expense and effort. The only phone number I had was an answering service in New York. When I left messages, she usually called back the next day. I eventually surmised that she wanted her father placed in an upright MVE capsule. She agreed to pay two thousand dollars for each three-month storage-and-maintenance period, plus an additional three thousand dollars toward the purchase of an MVE capsule.
Laura made the first payment of five thousand dollars during a clandestine meeting in Long Beach, in the parking lot of the Hotel Queen Mary. Shortly after I relocated her father into a capsule, she came twice to the vault to see him in the liquid nitrogen. After her second visit, I never heard from Laura again. It was frustrating living in that uncertainty and flux. She had several more payments of five thousand dollars remaining to cover the cost of purchasing and storing her new MVE capsule, and, like so many others, she became delinquent in maintenance charges.
For over a year I left messages threatening to remove her father from the capsule if she did not pay her debt. Fourteen months after receiving only the first five-thousand-dollar payment, I received a letter from a New York attorney claiming that I had not delivered her capsule and demanding a refund of the five thousand dollars. I immediately called him and explained that I had not heard from Laura for over a year. Before I could go any further, he stopped me and explained that he himself had been unable to locate her for going on nine months and was no longer going to represent her.
This was the last dealing I had related to this unusual woman. My conclusion was that she had decided to end her father’s cosmetic preservation and this was her unusual method of dealing with his remains. Although I never heard from Laura again, her father remains in the Chatsworth vault to this day.
Chapter 12
Vacuum and Vanity
For two years, Genevieve de la Poterie and Mildred Harrington remained in dry ice—a source of ever-present torture for me, since they needed a less-tenuous, more stable home. Their current accommodation was a four-inch-thick Styrofoam cold-storage box with a one-inch-thick wood exterior. We thought this adequate to hold a human body biologically intact for up to five years, but the dry ice needed to fill the box weekly was prohibitively expensive. I had a solution though. Steven Mandell was in a cryonics capsule, but I couldn’t locate his mother and no one was paying for his liquid nitrogen. I didn’t want a replay of the first capsule meltdown. I knew I was repeating so many of my earlier actions that had led to failure the first time. Desperate to save all three patients, I decided to open Steven’s capsule and place Genevieve’s and Mildred’s bodies inside with him.
For the first time since I had begun cryonics, I dreamed about death. I had a nightmare that I was laughing and having a great time. Meanwhile I heard a little weak voice say, “Mommy! Daddy! Mr. Bob!” With the feeble voice came the echo of little fists clanging against metal. It was Genevieve crying out for us. She was buried alive, slowly warming and slowly dying. “Mommy! Daddy!” No one had rescued her. I pictured the Grim Reaper sneaking toward her, bringing decay and permanent loss with every inch. The shadow of death was coming closer and closer to her sweet face. I tried to reach her, but I was surrounded by a fog of liquid nitrogen vapor. I felt my way through, but her voice was dissolving into the mist. I finally reached her, finally felt a loose tendril of her hair, and had a momentary flash of relief. Then hideous guilt washed over me as I realized she was no longer Genevieve but rather a crumpled, sad mass that used to be Genevieve.
Breathless, I sat up in my bed and clawed at my covers, whimpering and breathing loud and fast. My bedroom seemed strange now—like it didn’t belong to me. Eerie light from the street lamps streamed through the window as Elaine slept beside me. The recesses of my brain could still hear the banging sound inside a metal capsule. I looked around my room, scared and worried about what I might have done and what I hadn’t yet accomplished. Genevieve needed me and I couldn’t fail her. I would protect her and all my frozen heroes from the shadow of death.
With little funds to continue, my only prayer was to somehow find the money to keep Steven’s capsule functioning until help fell from heaven! I looked around me at the cemetery with its vast sea of headstones and felt sure that heaven still existed. Despite the inevitability of death, I wanted to delay it as long as possible. Cryonics for me was about extending life—not about immortality.
After two weeks of preparation, I was a nervous wreck on the day of the patient transfer. With Joseph Klockgether, Frank Farrell, and our trusty welder, Ray Fields, I knew I had an experienced team. I examined the necessary equipment three times: coolers with cold water, four dewars filled with liquid nitrogen, another four empty dewars, gigantic wrenches, Mylar foil, the diamond saw, a welding torch, gloves, lots of dry towels, and a cooler packed with two dozen of my wife’s sandwiches, enough to last a long day for four ravenous men. I looked around the heavy-equipment yard at the back of the cemetery grounds; the early morning light still appeared golden. I was glad our enclosure prevented people from seeing our unusual procedure, since I didn’t want people interrupting our important work and asking impertinent questions.
Addressing the three men helping me, I said, “Let’s discuss this beforehand, because perfection is paramount—no foul-ups. We’re performing a heroic undertaking today; we’re saving three lives, so let’s keep focused on that goal.” They nodded in agreement, and I felt satisfied they understood the stakes of our task.
I looked at Ray and said, “This job requires a master craftsman, that’s you, to cut off the end of the capsule’s inner chamber. We’ll take the capsule lid off and transfer Genevieve and Mrs. Harrington into the chamber with Steven. They’ll be heavy, and we’ll all have to help. Once they’re in, we’ll reassemble the capsule with . . . absolutely . . . perfect . . . alignment,” I staccatoed that phrase, “and re-weld the capsule together. Again, the welding seam needs to be perfect and without breaks so that we’ll be able to maintain a perfect vacuum between the two cylinders. Perfection is our goal for today—I cannot stress that enough. Any mistakes will be costly and could be catastrophic.”
I saw from the wide-eyed, open-mouthed stares of my helpers that they felt overwhelmed. Trying to reassure them I said, “I know it’s a huge agenda, but we have no other choice to save all three patients.” After I answered a few questions, I did one last equipment check, clapped my hands in excitement, slapped Ray’s back, and said, “Let’s get going then. We’ve got a long day ahead.”
For two hours we drained the nitrogen. The welder cut a perfect semicircle around the capsule’s end, using a diamond-tipped blade to slice through the stainless steel, and removed the end of the inner capsule. There were no sparks during the cutting, just a loud whirring and a clean break. As we lowered the heavy stainless-steel piece to the ground, the fog-like vapor from the liquid nitrogen dissipated and revealed Steven Mandell’s handsome face. The scene was magical, not scary or spooky; he appeared like a prince awaiting an enchanted kiss.
I was prepared for this, but Ray was still unaccustomed to our mission.
“How old was he?” Ray asked.
I placed my hand over Steven’s. “Five years ago, he was twenty-four.”
Without the nitrogen, the exterior of the warmed capsule developed a layer of ice, like a frosted beer mug, and turned everything a ghostly white. Later that frost melted into a thick film of condensation, and we swabbed the capsule with our towels.
Since heat was always our patients’ enemy, we hurried as fast as the fifteen-hundred-pound capsule allowed. We had Mildred and Genevieve in a temporary storage container filled with dry ice. We first moved Mildred; she looked regal in her favorite white wrap dress. Wearing thick gloves, we lifted her from the container and eased her inside the metal capsule. I didn’t know why a
frozen person felt so heavy, but it took all our strength to move her. After a little positioning, we picked up my beloved Genevieve. She was encased within shiny Mylar foil, and I couldn’t see her sweet eyes—chocolate eyes, I remembered. I ran my gloved hand over the Mylar covering her hair and then placed her into the bottom of the capsule next to Mildred.
It took three hours to open up the capsule, another hour to put Genevieve and Mildred in the capsule, four hours to close it, and another hour to align the capsule. Before welding, we covered the interior part of the capsule and the patients with Mylar to minimize their exposure to the heat of the welding. I reiterated that everything had to be done properly.
Watching the intense blue flame as Ray passed his welding torch across the stainless-steel capsule, I was struck by the intense contrasts playing out during our transfer. The welding torch was hotter than the hottest day in the Sahara; the capsule was colder than the coldest night in Siberia. Hot sweat trickled down my face, and cold condensation dripped off the capsule. The heavy capsule was filled with dense bodies and enshrouded by the diaphanous fog of the dry ice.
After the welding, I leaned over to examine the seam, smiled up at Ray, and said, “You did great, truly.” Although I wasn’t an expert, the weld looked perfect.
We grabbed our half-dozen coolers of cold water and poured them into the inner chamber to quickly cool it. With the capsule now sealed, we bolted on the outer steel lid. The pump needed an hour to reach a good vacuum between the inner and outer cylinders.