Freezing People is (Not) Easy (16 page)

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.

The final step was to fill the capsule with liquid nitrogen from the four large dewars. Finally our three patients were sealed and fully supplied with nitrogen. After thanking everyone, I needed to go home and take a much-needed shower and rest.

As I drove out of the cemetery, I checked my watch and realized our task had taken thirteen hours to complete. Hopefully we had guaranteed that our three frozen friends someday would open their eyes and realize they had traveled in the cryonics time machine. Indeed, I felt relieved and optimistic since we had made so much progress.

I returned the next day to see if the welding had been successful. The capsule's performance seemed promising and holding at a tolerable vacuum level, but we needed weeks of observation before I could relax. If it continued performing well, we could lower the capsule into the vault permanently. Only then would I believe these patients were safe.

For the next few months, I monitored the capsule daily and felt forlorn. These initial capsules for human storage were manufactured by Ed Hope, who was a wigmaker, not an engineer, and produced them only to make money. The design was seriously flawed, and the vessel acted like a leaky faucet; everything depended on those vacuum pumps providing the necessary insulation to hold the liquid nitrogen. Our worst problem was the intense heat at Chatsworth during the summer months. The hundred-degree temperatures played havoc with the performance of the pumps.

I received a telephone call from Claire Halpert, who lived somewhere in the Southeast. Like Pauline Mandell and Nick DeBlasio, she had contracted with Curtis and the CSNY for freezing services and later gone to battle with them. Her mother, Clara Dostal, had stated in her will that the family could not close their mother's trust until she was frozen and suspended. They had CSNY perform the perfusion and freezing and had her in temporary dry-ice storage.

Clara had set aside money in the trust to pay for everything, including perpetual care. Claire and her brother, Richard, were against having their mother suspended and had other ideas. I didn't know it at the time, but Curtis had sent them to me, telling them that I offered monthly plans for my patients. Mostly he just wanted to get rid of them. In retrospect, I should have followed his model. When the patients' families stopped making payments, Curtis notified them that he was pulling the plug and to retrieve their capsule. He also required the patient's families to purchase their own capsules.

Claire told me over the phone that she did not want to deal with the CSNY and wanted me to transfer her mother to my facility in Chatsworth. God knew I could use one paying customer, but I was disturbed by her tone. She sounded too authoritarian—and also a little wacko. She seemed like she wanted her mother's suspension off her hands. My innards were screaming at me, “Don't do it!” I would have to tread carefully this time.

She wanted me to fly to New York City, check her mother's condition, and arrange to have her flown out to California. I told Claire I needed $2,300 for my travel expenses and shipping arrangements for her mother. I hadn't made any promises at this point. Taking over her mother's suspension was contingent on several factors, including her mother's condition, her willingness to pay for perpetual care, and her attitude. I also wanted Curtis's opinion about the situation.

Claire gave me her brother's phone number and advised me to call Richard once I arrived in New York. He would escort me to the CSNY.

Ten days later, I arrived in New York City and called Curtis Henderson to tell him I was in town at Claire Halpert's request to check out her mother's condition and to possibly arrange her transfer to my facility.

He acted shocked at first but quickly responded, “I hope you're taking this nutcake's mother out of here today!”

“No,” I responded slowly, carefully. “I'm just coming out to meet with the son, to examine the capsule, and to learn what the hell is going on with all this craziness.”

Curtis sucked in his breath. “You mean you haven't met these people yet?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You're in for a surprise. Call me when you're ready to come out, and I'll meet you myself.”

After hanging up, dread washed over me. I was anxious to get this meeting done and over with.

That evening I called Richard Dostal from my hotel room.

“Good evening,” I started. “This is Bob Nelson from California. Your sister asked me to call you when I got into town to discuss transferring your mom to the CSC's storage facility in California.”

After a long silence he answered, “Who the hell are you, and what the hell are you talking about?”

I groaned; that was not the reaction I expected.

“Have you spoken to your sister? She hired me to fly to New York and discuss arrangements to ship your mother to California.”

“You know,” he responded, sounding cold and unapproachable, “you're as nutty as the rest of them sons-of-bitches. I'll make this as clear as ice water to you, maybe then you'll get it. My mother is dead. Understand? She ain't ever coming back. Not now, not ever. And as soon as her estate is settled, she's going into the ground and be buried, just like she's supposed to. Like normal people do. Do you hear what I'm saying? You body freezers are nuttier than a fuckin' fruit cake. And my sister—she's nuttier than all of you screwballs put together. Do you understand me?”