Freezing People is (Not) Easy (17 page)

I gritted my teeth and replied, “Yes, sir, I hear you perfectly.”

“Then do me a favor; don't ever call me again. I hate the idea of it.”

Click.

I flew all the way to New York City for this?
I didn't blame him—just his cuckoo sister. I was pissed off, but then I started giggling. I couldn't help myself. I ordered room service and picked the most expensive entree on the menu—filet mignon. I had flown three thousand miles for dinner at a New York hotel, so it should be memorable. Besides, Claire was paying.

I was too embarrassed to call Curtis Henderson, and I felt he didn't want me sniffing around his facility anyway. I didn't bother contacting Claire Halpert either. I didn't need to borrow her troubles.

When I returned to California, there were messages waiting for me at the office from Claire. I ignored her and her demand for her money back. She had wasted my time and subjected me to an unwarranted berating by her brother.

She continued trying to reach me, and I continued ignoring her until I heard she had begun legal action. By that time the money was gone and I had no way of raising it. I contacted her and offered to pay back all but eight hundred dollars in fifty-dollar monthly installments. It was the best I could do. She didn't accept my offer, nor did she decline it. She simply hung up.

Chapter 13

Even with Cryonics, There Is No Escaping Hell

Life intervened with horrific timing.
My brother called and said my mother was in critical condition in Boston City Hospital. My mom's leg was black with gangrene and would kill her within forty-eight hours if the hospital didn't amputate. My brother John refused to give permission without me. I made arrangements with Joe Mendoza, the grounds­keeper at Chatsworth, to look after the capsule and flew to Boston to sign the hospital's papers. Mom's recovery from the operation was remarkable, considering all her problems. She'd had crippling asthma and serious heart problems since childhood. She was also a lifelong smoker and a breast cancer survivor. She had no business being alive at all, but her will was stronger than the hurricane-force winds she'd battled for decades.

At the Boston airport, a fat man came up to me, an inquisitive look shadowing his face. “Isn't your name Buccelli?” That was Big John's name, which I had abandoned years earlier after my stepfather's murder.

I said, “Yes, it . . . is.”

He stuck out his hand. “Mine's Sheehy.”

His name clicked; this man was the brother of a cherished childhood friend. “Richard!” I yelled. “My God, where is John?” We had lived in the same neighborhood, but I had lost track of him a decade earlier. My long-lost friend now lived in Maine and spent most of his time on his lobster boat. John's life goal had been a lobster-fishing business, and I felt elated to hear he had achieved his dream.

“Richard,” I said as the line inched forward to board the plane, “please tell me how to reach him.”

“I'm a cop,” he answered, “so I can't do that without his permission. Give me your address, and he'll be in touch with you, I promise.”

I was thrilled for this chance encounter. What a good trip!

Three days later I received a letter from John.
Dear Bob, am I surprised? Not really; a friendship such as ours was destined to come full circle. Please visit me whenever you can. A pot of lobsters will be waiting for you.

It was two months before I could get to Maine and hug my old friend. Like he promised, the lobsters were waiting. The evening I arrived, John sat me down and covered my plate with three of them.

When I began to protest, he informed me the Maine record was held by a lumberjack who had devoured twenty-six lobsters at a single sitting. “So shut up and eat!” he ordered.

Thirty minutes later I could not eat another bite. I had eaten six lobsters and was officially declared the West Coast Lobster-Eating Sissy.

After dinner I received a call from Joe Mendoza, the Chatsworth groundskeeper who was watching the capsule for me along with his usual maintenance work.

The pump on the capsule had failed, he said, but had been fixed and all was okay again. Actually the pump had been replaced by our nitrogen supplier. Still, I was worried. I knew this trip was dangerous, since that capsule was functioning on borrowed time.

I flew home to California five days later. During the long flight, I looked out the window at blackness everywhere below, feeling lucky for the rare chance to reflect on our progress. I was soaring from visiting my friend, but the trip reminded me of how much I had sacrificed for the capsule: no vacations, no time that I wasn't free from obligations. The whole world was on my shoulders. I had accomplished so much with the cryonics program, but we had no money to improve the capsules and keep them safe.

I was too sentimental and made bad decisions; I could never say no to my friends because “no” meant I would be killing their future, their hope, and their possibility of a tomorrow. I still believed in hope and possibility, but those lofty concepts didn't matter, since I had created a nightmare of responsibility. I knew CSC would be flourishing if I had not frozen and maintained people who did not make proper financial arrangements.
How could I have let this happen?
There was no one else to blame.

I smiled at a little girl across the aisle. She reminded me of Genevieve; she had the same brown pixie haircut and bounced a Mickey Mouse doll on her tray table, sending my mind back to the wonderful day I had spent with my young friend at Disneyland. What could I do now for Genevieve? It seemed everything I did was never enough. The problems weren't lack of time, devotion, or courage; the problem was money. I remembered my dad's mob friends tossing money around recklessly—a thousand bucks for dinner, another grand for a suit. But for me, money was life and breath and liquid nitrogen.

My primary worry now was that the vacuum leak in the capsule would get worse. Somehow I had to find the money to purchase a better capsule; somehow I had to make it happen. . . .

I drove directly home and fell into bed, exhausted. I spent a few hours the next morning with my family, after not seeing them for two weeks. I made breakfast, giving Elaine a break, and ran lines with Lori for her school play. I was nervous about the capsule. Surely, I thought, since I hadn't heard from Joe again, everything was fine. But the butterflies in my stomach brought a pervasive worry.

I entered the cemetery grounds just after ten o'clock. It was a beautiful morning. The pristine, lush park and the smell of fresh-cut grass transformed my trepidations into optimism as I drove to the capsule at the back of the cemetery. The sunshine altered my mood. But when I approached the yard, I noticed an eerie silence when I turned off the car engine. At first I couldn't identify what was different. Hideous realization washed over me; the vacuum pump was not running!

I stood there for a few minutes in stunned disbelief before sprinting up to the capsule. I studied the vent pipe, knowing it should have a slight fog from the evaporating liquid nitrogen. I saw nothing.

I paced around the capsule for several minutes, trying to muster the courage to touch the vent. If it was cold then things were okay. But if it wasn't . . . I could not bear even to think about it! My mind tumbled over the consequences if it felt warm, imagining scenes of distraught families screaming and crying that I had failed them. If the vent was warm, my entire life would come crashing down on me.

Five minutes passed before I finally touched the vent. The vent was not just warm.
It was hot!
That heat penetrated straight to my heart and singed my soul. How long had it been this way? Then Genevieve's face appeared in my mind. The thought of her decaying deep inside this fifteen-hundred-pound pressure cooker drove me to my knees, and I cried. I cried harder and longer than ever before, until my face was wet from the flow of tears and snot, and my chest pained from relentless heaving. The meticulously manicured cemetery grass beneath me was a green blur, and in that blur I saw the faces of those lost after so much passion and effort expended to save them.

After what seemed like a very long time, I stood back up on wobbly legs. My emotions rapidly passed from devastation and despair to anger, and then to rage.
What the fuck happened?
I had to find Joe. I would tear him apart! I would . . . no. I could do nothing to him. He was not an engineer; he was a groundskeeper. I chose him to look after things. This catastrophe was my fault, not his.

As I careened around the winding roads like I was escaping hell, people attending funerals all turned toward me. I sped through the park looking for Joe, and I finally found him fixing a sprinkler on the north end of the grounds. I pulled up and I could see his face turn beet-red as I approached. He knew I was pissed.

I screamed, “Joe, what in the hell happened!”

“Well,” he said in a thick accent, “several days ago after I call you I see the pump, she's a-stop again, so I call the number you give me. I tell them three times; they say what? what? I'm tell them, come, come. They never come. I don't know what to do.”

“Why didn't you call me?” I fumed.

“I don-a know. I call them. They don-a come back.”

Still livid, I shoved him toward the sprinkler and got him wet, but then I calmed down. Yelling at him accomplished nothing. I turned around, disgusted, and walked away. I barged into the cemetery office, parked myself at Joe's desk, and jerked the rotary dial on the telephone as I spun each number to call Gilmore Liquid Air. “I made full arrangements for your company to come to Chatsworth and deal with emergencies. We called with an emergency and nobody came.” I was yelling but didn't care. “Do you know the consequences—the ramifications—of this?”

“Please hold.” The singsong reply of the operator made me more upset. A minute later I was talking to the owner of the company, Mrs. Gilmore herself.

Trying not to cry, I again explained what happened.

The owner's response was measured but sympathetic. “We received a call from someone who couldn't speak English very well. He kept saying something about fixing a pump. I finally spoke to him and told him we didn't fix pumps. Then he just kept repeating himself over and over; he finally hung up. I had no idea he was talking about cryonics or had any connection with your company.”

Well there it was—the dumbest explanation ever given for condemning three human beings. I had made all the arrangements, hired all the actors, and directed the entire scenario. Yet I failed to consider that the man I had charged with looking after the heart of the operation barely spoke English. I was solely responsible for the death of these three lost friends. We had tried so hard, but I had failed them even though I had spent so much time, energy, and money.

All for nothing.

Dropping into Joe's office chair, I had to figure out a plan. I called Gilmore back and asked them to deliver liquid nitrogen to the capsule site. I knew it was useless to keep feeding nitrogen into the capsule. The damage was done. They were dead—not just clinically dead but irrevocably gone—killed by my mistakes and the California sun. I needed time to think about the events that had created this tragedy.

I returned to the vault, hoping for some altered reality. I placed a tentative finger on the vent pipe; it was hot of course. I sank to the earth and sat on the ground. The entire day, my body was splayed against the sweltering-hot stainless steel of the outer capsule. I couldn't move from the scorching metal. I considered it penance—my punishment for failing my three patients. I wanted to share their fate; the waning sun spared me, but not them.

After several hours I allowed myself the undeserved luxury of standing up and stretching. I wished I hadn't, for I saw the dark shadow of the surrounding fence creeping slowly across the capsule, inexorably shrouding its inhabitants in darkness. The shadow of death that I had always feared came that day. For years I had stood ready to do battle with the Grim Reaper, poised with dry ice and liquid nitrogen instead of a cold steel sword. My failure was irrevocable and absolute.

In the late afternoon, a delivery truck from Gilmore arrived with more nitrogen. I poured the liquid nitrogen into the capsule; the backsplash felt like hundreds of tiny needles on my arm. Finally I was relieved to see the capsule's shroud of fog; I trudged to my car to head home.

My daughters tackled me with hugs when I arrived. Elaine saw my beaten face, noticed me wince, and sent the girls off to watch television. This amazing woman who knew me so well knew instantly that my world had somehow crumbled.

During many of our relationship's dramatic moments, she had been the one crying or about to cry; now it was my turn. She grabbed a bottle of aloe and smeared it onto the burns where I'd pressed against the hot metal.

“I lost them. They're gone.” I said. We didn't speak again that night, she just held me in her arms, smoothed my hair, and tried with love to ease the pain.

After a week of dwelling on the capsule loss, I knew I had to inform the families directly. If their relatives wanted to beat me up, then so be it. Remembering all the thrashings from my childhood, I figured this probably would be the first one I truly deserved.

It was now 1974, the better part of a decade since I had taken the reins with such lofty dreams, guiding CSC toward developing facilities for cryonic suspension. Now I confronted the most god-awful task of my entire life. I must tell Guy de la Poterie that I had failed to keep his daughter safe and preserved. After all his effort and mine, his daughter's capsule failed when I was far away visiting my friend.

I also needed to face Mildred's sons and inform them of their mother's loss in the same capsule. I had lost touch with Pauline Mandell, Steven's mother, and didn't know how to contact her.

I called Guy from my mom's home in Boston before I left for Montreal to confirm our visit.

He agreed to meet me at the airport but asked, “Why the sudden visit?”

I avoided answering, asking instead, “Can we meet for coffee?”

“A cup of coffee? You're always telling me how tight money is, and now you want to fly to Montreal for a cup of coffee?” I could hear the panic in his voice as his French accent grew stronger. “What's happening with my Genevieve?”

He sounded frantic, but I still didn't want to answer. I looked around my mom's house. It felt strange being here and being yelled at. I was a kid again—a twelve-year-old screw-up.

I couldn't stall any longer, making him wait and worry just so that my confession could match the script I had played out in my mind.

There was such agony in my heart as I cleared my throat and shakily began. I told him about my trip and how the capsule had failed while I was away. “I had made arrangements for the capsule, but it still happened. The responsibility is mine.”

Guy listened silently; then after a long pause he asked, “How long was the capsule without liquid nitrogen?”

“My best guess is five days. I am so sorry, Guy.”

I waited in silence for a few minutes before Guy asked, “Does the capsule have liquid nitrogen now?”

“Yes, I refilled it, and it's being checked daily by my assistant Frank Farrell.”