The Mansion of Happiness (33 page)

Across the street were two tombstone firms: Lincoln Granite, family owned and operated since 1903, and Clinton Grove Granite Works, established in 1929. Both offices were closed, so I browsed through the outdoor displays, gravestones of pink and gray granite, their borders engraved with stock sentiments:
FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS
, inside two valentines;
IN GOD’S CARE
, on a banner beneath a cross. In the middle of each stone a polished, empty space awaited only a pair of dates and somebody’s name. I tried to think spring.

A sign above the blanks caught my eye:
RESURRECTION MARKERS & MONUMENTS
. Of the thirteen cemeteries in Clinton Township—fourteen if you count the Cryonics Institute—the biggest is a place called Resurrection.

The Cryonics Institute occupies a seven-thousand-square-foot brick-fronted warehouse in an industrial park behind the township’s water and sewerage building and just across the street from a condominium development called Still Meadows. Past a shabby waiting room was the small office of Andy Zawacki. Andy constituted half of CI’s staff. (Ettinger used to be the other half, but he retired in 2003.) Andy is also one of CI’s nearly eight hundred members, which means that he plans to be frozen when he dies. (“Lifetime members” pay $1,250 to join and $28,000 to $35,000 upon “death”; members are encouraged to pay by making the institute the beneficiary of their life insurance policies.)
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On CI’s website, Andy sported a lab coat, as if he were a scientist or a doctor, but mostly he’s a handyman. He’d been working for CI since he graduated from high school. He’s
also the nephew of Ettinger’s daughter-in-law. He’s lumpy and balding and soft-spoken but, other than that, not a bit like Peter Lorre.

He answered the door and brought me into the office, where Robert Ettinger was waiting. I started to say hello.

“You want to see it?”

Andy led us down the hall and through a door into a storage area with fluorescent lights and twenty-foot-high ceilings. Almost everything else in the room was white or silver, like the inside of a refrigerator just off the truck from Sears. It sounded like a refrigerator in there, too, a faintly throbbing
hrrrmmm.
There were fourteen cylindrical freezers. They looked like propane tanks, the kind you attach to your gas grill, except they were about fifteen feet tall and eight feet wide. Each held six patients. All but four were filled. There were also three older, rectangular freezers, and then there was one more vat, the smallest, and that’s where Ettinger was headed. He stopped at a stainless steel thermos about the size of a rain barrel. He lifted the lid. Liquid nitrogen wafted out.

“Cats,” he said. He blew into the container and waved his hand, trying to clear the vapor. “Can’t see much, I guess.”

I peered in. I blew. We blew together. I couldn’t see a thing.

“Cats in there?” I asked, peering, blowing.

“Yup.”

“How many?”

“Don’t know.”

Andy interjected: “We’ve got forty pets. Mostly dogs and cats.”

“A few birds,” Ettinger added, halfheartedly. He closed the lid.

I stared at the giant freezers. “Are they upside down?” Better for the brain on thawing, I guessed. I pictured hibernating bats.

“Well, not the first ones,” Ettinger explained. “We put them in horizontally. Everyone else—in the cylinders—is upside down.”

“And, in … canisters or something, within the cylinders?”

“No.” He shook his head. “In sleeping bags.”

“Just regular sleeping bags? Like, from Kmart?”

“No,” said Andy. “Walmart.”

Ettinger, leaning on his cane, surveyed the room.

“Your mother, and your two wives,” I began, hesitantly. “Are they all in this room?”

“Yes.”

“And … where?”

“No idea.” He shrugged. “My mother and my first wife used to be over there,” he said, pointing to one corner of the room. “Andy, do you know where they are?”

“That one.” Andy nodded, with his chin, at one of the cylinders. “Or maybe that one. One of those two. I can check.”

Ettinger, slightly sheepish: “We have a chart.”

Robert Ettinger was born in Atlantic City in December 1918. His mother’s family came from Odessa; his father was born in
Germany. In about 1922, the Ettingers moved to Detroit. Ettinger’s father ran a furniture store, and the family lived in a house on Calvert Street, where, in 1927, when he was eight years old, Ettinger started reading
Amazing Stories
, the first magazine of what its editor,
Hugo Gernsback, called “scientifiction”: “Extravagant Fiction Today … Cold Fact Tomorrow.”
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Paul de Kruif’s
Microbe Hunters
, which inspired a generation of young readers to pursue careers in science, appeared just months before the first issue of
Amazing Stories
, and much of Gernsback’s scientifiction concerns the work of de Kruifian scientists; Gernsback’s July 1929 issue included “The Purple Death,” the story of a young scientist who keeps a copy of
Microbe Hunters
in his laboratory.
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Gernsback promised his young readers that everything that happened in his stories, however fantastic, would very likely become established science one day soon. Much of it has. Rockets, television, computers, cell phones. Gernsback’s stories also revisited what has been, for millennia, a literary perennial: immortality.

Stories about immortality are ancient, and they always contain within them an argument with history, an argument against history, because to live forever is to conquer time as much as it is to conquer death. Not all stories about time travel involve immortality (think of
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
or
The Time Machine
), but all stories about
immortality involve transcending time. (One of CI’s competitors is called
Trans Time.) About a century and a half ago, stories about immortality got mixed up with stories about scientists. In 1845,
Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a story about a mesmerist who hypnotizes a dying man at the instant of his death and keeps him in a trance for seven months. When he tries to lift the trance, the poor man cries, “For
God’s sake!—quick!—quick!—put me to sleep—or, quick!—waken me!—quick!—I say to you that I am dead!” and promptly melts into a pool of putrescence.
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Conquering death is usually gory; conquering time is usually depressing. In 1899,
H. G. Wells published
When the Sleeper Wakes
, about a man who falls asleep for two hundred years and awakens to a London he can’t understand. In “A Thousand Deaths,”
Jack London’s first short story, also from 1899, the narrator’s mad scientist father kills and revives him again and again, leaving him dead for longer and longer stretches: “Another time, after being suffocated, he kept me in cold storage for three months, not permitting me to freeze or decay.”
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Rot is always a problem for the living dead, which is why resurrectionists borrow a good deal from methods used for preserving food. In 1766, the Scottish surgeon
John Hunter tried to animate
frozen fish.
Benjamin Franklin thought that if he could be preserved in a vat of Madeira wine, he’d like very much to see what the world was like in a century or two.
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People used to eat their food fresh, canned, or salted, until someone got the idea to sell pond ice, and then those who could afford it paid to have ice delivered by the iceman. Starting in the 1890s, housewives could rent lockers in cold storage warehouses. All this made for some fantastic scientifiction. In January 1930, Gernsback published “The Corpse That Lived,” in which a man who dies in a plane crash in the year 2025 is immersed in a bathtub of ice cubes and brought back to life by an electric pulse. The next month’s issue included “The Ice Man”: Marcus Publius, frozen in Rome in 59 b.c., is defrosted in 1928 by an ingenious professor who happens to be remarkably handy with an electric blanket.
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Ettinger dates his interest in immortality to 1931, when he read “The Jameson Satellite” in
Amazing Stories:
in 1958, a dying professor has himself entombed in a rocket and launched into the cold storage of space. Forty million years pass, whereupon a race of mechanical men transplant Jameson’s brain into a body like theirs. The Zoromes used to have soft, fleshy bodies, but they gave them up, preferring instead to encase their squishy brains within impenetrable steel helmets attached to six probing tentacles. (Eternity turns out to be crushingly dull if you’re stuck on your own planet with no women, which is why the Zoromes are out exploring the universe.) They take Jameson to earth to show him that everyone there has died. Overcome by loneliness, he briefly considers throwing himself off
a cliff, calculating that if he could land on his steel head with enough force, he could squash his brain. But then he decides he’d rather be an everlasting Zorome.
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When Ettinger was a boy,
life expectancy was rising. G. Stanley Hall published
Senescence
in 1922. “How Long Can We Live?” was the question
Paul de Kruif posed in
Ladies’ Home Journal
in 1930—during the parrot fever panic—chronicling how every success in the twentieth century’s battle against infectious disease was lengthening life and marking progress.
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In 1932, de Kruif published a book called
Men Against Death.
“I grew up with the expectation that one day we would learn how to reverse aging,” Ettinger says.
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Immortality’s no good if you’re doomed to decrepitude. In the 1920s, a Viennese scientist named
Eugen Steinach perfected a surgical technique whose purpose was rejuvenation: the Steinach operation was, basically, a vasectomy. Steinach, much like
Sylvester Graham, thought that if men could keep their spermatic fluid, they would enjoy greater potency and live longer, too. Freud had the Steinach operation. So did Yeats. Steinach rejuvenated women by bombarding their
ovaries with X‑rays. In 1923, his work reached an American audience through a book called
Rejuvenation: How Steinach Makes People Young.
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When Ettinger was shot, during the Second World War, he thought, naturally, about death. In the hospital, he wrote the kind of fiction he’d read as a boy. In 1950, his story “The Skeptic” was published in a Gernsback knockoff called
Thrilling Wonder Stories.
In it, Robert, a soldier in leg casts, scorns his army doctors—“you so-called physicians, you medical midgets, you dope-dispensing dimwits”—and discovers a way to relieve his unbearable pain through mind control. Ettinger’s science fiction was autobiographical. Another of his stories, “The Penultimate Trump,” also written while he was in the hospital, was published in
Startling Stories
in 1948. The plot concerns H. D. Haworth, who is ninety-two years old and survives only because his doctors have cobbled him together: “They gave him gland extracts, they gave him vitamins, they gave him blood transfusions. They gave him false teeth, eye-glasses and arch-supports. They cut out his varicose veins, his appendix, one of his kidneys.” (Ettinger appears to have been influenced by Poe’s 1839 story “The Man That Was Used Up.”) Haworth, pursuing immortality with the same ruthlessness with which he had pursued an ill-gotten fortune, pays a brilliant young scientist to put him “to sleep in a nice refrigerator until people really know something about the
body.” The scientist says, “We’d better put the vault in Michigan—very safe country, geologically.”
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Michigan is also where freezers came from. The first refrigerator for home use was sold in 1918. It was invented in Detroit; refrigeration was an offshoot of the automobile industry. By 1923, the year after the Ettingers moved to Detroit, a company named Frigidaire, owned by General Motors and based in Detroit, began selling
refrigerators in cabinets for home use. A chemist hired by General Motors developed Freon-12. In the 1930s, General Foods launched Birds Eye
frozen foods. By 1944, more than 85 percent of American homes had refrigerators, but freezers were scarce. During the war, they couldn’t be had for love or money; their sale was banned for the duration. When the war ended, Americans had babies and built suburbs and bought appliances, including two hundred thousand freezers in 1946, and twice that many the next year.
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Haworth makes his arrangements in secret, sure that if anyone were to find out what he was doing, “everyone would demand a Frigidaire instead of a coffin.” He dies; the scientist puts him in a freezer. Three centuries later, he awakens in a room with a beautiful woman doctor, and observes—he is naked—that he is young, strong, and, to his astonished delight, ready: “A long-forgotten stimulus performed its ancient function.” Unfortunately, things don’t turn out as well as he had hoped. Word had gotten out, long since, and everybody had started going into the “freezatoria.” In the absence of any expectation of heaven, people had begun behaving very badly. Scientists had therefore invented the “Farbenstein Probe” to find out if a Sleeper had ever sinned; after scanning Haworth’s brain, the probe sentences him to a penal colony on a planet that used to be called Mars. What do they call it now? he asks. He is told, “Now they call it Hell.”
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Inside the Cryonics Institute, I stood with Ettinger, finding it hard not to think about “The Cerebral Library,” which appeared in
Amazing Stories
two months before “The Jameson Satellite,” and in which a mad scientist collects five hundred brains in glass jars. This place reminded me of a library, too, or, more, of an archive, a place where people deposit their papers—the contents of their heads—when they’re dead, so that someone, some future historian, can find them and bring them back to life.
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“Have you got any neuros?” I asked.

A neuro is a severed head; the theory is, scientists in the future, like the Zoromes, will give you a new body, so why bother saving your old one if your brain is all they’ll really need? In 2002, when Red Sox baseball great
Ted Williams died, his head was sawed off and frozen. It is now stored at the
Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alcor, with nearly nine hundred members and eighty-four patients at the time, was CI’s chief rival, although it charges a great deal more for eternal life. After Williams died, his oldest daughter insisted that her father had not wanted to be frozen, and produced, as evidence, a will in which he stated that he wished to be cremated, whereupon his son found, in the trunk of Williams’s car, a piece of scrap paper that said something about “bio-stasis.”
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