The Mansion of Happiness (35 page)

When
Doubleday agreed to publish
The Prospect of Immortality
, it made Ettinger into something of a star. (Thomas McCormack is not a convert. When he dies, he will be lost. “I’ll be buried in a place called Valhalla,” he told me. “That’s the name of the goddamned cemetery, believe it or not.”)
⁴¹
Ettinger claimed, and he is probably right, that nearly everyone active in cryonics first heard about it, directly or indirectly, from him. Cryonicists talk about where they were when they first read
The Prospect of Immortality
the way some people talk about where they were when Kennedy was shot.
⁴²
Ben Best, who later succeeded Ettinger as CI’s president, picked up a
copy in a health food store.
Stanley Kubrick read it, Ettinger said, and then “bought dozens of copies, gave them to his friends,” and arranged to meet with him to talk about signing up and, presumably, to fish for material for
2001.
(“I’m afraid his obsession with immortality has overcome his artistic instincts,” Arthur Clarke wrote in his diary in 1965.) In a 1968 interview with
Playboy
, Kubrick said, “Dr. Ettinger’s thesis is quite simple.” He proceeded to propound it, quoting Ettinger at length, and expressed his own conviction that, within ten years, “the freezing of the dead will be a major industry in the United States and throughout the world.”
⁴³

But when Kubrick died, in 1999, he was lost. He is buried in Hertfordshire.

During a book tour appearance on
The
Long John Nebel Show
, Ettinger said he had been gratified by the book’s reception: “Almost everybody is willing to take it seriously.”
⁴⁴
Nebel, who believed in UFOs, ghosts, and CIA mind control, took Ettinger seriously. Nebel died in 1978. I don’t know if he was lost.

Ettinger says he was also interviewed by David Frost, Steve Allen, Merv Griffin, and Johnny Carson.

“Did these people take you seriously?” I asked.

“Talk-show hosts don’t take anything seriously. They’re idiots.” He told me he was once on a show with William Buckley Jr.

“What did Buckley make of you?”

“He was aghast at everything I said.” This is the first time I’d seen Ettinger smile. “He thought it was immoral, unethical, unsanitary, against the will of God!” He laughed. “Buckley understood nothing.”

In May 1965, the month after
Lennart Nilsson’s photographs of the drama of life before birth were published in
Life
magazine,
Wilma Jean McLaughlin lay dying of heart disease in a hospital in Springfield, Ohio. Her husband asked Ettinger to freeze her, but at the last minute, the hospital refused to cooperate.
⁴⁵
The first human being was frozen in 1966; it went badly, and a few months later, the body had to be buried. Ettinger wasn’t there for any of it. The next year, a man named
James Bedford was frozen by an organization that later became the
Cryonics Society of California; Ettinger held a press conference.
⁴⁶
(What with one snafu and another, most of the people who were frozen in California rotted.) Alcor and
Trans Time were founded in 1972. That same year, St. Martin’s Press, where McCormack had moved,
published Ettinger’s second book,
Man into Superman: The Startling Potential of Human Evolution—and How to Be a Part of It.
It begins, “By working hard and saving my money, I intend to become an immortal superman.”
⁴⁷
The following year,
Sleeper
came out.
Woody Allen’s film is very loosely based on Wells’s 1899 novel. Miles Monroe (Allen), who runs a health food store in Greenwich Village, goes into the hospital for an ulcer, but when the surgery goes awry, he is covered in “Birds Eye wrapper” and stuck in a freezer for two hundred years. He eventually falls in love with Luna (played by Diane Keaton), although when first he wakes, he’s peevish, especially after his doctor tells him his resurrection is a miracle of science.

In
Man into Superman
, Ettinger throws around a lot of Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw but shows more evidence of having whiled away the hours reading
Penthouse
, which started in 1965. The world of tomorrow will be unimaginably better than the world of today. How? There will be transsex and supersex! Scientists will turn woman into a “sexual superwoman … with cleverly designed orifices of various kinds, something like a wriggly Swiss cheese, but shapelier and more fragrant.” Animals will be bred as sex slaves; even incest might be allowed. Also, scientists will likely equip men with wings, built-in biological weapons, body armor made of hair, and “telescoping, fully adjustable” sexual organs.
⁴⁹
(Hold on. That last one. Doesn’t the existing model already come with that?)

Ettinger saw Allen’s film when it came out. His opinion: “He has a lot of good things to say about death.”

Though that opinion is qualified: “But as far as I know, he’s never done anything about it.”

“Like what?”

“Like sign up.”

For a very long time, no one signed up. Ettinger’s first patient was his mother, Rhea. He froze her in 1977.

“Did she want to be frozen?”

“I don’t know if she was really enthusiastic about it, but she was willing.”

Ettinger’s second patient was his first wife, who died in November 1987. What did she think about the prospect of being frozen?

“She never talked much about it. It was just taken for granted.”

He remarried the following year. One month after Ettinger froze his first wife,
Saul Kent froze the head of his mother, Dora, at the Alcor facility. Kent, the author of
Future Sex
(1974) and
The Life-Extension Revolution
(1980), had become a convert to cryonics after reading
The Prospect of Immortality
on the beach. He had also founded the vitamin-peddling Life Extension Foundation, in Hollywood, Florida, which was raided by the Food and Drug Administration in 1987. There was some question of whether Dora Kent was actually dead when her head was cut off. But Kent was never convicted of anything.
⁵⁰

Ettinger’s second wife, Mae, suffered a stroke in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2000. Ettinger was with her. It was horrible. She was helpless; he was helpless. “All she was able to do was to move one arm,” he said, his voice quavering. Mae knew she would be frozen; Ettinger had paid a retainer to a local funeral home “to practice once a year.” She died the day after her stroke. Ettinger took comfort in what happened next. He acted fast: “I pronounced death—anyone can do that in Arizona—and the funeral people were there in a few minutes. We had already started packing her in ice, and the funeral people started right away.” She was flown to Detroit. She is Patient 34. She was not lost.

Ettinger finds nothing so uninteresting as history. “When the future ex–pands, the past shrinks,” he once wrote. Take literature. In the golden age, no one will read Shakespeare: “Not only will his work be far too weak in
intellect, and written in too vague and puny a language, but the problems which concerned him will be, in the main, no more than historical curiosities.”
⁵¹
Still, Ettinger told me, when I asked, that his mother and both his wives kept photo albums and that they’re at the institute, in that storeroom that was once a library, somewhere. He promised we could look for them on the second day of my visit, even though he was baffled by my interest. He showed me the cat vat. He told me about the heads. The future, so gleamy and white. How could anyone possibly care about the musty, dusty past?

The storeroom was a mess. There was an old StairMaster and some folding tables. The bookshelves housed a set of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, someone’s college textbooks—including a copy of
Organic Chemistry
—and a T‑shirt on which was printed the periodic table. Along one wall stood a bank of file drawers.

“What’s in there?”

“Any patient who wants to can buy a drawer, to put things in,” Andy said.

“Really?”

“But not many of them ask.”

Mae Ettinger asked. She kept a diary and asked for it to be kept here, marked, “Not to be read until and unless it is deemed useful for the revival.” It won’t survive, though. Paper turns to dust.

“Anything else?”

“One of our members suggested it would be a good idea to store your computer here,” Ettinger said. “No one’s done it yet, though.”

Andy riffled through drawer after drawer. At last, he found them: ten bulky albums with flesh-toned covers, pink, brown, and beige. He and I lugged them back to the table in the conference room. And then Ettinger and I sat, for a good hour, maybe more, and turned pages. The albums contained mostly photographs, but there were old documents in there, too: a military ID, a college transcript, newspaper clippings. Ettinger hadn’t wanted to drag these albums out, but now that he’d decided to indulge me, he was determined to be thorough. He didn’t skip a single photograph, even prying apart pages that had gotten stuck. He was bored before we began; I could have looked at that stuff forever.

The earliest albums belonged to his mother: sepia pictures of his babyhood. He offered names. “That’s Leo.…That’s Pee Wee Russell. He married my mother’s sister, Mary.” He remembered people from his early years
best. He was very sharp on the names of his cousins, growing up, and he never missed the name of a dog. He planned to freeze the one he currently had, Mugsy. Mae would like that. His father appeared in a picture or two, then disappeared. There followed dozens of photographs of Ettinger in uniform—handsome, smiling, promising—and, on the next pages, in casts, in wheelchairs, on crutches: a young man cut down. Here was his wedding, under a chuppah. The next albums were Elaine’s, snapshots of postwar suburbia: the wading pool, the tricycle, boys in crew cuts, girls in checkered dresses.

And then there was a long gap, until Mae’s albums started. There were a handful pictures of Ettinger but many more of a sweetly happy Mae, surrounded by people: her bowling league, her children from her first marriage, her grandchildren from her first marriage. “That’s one of Pat’s kids,” he’d say. Or, more often than not: “Who the hell is that? I don’t know who the hell that is.”

“When you wake up, nearly everyone in these albums will be gone. Won’t you miss them?”

“I hope to see the people I knew before and that I loved before.” Ettinger sighed. “Most of the people I grew up with are already gone. That’s been true for a long time. Most of the people that anybody grows up with, they lose track of. We lose them.”

Unless we save them, in the freezer, in an archive, in our children, forever in our hearts, in God’s care. We had gone through one album, two, five, eight. I asked why cryonics is, by any objective measure, a failure. Ettinger talked about something he calls the “legacy effect,” the crippling hold of the past. He isn’t crippled by it, but other people are. Or else the Freezer Era would actually have dawned, in 1964, when it was supposed to. Idiots. But you can’t worry about other people; you have to take care of yourself.

And then, as abruptly as we began, we were done. He pulled himself up to standing, grabbed his cane, and tapped the last page of the final photo album. “Someone should have put labels on these things,” he muttered.

Just after I left Michigan, Ettinger self-published a new book,
Youniverse: Toward a Self-Centered Philosophy of Immortalism and Cryonics
(you are the most important person in the world, it says; no one else matters), and the Cryonics Institute admitted a new patient.
⁵²
Patient 93 was born Billie
Joe Bonsall, but he had had his name legally changed to William Constitution O’Rights. He had no known occupation, although he liked to dress up as a priest. Bill O’Rights was forty-three when he “deanimated” in a hospital in Maine on May 9; the next day, his body was flown to Detroit in an icebox. At Faulmann & Walsh funeral home, Jim Walsh opened the body and pumped in eleven liters of ethylene glycol. Then he brought it to CI, where Andy put it into a Walmart sleeping bag and placed it in a cooling box. A few days later, Patient 93 was hoisted up on a forklift and lowered into a freezer, headfirst, like a hibernating bat, beside invisible cats, inside a seven-thousand-square-foot building in an industrial park in the heart of America, where some of the sorriest ideas of a godforsaken and alienated modernity endure.
⁵³

Robert C. W. Ettinger died on July 23, 2011. He had held on for a very long time, believing that the longer he lived, the better his chances, because in the golden age, or what used to be called Hell, scientists choosing which patients to thaw will follow a simple rule: Last in, first out.

His head was packed in ice; his corpse was carried to the Cryonics Institute. He was ninety-two. He was saved. He is Patient 106.

When I was nine, I swiped my mother’s
Joy of Cooking
and biked to a place called Annie’s Book Swap, where I traded it for
Is Sex Necessary?
, a book I couldn’t get out of the public library, where kids were allowed only in a cramped basement, called, rather grandly, the Juvenile Room. It’s hard to write a book about life and death without thinking about your own, even when you’re trying very hard not to.