“You really believe this is gonna work, don’t you?” Webster’s voice seemed to carry a note of hope.
“Probably not.”
“Oh.” Webster tugged at an ear; his eyes narrowed. “Then why bother with it?”
“My father used to tell a story about a devout man whose wife’s injured in a car wreck. She has to have an operation they can’t afford or she’ll never walk again. So he prays, night and day: ‘God, please let me win the lottery.’ Finally, after some months he starts to lose faith. He berates God, and screams, ‘I have been a pious man my entire life, have always tried to please you, and have never asked for anything before. Now the one time I really need help, you turn your back on me. When in the hell will you answer my prayers?’ Suddenly the skies turn black, thunder roars, and lightning flashes. A deep voice resounds from the sky, shaking the ground like an earthquake. And God asks, ‘When in the hell will you buy a lottery ticket?’”
October 19, 1985
A lazy Saturday morning, seven A.M., and Ben reveled in the luxury of a leisurely read. Boston Globe spread across floor, couch, and lap, he scanned the financial section, his third choice after world news and the sports page.
—Ford Taurus Firmly Established as America’s Best Selling Automobile—
Big surprise.
—Reagan to Sign Gramm-Rudman Act—
Yawn.
—Yamatsuo International Launches Cellular Phone—
Whoa… Ben read on, his interest intense, though hardly in the subject matter at hand. Without thinking, he’d lifted the phone, punched zero, been told he could direct-dial, lied by telling the operator that he was sight-impaired, then had his call quickly but courteously put through to Japan. His emotions were charged and all-embracing, leaving no room for guilt.
“…and it is nine P.M. here, sir,” a secretary at Yamatsuo International headquarters was saying in unaccented but too precise English.
“Oh… Stupid of me. An impulsive call. Don’t know what made me do it.”
“I will make sure Mr. Yamatsuo receives your number, sir.”
Now feeling like a total idiot, Ben hung up and reached for the comics. They somehow seemed an appropriate read.
He was laughing at Garfield when his phone rang.
“Smee-tee-san?”
The intelligent but indolent orange cat, and the rest of Ben’s world, disappeared.
They talked for ten minutes about nothing and everything; ten became twenty; twenty became an hour. It wasn’t until ten-fifteen that Ben regained any sense of time. “Good Lord,” he said. “How late is it there?”
“Bit after midnight,” Hiro Yamatsuo replied in nearly perfect English, which he had strangely yet graciously developed as the conversation ran along.
Ben marveled at his old enemy. “Sorry I’ve kept you so long,” he apologized.
“There isn’t much to do in a Tokyo hospital room, Smitty. Believe me, this is a welcome diversion.”
“Hospital room?”
“Nothing serious. Cataract surgery. Though I’m told an error with the anesthesia nearly killed me. Apparently I’ve had a rare allergic reaction that had been improperly tested for.”
“Nearly lost a patient myself that way, years ago. A close call…”
Yamatsuo laughed. “You can’t live forever…”
These words rocketed Ben forty years backward in time. “I’ve never said that!” He couldn’t feel his own body. What came next out of his mouth shocked even Ben himself. “You ever considered cryonics, Hiro-san?”
Amazingly, Hiro Yamatsuo not only listened to his spiel but encouraged him. An hour later Ben thought he just might understand how an evangelist—having just delivered a longwinded but impassioned sermon—might feel.
“You’ve convinced me to investigate the matter.” Yamatsuo then issued a strangely wistful sigh, like a man who’d lost something never to be regained. “You talked to me as an old friend. I had forgotten how that feels. Ironic that I should momentarily recapture such childhood feelings with you.”
Ben chuckled nervously. He had no idea what to say. Ironic that I should give a damn came into his mind but did not emerge from his mouth.
Yamatsuo seemed to sense Ben’s unease. Too cheerily, he added, “Yes, I’ll investigate this cryonics concept just as soon as my schedule permits.”
“You shouldn’t wait,” Ben said. “If you’re interested, just do it. Like your recent brush, almost no one can anticipate their dying day with accuracy. Besides, what’s there to lose? The money can’t be an issue to a man like you.”
“No, but as with everything, it is a matter of finding the time.”
“It’s more than that,” Ben heard himself say. “It’s a matter of all time, and that’s easy to forget.” Like so many others, he believed, this older man would entertain the idea lavishly, then show it the door. “If you’re really interested, invest the time and effort, and do something about it.”
“You’re a man of admirable passions, then as now,” Yamatsuo said.
A stone in the water, Ben thought. Then he said his good-byes.
June 2, 1988
Sirens blaring, the ambulance tore through Boston Common, rushing Dr. Benjamin Smith to New England Medical Center. Startled motorists pulled to one side as the three-year-old Ford transport van sped through traffic lights and over-wide turns. Then, with only the barest hesitation, the drivers returned to traffic and their own daily concerns.
Both ambulance attendants wheeled him through the emergency entrance toward intensive care. One of them whispered to a nurse, “Looks like a myocardial infarction. Probably massive.”
Ben wondered if they realized he could hear them. He’d treated many terminal patients himself, and had long sympathized with the helplessness felt by those who were dying or debilitated from illness. Their minds often became incapacitated along with their bodies. Inability to comprehend their predicament, Ben had always imagined, might be as much blessing as curse.
He understood that such loss of faculty was caused not only by physiological circumstance, but also by feelings of helplessness and loss of control. And now, feeling that helpless himself, he found his frustration worse than he could have anticipated or understood. He tried to focus on an internal pinpoint that was little more than hope. He knew his mind was clouded; he could barely remember his previous decisions, and creative thought was a struggle. Yet he’d methodically patterned a plan of action into his brain over the past five years:
I will show no ambivalence toward the freezer.
Now, even as his mind faltered and he questioned his own ability to judge, even as his reasons for embracing cryonics faded like a city disappearing into afternoon fog, he reminded himself that although he could no longer see its edifices, they were still there. Thus he knew he must appear resolute. There was precious little else he could do for himself. He would just have to hope that his own preparations were adequate, and entrust his destiny to others.
A nurse looked down at his face. “Oh my God! Dr. Smith.” She didn’t know him personally, but almost every nurse at the hospital would have recognized him. She ran alongside them. “It’s gonna be okay. We’ll take care of you, sir.”
Before surrendering consciousness, Ben managed to whisper the three important words he’d long planned to say if he ever found himself in this situation: “Call Toby Fiske.”
Dr. Tobias Fiske arrived forty minutes later, just in time to watch his friend open his eyes. Ben lay flat on an ICU bed, attached to monitors, hooked to an IV unit, breathing oxygen through a mask. Toby realized that Ben’s body would be helpless, virtually immobile, but his mind might still be lucid.
“Hey, stranger. How you feelin’?”
Looking up, Ben licked his lips. “I’m not gonna make it, am I?” he gasped.
Toby stood for several seconds, wrestling with himself for the right vocal timbre, the proper facial expression. “Doesn’t look good.”
“How long?”
�
��Without a transplant, a few hours. At most.”
“What about a transplant?” Ben asked.
“Nothing suitable available. Odds of finding anything in time are less than one percent.” Toby had to look away from Ben while speaking these words.
“Oh.”
“Ben, your daughters are here—all of them. Right outside.”
“Gary?” Ben asked.
“Not yet.”
“Okay. In a minute.” Ben closed his eyes. “See my bracelet?” he whispered.
Toby nodded.
“Call the number.” Ben was breathing hard now, obviously straining to force out everything he needed to say. “But don’t get in… trouble for me. Promise, Toby. I’m asking you… as my doctor, not my friend.”
“I promise.”
“Couldn’t love you more… if you were… my brother.”
Toby wondered if Ben understood that to him their kinship extended far beyond brotherhood. Throughout his adolescence and even adulthood, his feelings of disenfranchisement—feelings he now attributed to his parents’ blind devotion to religion and lack of devotion to each other—had left him open to a sort of quasi-scientific thinking far beneath his intellectual potential. Without his friend’s guidance, Toby knew he would never have pursued a career in medicine. He might’ve wound up writing horoscopes for a second-market newspaper. Or joined the Moonies, for God’s sake.
But he simply answered, “I know,” squeezed Ben’s hand, slipped the bracelet off his wrist, and walked to the door.
Outside, now in tears, Toby told Rebecca, Maxine, and Jan, “Ben wants to see you.” He hugged Maxine. “His heart’s barely pumping. Probably only an hour or two before it gives out completely. And he knows it.” Then he trudged down the hall to the doctor’s phone and placed a call to the number on Ben’s bracelet.
An operator answered on the first ring. “Phoenix. Emergency response.”
Of Ben’s three daughters, Maxine was the physician, so the others now looked to her with uncustomary deference. Max would know best how to mask her sorrow. There would be plenty of time to mourn later; she’d want her father’s final moments to be as pleasant as possible.
“You comfortable, Daddy?” she asked, stroking his right hand. Ben figured she must have looked at his chart, and knew he could no longer feet his left. “Any pain?”
“Yes, plenty. But nothing hurts,” he said, forcing a half smile, dreading the freezer, now imagining claustrophobia beyond toleration. He felt terribly weak, too.
No one knew what to say.
Max forced herself to break the silence. “Remember when you took us all to the Grand Canyon? Must’ve been 1962, wasn’t it?”
Ben smiled.
“Of course we could never fly anywhere, like normal families,” Rebecca said.
“I still can’t believe we did that,” Jan laughed. “All six of us in that Cadillac with those foot-tall tail fins blocking the view. No station wagon for us! Five straight days there, and five straight days back. It’s amazing we didn’t kill each other.”
“And some of those motor lodges were so seedy,” Max added. “I can only imagine what caused those stains on the bedspreads. You and Mom in one room, and the four of us sharing another. Rebecca and I usually slept on the floor.”
“Yeah,” Jan said, “so you could talk and tell dirty jokes all night while Gary and I tried to sleep. God, I hated that.”
“Those trips you used to make us take,” Rebecca said, “y’know, Dad, I tell my friends about them sometimes, and they’re jealous. They say stuff like, ‘My parents never took us along on their vacations. They’d just ship us off to Grandma’s.’ And I’d always tell them they were the lucky ones. But that’s—that’s not how I really felt, not a bit.” She was gasping now, trying hard not to cry. “Of all the things about growing up in our family, those summer vacations are what I remember best. They were like getting to live a separate lifetime; an extra year each year. I swear I remember as much of those vacations as I can of the years separating them.”
“Dad,” Max asked, “you want to see your grandkids? I could ask a friend to pick them up and drive them here.”
Ben tried to shake his head. Tears formed. The last time they saw him would become one of their strongest memories. It couldn’t be like this. Grampas, he decided, should only be recalled in a grin.
“No,” he whispered slowly, haltingly, “I want ‘em to remember me playing soccer with ‘em, or taking them… to the zoo. Not lying here with a tube up my nose.” He gasped for air, caught his breath. “But you make sure they know I love them. Tell those kids… my last thoughts… were about them, all of ‘em, and my last hours were happy… because I was thinking about them.”
Rebecca began to cry. Jan looked away, her own eyes welling. But dear Max had forced herself to hold her emotions in check, like a sagging dam whose purpose was to give the town below a few extra hours to evacuate before the impending flood.
“Is… Gary coming?” Ben asked.
“Yes. I’m sure of it,” Rebecca said. “He loves you, Dad. He’d be here now if he knew. I left a message on his answering machine, and called Vose Galleries, too. He’s supposed to approve the layout today for his one-man show next month. They’ll tell him as soon as he shows up, and he’ll come on the run.”
Picturing his son trying to run on that shortened left leg, he thought: more like on the reel. And that was probably Ben’s fault, too.
He whispered, “If he doesn’t get here in time, say goodbye for me. Just tell him how proud I am of him. He really made something of himself.” Despite me or in spite of me? he wondered.
“He sure did,” Rebecca said.
“In spite, I think,” Ben whispered.
After about half an hour Toby walked into the room. “Sorry to interrupt. The technicians from the Phoenix just arrived. They wanted me to make sure Ben knew.”
“Already?” Ben murmured. “Better talk to you in private.”
Max said, “We’ll be in the hall, Dad.”
“How’d they get here so fast?” Ben asked.
“They’re not from Arizona,” Toby heard himself explain, as if this were a normal frigging conversation, for God’s sake. Like he was maybe explaining a standard medical procedure; a goddamn triple bypass or something. Christ. “The Phoenix has two scientists traveling around the country training paramedics. They have teams on call in about twenty cities. Your team owns an ambulance company in Rhode Island. You’re their fourth cryonics job. Last one was in Warwick, seven months ago.”
“They can work here?”
“Yeah. They’re licensed in Massachusetts, and cleared for this hospital. I checked. Guess they figured Boston being so close…” Then Toby paused a moment, and finally said it: “Cryonics? Jesus, Ben. Your daughters know?”
“No. Couldn’t figure out how to tell ‘em… Or you.”
“What were you afraid of? That we’d think you lost your mind or something?”
“Well… yeah.” Ben was trying to smile. “Don’t you… think that?”
Toby hesitated. “Out of your mind? No. Gullible? Maybe…” He paused again. “You really s’ pose they’ll ever revive you?”
“I doubt it.” Ben chuckled weakly. “But you… never know.”
“Those three cryonic technicians seem like believers. One of them explained a bit of the procedure to me.”
“Ben, you sure about this?”
“Yes… positive.”
“Okay, I’ll help,” Toby said. After all, Ben was his best friend! Risk to his professional ass? To hell with it. What was an ass worth if you were ashamed it was yours? “But look, if we let your disease take its natural course, oxygen flow to your brain’ll diminish. And that’s a problem. You’ll start losing brain tissue long before your heart stops.”
Toby had said all this as if it were expected, the most natural thing in the world. Yet the secondary consequences were obvious enough to him.
“I know that.” Now Ben seemed c
oncerned that Toby might be moving too quickly, like a sinner who discovers God then donates every last possession to the Church.
“So what do I do?” Toby asked
“Do it by the book. Don’t jeopardize… your license.”
“I can give you morphine.”
“That’ll put me… in respiratory arrest.”
“Probably.” Hopefully.
“I’m not… in any pain.”
“I know. I was just saying that if you were… Think about it, Ben. Maybe you’re in severe pain and haven’t told me.”
“Don’t do it. You could get… in trouble.”
“Only if I get caught.”
“Isn’t worth the risk.” Ben gasped for air. “Besides… you have to look after Alice for me.” Deep breath. “Can’t do that… from prison.”
A joke, Toby realized. No doctor had actually gone to jail for helping a terminal patient die. But both knew doctors who’d lost their licenses for it.
Toby laughed quietly. “Okay, Ben. Whatever you say.” He turned to go.
“Cryonics is a longshot. Don’t risk your career… for a longshot.”
Toby did not turn back, nor did he answer. He wasn’t sure how his voice would sound right then.
Max had been talking to Harvey Bacon, the chief cryonic technician. She was sure that her own expression was now a portrait of her disbelief and disgust.
“You can go back in,” Toby said.
“Did you know about this?” she asked.
“No. I just found out. Like you.”
“Incredible,” she muttered, going back inside. To Max, cryonics was a fraud, a waste of money. And worse, it deprived living people of healthy, lifesaving organs that might otherwise have been donated. How could her father have fallen for this scam? He used to be such a realist.
But Toby refused to play judge. Some people spent $100,000 on their own goddamn funeral, didn’t they? Or left their money to some televangelist, looking to buy a place in heaven. Maybe cryonics would actually work. Who the hell could know? Ben had always been smart, even prescient, so maybe he was right again.
The First Immortal Page 11
