by Alan Emmins
“Do you ever get into it with your neighbors about …”
“Fuck yeah. Yesterday!”
“What happened?”
“She came up my driveway, looking at everything. I pull onto my driveway, I’m like, ‘Can I help you?’ She’s like, ‘No!’ ‘Then get the fuck off my driveway, lady!’ She started getting rough with me. I just told her, ‘Lady, get your big fucking ass outta here!’ But the truck is the biggest issue. You know, if the truck said ABC Construction there wouldn’t be an issue, so fuck ’em, man! They don’t look at the fact that I’m thirty-four years old. I’m half their age and I live in one of their houses.”
“Do you really think that’s part of it?”
“I don’t know. I think they’re just blinded by the ‘crime scene homicide suicide’ thing. They think I’m some kind of freak, you know. But I am really boring. I mean really boring. If you weren’t here I’d be at home right now playing with Jack, picking flowers, you know, sitting on my porch not bothering anybody. I want privacy. Leave me the fuck alone. If the truck said ‘Bio-hazard Cleanup’ there’d be no problem, but because I’m more assertive with the marketing …
“I just don’t take any notice. My truck’s not going anywhere. When I first started, I used to have my big white truck, like my others but the big one. And I used to do all the work, and if I had an especially funky load in the back, I used to pull up next to people at the stoplight with their windows down and watch them. Or I’d race to catch up with a convertible so that when the light turned I’d be next to them. It used to make me laugh so hard! ’cause you know, they smell it, and they’re like, ‘What the fuuuuuuck?’ And then they turn around and they see me laughing my fucking head off. Then they read the side of the truck and they’re trying to get their roofs up and they’re flapping and shouting. Fucking funny as shit, man. But the neighbors have nothing to complain about. I have never brought a load home and I never will. Not even passing through.”
An odd thing has happened since our arrival in the diner. I thought I was imagining things, at first. I mean, it has to be a coincidence. It can’t be because of …
“Oh, God, the place empties out when the Crime Scene Cleaners come in!” the waitress says as she comes to our table with pen and pad in hand.
So I am not the only person to notice. The diner was a little over half full when we entered, now it is empty except for Neal and me.
Were we that loud? Are people scared of catching something? Does Neal’s close relation to Mr. Death cause people to run for the their lives?
“I’ll take the Jimmy Ds with eggs over easy, a large coffee, and a large glass of milk,” says Neal, clearly not interested in the departure of the other customers. “I can’t wait until Jack’s that age,” Neal says, referring to a boy walking by outside. “I just can’t wait to take him places with me and … teach him, you know? My dad was a failure, dude. He never did any of that shit, plus, he was just a failure, period.”
Neal freely admits that he views every phone call as a moneymaking opportunity. Yet, every time the phone rings he complains and throws his cutlery down with a clank. “Damn, man! I’m trying to eat my Jimmy Ds!
“Which city and state, sir? Okay, well, look, I can get her there anytime you want … aha—aha, well, everything is guaranteed. If you see anything you want to raise, my name is Neal, I’m the president of the corp, you just get me on the phone, we work for you. So please, anything at all, just get me on the phone. Thank you, sir, thank you, you have a nice day now.” The very second Neal ends the call he looks into the phone, as if the phone has eyes, and tells it, “Fuck offff!” Neal loves it when his phone rings and he loves telling it to fuck off if the phone call didn’t evolve into several thousand dollars.
“Fucking guy. Has us come out and clean where a guy took his own head off with a shotgun and there’s one light! One fucking half-watt bulb and he’s like, the next morning, ‘I found a speck of blood.’ No fucking shit, dude. No fucking shit you found a speck of blood. If you only have half a watt of light tell me and I’ll bring light! I don’t mind buying you a fucking light bulb, you cheap ass motherfucker! Just let me know, okay! I mean, what do you think I am? A fucking owl?”
After breakfast Neal drops me back at my motel. There are no jobs right now and Neal is going home to play with Jack.
Walnut Creek, where I am staying, is a dull, Bermuda Triangle of a place. Soon after the departure of Neal I find myself immensely bored. But with crime scene cleaning being as sporadic as it is, I don’t want to drive anywhere in case a job comes in. So I have to stick around. To grin and bear it.
COOLER THAN ELVIS
There is no trip to the office for Neal this morning. It is Saturday, and so I must sit and wait for the call. I do most of this sitting and waiting in Starbucks, reading Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers and drinking too much coffee.
I call Neal, just to confirm once again that nothing is happening. He assures me he’ll be on the phone as soon as anything comes in. I cross the road, murder a burrito, but soon find myself turning numb. Walnut Creek is killing me. As the neighborhood is little more than an outdoor shopping mall, my options are limited. I hurry once again to the cinema for cover. But I don’t want to watch movies. I don’t want to be in Walnut Creek. I want to be working. I want to mop up the dead. But it would seem that death is not a well-oiled machine and I am noticing, on just the second day without any crime scene cleaning work, that I am starting to feel frustrated by this. It comes like a passing reflection in a mirror, an angle of yourself that you haven’t seen before and that you really don’t like.
After the movie I drive over to Neal’s house. One of the cable channels is showing a documentary they filmed with him six months ago and we are going to watch it together. The house is silent when I get there. Neal motions for me to be quiet, Jack is asleep. The television is turned down low; we sit and watch the documentary without talking as the screen flits from job to job. It’s typical Neal on the screen. He doesn’t tone himself down for the camera, but then he doesn’t tone himself up, either. The only time Neal speaks to me is at the end of a clip where he has just cleaned up a homicide: “Damn … I’m cooler than Elvis!” he says. Then, turning to me, he adds, “Okay, Alan, if anything comes in I’ll get you on the phone.”
Right you are, I think to myself. I’ll be off then.
I scurry out as quickly as I can.
SELLING TO THE FUTURE DEAD
The past two days have yielded a zero body count. Now, here we are on God’s day of respite, but what I want to know is will the devil also be resting on this here Sunday?
It seems so. All I have done is drink coffee and eat pancakes. Now I am back in my motel room, sitting on the bed, reading a brochure about cryonics. A while back I visited a cryonics facility in Arizona. I guess it was my first direct foray into death. I brought the brochure with me, thinking I might go back for an update, to see what part cryonics is now playing in our death culture.
Originally, I was interested in doing a story on them, but felt so cheated by the place that I never really got around to it. I drove twelve long hours through the desert, barreling along at speeds I really shouldn’t have been playing with, and when I eventually I found myself in the storage room of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of only two facilities in the USA that deals with cryonics, I wanted to get in my car and drive back to L. A.
Before me stood some very normal-looking metal cylinders with stickers on the sides. This was the “patient care bay.” I was terribly disappointed. I went there expecting images of science fiction. I mean, we are dealing with future innovations here; why can’t the visual elements be designed to match the perception? Far be it for me to say, never having been a Trekky, but stickers just aren’t very futuristic. They lack galactic quality.
Not for the first time, Hollywood had farted in my face. Where were the flashing screens? Where were the unexplainable oddities oscillating at the speed of light? The dials and glas
s viewing panels for keeping an eye on the subjects? The dry ice spewing across the mezzanine floor? The hyperdrive? I wanted some Hollywood, some cool visuals and far-out technologies. But in reality there wasn’t even a button to push. In fact, the Alcor patient care bay, if anything, was suggestive of days gone by, not some futuristic vision.
For three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon the building was surprisingly quiet. Like the rest of Scottsdale, Arizona, it looked like it was built just five minutes ago. Speed-dried by the intense desert heat. The building was basically two huge cement blocks that stood two stories high, separated by a slope-roofed entrance. There was something very eerie about this building from the outside, with only a few cars dotted around the large car park.
There was simply no sign of movement.
Nobody coming.
Nobody going.
It was pretty much the same on the inside. There were no white coats gliding along the corridors. No prospective customers. No deliveries. No regular employees. There was just Paula Lemler, my tour guide for the afternoon. But maybe that was to be expected: this wasn’t after all a high-turnover business.
There’s a lot of skepticism about being stored at low temperatures (vitrified) after death with a view to being brought back to life in the future. Alcor themselves admit that right now this isn’t feasible. But then, at the same time, they don’t believe you are dead just because your heart has stopped beating.
“We’re not there yet,” Paula Lemler told me, “but we will be. The way science is progressing, the day will come when we will be able to restore life. Maybe that’s fifty years away, maybe it’s three hundred. But I, and everybody here at Alcor, truly believe in that day.”
Their pitch is based on scientific breakthroughs that thus far don’t exist. But they are confident that one day, maybe after a cure for cancer is found, they will be able to revive one of their members and exercise such a cure on them. At the outset, I have to agree, there really is little to lose. The worst thing that could happen is that you will remain dead. So, if you have the money and the desire, it may well be worth humoring science.
But there are just so many questions. First up (call me defeatist), I would need to see some radical improvement in human behavior before I ever thought this planet worth a second stint. If I could be packed off somewhere else, never heard of, never seen, for better or worse, it would be worth a gamble. But the way planet earth is going? No, thanks! The only reason would be to see how the kids are doing. But what if you don’t come back for two hundred years, which from where we stand now would appear an optimistic time frame. The children will be long gone. Sure, one would hope for a generational trail, but what are you going to do? Knock on the family home and announce, “I used to live here!”?
Can you imagine the scene? In-laws can be troublesome enough. Some couples find it hard enough to accept each other’s parents in the now; imagine if said parents were several hundred years old.
The chances of your actually being wanted in three hundred years’ time are slim. Sure, you’ll be wheeled out at first for cocktail parties and after-dinner speeches, but what of you then? Once the novelty value wears off, you’ll be cast aside like any other aging fool. Only it will be easier to dispense with you because nobody will have any emotional connection to you. You never bounced them on your knee or took them out for ice cream. For the last three hundred years you were an ice cream. All you did was thaw out one day and turn up.
What other reasons could there be for coming back? A loved one? You could be vitrified together. Return together. But most people can barely keep a marriage together for one lifetime. Two lifetimes of marriage to the same person? There would be no surprises left.
There are many myths about cryonics: first, that it’s called cryogenics. Cryogenics is the study of the cause and effect of extremely low temperature. Cryonics is the study or practice of keeping a newly dead body at an extremely low temperature in the hope of restoring it to life at a later date with the aid of future medical advances. I know this because the Alcor Life Extension Foundation brochure is kind enough to point it out.
Another myth is that cryonics is expensive. And yes, to you or me, $150,000 may be a lot of money. But, you can actually pay for the procedure with life insurance. All you do is take out your policy and name Alcor as the legal benefactor of the policy, so in reality the cost can be very little. There are even entire families who are members; mum, dad, and the two kids. The people of Alcor foresee a future where cryonics is a natural choice. Instead of being buried or cremated, it will be just as natural to be packed into an arctic cylinder full of liquid nitrogen.
It is generally accepted by the cryonics societies and newsletters available on the Web that “rebirth” will not become an actuality for several hundred years. My opinion is that unless cryonics specialists start thinking before they speak, it will be several hundred years before people start taking cryonics seriously, let alone being reborn. This opinion, I should alert you, is based not on any scientific fact or reasoning but on reading through the booklet “Alcor Life Extension Foundation—An Introduction by Jerry B. Lemler, M. D.” The booklet is packed with credible titles, filled with Ph. D. Tom and M. D. Harry. But there are also some alarm bells that ring loud. The first is the reference to Alcor members as “Alcorians.” I am not about to accuse Alcor of being a religious cult, but surely anybody alive in the last thirty years can name a few that sound uncannily like “Alcorians.” I mean come on, add “ians” to the end of any word and you have taken your first step toward founding a cult. Try it. See, you’re a cult leader now.
To put such an awful tag on the membership really discredits everything that Alcor might be about. To me the tag suggests that they are aiming themselves at sci-fi fanatics and or other assorted nut jobs.
Dr. Lemler, in his booklet, is quick to list his acquainted Ph. D.s and M. D.s. But from where I sit, it doesn’t take an eight-year education to realize that by calling your members “Alcorians” you are begging to be harangued and mocked. Ever since coming across the phrase I have found it hard to come to terms with Alcor as a professional organization.
There are other interesting uses of Ph. D.s in the brochure.
“Eminent Extropian Philosopher and Alcor Member Max More, Ph. D., uses a compelling analogy involving an automobile,” writes Dr. Lemler:
If we say a car has the capacity to move at 110 mph, we mean that it is currently in a state such that, given appropriate stimuli (such as gas, a foot on the accelerator etc.), it will achieve 110 mph. The objection claims that we don’t mean that the car could achieve 110 mph given available technology, and we don’t mean that, given some empirically possible but non-actual technology, the car could achieve 110 mph. The problem with the objection lies in the fuzziness of the terms “capacity” and “appropriate stimuli.”
Mr. Eminent Extropian Philosopher and Alcor Member Max More, Ph. D. (who with such a name could also moonlight as a porn star and/or trusted name in news anchor), goes on for many paragraphs in the same vein and tells us …well, nothing! What he does do is use an awful lot of words to promote his branch of the death industry. He tries the old bamboozle technique. Say it, say it again, and again, and then slip in an analogy that, well, by the mere fact of its being so incompatible with what you’re talking about can’t really be called an analogy at all. He talks of disconnected wires, about how capacity can be restored by reattaching the wire. Sure, but how many human beings have you seen in the street immobilized by a loose wire? But the analogy gets thinner. What if the car is broken and there is no current technology that can fix it? “Further suppose that the manufacturer tells you that they are working on a new repair process that will restore function, a process that should be available a month from now.” Yes, I can “further suppose” until the cows come home, I just can’t get myself to further suppose all the way to accepting that that a broken-down car is in anyway comparable to a dead body. Mr. Ph. D. rounds up with. “The car analogy, th
en, supports rather than undermines the case for basing a criterion for death on irreversible loss of capacity rather than currently irreversible loss of capacity.”
Seriously!? Appropriate stimuli indeed!? If the “problem lies” in the “fuzziness” of the terms “capacity” and “appropriate stimuli,” Mr. Eminent, I suggest you don’t use the terms capacity and appropriate stimuli, they were, after all, if I am not mistaken, your own words.
It’s an overused and overrated technique, to try to sound so smart, hoping to make your reader feel so stupid that what you are saying will go unquestioned.
THE NOSE HAIR: I want to sound smart when I talk. Would you help me?THE BRIAN: Well, that’s easy; first off, give yourself some grand title, like “Extropian.” All you have to do then is stop midway through a sentence for effect, hold your pause with words like such that or, my personal favorite, appropriate stimuli, and talk around in circles without ever really getting to a point.
No, I don’t think I will be going back to Alcor. It’s not that I don’t believe that the service they offer will one day become a reality. I do; I hope so, at least. I just don’t like the way they sell death, or nondeath, to the dead. I much rather prefer Neal’s death economy, which, by the mere fact that Neal’s customers are generally not viable for cryonics, underlines the necessity of his existence.
For those of you, however, who are interested in cryonics, I suggest visiting cryonicssociety.org, a Web site that seems to give the subject the proper respect. But that’s for another day. The last thing I want Californians opting for today is cryonics; what I need is more along the lines of mayhem. I need Neal to call me with another job.
SELLING TO THE RELATIVES OF THE DEAD
