James Halperin - The First Immortal

“You mean cryogenics, don’t you?”

“No. Cryogenics is the entire subdivision of physics dealing with the creation and consequences of very low temperatures. Freezing living organisms in biostasis is called cryonics, a subset of cryogenics. It’s a fairly new term. Anyway, the author speculates that scientists of the future will discover how to revive and rejuvenate our bodies.”

“Don’t you think you might be speaking out of both sides of your mouth?” Ben asked.

“What do you mean?”

“If faith has such a down side in medicine, doesn’t cryonics have it, too?”

“I don’t see how,” Epstein answered.

“Well, cryonics is a longshot, isn’t it? Sort of a grasp at straws.”

“You bet, but if you’re falling over the edge of forever, would you rather grasp at straws or empty air?”

“But aren’t you worried that people who think cryonics will give them a second chance might not take care of themselves as diligently? They might not exercise or eat right or follow their doctor’s advice. Cryonics might offer patients the kind of hope which, and I quote, ‘seduces them to abandon other treatments that could save or prolong their lives.’”

“Oh. You actually listened to my speech. Makes it much harder for me to argue the point with you tonight, doesn’t it?” Epstein said, beaming with delight. At first Ben was confused by his friend’s effervescence, but then he understood: Being caught in a contradiction had reminded Epstein that he was once again talking to someone at his own level, an occurrence to savor. After all, it could be damned lonely up there.

Then all at once Ben asked himself: Who’s being dogmatic now?

October 28, 1982

Had it been a thousand days? As easily a thousand minutes or years. The loss seemed to expand to fill time, losing barely a hint of its bite in the interval’s amorphous growth. His mind’s eye flashed to Marge’s grave and the empty plot beside it. Waiting for him; beckoning him. He elbowed the thought aside as one might desperately shove a schoolyard bully…

Oh God! Suddenly Ben realized he would rather crawl from his Beacon Hill brownstone to the goddamn Pacific Ocean than trust some unseen pilot on one of those flying death traps. In fact he felt queasy just from thinking about it. But what choice did he have? Herbert “Mack” McGuigan had saved his life thirty-nine years ago; pulled him from those cold Pacific waters in the nick of time. He had to go to Phoenix and pay his last respects; since the funeral was tomorrow afternoon, flying was the only way to get there in time. Unfortunately.

Death remained Ben’s greatest fear, yet it wasn’t fear of death that caused this anxiety; he knew flying was the safest way to travel. He suspected his fear of flight had more to do with lack of control. In a car, fate was a wheel under his own hands.

Ben imagined sitting in an airplane—something he hadn’t done since 1945—when suddenly the engines lost power or a wing sheared off or the hydraulics failed, and there he was, strapped in his seat, helplessly pissing and screaming with nothing to be done about it. He assumed his heart would explode in his chest before the plane hit the ground.

He decided to rent a car in Phoenix, and once Mack’s remains were in the earth, he could drive home. It would only take four days for the return trip, but he’d have to fly there first; no question about that.

Even though a travel agency was located just a few blocks from his office, he walked the three miles to Crimson Travel in Cambridge; the same Crimson Travel where he’d bought the occasional train ticket back in medical school. At fifty-seven, his health was not perfect—he suffered from arthritis, seasonal allergies, and occasional migraines—but he tried to take care of himself. He walked six miles every day, lifted weights twice a week, performed a daily ten-minute stretching routine, and ate a vitamin- and fiber-rich low-fat diet.

He’d experimented with other ways to stave off the Grim Reaper, including yoga, macrobiotics, meditation, homeopathic medicine, vegetarianism, and megadoses of various vitamins, minerals, and amino acids, but concluded that the life-prolonging reputations of these therapies had been sustained either through fallacy or fraud. Everyone wanted a magic pill, it seemed; even scientists like him could be temporarily seduced.

Although Ben did not pretend to fathom the true nature of his Creator, he considered himself a religious man. Now his struggle against death was based partially on fear of what might await him there, as though God might never absolve his transgressions so long as Gary withheld forgiveness. He pictured the Almighty impatiently tapping His divine foot, awaiting His chance to punish Benjamin Smith’s sins against his own son. Ben knew it was an absurd image, yet there it was.

But in the end, he simply loved being alive.

“I know you, don’t I?” the travel agent at the desk said. “Ben, right? You used to come here, must be thirty years ago. You were at the medical school back then.”

Ben sneaked a look at her name plate. “Ah, Gloria, how could I possibly forget a face as lovely as yours? You’ve hardly aged,” he lied. People liked hearing that; he knew, because he liked it himself. Time was an enemy to every living thing.

And of course Gloria smiled. For several minutes they talked about the old days. Gloria admitted that she used to have a crush on him; something she’d kept and now wanted to share. An easy thing to understand.

“Good thing I didn’t know it back then ,” he said. “Might’ve wrecked my marriage.”

Again she beamed.

It was all he had to give her.

The one-way coach ticket was $239. The rental car and motels would cost a similar amount. Ben kept careful track of his finances even though he had more money than he could ever spend. When the time arrived to join Marge, he would leave his grandchildren a concrete reminder that their grandfather had once walked this earth. He would also bequeath some funds into a spendthrift trust for Gary: guilt money, pure and simple.

Walking back to his office, he caressed the locket that dangled from his neck on a slender gold chain. It was the same piece that Toby had borrowed from him before their tours of duty; at their first encounter in 1945 after returning from the war, Toby had returned it in exchange for his lucky rabbit’s foot. For the past three years Ben had worn this antique, containing photographs of Marge at age twenty on one side and of Sam and Alice on the other, with locks of their hair in the center. Since Marge’s burial, he’d never removed it even for a moment, and now imagined he would wear the small heirloom until his own death, perhaps beyond.

As he gently held it between thumb and forefinger, he thought once again about his wife’s final days. Such remembrances were never farther from him than the locket.

It was 1979. They’d been married thirty-four years and were as happy as any couple he knew. Then it happened, so damned suddenly. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in early August, and gone by mid-September. For six weeks they’d both known she was dying. Ben would not go to work; he rarely left her side. While her body and mind disintegrated before his eyes, he’d felt frozen, scared that if he left, even for a moment, he might miss that single flash of lucidity, that epiphany in which she would reveal to him her mysterious wisdom. He had sat with her every day, all day, holding her hand, talking about the children and reliving their lives together.

Now he thought of all his cancer patients and their families, and the countless ways spouses and loved ones coped with coming death. Those who would actually do the dying almost had it easier; they only needed to accept their own death. But those who would have to continue often avoided acknowledgment, as though they could somehow conjure up their own reality. “When you get better and come home, my love, the first thing we’ll do is…” Non cogito, ergo non est.