Don't Get Too Comfortable (18 page)

Apparently I also have to worry about the ego projections of others. Brian advises everyone to keep the fast to themselves. What I will find is that those who know I am fasting will broadcast their own worries or anti-fasting prejudices, saying things like “You look too thin,” while those who don't will try unsuccessfully to put their finger on just why I look so uniquely healthy and great, like the Viagra commercial where people are struck by the charismatic confidence with which the newly bonerific fellow moves through the world. It seems true. My friends who know I am fasting think I look terribly gaunt, and not in a good way. One Saturday morning, I go to synagogue for the baby-naming service for the twins of some friends who have no idea. I've lost twelve pounds. I wait for the compliments. I find out later that someone asked my friend Jeff if I had cancer.

One night on the subway, I see a woman at the end of the car. She leans over to the people sitting near her and asks in a quiet, friendly, almost businesslike manner, “Do you have any extra food that I could buy off of you?” I can only hear her because the train is silent. From a distance, she doesn't look appreciably different from the rest of us. I wouldn't have picked her out. On closer inspection, I can see that her clothes are worn, and that what appeared to be a ruddy complexion is actually a dirty face. She isn't standing in the middle of the car addressing us. She is just asking those within earshot. I walk over and give her a dollar before I get off at Union Square. “But do you have any extra food?” she asks me. I don't, but I also know in that moment that there is neither clarity nor serenity enough in the world that would give me the chutzpah to explain to her why not.

DAY THIRTEEN, THE
home stretch. I have lost fourteen pounds. I am not really hungry but I am experiencing appetite. I find myself thinking about food a lot; about cooking it more than eating it. I pore through books and surf the Web for recipes: roast goose with prunes, brown butter madeleines, candied grapefruit peel. Precisely the kind of Olde Worlde delicacies Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl saw dancing before her eyes before she froze to death on the Copenhagen street.

On my final day without food, I bound out of my house, another blue and freezing day. The light of the city is etched with a diamond-bit drill. I am feeling jaunty and alive, like a character in a movie who, newly in love, walks through the streets he thought he knew, only to find them vibrant and full of beautiful humanity, and he a wonderful part of it all: he dances for a group of French children, he smiles with friendly commiseration at young couples, flirts nonthreateningly with an old lady, telling her, “Madam, you smell delicious!” But it is not universal brotherhood that has me jazzed as I dance along. What I am thinking to myself is,
Hello world! Tomorrow I eat an apple!

My high spirits are tempered with something else, though. When I tell Brian that I feel good but not markedly different, he doesn't hesitate to tell me that my experience is atypical. Part of the reason for this, he tells me, is the length of my fast. Apparently true detoxification and its attendant bonanza comes when one fasts the number of days of one's age plus seventeen. In my case, that would be close to two months of fasting. The twenty-day fast is the shortest one offered, it is true, but it
is
offered. In his later correspondence to me, Brian qualifies my fast more than once as “the very shortest,” one that people can do “standing on their heads,” and says that I just “dipped my toe in.”

It strikes me as a little unsporting and kind of assoholic for him to paint my program as the fasting equivalent of Rosie Ruiz taking the subway during the Boston marathon. Mine, it seems, is the fast of the faker and dilettante. Apparently I might as well have been sitting around with a bucket of chicken and a TV remote. But it's more than just the piddling duration of my experience. Brian thinks I didn't approach this with an open mind from the beginning. He feels I had written the story in my head before I even started, looking to debunk him and the entire thing as pseudoscience.

In truth, we didn't get along from the start. In our initial phone call, when it came out that I was from New York, he said sagely, “Ah, the second most toxic city in the U.S.”

“What's the first?” I asked.

“Los Angeles.”

LA sounds reasonable to me, but New York City has no industry and is vertical and has exponentially fewer cars than anywhere else. Surely some of those rust belt towns are dirtier, I wonder aloud. Brian is not pleased with my doubting him and responds shortly, “Steel is done as an industry and you have ten million people.”

I let it rest, but I can't help thinking,
10 million people with mass transit.
I think he's wrong and I do a little research. According to the EPA, just in terms of air quality, New York ranks fourteenth, not second. I feel Brian is speaking about some other kind of chimerical toxicity; the New York stereotype of the city as a cynical, New Age–free zone.

After that, our e-mail exchanges seem to follow a similar dynamic. He finds me annoyingly inquisitive and his impatience makes me feel like I've been insubordinate. He is curt and resorts to a lot of uppercase spelling, which I think is meant to seem exuberant and expansive but in e-mail just means yelling. In fact, all of his e-mails seem rife with barely concealed anger at me. He reminds me of the menacing gym teachers of my youth, while I no doubt remind him of some pedantic pansy ruining everybody's fun with my constant interrogation and fear of the ball.

But I am determined not to let our bad relationship be the story. I try to keep our communication to a minimum and whatever contact we do have, I keep as chatty and neutral as possible, resorting to the age-old tactic of talking about the weather. Good thinking on my part. It gets back to me later that Brian tells other people that “David wimped and whined his way through his fast, complaining constantly about his freezing New York.”

It's a fairly bleak and isolating feeling when your own guru hates you.

RETURNING TO THE
world of digestion must be done gradually. Before the apple I am to have some broth mixed with a tablespoon of bran and flaxseed, to give it some bulk and prepare my body for anything with mass. It is like thin porridge. I crunch down on the seeds, the first chewing I've done in fourteen days. It takes me almost twenty minutes to swallow eight ounces of liquid, and it leaves me depleted. I have to go back to bed for an hour and a half.

My apple, to which I had so looked forward, now just seems like an immense ordeal. I had bought myself the hardest, sourest Granny Smith for the occasion. I had imagined a gusto-filled chomp, the sound of my teeth breaching its skin and flesh gorgeous music to my ears, but now the thought is only exhausting. I cut the fruit up into careful, grandmotherly slices. I bite into the first one tentatively. The more I chew the easier it becomes. A third of my way into it, I am tearing into my first meal as if I had never even been away from eating at all. The flavor is sublime, but there's an undertaste of bitterness, too. I hardly need Brian's dislike of me to feel like I blew it, as though I returned from a trip to Paris only to find that I had somehow missed everything, and hadn't even noticed they spoke French there. I cannot shake this sheepish feeling that I somehow failed to receive the thing I should have, and here I am, already out the door and it's too late.

When I started the fast, I had entertained the romantic notion that it wouldn't just work but that it really would be the magic bullet. The fast would short-circuit logic and somehow my problems, such as they are, didn't need the talk and the scrutiny, they needed this. There was even a moment where I thought I could see all those self-generated impediments, feel them even, impacted and concentrated into a gray, plaquelike obstruction: a thick, squat blockage the shape and size of a scallop, plugging up some critical channel of my body. I thought, I hoped, that
this
was the way they might finally be broken up, pulverized, and flushed away.

It can be hard to remember what one's anticipatory image of something was once you're on the other side. I'm no longer sure exactly what it was I was waiting for, but I do know that it was something wholly unfamiliar and thrilling. Like a new color. Not a mixture, no trace of blue or yellow or red. What would that look like? I have some basic understanding about light—how it can only be broken down and refracted into its seven constituent hues—and even though I know that the physical world makes the existence of such a thing basically impossible, I'd still really like to see that.

OFF WE'RE GONNA SHUFFLE

T
he Grim Reaper cannot catch a break in Newport Beach, California. In a grand ballroom of the Marriott, a slide of the hooded, scythe-wielding one shows him imprisoned behind a circle with a diagonal strike through it; international sign of negation. Adding insult to injury, he has been rendered with juvenile simplicity. The Pale Rider looks like a neutered Milquetoast. He could signify “No trick-or-treaters!” for all the menace he musters. This vanquished monster is the visual for a lecture entitled “Death Is an Outrage!” being given by a man named Rob Freitas.

“During the time I just spoke this sentence, a dozen people died,” he says, sounding duly appalled. He pauses for effect, and then adds, “And there's another dozen,” throwing his hands out like an exasperated parent with an impatient
Happy now?
gesture. The scratch of pens on paper fills the room as people transcribe Freitas's words. It's an Escher-like moment, the cereal box with an image of a child eating cereal beside a box with an image of a child eating cereal beside a box, and so on.
How many people died,
one wonders,
in the time it took to write down what he said about how many people died in the time it took him to say it?

The Extreme Life Extension Conference is a three-day meeting sponsored by Alcor, the Scottsdale, Arizona, cryonics company that has Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams in cold storage, with hopes that he may one day rise again. Like worshippers at a weekend-long Easter Mass, about 150 scientists and acolytes have gathered to hear the Good News about the latest developments in securing their own resurrection and immortality. Death hovers over everything here, although less as an awe-inspiring, numinous presence than a nuisance, a persistent midge to be batted away. Death is not going to ruin anyone's picnic. As chair Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnologist from Palo Alto, puts it simply, “This conference is about, by, and for people who think life is a pretty good thing and that more life is better.” Even the landscape surrounding the hotel seems optimistic: rolling manicured lawns, palm trees, and flower beds planted with murderously orange canna lilies, sloping gently down to the emerald golf links of Orange County.

Rob Freitas continues. “This holocaust we call natural death produces 2.4 million deaths annually in the United States alone. The human death toll in 2001 was nearly 55 million people. The worst disasters in human history
pale
in comparison to natural death. The flu epidemic of 1918 was less than half the toll from natural death.” Freitas goes on to liken the richness of each person—his knowledge and experience, as opposed to, say, the street value of his hair and gold fillings—to the equivalent of at least one book. That's a “destruction” equivalent to three Libraries of Congress per year. Further, if you agree that some people are more than one book, then it's even more devastating. If, however, you feel that some folks' book is
The Prince of Tides,
or that others of us add up to all the complexity of a document, frequently pink, entitled “While You Were Out,” then it's a tragedy of lesser magnitude.

Like Ralph Merkle and many here, Freitas is a nanotechnologist. Nanotechnology is the Holy Grail of what's to come for cryonics. It will be nanotechnology that will make bringing people out of cryosuspension possible. He paints a picture of a future in which an array of intelligent nanodevices will be dispatched into our bodies like so many
Fantastic Voyage
Raquel Welches, their sole mission our intracorporeal perfection. Many of the methods are already theoretically feasible: chromosome replacement therapy (microscopic cell-by-cell damage repair), respirocytes (artificial red blood cells that would enable us to sink to the bottom of a pool and hold our breath for four hours), microbivores (artificial white blood cells that would be one hundred times more effective than the real thing). All of these, says Freitas, could potentially restore us to the perfection of youth.

“A roll back to the physiology of your late teens might be easier than your ten-year-old self,” he says, “and more fun. We could live about nine hundred years.”

A libidinous thrill ripples through the crowd as they pick up on Freitas's erotic innuendo. It's almost poignant, this desire to return to the ruthless food chain of those miserable years. The grand fantasy of cheating death has wiped their memories of high school clean, because one need only look around the room to know that many of the attendees must have spent a good portion of their late teens being forcibly hung from coat hooks by their underpants.

MOST EVERY CULTURE
has a cautionary tale about some soul who forgets his place and aspires to godlike powers only to be brought low as a result. The muddle of Babel and the disastrous hubris of Icarus are not invoked here, no surprise. What is brought up as a worthy precedent for cryonics is a 1773 letter from Benjamin Franklin: “I should prefer to any ordinary death, being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till that time, to be then recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country.”

Aside from its implausibility, Franklin's dream of pickling shares a crucial passivity with the modern cryonics movement, both being dependent on the ministrations of others to bring one back. As for proactive, personal efforts at extending the life they have now, I don't see a whole lot of it beyond a woman with a ziplock bag full of herbal supplements. I never see, for example, anyone else in the hotel gym. Over the three days of the conference, I am the only one in the fitness center doing this particular tap dance along the mortal coil. Instead of breathless conversation, my soundtrack is the whir of my solitary treadmill and the neocon drone of Fox News on the television placed too high up for me to change the channel. I have heard the future and it sounds like Bill O'Reilly.

There is a lecture about the fifty ways in which we might potentially slow our aging, including switching from coffee to tea, doing weight training, and cutting out fat and sugar, but people still seem perfectly happy to tuck into lunches of mashed potatoes, beef in gravy, chicken in cream sauce, and white-flour rolls. We eagerly line up for our life-extending Mexican buffet. I am reminded of that moment in
Sleeper
, when one of the scientists of 2173 is amazed to hear that Woody Allen, a health-food store owner revived out of cryosuspension after two hundred years, knows nothing of the salubrious properties of hot fudge. I have tasted the future and it is gooey with melted Jack cheese.

EVEN IF REANIMATION
works—and conventional science likens such a prospect to reconstituting a live cow from a package of hamburger—progress is a continuum: there will inevitably be a good many botched thawings before they get it right. The brains of the first few subjects will likely have all the cognitive capacities of pimento loaf, with minds so amnesiac and compromised, reborn into a world whose technology so far outstrips our capacity to ever come up to speed, that the only life available would be as a menial. And I also cannot get past thoughts of the crushing loneliness of waking up years hence without loved ones, knowing nobody. Gregory Benford, a physicist and science-fiction writer, suggests having one's “context”—friends and family—frozen alongside one. One would then be reanimated into a community of like-minded cryonauts. But even without them, Benford argues, the future will be no worse than a new infancy. “When we're born we don't know anybody. Others know us, though. It's like being a star.”

To render this eventual stardom a less threatening prospect—to make us feel it as something closer to the glow of adoration we might encounter at a movie premiere, say, rather than the notoriety that will lead torch-wielding villagers to storm the castle calling for our monster heads—we are given a pep talk by a man named Max More. More is a leading proponent of transhumanism, a philosophy dedicated to the superpositive but rather diffuse goals of extending life, advancing without limits, and achieving heretofore unimagined heights of human potential, all through technology. Like many utopians, he has adopted a pseudonym, in his case one meant to embody all the hypertrophic dynamism of this brave new world; 150 years ago, he would have been calling himself Hieronymus T. Steam Engine. More and his wife, Natasha Vita-More (get it?), are the golden couple, the Scott and Zelda of the conference, he with his ponytail, muscled physique, and equine haunches packed into tight jeans, she as sleek as a hood ornament in a white pantsuit.

He calls his process of mental preparation for the future “deabyssification,” but aside from the rather catchy buzzword, it is content-free miasma. Essentially, he tells us to expect the unexpected. To simulate the unknowability of what's to come, he suggests we “use psychological tools. Keep throwing yourself curves. Start your own business. It's about being healthy, vibrant, and alive, and challenging yourself.” Even in this audience of believers, people are detecting the distinct slipperiness of snake oil on their tongues. Their abyss is in no way diminished. Eventually someone tries to pin More down and asks him about his own specific thoughts of what the future will be like. More demurs, saying that were he to tell, his version would unhealthily influence others' vision and we'd all be stuck using the same derivative tropes (more derivative and tropey than “push yourself out of your comfort zone,” I'm guessing).

If this is what passes for prescriptive information, it's really no wonder that these brilliant scientists seem so clueless. They may be up on their molecular engineering, tissue preservation, and protocols in the rapid cooling of bodies, but ask them something mundane, like where reanimated Alcorians will get their money, and the blank stares begin. At other times, the flights of fancy are straight out of a bedtime story. During a lull between speakers, a sixtyish elfin man named Peter Toma stands up at the microphone. Toma, a finely made European linguist and pioneer in the field of automatic translation programs, tells of being disconsolate when his mother was dying, believing “there must be a continuation of life.” He tried to find some place to store her body, looking in New Zealand and Argentina, to no avail. She is now safely at Alcor. And today Toma bears great tidings. He has found a place where one can go into “vistasis”—that is, be frozen while still alive, although the process itself would kill you (Alcor's official position on vistasis is one of supportive non-endorsement). This magical place? Switzerland. I am shocked,
shocked,
to hear that the Swiss—whose famous neutrality has made them a shining beacon unto the world for haven-seekers, clock enthusiasts, and Nazi bankers—will, according to Toma, look the other way if one is euthanized within their borders. Switzerland has other advantages should some unforeseen global disaster arise. “We can be taken into the mountains.” I can hear the strains of Grieg and the plinking of icicle chandeliers, as bobsledding teams of dedicated scientists, their frozen cargo carefully loaded onto sleighs, mush their way through the ever thinner air, up, up into craggy hideaways. “So!” Toma concludes his alpine fairy tale. “Switzerland!”

THE AREA AROUND
Alcor headquarters in Scottsdale is dominated by low buildings in ochre-colored plaster. It's hard to distinguish the Chinese buffets from the stone-and-marble suppliers from the cryonics labs out here in this vast Frederic Remington landscape. Alcor itself is a one-story box of a place, set back from the road by a small parking area and a gravel desert garden, with palmettos and agave plants. Almost defiantly unprepossessing, it could be a suburban dental practice. There would be no way of knowing that this is the temporary resting place for the dead in Scottsdale. Then again, there is also no way of knowing until you visit that the terms “temporary resting place for the dead” and “Scottsdale” turn out to be cruelly synonymous.

On a round glass table in the modest reception area sits an Emmy Award, part of the bequest of Dick Jones, a writer for
The Carol Burnett Show.
The familiar sharp-winged angel, already a quarter of a century old, is showing a tracery of crackle on her electroplate finish. A statuette is not a sculpture; it
belongs
to someone. It looks misplaced, as if the owner might come back at any moment. Jones is also among the twenty-odd Alcor patients who have opted to have their pictures displayed in the entrance. He was a handsome man and the small brass plate underneath his photo bears his name, as well as the dates of his “first life cycle.” Other photographs include a man holding the hands of his wife who, it seems, is still alive. An older couple in their forties Sunday best. A young man, dead at age twenty-nine from hemophilia-derived AIDS. There is very little fanfare to this gallery. They could all be Employees of the Month.

It's neither terribly difficult nor terribly expensive to sign up for cryonic suspension. There is a lot of paperwork, much of it in triplicate and much needing to be notarized. Bodies are bequeathed to Alcor under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, the same statute that allows you to give your postmortem organs to the sick, or donate your cadaver so that first-year anatomy students can cut you up and, if my cousin's medical school experience is any indication, make fun of the size of your penis. Suspensions are paid for by insurance policies taken out with Alcor as the beneficiary. It costs $75,000 for a neuropreservation, “neuro” for short, which is just your head, and $130,000 for your whole body. Ted Williams, our most famous frozen American, is a neuro. (That apocryphal tale of Mr. Disney being preserved in a secret laboratory somewhere underneath Main Street, USA, is a myth, I'm afraid. Uncle Walt was summarily cremated upon his death in 1966.)

Membership also comes with a one-foot-cubic box for memorabilia and keepsakes, which is placed one mile underground in a salt mine in Hutchinson, Kansas. Patients receive a Medic Alert–type bracelet, as well as a dog tag on a neck chain and a wallet-sized card, all with the express written admonition that no autopsy be performed in the event of your death. If any cutting is going to be done, that's Alcor's job. And if you're a neuro, there is some major cutting to be done, namely decapitation, euphemistically referred to as “cephalic isolation.”