The Ups and Downs of Being Dead Read online

“I don’t want to go.”

  She laughed, even though he could see she was disappointed.

  “That’s okay,” she said, exaggerating gaiety. “You don’t mind if I go, do you?”

  “What do you want to see? Comedy, drama, avant-garde, off-broadway. You want to see the Lion King as a musical?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that everyone always said they went to see a Broadway play while they were in New York.”

  “They should have all the shows posted at Rockefeller Center,” Robert said. “Let’s go see what’s playing.”

  Suzanne read through all the choices on a marquee in the lobby.

  “They all sound good. Maybe I’ll do a different play each night.”

  “You’re kidding! That could take weeks.”

  Her eyelids fluttered as she smiled sweetly. She was teasing him. Then she thrust a finger in the air.

  “Here’s an idea. What if we did a theater marathon? We start at a theater, and when it gets boring, we walk out.”

  “Who gets to decide that it’s boring?”

  “When you start snoring, I’ll know it’s time to leave,” she said.

  “Very funny.”

  “It’ll be fun. We’ll see how many shows we can cram into one night.”

  Robert caved. “All right. You’re going to need someone to show you where the best theaters are, anyway. Let’s start with the Lyceum.”

  “Technically,” Robert told her as they walked along West Forty-fifth Street, “The New Amsterdam is just as old, but the Lyceum is my favorite.”

  To her credit, Suzanne gushed over the pilastered Beaux-Arts façade of the theater, and the undulating marquee out front. And once inside, she took Robert’s arm as he escorted her up one of the marble staircases to a drapery-swagged box.

  All the seats were taken, but Suzanne parked herself right in front at the rail. The storyline didn’t hold her attention for more than five minutes. But the décor kept her riveted for a while.

  Half an hour later, they cut over three blocks to the New Amsterdam and its gaudy Disney marquee. And then they dashed across the street to the New Victory for some steamy drama.

  By midnight, overlapping stories and blaring music had Robert’s head pulsing like an alien’s brain in a cheesy sci-fi movie.

  “Can we go someplace quiet where everyone’s not shouting to the back of the house?”

  “How about Sardi’s? I heard that’s where all the cool people hang out after a show.”

  “Exactly,” Robert said. “And that’s why we’re not going.”

  He found a nice, dimly-lit bar with few patrons. As he went through the motion of slumping onto a banquette, Suzanne slipped into the booth across from him.

  Propping her elbows on the table, she said, “What a shame we can’t order a glass of wine.”

  “Or a double scotch.”

  Lounging back, Robert took a moment to enjoy the quiet.

  “So, let me get this straight,” he said. “The matriarch of the southern family murdered the Lion King because he was planning to rob a bank with his neighbor, who was having an affair with the anorexic teenager.”

  The lilt of Suzanne’s laugh caused a flutter inside Robert.

  “Why, Ro-but,” she said, using the same southern accent as the woman in the play at the Shubert, “Ah do buh-lieve you enjoyed yourself this evenin’.”

  Oddly, she was right.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The instructions were simple. Anyone attending the December meeting of the Cryonics Center temps was to show up at the Sky Club at LaGuardia airport on the First. There, they would get more specific details on where the meeting was being held, and at what time.

  Inside the luxurious lounge, the comfortable leather chairs, tastefully positioned for privacy, dazzled Suzanne. Glossy mahogany trim added a touch of color to the modern décor.

  “I can’t believe I’m actually in here,” she whispered, as if she expected someone to eject her from the premises at any minute. “I tried to peek in the door of the first-class lounge in Madison once, but I couldn’t see anything.”

  She wove through the lounge, past living passengers waiting for flights, to check out the baskets of snacks strategically placed.

  “All we got was a tiny bag of pretzels.” She swung around to a sideboard. “And look at all the fruit! Is all this free?”

  Robert nodded.

  “What about at the bar?”

  “Sorry. You have to pay for your drinks.”

  Suzanne was pouring over the newspapers from all over the world when Robert spotted a small group of people gathered in a back corner. They chatted, laughed, nodded. It looked like a reception only no one had a cocktail.

  “Come on,” he said, holding an arm out for Suzanne. “Let’s see if Maggie’s here.”

  Sam spotted Robert first and broke away from the group to bustle over.

  “Robert!” he said, extending his hand. His eyes were on Suzanne as he said, “Good to see you.”

  “And you,” Robert said. “This is Suzanne Davis.”

  After a slight bow of the head, Sam introduced himself. “I wasn’t aware we’d gotten another new member.”

  “I’m not one of you,” Suzanne told him. “Robert and I met by accident.”

  “Har, har,” Robert mumbled.

  A majorly obese man waddled up next to Sam, holding out a hand toward Robert for another ineffectual handshake. Again, his eyes were on Suzanne.

  “Wally Birnbaum, patient number sixty-eight,” he said. “I had a BMW dealership in Passaic. Had a massive coronary just like my wife said I would.”

  He patted his belly to lay the blame.

  Robert introduced himself and Suzanne. The moment he mentioned Audrey’s clothing stores, Wally hooted.

  “What kind of car did you drive, Robert?”

  For a moment, he considered lying, but then admitted that he’d driven a Mercedes.

  “Well, you can thank me for that,” Wally said with a smile. “With all the money my wife spent in your stores, I’m sure I paid for it.”

  More people arrived; more introductions were made. Each time, the temp gave their name and what number they were in the cryonics process. Robert realized they were establishing the pecking order of who would get thawed out when.

  According to the administrators at the Cryonics Center, the last people to be preserved would be the first ones revived. It had to do with improved technology. As time went on, the preservation process would become more sophisticated, more exacting. So basically, the last ones to be frozen would be the easiest to thaw back out.

  “Hey, Randy,” Sam asked one of the newly arrived. “What happened Sunday?”

  “Oh, man!” Randy made a gesture of rubbing a hand over his bald head. “I was standing right next to Quomo when he told Pennington to throw that pass to Williams. The Packers were already up by fourteen. They should have gone for the field goal.”

  “When I saw Pennington drop back to throw,” another man commented, “I thought Quomo had lost his mind. So did the guys at ESPN.”

  Robert listened politely, nodding and smiling. From what he gathered, Randy had stood on the sidelines with the Green Bay Packers coach the whole game. After the lengthy, and boring analysis of the game, one of the other men turned to Robert.

  “So, Atlanta. Guess you’re a Falcon’s fan.”

  “Not really,” Robert said. “I never had much time to watch football.”

  Over the din of conversation, Robert could hear Asa Walker regaling another group about some golf tournament he had attended that fall.

  The man to Robert’s left chuckled. “It’s a good thing Asa’s dead. Can you imagine him on the sidelines of a tournament, bellowing at the top of his lungs like that?”

  “He’s quite a character,” Robert agreed.

  “So what was your handicap?”

  Robert told the man he’d never learned to play golf, and everyone around him suddenly fell silent as though he’d j
ust admitted to being a child molester.

  Sam finally broke the silence. “Just as well. At least you don’t understand the torture of having all this free time and not being able to play.”

  If Asa had arrived from the center, then Maggie must be around somewhere, too. Robert was about to break away from the sports jocks when an old gentleman with only a few remaining wisps of hair on the crown of his head eased into the huddle. He extended a hand to Robert and introduced himself.

  “Stuart Greyson,” he said, “patient number one. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Robert. I’ll be introducing you at the meeting. We usually bring new members up to the podium to say a few words, tell us your interests, hobbies, obsessions. It gives us all an idea of what you might like to do now that you’re free.”

  He smiled, then turned to address them all.

  “The meeting is at the Carlisle Hotel on the Upper East Side. Our meeting committee did a fantastic job of locating our venue for December, particularly since it’s a Tuesday. They found a Christmas party scheduled in the Trianon Suite at seven o’clock tonight.”

  Before each meeting, a committee arrived at the city chosen during the previous meeting. According to Maggie, the committee searched hotels for a first-class event being hosted on the First, the day of their meetings. Once a venue was found, the temps held their gathering a couple hours before hand, so they could enjoy the accommodations instead of sitting in some gloomy, empty ballroom. A party at the Carlisle was definitely top notch.

  “Be sure to check out the three-bedroom apartment in the tower while you’re there,” Stuart told them. “It takes up the whole top floor of the hotel. There are breathtaking views of Central Park as well as Manhattan.

  “Just remember we start at four o’clock. Don’t be late. The wait staff will be bustling around making last-minute preparations by six o’clock, so we want to be gone by then.”

  Once Stuart moved on to the next group of temps, Robert said, “Wow! He’s the first man to be preserved?”

  “No,” Sam said. “He’s just the first member from the Cryonics Center. Technically, the first patient was a man named Bedford, from California, but he was just frozen, without any preservatives. There were a few attempts at freezing bodies in the mid-sixties, but they were blocked by families or hospitals. Even ministers. You can imagine how hard it was to believe someone could be held in suspended animation. Hell, no one even owned a computer back then.

  “Another group tried to freeze a woman who had already been embalmed, but obviously, that was a no-go.

  “This Bedford fellow was a doctor who volunteered to be frozen. He also agreed to spend his final days in a nursing home. The perfusion was done right there, then the man was popped into the back of someone’s station wagon and taken to a garage to be frozen. When the homeowner’s wife found out there was a stiff in her freezer she went ballistic.”

  A few of the group chuckled. Suzanne was aghast, but Robert wasn’t sure if it was over the primitive process, or the frozen guy in the chest freezer.

  “I guess it was a real circus for a while,” Sam continued, but eventually they got Bedford into a Dewar in Phoenix, and that’s where he still is. I met him at an open house at their facility. He even sat in on a couple classes with me at Cal Tech, but he started getting nervous about his chances for a successful reanimation and dropped out.”

  “What are his chances of being brought back?” Robert asked.

  “It’s anybody’s guess,” Sam said. “But the procedures were so antiquated, even years later when Stuart was preserved. It will all come down to what can be retrieved from his brain.”

  “Come on, Sam,” Randy said. “Admit it. Bedford’s brain is going to be pudding when he gets thawed out. There won’t be anything to retrieve.”

  Robert finally found Maggie sitting in a corner with another woman who was wringing her hands in despair. He and Suzanne stood discreetly to the side as Maggie assured the woman she was not at fault for something.

  “I hope you’re right,” the woman told Maggie. “I’ll never forgive myself if I caused that baby’s death.”

  The woman glanced up, and when she saw Robert and Suzanne, she hopped to her feet.

  “It was an accident,” Maggie said. “You just happened to be there to witness it.”

  Relieved, the woman thanked Maggie and bustled away without even introducing herself.

  “Hello, kiddos,” Maggie said when the woman was gone. “Have you been enjoying the sights?”

  “Who was that?” Robert asked.

  “Oh, that’s Brenda Fields. She hangs out with her son and daughter-in-law most of the time. She caught the daughter-in-law cheating on her son, and got a bit miffed. For the past two months, she’s been trying to harass the wife. Finally, a couple days ago, the wife took a tumble down the stairs. Brenda thinks she caused the fall. And to make matters worse, the wife miscarried on her way to the emergency room. Brenda didn’t know she was pregnant. I don’t think any of them did.”

  “How awful,” Suzanne said.

  “She’s feeling incredibly guilty about the whole thing.”

  “Do you think she did cause the wife to fall?” Suzanne asked.

  “I really doubt it,” Maggie said. “But even if she did, what’s the point in making her feel bad? Nothing can be done now.”

  “Famous last words,” Robert mumbled.

  An enormous Christmas tree draped in gold ribbon and adorned with red satin balls stood in the lobby of the Carlisle. Maggie and Suzanne passed right through the gold ropes cordoning off the tree to examine miniature replicas of antique teddy bears and toy trains that dotted the tree here and there.

  And once inside the Trianon Suite, she and Suzanne fluttered about, gushing over the white poinsettia centerpieces, and swags of garland over an art deco fireplace.

  Promptly at four o’clock, Stuart Greyson stepped in front of the fireplace and asked everyone to take a seat.

  When he thanked everyone for interrupting their busy schedules to attend, the group tittered with chuckles. Then Stuart introduced Robert as their seventy-second member, and motioned for him to come up front to say a few words.

  Robert had been anguishing over this moment since they’d left the airport’s executive lounge. What did he have to say to these total strangers? If he were addressing buyers, he’d be able to talk for hours about fashion trends. Or if it was potential investors, he could extol the many benefits of joining the Audrey’s team. But what did he have in common with these people other than the fact they were all dead.

  Rising to his feet, Robert waved off Stuart’s invitation to come up front. Instead, he gave a brief nod to the crowd before quickly taking his seat again.

  Thankfully, Stuart let him off the hook.

  “I know someone who never passes up a chance to speak,” Stuart said. “Sam Parker, come on up here and tell us what’s happening in the world of technology.”

  Sam trotted to the front of the room, planting his feet apart as though he intended to stay a while.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “We are living in an intelligence explosion.” He paused to scan faces.

  “Oh, boy,” Maggie muttered. “We’re not just getting an update, we’re getting the whole Magilla.”

  “Ten years from now, when I’m standing up here,” Sam continued, “we’ll all laugh at what we thought were technological breakthroughs, because everything will be so much more advanced. The rate of change we are experiencing in science, medicine and technology is not linear—one, two, three, four. No, my friends. We are seeing ever more rapid changes at exponential rates—two, four, eight, sixteen.

  “Our first computers filled rooms, now they fit in our pockets and purses. And many scientists say that in the next twenty-five years, a computer will fit inside a blood cell.

  “Impossible? Isn’t that what people said about going to the moon?” Sam crossed his arms, then raised a hand to tap his chin. “Isn’t that what your friends and family s
aid when you decided to be cryonically preserved?”

  As the crowd murmured in agreement, Robert glanced around the room. No one was surreptitiously reading their Blackberry under the table, or texting on their phone. He didn’t catch anyone glancing at his watch or fidgeting in her seat. How odd it felt to be in a group where no one had anywhere to go, and nothing to do but listen to Sam talk about the future.

  “Here’s an interesting tidbit from Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and futurist,” Sam continued. “He said that in the year 2000, if he’d ordered a book online, it would have been shipped via FedEx. If he wanted it overnight, he paid extra. But ten years later, if he ordered that same book, he simply downloaded the information onto his e-reader in seconds. The same thing was true with music and movies. Those were physical products. But now they’re information products. And once we have full-scale nanotechnology, with the ability to reorganize matter and energy at the molecular level, we’ll be able to download a toaster, or a blouse, or a replacement panel for our solar heater.”

  Sam began to pace in front of his captive audience.

  “What about science and medicine? There are engineering companies out there right now building replacement tissues and organs in laboratories, other companies are experimenting with creating organs from stem cells taken from the patient who needs the organ. Still other companies have developed perfusates and protocols for long-term cryopreservation of human organs, tissues and cells at cryogenic temperatures. One day, a human heart will remain viable much longer than our current four to six hours, so the days of scrambling to assemble surgical teams, and jetting organs from one hospital to another will be over.”

  Sam stopped and patted his belly with both hands. “Humans have a fat insulin receptor gene that tells the body to hold onto every calorie. Back in our distant past, this gene was a lifesaver because the next hunting season might be poor, the next harvest might be destroyed by storms or drought. But we don’t need this gene anymore, and pharmaceutical companies are working on a way to turn this gene off.”

  Sam’s enthusiasm had him wandering up and down between the tables now, waving his arms as he rattled off more information. “Some day we will have software programs to get our bodies into shape, we’ll have gene therapy, designer babies. We are on the cusp of a nanoengineered device, the size of a blood-cell, that will cure type 1 diabetes. It’s already being tested on rats.”