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Letters to the Atlantic

October 14, 1947

My Dearest Vera,

I write this by the light of a single lamp in our apartment, the one with the broken blind that lets the streetlight from Sunset Boulevard pour across the floor like spilled milk. You are sleeping now, though I am not sure the word applies. The doctor called it suspension. I call it a kind of death that has not finished happening.

Tomorrow you go into the chamber. I know this. You know this. We both know that the men in suits who came to our apartment three days ago are the reason we are here. They were polite, Vera. Polite men are the most dangerous kind. They asked about your reporting. About the stories you published. About the corruption you uncovered in the LAPD and City Hall. They asked with smiles on their faces and coldness in their eyes, and I know what that means. I have seen it before, in Normandy, in the war, in the twenty years since.

Dr. Cross says the procedure is safe. He says it is not freezing, not death, only a pause. But his eyes are too bright, Vera. Too bright. And his smile does not reach them. He was a Hungarian Jew who worked for the Nazis, who fled to America in 1947 with forged papers. He operates out of a basement beneath an abandoned air-raid shelter. The chamber is a steel cylinder set into the concrete floor, connected to tubes and pumps and glass containers filled with amber liquid. Cross named a figure that would have bankrupted a middle-class family. I sold the house. I sold your piano. I sold my father's watch. I sold everything I owned.

I do not know if I am saving you or destroying you. I do not know anything anymore, except that I love you and that I cannot bear the thought of a world without you in it.

Yours, always, Marcus

November 3, 1947

Vera,

You have been in the chamber for twenty-one days. I visit every day. I sit in the basement and I talk to you through the steel wall and I tell you about the rain and the news and the way the light falls across the floor in the afternoon. Cross tells me your vitals are stable. Your breathing is slow. Your pulse is faint. Your face is still. He says you are preserved. He says you are not dead.

I found something today. While Cross was preparing the compound, I went into his office and I found a file. It was labeled PROMETHEUS. Inside were names, Vera. Names of police captains and city councilmen and judges and businessmen. Names I recognized. Names I had worked with. Names I had trusted. The men in suits were not gangsters. They were the system. The corruption you uncovered goes deeper than we ever imagined. It goes into the heart of the LAPD and City Hall and the courts. It treats human beings as currency and truth as negotiable.

And Cross is part of it.

I also found records of seven other suspensions, Vera. Seven other men and women who were preserved by Cross's compound. All of them died. The official cause was complication of treatment. The unofficial cause, written in Cross's handwriting, was subject rejection. The compound suspends the body but it also suspends the mind. And some minds cannot handle the pause. They break. They shatter. And when the mind shatters, the body follows.

You are subject number eight. You are the one we are betting on. You are the one chance we have.

I am sorry I brought you into this. I am sorry I sold everything we owned. I am sorry I trusted a man whose eyes are too bright and whose smile does not reach them. But I would do it again. I would do anything.

Marcus

March 12, 1948

Unknown recipient,

I do not know who will read this letter. I only know that I must write it, that I must put words on paper and try to make sense of what happened, because if I do not, the silence will consume me and I do not know if I can survive another silence.

Vera has been in the chamber for four months. She is still there. She is still breathing, though slowly. Her face is still. Her body is preserved. Cross says this is what we want. Cross says Prometheus brought fire to humanity and I am bringing fire to Vera. But I do not feel like a titan. I feel like a man who has made a terrible mistake and does not know how to undo it.

The PROMETHEUS file haunts me. Seven dead. Seven names I will carry for the rest of my life: Eleanor. Margaret. Dorothy. Helen. Ruth. Catherine. Anne. Seven women who trusted a doctor and trusted the system and died for their trust. I think of them every night. I think of their faces. I think of the expressions on their faces when the compound took hold and their minds broke and their bodies followed.

I am a man with one eye and a hollow chest and a wife in a steel cylinder. I am a man who sold everything he owned and still cannot promise that I have done the right thing.

Marcus

March 15, 1980

To the Young Woman at the Times,

You asked me to write this down. You asked me to put everything in writing, to give you the file and the testimony and the truth. I am an old man now. Sixty-five years old. One eye. A bad back. A pension that does not cover rent. I live in a rooming house near Skid Row. I drink coffee and watch the rain. I have watched the rain for thirty-three years.

In 1947, my wife Vera went into a chamber. A steel cylinder set into the concrete floor of a basement beneath an abandoned air-raid shelter in downtown Los Angeles. A doctor named Victor Cross administered a compound that he called metabolic suspension. Your reporter's instinct will understand what this means. This is not science. This is alchemy. This is a man playing at being God.

Cross was not a doctor. Not really. He was a Hungarian Jew who had worked for the Nazis. He fled to America in 1947 with forged papers. He operated out of his basement and performed procedures that no licensed physician would touch. He called it a pause. A suspension between life and death.

I sold everything to pay for it. The house. Her piano. My father's watch. Everything. And they lowered Vera into the chamber on a night in November. Her breathing slowed. Her pulse became faint. Her face went still. She was preserved. She was not dead. She was not alive.

Thirty-three years ago today, I found the chamber again. The basement had been sealed. Concrete poured over the door. The address changed. The history erased. But I knew this building. I had worked cases here. I pried the concrete loose with a crowbar. My back screamed. My good eye watered. But I got through.

The chamber was there. The steel cylinder. The tubes. The glass containers. Most of them empty. Cross's other subjects had been removed or destroyed or both. But the one on the far left, labeled SUBJECT 08, was still intact. Vera's face was still there. Pale. Still. Unchanged. Thirty-three years had done nothing to her.

I found the reversal compound in a locked cabinet behind Cross's desk. The only one he had left. I administered it. The process took hours. I sat on the floor beside the chamber and watched Vera's chest rise and fall. When she opened her eyes, she looked at me with eyes thirty-three years younger than the man she was looking at.

What year is it? she asked. 1980, I said. She closed her eyes. Thirty-three years. The war was over. The civil rights movement was over. Vietnam was over. And she had missed it all.

We found the PROMETHEUS file. Cross had been careless. He kept a copy in his apartment, in a desk drawer, in a manila envelope labeled TAX RECORDS. The file contained everything. Names. Dates. Transactions. Police captains who took bribes. Councilmen who sold zoning permits. Judges who sold verdicts. Cross at the center. The fire-bringer. Selling suspension to the highest bidder.

We gave you the file. We gave you our testimony. We gave you everything. Thank you for publishing it. The stories ran in March, 1980. They did not topple the system. They did not send anyone to prison. But they exposed enough. Two police captains retired. One councilman was indicted. Cross vanished.

Was it worth it? I asked Vera. She looked at me with the eyes I married in 1943, in a small ceremony in Brooklyn with only our families and a judge and a bottle of wine. She said yes. It was worth it.

We stayed in Los Angeles. Vera writes for the Times now. I drive a cab. Not because I need the money. Because I like the city. Because I like watching it move.

Sometimes, late at night, when I park near the bay and watch the freighters move across the water, I think about the chamber. I think about the seven others. Eleanor. Margaret. Dorothy. Helen. Ruth. Catherine. Anne. Seven women. Suspended. Abandoned. Forgotten.

Vera was the eighth. And she is alive.

With gratitude, Marcus

June 20, 1980

Dear Marcus,

I am writing this because you asked me to, because you said that someday someone might want to know what happened, and I want you to know that I am not afraid of the truth. Not anymore.

Thirty-three years in that chamber. Thirty-three years between waking and sleeping. I remember fragments, Marcus. Fragments of dreams or perhaps memories of the future, I do not know which. I remember the amber liquid. I remember the steel walls. I remember a voice, my voice perhaps, or Cross's, saying the words metabolic suspension. And then nothing. Nothing for thirty-three years. And then waking, in your arms, in a world that had moved on without me.

You aged. Your face became a map of wrinkles and sunspots. Your hair turned white. Your remaining eye clouded with cataracts. But you were still you. You are still you. That is the one thing I know, the one thing that has not changed: you are Marcus, and I am Vera, and we are married, and that is enough.

The PROMETHEUS file. I read it and I felt the old anger rise, the same anger that drove me to investigate the corruption in the first place, thirty-three years ago. The system did not change, Marcus. It never changes. The names changed. The faces changed. But the system remained. Corruption and silence and the treatment of human beings as currency.

But we exposed them. We did not topple the system, but we exposed it. And that is something. That has to be something.

I write stories now for the Times. Investigative pieces. The kind of stories that make powerful men nervous and ordinary people feel less alone. I think about the seven women. Eleanor. Margaret. Dorothy. Helen. Ruth. Catherine. Anne. I think about them every day. They trusted Cross. They trusted the system. They trusted a man with too-bright eyes. And they died.

I am the eighth. And I am alive. And I will write until my hands cramp and my eyes fail and my voice gives out. That is what I will do. I will write. That is how I honor them. That is how I honor you.

Your Vera