by Alan Alda
Alan Dressler knew this image didn’t make it clear to me, so he said, “This morning I remembered an image that’s always appealed to me. Curved space is like stepping onto a moving merry-go-round. You expect to move in a straight line, but a force, in this case the Coriolis effect, makes your path curve.”
It’s an image that lets you come in at another angle and feel the pull. But I still wished for something more tangible, more vivid. We chatted for a while, mostly about being glad to be alive, then Alan left and Nick arrived. Generously, he sat on the other bed and talked for a half hour with me about supernovas and dark energy. He knew how curious I was about his work, and he laid out a feast for me.
I was haunted by desire in Chile, and the object of my lust was curved space-time.
The astronomers had all chuckled at me, and one after another, they’d said almost the identical words to me: “You feel bad because you think you’re the one person in six billion who can’t picture the fourth dimension?” But I thought they could picture it. My friend, the mathematician Steve Strogatz, said once that as a boy, while charting the motion of a pendulum, he realized that “there could be order in the universe and that, more to the point, you couldn’t see it unless you knew math.” I suspected that through the language of math they have a glimmer of nature that I can’t have. But somehow it can’t be translated into my language.
thursday
Tatiana helped me out of bed and walked with me down the hospital corridors, teaching me Spanish as we walked. It reminded me of walking down the hospital corridor with my father, trying to get him to blurt out words in English.
A charming, lithe man with a ponytail and a face and voice exactly like those of Ricardo Montalban came to the room and taught me to breathe with one arm draped over my head. This would prevent pneumonia, he said. Until Ricardo Montalban told me this, it didn’t occur to me there were still ways to die from the operation. I wrapped my arm over my head and breathed as deeply as I could.
Every day, three times a day, Nelson Zepeda visited me to see how I was doing and stayed for fifteen or twenty minutes. There was a lot of laughing, and Nelson’s wife, Tita, also a doctor, taught me how to laugh without pulling my stitches. You cross your arms over your belly and grab your sides. Tita speaks excellent English. She learned it one year as an exchange student in the United States, where she graduated from high school in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Chile is a narrow strip of a country cut off from the world on all four sides by the Andes, the desert, the ocean, and Antarctic ice, yet Nelson studied surgery in Japan and Tita graduated from a high school in Oshkosh.
friday
Nelson said I could be released. We packed up the towels to return them to the hotel. The press was waiting in front of the hospital, and I couldn’t resist a chance to perform. As I dressed, I figured out a little speech in Spanish, my new first language.
On the sidewalk, I launched into my speech, a blend of corn and sincerity:
Yo nací en Norteamérica, y yo renací en Chile. Ahora, soy medio norteamericano y medio chileno.
This, of course, got big smiles.
I was born in North America, and I was reborn in Chile. Now, I’m half North American and half Chilean.
I pulled Nelson over to me and kissed him on the head. Then, not knowing when to quit, I took questions and attempted answers in Spanish, which came out in a sort of Italian.
saturday
Tatiana and Jocelyn came with us to the hotel.
I spent hours chatting with Tatiana in Spanish. It took hours because we could spend fifteen minutes on one sentence before I knew what she meant. She told me about her father, who worked for a large Chilean company, and about the company town on top of a mountain where she was born. Later, she pointed excitedly to a picture of the town in a book of photographs of Chile. There wasn’t anything green on the entire mountain. It was barren. A lonely road wound to the top of an ashen plateau, where the housing was sited in neat rows.
“There aren’t any trees,” I said.
“No,” she said simply, admiring the picture of her birthplace. “It’s arid.”
Tatiana asked about my family, and I tried to tell her, but I was still suffering from the aftereffects of the operation. I had lost some of my memory.
“I have three daughters,” I told her. “There’s Eve . . . Elizabeth . . .”
“And the third?”
“I can’t remember . . . the anesthesia.”
“Anastasia?”
monday
As a surprise, our daughters Eve and Elizabeth flew down with our niece Beverly to help us make the trip home. I was feeling pretty good, so they spent a day shopping and sightseeing, and it was good to hear their laughter.
When they heard I had dictated my last words to Graham, they wanted to know what I’d said. Elizabeth particularly wanted to know if I left everything to her. But the anesthesia and the stress of that night had obliterated all of it. Finally, I got an e-mail from Graham:
The alleged last words of Alan Alda, as scrawled by GC at 3:30AM October 19 outside the O.R. at La Serena Hospital, Chile:
“I’m thinking of Arlene, Eve, Elizabeth, and Beatrice. My heart is full of love for them and all my grandchildren, and I have complete confidence if anything goes wrong that they will mourn for me and then carry on with their happy lives and take care of each other.”
A few minutes later, just before being wheeled into the OR, you added this, for Arlene:
“I love you with all my heart and know that you have the strength, wisdom, and creativity to keep the family . . .” (At this point you faltered, and either you didn’t complete the thought or I failed to hear what you said.)
So we still didn’t know what I said. Maybe I did leave it all to Elizabeth.
We joked about last words, but reading Graham’s letter, I choked up.
Nelson took out some of my stitches and ran a slide show on my computer of photographs of the operation. There was the necrotic ileum, and there was the anastomosis. I was surprised that I wasn’t repelled by these pictures. Even the full three feet of dead intestine curled up like a huge worm on the operating table looked no more threatening than dead leaves in the backyard.
Then he handed me my dead intestine in a plastic bag, so I could give it to my doctor in the States for tests. This got us to wondering about how I’d explain this package in customs.
“Do you have a permit to take this out of the country?”
“No, no, I came in with it.”
As I hugged Nelson and Nick and said good-bye, I choked up for the second time.
tuesday
After we were up in the air, as Nelson had warned me it would, my stomach became distended and I had to leave my trousers undone at the top. Every time I headed for the bathroom, Eve reminded me to hold on to my pants so they wouldn’t fall down. Arlene said she was happy for me that if my pants did fall down, I’d finally have a legitimate reason to say I was going from the Andes to the Indies in my Undies. This got me talking at length about rhythm and sound in the construction of a joke. Why did Jack Douglas say “from the Indies to the Andes” and not the other way around? Is it funnier to go from the Indies to the Andes than from the Andes to the Indies? Arlene heard my rush of words and decided I was high. She wondered what would come next and asked Sally when I’d be able to go back on Zoloft.
Was I high? I was high.
I looked down from forty thousand feet at the Amazon. At first it looked like a fat, brown, curving snake glinting in the sun. But then it became obvious what it really was. How could anyone miss it? The Amazon is a giant ileum. It carries nutrients and waste downriver through loops and folds and, pulled by gravity, it experiences a kind of curvature of space.
And then the real reality of the green jungle below me percolated to the surface. If I had become sick flying over this stretch of the Amazon instead of on Cerro Tololo, I would have been four or five hours from any good-size city, no matter in which direction they might have di
verted the flight. And that would have been it.
After thirteen hours, we landed. I was waiting for the luggage to be collected, my head propped up on my lucky pillow. Abruptly, I opened my eyes and called out, “Who’s got my guts?”
Elizabeth held up the red biohazard bag. “I’ve got them. Relax.”
I put my head back on the pillow. It was under control.
wednesday
We were back in our New York apartment, fifty-one floors above the city, our little pied au ciel. Arlene had developed a slightly fearful concern for me, as if I were now disaster prone. She went out for milk but immediately called upstairs from the lobby. On the way down, she’d noticed something wrong with the elevator. “Don’t take the elevator on the left,” she said. “It has a wobble. The one on the right is the one without the wobble, but the one on the left is no good. Don’t take it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Do you realize who you’re talking to? I had anesthesia. How can I remember this? The shaft on the left has the wobble with a bobble, but the site on the right is the flue that is true?”
“Don’t take the elevator. Please.” She hung up.
friday
I was restless. I got caught up in hypomanic projects around the apartment. I rewired the phone so it reached my easy chair. I set up a wireless network so I could go online without leaving the chair. I hid more wiring under the rug so I could charge my laptop at the chair. All this so I could get some rest in the easy chair.
We have a French grandfather clock from about 1840 that had gained five minutes a day since we bought it. I decided to fix it. I remembered that Steve Strogatz had told me it’s not the weight of the pendulum, it’s the length that affects the timing of its swing. So I went down to the hardware store and bought a nut and bolt to lengthen the pendulum. This made it slow by a minute a day, so I shortened it a little. Then, a few hours later . . . bingo, it was keeping perfect time, right to the second.
I was thrilled. I was not just measuring time, I was measuring gravity. Gravity, time, space . . . I ruled them now. I just couldn’t picture them. But this was better. I was like the dog with his nose out the window of a car: The neighborhood smelled glorious to me, even if I couldn’t show you where it was on a map.
Fiddling with the pendulum, I felt as if I’d touched gravity itself. I’d put my hand inside its belly and felt its beat. I’d gone to Chile with the wrong question, but I’d come back with an answer.
I still wanted to see what Nick sees, what all the physicists and astronomers see, and maybe among them I’d find a Tatiana who would teach me their language. But now I wanted more than to see these things; I wanted to taste them, too.
I’d never before felt this ecstasy at the taste of being alive. Everything was in vivid colors now. Smells were pungent. The ordinary was extraordinary. The experience in Chile had pressed my reset button.
My euphoria had a touch of sadness, because I knew it would go away before long and I’d miss it. Arlene saw a more dangerous pattern forming: Man, glad to be alive, gets hypomanic; floats above the clouds; crashes to earth. On the phone, I told Steve Cohen how good I was feeling. “I hope you have a soft landing,” he said. I saw their point, but how can you be just moderately glad to be alive?
It was morning. I was in the living room of our New York apartment, overlooking the city. The grandfather clock was ticking softly. The pale early sun painted itself across the floor and gilded the town’s eastern walls while I read The New York Times. I felt a rush of emotion. I looked up from the paper and said to Arlene, “This is one of those mornings when I’m filled with happiness. Filled with it. And I’m brimming with love for you. Brimming. It’s overflowing.” I waited for an answer, and I didn’t have to wait long.
“Right,” she said. “I talked to Sally. You can start your Zoloft again anytime now.”
We burst out laughing. I grabbed my sides and pressed my arms against my stitches.
I was coming in for a landing.
Up in Manhattan.
chapter 21
GOLDEN TIME
On a movie set, after the crew has worked twelve straight hours, they go into overtime pay in which every hour is worth two. It’s called golden time. After Chile, I was on golden time. It was clear to me that everything I did was something I couldn’t have done if I’d checked out in La Serena. Now, at last, there was no pressure to succeed. There was nothing I needed to prove to anyone. There was only the chance to have another day and to have some kind of fun with it; trivial fun or deep fun, they were both good. I still wanted to get better at what I knew how to do, but that was just another kind of fun.
There was one thing I needed to prove to myself: that I could still remember a play. The Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, near where we lived, sent me a brilliant play by Charles Mee. It was essentially a two-character piece, and it would mean learning an enormous number of words. I worked hard on it so I wouldn’t be standing there on opening night wondering what to say next. I used the memory tricks I’d learned from Harry Lorayne and a few I’d invented myself.
The biggest challenge in the script was a complicated speech that went on for two pages and needed to be spoken at a fast clip. That was okay. I could do that. But I also had to remember it while I watched the actress in the play, a voluptuous young woman named Nicole Leach, as she kept changing her dress, repeatedly stripping down to her French underwear.
I was transported back to the Hudson Theater of my childhood. Only now I wasn’t in the wings, I was out onstage, and I had to watch Nicole while I kept talking as though I knew what I was talking about. Whether I accomplished this or not wouldn’t make much difference, of course. As a friend said when he came backstage, “Well, you don’t have to worry about knowing your lines in that speech. Nobody’s paying any attention to you.”
Sort of the position my father was in when he sang the opening number.
But I hadn’t lost my memory. It was stronger than before.
Even better, I was enjoying the pure pleasure of acting; it was the doing of it that was fun. It didn’t matter if it was for a few hundred people in a small theater in Sag Harbor or for millions of people, running for president on The West Wing. Now, events that once would have jolted me into a grinding anxiety only amused me. I was nominated for an Academy Award for Martin Scorsese’s movie The Aviator, and the pressure started immediately.
Camera crews would be waiting when I came out of a building. Gifts started arriving, a new form of promotion called Oscar swag—suitcases full of the stuff. There was a cell phone designed especially for the nominees; a specially designed watch; a trip to China. There were also eighty pounds of face cream; a gift certificate for Botox along with a free visit to a plastic surgeon. How much more imagination Hollywood has than Stockholm, where winners have to be content with a grubby truckload of cash.
As silly as it can get, the attention focused on the nominees can make you nervous. It feels as if you’re being sent to the Olympics. Earlier, all this would have thrown me: What will I say if I win; how will I look if I lose? Now, instead of fretting, I went back to my old acquaintance, probabilities, and I figured out my chances. Online, I looked up the odds that were being given on all the nominees by bookies in London and Las Vegas. None of them gave me a chance over Morgan Freeman. That’s fine, I thought. He’s one of our greatest actors who’s been nominated three times before and never won. He was due. I could relax, which was good, because every honor comes with a dose of reality. The morning of the ceremony we had no milk in the house, so I went to the market to buy some. I was putting my shopping basket back in a pile near the door as a woman walked in briskly and saw me stacking the baskets. She looked me up and down and said just a little brusquely, “Do you have parsley?”
I pointed to the back of the store, and she brushed past me without a thank-you. You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat the help.
Living on golden time doesn’t mean things come easily. Just because you ge
t the day for free doesn’t mean you don’t have to work at it. I found this out a month later when I started rehearsals for a revival of Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway. David Mamet’s dialogue is so beautifully abstracted from everyday speech that if you leave out a syllable, you throw the whole scene off. And there are times when there are seven people onstage at once, all of whom have to speak in such a precise rhythm that the words are dizzying to learn. And because the story is told in truncated fragments of dialogue, you don’t really know what is happening in the scene until everyone has mastered the exact words and rhythms. But, of course, you can’t really get the rhythm right until you know what the words mean. This may be why William Macy, who has acted in a lot of Mamet, told me that any actor who tries to memorize a Mamet play eventually wants to commit suicide.
Three years earlier, I had acted on Broadway in QED, a play by Peter Parnell about the physicist Richard Feynman. In that play I was alone onstage for almost two hours, often speaking in the language of quantum mechanics, and that was easier to understand than these tough-talking guys from Chicago. We spent six years getting QED ready. With Glengarry, we’d have three weeks.
After two weeks of rehearsal, I felt like an amateur. I was still struggling to understand what I was saying or even remember it. The disjunctive way the dialogue jumps from thought to thought captures real speech, but you have to find out why it’s jumping like that. As the evening of our first performance with an audience approached, I began talking about my appointment with Dr. Kevorkian.
I was sitting up until three in the morning one night, trying to understand it so I could learn it, or learn it so I could understand it; I’d have been happy with either way. For a break, I turned on the television set. An Abbott and Costello movie was playing, and I watched the old familiar routines. After a while, I locked on the screen. I was hearing something I hadn’t expected. I was hearing something very similar to Mamet’s rhythms. Instead of the lighthearted nonsense of Bud and Lou, of course, Mamet had the scathing, corrosive bile of Ricky and Shelly. But the rhythms were similar. These were rhythms I knew from my childhood—first listening to them in the wings, then performing them at the Hollywood Canteen. I picked up the script. When I saw the dialogue in these rhythms, it suddenly fell into place, as if I had cracked the Germans’ Enigma code. The phrases that had seemed to shoot off in all directions now had a thrust that went like an arrow to the heart of what the character wanted.