He told me the next step was a blood test to see if some hormone level was elevated. We ought to schedule a talk with a surgeon, he said. I felt the blood rush from my head. I collapsed into a seat. At this point his radar finally picked up that I was human, and not some poor clueless dog in his lab. He suddenly brightened a bit and to comfort me, I suppose, he told me that—if the cancer hadn’t spread—after they removed my testicles hormone pills and a prosthesis would allow me to live a near-normal life. I wondered what Dr. Smiley-Face meant by “near-normal.” To me, forget your pills and your voice goes up an octave is pretty far from normal. And how do you explain to your girlfriend those fake, nonfunctional testicles? No, I figured, life would never be “near-normal” for me again.
That was it. In an instant, my life had changed. My mother’s mother had died of cancer at age forty. It was some kind of tumor that occurs between the bladder and kidney. They were wealthy, but this was in Poland in the 1930s, and there wasn’t much to be done. It had apparently been a slow death, and excruciatingly painful. There was morphine, but it didn’t help. My mother often recounted with tears hearing the screams of her mother every night. She told me of one night when she slept over at a friend’s house, and how, when she came back, her father berated her for abandoning her dying mother that night, and for forgetting her family’s pain. She never went out with friends again after that. Then her mother died. A couple of years later Hitler eliminated her family, her friends, and the need to balance their concerns. To this day my mother hasn’t forgotten her family’s pain. Neither had I. Even in my twenties, cancer had been my biggest fear.
It seemed to be the year for cancer at Caltech. Feynman dealt with his impending death by doing everything prudent to fight it, but also by proceeding mostly with calm acceptance. Murray had fought like crazy to save his wife, and his panic and sadness had both been apparent. How would I handle it? And how long would I last? I thought about all those times I had felt sorry for Feynman, while, it seemed, all the time it was I who would turn out to be the poor sap.
At first I walked around in a daze after getting the news. If I was unable to concentrate on physics before, afterward I was unable to concentrate on anything. I had trouble following simple conversations. Still, I went through the usual motions and told no one. Constantine took me aside and asked if I was on drugs. I think Ray just assumed. When I was alone, I felt sorry for myself. I cried often, and it would sometimes go on for what seemed like hours. After a few days, when my brain would work again, there was not one moment when my death was not in the foreground, along with the sinking feeling it produced in my stomach. Death became the focus of my life.
I looked at the olive trees on campus. Their beautiful craggy shape. Their pleasing gray color. Suddenly, everything seemed precious. The landscape, the sky, the elegant line formed in my apartment where the off-white wall met the cottage-cheese ceiling. I thought of Feynman staring at the rainbow. That was me now, desperate to appreciate all the little experiences of existence, even the ones that used to annoy me.
In a few days my doctor called. The blood test came back negative. The hormone level was not elevated. Relief. Ecstasy. But quickly shattered.
“That is often the case that the test is negative,” he said. “It really doesn’t mean anything.”
I felt lost. Confused. I couldn’t get a handle on what was going on.
“Why’d you take the test if it doesn’t mean anything?” I said.
“It would have been the easiest way to confirm the diagnosis. But there are other ways. It’s a formality, really.”
“Will you take a biopsy?”
“No, we usually just remove the whole testicle.”
“But this is both testicles.”
“I’m afraid this kind of mass is always malignant,” he said. I figured I was more afraid than he was. “We’ll talk when you come in,” he said. With that he ended the conversation. God hung up on me.
I felt lost. How did I let myself get into this situation? I had a Ph.D. in physics. According to a study I once read that meant, on the average, that I was about 25 percent smarter than Dr. Smiley-Face. But he was the expert. And I was left begging for his time and explanations. I decided to drive down to the USC medical school and educate myself, find a book and read up all about lumps and testicles. On the way I fantasized finding an array of benign explanations. Like cysts. Or bunions of the balls.
Unfortunately, testicles do not seem to suffer such fate. The books seemed to back him up.
When I got home I sat on my beanbag chair. Outside the heat of the day was dying down and the sun was low enough to be alluring instead of oppressive. The pool in the courtyard outside my door was deserted, except for a neighbor’s cat crouching on the concrete beside it. As part of my new appreciation of life and nature, I watched the cat. How cute, I thought, the way it would crouch and pounce, practicing its long-lost ancient art of hunting.
Then I realized it wasn’t practicing alone. The cat was toying with a young mouse it had caught. It would crouch, motionless, until the mouse tried to run away, then it would pounce and capture it. After a moment, it would let the mouse loose and repeat the game. Instead of drawing calm from gentle Mother Nature’s beauty, I found myself receiving a depressing reminder that shit happens. It reminded me of Feynman and his multiple cancer surgeries. But if God was toying with Feynman, at least Feynman seemed to be enjoying the end of his days. I didn’t think I could say the same for the poor mouse. Or me.
Ray came over.
“I can see there are dark clouds blanketing Mount Leonard,” he said.
I still hadn’t told him about the lumps but the dark clouds were impossible to hide. So I shrugged. He smiled.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Dr. Ray brought medicine. Not exactly what’s prescribed by the medical profession, but it’ll do.”
“Screw the medical profession,” I said. “But I’ve been smoking too much.” Suddenly I wondered if the marijuana smoking was related to the lumps.
“I need a light,” he said, ignoring my response.
I got up and looked for some matches. He picked up a copy of a paper on string theory and flipped through it. Like most physics research papers, it was full of equations.
“It’s theoretical physics but it looks like just math,” he said.
“Call it purposeful math,” I said.
“I hate math because of my dad,” he said. “He was an engineer, rose out of the ghetto—we’re talking Spanish Harlem, man—and goddamn it, he was going to make me an engineer, too. To him it was a matter of survival. To him, it was either learn math, or end up on welfare. So he’d test me on my arithmetic. And every time I got an answer wrong, POW! He’d hit me. And I mean hard, so I really felt it. No pussy-footing around from my father, no sir. What’s nine times eight? POW! What’s six times twelve? POW! That’s why I hate it and that’s why I’m good at it.”
He lit his pipe and offered me some. I needed it badly.
“No, thanks,” I said, and then regretted it.
“My dad should have forced me to smoke dope instead of doing math. Then I’d have grown up hating dope and loving math. Maybe I’d be a physicist like you. Not bad, cavorting with famous scientists, sleeping till noon. But what the hell, I like picking up garbage. I get off work early in the day, and I get to be outside.” He looked over the research paper again. “I bet you have to really concentrate to do stuff like this.”
“Yeah,” I said. I felt I understood how he felt. I was both he and his father in one, forcing myself to study what I didn’t want to, and beating myself up when I didn’t get the answers fast enough.
He tried to hand me the pipe again. This time I took it.
XIX
I WALKED TOWARD FEYNMAN’S office. My jeans had a rip at the knee and my flannel shirt was into its third day. But I didn’t think about that. I was focused on the idea that Feynman and I finally had something in common. Impending death. Maybe we could form a support grou
p of two.
I noticed Helen standing in her doorway, chatting with a student.
“Hello,” she said as I approached.
“Hi,” I said. I stopped at the mailboxes and pretended to sort through the two stale items of junk mail in the slot under my name. It was a stretch to linger there, but I didn’t want Helen shooing me away from Feynman’s door. Finally, her phone rang, and she disappeared into her office. I stepped quickly past. I knocked on Feynman’s door. No answer. I knocked again.
“Yes,” came his muffled voice from inside.
I opened the door and took a step inside. He was sitting on his couch, looking at a pad of paper he was holding. Finally, he looked up at me.
“I’m too busy to talk,” he said. And when I didn’t immediately move, he added, “Go away.”
“I have a physics question,” I said.
Of course, this wasn’t true. But if I let on that my real purpose was personal, I’d never get in. And I certainly wasn’t about to blurt out the whole truth, I came to chat ’cause we’re both dying of cancer.
After a pause he said, “Not now.”
His tone was softer now that he thought my visit was about a real physics question.
“Okay, when’s a good time?”
“I don’t know. Try me next week.”
Next week wouldn’t do. Next week I might be dead.
I said, “Okay.” I stepped back. “Anyway, it was a long shot that you could help. It’s a question about quantum optics, and I’m sure you haven’t thought about that subject in years.”
A good friend of mine from graduate school named Mark Hillery had gotten a position in New Mexico doing research in quantum optics. We had been talking over the phone about his work and mine on and off amid my study of string theory, mainly on nights the janitor was too busy to provide a diversion. Like my writing, my dabbling in quantum optics was not something I shared with my colleagues. It’d be considered lowbrow. Too applied. But Feynman appreciated all aspects of physics. And he always liked a challenge.
I started to close the door. Slowly.
As I just about had it shut he said, “Wait.”
He was curious now and, most of all, wanted to show me that there was no problem in the world of physics into which he couldn’t provide the greatest insight.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
My ploy had worked. Now I had to come up with a question. That wasn’t hard.
One of the major issues in quantum optics was to describe how beams of laser light behave when they penetrate a material such as a crystal. Due to the presence of the material medium, they behave quite differently than when they propagate in a vacuum. Mark and I had found that we could use the methods of my dissertation—approximation by infinite dimension—to model the individual atoms inside certain crystals, and, with some assumptions and a lot of mathematics, develop a theory of how laser light and the crystal interact.
There already existed a theory describing those interactions, but it wasn’t derived from a theory of the individual atoms, as ours was. Instead, it had been derived by approximating the crystal lattice of atoms as a continuous medium with certain macro-properties that were measured by experiment. If the crystal were a cup of water, then the old approach would be to treat the water within the cup as a liquid with certain macroscopic properties, such as density, viscosity, and refractive index (a measure of how it bends light), and to ignore the fact that it was actually made of microscopic things called water molecules. Our approach was to start with the water molecules, and then derive everything else. If we could really “derive” everything else, then because we didn’t ignore the “details,” ours would be a clearly superior approach. But to do what we wanted was a far more complicated undertaking than the old approach, so in order to carry it out we had to make our own simplifying approximations. The central one was to employ my method of infinite dimensions. Since both the old way and our way thus involved approximations, neither was inherently a better method. Still, we thought redoing the theory our way might lead to some new insights about the physics. Like Feynman’s work on liquid helium, this theory would be a model created for a given situation, not a fundamental theory like quantum chromodynamics or string theory. But it seemed interesting, so we worked on it.
Mark compared our theory to the usual theory and called one night to report that they didn’t agree. I looked up the fifteen-year-old paper in which the old theory was first presented, and sure enough, our results, though similar, had a major conflict. Obviously, one or the other of the theories was wrong, and we figured it was us. Somewhere we had either made a mathematical error or made an assumption that to not justified. I figured finding it would be a great problem to discuss with Feynman.
Feynman grasped the idea behind our theory immediately, proving to me that there indeed was no problem in the world of physics into which he couldn’t provide the greatest insight. In fact, in the next half hour he provided me with more insight into it than I had had in the two months I had been thinking about it. I should have been discouraged by the ease with which he surpassed my own thinking, but instead I was excited because he liked our idea.
Then I told him about the conflict with the other theory.
“Do you understand their theory?” he said.
“I read the paper. I followed most of it.”
“Followed it? Just because you are following someone doesn’t mean you are going down the correct path. When you can derive it yourself,” he said, “then you understand it. And maybe you can believe it.” After a moment he added, “Of course, you might find that it is bullshit. I suspect it is, because it looks to me like you did everything correctly.”
“But the theory has been around for fifteen years,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “So not only is it bullshit, it is old bullshit.”
I laughed.
We never did get around to talking about our impending deaths, but it was a support group nonetheless. For the short period of our conversation, I was provided with an escape from my constant worry about cancer. When we were talking quantum optics, the world seemed wonderful and exciting. I got the impression Feynman felt the same way.
XX
IT WAS TIME to see Dr. Smiley-Face again. As I approached the clinic, my stomach tightened up. By the time I got there, I must have looked pale and awful, because this time they didn’t make me wait. I was immediately shown to an examination room, and told I could lie there and rest if I liked. Yeah, they treat me nice, now, I thought. Because they feel sorry for me.
Lying on the papered cushion, I pictured all the nasty procedures that might be in my future. The surgery, of course, which in itself was too terrible to contemplate, and then the endless tests, injections, X-rays, and maybe radiation or chemo, which meant further internal mutilation. Terrible nausea, and losing all my hair, even my eyebrows and lashes.
After a few minutes my doctor opened the door. I sat up, suddenly feeling adrenaline rush into my body. He seemed surprised that I was alone. He started to retreat from the room.
“Doctor?” I said.
“I’ve asked for a consultation,” he said. “The best people we’ve got. It’ll be just a minute.”
Then he stepped out. He had sounded grim. I wondered what this meant. What was in store for me? I felt shaken. The worst was just not knowing what was going on. I lay back down.
When he returned he had with him, not one, but two specialists, a testament, I figured, to his excitement over my illness. He was showing me off. Soon, three serious men stood there, huddled over my balls. Unlike physicists, these doctors did wear white coats. For some reason, it made the whole episode even scarier. As if they wore them to insulate themselves from my blighted body.
One specialist muttered something to the other. They both nodded.
The second specialist left, and the first one looked at me.
“You have lumps,” he told me, “but they aren’t cancer. They aren’t even tumors.
You are just fine.”
I looked at him, and for a moment I was relieved. My whole body relaxed as if I had been given some sort of injection. Tears came to my eyes, then streamed down my cheeks. I looked at Dr. Smiley-Face. Then suddenly I was thinking, you said the lumps were malignant. Why do these other guys think the lumps are okay? Do they have X-ray fingertips? What kind of medicine do you practice, majority rules?
Dr. Smiley-Face answered the questions that must have been apparent on my face.
“The lumps are the same on both sides,” he said.
“They’re mirror images,” the specialist said. “Tumors would not grow like that. So you must have been born that way. You are fine. Hasn’t any other doctor ever remarked on them before?” No, the landscape of my testicles had until now been virgin territory.
Dr. Smiley-Face apologized, and that, for them at least, was that. For me, for years after that incident, I had trouble believing Dr. Smiley-Face was not actually right. Articles in the newspaper on testicular cancer would give me a sinking feeling in my stomach and the blood would drain from my head and I’d have to sit down to avoid fainting. I would get strange looks from the doctors I saw for unrelated ailments, as I asked them to, by the way, also check my testicles.
I’m finally over that. I figure, if it had been true, I’d be long dead by now. The problem with my genitals was congenital. I had been saved by symmetry.
XXI
I DROVE BACK TO the apartment so elated I almost had two serious accidents on the way. I thought about the irony of dying just after learning I wasn’t dying. I thought, you don’t need cancer to die. It could come just like that, from a moment of carelessness. You get into the car. You are terminally ill, but you don’t even know it until that last moment when you’re slamming on the brakes.
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