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me,” I said to the vet. I was too ambitious, too stubborn, to pay attention to pragmatic considerations.
    â€œOne day you may have regrets,” was his reply.
    I did give it a chance—once. During college, at my parents’ insistence and following Rajiv’s suit, I volunteered in the emergency room at Riverside General Hospital over Christmas break. The ER was quiet that first night. The biggest excitement was a teenager who came in with a cockroach stuck in her ear. She screamed as a doctor took the insect out, piece by piece.
    I spent most of the shift in a back room, reading a book on quantum philosophy called
Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
At 9:30 p.m., when I was getting ready to leave, a call came in from paramedics. “Stick around,” a doctor told me. “Things are about to get interesting.” Within minutes a young man was wheeled in on a stretcher after crashing his VW Bug into an eighteen-wheeler. As he screamed horribly, the ER staff went to work on him, cutting off his clothes, immobilizing his head, wiping away blood. Someone inserted a catheter through the tip of his penis, which began draining red urine. Someone else prepared to insert a tube into his bleeding chest. That was enough for me. I quicklypacked up and left, vowing never to return. Such excitement, I informed my parents, was not for me.
    I STOPPED MY LOADED-UP HONDA at the traffic light at Bancroft and Telegraph. The food carts were still out; Berkeley would obviously carry on without me. Freshman year, a chemistry professor had told me that some people believed the world begins and ends at this intersection, and in a sense it had for me. Snaking up the hill behind me was Cyclotron Road, where E. O. Lawrence had built the world’s first atom smasher and where I had spent the past five years doing my graduate studies on quantum dots. The research had been published in the most important physics journals. But after a while, the research didn’t matter to me anymore.
    On my right was Sproul Plaza, where I had spent many afternoons sitting on the steps of the student union playing chess with a demented old man who took my pieces with strange exuberance (and sometimes cheated), while the hippies played guitar or the evangelists and other cranks hollered inflammatory oratory in the background. One of the evangelists got kicked off campus for uttering a vulgar epithet—a controversial action on a campus that had given birth to the free speech movement—but he eventually came back. Berkeley had a way of doing that, pulling you back in.
    As I waited at the stoplight, my eyes wandered over to the Carlton Hotel, a single-room-occupancy dwelling where my girlfriend Lisa had lived. She was from Los Angeles, and we had met my junior year in the dorms, when she was still a freshman. When I was in graduate school, we had had a standing date for lunch at least once a week at the little Chinese place on the north side of campus. I looked over at the stone bench near the dried-up fountain where she first told me about her illness: lupus. I stared at the spot, reliving the moment; sadness washed over me once again. I pictured her in her white sweater, looking delicate and pale, her skin the color of milk, with me holding her tightly and whispering that one day she was going to be cured and that Iwould see her through it. She cried hard that day, and so did I. For her and for myself.
    The disease aged her, sapped her of strength, inflamed her joints, sullied her unblemished complexion. Her hair thinned; her fingers became swollen, like sausages. The membranes around her lungs became inflamed and protein started spilling into her urine. For weeks she could hardly get out of bed. And the worst part was that there was no cure! At first I didn’t believe it. There were entire libraries devoted to medicine, with hundreds, even thousands, of journals. Surely the answer had to be in one of them.
    I brought to my