The Rock 'n' Roll Heart of Robert Jarvik

Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man.

--Robert Louis Stevenson

On Good Days, he seemed normal enough. About eight in the morning, his black Toyota Celica would pull into the parking lot at Symbion headquarters at old Saint Mark's Hospital, an institutional red-brick building on the northern outskirts of Salt Lake City. He'd stride in, carrying his briefcase, collegiate and neat in his dark blazer and bright tie, and he'd even get his own coffee from the little lunchroom. Then he'd sit in his office in an arctic blast of air conditioning, signing letters and glancing now and then through black Levolor blinds at the first 500-foot ripples of the Wasatch mountain range--yellow, rocky hills that seemed to become incandescent in the growing heat of the day.

He'd talk on the telephone with potential customers--usually the directors of heart-transplant programs--and he would charm them, being by turns witty and sober. He had a way with people.

His office walls were covered with awards and with pictures of the people who had played significant roles in the development of the artificial heart, most of all himself. (From William A. O'Neill, governor of Connecticut: I am Pleased to Designate February 14, 1985, AS DR. Robert K. Jarvik Day in Connecticut.) On a bookcase behind his desk, various hearts and pieces of hearts lay in disarray, like the castoff idle tinkerings they might have been, had he not had a compulsion to design and build things--not only the artificial heart but the artificial ear, a surgical stapler to replace stitching and an internal power pack to run an improved artificial heart.

On good days, Dr. Robert K. Jarvik, president of Symbion, Inc., the company that manufactures the Jarvik-7 artificial human heart, had the appearance of a successful entrepreneur who had everything--intelligence, style, money, talent, good looks, youth and a sense of humor.

Then there was the weekend I spent watching him design a new dildo.

True, I had seen hints that there was more to this man than met the eye. The ties, for instance. The blazers and slacks and shirts were ordinary enough. But the ties.... They were sometimes lavender or lilac, sometimes shiny, sometimes almost--I don't know--punk. There was also the high-pitched giggle. Dr. Jarvik had a way of delivering a line, deadpan, and then following it with a little squeak-cough that turned out, upon close examination, to be a laugh. And he had a crooked smirk that pulled his upper lip way back over his teeth; it could be coy or menacing, depending upon how he used it. He also had a quirky sense of humor, as when he gave me a T-shirt showing the human heart and turned to tell his secretary, "Look, he's got a heart-on." Giggle.

Still, it was nothing I could put my finger on when I first went to visit him in Utah. It was the second time I met him, when he came to Chicago, that I saw the other side of Dr. Robert Jarvik.

He had been on a tour for Symbion, visiting hospitals, universities and scientists around the Midwest. Public relations for the artificial-heart program takes up a lot of his time these days, and it gets wearying, traveling from hotel to hotel. Besides, not everyone wants an artificial heart. Some people would rather stick with their own hearts, no matter how pesky the darned things get. It's hard to believe, but some people would rather die than have an artificial heart.

So Jarvik was traveling around, proselytizing; and one day, in an airport in Arkansas, he met a woman--call her Joan of Ark. I don't want to use her real name, because she may not want to know Jarvik after she finds out that he's thinking about mass-producing the dildo he designed for her, the one with the unicorn on the end. Besides, she's got her own children, and they may not want everybody to know that Jarvik fell in love with their mother in an airport in Arkansas. In fact, I've changed the name of the state, too, just to be on the safe side.

"I feel like a teenager," Jarvik told me when he phoned to say he would be arriving in Chicago with Joan of Ark for the weekend. "I've only known her for a week. She's great, though. She likes to go camping when there are tornado warnings out."

"Hey, cool," I said.

They were going to spend a romantic weekend in that Toddlin' Town, hitting all the best restaurants and (presumably) hoping for heavy weather. Then Jarvik was scheduled to go off to Milwaukee to visit the heads of a new artificial-heart program there, and Joan of Ark was scheduled to go back to the rest of her real life. Jarvik suggested that maybe we'd go out to dinner Saturday night, he and Joan of Ark and my wife and I. It sounded like a good opportunity, journalistically speaking.

But tragedy struck: Joan of Ark couldn't make it. Something had come up at home. Jarvik was left alone in Chicago for the entire weekend with nothing to do.

He called again: Could I maybe find him a nice, interesting, beautiful lady companion to take to dinner Saturday night? I told him he could dine at my house. "Well, if you think of any interesting lady who might like to accompany me..." he suggested again.

"So," I said to my wife as I hung up the phone, "guess who's coming to dinner."

•

The assignment had begun normally enough: Interview Jarvik and find out what sort of man manufactures hearts. He was the principal designer of the Jarvik-7, which is now the best known of several such devices in the burgeoning field of artificial internal organs. I flew out to Symbion headquarters in Salt Lake City and met the man and had the grand tour of the plant. True, there were undertones that led me to believe I wasn't getting the compleat Dr. Jarvik; but I was willing to let him present himself as he chose. That was his prerogative, and I wasn't there to overturn his soil, just to interview him. Indeed, while at Symbion, I discovered the serious, competent side of Robert Jarvik. He did, after all, develop the first workable artificial human heart; and he did raise $25,000,000 to start the company that manufactures it; and without him, a number of people who are now alive and extremely grateful would almost certainly be dead. But where Jarvik is involved, no matter how grave the issue, there is always another twist; and it takes a while to catch on to that. Take the case of the second implantation of a Jarvik-7 in a human, that of William Schroeder. (The first recipient, Dr. Barney Clark, lived 112 days.)

With Jarvik, things must always be just so. If they are not just so, he becomes irked and changes them. It is that compulsion, along with his ability to block out all but his own goals, that may have allowed him to complete work on an artificial heart that had been under development by dozens of others for decades. So it was nothing out of the ordinary when Jarvik moved into a hotel room near Humana Hospital-- Audubon in Louisville, Kentucky, and decided that he had to rearrange the furniture. He wanted a desk to write on, and it had to be in just the right place, by the window, for the early light and the view: writing desk, mirror, bed, window, muted pastels, a cup of coffee at 9:45 A.M.

Jarvik keeps a diary. He carries it with him and writes of the most minute and seemingly trivial matters, right next to what he hopes will one day prove to be profound theories of the universe. He made sure I read excerpts from his diary when I went to visit him:

I think Bill Schroeder is going to do very well. I still see him clearly in my mind's eye, overwhelmingly stronger than Barney (continued on page 128)Robert Jarvik(continued from page 87) ever was. I can see him stand up and walk down the hall with the portable driver. This is possible and this is now where I set my hopes for him: that he will do well--be home from the hospital in less than two months--and find himself feeling well and able to walk outside when new leaves open next spring.

If physicians had read that diary at the time of Schroeder's operation, when Jarvik wrote it, they might have been more than a little worried by his optimism. They knew there were many problems with the artificial heart, and Schroeder would be lucky to live as long as Clark had lived. But Jarvik is an optimist, not a realist. His optimism stems, in part, from his ability to make the wildest of his dreams come true. That childlike quality circumscribes and defines his life. Asked where he'd like to live, he said, "I'd like to live in Seattle, if we could get rid of the clouds." The remarkable thing about Jarvik is that if he moved to Seattle, he might very well get rid of the clouds.

When I first met him, we spent half a day discussing the most esoteric mystical, artistic and scientific subjects imaginable, from his desire to fly in space (preferably with Sally Ride) to his conviction that he has discovered, by logic and without the aid of higher mathematics, the ultimate nature of all matter in the universe. Jarvik is not a surgeon; he is not even a practicing physician. He received an M.D. but never did an internship or took a residency. When then talk turns to matters of biochemistry, his eyes appear to glaze over. What, then, is he? Alchemist? Artist? Entrepreneur? As I read Jarvik's journals, passages from a Robert Louis Stevenson novel kept coming back to me:

Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I labored, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.

Observing the surgery on Sunday morning, Jarvik wrote in his diary:

Now 8:17--Mr. Schroeder's chest has just been opened.... Things are very calm. No one is talking. Surgery is proceeding very directly. There is the presence of cold air and the hum of the video recorder.... No talking.

8:35--Opening the pericardium. There is a major difference compared to Dr. [Barney] Clark. Then we had the feeling that he might arrest and not survive the last few minutes while he was being put on bypass.

9:25--Progress is steady but slow. The chest and pericardium are now widely open. The heart is beating--the right stronger than the left, but both ventricles are moving only slightly.

9:50--Now on bypass. The heart went into V-tach and now is stopped. The aorta is cross-clamped.

9:56--Apex is clamped. DeVries is beginning to cut out the heart.

It was two days later before Jarvik could fully relax; after the operation, Schroeder began bleeding heavily and had to be cut open again.

Somewhere along the way, through the extremes of elation and disappointment there in Louisville, the wild swings of emotion, Jarvik had met a woman. That special electricity had passed between them, and they had sworn they'd try to get together. Of course, the ultimate in optimism is to find love in the midst of adversity. It's the stuff of which classic novels are made. Stevenson described a similar feeling this way:

There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.

After days of medical emergencies, during which Schroeder was snatched back from the brink of death time after time, Jarvik sat at the writing desk by the window in his room and took a photograph of himself in the mirror--for posterity. Jarvik fasts and does sit-ups and rides a bicycle in the Wasatch foothills to ward off the transformation of aging. A man of 39 years, small and thin, with boyish good looks and black hair touched here and there with gray, he snapped his picture again. And again. Only now he looked haggard in the hoary November light.

Stevenson wrote:

I lingered but a moment at the mirror: The second and conclusive experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a house that was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I once more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once more....

That day, Jarvik shaved and dressed and visited Schroeder, who was finally out of immediate danger and breathing on his own. The Jarvik-7 artificial heart clicking away in his chest felt better than his own heart, Schroeder said. At one point, Jarvik became so confident in his achievement that he promised Schroeder he'd take him fishing one day. Schroeder believed him, too, so they set the date.

Jarvik reassured the television reporters as they were drawn to the bizarre event. He looked good on camera. He'd been on the cover of Time.

The next night, Jarvik sat in his hotel room, waiting for the mystery lady. He wrote:

It is ten at night and I have a bottle of champagne with two glasses waiting for a phone call or for the lady with the kiss in the dry-ice bubble to show up at my door--as she said she would if she can get away. This is the way life goes--to celebrate such a moment so long in coming with a new friend.

OK, telephone.

OK, doorbell....

•

For some time, I had been promising my four-year-old daughter that we'd go to the Field Museum of Natural History. So when Dr. Jarvik came to town unexpectedly early, we invited him to go along. Then, on the way, he announced that he had to have some Polyform modeling compound, a special white-plastic material that looks like Spackle and can be molded and then baked in the oven until it hardens to the consistency of wood. There was a sense of urgency about his mission. Having visited Jarvik at Symbion, I knew all about special modeling materials. I knew he had made the first Jarvik-7 hearts by hand, pouring Lycra plastic, layer after layer, over a mold. In fact, the hearts were still being made that way by technicians in a special clean room when I took the tour; so I naturally assumed that he now needed Polyform to make a model of some sort for his trip to the hospital in Milwaukee. Or perhaps he had just been struck by an inspiration and was going to invent some new medical device before our very eyes. This was important, I thought. This was medical science.

We stopped at the largest art store in our area but had no luck. All the way downtown, Jarvik inquired about other (continued on page 146)Robert Jarvik(continued from page 128) stores; by the time we reached the Field Museum, I had begun to wonder if I might be standing in the way of some vital medical invention.

In the Field Museum, I observed Jarvik for signs of stifled scientific creativity. From afar, dressed in blue jeans, a dark suede jacket and white Reeboks, he looked like a student--short, intense, emaciated, hands jammed into his pockets, in close examination of the elk and antelope horns on display in the mammalian-fauna room.

When we left the museum, we were fortunate enough to find a large art store that was still open and sold Polyform. Jarvik bought himself a load of it and bought my daughter some colored modeling clay as a gift. When we got home, she and he spread out on the kitchen table to make their models.

They had a similar method of working, except that Jarvik was more demanding, sending me down to the basement for iron wire for the core of his model and upstairs for carving tools and here and there for kitchen knives, satay skewers and whatever struck his fancy as he massaged the white Polyform into a long, thick roll. I didn't mind all this; after all, I might be able to say I had had a hand in making the Jarvik-9 or something.

They both worked all afternoon, side by side, heads down, muttering now and then, conferring with each other, commiserating, concentrating on their work, smearing the clay around.

My daughter nibbled on snacks to keep from getting hungry while she worked. Jarvik fasted, as was his avowed habit. In fact, the only sustenance he would take was diet Coke and Tylenol. I offered him regular Coke, but he said, "No, it has, you know, nutrients in it."

Only when he could stand it no longer, just before I was about to serve dinner, did he begin roaming the kitchen like a hungry cat, rummaging in the refrigerator and the cabinets, grabbing whatever he could find to put into his mouth. At one point, he even took a piece of lettuce that I was in the act of pushing down the garbage disposal. He rescued it, rinsed it off and popped it into his mouth.

By the time dinner was ready, it was clear that he was not making a scientific breakthrough in my kitchen. No doubt about it: It was a unicorn dildo.

He explained that when he was in high school, his parents had gone to Japan and had brought him back a piece of an ivory tusk that was about the right size and shape for what he was now modeling in Polyform. Years later--after a marriage and two children and the artificial heart and a divorce and all that sort of stuff--he had promised a girlfriend (call her Lilly of the West) that he would carve her something from the tusk (and we are not talking here about carving scenes from the Sistine Chapel but, presumably, something long and stout). But he had never gotten around to it, and he and Lilly had eventually broken up. Now, looking at his prototype for the ivory carving, he shook his head and emitted a high-pitched giggle. "Lilly of the West would kill me if she knew I was making this for Joan of Ark," he said with a smirk.

After dinner that night, one of the guests who had seen the dildo sculpture confided, "I don't trust men who like unicorns."

"Yeah," I said, "but what about men who like dildos?"

Someone who had known Jarvik when he was in college later asked, "Does he still sit in the corner at parties? I used to go to these parties and see him. He'd just go into the corner and sit. No chair. Nothing. Just him in the corner."

Yes, sort of.

He squatted on the floor by the fireplace most of the evening after dinner, hugging himself, talking about himself, speculating on where he might move if he could leave Salt Lake City, land of the Mormons, where no antelope dildos roam. He brought out his video tape of a Swedish recipient of the Jarvik-7, and we watched the man make history by talking and walking and eating a huge meal and then thanking everyone because he was alive.

"That," Jarvik said, "is the richest man in Sweden." The Swedish press also said he was a gangster--now an artificial gangster. Imagine the moral questions that brings up.

Finally, Jarvik brought out the artificial heart he carries in his briefcase, and we all handled it, sipping our port by the fireplace in the living room of my turn-of-the-century house. The trees we were burning had grown to maturity before any of us had even conceived the possibility of such an invention as we now held in our hands.

The Jarvik-7 looks like a Tupperware carburetor with long, thin fuel lines coming off it. The only really exotic-looking parts of it are the Bjork-Shiley tilting-disc titanium-and-carbon-steel valves. They are as beautiful as jewelry; instead of the familiar old lub-dub, they go click-tick. The Jarvik-7 is a spooky thing to hold, though, because it has the general shape of a human heart; and you know that a man who is dangling between life and death will have his chest wrenched open and his own beating, liver-colored heart snipped out with silver scissors and forever stilled, while this wobbly plastic apparatus is shoved down into that bloody cavity to take its place.

Holding the Jarvik-7 in my hands that night, after seeing Jarvik work on his dildo all day, I stood watching him squat by the fire and hug himself and talk about himself; and I couldn't help wondering what it would be like to have one of his inventions inside my body. Joan of Ark was about to find out.

•

The holy secrets of the body were revealed to Robert Jarvik as a youth; his father was a doctor, and he let Jarvik watch surgery when he was still in high school. It was while watching surgery that Jarvik perceived the need for a way to close off blood vessels faster than the traditional method of hand-stitching them. He invented a surgical stapler. That patent, which was bought by a large medical manufacturer, still pays him royalty checks.

It may well be that the moment it was decided that the Jarvik-7 artificial heart would be built occurred when Jarvik was a freshman architecture student at Syracuse University. "It was in the spring; I remember that very clearly," he said. He was studying for an exam in the library when someone called him to the telephone. Jarvik knew something was wrong. Freshmen at Syracuse did not get paged in the library.

What was wrong was that his father had just been diagnosed as having an abdominal aortic aneurysm and was being rushed to Houston's Baylor Medical Center to go under the knife of heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. Jarvik went home and for the next few days followed his father's progress by phone, learning of the new and radical techniques being used: DeBakey sewed a Dacron patch over the delicate blood vessel that had ballooned out and threatened to burst.

The surgery worked. Technology and flesh were wed. "That made a big impression on me," Jarvik said. (Later, he would buy Dacron in a downtown Salt Lake City fabric store and use it in constructing his artificial heart.) "That's when I decided to go into premed. My parents had always wanted me to be a doctor. I didn't quite want to do that. I wanted to be an artist or something."

"Were you pressured into medical school?" I asked him.

"Yeah," Jarvik said with a smirk. "I don't think he had that aneurysm at all. I think they went to the Caribbean." Then he giggled.

In fact, he was unable to get into medical school because of his grades. He was rejected by two dozen schools before he went off to Italy, where acceptance standards were not so strict. He daydreamed his way through a year of medical school there. When he came back, he enrolled in the biomechanics program at New York University and eventually got into the University of Utah artificial-organs program, run by Willem J. Kolff, who had developed the artificial kidney and was the first man in the West to implant an artificial heart in an animal. (The dog lived 90 minutes.)

Jarvik was immediately put to work trying to improve upon the artificial heart, which was under development by Dr. Clifford Kwan-Gett, Kolff's assistant. The Kwan-Gett heart held the world's record--ten days--for keeping an animal alive.

Jarvik plunged himself into the task, working obsessively, sometimes forgetting to eat or sleep. He redesigned the device to make it fit more neatly into the chest. Before he had been there half a year, the world record was up to two weeks.

Jarvik redesigned the heart several times during the next year, and soon it was known as the Jarvik heart. But he had run into a major problem with clotting. The machinery was rough on the delicate and complex components of the blood. This caused many clots to form, which used up the chemicals in the blood that make clotting possible. Hemophiliacs have no clotting factors; that's why they don't stop bleeding. The animals that received Jarvik hearts were dying not from the artificial hearts but from uncontrolled bleeding.

Then, in early 1973, the Cleveland Clinic, where Kolff had worked before he moved to Utah, set a new record with an animal that survived 17 days. Kolff put the pressure on Jarvik, whose talents as a designer he had come to appreciate over the months.

A Jarvik-3, as the most recent design was being called, was implanted in a calf named Betty. She lived only six days. Kolff grew even more anxious, because the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs was about to have its annual meeting. Being in second place for that meeting would mean losing his primacy in the artificial-organs field.

In April, the Jarvik-3, with some improvements, was put into a calf named Burke. The A.S.A.I.O. meeting took place in Boston, and the announcement was made that the Jarvik-3 heart had kept an animal alive for 19 days. There was a buzzing in the crowd: Who is this Jarvik? The answer was, a 27-year-old kid from Connecticut who was not even licensed to practice medicine.

Unfortunately, by the time Jarvik succeeded in perfecting the invention, his father had died of an aortic aneurysm.

In spite of that (or perhaps because of it), Jarvik wanted his medical degree. He went to his University of Utah Medical School interview armed with his degree in biomechanics and the latest model of his artificial heart to impress the admissions officer.

"I come to you with my heart in my hands," he said.

•

When I was out in Utah, Jarvik showed me the animal lab. In a red-brick room with a high ceiling, we watched half a dozen calves with artificial hearts standing in steel cages. Their heads stuck out between the bars so they could eat from plastic containers of hay and feed. The concrete floor was awash in urine and manure, and every now and then, a lab technician in rubber boots would hose it down the drain. The room was a cacophony of hissing and clicking sounds from the Jarvik-7 hearts and their pneumatic driving units. (William Schroeder described his as sounding like a threshing machine.) On the newer Utahdrive units, a Compaq computer traced each beat of the heart graphically on a green phosphorescent screen.

Each calf was connected to its console by one-inch clear-plastic tubing. Life flowed invisibly through that tubing: air to power the Jarvik-7. The concept of the artificial heart is elegantly simple: Air pushes a diaphragm, which changes the volume of a ventricle. As the volume gets smaller, blood is pushed out; as the volume gets larger, blood fills the ventricle again. There are two ventricles, two pneumatic hoses.

On top of each cage was a sheet of paper on which a cute name for the animal had been scrawled in black marker. Below that, a digital timer showed days and hours since the operation. They ranged from a few days to a few months. On the newer calves, I could see the stitches where the chest had been opened; but on the older ones, it looked as if the polyurethane tubing issued quite naturally from a smooth expanse of seamless hide. Jarvik reached into one of the cages and jerked on a tube to demonstrate the attachment he'd designed to prevent infection. The calf flinched in pain and tried to kick him but could not, being tethered in the cage.

"See, that doesn't pull on the skin. The force is transmitted to the deep tissues."

The calf kicked at him again.

"How long can they survive like this?" I asked.

"Months and months," he said. "But usually, we don't keep them that long. It's pretty expensive to keep these animals alive. Most of them we sacrifice before that."

On video tape, I had watched a calf receive a Jarvik-7 heart. Like tightrope walking, it looks so easy: With a smooth stroke of a tiny silver blade, the taut skin is slit and falls away like an unzipped overcoat. The chest is split open by steel spreaders, and the big blood vessels entering and leaving the heart are tied off with loops of ribbon. The animal is put on a heart-lung-bypass machine, which pumps the blood out the jugular vein and into the carotid artery, bypassing the heart.

Then the surgeon grips the heart with silver tongs and hauls it out of the chest.

The surgery is deft, and there is surprisingly little blood up to this point. But then the surgeon plunges a pair of scissors into the beating heart, and the blood pours out. It is quickly siphoned off, as the snipping continues, until half the heart is gone--the pumping part, the left and right ventricles. That is the point of no return.

Four plastic quick-connect cuffs are sewn into place on the vena cava, the aorta and the two remaining valves. The Jarvik-7 heart is actually two separate mechanical pumps (ventricles) that fit together with a Velcro attachment. The left one is snapped into place first. The air is sucked out of it with a fat hypodermic syringe; and as someone hammers on it with a hemostat to make sure there are no air bubbles, fresh red blood is pumped in to prime it. The right ventricle goes in the same way, and the two are pressed together so that the Velcro holds.

Now the animal is doomed to be part flesh, part machine, for the rest of its short life. Stevenson wrote of the duality of human nature, "I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both...."

•

The second day that Jarvik was in Chicago visiting me, we got up bright and early, and I told him I'd have to go shopping for food if we were going to have breakfast.

"I'll go with you," he said.

We bought all the usual breakfast foods--eggs, The New York Times, coffee cake--and when we got home, Jarvik clipped stories about the most recent artificial-heart recipient while I unpacked the groceries. The Times gave ample space to the University of Pennsylvania's achievement. It was the first serious competition for Symbion.

When asked what he'd like to eat, Jarvik said, "I think people eat too much." He refused to eat anything. I urged him to have a bite so he wouldn't get so hungry, and without looking up from the success story of his competitors, he said, "Eat whatever the hell you want."

So we fixed breakfast for three instead of four. Just as we were about to sit down to eat it, Jarvik popped into the kitchen, sat down and started eating everything in sight. "I always do that," he said cheerfully, "refuse to eat and then pick at someone else's plate."

After breakfast, he took one look at his Polyform unicorn dildo and decided that it was all wrong. He shoved the breakfast dishes aside, got more wire and spread out on the kitchen table again to start over from scratch. He wasn't going to rush through this thing; it was too important.

I said this must have been how it was when he was working on the artificial heart.

"The artificial heart was never this interesting," he said.

I admired his tenacity, his stamina, his single-minded sense of purpose. My daughter glued herself to his side, asking questions, offering him bits of blue modeling clay, but he managed to work around her distractions.

My wife remarked that it was a lot of work for someone he'd known only a week.

"You haven't met Joan of Ark," he said.

Apart from that, he spoke little that day, unless he needed something.

I went out for a jog. Later, my wife told me that while I was out, Jarvik had taken her aside and, giggling like a teenager, had explained to her what the sculpture was, to make sure that she knew it was a dildo. He ran upstairs and got his journal and let her read the good parts, where he described making it. He was already writing about it, though it was not finished or tested.

He insisted that it was not a unicorn but an antelope. Evidently, even he thought there was something weird about guys who like unicorns, and so he gave the new model more definition to show that there were two horns, not one. ("I got a good look at those horns in the museum," he said.)

In spite of Campbell's soup for lunch, Jarvik turned up starving again that evening, right about the time dinner was ready to go into the oven. He began to root, first asking my wife, then me, if we had peanuts.

This dinner had been planned before Jarvik had announced his arrival. It was a family affair, but I thought it would be fun to have everyone together, especially since my father happens to be a biophysicist. I thought maybe Dr. Jarvik and Dr. Gonzales would say something quotable in biophysics. My mother was making enchiladas. One of my brothers was in from out of town. I envisioned this homey autumn scene as Mozart played on the Victrola.

We explained that we did not have peanuts, but Jarvik insisted. "Come on," he said, "everybody's got peanuts." And he started going through the cabinets. He found some walnuts and said, "See! Look!"

"Those are walnuts," I said.

"Same thing," he said.

He then decided he didn't want the walnuts and settled into a bag of raisins, stuffing handfuls into his mouth. My daughter happily joined him in that, her favorite food.

The ovens were heating up for dinner, and we were about to begin when Jarvik insisted that his dildo be baked first.

"Couldn't we bake it after dinner?" I asked. "We're about to put the food in."

"No," he said. "It only takes thirty-five minutes."

As it turned out, we all stood around for half an hour--my wife, my parents, two of my hungry brothers and I--peeking into the oven, watching the unicorn dildo turn from a snowy white to a toasty brown, until Dr. Jarvik declared it finished.

•

During my trip to Utah, Jarvik told me about an exercise device he had invented. It was like a jump rope, he said, only weighted. It was actually a tube of heavy nylon mesh filled with bird shot. He had devised a series of exercises to be used with this Ae-rope-ic, as he called it, "almost like a dance." He showed me the prototype one day when we stopped at his apartment in the hills near Salt Lake City.

Jarvik brought up the mail and slit open a letter from Lilly. She had sent him two pages torn from People magazine, featuring the inventor of something called the Heavyrope, which happened to be the very thing Jarvik had invented. As I sat in the living room, I could hear him shouting from the bedroom. "Shit! I hate that! That pisses me off! Goddamn it!" From where I sat, I could see his study. In it were a weight bench with about 90 pounds on it, an artist's easel and oils, a lightweight pink racing bicycle and a fly rod with a Pflueger reel.

Jarvik came stomping out of his room, waving the magazine pages. "Thanks a lot!" he shouted at the absent ex-lover. And to me: "You know he invented this goddamn thing in 1968? Shit! I hate that."

The apartment, he said, was a temporary measure. In January 1985, he had divorced Elaine Levin, a real woman with a real name who had been the real Mrs. Jarvik for 17 years. Jarvik had lived with Lilly for a while after the divorce but moved out. Now the apartment where he lived looked lonelier than a highway motel room: a bathroom with no soap, no towel, no wastebasket. An injection-molded shower with no curtain. The kitchen was equally bare. The refrigerator was bare except for a few Heinekens.

It was, after all, only temporary.

Up the hill, there was a piece of land on a crest overlooking the Great Salt Lake. There Jarvik would build his real home, as soon as he could find the time to finish the design. (He would, of course, have to design it himself.) Then he would become the real Dr. Robert K. Jarvik. It was as if, having transformed himself once from husband and father and scientist into this new creation--this famous and dashing miracle worker, jetting around the globe--he could not find the concoction that would change him back.

I had seen it before in young rock-'n'-rollers who had suddenly come into great wealth and power: Their lives changed suddenly, and what at first seemed wonderful soon ceased to seem real to them. Unable to unlock the combination and return to normalcy, they started running. They ran toward the mirage of their real lives or away from the specter of their unreal lives; but either way, they could not stop running. Traveling in airplanes and limousines in great luxury, they found themselves filled with a dreadful sense of being lost, of drifting in space.

On the day Jarvik received the People article, we were to meet his ex-wife at a little-league game in which his 11-year-old son, Tyler, was playing. On the way, Jarvik stopped to pick up something at his family's house. Although he had been divorced more than half a year and separated even longer, he still had the garagedoor opener. He pulled his dusty black Toyota (license plate UP-N-UP) into the garage at his former house, strode inside, ran quickly through a wicker basket of mail and began to rummage in a kitchen cabinet.

"You know, she's got every kind of vitamin on earth in here, but where the hell's the aspirin?" Perhaps he had a headache from not eating.

At the ball park, Jarvik sat in the bleachers, thinking, while Elaine and their daughter, Kate, hollered encouragement at Tyler, and Elaine occasionally nudged Jarvik in the thigh when something exciting happened. "We're just hoping he hits the ball," she said. "That would be enough."

Rob and Elaine, as they were once known to their friends, seemed to fall back into the easy familiarity of husband and wife, as if they'd never been apart. There was a gentle intimacy in the way they sat touching each other. Elaine said that if Jarvik moved, as he kept talking about doing, she would move with him.

"Do you like Salt Lake City?" I asked.

She laughed. "Do I like Salt Lake City?" she asked Jarvik.

He smirked.

Some weeks later, as we were driving around Chicago, searching for Polyform modeling compound, Jarvik told me, "You ought to find some nice guy for Elaine. She's really a great person. She's just not for me. But she keeps meeting these Mormon guys, and then it just doesn't work out. Don't you know some nice guy for Elaine?" A nice guy for Elaine, an interesting lady for Rob. Sounds like they should get to know each other.

At the little-league game, Jarvik kept coming back to the article in People about the Heavyrope inventor. He was thinking hard, and every few minutes another strategy for making the best of a bad situation would rise to the surface. "Maybe I should just compete with them," he said.

Elaine, momentarily distracted from Tyler's attempts to hit the ball, said, "Hmm?"

The visiting-team coach threw a fit on the field.

A lady in our section of bleachers got beaned with a pop-up foul.

Jarvik was off in his own world. "He's got them jumping rope," he mused. "My rope is heavier. You can't jump rope with it. I've got a whole series of exercises worked out. Maybe I could do a book."

"Hmm?"

Tyler finally hit the ball and was thrown out at first base. There was a moment of excitement, then Jarvik went back to his reverie. An hour and a half into the game, he had arrived at this: "Maybe I should just give that guy a call and see if we can work something out ...."

•

It was the final night of Dr. Jarvik's Chicago visit. The dildo had come out of the oven, piping hot on a cookie tray. The enchiladas had gone in, and we were finally seated around the big table. Mozart was playing in the background. I was at the head of the long table, with Jarvik on my left, my mother at the opposite end, my father next to her, my brothers and wife and daughter. Not much biophysics was spoken at that table. Jarvik was curiously quiet as he made quick work of his enchiladas.

We were nearly through with dinner when I wondered out loud whether or not I should have a second helping.

"Sure, have one," Jarvik said, scooping up a generous portion of enchiladas with a spatula and flipping it across the table at my plate. It missed the plate and landed on the tablecloth, splashing reddish-brown chili sauce this way and that. I saw my mother's fork pause halfway to her mouth, which remained open for some time. My father's eyes had shifted to the left as he followed the arc of travel of the flying enchiladas, and now they seemed stuck there--the eyes, that is. It was so quiet you could have heard a Bjork-Shiley valve click-ticking.

"Well, it would have been neat if it had worked," Jarvik said.

"Rob's drunk again," I said. Pause. "No, the sad part is, Rob's not drunk." There were a few hollow laughs.

Then I was out of the room, serving chocolate cake, when I heard someone explain to Jarvik that the white stuff in the glass bowl on the table was not whipped cream but sour cream. He knew that, of course, because it had been part of the dinner. When I returned to the table, Jarvik had piled sour cream on a piece of chocolate cake and put it at my place.

"I made you a special dessert," he said. Smirk.

I went to get another piece of chocolate cake to replace the piece he'd spoiled; and when I returned to the table, Jarvik had put a second slice of cake on top of the mound of sour cream.

"I made you a sandwich," he said.

I carried both pieces away for the garbage disposal, thinking about a dinner he and I had had in Salt Lake City with his (then) girlfriend, a TV reporter--call her Electra. We were at one of the fanciest restaurants in Utah, built like an ancient French manor house; and because Jarvik is famous in Salt Lake City, he was recognized by a number of people as we dined. After the dinner, he grabbed two long loaves of bread from a nearby shelf and made Electra fence with him as the people in the restaurant stared incredulously. Jarvik wouldn't stop fencing until he had broken Electra's loaf and knocked it to the floor.

I thought, Here is a man who is truly fearless, acting this way in front of not one but two reporters. In fact, his former wife is a reporter. Doesn't he know what reporters do? I wondered. I could only conclude that he frankly didn't care what anyone thought of him.

Or perhaps, like Stevenson's hero, he was a scientific genius who had begun to experience involuntary transformations:

I was led to remark that whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side. All things therefore seemed to point to this: that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

•

On the night Jarvik finished his unicorn (now antelope) dildo at my house, after airborne enchiladas and chocolate-cake surprise, we sat around watching the news for word of the artificial-heart implant at the University of Pennsylvania, the first implant of a non-Jarvik heart in which the patient had an appreciable chance of survival. The patient was doing well, in fact, and Jarvik expressed his hope that the man would survive a long time. The success of another artificial-heart group would give Symbion that much more credibility. Moreover, he was interested in watching the news because news anchor Faith Daniels might come on. "I really like her," he said. "She's really cute." We also talked a lot about the dildo. He kept asking for paint.

"Don't you have any white spray paint?" he asked, incredulous that my home could run without it. As with the peanuts, I think he believed I was concealing white paint from him. "How about black? It would look great painted black."

I said I had none.

We watched the news and poked at the fire.

"I've got it!" he said a while later. "White nail polish. That'll work great."

I regretted that we had none. Not only did my wife not paint her nails, she most especially didn't paint them white. Not even my four-year-old daughter painted her nails white. I wondered if, in addition to sitting out in tornado weather, Joan of Ark painted her fingernails white. Maybe she was a really New Wave woman.

Later, Jarvik was speculating on how difficult it was going to be to carve the dildo out of ivory, now that he had the prototype done nearly to his satisfaction. He was talking about using some exotic reduction grinding machine at Symbion to make a copy of it. "The only problem is that you can't copy things one to one with it. It only reduces models, so this would come out about one fourth the size." We talked for a while about how it would be to sell tiny ivory antelope dildos. Then he decided that it would be better to send the thing overseas somewhere and have Micronesians or Orientals carve them out of ivory--cheap labor but the real thing.

"It would cast really nice in bronze," he said, admiring the horn, the detail, "but it would be too cold."

And later, just before going to bed: "I've got it! I can have them made of polyurethane."

"You mean Lycra?" I asked.

"Yeah, that's what the artificial heart is made of."

I envisioned the red-brick Symbion building in Salt Lake City churning out flesh-colored Lycra antelope dildos within sight of the Mormon Temple. I imagined an outpouring of chagrin and dismay.

Maybe, I thought, just maybe, Jarvik is a New Wave artist, and this is not medical science at all; it's just art so avant-garde that we can't even recognize it: all these people with artificial hearts and antelopes.

Before going to bed that night, he worried about how he would transport the protodildo without breaking it. I offered him Styrofoam peanuts, but he shook his head, deep in creative thought. He went upstairs, muttering to himself. A few minutes later, he came rushing back down, carrying one of his white Reeboks gym shoes.

"Look!" he said excitedly. "It fits!" He tipped the shoe so that we could see. The dildo was nestled neatly inside.

•

The next day, at breakfast, after Jarvik had left, we were talking about it, and someone said, "He's just inconsiderate."

"No, he's not!" my daughter piped up. "He fixes people's hearts. He's good."

And therein lies the baffling thing about Dr. Robert Jarvik: He does what he sets out to do. It's difficult to argue with success. He and Schroeder actually went fishing in the summer of 1985. Schroeder caught a fish, too.

"His optimism stems, in part, from his ability to make the wildest of his dreams come true."

"Looking at his prototype for the ivory carving, he shook his head and emitted a high-pitched giggle."