This story was originally published in Exquisite Corpse and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

It felt like he was cutting my scrotum with an X-act-o knife. And this was only the needle, and the lydocaine squirt. The knife would come soon enough. He was keeping up a bright line of patter. He was about fifty-five, gray, trim, prim. He wore bifocals, but seemed able to see fine. I was wide-awake, on my back, naked from the waist down.

“Breathe,” he ordered, beginning the incision. “The women know how to do this… from childbirth. We men don’t practice enough relaxing in the face of pain. Take deep breaths. Let me know if you feel anything. The lydocaine should by now have rendered your testicles numb.”

I inhaled deep as I could. Probably about a cup of tight clinic air. I huffed it out. Hauled in another gasp.

“More men should be undergoing this same operation.”

“Yes.” I tensed my toes and fingers, not so much feeling as hearing the pain, the knife inching into my sack. “Yes, I agree. Too many people on the planet. Human life is important. But surely the survival of the planet outweighs…”

“Yes!” he butted in, smiling down at my crotch. “Death is difficult to understand. And yet we must accept it. Out of death comes life. Without death, there would be no more life.”

Where did he get the idea I was talking about death? I took in a good quart of air. I felt things inside my scrotum move. I had to say something. Death seemed a bad topic.

I mentioned the books on quantum theory I had been reading.

He looked up at me, his hands still at work inside my sack.

“Popularizations,” I clarified. “I only took a year of college. I was a French major.”

He smiled. Shifted his gaze back onto my scrotum. Moved his knife in a knit-one purl-two fashion.

“I was amazed by the many universes interpretation of the…”

“Yes,” he interrupted. “You know, you can tell people that the man who performed your vasectomy once sat in a lecture hall with Albert Einstein.”

“Wow! I bet you were, uh… thrilled.”

“It was a lecture on parapsychology. Einstein was there solely out of curiosity, and to improve his mind. That’s the kind of man he was. He was the greatest scientist who ever lived.”

“Wow!” I said. “Wow, that’s… wow, something!”

“Did you feel that?”

“Little.”

“I’m surprised. Perhaps the lydocaine hasn’t yet penetrated this deep. Don’t forget to breathe. That’s it. Deep breath… deep as you can. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it myself. It was my senior year. This was 1955. I thought I’d seen everything. It was an assignment for the elective I was taking. The hall was packed. It was a popular course. I look to my left, and there sits three chairs down this moustached little guy with white hair. Wild like yours, only yours isn’t white… yet.”

I remembered outloud, that Einstein died in 1955… didn’t he?

“Yes. But in the spring, three months after I saw him at this lecture on parapsychology. Can you feel anything now?”

“Can you feel anything now?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“But Einstein said: ‘God does not play dice.’ He never admitted quantum theory was, uh… wow! Oh, uh… right. To him the concept of, uh… parallel universes… absurd.”

“I think he changed his mind on that toward the end of his life. There, can you feel that when I tug?”

“Yeah…”

“That’s your vas. One of ‘em. I’ve got it pulled out. Now we cut it. Like so. I’ll cauterize the ends. But I’ll say one thing for Einstein…” He exchanged the tool in his hand for a different one on the counter. “Einstein had the most open mind mankind has ever seen.”

A soft buzz, like a bumblebee, nuzzled my crotch.

“Still,” I stuck to my guns, “he never admitted quantum theory was right.”

“Oh, I know,” he squeezed, and the buzz of the cauterizer loudened. “He was no greater than Newton or Galileo. But these men come only once a century or so.”

According to the brochure handed me in the lobby, I was not to ejaculate for seven days. I suddenly didn’t want so much as to piss till Christmas.