Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  His hand lay in mine, and I felt its weight: the bones and the smooth, scarless skin so soft it didn’t seem real. Mine dwarfed his, but still I held his hand up and inspected his fingers for a moment. He thought I was being funny, and he laughed, a little-boy giggle. His breath smelled like cookies. Yes, his fingers were bigger, and I was not frightened. Maybe the betrayals lay out before us somewhere in our murky future. Maybe we were all growing until someday nothing would work for us anymore. But I was not frightened. I was filled with joy.

  It read four o’clock on the wall—on the East Coast of the United States of America—and at that very moment, somewhere, the giant was sleeping on his oversized bed. His huge shoes lay empty near the doorway, his pants thrown over the chair. His enormous suit hung in the closet, waiting.

  Soon he would rise to milk the cows, feed the pigs, pick the rest of the apples. In the dirt lane before his house, carts would come and go, bearing payloads of huge purple hearts. And there he would be, the giant, alone up in the apple tree, gently picking fruit, humming the notes again.

  At the bus station, my children began singing.

  DRIVING MR. ALBERT

  IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS A brain. All of the universe was the size of this brain, floating in space. Until one day it simply exploded. Out poured photons and quarks and leptons. Out flew dust particles like millions of fast-moving birds into the expanding aviary of the cosmos. Cooked heavy elements—silicon, magnesium, and nickel—were sucked into a pocket and balled together under great pressure and morphed with the organic matter of our solar system. Lo, the planets!

  Our world—Earth—was covered with lava, then granite mountains. Oceans formed, a wormy thing crawled from the sea. There were pea-brained brontosauri and fiery meteor showers and gnawing, hairy-backed monsters that kept coming and coming—these furious little stumps, human beings, us. Under the hot sun, we roasted different colors, fornicated, and fought. Full of wonder, we attached words to the sky and the mountains and the water, and claimed them as our own. We named ourselves Homer, Sappho, Humperdinck, and Nixon. We made bewitching sonatas and novels and paintings. Stargazed and built great cities. Exterminated some people. Settled the West. Cooked meat and slathered it with special sauce. Did the hustle. Built the strip mall.

  And in the end, after billions of years of evolution, a pink two-story motel rose up on a drag of asphalt in Berkeley, California. The Flamingo Motel. There, a man stepped out onto the balcony in a bright beam of millennial sunlight, holding the original universe in his hands, in a Tupperware container, and for one flickering moment he saw into the future. I can picture this man now: He needs a haircut, he needs some coffee.

  But not yet, not before rewind and start again. Not long ago. In Maine on a bus. In Massachusetts on a train. In Connecticut behind the wheel of a shiny, teal-colored rental car. The engine purrs. I should know, I’m the driver. I’m on my way to pick up an eighty-four-year-old man named Thomas Harvey, who lives in a modest, low-slung 1950s ranch that belongs to his sixty-seven-year-old girlfriend, Cleora. To get there you carom through New Jersey’s exurbia, through swirls of dead leaves and unruly thickets of oak and pine that give way to well-ordered fields of roan, buttermilk, and black snorting atoms—horses. Harvey greets me at the door, stooped and chuckling nervously, wearing a red-and-white plaid shirt and a solid-blue Pendleton tie that still bears a waterlogged $10 price tag from some earlier decade. He has peckled, blowsy skin runneled with lines, an eagle nose, stubbed yellow teeth, bitten nails, and a spray of white hair as fine as corn silk that shifts with the wind over the bald patches on his head. He could be one of a million beach-bound, black-socked Florida retirees, not the man who, by some odd happenstance of life, possesses the brain of Albert Einstein. But, in fact, he possesses the brain of Albert Einstein, literally cut it out of the dead scientist’s head.

  Harvey has stoked a fire in the basement, which is dank and dark, and I sit among crocheted rugs and genie bottles of blown glass, Ethiopian cookbooks, and macramé. It has taken me more than a year to find Harvey, and during that time I’ve had a dim, inchoate feeling—one that has increased in luminosity—that if I could somehow reach him and Einstein’s brain, I might unravel their strange relationship, one that arcs across this century and America itself—and, as well, figure out some things for myself. And now, before the future arrives and the supercomputers of the world begin to act on their own and we flee to lunar colonies—before all that hullabaloo—Harvey and I are finally sitting here together.

  That day Harvey tells me the story he’s told before—to friends and family and pilgrims—one that has made him an odd celebrity even in this age of odd celebrity. He tells it deliberately, assuming that I will be impressed by it as a testament to the rightness of his actions rather than as a cogent defense of them. “You see,” he says, “I was just so fortunate to have been there. Just so lucky.”

  “Fortunate” is one word, “improbable” is another. Albert Einstein was born in 1879 with a head shaped like a lopsided medicine ball. Seeing it for the first time, his grandmother fell into shock. “Much too fat!” she exclaimed. “Much too fat!” He didn’t speak until he was three, and it was generally assumed that he was brain-damaged. Even as a child, he lived mostly in his mind, building intricate card houses, marveling at a compass his father showed him. His faith was less in people than in the things of the world. When his sister Maja was born, young Albert, crestfallen, said, “Yes, but where are its wheels?”

  As a man, he grew into a powerful body with thick arms and legs. He liked to hike and sail but spent most of his life sitting still, dreaming of the universe. In 1905, as a twenty-six-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, he conceived of the special theory of relativity and the equation E = mc2, a supposition that all matter, from a feather to a rock, contains energy. And with his theories that predicted the origin, nature, and destiny of the universe, he toppled Newton and more than two hundred years of science. When the first inkling of relativity occurred to him, he casually told a friend, “Thank you. I’ve completely solved the problem.”

  So complex were his findings that they could only be partially understood and verified fourteen years later. Then, of course, Albert Einstein instantly became famous. His mischievous smile beamed from newspapers around the world. A genius! A Nobel Prize! A guru-mystic who had unlocked the secrets of God’s own mind! There were suddenly hundreds of books on relativity. Einstein embarked on a frenzied world tour, was fêted by kings and emperors and presidents, gamboling into the world’s most sacred halls in a sockless state of bemused dishevelment. He claimed he got his hairstyle—eventually a wild, electric-white nimbus—“through negligence” and, explaining his overall sloppiness, said, “It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.” He laughed like a barking seal, snored like a foghorn, sunbathed in the nude. And then took tea with the queen.

  Everywhere, it was Einstein mania. People named their children after him, fawned and fainted upon seeing him, wrote letters inquiring if he really existed. He was asked to “perform” at London’s Palladium for three weeks on the same bill as fire-eaters and tightrope walkers, explaining his theory, at a price of his asking. “At the Chrysanthemum Festival,” wrote one German diplomat stationed in Japan, “it was neither the empress nor the prince regent nor the imperial princes who held reception; everything turned around Einstein.” A copy of the special theory of relativity in Einstein’s scrawl was auctioned off for $6 million. And The New York Times urged its readers not to be offended by the fact that only twelve people in the world truly understood the theory of “the suddenly famous Dr. Einstein.”

  In the years to follow, Einstein’s fame would only grow. He would vehemently criticize the Nazis and become a target for German ultranationalists, who waited outside his home and office, hurling anti-Semitic obscenities at him. When they made him a target for assassination, he fled to the United States—to Princeton, New Jersey—and became an American
citizen. He was called “the new Columbus of science.” David Ben-Gurion offered him the presidency of Israel (to everyone’s relief, he declined). His political utterances were as good as Gandhi’s. Before Michael Jordan was beamed by satellite to China, before Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Albert Einstein was the first transglobal supercelebrity.

  In the last years of his life, he was struck with frequent attacks of nausea, the pain flowering between his shoulder blades, culminating in diarrhea or vomiting. An exam revealed an aneurysm in his abdominal aorta, but Einstein refused an operation and anticipated his own demise. “I want to be cremated so people won’t come to worship at my bones,” he said. On the night before he died, April 17, 1955, lying in bed in Princeton Hospital, Einstein asked to see his most recent pages of calculations, typically working until the end. His last words were spoken in German to a nurse who didn’t know the language, though sometime earlier he had told a friend, “I have finished my task here.”

  The next morning, April 18, when the chief pathologist of the hospital—our Harvey, then a strapping forty-two-year-old with Montgomery Clift good looks—arrived for work, Einstein’s body was laid out, naked and mottle-skinned, on a gurney. “Imagine my surprise,” Harvey says to me now. “A fellow up in New York, my former teacher Dr. Zimmerman”—and an acquaintance of Einstein’s—“was going to do the autopsy. But then he couldn’t get away. He rang me up, and we agreed that I’d do it.” Harvey says that he felt awe when he came face-to-face with the world-famous physicist, the voice of conscience in a century of madness, who had bewildered the world by suggesting that time should be understood as the fourth, and inseparable, dimension. Now he lay alone in the pale light, 180 pounds of mere matter.

  Harvey took a scalpel in his hand and sliced Einstein open with a Y incision, scoring the belly, the skin giving like cellophane, then cut the rib cartilage and lifted the sternum. He found nearly three quarts of blood in Einstein’s peritoneal cavity, a result of the burst aneurysm, and after investigating his heart and veins concluded that, with an operation, the physicist might have lived for several more years, though how long was hard to tell “because Einstein liked his fatty foods,” in particular goose scratchings.

  Working under the humming lights, his fingers inside Einstein’s opened body, juggling the liver, palpating the heart, Harvey made a decision. Who’s to say whether it was inspired by awe or by greed, beneficence or mere pettiness? Who’s to say what comes over a mortal, what chemical reaction takes place deep in the thalamus, when faced with the blinding brightness of another’s greatness and, with it, a knowledge that I/you/we shall never possess even a cheeseparing of that greatness?

  Working quickly with a knife, Harvey tonsured the scalp, peeled the skin back, and, bearing down on a saw, cut through Einstein’s head with a quick, hacking motion. He removed a cap of bone, peeled back the meninges, then clipped blood vessels and bundles of nerve and the spinal cord. He reached with his fingers deeper into the chalice of the man’s cranium and simply removed the glistening brain. To keep for himself. Forever. In perpetuity. Amen.

  What he didn’t count on, however, was that with this one act his whole world would go haywire. Apparently, word got out through Zimmerman that Harvey had the brain, and when it was reported in The New York Times a day later, some people were aghast. Einstein’s son, Hans Albert, reportedly felt betrayed. Harvey claimed that he was planning to conduct medical research on the brain, and, in an agreement eventually struck with Hans Albert over the phone, he promised that the brain would be the subject only of medical journals and not become a pop-cultural gewgaw, as the Einsteins most feared. Sometime after the autopsy, Harvey was fired from his job for refusing to give up the brain. Years passed, and there were no papers, no findings. And then Harvey fell off the radar screen. When he gave an occasional interview—in articles from 1956 and 1979 and 1988—he always repeated that he was about “a year away from finishing study on the specimen.”1

  Forty years later—after Harvey has gone through three wives, after he has sunk to lesser circumstances, after he has outlived most of his critics and accusers, including Hans Albert—we are sitting together before a hot fire on a cold winter day. And because I like him so much, because somewhere in his watery blue eyes, his genial stumble-footing, and that ineffable cloak of hunched integrity that falls over the old, I find myself feeling for him and cannot bring myself to ask the essential questions:

  Is Harvey a grave-robbing thief or a hero? A sham artist or a high priest? Why not heist a finger or a toe? Or a simple earlobe? What about rumors that he plans to sell Einstein’s brain to Michael Jackson for $2 million? Does he feel ashamed? Or justified? If the brain is the ultimate Fabergé egg, the Hope Diamond, the Cantino map, the One-Cent Magenta stamp, Guernica, what does it look like? Feel like? Smell like? Does he talk to it as one talks to one’s poodle or ferns?

  We conclude the visit by going out for sushi, and over the course of our conversation he mentions a handful of people he hopes to see before he dies. “Yessir, I’d really like to visit some folks,” he says. They include a few neuroanatomists with whom he has brain business, some friends, and, in Berkeley, Evelyn Einstein, Hans Albert’s daughter and the granddaughter of Albert. Harvey has wanted to meet her for many years. Although he doesn’t say why, I wonder if he’s trying to face down some lingering guilt, some late-in-life desire to resolve the past before his age grounds him permanently and, with his death, the brain falls into someone else’s hands. Perhaps, too, he wants to make arrangements for someone to take over the brain, and Evelyn is going to be interviewed for the job. Whatever the reason, by the meal’s end, doped on the incessant tinkling of piped-in harps and a heady shot of tekka maki, Harvey and I have somehow agreed to take a road trip: I will drive him to California.

  And then, one afternoon soon before our departure, Harvey takes me to a secret location—one he asks me not to reveal for fear of thieves and rambunctious pilgrims—where he now keeps the brain. From a dark room he retrieves a box that contains two glass jars full of Einstein’s brain. After the autopsy, he had it chopped into nearly two hundred pieces—from the size of a dime to that of a thick turkey neck—and since then he has given nearly a third of it away to various people. He parades the jars before me but only for a second, then retreats quickly with them. The brain pieces float in murky formaldehyde, leaving an impression of very chunky chicken soup. But it happens so quickly, Harvey so suddenly absconds with the brain, that I have no real idea what I’ve seen.

  When I show up at his house a few weeks later in a rented Buick Skylark, Harvey has apparently fished several fistfuls’ worth of brain matter from the jars, put them in Tupperware filled with formaldehyde, and zipped it all inside a gray duffel bag. He meets me in his driveway with a plaid suitcase rimmed with fake leather and the gray duffel sagging heavily in his right hand. He pecks Cleora goodbye. “He’s a fine Quaker gentleman,” she tells me, watching Harvey’s curled-over self shuffle across the pavement. He rubs a smudge of dirt off my side mirror, then toodles around the front of the car. When he’s fallen into the passenger seat, he chuckles nervously, scratchily clears his throat, and utters what will become his mantra, “Yessir … real good.” And then we just start driving. For four thousand miles. Me, Harvey, and, in the trunk, Einstein’s brain.

  Toward Columbus, Ohio. February 18.

  We morph into one. Even if we are more than a half century apart in age, he born under the star of William Howard Taft and I under the napalm bomb of Lyndon Baines Johnson, if he wears black Wallabees and I sport Oakley sunglasses, if he has three ex-wives, ten children, and twelve grandchildren and I have yet to procreate, we begin to think together, to make unconscious team decisions. It seems the entire backseat area will serve as a kind of trash can. By the time we make Wheeling, West Virginia, it’s already strewn with books and tissuey green papers from the rental-car agreement, snack wrappers, and empty bottles of seltzer, a hedge against “G.I. upset,” a
s Harvey puts it. An old rambler at heart, he takes to the road like it’s a river of fine brandy, seems to grow stronger on its oily fumes and oily-rainbow mirages, its oily fast food and the oily-tarmacked gas plazas that we skate across for candy bars and Coca-Colas while the Skylark feeds at the pump. By default, I take charge of the radio—working the dial in a schizophrenic riffle from NPR to Dr. Laura and, in between, all kinds of high school basketball, gardening shows, local on-air auctions, blathering DJs, farm reports, and Christian callin shows. Harvey is hard of hearing in his right ear and, perhaps out of pride or vanity, refuses to wear a hearing aid, so I’ve brought music, too, figuring he might do a fair amount of sleeping while, as designated driver, I might do more staying awake. I’ve got bands with names like Dinosaur Jr., Soul Coughing, and Pavement, and a book on tape, Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Harvey himself is partial to classical music and reads mostly scientific journals and novels by Kay Boyle.

  And although we are now bound by the road—Einstein’s brain, Harvey, and I—he studiously avoids all discussion of the brain. Earlier, however, he ticked off twelve different researchers to whom he had given slices. According to Harvey, one of them, Sandra Witelson from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, organized his ephemera and articles on the brain into a scrapbook, and he turned over nearly a fifth of the brain to her. “She has one of the biggest collections of brains around,” he says proudly. “She gets them from a local undertaker.” (Later, when contacted, Witelson said that Harvey’s assertions about her were “incorrect.”)