Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  In most cases, Harvey has made it sound as if he himself handpicked these people after reading their work, though by some of their own admissions, a number of them had contacted him first. One neuroanatomist, a Berkeley professor named Marian Diamond, had written a paper claiming that she had counted in Einstein’s brain a higher than normal number of glial cells, which nourish the organ. The only other paper written to date, by a researcher at the University of Alabama named Britt Anderson, stated that Einstein had a thinner cortex than normal. “You see,” says Harvey enthusiastically, “we’re finding out that Einstein’s brain is more unusual than many people first thought.” But a professor of neurobiology at UCLA, Larry Kruger, calls the “meagre findings” on the brain “laughable” and says that when Diamond herself delivered her paper, the audience found it “comical,” because “it means absolutely nothing.” (When I asked Diamond, a woman with impeccable credentials, about this, she claimed that Kruger had “a lack of inhibitor cells” and said, “Well, we have to start somewhere, don’t we?”)

  Despite my expectations that Harvey will sleep a good deal, what I soon realize is that he’s damn perky for eighty-four and never sleeps at all. Nor talks much. In this age of self-revelation, he eschews the orotundity of a confessor. He speaks in a clipped, spare, almost penurious way—with a barely perceptible drawl from his midwestern childhood—letting huge blocks of time fall in between the subject and the verb, and then between the verb and the object of a sentence. He pronounces “pleasure” play-sure, and “measurements” may-sure-mints. When my line of questioning makes him uncomfortable, he chuckles flatly like two chops of wood, “Heh-heh,” raspily clears his throat, then says, “Way-ell …” And just steps aside to let some more time pass, returning to his map, which he studies like it’s a rune. Through the window he watches Pennsylvania pass by: its barns and elaborate hexes, signs for Amish goods, the Allegheny Mountains rising like dark whales out of the earth, lost behind the mist of some unseen blowhole. He watches Ohio all pan-flattened and thrown back down on itself. And he blinks languidly at it. But never sleeps.

  I admit: This disappoints me. Something in me wants Harvey to sleep. I want Harvey to fall into a deep, blurry, Rip Van Winkle daze, and I want to park the Skylark mothership on top of a mountain and walk around to the trunk and open it. I want Harvey snoring loudly as I unzip the duffel bag and reach my hands inside, and I want to—what?—touch Einstein’s brain. I want to touch the brain. Yes, I’ve said it. I want to hold it, coddle it, measure its weight in my palm, handle some of its fifteen billion now-dormant neurons. Does it feel like tofu, sea urchin, baloney? What, exactly? And what does such a desire make me? One of the legion of relic freaks who send Harvey letters asking, sometimes begging, for pieces of the brain? One of the pilgrims who come from as far away as Japan or England or Australia to glimpse it?

  For Harvey’s sake, I act like I haven’t given the brain a second thought, while he encourages stultifying state-long silences and offers the occasional historical anecdote. “Eisenhower’s farm was in these parts, I believe.” Or, “In the days of the canal …” The more the idea persists in my head, the more towns slip past outside the window, the more I wonder what, in fact, I’d really be holding if I held the brain. I mean, it’s not really Einstein, and it’s not really a brain but disconnected pieces of a brain, just as the passing farms are not really America but parts of a whole, symbols of the thing itself, which is everything and nothing at once.

  In part, I would be touching Einstein the Superstar, immediately recognizable by his Krameresque hair and the both mournful and mirthful eyes. The man whose apotheosis is so complete that he’s now a coffee mug, a postcard, a T-shirt. The face zooming out of a pop rock video on MTV’s Buzz Clip for a song called “MMMBop.” A figure of speech, an ad pitchman. The voice of reason on posters festooning undergrad dorm rooms. Despite the fact that he was a sixty-one-year-old man when he was naturalized as an American citizen, Einstein has been fully appropriated by this country, by our writers and moralists, politicians and scientists, cult leaders and clergy. In the fin-de-siècle shadows of America, in our antsy, searching times, Einstein comes back to us both as Lear’s fool and Tiresias, comically offering his uncanny vision of the future while cautioning us against the violence that lurks in the heart of man. “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,” he warned, “but I do know how the Fourth will: with sticks and stones.”

  To complete his American deification, Einstein has been fully commodified and marketed, earning millions of dollars for his estate. Bought and sold back to us by the foot soldiers of high capitalism, Einstein’s name and image are conjured to sell computers and CD-ROMs, Nikon cameras and myriad baubles. In fact, a Los Angeles celebrity-licensing agency handles his account.

  But why so much commotion over a guy with sweaty feet and rumpled clothes? The answer is perhaps found in a feeling that Einstein was not one of us. It seems we regard him as being supernatural. Because he glimpsed the very workings of the universe and returned with God on his tongue, because he greeted this era by rocketing into the next with his breakthrough theories, he assumed a mien of supernaturalism. And because his tatterdemalion, at times dotty demeanor stood in such stark contrast to his supernaturalism, he seemed both innocent and trustworthy, and thus that much more supernatural. He alone held the seashell of the century to his ear.

  Einstein is also one of the few figures born in the past century whose ideas are equally relevant to us today. If we’ve incorporated the theory of relativity into our scientific view of the universe, it’s Einstein’s attempt to devise a kind of personal religion—an intimate spiritual and political manifesto—that still stands in stark, almost sacred contrast to the Pecksniffian systems of salvation offered by the modern world. Depending on the day’s sex crimes and senseless murders, or the intensity of our millennial migraine, we run the real risk of feeling straitjacketed and sacrificed to everything from organized religion to the nuclear blood lust of nations to the cult visionaries of our world and their various vodka-and-cuckoo schemes, their Hale-Bopp fantasies.

  Thus Einstein’s blending of twentieth-century skepticism with nineteenth-century romanticism offers a kind of modern hope. “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever,” he said. “This is a somewhat new kind of religion.” Pushing further, he sought to marry science and religion by redefining their terms. “I am of the opinion that all the finer speculations in the realm of science spring from a deep religious feeling,” he said. “I also believe that this kind of religiousness … is the only creative religious activity of our time.”

  To touch Einstein’s brain would also be to touch the white dwarf and the black hole, the Big Bang and ghost waves. To ride a ray of light, as Einstein once dreamed it as a child, into utter oblivion. He imagined that a clock placed on the equator would run more slowly than a clock placed at one of the poles under identical conditions. Einstein claimed that the happiest thought of his life came to him in 1907, at the patent office in Bern, when he was twenty-eight and couldn’t find a teaching job. Up to his ears in a worsted wool suit and patent applications, a voice in his mind whispered, “If a person falls freely, he won’t feel his own weight.” That became the general theory of relativity. His life and ideas continue to fill thousands of books; even today, scientists are still verifying his work. Recently, a NASA satellite took millions of measurements in space that proved a uniform distribution of primordial temperatures just above absolute zero; that is, the data proved that the universe was in a kind of postcoital afterglow from the Big Bang, further confirming Einstein’s explanation of how the universe began.

  It would be good to touch that.

  We disembark that first night at a Best Western in Columbus, Ohio. As we open the trunk to gather our bags, I watch Harvey take what he needs, then leave the gray duffel there, the zipper shining like silver teeth in the streetlight.

  “Is it safe?” I ask, nodding toward the duffel.

  “Is what safe?
” Harvey asks back, gelid eyes sparking once in the dark. He doesn’t seem to know or remember. He’s carried the contraband for so long he’s come to consider himself something of a celebrity. No longer defined by the specimen, he’s the real specimen. A piece of living history. On tour. In his glen-plaid suitcase, he carries postcards of himself.

  Inside his motel room with the brain, Harvey gathers the sleep of the old. Next door I am exhausted yet wide awake. I am thinking of the brain, remembering that after more than eight million people had marched to their deaths in the fields of Europe during World War I, Einstein’s theory of relativity allowed humanity, in the words of a colleague, to look up from an “earth covered with graves and blood to the heavens covered with the stars.” He suddenly appeared on the world’s doorstep, inspiring pan-national awe and offering with it pan-national reconciliation—a liberal German Jew who clung to his Swiss citizenship and renounced violence. What better way to absolve oneself of all sins than to follow a blameless scientist up into the twinkling waters of time and space?

  Another contemporary of Einstein’s, Erwin Schrödinger, claimed that Einstein’s theory of relativity quite simply meant “the dethronement of time as a rigid tyrant,” opening up the possibility that there might be an alternative Master Plan. “And this thought,” he wrote, “is a religious thought, nay I should call it the religious thought.” With relativity, Einstein, the original cosmic slacker, was himself touching the mind of a new god, forming a conga line to immortality through some wrinkle in time. “It is quite possible that we can do greater things than Jesus,” he said.

  That, finally, was Einstein’s ultimate power and hold on our imagination. Eternity—it would be good to touch that, too.

  Kansas City, Missouri. February 19.

  Across Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, beneath scudding clouds and clear shots of sunlight, the chill air fragrant with manure and feed. We pass over the chocolate, moiling Mississippi, drive near the towns of Emma and Bellflower, Peruque and Auxvasse. We stealth through shadows thrown by crop dusters and Greyhound buses, up against wobbling fifty-three-foot truck trailers full of movie videos or broccoli or industrial turbines and, at one point, a flatbed with a Vietnam-era helicopter strapped to it. On this bright, windy day, we see the outbuildings and barns of the Midwest, where farmers stand in small circles eyeing their fields like nervous, hand-wringing fathers, repairing their threshers, turning the first soil, pointing to what’s yet invisible, speaking in incantations: feed and fertilizer, moisture content and till depth. With each day’s work, with each fieldside conference and hour alone in the air-conditioned cab of a supertractor, they will silently appeal to the circadian rhythms of some higher power for a perfect calibration of sun and rain, as well as for the perfect ascension of market prices to deliver a bountiful harvest. On the radio, we get the farm reports: Lean hog futures down five-eighths; feeder cattle futures up a half. Corn futures and soybean and cocoa, up an eighth, down a third, even. January sugar and March corn; September rice and December cotton—all of them attached to a momentary price that may right now be making someone rich as it bankrupts someone else.

  “Look at that cow!” exclaims Harvey.

  And it is quite a cow! On this afternoon together, something is beginning to happen out here among us, the three of us. Time is slowing, it seems, or expanding to fill a bigger sky, a more open landscape. The got-to-be-there self-importance of the East, its frantic floodlight charge, has given way to a single lit parlor lamp. And under it, a cow or one silver tree in the wind or the rusted remains of an old tiller seems more holy, even mythic. It’s not that the Midwest lacks bustle; it’s just that away from the cities, the deadlines are imposed by the earth and its seasons. I slip off my watch and feel myself beginning to slow into Harvey time.

  We are, in fact, retracing Harvey’s route when he came west from New Jersey in the 1960s, after eluding those who desired the brain for themselves. Within weeks of Einstein’s death, after it was reported that the brain had been taken from the body, a group of leading brain researchers met in Washington, D.C. It was an august collection of men: Doctors Webb Haymaker and Hartwig Kuhlenbeck, Clem Fox and Gerhardt von Bonin, Jerzy E. Rose and Walle Nauta. And necessarily among them, but perhaps regarded with a tinge of condescension, this slightly awkward, nervously chuckling half doctor, this Irregular Sock, this pathologist from a small-town hospital connected only by the same name to the hallowed halls and elite eating clubs of Princeton University. When Webb Haymaker, who represented the U.S. Army, demanded the brain, Harvey simply refused to hand it over. Heh-heh. When Haymaker got angry, Harvey didn’t budge. And now who laughs last? Who’s dead, each last one of them, and who’s out here busting for California with the brain, inhaling Frosties and baked potatoes, hoovering Denny’s pancakes and green salads and chicken noodle soup?

  “Harvey didn’t know his ass from his elbow from the brain,” says Larry Kruger, who at the time was a postdoctoral fellow with Jerzy Rose at Johns Hopkins. “Harvey refused to give up the brain even though he wasn’t a neuropathologist, and then all bets were off. I mean, what were you going to do with it, anyway? I heard he kept it in his basement and would show it to visitors. I guess some people show off a rare edition of Shakespeare. He would say, ‘Hey, wanna see Einstein’s brain?’ The guy’s a jerk.… He wanted fame and nothing came of it.”2

  Meanwhile, Harvey bristles at such suggestions, regards himself as destiny’s chosen one, the man who forever belongs with Einstein’s brain, for better or for worse. In a way, it is a tale of obsessive love: Humbert Humbert and his Lolita. But Harvey sees it more prosaically: “Yup, I was just so fortunate to be the one to walk in the room that morning,” he repeats again and again. Prior to that April morning in 1955, Harvey’s life hardly augured greatness as much as it did stolid servitude and an abiding curiosity in science. He had met Einstein only once, to take blood from him. Expecting his usual nurse for such a menial chore, the ever-lustful scientist saw Harvey and blurted, “You’ve changed your sex!” Summing up his years as a pathologist, Harvey says, “It was great to try to figure out what killed someone.”

  Sawed-off statements like these initially make it easy to, well, feel underwhelmed by Harvey. In part, it is simply Quaker modesty, a respectful reticence, beneath which lies a diamond-sharp, at times even cunning man who has survived over four decades with the brain. Harvey grew up in a Kentucky line of dyed-in-the-wool Quakers, then moved to Hartford, Connecticut, when his father got a good job with an insurance firm. Later, he attended Yale, where he contracted tuberculosis, then spent over a year in a sanatorium, and when he returned to school, he gave up his dreams of doctoring and turned to pathology because “the hours were less demanding.” He lists that year of sickness and the later revocation of his medical license as among the greatest disappointments of his life. Did he pay a price for the brain? Perhaps. He was soon fired from his job at the hospital and divorced from his first wife. In the next years he drifted through jobs at state psychiatric hospitals and medical labs, another wife, and then picked up and moved west to start a general practice in Weston, Missouri, which eventually folded. Later, he lost his medical license after failing a three-day test and was forced to work the late shift as an extruder at a plastics factory in Lawrence, Kansas. All of it after the brain, perhaps because of the brain.

  Nonetheless, a life isn’t one paragraph long, and we might also consider Harvey a happy man, maybe with each move feeling himself to be on to the next adventure, with each wife and child perhaps feeling himself loved. Still, I try to picture him standing before Einstein’s body—in that one naked moment.

  Only occasionally can you glimpse, through the embrasures of an otherwise perfectly polite person, the cannons aimed outward; only in a certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins.

  Lawrence, Kansas. February 20.

  In
the heart of America, a psychic vortex. We cruise through a neighborhood of picket fences and leafless trees, parking before a small red house, a four-room once built from a Sears, Roebuck kit, replete with bookcases of paperback horror fiction and wax skulls. Here lives Harvey’s former neighbor, the soon-to-be-late novelist William S. Burroughs. It’s both odd and fitting that the man who allegedly stole Einstein’s brain once lived with said brain just around the corner from William Burroughs, the strange, kinetic father of the Beats, as if Harvey were an invention of one of his novels.

  While their neighborhood encounters didn’t add up to much—Harvey remembers one extended meeting—he treats their reunion with all the gravitas of the Potsdam Conference. Shuffling across the front porch now, Harvey clasps the old writer’s hand, enunciating loudly, believing that the eighty-three-year-old Burroughs is equally deaf, which he isn’t, then climbs up his arm until they are in a startled embrace, the two of them as pale as the marble of a Rodin sculpture. “REAL, REAL GOOD TO SEE YA!” Later, Harvey quaffs glasses of burgundy until he turns bright red; Burroughs, himself a bowed and hollowed cult hero and keeper of the Secret—his cheeks dimpled as if by the tip of a blade, a handgun in a holster over his kidney—drinks five Coke and vodkas after taking his daily dose of methadone.

  “Have you ever tried morphine, Doctor?” he asks Harvey.

  “NO. NO, I HAVEN’T,” yells Harvey earnestly.

  “Unbelievable. In Tangiers, there was a most magnificent, most significant drug … went there just to have the last of it. Last there ever was. Tell me about your addictions, Doctor.”

  “WELL, HEH-HEH …” But then Harvey keeps quiet about the brain.

  Burroughs lights a joint and offers it to Harvey, who demurs, smoke swirling around his head like a wreath of steam from a Turkish bath.

  “DID YOU BECOME ADDICTED BECAUSE YOU FELT PAIN?”