Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  “I wish I could say that, Doctor, but no,” says Burroughs, considering. “I became addicted because I wanted more.”

  Later, when the two soused men face each other for a goodbye on the tippy front porch—for no apparent reason, Burroughs now calls him Dr. Senegal—the writer lowers his voice and delivers a farewell chestnut, one that Harvey receives with a knowing nod, though it isn’t clear he actually hears it. “What keeps the old alive, Dr. Senegal,” advises Burroughs, “is that we learn to be evil.”

  And then we are out in the night, in a downpour, Harvey trundling toward the car for what feels like a small eternity. Behind him Burroughs sways, curling and unfurling his arms like elephant trunks, then assumes a position of Buddhist prayer—pale, delirious, still.

  Toward Dodge City, Kansas. February 21.

  We wake in Lawrence to a nuclear-powered snow, driving horizontally, starring the windows with ice, piling up until the Skylark looks like a soap-flake duck float in a Memorial Day parade gone terribly wrong. Everything is suddenly heaped in the frigid no-smell of winter, cars skidding, then running off roadsides into gulleys. The snow falls in thick sheaves, icicles jag the gutters. It feels like Lawrence is going back to a day, 500,000 years ago, when it was buried under hundreds of feet of ice.

  We take shelter in our adjoining rooms at the Westminster Inn, are slow to rise. When we do, Harvey is bright-eyed and spunky as we find the good people of Kansas doing what they do in a blizzard: eating pancakes. The Village Inn Pancake House Restaurant—real name—is packed: college students and retirees, all flannel-shirted, how-are-yas ricocheting everywhere, steak-and-egg specials zooming by on super-white plates. Some of the old men wear Dickies work pants and baseball caps with automotive labels; the undergrads sport caps emblazoned with team names or slogans like WHATEVER or RAGE or GOOD TO GO. Even in the no-smoking section everyone smokes—one of Harvey’s pet peeves.

  Our routine in restaurants follows a familiar pattern: Harvey meditates over the menu, examining it, dissecting, vectoring, and equating what his stomach really wants. I get a newspaper and usually skim through the first section before he’s ready. Even as James Earl Ray is planning to go on The Montel Williams Show to plead for a new liver and two teenagers are indicted for the murder and dismemberment of a man in Central Park, there’s an ongoing existential debate raging in Harvey’s head: salty or sweet, eggs or waffles with maple syrup.

  Occasionally, after a particularly deliberate order, he’ll deliberately change it. Our waitress is a pathologically smiley KU student, well versed in the dynamics of a breakfast rush, the coffee-craving, caffeine-induced chaos of it all. She waits as Harvey takes a second look at the menu. It could be that an actual week passes as he clears his throat a couple of times, then ponders some more, but she smiles patiently and then chirps back. “Eggs over easy, bacon, wheat toast, home fries. More coffee?”

  This town was once the setting for a Jason Robards made-for-television movie called The Day After. In it, the sturdy people of America’s Hometown were blown to smithereens in a nuclear attack, and the few who survived wandered in a postapocalyptic stupor, in rags, bodies flowered with keloid scars. That Lawrence would become connected in the nation’s psyche with nuclear devastation and that Einstein’s brain, the power that unknowingly wrought the bomb, rested here for six or seven years is a small pixel of irony that seems to escape Harvey. When I ask him about it, he says, “Way-ell, I guess that’s true.” And starts laughing.

  The truth is that Einstein himself was confounded by the idea that his theory of relativity had opened up a Pandora’s box of mutually assured annihilation. In a 1935 press conference, in which he was asked about the possibility of an atomic bomb, the physicist said that the likelihood of transforming matter into energy was “something akin to shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are only a few birds.” Four years later, however, the Nazis had invaded Poland, and Einstein, the celebrated pacifist, signed a letter to President Roosevelt advocating the building of an atomic weapon. When the letter was personally delivered to Roosevelt, the president immediately saw the gravity of the situation—that if the Americans had just decided to build a bomb, perhaps the Nazis, with great scientists such as Heisenberg, were well on their way to completing one—and ordered his chief of staff to begin immediate top-secret plans that led to the building of an atomic weapon. Sometime later, on a mesa in New Mexico, rose the Town That Never Was, Los Alamos, and under the guidance of Robert Oppenheimer came Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs that would eventually decimate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively.

  Einstein, who was thought to be a Communist sympathizer by the FBI and an untrustworthy, outspoken pacifist by the Roosevelt administration, was not part of Oppenheimer’s team. In fact, he had nothing whatsoever to do with the bomb, though even today his name is connected to it. The letter to Roosevelt haunted him and his family and, in one case, incited a physical attack against Einstein’s son, Hans Albert. Writing to Linus Pauling, Einstein called the letter the “one mistake” of his life. When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima—on August 6, 1945—Einstein heard the news after waking from a nap at Saranac Lake, in upstate New York. “Oy vay,” he said wearily. “Alas.”

  When Harvey and I loop back on Interstate 70 heading west, the snow has slowed to mere ticks. In this single day, we will live through four seasons. Which can happen if one drives long enough with Einstein’s brain in the trunk. Time bends and accelerates and overlaps; simultaneity rules. Heading north now to Lucas, Kansas, and a tourist spot known as the Garden of Eden, a spring wind suddenly whips across the prairie. Borne along on it, we rack up our first speeding ticket.

  My strategy has been to keep the Skylark at seventy-five or eighty, scanning the road for cops, and when feeling luxurious or bored rotten to push it to eighty-five max. Which is precisely what I get nailed for—eighty-five in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour zone. The state trooper asks me to join him in his cruiser, and I don’t try to defend my actions, the greed of speed. “Where you boys going in such a hurry?” he asks. Glancing through the windshield of the cruiser into the back window of the car, I can just make out the silver crown of Harvey’s head, and I’m overcome with the desire to confess. It’s not exactly as if we have a dead body in the trunk, but it’s not as if we don’t, either.

  For some reason, though—perhaps out of self-preservation, for fear of losing the brain altogether—I simply say, “California.” The trooper writes out the ticket, warns me against reckless driving in his state, and sets me free. When he turns off the road in the opposite direction, I hike the speedometer up to eighty and hold it steady.

  We drive south to Dodge City, the Ogallala Aquifer under our wheels, huge cow-uddered clouds overhead. On the radio: steer calves and heifers for sale, Red Angus bulls, yearlings with good genetics and quality carcass. Later, Bobby Darin singing “Beyond the Sea,” Harvey tapping a finger on his knee, the brain sloshing in its Tupperware. In this happy moment, we could probably drive forever.

  By twilight, a nocturne of rain on the roof of the Skylark. We pass a pungent nitrogen plant, itself like a twisted metallic brain. Water towers gleam in the silver light like spaceships, telephone poles pass like crucifixes, and grain elevators rise like organ pipes from the plains.

  Out here, too, just before Dodge City and a most delicious slab of Angus fillet, before a night at the Astro Motel and a dawn that brings a herd of eighteen-wheelers hurtling for Abilene, we see a rainbow and come face-to-face with Harvey’s blighted ambition. “I remember more rainbows in Kansas than any other state,” he says, blinking his moist eyes at the brilliant beams of blue and green, orange and yellow. “I used to try to photograph rainbows, but they never turned out.”

  Somewhere east of Los Alamos, New Mexico. February 22.

  A confession: Over the last days, at truck stops and drive-thrus, at restaurants and gas stations, I’ve kept our secret that we’ve got Einstein’s brain stashed in the trunk, and it’s taken its psychic t
oll. There have been moments when I’ve been alone with the brain—Harvey in a restroom or loitering before postcards on a spinning display—when I’ve opened up the car trunk and looked in, pinched the cold zipper between my thumb and forefinger, but then couldn’t bring myself to unzip the duffel and unsheathe the brain. Too much of a violation, an untenable breach in our manly society, even as Harvey covets for himself the gray matter upon which our private Skylarkian democracy is founded. In fact, we’ve been together now for nearly five full days, and he won’t show me the brain. When I bring it up in conversation, he doesn’t want to talk about it. When I ask him what parts of the brain we’re traveling with exactly, he says he doesn’t know and changes the subject. It is as if I am trying to find the hidden center of his power. Which I am.

  Leaving the Astro Motel the next morning, I unexpectedly spill my guts at the front desk as I return our room keys to the manager. I tell him we’ve got the brain in the trunk, adding that we’re headed to California to show it to Einstein’s granddaughter. The manager, an affable, middle-aged man, stops for a moment and looks at me sideways, realizes I’m serious, and tries to be hospitable. “Einstein, huh? That guy knew some things,” he says, folding his arms, shifting his weight. “That guy really did have a brain. But I wouldn’t have wanted to live with him. You know … a little weirdy.” He spins his finger in a cuckoo circle around his ear. “I have a nephew who is kind of a genius, but he hasn’t flaked off yet. I met a guy in California who was so smart he couldn’t talk. He sure could tell you how to look at the moon, but he couldn’t tell you how to tie your shoes.”

  I’m not sure that I feel better, though I know that, in his way, he has tried to help. But does he scribble down our license plate number as we leave?

  In Liberal, Kansas, we eat at a glassed-in coffin of a restaurant called Mr. Breakfast. Old folks arrive in old, rusted Ford pickups, chain-smoking, hacking phlegm. Swab runny eggs with Wonder Bread toast, gulp mud-water coffee. Looking around—Harvey fitting right in among the chorfing, anonymous throng—one discerns that this is not a bunch racing toward the millennium, that the millennium may, in fact, only be a construction of the coastal power elite, a media-and-marketing event. Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying. And along its highways and byways, the country seems less ready to leap into the future than it is already clinging to a sepia-toned past when America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in a Manichean world of good and evil, capitalists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of the interstate—the perpetual clusters of Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Denny’s, and Burger King—are crowded with people strangely reclaiming bygone days, connecting themselves to some prior eating experience, reveling in the familiar.

  We gas down into Oklahoma (through Tyrone, Hooker, Guymon, and Texhoma) and then the Texas Panhandle (edging the Rita Blanca National Grassland, through Stratford, Dalhart, and Nara Visa)—all of it flat, with oil rigs like metronomes. I’ve taken to photographing Harvey by various signs and monuments along the road, and when we drift by a huge wooden cowboy with two guns blazing out across the empty plains, Harvey poses between his legs. By the New Mexico border, the wood-frame farmhouses have transmogrified into adobe. In Tucumcari, almost on cue, there is red dirt and tumbleweed. We drive through ruts and washes, over tableland and mesa. Here the hills are testicular, the ancient mounds monslike, but all of it has a desiccated, washed-out sexuality, decayed from a time when this place was overrun by dinosaurs. We climb the crags that rim the Pajarito Plateau to Los Alamos—the gridded, repressed hothouse that wrought Little Boy and Fat Man. In the rush of cacti, my frustration with Harvey’s Humbertness, with his protective zeal, has bled into a kind of benevolent respect, an idea that Harvey actually may be a revolutionary hero. For wasn’t he the one who thumbed his nose at the great U.S. Army doctor, Webb Haymaker, upped the establishment, and legged it out West on an end around with the brain? Maybe he thought he was protecting the brain from the so-called experts, or saving the brain of one of the world’s greatest pacifists from the clutches of the U.S. military. Wouldn’t that make him the perfect Einsteinian hero?

  After all, Einstein himself had nothing but disdain for authority, spent a life shirking it. In a letter to his friend Queen Elisabeth of Belgium that described the stuffy hierarchy of his adopted hometown, Princeton, he said it was “a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts.”3

  Perhaps this is why Harvey felt that Einstein’s brain, one of the most powerful engines of thought ever on earth, deserved a committed curator, an unpartisan keeper, an eccentric brother whose sole purpose would be to unlock the biological secrets of Einstein’s brain by placing it in the hands of a chosen few. Einstein himself had called his brain his laboratory, and with it had pondered the blueness of sky, the bending of starlight, the orbit of Mercury. And maybe, if Harvey knew nothing else, he knew enough to make sure that Einstein’s brain didn’t get sucked into the maw of the System.

  This is my line of thought as we zag through saguaro and scrub brush, in the shadow of the Jemez Mountains. When I look over at Harvey, he has momentarily nodded off for the first time all trip. I’ve sort of nodded off, too. On a straightaway, I look at the speedometer: We’re going 115 miles an hour.

  Los Alamos, New Mexico. February 22.

  At Los Alamos, we visit the Bradbury Science Museum. Not unexpectedly, the first exhibit is Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt. Harvey stands before it, nodding seriously, then moves on. The museum is a three-room pavilion walled with text and grainy black-and-white photographs that detail the scientific, as well as human, challenges of building the bomb, while lionizing the patriotic men and women who contributed to the Manhattan Project. But the museum—and the culture of Los Alamos as a whole—is most glaringly defined by what its curators seem to have selectively forgotten about the bomb.

  For what the Bradbury Science Museum doesn’t show is an August 1945 morning in central Hiroshima, trolleys packed with people, thousands of schoolgirls doing community service in the streets. It doesn’t show the B-29, the Enola Gay, floating above at 31,000 feet, then releasing four tons of metal, Little Boy, through the air. It doesn’t show the side of the bomb with its autographs and obscene messages (one starts “Greetings to the Emperor …”) and emblazoned with the crude naked likeness of Rita Hayworth.

  What the museum forgets to show is the forty-three seconds of utter silence, the time it takes Little Boy to drop on the city, and then perhaps the loudest second of the twentieth century, a blast that equals 12,500 tons of TNT. It doesn’t show ground zero, at Aioi Bridge, the birds incinerating in the air, people flaming like candles, others swelling like bronze Buddhas. And this is just the beginning.

  It doesn’t show the firestorm that soon pulverizes the city, the atomic winds that turn into a tornado in the north part of town. The nine of every ten people dead within a mile of the blast, the 200,000 people who will finally be counted dead, and the black, sticky rain, carrying radioactive fallout, that beats relentlessly down on the survivors. It doesn’t show the naked man, skin hanging from his body like a kimono, with his eyeball in his hand. It doesn’t show the 70,000 rubbled buildings and the people trapped beneath them. Afterward, it doesn’t show Nagasaki and the 140,000 more Japanese who will die in like fashion. One can spend a couple hours in the museum—as Harvey does, finally exiting, exhilarated, buzzed about the wonders of technology—but this devastation remains invisible.

  We spend the night at the ranch of some friends of mine near Cerrillos—a thirtyish couple, Scott and Clare. We share a terrific meal, and Harvey is particularly animated, fired on red wine, suddenly talking at length about the brain, about how he came by it and how, after fixing it with formaldehyde (his one mistake was injecting the brain with warm formaldehyde instead of cold formaldehyde, thus hastening its denaturation), he photographed the brain. “It’s a real tray-sure,” he says. “I’ve gotten to meet many famous people, many who knew Einstein.”

  Aft
er leaving the room to make a phone call, I return to find Harvey and Clare alone at the table, flushed with excitement, absolutely twittering about the brain. They lower their voices when I come in, raise them when I leave again. Later, I feel compelled to ask Clare some questions: What is Harvey’s magic? Does the brain turn her on? Does she feel hypnotized? “He’s a very, very interesting man,” she says. “And for some men chivalry is not dead. Did you see him pull out my chair for me before dinner?”

  Before bed, we take a hot tub. I’m confident that Harvey will sit this one out, but, no sir, he doesn’t. Shambles out in a borrowed bathrobe and swim trunks, dips a toe in the boiling water. It’s a pretty chilly night, stars glazed in the sky like cold coins on black ice, and it’s hard not to worry about the physiological ramifications of dropping an eighty-four-year-old body into 104-degree water. But Harvey just throws himself in like a heavy stone. “OH, OH, HEH-HEH. WOW, THAT’S HOT. WOW, WOW, WOW!!!” We simmer for a while, and, chitchatting over the bubbler, it slips out that in my earlier absence Harvey opened the duffel for Clare, unpeeled the Tupperware top, fingered chunks of the brain, and expansively answered questions for her. Rightly or wrongly, this infuriates me. I want to say something about how unfair it is that I’ve driven two thousand miles so far and not been allowed to examine the brain, while Clare, doing nothing but being her friendly self, got to see the brain instantly. But when I look over at Harvey, he has his eyes closed, in a wonderful trance, his pale body streaming out from him underwater. I wait for as long as I can take it, really, expecting to outlast him as a kind of revenge. But damn if he doesn’t seem to gain strength. Finally, grudgingly, I lift myself from the tub, from its magic eternal spring, and splosh inside, leaving him in the dark waters, keening softly with pleasure—ahhh, play-sure!—alone beneath the cosmos.

  Near Kingman, Arizona. February 23.

  We reach one of those strange moments in the course of every road trip, exhaustion spilling into a kind of ecstasy, towns darkly iridescent like trout in a river. All things—the strains of “Wild Horses” on the radio, the galactic motion of driving, the purple night—seem like one perfect, unalloyed thing, haunted through. Like Charles Lindbergh, who believed that there were spirits riding with him over the Atlantic Ocean, we feel the presence of ghosts. Approaching the Hoover Dam, I stupidly pass a VW Bug and by the hairbreadth grace of God just barely avoid a head-on collision with a lumbering truck. Its lights, broken out like jewels on the grill, spell MARIANNE, the name of my mother.