Love and Other Ways of Dying (15 page)

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,” as 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.”)

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?