Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  Gonzalez has reserved us rooms at the Biltmore Hotel, but when we arrive around 2:00 A.M., out on some industrial edge of San Jose, there’s only one available room left, with a single bed. “Why, I’m sure it’s a big one,” says Harvey with a nervous chuckle.

  I ask for a cot. And by the time I roll it into the room, the gray duffel is up on the television with the weather on and Harvey is snorkeling through his suitcase, each item of his clothing—his silk pajamas, a 49ers sweatshirt, his slippers, and a dress shirt—wrapped in cellophane. He has brought two suits for tomorrow, neatly folded like big bat wings in his case, a black winter worsted wool and a baby-blue leisure-type suit that puts me in mind of a carnival barker or a midwestern aluminum-siding salesman.

  I collapse on the cot, and no sooner do I hit the pillow than I’m wide awake. But I keep my head buried as Harvey putters about the room. I can hear him running water in the sink, clearing his throat, ironing. I can hear him rustling through his cellophane-wrapped clothes, then perusing his various articles on Einstein, preparing for his lecture. I can hear something that sounds like an electric toothbrush. Before the sun rises, he finally beds down, and his breathing slows and then grows deeper, like a river running into pools. Instead of snoring, there’s a sweet lowing in his theta-gasps for air, and finally it puts me to sleep, too. When I wake to the crunching of Harvey eating caramel corn, it’s 8:00 A.M., and he’s half dressed, having opted for the black suit with black suspenders and a gray turtleneck, though the weather is verging on summer. Sarah Gonzalez calls and announces that she’s in the lobby, nearly an hour early. While Harvey primps, I go to meet her. She’s the only person at the bar, busily doing something with her hands. When I come closer, I realize that she is pressing on a set of acrylic fingernails. For a moment, she doesn’t notice that I’m standing there, and we both admire her handiwork. When she looks up, she seems surprised. “Oh,” she says, extends an automatic hand with half new nails and half bitten ones, and peeks around me for Harvey and the brain.

  Sarah Gonzalez is a short, pretty, quick-moving Filipino woman with black-and-gold sunglasses and an ostentatious emerald car. In her mood and mannerisms she reminds me of a brushfire in a high wind. She personifies the immigrant’s dream. A former executive secretary, she is now the president of her own company, Pacific Connections, which markets biomass energy conversion—or, as she puts it, “turning cornstalks to megawatts.” Next week, she tells me, she will be in Manila meeting with the Filipino president, Fidel V. Ramos, in hopes of bringing the gift of energy—more lights and televisions—to her country of birth.

  When Harvey comes chugging out, she blanches, then starts forward. “Dr. Harvey, I presume,” says Gonzalez, clucking and bowing her head. “I can’t believe there’s someone living and breathing who was so close to Einstein.” Harvey has removed the brain from the gray duffel and now holds the Tupperware container in his hand, though the plastic is clouded enough that you can really see only urine-colored liquid inside. Suddenly, it feels as if we’re not fully clothed. Even as Harvey palms the brain in the lobby, I feel a need to hide it. Gonzalez herself doesn’t notice and rushes us into her Mercury Grand Marquis. She’s a woman who enjoys the liberal use of first names. “Mike, what do you think of this scandal, Mike?” she asks. “This—how do you say?—campaign-contribution scandal, Mike?” She is perhaps the most persistently friendly person I’ve ever met.

  Harvey sits in the front bucket seat, sunk down in the fine Italian leather, the fabric of his own suit, by comparison, dull and aged; there’s a tiny hole in one knee of his heavy suit pants. He clears his throat repeatedly and starts to chuckle. “Do you know a fella named Burroughs, William Burroughs?” She’s never heard of him. Harvey tries again.

  “Where does Gates live?”

  “Bill Gates, Dr. Harvey? That would be Seattle, I think. Isn’t that right, Mike? Seattle, Mike?”

  “I thought that fella lived right here in Silicon Valley,” says Harvey, hawkeyeing the streets suspiciously. A little later on, Harvey’s more at ease, sets himself chuckling again. “Those are the funniest-looking trees,” he says.

  “They are palm trees, Dr. Harvey,” says Gonzalez.

  We are given a brief tour of “old San Jose”—a collection of Day-Glo houses that look brand-new—then stop at Gonzalez’s house, a comfortable bungalow on a cul-de-sac where she lives with her husband and five children, two of them teenagers. A full drum kit is set up in the living room. One gets the impression that when this house is full there’s probably nothing here but love and a hell of a racket. Meeting her husband, I retract her title and claim him as the friendliest person I’ve ever met. “Oh, Dr. Harvey, what does it feel like to be you?” he asks. He serves us cookies and milk. Finally, after photographs have been taken on the front lawn, we start to leave. Harvey reaches down and lifts a pinecone from the perfect, chemical-fed turf. He holds it up, admiring its symmetry, and for reasons of his own pockets it.

  Then we drive to Independence High, where we are picked up by a golf cart at the front entrance and whisked a half mile through campus. Harvey delivers his lecture in a dim, egg-cavern room flooded with students and the smell of bubble gum. Some wear baggy Starter sweats or jeans pulled low off their hips or unlaced high-tops; some have pierced noses or tongues or eyebrows. Some are white or Asian or Latino or African American. A number of boys have shaved the sides of their heads and wear moptops or Egyptian pharaoh dos; a number of the girls have dyed hair, all colors of the rainbow.

  The teachers shush everyone, but the hormonal thrum here defies complete silence, and there’s a low-level sputter of laughter like a car chuffing even after the ignition’s been turned off. And then suddenly Sarah Gonzalez is introducing Harvey, the gold of her glasses synonymous with success, and Harvey, shaped like a black candy cane, is stumping to the podium, looking every bit the retired undertaker. He clears his throat and chuckles and then clears his throat again. He runs his hands up and down the side of the podium and focuses on a spot at the back of the room, rheumy-eyed, squinting. These are the thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-olds of America—hundreds of clear eyes reflecting back at him, brains obsessed with Silverchair, Tupac, Blossom, and Brandy—and Harvey seems at a loss, begins a droning, discombobulated, start-and-stop remembrance of Albert Einstein almost as if he’s talking to himself.

  “The Great Scientist would eventually come up with the equation E = mc2, and how he did that I’ll never know, heh-heh …

  “He was a friendly person. Real easy to talk to, you know. Wore flannels and tennis shoes a lot …

  “I was just real lucky to be at the right place at the right time …”

  Einstein’s animated face is projected on a screen, Harvey’s impassive one beneath it. When Harvey senses he’s losing his audience, he tells them about the autopsy, about the Great Scientist lying on the table and how his brain was removed. “He liked the fatty foods, you know,” says Harvey. “That’s what he died of.” He starts slowly for the Tupperware and the entire audience leans forward in their seats, crane their necks, hold their collective breath. For the first time, there is complete silence.

  He pops the lid and unabashedly fishes around for some of the brain, then holds up a chunk of it. It’s almost like a dream—illogically logical, shockingly normal. My first real glimpse of the Tupperwared brain on this trip, and it’s with three hundred other strangers. One girl squeals, and general chaotic murmurings fill the room. Kids come to their feet in waves of “ohhhhs” and “ahhhs.” The smell of formaldehyde wafts thickly over them, a scent of the ages, and drives them back on their heels.

  Harvey natters on, but no one is really listening now, just gasping at these blobs of brain. “I took the meninges off.… This is a little bit of the cortex.… He had more glial cells than the rest of us—those are the cells that nourish the neurons …”

  They are transfixed by the liver-colored slices as if it’s all a macabre Halloween joke. They are repulsed and captivated by the
man whose fingers are wet with brain. Sarah Gonzalez stands up, slightly disheveled, flushed in the face. “Children, questions! Ask Dr. Harvey your questions!”

  One swaggering boy in the back of the room raises his hand, seemingly offended: “Yeah, but like, WHAT’S THE POINT?”

  Harvey doesn’t hear, puts his hand behind his ear to signal that he doesn’t hear, and a teacher sitting nearby translates: “He wants to know what the point is,” says the teacher politely.

  Harvey hesitates for a second, then almost seems angry. “To see the difference between your brain and a genius’s,” he shoots back.

  The crowd titters. A girl throws a high five at her best friend. “Dang, girl.”

  The old man is cool!

  Another boy in the back stands. “I was told, like, Einstein didn’t want people to take his brain.”

  Again the teacher translates, and as soon as Harvey processes the question he bristles. “Where are you getting your information?” he says.

  “My world government teacher,” the boy says.

  Harvey ponders this, then responds, as if it’s answer enough, “In Germany, it’s very common to do an autopsy and take the brain out.”

  When the period ends, the students storm Harvey and the brain. They want to know how long he’s had it (forty-two years). Whether he plans to clone it (“Way-ell, under the right conditions someday, I suppose it might be done”). Whether an evil dictator such as Qaddafi might try to get his hands on it (“Heh-heh-heh”). I try to get close, but the crowd is too thick, the crush too great, and so I stand on the edge with Gonzalez. Even as Harvey goes to leave later, a few students come up and a boy says, “Yo, man, where you going next? Can we follow?” Harvey flushes with triumph, stammers that he doesn’t really know where he’s going now, as Sarah Gonzalez leads him to a seat in a waiting golf cart.

  When we pull away, I wonder what we must look like to the students waving goodbye. Harvey rides shotgun as always, with the Tupperwared brain on his lap—a man beyond their own grandfathers, someone from a different dimension in time and space, really, lit down here for a weird moment at Independence High, then away again, vanishing on a golf cart down the concrete superstring sidewalks of their world.

  Berkeley, California. February 27.

  We’ve reached the end of the road. Evelyn Einstein greets us at the door to her bayside apartment complex in a black jumper, wearing two Star Trek pins and globe earrings. Nearly a head taller than Harvey, she’s a big-boned fifty-six-year-old though looks younger, with a short bob of brown hair. Due to a series of illnesses over the past few years, she walks in small steps and breathes heavily after the slightest exertion. She gives off an aura of enormous sadness, though her powers of humor and forgiveness seem to run equally deep. Despite the distress that Harvey’s removal of the brain caused her father—Hans Albert—and the rest of the family, she has invited him to her house.

  Evelyn is known to be the adopted daughter of Hans Albert, though the circumstance of her lineage is a bit clouded. Rumor has it that she was born as a result of an affair between Einstein and a dancer. And at least one doctor, Charles Boyd, believing the same, tried but failed to match the DNA of Albert’s brain matter and Evelyn’s skin, given that the brain sample was too denatured. Whatever the truth, however, her resemblance to Einstein, the mirthful play of light in her heavy-lidded eyes and the Picasso shape of her face, is uncanny. Evelyn herself ruefully says, “If you believe in what Albert said about time, then I’m really his grandmother anyway.”

  From her light-filled living room, you can see the skyline of San Francisco, Angel Island rising from the sun-flecked blue bay, Mount Tamalpais lurking in the distance. Among artifacts and antique clocks, Evelyn offers us seats. We have come a long way—almost four thousand miles, to be exact—and yet it feels like Harvey would like to be anywhere else but here. Evelyn sits down. I fall onto the plush couch, overcome with relief and exhaustion. Harvey remains standing.

  Evelyn tells us about what it was like to grow up as an Einstein, how her life became an exercise in navigating the jagged shoals of her family. Her father had inherited a degree of his own father’s cold distance—she refers to her grandfather only as Albert or Albie—and Evelyn found herself shipped off to school in Switzerland. She came back to Berkeley for college, had a bad marriage, lived for a year on the streets, then later worked as a cop in Berkeley and afterward with cult members and their families. She has very few remembrances of her grandfather. Most of the letters he’d once sent her were stolen.

  As she says this, Harvey still stands frozen in the middle of the room, speechless. Evelyn does what she can to politely ignore him, asks me innocuous questions about the trip, waiting for him to sit, too. But he doesn’t. He just stands there, his arms limply at his sides. He breathes more quickly. Somewhere in his head, virulent, radioactive cells of what?—guilt?—proliferate and mushroom. He stands awkwardly in the middle of the room and just won’t sit, can’t sit, holds the brain in its Tupperware, trembling in his left hand. Having arrived here, does he now have second thoughts? Could he ever have imagined, those forty-two years ago when he cut the brain from Einstein’s head, that he would ultimately present himself in the court of Evelyn Einstein’s living room with the contraband in his hands?

  The fourth time Evelyn offers him a seat he takes it. He laughs nervously, then clears his throat. “Real good,” he says. Evelyn is talking about cults, how frightening they are and how what’s most frightening about cults is that it’s you and I who end up getting sucked in, how easy mind control really is. “All my friends say I should start one,” she says, joking. “I could channel Albert. I mean, when Linda Evans channels Ramtha she talks like Yul Brynner. It’s just hysterical. If this broad can channel a thirty-thousand-year-old guy, I can channel Albert.”

  Having summoned his courage, Harvey abruptly pulls out a sheaf of photographs and slides with cresyl violet stains of axons and glial cells, then plunks the Tupperware on the table. “Ah, brain time,” says Evelyn, and Harvey just begins talking as if he’s talking to the youngsters at Independence High School again. “This is a picture of the brain from different aspects, olfactory nerve, and so forth.” He pulls out a photo of Einstein. “I like to show this picture because it shows him as a younger man, you know, when he first came over to be an American. So many of the photos you see of him are when he was an older man.”

  “I have a lot when he was young,” says Evelyn.

  “You do? I’ll trade you some,” says Harvey.

  “Did you autopsy the whole body?”

  “The whole body.”

  “What was that like?”

  Harvey pauses a moment, clears his throat. “Why, it made me feel humble and insignificant.”

  “Did he have a gallbladder? Or had they taken it out?”

  “I think he still had a gallbladder. Heh-heh. Yeah, his diet was his nemesis, you know, because he lived before we knew what cholesterol did to the blood, so he probably walked around with high blood cholesterol, much of it being deposited in his blood vessels. That aorta, that was just full of cholesterol plaque.”

  Evelyn nods. “Yeah … well, of course, the European diet … my father and I would fight over fat. When we got a ham, we would cut off the fat and fry it, then fight over it. Bitterly.” Evelyn smiles.

  “And all that good goose grease,” chimes in Harvey.

  “Oh yeah. Well, in those days goose … well, goose is actually a lot safer than beef, a lot less cholesterol.”

  “Oh yeah? I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s a family that just adored fat,” she says.

  “I used to eat in a little inn up in Metuchen, New Jersey, where your grandfather would spend weekends, and they had these cheeses, you know, full-fat cheeses and nice wines.”

  “I don’t know if he was into wines,” says Evelyn.

  “I never saw him drink it myself,” says Harvey, forgetting, then perhaps remembering, that he met Einstein only once. “Well
, the innkeeper had a good supply of wine, and I thought it was for your grandfather. Maybe it wasn’t.”

  There’s some talk about the size of the brain. Evelyn contends that at 1,230 grams it qualifies as microcephalic—that is, smaller than normal—according to a 1923 edition of Gray’s Anatomy in her possession, but Harvey insists that the brain was normal size for a man Einstein’s age, given the fact that brains shrink over time. He lets her see some slides but seems unwilling to open the Tupperware. When I ask him if he’d show us pieces of the brain, he seems a bit put out, uncaps the lid for a moment, then almost immediately lids it. He offers Evelyn a piece—to which she says, “That would be wonderful”—then, curiously, never gives it to her. Evelyn appears perplexed, as am I. After all of this, it seems, Harvey has decided that there will be no show-and-tell with the actual gray matter.

  “I’m amazed they didn’t work with the brain earlier, right away when he died, actually,” Evelyn says. Harvey gets uncomfortable again, stiffening into his pillar of salt. The words slow as they come from his mouth: something about the fissure of Sylvius, occipital lobe, cingulate gyrus. All of it a part of some abstract painting, some hocus-pocus act. “It took us a while,” he says finally.

  And then Harvey abruptly tries to end the meeting. “Way-ell, it’s been a real play-sure,” he says, taking us by surprise. And then he explains: Earlier, in San Jose, unbeknownst to me, he made a call to his eighty-five-year-old cousin in San Mateo and now insists that he must go spend the night there, assuming that I will take him more than halfway back to San Jose in rush-hour traffic. But to come this far for only half an hour? And besides, Evelyn has made reservations for us all to have dinner. But nothing sways Harvey. I suggest that his cousin join us or that we visit his cousin in the morning after rush hour. Harvey stands firm; then I stand firm. After four thousand miles of driving, I, for one, intend to eat with the daughter-granddaughter of Albert Einstein. Harvey gets on the phone with his cousin and says loudly enough so that I can hear, “The chauffeur won’t give me a ride.”