Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  Ever the rambler, Harvey decides to take public transportation—BART—and then have his cousin pick him up at the station. And so he does. We pile into the Skylark and drive to a nearby station, Harvey in the backseat with the brain. Although Harvey and I will meet again tomorrow for a visit with the neuroanatomist Marian Diamond, and although we will share a heartfelt goodbye as I drop him off at the train station again (he on his way to the airport to fly back home, me off to visit friends), this parting feels like the real end of our trip. At the station, Harvey opens his case and presents Evelyn with a postcard: a black-and-white photo of himself looking pensive in a striped turtleneck, his ear the size of a small slipper, gazing sleepy-eyed at some form in the distance, some ghostly presence. “That’s a very nice one,” she says politely.

  “Yessir,” says Harvey. “Couldn’t have been happier to meet …”

  It all seems so anticlimactic, but so appropriate. So like Harvey. And then he’s off with his suitcase full of cellophane-wrapped clothes, caught in a river of people drifting toward the escalators, spilling underground, the silver tassel of his hair catching the light, then his body going down and down into the catacomb’s shadow.

  It’s not until after Evelyn and I have had dinner that we realize the brain is still with us. In fact, it’s sitting on the car’s backseat in its bubble of Tupperware, lit by a streetlight, slopping in formaldehyde. It has been there for three hours, as Evelyn told me over dessert about the ugly schisms and legal battles inside her family for letters left behind by “Albie.” Given Harvey’s well-documented guardianship of the brain, it seems impossible that he’s just forgotten it, but then maybe not. Maybe, through some unconscious lapse or some odd, oblique act of intention, he has left it for us. A passing of the brain to the next generation. My giddiness is now rivaled only by my sudden paranoia. What if it gets ripped off?

  “He left the brain?” says Evelyn. “Does he do this often?”

  “Nope,” I say, and suddenly we are smiling at each other.

  We don’t look at it right away—right there in full view of the strolling sidewalk masses—but drive back to Evelyn’s apartment by the bay. I stop in front of the building with the Skylark idling. I reach back and take the Tupperware in my hands, then unseal the lid, and, in the dome light of the car, open the container.

  After all these miles, all these days on the road during which I felt taunted by the gray duffel, the big reveal has arrived. Bits of the brain are pouched in a white cloth, floating in formaldehyde. When I unravel the cloth, maybe a dozen golf-ball-sized chunks of the brain spill out—parts from the cerebral cortex and the frontal lobe. The smell of formaldehyde smacks us like a backhand, and for a moment I actually feel as if I might puke. The pieces are sealed in celloidin—the liver-colored blobs of brain rimmed by gold wax. I pick some out of the plastic container and hand a few to Evelyn. They feel squishy, weigh about the same as very light beach stones. We hold them up like jewelers, marveling at how they seem less like a brain than—what?—some kind of snack food, some kind of energy chunk for genius triathletes. Or an edible product that offers the consumer world peace, space travel, eternity. Even today, the Asmat of Irian Jaya believe that to consume a brain is to gain the mystical essence of another person. But to be absolutely honest, I never thought that, holding Einstein’s brain, I’d somehow imagine eating it.

  “So this is what all the fuss is about,” says Evelyn. She pokes at the brain nuggets still in the Tupperware, laps formaldehyde on them. A security guard walks by and glances at us, then keeps walking. There is, I must admit, something entirely bizarre about Evelyn messing around with her grandfather’s brain, checking his soggy neurons. But she seems more intrigued than grossed out. “You could make a nice necklace of this one,” she says, holding up a circular piece of brain. “This is pretty weird, huh?”

  Watching her in the cast of dome light—an impression of her sadness returning to me, the thrill of adrenaline confusing everything—I’m overcome with a desire to make her happy for a moment. Without thinking, I say, “You should take it.” Then I remind her that Harvey had offered her a piece earlier but had never given it to her. “It belongs to you anyway,” I say. Weeks later, on the phone, she’ll tell me, “I wish I’d taken it.” But now, sitting back in the teal velour of the Skylark, she says, “I couldn’t.”

  Instead, she puts the pieces back in the Tupperware, closes it, and hands it to me. She gets out of the car and heavily walks herself inside.

  Which leaves just me and the brain.

  The Flamingo Motel. February 28.

  We, the brain and I, drive the East Shore Freeway to University Avenue—skirting the bay, all black and glassed-over, San Francisco on the other side like so many lit-up missile silos—and then head toward Shattuck Avenue. Although I’m exhausted, I suddenly feel very free, have this desire to start driving back across America, sans Harvey. On the radio, there’s a local talk show about UFOs, an expert insisting that in February 1954, Eisenhower disappeared for three days, allegedly making contact with aliens.

  It would appear, as we go from no vacancy to no vacancy, that all the inns of Berkeley are full. All the inns but the Flamingo Motel—a pink, concrete, L-shaped, forties-style two-story with a mod neon rendering of a flamingo. A fleabag. But it’s enough. A double bed, a bathroom, a rotary phone. Some brother partyers have an upstairs room at the far end of the motel and are drinking cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon. As I carry the brain up to my room they eye me, then hoot and toss their crushed cans over the banister into the parking lot.

  Inside, I’m hit with an industrial-sized wallop of disinfectant. The room is the size of a couple of horse stalls with a rust-colored unvacuumed shag rug scorched with cigarette burns. A few stations come in on the television, which is bolted high on the wall. Nightline is getting to the bottom of the sheep cloning business. It’s been a long day, and yet the brain has got me pumped up. I try to make a phone call, but the line is dead. I try to write some postcards, but my pen explodes. By some trick of the room’s mirror, it seems that there are lights levitating everywhere. Finally, not quite knowing what to do, I go to bed. I put Einstein’s brain on one pillow and rest my own head on the other one next to it, fewer than four inches away. Just to see. I’ve come four thousand miles for this moment, and now all I do is fall asleep. Light from the road slips over the room—a greenish, underwater glow—and the traffic noise dims. I can hear beer cans softly pattering down on the pavement, then nothing.

  It’s possible that in our dreams we enter a different dimension of the universe. On this night, it’s possible that I suddenly have three wives and ten kids and twelve grandchildren, that I’ve become Harvey himself, that I open up bodies to find more bodies and open those bodies to find that I’m falling through space and time. It’s possible that in some other dimension, I am Robert Oppenheimer and Mahatma Gandhi, Billie Holiday and Adolf Hitler, Honus Wagner and Olga Korbut. I am Navajo and Cambodian and Tutsi. I am Túpac Amaru and NASA astronaut. I am a scattering, I am a billionaire, I am a person in a field in North Dakota about to be abducted by a UFO. It’s possible, too, that I am nobody, or rather only myself, slightly dazed and confused, curled in a question mark in a pink motel with Einstein’s brain on the pillow by my head.

  When I wake the next morning, craving coffee, there is only the world as I know it again—the desk chair in its place, the wrappered soap in the shower, the brain sitting demurely on its pillow, the Flamingo still the Flamingo, with cigarette burns in the rusty rug. There’s a sudden grand beauty to its shoddiness.

  When I step outside into the bright early-morning sun of California, I have the top off the Tupperware. And although later I will return the brain to Harvey, I am for a brief moment the man with the plan, the keeper of the cosmos. Do I feel the thing that all totems and fetishes make people feel? Something that I can believe in? A power larger than myself that I can submit to? Salvation? Have I touched eternity?

  I’m not sure. The beer cans s
trewn in the parking lot make out the rough shape of America, surrounded by pools of sudsy, gold liquid. And the birds have come down out of the sky and they’re drinking from it. Even now, the universe is filling with dark matter. We are slowing down. Snowballs the size of jumbo trucks are pelting our atmosphere. Perhaps a meteor has just been bumped into a new flight pattern, straight toward Earth, and we won’t know anything about it until it explodes us all, as meteors once exploded the dinosaurs.

  But I am here now. In the now now. Day has come back up from the other side of the earth, the birds have come down from the sky. There are flashes of orange light, the air is flooded with honeysuckle. I feel something I can’t quite put my finger on, something euphoric but deeply unsayable. Is it love or just not hate? Is it joy or just not sadness? For a moment, all of time seems to flow through the Flamingo, its bright edges reflecting the past and the present, travelers packing their bags and rivering into some farther future. We are always driving with our secrets in the trunk, amazed by the cows and rainbows and palm trees. And do I dare to think that there will be no ending of the world, of America, of ourselves? I do. I really do. For in some recurrence, in some light wave, in some shimmer of time, we are out there now, and forever, existing, even as surely as Einstein himself continues to exist, here in my hands.

  * * *

  1. According to newspaper accounts following Einstein’s death, mystery immediately shrouded the brain. Dr. Zimmerman, on staff at New York City’s Montefiore Medical Center, expected to receive Einstein’s brain from Harvey, but never, in fact, did; Princeton Hospital decided not to relinquish the brain. Harvey, however, also decided not to relinquish the brain, and at some point removed it from the hospital.

  2. Later, when I visit Kruger in Los Angeles amid the clutter of his office, which includes an oversized book entitled A Dendro-cyto-myeloarchitectonic Atlas of the Cat’s Brain, he’s a bit more judicious. “What [Harvey] did is probably illegal,” he tells me. “I guess he must be a slightly strange guy.… Had he been smart, he would have given it up and moved away from it, but he was grandstanding, and I presume he paid a price for it.”

  3. An accomplished philanderer, he also flouted the conventional morals of his day. “Einstein loved women,” Peter Plesch, whose father was a close friend, once said of the physicist, “and the commoner and sweatier and smellier they were, the better he liked them.” To live so completely in his head, he held the real world close—women, sailboats, a sudden meal of ten pounds of strawberries.

  THE ACCIDENT

  THE ACCIDENT—THE FIRST ONE—OCCURRED ON THE Wednesday night before Thanksgiving of my senior year in high school. It left one friend injured and one dead, and for a while afterward, the whole thing seemed so surreal and impossible that all we could do—friends, family, anyone connected but not in the accident itself—was try to re-create the simultaneities of that evening, the first person at the scene, the shock of the couple at the nearby house from which the call was made for an ambulance, and then: who called whom and who was where when they heard. Given our own shock, we couldn’t imagine the parents of the victims hearing those first words: There’s been an accident …

  When the news reached my family that night, in that orbit of calls, my parents, perhaps like other parents among our friends, presumed their child might have been in the car, which wasn’t the case, though might have been, had I made a different decision earlier that evening. For us seniors, it was a gloriously free night with no school the next day, a holiday from everything, including our cursed college apps. Mine was spent with my girlfriend, so I missed the preparty, and then the ride to the real party. And so I missed the accident, too.

  There were two cars, belonging to Jax and Flynn, driving from the beach north up through town to someone’s parentless house. Riding with Jax was Seger, and with Flynn, Xavier. On a stretch of road by one of the town’s country clubs, Jax lost control of his car, hit a telephone pole, and skidded a hundred feet into a tree. The crash drove the engine through the dashboard. The Jaws of Life was required to cut the bodies from the wreckage.

  At that moment—as the first siren sounded, as the first numbers were dialed, as the bodies were gathered and rushed away—I was watching a movie/eating Chinese/on a bed with my girlfriend, I can’t remember exactly. Lost in the oblivious haze of youth, I was oddly certain, like billions of teenagers before me, that nothing would ever touch us there.

  Until, of course, it did.

  Growing up, we had this odd thing in our town: an ambulance service run by kids. It’s still there today, in fact—thriving. Then, it was housed in a defunct red train station that rattled and roared every time a passing commuter train rushed by on its way to Manhattan. In winter, icy gusts came lunging through the walls. There was a garage with two ambulances, and off of it, a cramped radio room. Inside the station was an open common area, where presumably tickets had once been sold, but which now hosted our training sessions and organizational meetings. Upstairs, there was a loft where the CPR mannequins were stashed. Sometimes you’d forget and go up there at midnight to turn out a light and nearly have a heart attack at all those synthetic bodies laid out, staring dumbly at the ceiling.

  The ambulance service had been founded in the seventies, as a way for teenagers to understand the ravages of drugs by working with addicts in a nearby town. Then it morphed into a first-response ambulance. It was as if some Hollywood execs had sat around spitballing one-line pitches for after-school specials, until someone blurted, “Emergency … but with kids in charge.” Of course, we had a cadre of adult advisers, who played a vital role—and our mercurial, fifty-something patriarch who cursed and yelled and berated everyone, calling them “boobie,” in an attempt to gauge our toughness. And yet it was we teenagers who did the bulk of the work. We started in the radio room in ninth grade, and graduated to gofer on the ambulance in tenth, then went on to become EMTs and ambulance drivers. As an experiment, the ambulance had succeeded a little too thoroughly, and by the time I came along, there were about fifty of us who worked there in one capacity or another.

  Still, there were those in town who wondered: Could a sixteen-year-old EMT (someone who had only recently learned to drive a car) really help at, let alone handle, the worst accidents? It became our job, then, to be overdiligent and professional so as not to let anyone down. On every night of the week, including weekends, holidays, and religious days, a crew was “on duty” at the rickety station, where we’d run through checklists, train, sit and do homework, or just flirt and shoot the shit, pimply, hormonal teenagers that we were. From 6:00 P.M. to midnight, we acted as first responders, clad in our “whites” (a curious uniform choice for those dealing in blood) and orange fluorescent jackets. The rest of the time we carried pagers, in school, at practice, wherever. And our precious weekends were soon filled with fund-raising, myriad chores at headquarters, and more training courses, including hours logged at a local emergency room. In this, we were taught to regard each new accident with a sort of dispassionate intensity, no matter how extreme the circumstance.

  Initially, however, I remember a lot of time spent blowing air into those synthetic mannequins, real lip to plastic lip, thrusting palms down on fake chests loaded with thick springs, and, at the end, paper readouts issuing from a slot at the ribs, a ticker showing the peaks and valleys that gauged one’s efficacy at giving CPR. Repetition made for perfection on those fake bodies, though reality, I would soon find to my dismay, could be different. When the grandfather of the boy next door keeled over on the lawn, I lined my palm up on his sternum as I’d been instructed—and had succeeded at so many times before on the dummies—and with the first thrust, felt three real ribs give way.

  When it came to treating victims, every kid at the ambulance had at least one call that remained indelible—maybe a multicar crash on the highway, maybe a cardiac arrest or a house fire or head injury—that introduced us to a world of pain and grief we hadn’t known before, that took us behind the veil of our town.
I recall responding to a daytime suicide, at a house not more than a mile from my own, and when we spilled out of the ambulance and hustled through the strobes in our bright uniforms, hoping to save the overcast day, fix the wrong, piece back the body—crazy-competent mini-adults that we were—one unimpressed police officer stopped us short on the doorstep.

  “You’re not going in there,” he said. When we insisted, he exhaled an exasperated sigh and added, “She slit her goddamn wrists in the tub, and you’re kids, and I’m not letting you in there.” I remember we protested, outraged that he’d called us kids, and we wouldn’t leave the scene, waging our own quiet sit-in, until we were finally called off by an adult adviser. But even as we worked ourselves into a bruit, I had this nightmare image of a submerged naked body, blood streaming from her wrists, face twisted in some ghoulish rictus.

  Half an hour later, I was sitting back in Calculus, trying to figure out a derivative.

  The night of the accident I returned home from my girlfriend’s house to find my parents and my sixteen-year-old brother sitting grimly at the kitchen table, a scene that undoubtedly played out in other kitchens across town, too. My dad, who would have been in his late forties at the time—my age now as I write this—was a business executive who worked long hours, seemed to have boundless energy for house projects on the weekend, and made sure we were at church each Sunday morning, where he often volunteered as a lector. My mom, a country girl transplanted to suburbia, possessed a deep reserve of patience for her four wilding boys. Among them I was the oldest, recently sprouting up an inch taller than my dad, attaining full, moody man-boy status. In that moment, I knew nothing really, and was being told nothing. My parents said they’d drive me to the hospital; I said I could drive myself, but they were having none of it.