Love and Other Ways of Dying (14 page)

“Dobryi den,”
the boy said in a startled whisper. He looked up into the branches, gazed upon Leonid’s face there, and stumbled. Then he put his head down and hurried on.

It took two days to get home. In the lounge at the airport in Munich, still itching madly, I realized that something smelled. Did anyone bathe in Germany? Yes, they did. It was me: I smelled like Podoliantsi, and I could tell people were thinking twice about sitting near me. I got up and found a terminal shower that I could use and stood in warm, clear water for nearly a half hour, washing it all away.

On the flight to Boston, I looked down on the world for any signs of life on land and sea, but from that height many of the fine details of the earth, including large houses and tankers, were simply erased. After landing at Logan, I waited in line, passed through customs, and again waited for my luggage to appear from behind rubber ribbons, trusting it would. The minute it did, I ran like a madman for the bus. I was so shot through with adrenaline, I was floating.

Soon the bus cloverleafed onto the highway. Two hours north now, to home, fitting neatly in my seat. When I saw this familiar land outside the window—fall here, too, flat land with its own forest flaring—and when I saw my wife, her stomach rounded against her sweater, and my daughter in funny pigtails there at the station, waiting, and I could finally touch them again, and when I lifted and held my little boy, Leo, in my arms again
and felt my heart beating hard enough to know that I wanted to live a very long time, I took his hand up against mine, just to check, just to see what had occurred in my absence.

His hand lay in mine, and I felt its weight: the bones and the smooth, scarless skin so soft it didn’t seem real. Mine dwarfed his, but still I held his hand up and inspected his fingers for a moment. He thought I was being funny, and he laughed, a little-boy giggle. His breath smelled like cookies. Yes, his fingers were bigger, and I was not frightened. Maybe the betrayals lay out before us somewhere in our murky future. Maybe we were all growing until someday nothing would work for us anymore. But I was not frightened. I was filled with joy.

It read four o’clock on the wall—on the East Coast of the United States of America—and at that very moment, somewhere, the giant was sleeping on his oversized bed. His huge shoes lay empty near the doorway, his pants thrown over the chair. His enormous suit hung in the closet, waiting.

Soon he would rise to milk the cows, feed the pigs, pick the rest of the apples. In the dirt lane before his house, carts would come and go, bearing payloads of huge purple hearts. And there he would be, the giant, alone up in the apple tree, gently picking fruit, humming the notes again.

At the bus station, my children began singing.

I
N THE BEGINNING
,
THERE WAS A
brain. All of the universe was the size of this brain, floating in space. Until one day it simply exploded. Out poured photons and quarks and leptons. Out flew dust particles like millions of fast-moving birds into the expanding aviary of the cosmos. Cooked heavy elements—silicon, magnesium, and nickel—were sucked into a pocket and balled together under great pressure and morphed with the organic matter of our solar system. Lo, the planets!

Our world—Earth—was covered with lava, then granite mountains. Oceans formed, a wormy thing crawled from the sea. There were pea-brained brontosauri and fiery meteor showers and gnawing, hairy-backed monsters that kept coming and coming—these furious little stumps, human beings,
us.
Under the hot sun, we roasted different colors, fornicated, and fought. Full of wonder, we attached words to the sky and the mountains and the water, and claimed them as our own. We named ourselves Homer, Sappho, Humperdinck, and Nixon. We made bewitching
sonatas and novels and paintings. Stargazed and built great cities. Exterminated some people. Settled the West. Cooked meat and slathered it with special sauce. Did the hustle. Built the strip mall.

And in the end, after billions of years of evolution, a pink two-story motel rose up on a drag of asphalt in Berkeley, California. The Flamingo Motel. There, a man stepped out onto the balcony in a bright beam of millennial sunlight, holding the original universe in his hands, in a Tupperware container, and for one flickering moment he saw into the future. I can picture this man now: He needs a haircut, he needs some coffee.

But not yet, not before rewind and start again. Not long ago. In Maine on a bus. In Massachusetts on a train. In Connecticut behind the wheel of a shiny, teal-colored rental car. The engine purrs. I should know, I’m the driver. I’m on my way to pick up an eighty-four-year-old man named Thomas Harvey, who lives in a modest, low-slung 1950s ranch that belongs to his sixty-seven-year-old girlfriend, Cleora. To get there you carom through New Jersey’s exurbia, through swirls of dead leaves and unruly thickets of oak and pine that give way to well-ordered fields of roan, buttermilk, and black snorting atoms—horses. Harvey greets me at the door, stooped and chuckling nervously, wearing a red-and-white plaid shirt and a solid-blue Pendleton tie that still bears a waterlogged $10 price tag from some earlier decade. He has peckled, blowsy skin runneled with lines, an eagle nose, stubbed yellow teeth, bitten nails, and a spray of white hair as fine as corn silk that shifts with the wind over the bald patches on his head. He could be one of a million beach-bound, black-socked Florida retirees, not the man who, by some odd happenstance of life, possesses the brain of Albert Einstein. But, in fact, he possesses the brain of Albert Einstein, literally cut it out of the dead scientist’s head.

Harvey has stoked a fire in the basement, which is dank and dark, and I sit among crocheted rugs and genie bottles of blown glass, Ethiopian cookbooks, and macramé. It has taken me more than a year to find Harvey, and during that time I’ve had a dim, inchoate feeling—one that has increased in luminosity—that if I could somehow reach him and Einstein’s brain, I might unravel their strange relationship, one that arcs across this century and America itself—and, as well, figure out some things for myself. And now, before the future arrives and the supercomputers of the world begin to act on their own and we flee to lunar colonies—before all that hullabaloo—Harvey and I are finally sitting here together.

That day Harvey tells me the story he’s told before—to friends and family and pilgrims—one that has made him an odd celebrity even in this age of odd celebrity. He tells it deliberately, assuming that I will be impressed by it as a testament to the rightness of his actions rather than as a cogent defense of them. “You see,” he says, “I was just so fortunate to have been there. Just so lucky.”

“Fortunate” is one word, “improbable” is another. Albert Einstein was born in 1879 with a head shaped like a lopsided medicine ball. Seeing it for the first time, his grandmother fell into shock. “Much too fat!” she exclaimed. “Much too fat!” He didn’t speak until he was three, and it was generally assumed that he was brain-damaged. Even as a child, he lived mostly in his mind, building intricate card houses, marveling at a compass his father showed him. His faith was less in people than in the things of the world. When his sister Maja was born, young Albert, crestfallen, said, “Yes, but where are its wheels?”

As a man, he grew into a powerful body with thick arms and legs. He liked to hike and sail but spent most of his life sitting still, dreaming of the universe. In 1905, as a twenty-six-year-old
patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, he conceived of the special theory of relativity and the equation E = mc
²
, a supposition that all matter, from a feather to a rock, contains energy. And with his theories that predicted the origin, nature, and destiny of the universe, he toppled Newton and more than two hundred years of science. When the first inkling of relativity occurred to him, he casually told a friend, “Thank you. I’ve completely solved the problem.”

So complex were his findings that they could only be partially understood and verified fourteen years later. Then, of course, Albert Einstein instantly became famous. His mischievous smile beamed from newspapers around the world. A genius! A Nobel Prize! A guru-mystic who had unlocked the secrets of God’s own mind! There were suddenly hundreds of books on relativity. Einstein embarked on a frenzied world tour, was fêted by kings and emperors and presidents, gamboling into the world’s most sacred halls in a sockless state of bemused dishevelment. He claimed he got his hairstyle—eventually a wild, electric-white nimbus—“through negligence” and, explaining his overall sloppiness, said, “It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.” He laughed like a barking seal, snored like a foghorn, sunbathed in the nude. And then took tea with the queen.

Everywhere, it was Einstein mania. People named their children after him, fawned and fainted upon seeing him, wrote letters inquiring if he really existed. He was asked to “perform” at London’s Palladium for three weeks on the same bill as fire-eaters and tightrope walkers, explaining his theory, at a price of his asking. “At the Chrysanthemum Festival,” wrote one German diplomat stationed in Japan, “it was neither the empress nor the prince regent nor the imperial princes who held reception; everything turned around Einstein.” A copy of the special theory of
relativity in Einstein’s scrawl was auctioned off for $6 million. And
The New York Times
urged its readers not to be offended by the fact that only twelve people in the world truly understood the theory of “the suddenly famous Dr. Einstein.”

In the years to follow, Einstein’s fame would only grow. He would vehemently criticize the Nazis and become a target for German ultranationalists, who waited outside his home and office, hurling anti-Semitic obscenities at him. When they made him a target for assassination, he fled to the United States—to Princeton, New Jersey—and became an American citizen. He was called “the new Columbus of science.” David Ben-Gurion offered him the presidency of Israel (to everyone’s relief, he declined). His political utterances were as good as Gandhi’s. Before Michael Jordan was beamed by satellite to China, before Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Albert Einstein was the first transglobal supercelebrity.

In the last years of his life, he was struck with frequent attacks of nausea, the pain flowering between his shoulder blades, culminating in diarrhea or vomiting. An exam revealed an aneurysm in his abdominal aorta, but Einstein refused an operation and anticipated his own demise. “I want to be cremated so people won’t come to worship at my bones,” he said. On the night before he died, April 17, 1955, lying in bed in Princeton Hospital, Einstein asked to see his most recent pages of calculations, typically working until the end. His last words were spoken in German to a nurse who didn’t know the language, though sometime earlier he had told a friend, “I have finished my task here.”

The next morning, April 18, when the chief pathologist of the hospital—our Harvey, then a strapping forty-two-year-old with Montgomery Clift good looks—arrived for work, Einstein’s body was laid out, naked and mottle-skinned, on a gurney. “Imagine my surprise,” Harvey says to me now. “A fellow up in New
York, my former teacher Dr. Zimmerman”—and an acquaintance of Einstein’s—“was going to do the autopsy. But then he couldn’t get away. He rang me up, and we agreed that I’d do it.” Harvey says that he felt awe when he came face-to-face with the world-famous physicist, the voice of conscience in a century of madness, who had bewildered the world by suggesting that time should be understood as the fourth, and inseparable, dimension. Now he lay alone in the pale light, 180 pounds of mere matter.

Harvey took a scalpel in his hand and sliced Einstein open with a Y incision, scoring the belly, the skin giving like cellophane, then cut the rib cartilage and lifted the sternum. He found nearly three quarts of blood in Einstein’s peritoneal cavity, a result of the burst aneurysm, and after investigating his heart and veins concluded that, with an operation, the physicist might have lived for several more years, though how long was hard to tell “because Einstein liked his fatty foods,” in particular goose scratchings.

Working under the humming lights, his fingers inside Einstein’s opened body, juggling the liver, palpating the heart, Harvey made a decision. Who’s to say whether it was inspired by awe or by greed, beneficence or mere pettiness? Who’s to say what comes over a mortal, what chemical reaction takes place deep in the thalamus, when faced with the blinding brightness of another’s greatness and, with it, a knowledge that I/you/we shall never possess even a cheeseparing of that greatness?

Working quickly with a knife, Harvey tonsured the scalp, peeled the skin back, and, bearing down on a saw, cut through Einstein’s head with a quick, hacking motion. He removed a cap of bone, peeled back the meninges, then clipped blood vessels and bundles of nerve and the spinal cord. He reached with his fingers deeper into the chalice of the man’s cranium and simply removed the glistening brain. To keep for himself. Forever. In perpetuity. Amen.

What he didn’t count on, however, was that with this one act his whole world would go haywire. Apparently, word got out through Zimmerman that Harvey had the brain, and when it was reported in
The New York Times
a day later, some people were aghast. Einstein’s son, Hans Albert, reportedly felt betrayed. Harvey claimed that he was planning to conduct medical research on the brain, and, in an agreement eventually struck with Hans Albert over the phone, he promised that the brain would be the subject only of medical journals and not become a pop-cultural gewgaw, as the Einsteins most feared. Sometime after the autopsy, Harvey was fired from his job for refusing to give up the brain. Years passed, and there were no papers, no findings. And then Harvey fell off the radar screen. When he gave an occasional interview—in articles from 1956 and 1979 and 1988—he always repeated that he was about “a year away from finishing study on the specimen.”
¹

Forty years later—after Harvey has gone through three wives, after he has sunk to lesser circumstances, after he has outlived most of his critics and accusers, including Hans Albert—we are sitting together before a hot fire on a cold winter day. And because I like him so much, because somewhere in his watery blue eyes, his genial stumble-footing, and that ineffable cloak of hunched integrity that falls over the old, I find myself feeling for him and cannot bring myself to ask the essential questions: