Love and Other Ways of Dying (19 page)

Finally I ask Richman why our country is overly obsessed with celebrity today, why celebrity, as much as a Vegas jackpot, has become the Jell-O mold of the American Dream. He begins by quoting Thoreau: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

“They’ll never be an Elizabeth Taylor,” he says. “Their hopes are their dreams and their dreams are on TV and their dreams are watching these beautiful chests walking into the Academy Awards in gorgeous gowns and they live for that. That’s why Communism failed. [It] never gave people any hope. That’s why democracy has been so successful. The American Dream, it’s based on hope … as long as you have money, you go right to the top.”

He continues. “When I travel into the heartland of America—I go backpacking a lot—and talk about what I’m doing, oh,
these people, they won’t let me shut up. They just ask question after question after question. I’m like a hero to them. Around here, no one cares. Dead stars, oh, forget it. You’re an agent for the dead, you’re a joke, c’mon.”

But Richman is convinced that he’s having the last laugh, in no small part thanks to Einstein, who’s gone global. In Japan, Einstein’s image is used in a commercial for a video game called 3DO; in Hungary, his mug is plastered on billboards for a local telephone company; in South Africa, he advertises insurance. “He’s the most widely recognized human being that ever lived,” declares Richman. “In China”—where Richman has recently brokered a deal for Einstein T-shirts—“they’re limited to one child per family, and every single parent calls their one child ‘my little Einstein.’ ” He smiles at the thought.

“China is a cultural wasteland,” he says emphatically. “They’ve never heard of John Wayne. They’ve never heard of Steve McQueen. They’ve never seen any of their movies. But Einstein, they know.”

San Jose, California. February 26.

Harvey is to give a talk on Einstein’s brain in San Jose. Before we left Princeton, he rooted through the letters he keeps in a shoe box—letters from an oddball collection of fans and groupies, critics and psychos, everywhere from Denmark to New Zealand, everyone from angry rabbis demanding the brain for burial to elegiacal schoolkids cutely waxing juvenile about trying to figure out relativity—and called a woman named Sarah Gonzalez, someone he doesn’t know but who had written to him a few years ago randomly asking for a piece of the brain. When she heard from Harvey, she felt that the Lord God had intervened on her behalf. Ever since his call, she has been busy informing San
Jose of our arrival, contacting the mayor and the local media, trying to set up a dinner party for leading lights in the community, and arranging for Harvey and Einstein’s brain to visit with students at Independence High School, one of the biggest in the country.

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 = mc
²
, 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.”