DAVID EHRENFELD: THE TECHNO-POX UPON OUR LAND

HARPER'S MAGAZINE/OCTOBER 1997 $3.95

DRIVING MR. ALBERT A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain By Michael Paterniti ------. ------MADE MEN OF LETTERS Our Thing About the Cosa N ostra By Albert Mobilio FASCISM A LA MODE In France, the Far Right Presses for National Purity By David Zane Mairowitz FEATHER AND BONE A story by Mark Slouka Also: Michael Chabon and Andy Warhol's Time Capsule ------+ ------F 0 L 0

DRIVInG ffiR. HIBIRT '~l ••iIII'!"'! I

dinck, and Nixon. We made bewitching PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY. . sonatas and novels and paintings. Stargazed .FEBRUARY 17, 1997. and. built great cities. Exterminated .sorne people. Settled the West. Cooked meat and n the beginning, there was a brain. All slathered it with special sauce. Did the hustle . . of the universe was the size of this .Built the strip mall. I. brain, floating in space. Until' one day it , . And in the end, after billions of years of simply exploded. Out poured photons and evolution, a pink two-story' motel rose up on a quarks and leptons. Out flew dust particles like drag of asphalt in Berkeley, California. The millions of fast-moving birds into the expand- Flamingo Motel. There, a man stepped out on-

ingaviary of the cosmos. Cooked heavy o to the balcony in a bright beam' of mil- elements-silicon, magnesium, and lennial sunlight, holding the origi- nickel-were sucked into a small nal universe in his hands, in a pocket and balled together Tupperware container, and under great pressure and for one flickering moment morphed with the organic he saw into the future., I matter of our solar system. can picture this man now: Lo, the planets! ,he needs a haircut, he Our world-Earth-was needs some coffee. covered with lava, then But not yet, not before granite mountains. Oceans we rewind and start again. formed, a wormy thing' Not long ago. In Maine on. crawled fromthe sea. There .a bus. In Massachusetts on a were pea-brained brontosauri train. In Connecticut behind and fiery meteor showers and, the wheel of a shiny, teal-col- , gnawing.vhairv-backed monsters ored rental car. The engine purrs. I that kept coming and coming-these should know, I'm the driver. I'm on " furious little stumps, human beings, us. Under my way to pick up an eighty-four-year-old man the hot sun, we roasted different colors, forni- named thomas Harvey, who lives in a modest, cated, and fought. Full of wonder, we attached low-slung 1950s ranch that belongs to his sixty- words to the sky and the mountains and the seven-year-old girlfriend, Cleora. To get there water, and claimed them as our own. We you caroom through New Jersey's exurbia, named ourselves Horner, Sappho, Humper- through swirls of dead leaves and unruly thick-

Michael Patemiti lives in Portland, Maine. He is at work on a novel.

Illustrations by Lou Beach FOLIO 35 ets of oak and pine that give way to well-or- As a man, he grew into apowerful body with dered fields of roan, buttermilk, and black thick arms and legs. He liked to hike and sail snorting atoms-horses. Harvey greets me at but spent most of his life sitting still, dreaming - - the door.rstooped and chuckling nervously, of the universe. In 1905, as a twenty-six-year-old wearingared-and-white plaid shirt and a solid- patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, he conceived

o blue Pendleton tie that still bears a waterlogged of the special theory of relativity and the equa- $10 price tag from some earlier decade. He has tion E=mc2, a supposition that all matter, from a .peckled, blowsy skin runneled with lines, an ea- feather to a rock, contains energy. And with his gle nose, stubbed yellow teeth, bitten nails, and theories that predicted the origin, nature, and a spray of white hair as fine as corn silk that destiny Ofthe universe, he toppled Newton and shifts with the wind over the bald patches on nearly three hundred years of science. When the his head. He could be one of a million beach- first glimmer of relativity occurred to him, he ca- bound, black-socked Florida retirees, not the .sually told a friend, "Thank you. I've completely man who, by some odd happenstance of life, solved the problem."

possesses the brain of Albert Einstein-literally So complex were 0 his cut it out of the dead scientist's head. findings that they could on- Harvey has stoked a fire in ly be partially understood the basement, which is dank ana verified fourteen years

and dark, and I sit among cro- 0 later. Then, of course, Al- cheted rugs and genie bottles bert Einstein instantly be- of blown glass, Ethiopian came famous. His mis- cookbooks, and macrame. It chievous smile beamed has taken me more than a year from newspapers .around to find Harvey, and during that the world. A genius! A time I've had a dim, inchoate Nobel Prize! A guru- feeling-one that has increased mystic who had un- in luminosity-that if I could locked the secrets of somehow reach him and Ein- God's own mind! There stein's brain" I might unravel were suddenly hundreds their strange relationship, one of books on relativity. that arcs across this century and Einstein embarked on a America itself. And now, before frenzied world tour, the future arrives and the super- was feted by kings and computers of the world fritz out emperors and presidents, and we move to lunar colonies- gamboling into the world's most sacred ha:tls in before all that hullabaloo-c-Harvey and I are fi- a sockless state of bemused dishevelment. He

nally sitting here together. 0 0 claimed he got his hairstvle-s-eventuallv a wild, Thatday Harvey tells me' the story he's told electric-white nimbus-"through negligence" before-to friends and family and pilgrims- and, explaining his overall sloppiness; said, "It one that has made him an odd celebrity even would be a sad situation if the wrapper were, in this age of odd celebrity. He tells it deliber- better' than the meat wrapped inside it." He ately,' assuming that I will be impressed by it as laughed like a barking seal, snored like a a testament to the rightness of his actions foghorn, sunbathed in the nude. And then rather than as a cogent defense of them. "You took tea with the queen. see," he says, "1 was just so fortunate to have 'Everywhere, it was Einstein mania. People been there. Just so lucky." named their children after him, fawned and "Fortunate" is one word, "improbable" is an> fainted upon seeing him, wrote letters inquir- other. Albert Einsteinwas born in 1879 with a ing if he really existed. He was asked to "per- head shaped like a lopsided medicine ball. form" at London's Palladium for three weeks Seeing it for the first time, his grandmother on the same bill as fire-eaters 'and tightrope fell into shock. '~Muc.htoo fat!" she exclaimed. walkers, explaining his theory, at the price of "Much too fat!" He didn't speak until he was his asking. "At the Chrysanthemum 'Festi- three, and it was generally assumed that he val," wrote one German diplomat stationed was brain-damaged. Even as a child, he lived in Japan, "it was neither the empress nor the mostly in his mind, building intricate card prince regent nor the imperial princes who houses, marveling at a.compass his father held reception; everything turned around showed him. His faith was less in people than Einstein." A copy of the special theory of rel- in the things of the world. When his sister ativity in Einstein's, scrawl was auctioned off Maja was born, young Albert, crestfallen, said, for $6 million. And the New York Times "Yes, but where are its wheels I" urged its readers not to be offended by the.

36 ,HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OcrOBER 1997 Photograph from thE;Corbis-Bettrnann ~rchive fact that only twelve people in the world tru- peritoneal cavity, a result'of the burst ly understood the theory of "the suddenly fa- aneurysm, and after investigating hisheart and, mous Dr. Einstein." ~einsconcluded that, with an operation, the 'In the years to follow, Einstein's fame would physicistmight have lived for several more only grow: He \~ould vehemently criticize the years, though how long was hard to tell "be- Nazis and become a target for German ultra-nationalists, who' waited outside his home and of- fice, hurling anti-Semitic obsceni- I ties at him. When they made him' ; . Who' s>t<2.,say what Lnspi.r-ed Harvey to a target for assassination, he fled ~ ~e~ov~ ,Einst~~~ I s brain--gree~' 9r~ to the United States-e-tc Prince- ton, New Jersey-and became ,an American citizen. He was called "the new Columbus of science." David Ben-Gurion offered him the presidency. cause Einstein liked his fatty foods," in particu- of Israel (to everyone's relief, he declined). His lar goose scratchings. ' political utterances were as good as Gandhi's. Working under the humming lights, his fin- Before Michael Jordan was beamed by satellite gers inside Einstein's opened body, juggling the to China, before Marilyn Monroe and the Bea- liver, palpating the heart, Harvey made a deci- tles and .Arnold Schwarzenegger, Albert Ein- sion. Who's to say whether it was inspired by stein was the first transglobal supercelebrity. awe or by greed, beneficence or mere pettiness? In the last years of his life, he was struck Who's to say what comes over a mortal, what with frequent attacks of nausea, the pain flow- chemical reaction takes place deep in the thal- eringbetween his shoulder blades, culminating . amus, when {aced with 'the ·blinding brightness in diarrhea or vomiting. An exam revealed an ' of another's greatness arid, with it, a knowledge .aneurysm in his abdomina} aorta, but Einstein that I/you/we shall never possess even a refused an operation and' anticipated his own cheeseparing of that greatness? demise. "I want to be cremated so-people won't Working quickly with a knife, Harvey ton- come to worship at my bones:" he said. On the . sured the scalp, peeled the skin back, and, bear- night before he died, April 17, 1955, lying in .ing down on a saw, cut through Einstein's head bed in Princeton Hospital, Einstein asked to with a quick, hacking motion. He removed a see' his most recent pages of calculations, typi- cap of bone, peeled back the' meninges, then cally working until the end. His last words were clipped blood vessels and bundles of 'nerve and spoken in German to a .n!1fsewho 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 ac> quaintance of Einstein's-c-/'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.",Har- vey 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 insepa- rable, dimension. Now he lay alone in the pale -Iight, 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

Einstein's handwriting-and signature courtesy of Alice Calaprice FOLlO 37 the spinal cord. He reached with his fingers ultimate Faberge egg, the Hope diamond, the deeper into the chalice of the man's cranium Cantina map, the One-Penny Magenta stamp, and simply removed the glistening brain. To "Guernica," what does it look like? Feel like? keep far himself. Forever. In perpetuity. Amen. Smell like ? Does he talk to it as one talks to What he didn't count on, however, was that one's poodle or ferns? . with this one act his whole world would'go hay- We conclude the visit by going out for sushi, wire.' Apparently, word got out through Zim- and over the course of our conversation he men- merman that Harvey had the brain, and when it tions a handful of people he hopes to see out in was reported in the New York Times a day later, America before he dies. "Yessir,I'd really like to some people were aghast. Einstein's son, Hans visit some folks," he says. They include a few Albert, reportedly felt betrayed. Harvey claimed neuroanatomists with whom he has brain busi- that he was planning to conduct medical re- ness, some friends, and, in Berkeley, Evelyn Ein- search on the brain, and, in an agreement.even- stein.iHans Albert's daughter and the grand- tually struck with Hans Albert over the phone, daughter of Albert. Harvey has wanted to meet . he assured that the brain would only be the sub- her for many years. Although he doesn't' say ject at medical journals and not become a pop- why, I think he might be trying to face down cultural gewgaw, as the Einsteins most feared. some lingering' guilt, some late-in-life desire to Sometime after the autopsy, Harvey was fired resolve the past before his age grounds him per- from his job for refusing to give up the brain. manently and; with his death, the brain falls in- to- someone else's hands. Perhaps, too, he wants to make arrangements for someone to take over the brain, and Evelyn is going to be inter- viewed for the job. Whatever the reason, by the meal's end, doped 'on the incessant tinkling of piped-in ~ '¥~ ~'" -. ;>-.':: ~. \~i5~~, harps and a heady shotoftekka rna- r--'-- ki, Harvey and I have somehow Ih.'411:f 2 < -1 ~'t' agreed to take a road trip: I will drive i~. Years passed, and there were no papers, no find- _him to California. . ' ings. And then Harvey fell off the radar screen. , And then, one atternoorr soon before our de- When he gave an occasional interview-in arti- parture, Harvey takes me W a secret location-s- cles from 1956 and 1979 and 1988-he always one he asks me not to reveal for fear of thieves repeated that he was about "a year away from and rambunctious pilgrims-where he now finishing study on the specimen." 1 . keeps the brain. From a dark room he retrieves Forty years later-after Harvey has gone a box that contains two glass jars full of Ein- through three wives, after he has sunk to lesser stein's brain. After the autopsy, he had it circumstances, after he has outlived most of his chopped into nearly two hundred pieces-from critics and accusers, including Hans Albert->- the size of a dime to that of a thick turkey we are sitting together before a hot fire .on a neck-and since then he has' given nearly a cold winter day. And because I like him so third of it away to various people. He flashes the much, because somewhere in his watery blue jars before me but only for a second, then re- eyes, his genial stumble-footing, and that inef- treats quickly with them. The brain pieces 'float fable cloak of hunched integrity that falls over in murky formaldehyde, leavihg an impression the' old, -I find myself feeling for him and can- of very chunky chicken soup. But it happens so not bring myself to ask the essential questions: quickly, Harvey so suddenly absconds with the Is Harvey a grave-robbing thief or a hero? A brain, that I have no real idea what I've seen. sham artist or a high priest? Why not heist a When I sho~ up at his house a few weeks finger or a toe? Or a simple earlobe? What later in a rented Buick Skylark, Harvey has ap- about rumors that he plans to sell Einstein's parently fished several fistfuls' worth of brain brain to Michael Jackson for $2 million? Does matter from the jars, put them in T upperware -he feel ashamed? Or justified? If the brain is the. filled with formaldehyde, and zipped it all in- side a gray duffel bag. He meets me in his

1 According to newspaper accoUnts following Einstein's driveway with a plaid suitcase rimmed with ,~. death, mystery immediately shrouded the brain. Dr. Zim- fake leather and the gray duffel sagging heavily merman, on staff atNe» York City's Montefiore Med- in his right hand. He pecks Cleora good-bye. icalCenter, expected to receive Einstein's brainfrom Har- "He's a fine Quaker gentleman," she tells me, vey, but never, infact, did; Princeton Hospital decided not watching Harvey's curled-over self shuffle to relinquish the brain. Harvey, however, also decided not to relinquish the brain aru;/at some point removed it across the pavement He rubs a smudge of dirt from the hospital. - off my side mirror, then toodles around the

38 HARPER'S MAGAZIKE I OCTOBER 1997 front of the car. When he's fallen into the pas- turned over nearly a fifth of the brain to her. senger seat, he chuckles nervously, scratchily "She has one of the biggest collections of brains clears his throat, and utters what will become around," he says, proudly. "She gets them from-a his mantra, "Yessir ... real good." And then we local undertaker." (Later, when contacted, just start driving. For four thousand mites. Me, Witelson said that Harvey's assertions about her Harvey, and, in the trunk, Einstein's brain. were "incorrect.") In most cases, Harvey has made it sound as if TOWARD COLUMBUS, OHIO. he himself handpicked these people after read- FEBRUARY 18, 1997. ing their work, though by some of their own admissions, a number of them had contacted e rnorph as one. Even if we are more him first. One neuroanatomist, a Berkeley pro- , than a half century apart in age, he born fessor named Marian Diamond, had written a W under the star of William Howard Taft paper claiming that she had counted in Ein- and I under the napalm bomb of Lyndon' stein's brain a higher than normal number of Baines Johnson, if he wears black Wallabees glial cells, which nourish the organ. The only and I sport Oakley sunglasses, if he has three other paper written to date, by a researcher at ex-wives, ten children, and twelve grandchil- the University of Alabama named Britt Ander- dren and I have ye't to procreate, we begin to son, stated that Einstein had a thinner cortex think together, to make unconscious team de- than normal. "You see," says Harvey enthusias- cisions. It seems the entire backseat area will tically, "we're finding out that Einstein's brain serve as a kind of trash can. By the time we is more unusual than many people first make Wheeling, West Virginia, it's already thought." But a professor of neurobiology at strewn with books and tissuey green papers UCLA, Larry Kruger, calls the "meagre find- from the rental-car agreement, snack wrappers, ings" on the brain "laughable" and says that and empty bottles of seltzer, a hedge against when Diamond herself delivered her paper, the ,"G.!. upset," as Harvey puts it. An old rambler audience found it "comical," because "it means at heart, he takes to the road like it's a river of absolutely nothing." (When I asked Diamond, fine brandy, seems to grow stronger on its oily a woman with impeccable credentials, about fumes and oily-rainbow mirages, its oily fast this, she claimed that Kruger had "a lack of in- , food and the oily-tarrnacked gas plazas that we hibitor cells" and said, "Well, we have to start skate across for candy bars and Coca-Colas somewhere, don't we?") while the Skylark feeds at the pump. By de- Despite my expectations that Harvey will fault, I take charge of the radio-working the sleep a good deal, what I soon realize is that he's dial in a schizophrenic riffle from damn perky for eighty-four and never NPR to' Dr. Laura and, in between, sleeps at all. Nor talks much. In this age all kinds of high school basketball; of self-revelation, he eschews the oro- gardening shows, local on-air auc- tundity of a confessor. He speaks in a tions, blathering DJs, farm reports, clipped, spare, almost penurious way- and Christian call-in shows. Harvey with a barely perceptible' drawl from his is hard-of-hearing in his right ear midwestern childhood-letting huge and, perhaps out of pride or vanity, blocks of time fall in between the sub- refuses to wear a hearing aid, so I've ject and the verb, and then between the brought tapes too, figuring he might verb and the modifier of a sentence. He do a fair amount of sleeping while, as pronounces "pleasure" play-sure', and designated driver, I might do more "measurements" mI:ly-sure~mints. When staying awake. I've got bands with my line of questioning makes him un- names like Dinosaur [r., Soul .comfortable, he chuckles flatly like two Coughing, and Pavement, and a book-an-tape, chops of wood, "Heh-heh," raspily clears his Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Harvey him- throat, then says, "Way-ell ... " And just steps self is partial to classical music and reads most- aside to let somemore time pass, returning to his' ly scientific journals and novels by Kay Boyle. map, which he studies like it's a rune. Through And although we are now bound by the the window he watches Pennsylvania pass by: its road-Einstein's brain, Harvey, 'and me-he barns and elaborate hexes, signs for Amish studiously avoids all discussion of the brain. Ear- goods, the Allegheny Mountains rising like dark lier, however, he ticked off twelve different re- whales out of the earth, lost behind the mist of searchers to whom. he had given slices of the some unseen blowhole. He watches Ohio all brain. According to Harvey, one of them, San- pan-flattened and thrown back down on itself. dra Witelson from McMaster University in And he blinks languidly at it. But never sleeps. Hamilton, Ontario, organized his ephemera and Iadmit: this disappoints me. Something in articles on the brain into a scrapbook, and he me wants Harvey to sleep. I want Harvey to

FOLIO 39 fall into a deep; blurry, Rip Van Winkle daze, of the future while cautioning us against the and I want to park the Skylark mothership on violence that lurks in the heart of man. "I do top of a mountain and walk around to the not know how the Third World War will be trunk and open it. I want Harvey snoring loud- fought," he warned, "but I do know how the . ly as I unzip the duffel bag and reach my hands .Fourth will: with sticks and stones." inside" and I want to-what?-touch Einstein's To complete his Amerioan deification, Ein- brain. I want to touch the brain. YesI've said stein has been fully commodified and marketed, it. I want to hold it, coddle it, measure its earning millions of dollars for his estate. Bought weight in my palm, handle some of its 15 bil- and sold back to us by the foot soldiers of high lion now-dormant neurons. Does it feel like to- capitalism, Einstein's name and image are con- fu, sea urchin, baloney? What, exactly? And jured to sell computers and CD-ROMs, -Nikon what does such a desire make me? One of the 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 rum- pled 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 into the very workings of the universe and returned with legion of relic freaks who send Harvey letters God on his tongue, because he greeted this era asking; sometimes be'gging, for pieces of the by rocketing into the next with his break- brain? One of the pilgrims who come from as through theories, he assumed a mien of super- far away as Japan or England or Australia to naturalism. And because his tatterdemalion, at glimpse it? times dotty, demeanor stood in such stark con- For Harvey's sake, I act like I haven't given trast to his supernaturalism, he seemed both in- the brain a second thought, while he encour- nocent and trustworthy and thus that much ages stultifying state-long silences and offers rp.oresupernatural. He, alone, held the seashell the occasional historical anecdote. "Eisenhow- of the century to his ear. er's farm was in these parts, I believe." Or, "In Einstein is also one of the few figures born in the days of the canal ... " The more the idea the last century whose ideas are equally relevant persists in my head; the more towns slip past , to us today, If we've incorporated the theory of outside the window, the more I wonder what, relativity into our scientific view of the universe, in fact, I'd really be holding if I held the brain. it's Einstein's attempt to devise a kind of person- I mean, it's not really Einstein and it's not real- al religion-an intimate spiritual and political ly a brain but disconnected pieces of a brain, manifesto-that still stands in stark, almost sa- just as the passing farms are not really America cred contrast to the Pecksniffian systems of sal- but parts of a whole, symbols of the thing itself, vation offered by the modem world. Depending which is everything and nothing at once. on the, day's sex crimes and senselessmurders, or In part, I would be touching Einstein the the intensity of our millennial migraine, we run Superstar, immediately recognizable by his the real risk of feeling straitjacketed and sacri- Krameresque hair and the both-at-once ficed to everything from organized religion to mournful and mirthful eyes. The man whose the nuclear blood lust of nations to the cult vic apotheosis is so complete that he's now a cof- sionaries of our world and theirvarious vodka- fee mug, a postcard, aT-shirt. The face zoom- and-cuckoo schemes,'their Hale-Bopp fantasies. ing out of a pop rock video on MTV's Buzz Thus Einstein's blending of twentieth-centu- Clip for a song called "MMMBop." A figure of ry skepticism with nineteenth-century romanti- speech, an ad pitchman. The voice of reason cism offers a kind of modern hope. "I arna on posters festooning undergrad dorm rooms. deeply religious nonbeliever," he said. "This is a Despite the fact that he was'a sixty-one-year- somewhat new kind of religion." Pushing fur- old man when he was naturalized as an Ameri- ther, he sought to marry science and religion by can citizen, Einstein has been fully appropriat- redefining 'their terms: "I am of the opinion that ed by this country , by our writers and all the finer speculations in the realm of science moralists, politicians and scientists, cult lead- spring from a deep religious feeling," he said, "I ers and clergy. In the fin-de-siecle shadows of also believe that this kind of religiousness ... is America, in our antsy, searching times, Ein- the only creative religious activity of our time." stein comes back to us both as Lear's fool and. To touch Einstein's brain would also be to Tiresias, comically offering his uncanny vision touch the white dwarf and the black hole, the '

40 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 1997 Big Bang and ghost waves. To ride a ray of light, "Is what safe?" Harvey asks back, gelid eyes as Einstein once dreamed it as a child, into utter sparking once in the dark. He doesn't seem to ' oblivion. He imagined that. a clock placed on know or remember, He's carried the contraband . the equator would run more slowly than a clock for so long he has come to consider himself placed at one of the poles under identical condi- something of a celebrity. No longer defined by tions. Einstein claimed that the happiest .the specimen, he .has become the teal specimen . . . thought of his life came to him in 1907, at the A piece of living history. On tour. In his glen- Patent Office in Bern, when he was twenty- plaid suitcase, he carries postcards of himself. eight and couldn't find a teaching job. Up to his Inside his motel room with the brain, Har- ears in a worsted wool suit and patent applica- vey gathers the sleep of the old. Next door I am tions, a voice in his mind whispered, "If aperson exhausted yet wide awake. I am thinking of the falls freely, he won't feel his own weight." That brain, remembering that after more than 8 mil- became the general theory of relativity. His life lion people had marched to their deaths in the anti ideas continue to fill thousands of books; .fields of Europe during Wofld Wat I, Einstein's even today, scientists are still verifying his work. theory of relativity allowed humanity, in the Recentlv.,a NASA satellite took millions of words of a colleague, to lookup from an "earth measurements in space that proved a uniform covered with graves and blood to the heavens'

distribution of primordial temperatures just covered with the stars." He suddenly appeared above absolute zero; that is, the data proved that on the world's doorstep, inspiring pan-national the universe was in it kind of postcoital after- awe arid offering with it pan-national reconcil- glow from the Big Bang, further confirming Ein- iation--:-a liberal German Jew who clung to his stein's explanation for how the universe began. Swiss citizenship and renounced violence. It would be good to touch that. ' What better way to absolve oneself of all sins

We disembark that first night at a Best West- than to follow a blameless scientist up into the " ern in Columbus; Ohio. As we open the trunk glimmering waters of time and space? ' "~ to gather our bags, I watch Harvey take what he Another contemporary of Einstein's, Erwin 1·~" ~ Schrodinger, claimed that Einstein's theory of , needs, then leave the gray duffel there, the zip- ~. per shining like silver teeth in the streetlight. relativity quite simply meant "the dethrone- ;~ "Is it safe?" Iask, nodding my head toward ment of time as a rigid tyrant," opening up the '.~ ~ the duffel. . possibility 'that the~e .mightbe an alternative .1 'c,•.., .I' i. ';\ ! FOLIO 41 '{ Master Plan. "And this thought," he wrote, "is more holy, even mythic. It's not that the Mid- . a religious thought, nay I should call it the reli- west lacks bustle; it's just that away from the gious thought." With relativity, Einstein, the cities, the deadlines are imposed by the earth original cosmic slacker, was himself touching and its seasons. I slip off my watch and feel my- the mind of a new god, forming a conga line to selfbeginningto slow-into Harvey time, immortality through some wrinkle in time. 'iIt W'e arevin fact, retracing Harvey's route is quite possible that we can do greater things when he came west from New Jersey in. the thanjesus," he said. ' 1960s, after eluding those who themselves de- That, finally, was Einstein's ultimate power sired the brain. Within weeks of Einstein's and hold on our imagination. Eternity-c-ir death" after it was reported that the brain had would be good to touch that too. been taken from the body, a group of leading brain researchers met in Washington, D.C. It KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI. was an august, winning collection of men: Doc- FEBRUARY 19, 1997. tors Webb Haymaker and Hartwig Kuhlen- beck, Clem Fox and Gerhardt von Bonin, Jerzy cross In,'diana, Illinois, ,and Missouri, be- E. Rose and Walle Nauta. And necessarily neath scudding clouds and clear shots of among them.ibut perhaps regardedwitha tinge A sunlight, the chill air fragrant with ma- of condescension,' this slightly awkward, ner- nure and .feed, We pass over the chocolate, vously chuckling half-doctor, this Irregular , moiling Mississippi, drive near the towns of.Em- Sock, this pathologist from a small-town hospi- rna, Bellflower, Peruque, and Auxvasse. We tal connected only by the same ,name to the stealth through shadows thrown by crop dusters hallowed halls and elite eating clubs of Prince- , and Greyhound buses, up against wobbling 53- ton University.'When Webb Haymaker, who foot truck trailers full of movie videos or broc- represented the U.S. Army, demanded the coli or industrial turbines and, at one point, a , brain, Harvey simply refused to hand it over. flatbed with a Vietnam-era heli- Heh-l).eh. When Haymaker got copter strapped to it. On this angry, Harvey didn't budge. And bright, windy day, we see the out- now who laughs last? Who's dead, buildings and barns of the Mid; each last one ofthem, and who's west, where farmers stand in small out here 'busting for California circles eyeing their fields.like ner- ,with the brain, inhaling Frostees vous, hand-wringing fathers, re- and baked potatoes, hoovering pairing their threshers, turning Denny's pancakes and green sal- the first soil, pointing to-what's yet invisible, ads and chicken noodle soup? speaking in incantations: feed and fertilizer, "Harvey didn't know his ass from his elbow moisture content and till depth. With each day's from the brain," says Larry 'Kruger, who at the work, with each field-side conference and hour time was a postdoctoral fellow with Jerzy Rose alone in the air-conditioned cab of a supertrac- at Johns Hopkins. "Harvey refused togive' up tor, they will silently appeal to the circadian the -brain even though he wasn't a neu- ,,rhythms of some higher power for a perfect cali- ropathologist,; and then all bets were off. I bration of sun and rain, as well as for the perfect mean, what were you going to do with it any- ' ascension of market prices to deliver a bountiful way? I heard he kept it in his basement and harvest. On' the .radio, we get the farm reports: would show i~ to visitors. I guess some people lean hog futures down five-eighths; feeder cattle show off a rare edition of Shakespeare. He futures up a half. Corn futures and soybean and would say, 'Hey, wanna see Einstein's brain?' cocoa, up two-eighths, down a third, even. Janu- The guy's a jerk: ... He wanted fame and noth- ary sugar and March coin; September rice and ing came of it.'? December cotton-all of them attached to a Meanwhile, Harvey bristles at such sugges- momentary price that may right now be making' tions, regards himself as destiny's chosen one, someone rich as it bankrupts someone else. the man who forever belongs with Einstein's "Look at that cow!" exclaims Harvey. '. brain, for better or for worse. In a way, it is a And it is quite a cow! On this, our third day tale of obsessive love: Humbert Humbert and together, something is beginning to happen out here between us, the three of us. Time is slow- 2 Later, whenI visit Kruger in Los Angeles, amOng the clut- ing, it seems, or expanding to fill a bigger sky, a ter of his office, which includes an oversize boOk entitled A more open landscape. The get-to-be-there self- Dendro-cyto-mveloarchitectonic Atlas of the Cat's importance of the East, its frantic floodlight , Brain, he's a bit more judicious, "'What [Harvey) did isprob- ably illegal," he tells me. "I guess he must be a sUghtly charge, has given way to a single lit parlor lamp. strange guy, Had he been smart', he would have given And under 'it, a cow or one silver tree in the it up and moved away from it, but he was grandstanding, wind or the rusted remains of an old tiller seems and I presume he paid a price for it." .' '

42 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/OCTOBER 1997 his Lolita. But Harvey sees it more prosaically: LAWRENCE, KANSAS. "Yup, I was just so fortunate to be the one to FEBRUARY 20, 1997. walk in the room that morning," he repeats again and again. Prior to that April morning in 1955, Harvey's life hardlyaugured greatness as n the heart of America, a psychic vortex. much as stolid servitude and an abiding curiosi- .. We cruise through a neighborhood of ty in science. He had met Einstein only once, Ipicket fences and leafless trees, parking to take blood from him, and, expecting his usu- . before a small red house, a four-room Sears .al nurse for such a menial chore, the ever-lust- Roebuck with bookcases of paperback horror ful scientist saw Harvey and blurted, "You've fiction and wax skulls. Here lives Harvey's for- changed your sex!" Summing up his years as a mer neighbor, the soon-to-be-late novelist pathologist, Harvey says, "It was great to"try to William S. Burroughs. Shuffling across the front figure out what killed someone." porch, Harvey clasps his hand, enunciating Sawed-off statements like these initially. loudly, believing that the eighty-three-year-old make it easy to, well, feel underwhelmed by Burroughs is equally deaf, which he isn't, then Harvey. In part, it is simply Quaker modesty, a respectfulreti- cence, beneath which glimmers a diamond-sharp, at times even cunning man who has survived over four decades with the brain. Harvey grew up in a Kentucky line of dyed-in-the-wool Quakers, then moved to Hartford, Con- necticut, when his father got a good job with an insurance firm. Later, he at- climbs up his arm until they m-e in a startled tended Yale, where he contracted tuberculo- embrace, the two of them as pale as the marble sis, spent over a year in a sanatorium, and of a Rodin sculpture. "REAL, REAL GOOD when he returned, gave up his dreams of doc- TO SEE YA!" Later, Harvey quaffs glasses of toring and turned to pathology because "the burgundy until he turns bright red; Burroughs, hours were less demanding." He lists that year himself a bowed and hollowed cult hero and of sickness and the later revocation of his keeper of the Secret-his cheeks dimpled as if medical license as among the greatest disap- by the tip of a blade, a handgun in a holster pointments of his life. Did he pay a price for over his kidney-drinks five Coke and vodkas the brain? Perhaps. He was soon fired from his' after taking his daily dose of methadone. job at the hospital and divorced from his. first "Have you ever tried morphine, Doctor?" he . wife. In the next years he drifted through jobs asks Harvey. . at state psychiatric hospitals and medical labs, "NO .. NO, I HAVEN'T," yells Harvey another wife, and then picked up and moved earnestly. west to start a general practice in Weston, "Unbelievable. In Tangiers, there was a most Missouri, which eventually folded. Later, he magnificent, most significant drug ... went lost his medical license after failing a three- there just to have the last of it. Last there ever day test and was forced to work the late shift was. Tell me about your addictions, Doctor." as an extruder at a plastics factory in Law- "WELL, HEH-HEH ... " But then Harvey renee, Kansas. All of it after the brain, per- keeps quiet about the brain. haps because of the brain. Burroughs lights a joint and offers it to Har- Nonetheless, a life isn't one paragraph long, vey, who demurs, smoke swirling around his and we might also consider Harvey a happy . head like a wreath of steam from a Turkish bath. man, with each move maybe feeling himself to "DID YOU BECOME ADDICTED BE- be on to the next adventure, with each wife CAUSE YOU FELT PAIN?" . and child perhaps feeling himself loved. Still, I "I wish I could say that, Doctor, but no," says try to picture him standing before Einstein's Burroughs, considering. "I became addicted be- body-in that one naked moment. cause I wanted more." Only occasionally can you glimpse through Later, when the two soused men face each the embrasures' of an otherwise perfectly polite . other for a good-bye on the tippy front person to see the cannons aimed out,' only in a porch-for no apparent reason, Burroughs certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become now calls him Dr. Senegal-the writer lowers fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in his voice and delivers a farewell chestnut, one our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capa- that Harvey receives with a knowing nod, ble of the most magnificently unexpected sins. though it isn't dear he actually hears it.

FOLIO 43 "What keeps the old alive, Dr. Senegal," ad- tential debate raging in Harvey's head: salty or vises Burroughs, ''is that we learn to be evil." sweet, eggs or waffleswith maple syrup. And then we are out in the night, in a Occasionally, after a particularly deliberate downpour, Harvey trundling toward the car for order, he'll deliberately change it. Our waitress is a pathologically smiley K.U. stu- 'dent, well-versed in the dynamics of a breakfast.rush, the coffee-crav- ing, caffeine-induced chaos of it all. She waits as Harvey takes a second look at the menu. It could be that an actual week passes as he clears his throat a couple of times, then ponders some more, but she smiles patiently and then chirps back. what feels like a small eternity. Behind him "Eggs over easy, bacon, wheat toast, home' Burroughs sways, curling and unfurling his arms fries. More coffee?" ' like elephant trunks, then assumes a position of This town was once the setting for, a Jason Buddhist prayer-s-pale, deliriousstill. ' Robards made-for-television movie called The Day After. In it, the sturdy people of America's TOWARD DODGE CITY, KANSAS. Hometown were blown to smithereens in a nu- . FEBRUARY 21, 1997_ clear attack, and the few who survived wandered , in a postapocalyptic stupor, in rags, bodies flow- e wake in Lawrence to a nuclear-pow- ered with keloid scars. Thkt Lawrence would be- ' ere? snow, driving horizontally, star- come connected in the nation's psyche with nu- W ring the windows with ice, piling up clear devastation and that Einstein's brain, the -;~, .", until the Skylark looks like a soap-flake duck power that unknowingly wrought the bomb, t ,~./~~ float in a Memorial Day parade gone terribly rested here for six or seven years is a small pixel • J r:-;- wrong. Everything is suddenly heaped in the of irony that seems to escape Harvey. When I V--I"'l( frigid no-smell of winter, cars skidding, then, ask him about it, he says, "Way-ell, I guess that's -l I ,1.,( r running 'off roadsides into gulleys. The snow true." And starts laughing. falls in thick sheaves, icicles jag the gutters. It The truth is that Einstein himself was con- feels like Lawrence is going back to a day, founded by the idea that his theory of relativity -' ---, 500,000 years ago, when it was buried under had opened up a Pandora's bo~ ofmutually as- ' hundreds of feet of ice. sured annihilation. In a 1935 press conference, We take shelter in our adjoining rooms at in which he was asked about the, possibility of the Westminster Inn, are slow to rise. When an atomic bomb, the physicist said that the we do, Harvey is bright-eyed and spunky as we likelihood of transforming matter into energy find the good people of Kansas doing what was "something akin ,to shooting birds in the they do in a bliazard- eating pancakes. The dark in a country where there are only a few Village Inn Pancake House Restaurant is birds." Four years later, however, the Nazis had packed: college students and retirees, all flan- invaded Poland, and Einstein, the celebrated nel-shirted, how-are-ya's ricocheting every- , pacifist, signed a letter to President Roosevelt where, steak-and-egg specials zooming by on advocating the building of an atomic weapon. super-white plates. Some of the old men wear When the letter was perso;ally delivered to Dickies workpants and baseball caps with au- Roosevelt, the President immediately saw the tomotive labels; the undergrads sport caps em- gravity of the situation-i-that if the Americans blazoned with team names or slogans like had just thought to build a bomb, perhaps the WHATEVER or RAGE or GOOD TO GO. Even in Nazis, with great scientists such as Heisenberg, the no-smoking section everyone smokes- were well on their way to completing one-and , one of Harvey's pet peeves. ordered his chief of staff to begin immediate Our routine in restaurants follows a familiar top-secret plans that led to the building of an pattern: Harvey meditates over the .menu, ex- atomic weapon. Sometime later, on a mesa in amining it, dissecting, vectoring, and equating New Mexico, rose the Town That Never Was, what his stomach really wants. 1- get a newspa- Los Alamos, and, under the guidance of Robert per and usually skim through the' first section . Oppenheimer, came Little Boy and Fat Man, before he's ready. Even as James Earl Ray is the bombs that would eventually decimate Hi- planning to go on The Momel Williams Show to roshima and Nagasaki, respectively. . plead for a new liver and two teenagers are in- Einstein, who was thought to be a Communist dicted for the murder and dismemberment of a sympathizer by the FBI and an untrustworthy, man in Central Park, there's an ongoing exis- outspoken pacifist by the Roosevelt Administra-

44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I OcrOBER 1997 tion, was not part of Oppenheimer's team. In Out here, too, just before Dodge City and a fact, he had nothing to do with the bomb what- most delicious slab of Angus fillet, before a night soever, though even today his name is connect- at the Astro Motel and a dawn that brings a herd ed to it. The letter to Roosevelt haunted him of l Svwheelers hurtling for Abilene, we. see a' and his family and, in one case, incited a physi- rainbow and come face-to-face with Harvey's cal attack against Einstein's son, Hans Albert. blighted ambition. "I remember more rainbows in Writing to Linus Pauling, Einstein called the let- Kansasthan any other state," he says,blinking his terthe "one mistake" of his life. When the bomb moist eyes at the brilliant beams of blue and. wasdropped on Hiroshima---einAugust 6, 1945- green, orange and yellow. "I used to try to pho- Einstein heard the news after waking from a nap tograph rainbows, but they never turned out." at Saranac Lake: "Oy vay,"he saidwearily."Alas." When Harvey and I loop back on Interstate SOMEWHERE EAST OF 70 heading west, the snow has slowed to mere LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO. ticks. In this single day, we will live through . FEBRUARY 22, 1997. four seasons. Which can happen if one drives .C1 long enough with Einstein's brain in the trunk. ·confession: over the. last days, at truck Time bends and accelerates and overlaps; si- stops and drive-rhrus, at restaurants and multaneity rules. Heading north now to Lucas, random road 'meetings, I've kept our lit- A s"": Kansas, and a tourist spot known as the Garden tle secret-that we've got Einstein's brain M'l •.,it;ti.eJW4,~a of Eden, a spring wind suddenly whips across , stashed in the trunk-and it's taken its psychic ~'(>%l't< , the prairie. Borne along on it, we rack up our toll. There have been moments when I've been , -:",.~ AR'.;"»t , first speeding ticket. . .alone with the brain-e-Harvey in a rest room or ••:'/-<'I:.,~".!~~,j)~ ~;:V-;.'f.•tf«n.{ My strategy has been to keep the Skylark at visiting a friend-when I've opened up the car , "t • 1.1 ,.-.t42,~y.!'4' 75 or 80, scanning the road for cops, and when trunk and looked in, pinched the cold zipper {.,,' ~..,;(J".",~(. ! ~\\ feeling luxurious or bored rotten to push it to 85 between my thumb and forefinger, but then max. Which is precisely what I get nailed for- couldn't bring. myself to unzip the duffel and 85 in a 65-mile-per-hour zone. In the police car unsheath the brain. Too much of a violation, with the state trooper; I don't defend an untenable breach in our manly so- my actions, the greed of speed. "Where . ciety, even as Harvey covets for him- you boys going in such a hurry?" he self the gray matter upon which our asks. Glancing through the windshield private Skvlarkian democracy is found- of the cruiser into the back window of ed. In fact, we've been together now the car, I can just make out the silver for nearly five full days, and he won't crown of Harvey's head, and I'm over- show me the brain. When I bring it up come with the desire to confess. It's not in conversation, he doesn't want to exactly as if we have a dead body in the talk about it. When I ask him what trunk, but it's-not as if we don't either . parts of the .brain we're traveling with .For some reason, though-perhaps exactly, he says he doesn't know and 'out of self-preservation, for fear of los- ' changes-the subject. It is as if I am try- , ing the brain altogether-l simply say, .ing to find the secret center of his "California." The trooper writes out the ticket, , power. Which I am. . . , warns me against trying to go' 85 'again in his Leaving the Astra Motel the next morning, I state, and sets me free. When he turns off the unexpectedly spill my guts at the front desk, as I road in the opposite direction, I hike the return our room keys to the manager. I tell him speedometer up to 80 and hold it steady. we've got the brain in the trunk', adding that We drive south to Dodge City, the Oglala we're headed to California to show it to Ein- aquiferunder our wheels, huge cow-udderedclouds stein's granddaughter. The manager, an affable, overhead. On the radio: steer calves and heifers middle-age man, stops fora moment and looks at for sale, Red Angus bulls, yearlings with good ge- me sideways, realizes I'm serious, and tries to be 'netics and quality carcass. Later, Bobby Darin hospitable. "Einstein, huh? That guy knew some- singing "Beyond the Sea," Harvey tapping a fin- thing," he says, folding his arms, shifting his ger on his knee, the brain sloshing in its Tupper- weight. "That guy really did have a brain. But I . ware. In this happy moment, we could probably wouldn't have wanted to live with him. You drive forever. know ... a little weirdy." He spins his finger in By twilight, a nocturne of autumn rain on the a cuckoo circle around his ear. "I have a nephew roof of the Skylark. We pass a pungent nitrogen who is kind of a genius, but he hasn't flaked off plant, itselflike a twistedmetallicbrain. Water tow- yet. I met a guy in California who was so smart ers gleam in the silver light like spaceships, tele- he couldn't talk. He sure could tell you how to phone poles pass like crucifixes, and grain eleva- look at the moon, but he couldn't tell you how tors rise like organ'pipes from the plains. to tie your shoes."

FOLIO 45 I'm not sure that I feel better, though I know the one who thumbed his nose at the great that, in his way, he has tried to help. But does U.S. Army doctor, Webb Haymaker, upped he scribble down our license-plate number as the establishment, and legged it out West on we leave? . an end around with the brain? Maybe he In Liberal, Kansas, we eat at a glassed-in cof- thought he was protecting the brain from the 'fin of a restaurant called Mr. Breakfast. Old so-called experts, or saving the brain of one of folks arrive in old, rusted Ford pickups, chain- the world's greatest pacifists from the clutches smoking, hacking phlegm. Swab runny eggs of the U.S. military. Wouldn't that make him with Wonder-bread toast, gulp mud-watercof- the perfect Einsteinian hero? fee. Looking around-Harvey among the chorf- After all, Einstein himself had nothing but, ing, anonymous throng---one discerns that this disdain for authority, spent a life shirking it. In is not a bunch racingtoward the millennium, a letter to his friend Queen Elizabeth of Bel- . that the millennium is in fact only a construe- 'gi\lm that described the stuffy hierarchy of his tion of the coastal power elite, a media-and- adopted hometown, Princeton, he said it was marketing event. Frankly, out in America, you "a quaint and ceremonious village of puny get' the feeling that America is dying. And demigods on stilts."! along its highways and byways, the country Perhaps this is why Harvey felt that Ein- seems less ready to leap into the future than it is stein's brain, one of the most powerful engines already clinging to a sepia-toned past when of thought ever on earth" deserved a commit- America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in ted curator, an unpartisan keeper, an eccentric a Manichaean world of good and evil, capital- brother whose sole purpose would be to unlock ists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of , the biological secrets of Einstein's brain by the interstate-the perpetual clusters of placing it in the hands of a chosen few. Ein- Wendy's, McDonald's, Denny's, and Burger , stein himself had called his brain his laborato- King-are crowded with people strangely re- , . ry, and with it had pondered claiming bygone days, ' the blueness of sky, the bend- connecting themselves ing of starlight, the orbit of to some prior eating ex- , Mercury. And, maybe" if Har- perience, reveling in 'vey knew nothing else,·he the familiar. knew enough to make sure We gas down into that Einstein's brain didn't Oklahoma (through Ty- get sucked into the maw of ' rone, Hooker, Guymon, the System.: and Texhoma) and then' This is my line of thought the Texas Panhandle' as we zag through saguaro and (edging the Rita Blanca scrub brush, in the shadow of the [emez Moun- '11' National Grasslands, through Stratford, Dal- tains. When I look over at Harvey, he 'has rno- hart, and Nara Visa}-all' of it flat. with oil 'mentarily nodded off for the first time all trip. rigs like metronomes.' I've taken to pho- I've sort of nodded off, too. On a straightaway, tographing Harvey by various signs and monu- I look at the speedometer: we're going 115 ments along the road, and when we drift by a miles an hour. ' huge wooden cowboy with two guns blazing out across the empty plains, Harvey poses be- LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO. tween his legs. By the New Mexico border, 'the FEBRUARY 22, 1997. wood-frame farmhouses have transmogrified into adobe. In Tucumcari, almost on cue, t Los Alamos, we visit the 'Bradbury Sci- there is .red dirt and tumbleweed. We drive ence Museum. Not unexpectedly, the through ruts and washes.rover tableland and A first exhibit is Einstein's letter to Presi- mesa. Here the hills are testicular, the ancient dent Roosevelt; Harvey stands before' it, nod- mounds mons-like, but all ofit has a dead, ding seriously, then moves on. The museum is, washed-out sexuality, decayed from a time a three-room pavilion walled with text and when this place was overrun by dinosaurs. We grainy black-and-white photographs that detaii climb the crags that tim Pajarito Plateau to the scientific, as well as human, challenges of Los Alamos-the gridded, repressed hothouse that wrought Little Boy and Fat Man. In the 3 An accomplished philanderer, he also flouted the con- rush of cacti, my frustration with Harvey's ventional morals ofhis day. "Einstein loved women," Pe- Humbertness, with his protective zeal when it ter Plesch, whose father-was a close friend, once said of the • physicist, "and the commoner and sweatier and smellier they comes to the brain, has bled into a kind of were, the better he liked them." To live so completely in his benevolent respect, a11idea that Harvey actu- head, he held the real world close-women, sailboats, a sud- ally may be a revolutionary hero. For wasn't he den meal of ten pounds of strawberries,

46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 1997 building the bomb, while lionizing the patriotic Later, I leave the room to make a phone call, , men and women' who contributed to the Man- and when I return Harvey and Clare are alone at hattan Project. But the museum-s-and the cul- the table, flushed with excitement, absolutely ture of Los Alamos as a whole-is most glar- twittering about the brain. They lower their ingly defined bywhat its curators seem to have voices when I come in, raise them when I leave selectively forgotten about the bomb. again. Later, I feel compelled to ask Clare some , For what the Bradbury Science Museum questions: What is Harvey's magic? Does the doesn't show is an August 1945 morning in _ brain turn her on? Does she feel hypnotized? central Hiroshima, trolleys packed with people, "He's a very, very interesting man," she says. thousands of schoolgirls doing community ser- "And for some men chivalry is not dead. Did you vice in the streets. It doesn't show the B-29, the see him pull out my chair for me before dinner?" Enola Gay, floating above at 31,000 feet, then . Before bed, we take a hot tub. I'm confident releasing four tons of metal through the air, Lit- that Harvey will sit this one out, but, no sir, he tle Boy. It doesn't show the side of the bomb doesn't. Shambles out :in a borrowed bathrobe with its autographs and obscene messages (one starts, "Greetings to the Emperor ... ") and emblazoned with the crude naked likeness of Rita Hayworth. What the museum forgets to , show is the forty-three seconds of utter silence, the time it takes Lit- tle Boy to drop on the city, and. then perhaps the loudest second of the twentieth century, a blast that equals. . and swim trunks, dips a toe in the boiling water. 12,500 tons of TNT~ It doesn't show ground It's a pretty chilly night, stars glazed in the sky' zero, at Aioi Bridge, the birds incinerating in like cold coins on black ice; and it's hard not to the air, people flaming like candles, others worry about the physiological ramifications of swelling like bronze Buddhas. And this is just dropping an eighty-four-year-old body into 104- the beginning'. degree water. But Harvey just throws himself in It doesn't show the firestorm that soon pul- like a heavy stone: "OH,' OH, HEH-HEH. ' verizes the city, the atomic winds that tum in- WOW, ' THAT'S HOT. WOW, WOW, to a tornado in the north part of town. The WOW!!!" We simmer for a while, and, chitchat- nine of ten bodies dead within a mile of the ting over the bubbler, it slips out that, in my ear- blast, the 200,000 people who will' finally be lier absence, Harvey opened the duffel for my ~ .. counted dead, and 'the black, sticky rain, carry- friends, unpeeled the Tupperware top, fingered \ ing radioactive fallout,' that beats relentlessly chunks of the brain, expansively answered ques- down on the survivors. It doesn't show the tions. This hits me hard. In fact, I take it as a naked man, skin hanging from his body like a personal injury. I want to say something about kimono, with his eyeball in his hand. It doesn't how unfair it is that I would have driven 2,000 show the 70,000 rubbled buildings and the miles so far and not been allowed to examine the people trapped beneath them. Afterward, it brain, while my friends, doing nothing but being doesn't show Nagasaki and the 140,000 more their friendly selves, got .to see the brain instant- Japanese who will die in like fashion. One can ly. But when I look over at Harvey, he has his spend hours in the museum-as Harvey does, eyes closed, in a wonderful trance, his pale body finally exiting, exhilarated, buzzed about the streaming out from him underwater, I wait for as wonders of technology-but this devastation long as I can take it really, expecting to outlast remains invisible. him, as a kind of revenge. 'But damn if he doesn't We spend the night. at the ran~h of some seem to gain strength. Finally, grudgingly, I lift friends of mine near Cerrillos-a thirtyish cou- myself from the tub, from its magic eternal pie, Scott and Clare. We share a terrific meal, spring, and splash inside, leaving him in the dark and Harvey is particularly animated, fired on red waters, keening softly 'with pleasure-s-ahhh, wine, talking at length about the brain, about play-sure-r-alone beneath the cosmos. how he came by it and how, after fixing it with formaldehyde (his one mistake was injecting the NEAR KINGMAN, ARIZONA. brain with warm formaldehyde instead of cold FEBRUARY 23, 1997. formaldehyde, thus hastening its denaturation), he photographed the brain. "It's a real tray- e reach one of those strange moments sure," he says. "I've gotten to meet many famous , . in the course of every road trip, exhaus- people, many who knew Einstein." W tion spilling into a kind of ecstasy,

'I ' ! ' towns darkly flashing like trout in a river, All high school production of Camelot. He refuses things-the strains' of "Wild Horses" on the help with his luggage, has the brain slung over radio, the galactic motion of driving, the pur- his shoulder in the duffel; tosses it in the closet. ple night-seem like one perfect, unalloyed Wide awake, I go back downstairs and roam .thing, haunted through. Like Charles Lind- . all night, remembering that Einstein put little faith in games of chance. About quantum mechanics, a theory that al- lowed for unpredictable outcomes, he once said that God does not play dice with the universe. Yet LasVegas is all about dice. And all about a perverse kind of hope too. One man at a five; dollar blackjack table, a short, tightly bundled guy-who smells oflime after- shave, is .abstractly addressing the bergh, who .believed that there were.spirits rid- male dealer in gambler cliches and porn-movie ing with him over the Atlantic Ocean, we feel dialogue. "Oh yeah, baby! Yeah, baby! ... the presence of ghosts. Approaching the Give it to me! ... Hit me! Oh yeah! ... Hold Hoover Dam, I stupidly pass a VW Bug and by right there! ... Feelsgood!" the hairbreadth grace of God just barely avoid. Soon, he is sitting alone. As are others like a head-on collision with a lumbering truck. Its him. These are men so sunk down inside them- lights, broken out like jewels on the grill, spell selves that they don't give a prostitute working MARIANNE; the name of my mother. the place a second .look when she cozies up to them. Personally, I'm feeling pretty good, lose LAS VEGAS, NEVADA. some quick money at the roulette table, and FEBRUARY 23, 1997. then, feeling a little less good, regroup in the . Minstrel's Lounge. Maybe I've been alone with he city is a coronation of shimmering Harvey too long, probably I need friends, but I brightn.esses, like so much shattered find myself asking an older couple about Ein- Tglass thrown by the fistful over a sandy stein. The man looks at me suspiciously. "I floor, a high-desert Hong Kong of possibility. don't know anything about him really, and 1 "Sunday midnight is our busiest time of the don't care one way or the other. I'm just trying week," says the woman who checks us in to to have fun," he says in a Yankee accent. ?' ) the Excalibur Hotel/Casino. "There's no freak- "I don't know anything either," chimes his ing explaining it." We've driven to Las Vegas wife cheerfully. "Just that he was a genius or in a dopamine infusion of orange light, nerved something." . on Coca-Cola, gorged on pizza, the Skylark After the hot-tub revelation, I no longer feel smelling vaguely stale. The brain sloshing in compelled to keep our secret. 1 am traveling the padded cranium of the trunk. On 1-40 in with the man who owns Einstein's brain, 1 say, Arizona, we passed a Navajo woman in a Ford and we are going to California to show it to pickup listening to the same radio station as Einstein's granddaughter. The man folds his we were, pounding out a drumbeat on her arms and. looks at me straight on. "Whatever steering wheel. Later, an embalmed moon, makes you happy," he says. Hale-Bopp like a pale teardrop. When Ein- At an empty blackjack table, 1ask a dealer, a stein once visited the Hopi Indians at the Korean guy with amustache, about Einstein. "I Grand Canyon, they honored him with an In- don't know 'anything about him," he says,"but dian name, the Great Relative, and presented that' man over there should be able to help himwith a headdress. you." He points to his manager, a white guy And now, in the casino at midnight, we with a mustache. He barely lets me finish be- stand amid ballyhooing hordes of pale-skinned fore responding. "Haven't seen him in here Easterners and 'leather-skinned Westerners, tonight. Sorry, pal." bikers and accountants, cowboy-hatted and I try again, with the friendliest-looking man 1 big-haired and bald as cue balls, imperial on can find. He's middle-age and round-bellied, like free drinks, soaring on the oxygen-enriched air his group of friends, all wearing Bucky Badger pumping into the casino to keep people awake, sweatshirts. I smile at them, ask their pardon, everyone. taking a stab at Instamatic riches: phrase my question more carefully this time. Harvey seems' overwhelmed, his sensibilities so Mr. Badger furrows his brow.

48 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 1997 I explain that in fact no one has, that I myself We pause at a bank of slot machines. A group am traveling with Einstein's brain. At the men- of grandmothers from Iowa give Harvey a quick tion of the brain, he doesn't miss a beat, becomes once-over, then go back to their spinning impatient. "Let's bury the damn brain and be lemons and limes and sevens..I pull a couple of done with it," he says,as ifhe's been in on the de- coins from my pocker. "For good luck," I tell bate since day one. him. Until now, Harvey hasn't been keen on I try one last time; a cocktail waitress with a gambling, but for my sake he slides a quarter in tornado of blond hair. She stands in a short the slot machine and reluctantly pulls the black-and-gold dress, looking like someone's lever. In a way, however; Harvey has been a risque aunt in age denial at a wedding; WJ,1enI high-stakes gambler all along, having risked ask her if she happens to know what Albert Ein- everything on one bet many, many years ago. stein is famous for, her jaw drops. "You're kid- And even though his slot windows display only ding?" she asks. "You must 'be kidding me. Is unmatched fruit, he leaves the casino with his

. there a hidden camera around here? You're the own jackpot safely stashed in the gray duffel, fifth guy to ask me that tonight, and frankly I'm his step oddly light as he slips over the Excal- offended." Her voice is. pinched with anger. ibur's rich purple carpet and out into the blind- "You know what? I do know who he is ... " She 'ing sunlight and sandpapery air. and I have known each other less than twenty seconds, and yetit feels as if we've lived a life- LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. time of emotions. "He invented the atom bomb, FEBRU~RY 24, 1997. and I happen to think he's terrible." \ In the morning, Harvey and I go for break- own through the brown, low-slung, fast. There are huge lines trailing out of the . . burned-out flats of the Mojave, passing Roundtable Buffet and Sherwood Forest Cafe, Dthe Soda. and Cady Mountains, along and so we watch a juggler dressed in green Ivanpah and Silver Lakes.lpowdered white and tights work the crowd-"Oh boy, whatta jug- . dinosaur-bone dry, through the broken-winged, gler!" says Harvey. Later, we gather our bags blue-shadowed towns of Baker and Yermo and and head .through the casino for the castle Barstow, by the world's largest thermometer door. As usual, Harvey refuses help with his (electronically measuring temperatures to 140 luggage, has the brain slung over his shoulder. degrees), then up over Cajon Summit-all of it .(

FOLIO 49 like a grim, parched-mouth, sun-bleached day- After a half block, Harvey .glances once over after-Las- Vegas hangover until suddenly Los his shoulder. "Well, we .sure asked the right Angeles explodes in a flash of lush green palm person," he says, with ne;>irony intended. We trees and red taillights 'at rush hour, the Cali- drive the brain down Sunset and Wilshire, fornia sky tilting ultraviolet over the Pacific. Rodeo and Hollywood, and finally hole up in Harvey reads from the map the whole way, lit-- Santa Monica. erally reads to me likeit's the story of job. We We've come to L.A. so that Harvey can meet one of the doctors to whom he oncesent slices of Einstein's brain for research. Yet Harvey can't seem to reach him-ean't recall his name, when I ask. Meanwhile', I've made plans to meet Roger Richman, the president of his own celebrity-li- censing agency and the man who represents the beneficiaries of the estate of Albert Einstein, which it- pass a Chanel-earringed Asian woman, driving self is presided over by Hebrew University in a red BMW with a vanity plate that reads :Jerusakm. Richman polices trademark in- 2SUCCESS. It.seems every car here gleams with fringements, hawks trade shows for Einstein its own declaration of erotic or financial contraband, and decides just how the image of prowess: 8MILL; ORGAZ; MONEY. On the radio, the physicist will be used in advertisements and we get an action-news update about a disgrun- on merchandise around the world. When I first tled circus clown who's stolen a car, busting for called Richman from Kansas and told him that freedom on 1-110. And, packed in, moving five I was heading his way with Harvey and the abreast, having apparently passed our desirable brain, he was curt. "The brain is at the Smith- exit some miles ago, we're completely lost for sonian," he said. "And I'd rather not have you the first time all trip. bring that man along." When we finally escape the highway, we're ,And although the brain has never been near somewhere in West Hollywood, though we are the Smithsonian, actually, and is authentically looking for Santa Monica and the ocean. At a still in our trunk, I'm: forced to make up some gas station, I approach a stocky, balding guy in polite excuse when I leave Harvey-something short sleeves and a tie. He works foi:Kodak as a about seeing a friend. I drop him at the beach, field engineer. He gives me directions and then where he finds a senior center and spends the asks where I'm from. Once he's registered our day writing postcards, making pals, playing vitals, the expression on his face looks like a , cards. Then I guiltily head over to Richman's billboard for the country of the dumbfounded. Beverly Hills office. "No fuck, you got Einstein's brain right over Richman, fifty-three, is a big; powerful man there?" he says. "No fucking way. Right in.that with big, powerful ideas and a full head of trunk? The car with the little old man? Are you thickly parted, natural hair. He wears an Izod- making a fucking movie of this? Holy fuck." He .type green short-sleeve shirt. He greets me by pulls out a business card with a picture of him- saying, "You got the brain with you?" And then self on it, sporting a full head of half-synthetic he starts laughing. hair. "That was in my Hair Club days," he says, He ushers me,into his office, a spacious, clut- without hesitation. "You gotta put me in this tered room strewn with unlicensed celebrity fucking article. I'm the guy who gave you direc- products, and before we begin our interview he tions to the ocean. Einstein's fucking brain! ' puts a tape recorder next to mine, turns 'it on, What the fuck next? Aliens, right?" and, in this most self-referential of Cities, an- About five blocks down, we realize that Hair nounces that he is taping for the autobiography Club has given us bum directions. We drift to he intends to write someday. "I would like to the curb and ask-help from the first person who say that I'm a marketing genius," he an- ; -.;-t appears on the other side .of our rolled-down nounces. , window: a cross-dresser in body-hugging, black Richman proceeds to tell me the illustrious ; e leather with thin, shaven legs that seem six history of-Richman. How, eighteen years ago, n feet high and a tiara of some sort in his hair. the son of Bela Lugosi sued Universal Studios ,j He's an attractive woman and knows it and for a percentage of profits made from the image acts like he's been expecting us, bends into the of his father as Dracula. And although he lost window seductively, and gives ,precise direc- the lawsuit, the judgment contained one para- tions, then says, "Hurry now, y'all don't want graph stating that whereas the studio owned to miss that romantic sunset over the Pacific." the rights to Dracula and the family did not

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 1997 have a rightto control Lugosi's image, no one Then, to show me just how bleak a world else had the right to appropriate it either. With without Roger Richman can be, he leads me to that one paragraph, Richman set off for swap a large cardboard box across the room. It's full of meets, stalking the stalls, picking up all kinds black-market desecrations-"horrible, horrible of items that illegally appropriated the images stuff," Richman says. A greeting card with Mae of dead stars. Then he went after the infringers W est urinating through an hourglass, one of on behalf of the families. Marilyn Monroe snorting cocaine, There's John In 1983, he drove to Sacramento with the Wayne toilet paper ("It's rough!-It's tough! sons of John Wayne and Harpo Marx and the And it doesn't take crap offanyone!") and a vial grandson of W. C. Fields, and together they of Elvis's sweat ("Now you can let his perspira- argued for a celebrity-rights act, which legally , , tion bean inspiration") and a box of cotton assured that no one may use the name, voice, balls emblazoned with the words BRANDa'S ' or picture of a deceased personality without BALLS. But the piece de resistance, the succ~s de permission from the family. Then the group scaruiale; is wrapped in paper with rubber bands made the same argument it).New York State, around it. "I always keep him in his, house," where they were called "a group of tribal says Richman. "I never take him out." headhunters" by a lawyer representing Time Richman places it in 'my hands, and Inc. "It was the proudest moment of my life," I unwrap it slowly to find eight Richman says. ' inches of hard tubber topped by , What he's become in these past two decades the smiley-faced head of President is the Upholder of Dead Celebrity, the Protec- Ronald Reagan, It was this very tor of the After-Image. Among the estates he dildo that Richman waved on the' has recently serviced are those of W. C. Fields, floor of the California statehouse to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy' Durante, Sigmund make his point-"I HAVE 'HERE IN Freud, Mae West, and the Wright brothers, as , MY HANDS A SEXUAL DEVICE," well as a personal favorite of mine, Basil Rath- he bellowed to the shocked assemblage- bone. It's easier to have dead clients, Richman, and that pleases him. confides, because they don't cancel a million- Once the Gipper has been wrapped and dollar dress deal when they get a better offer for replaced in the box, we tour the rest of the a clothing line of their own at Kmart. office. And Richman gallops on: "We're , Of all his clients, Einstein is the biggest -, planning a major celebration of the millenni- Richman employs five law firms domestically um. We're doing mailings to advertising and as many abroad to police him, paying up to agencies reminding them that it's coming, $40,000 a month for their services, He shows that we represent all these people, that they , me a stack of papers, dictionary thick. "All of should be celebrating this past century." these are Albert Einstein infringements," he In order to put his own client list in perspec- declares proudly, He shows me a famous photo- tive, Richman recently called the Screen Actors graph of Einstein sticking his tongue out. "We Guild arid found that about 18,000 actors have , never allow this picture to be used," he says died in this century. "How many are marketable fussily. "You know people come back to me and

Falla 51

'\ ; ; He continues. "When I travel into the ing for Harvey and Einstein's brain to visit heartland of America-I go backpacking a with students at Independence High School, lot-and talk about what I'm doing, oh, these one of the biggest in the country. people, they won't let me' shut up. They just Gonzalez has reserved us rooms at the Bilt- ask question after question after question. I'm more Hotel; but when, we arrive around 2:00 like a hero to them. Around here, no one A.M., out on some industrial edge of San Jose, cares, Dead stars, oh, forget it. You're an agent there is only one available room left, with a for the dead, you're a joke, c'mon." 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 duf- fel is up on the television with the weather on and Harvey is,snorkel- ing through his suitcase, each item of his clothing-c-his silk pajamas, a 4gers sweatshirt, .his slippers, and a dress shirt-wrapped in ce 110- phane. He has brought two suits for But Richman is convinced that he's having tomorrow, neatly folded like big bat wings in the last laugh, in no small part thanks to Ein- his case, a black winter worsted wool and a stein, who's gone global. In Japan, Einstein's baby-blue leisure-type suit that puts me ih image is used in a commercial for a video game mind of a carnival barker or a midwestern alu- called 3DO; in Hungary, his mug is plastered minum-siding salesman. on billboards for a local telephone company; in . I collapse on the cot: and no sooner do I hit South Africa, he advertises insurance. "He's the pillow than I'm wide awake. But I keep my the most widely recognized human being that head buried as Harvey putters about the room. ever lived," declares Richman. "In China"- I can hear him running water in the sink, where Richman has recently brokered a deal clearing his throat, ironing. I can hear him for Einstein T-shirts-"they're limited to one rustling through his cellophane-wrapped child per family, and every single parent calls clothes, then perusing his various articles on their one child 'my little Einstein.!" He smiles Einstein, preparing for his lecture, I can hear at the thought. something that sounds like an electric tooth- "China is a cultural wasteland," he says em- brush. Before the sun rises, he finally beds phatically. "They've never heard of John down, and his breathing slows and then grows Wayne. They've never heard of Steve Me- deeper like a river running into pools. Instead Queen. They've never seen any of their of snoring, there's a sweet lowing in his theta- movies. But Einstein, they know." gasps for air, and finally it puts me to sleep tab. When I wake to the crunching of Harvey eat- SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA. ing caramel corn, it's 8:00' A.M., andhe's half- FEBRUARY 26, 1997. dressed, having opted for the black suit with black suspenders and a gray turtleneck, though arvey is to give a talk on Einstein's the weather is verging on summer. Sarah Gon- . brain in S~n Jose; Before we left Prince- . zalez calls and announces that she's in the lob- Hton, he rooted through the letters he by, nearly an hour early. While Harvey primps, keeps in a shoe box-letters from an oddball I go to meet her. She's the only person at the collection of fans and groupies, critics and psy- bar, busily doing something with her hands. chos, everywhere from Denmark to New When I come closer, I realize that she is press- Zealand, everyone from angry rabbis demand- ing on a set of acrylic fingernails. For a mo- ing the brain for burial to elegiacal schoolkids ment, she doesn't notice that I'm standing cutely waxing juvenile 'about trying to figure, there, and we both admire her handiwork. out relativity-and called a woman named When she looks up, she seems surprised. "Oh," Sarah Gonzalez, someone he doesn't know but she says, extends an automatic hand with half who had- written to him a few years ago ran- new nails and half bitten ones, and peeks ~.•..-. domly asking for a piece of the brain. When < -, "'. around me for Harvey and the brain. she heard from Harvey, she felt that the Lord Sarah Gonzalez is a short, pretty, quick-mov- God had intervened on her behalf. Ever since 'ing Filipino woman with black-and-gold sun- his call, she has been busy informing San Jose glasses and an ostentatious emerald car. In her of our arrival, contacting the mayor and the mood and mannerisms she reminds me of a local media, trying to set up a dinner party for 'brushfire in a high wind. She personifies the im- leading lights in the community, and arrang- migrant's dream. A former executive secretary, ~~~ 1 ,1 " t...t ~ i 52 . HARPER'S MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 1997 ,J ~ _~ \",

<~ \~ ~< ,,~~ «.) i Y 1 c- ..l .>\. ~.'"" she is now the president of her own company, his own suit, by comparison; dull and aged; Pacific Connections, which markets biomass there's a tiny hole in one knee of his heavy suit energy conversion--or, as she puts it, "turning pants. He clears his throat repeatedly arid starts .cornstalks to megawatts." Next week, 'she tells to chuckle. "Do you know a fella named Bur- me, she will be in Manila meeting with the Fil- roughs, William Burroughs?" She's never heard ipino president, Fidel V. Ramos, in hopes of of him. Harvey tries again. bringing the gift of energy-more lights and "Where does Gates live?" televisions-to her country of birth. "Bill Gates, Dr. Harvey? That would be When Harvey comes chugging out, she Seattle, I think. Isn't that right, Mike? Seattle, blanches,' then starts forward. "Dr. Harvey, I Mike?" presume," says Gonzalez, clucking and bowing "I thought that fella lived right here in Sili- her head, "I can't believe there is someone liv- con Valley," says Harvey, hawkeyeing the ing and breathing who was so close to Ein- streets suspiciously. A little later on, Harvey's stein." Harvey has removed the brain from the more at ease, sets himself chuckling again. gray duffel and now holds the Tupperware con- "Those are the funniest looking trees," he says.

4

\~~

tainer in his hand, though the plastic is cloud- "They are palm trees, Dr. Harvey," says ed enough that you can really only see urine- Gonzalez. colored liquid inside. Suddenly, it .feels as 'if We are given a brief tour of "old San ]ose"- we're not fully clothed. Even as,Harvey palms a collection of Day-Glo houses that look brand the brain in the lobby, I feel a need to hide it. new-then stop at Gonzalez's house, a com- Gonzalez herself doesn't notice and rushes us fortable though tightly packed bungalow on a . into her Mercury Grand Marquis. She's a cul-de-sac where she lives with her husband woman who enjoys the' liberal use of first and five children, two of them teenagers. A full names. "Mike, what do you think of this scan- drum kit is set up in the living room. One gets dal, Mike?" she asks. "This-how do you say?- the impression that when this house is full campaign-contribution scandal, Mike?" She is there's probably nothing here but love and a perhaps the most persistently friendly person hell of a racket. Meeting her husband, I retract I've ever met her title and claim him as the friendliest person Harvey sits in the front bucket seat, sunk I've ever met. "Oh, Dr. Harvey, 'what does it down in the fine Italian leather, the fabric of feel like to be you?" he asks. He serves us cook:

FOLIO 53 ies and milk. Finally, after photographs have of." He starts slowly for the Tupperware and been taken on the front lawn, we start to leave. the entire audience lean .forward in' their seats, Harvey reaches down and lifts a pinecone from crane their necks, hold their collective breath. the perfect, chemical-fed turf. .He holds it up, For the first time, there is complete silence. admiring its symmetry, and for reasons of his He pops the lid and unabashedly fishes own pockets it. . around for some of the brain, then holds up a Then we drive to Independence High, where chunk of it. It's almost like a dream-illogical- we are picked up by a golf Cart at the front en- ly logical, shockingly normal. My first real trance and whisked a half mile through campus. glimpse of the T upperwared brain and it is with Harvey delivers his lecture in a dim, egg-cavern three hundred other strangers, One girl squeals, room flooded with students and the smell of and general chaotic murmurings fill the room. bubble gum. Some wear baggy Starter sweats or Kids come to their feet in waves of "ohhhhs" jeans pulled low off their hips or unlaced high- and "ahhhs." The smell of formaldehyde wafts tops; some have pierced noses or tongues or thickly over them, a scent of the ages, and eyebrows. Some are white or Asian or Latino or drives them back on their heels. African Amer:ican,~ A number of boys have Harvey natters on, but no one is really lis- shaved the sides of their head and wear mop- tenirignow, just gasping at these blobs of brain. tops or Egyptian pharaoh dos; a number of the "I took the meninges off.... This is a little bit girls have dyed hair, all colors of the rainbow. of the cortex .. ,. He had more glial cells than The teachers shush everyone, but the hor- the rest of us-those are the cells that nourish , monal thrum here defies complete silence, the neurons ... " and there's a low-level sputter of laughter like They are transfixed by the liver-colored a car chuffing even after the ignition's been 'slices as if it were all a macabre Halloween turned off, And then suddenly Sarah Gonzalez joke. They are repulsed and captivated by the is introducing Harvey, the gold of her glasses man whose fingers are wet with brain. Sarah flashing success, and Harvey, shaped like a Gonzalez stands up, slightly disheveled, flushed black candy cane, is stumping to the podium, in the face. "Children, questions! Ask Dr, Har- looking every bit the retired undertaker. He vey your questions!" clears his throat and chuckles and then clears One swaggering 'boy in the back of the room his throat again. He runs his hands up and raises his hand, seemingly offended: "Yeah; but d~wn the side of the podium and focuses on a like, WHAT'S THE POINT?" spot at the back of the room, rheumy-eyed, Harvey doesn't hear, puts his hand behind squinting. These are the thir- his ear to signal that he doesn't hear, and a teen-, fourteen-, and fifteen- teacher sitting nearby translates: "He wants to vear-olds of America-hun- know what the point is," says the teacher po- dreds of clear eyes reflecting litely, back at him, brains obsessed Harvey hesitates for a second; then almost with Silverchair, Tupac, Blos- seems angry. "To see the difference between som, and Brandy-and Harvey your brain and a genius's," he shoots back. seems at a loss, begins a dron- The crowd titters. A girl throws a high five ing, discombobulated, start- at her best friend. "Dang, girl." and-stop remembrance of Al- The old man is cool! bert Einstein almost as if he's Another boy in the back stands. "I was told, talking to himself. like, Einstein didn't want people to take his "The Great Scientist would brain." eventually come up with the Again the teacher translates, and as soon as equation Esmc-, and how he did that I'll never Harvey processes the question he bristles. know, heh-heh ... "Where are you getting your information?" he "He was a friendly person. Real easy to talk says. to, you know. Wore flannels and tennis shoes a "My world-government teacher," the boy lot .. . . says. "I was just real lucky to be at the right place Harvey ponders this, then responds, as if it's at the right time ... " answer enough, "In Germany, it's very com- Einstein's animated face is flashed on a mon to do an autopsy and take the brain out." screen, Harvey's impassive one beneath it, When the period ends, the students storm When Harvey senses he's losing his audience, Harvey and the brain. They want to know he tells them about the autopsy, about the how long he's had it (forty-two years). If he Great Scientist lying on the table and how his plans to clone it ("Way-ell, under the right brain was removed. "He liked the fatty foods, conditions someday, I suppose it might be you know," says Harvey. "That's what he died done"). Whether an evil dictator such as

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 1997 Qaddafi might try to get his hands on it From her light-filled living room, you can ("Heh-heh-heh"). I try to get close, but the see the skyline of San Francisco, Angel Island crowd is too thick, the crush to see the brain rising from the sun-flecked blue ,bay; Mt. too great, and so I stand on the edges with T amalpais lurking in the distance. Among arti- Gonzalez. Even as Harvey gambols outside lat-, facts and antique clocks, Evelyn offers us seats. er, a few students come up and a boy says, "Yo, man, where you go- ing 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 stu- dents waving good-bye. Harvey rides shotgun We have come a long way and yet idee Is like as always, with the Tupperwared brain on his Harvey would like to be anywhere else but lap-s-a man beyond their own grandfathers, "here. Evelyn sits down. I fall onto the plush someone from a different dimension in space couch. Harvey remains standing. and time really, lit down here for a weird rno- , Evelyn tells us about what it was like to grow ment at Independence High, then away again, up as an Einstein; how her life became an exer- ,vanishing on a golf cart down the cement su- cise in navigating the jagged shoals of her fami- perstring sidewalks of their world. ly. Her father had inherited a degree of his own father's cold distance-she refers to her grand- BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA. father only as Albert or Albie-and Evelyn FEBRUARY 27,1997. found herself shipped off to school in Switzer- land. She came back to Berkeley for college, e've reached the end of the road. Evelyn had a bad marriage, lived for a year on the , Einstein greets us at the door to her bay- streets, then later worked as a cop in Berkeley W side apartment complex in a black- and afterward with cult members and their jumper, wearing two Star Trek pins and globe families. She has very few remembrances of her , earrings. Nearly a head taller than Harvey, she grandfather. Most of the letters he'd once sent is a big-boned fifty-six-year-old, though looks her were stolen. younger, witha short bob of brown hair. Due As she says this, Harvey still stands frozen in to a series of illnesses over the last few years" the iniddle of the room, speechless. Evelyn she walks in small steps and breathes heavily does what she can to politely ignore him,asks after the slightest exertion. She gives off an au- me innocuous questions about the trip, waiting taof enormous sadness, though her powers of for him to sit, too. But he doesn't. He, just" humor and forgiveness seem to run equally as , stands there, his arms limply at his side. He deep. Despite the distress that Harvey's re- breathes more quickly. Somewhere in his head, moval of the brain caused her father-Hans virulent, "radioactive cells of what? guilt? prolif- Albert-s-and the rest of the family, she has in- erate and mushroom. He"stands awkwardly in vited him to her house. , the middle of the room and just won't sit, can't Evelyn is known to be the adopted daugh- sit, holds the brain in its Tupperware, trem- ter of Hans Albert, though the circumstance bling in his lett hand. Having arrived here, of her lineage is,a bit clouded. At least one does he now have second thoughts? Could he , doctor, Charles Boyd, tried but failed ro ever have 'imagined, those forty-two years ago, match the DNA of Albert's brain matter and when he cut the brain from Einstein's head, Evelyn's skin because of suggestions that Eve- that he would now be standing here before lyn might actually be Albert's daughter. And Evelyn Einstein with it in his hands? although Albert's DNA was too denatured to The fourth time that Evelyn offers him a seat decipher, the attempt led to something of a he takes it. He laughs nervously, then clears his row. Even as Evelyn characterizes Boyd's the- throat. ''Real good," he says. Evelyn is talking ory as "unfortunate and unfounded," however, ,about cults, how frightening they are and how " . her resemblance to Einstein, the mirthful play what's most frightening about cults is that it's , of light in her heavy-lidded eyes and the Pi- you and I who end up getting sucked in, how casso shape of her face, is uncanny. Evelyn easy mind control really is. "All my friends say I herself ruefully says, "If you, believe in what should ,start one," she says, joking. "I could Albert said about time, then I'm really his channel Albert. I mean, when Linda Evans grandmother anyway." , channels Ramtha she talks like .Yul Brynner.

FOLIO 55 It's just hysterical. If this broad can spend weekends, and they had these cheeses, channel a, 30,000-year-old guy, I you know, full-fat cheeses and nice wines." can channel Albert." "I don't know if he was into wines," says Having summoned his courage, Evelyn. , Harvey abruptly pulls out a sheaf of "I never saw him drink it myself," says Har- photographs and slides with cresyl vey, forgetting, then perhaps remembering,that violet stains ofaxons and glial cells, . he met Einstein only once. "Well, theinnkeep- then plunks the T upperware on the er had a good supply of wine, and I thought it table. "Ah, brain time," says Evelyn, and was for your grandfather. Maybe it wasn't," Harvey just begins talking as if he's talking to There is Some talk about the size of the , the youngsters at Independence High School, brain. Evelyn contends that at 1,230 grams it again. "This is a picture of the brain from differ- qualifies as microcephalic according to the ent aspects, olfactory nerve, and so forth." He 1923 edition of Gray's Anatomy-that is, pulls out a photo of Einstein. "I like to show smaller than normal-but Harvey insists that this picture because it shows him as a younger the brain was normal size for a man Einstein's man, you know, when he first came over to be age,given the fact that brains shrink over an American. So many' ~f the photos you see of time. He lets her see some 'slides but seems un- him are when he was an older man." willing to open rhe Tupperware. When I ask "I have a lot when he was young," says Eve- him if he'd show us pieces of the brain, he lyn. ' , seems a bit put out, uncaps the lid for a mo- "You do? I'll trade you some," says Harvey. ment, then almost immediately lids it. He of- "Did you autopsy the whole body?" fers Evelyn a piece-to which she says, "That "The whole body." would be wonderful'l-s-rhen, curiously, never gives it. to her. Evelyn seems per- plexed, 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 "What was that like?" salt. The words slow as they come from his ,Harvey pauses a moment, clears his throat. mouth: 'something about the fissure of Sylvius, "Why, it made me feel humble and insignifi- occipital lobe, cingulate gyrus. All of it a part cant." . of some abstract painting, some hocus-pocus "Did he have a gall bladder? Or had they act. "It took us a while," he says finally:' taken it out?'" And then, as wemake plans to leave soon "I think he still had a gall bladder. Heh-heh, for dinner, Harvey abruptly ends the meeting. Yeah, his diet was his nemesis, you know, be- "Well, it's 'been a real play-sure," he says, tak- cause he lived before we knew what cholesterol ing us by surprise, And then he explains: earli- did to. the blood, so he probably walked around er, in San Jose, unbeknownst to,me, he made a' ' with high blood cholesterol, much of it being call to his eighty-five-year-old cousin in San deposited in his blood vessels. That aorta, that Mateo and now insists that he must go spend was just full of cholesterol plaque." the night there, assuming that I will take him Evelyn nods. "Yeah ... well, of course, the . more than halfway back to San [ose in rush- European diet ... my father and I would fight hour traffic, But to come this far for only half over fat. wq.en we got a ham, we would cut off . an hour? And besides, Evelyn has rriade reser- the fat and fry it, then fight over it. Bitterly." vations for us all to have dinner. But nothing Evelyn smiles. ' swaysHarvey. I suggest that his i ~, 1 ~ 1 56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 1997 s " ~ ,t, 1 ~ his cousin pick him up at the station. And so Einstein's brain are pouched in a white cloth, he does. We pile into the Skylark and drive to floating in formaldehyde. When I unravel the a nearby station, Harvey in the back seat with cloth, maybe a dozen golf-ball-size chunks of the brain. Although Harvey and I will meet the brain spill out-parts from the cerebral cor- again tomorrow for a visit with Marian Dia- tex and the frontal lobe. The smell of formalde- mond, and although we will share a heartfelt hyde smacks us like a backhand, and for a mo- • good-bye as I drop him off at the train station ment I actually feel as if I might puke. The again (he on his way to the airport to fly back pieces are sealed in celloidin-s-the liver-colored home, me off to visit friends), this parting feels blobs of brain rimmed by gold wax. I pick some like the real end of our trip. At the station, out of the plastic container and hand a few to Harvey opens his case and presents Evelyn Evelyn. They feel squishy, weigh about the' with a postcard: a black-and-white photo of ' same as very light beach stones. We hold them' himself looking pensive in a striped turtleneck, up like jewelers, marveling at how they seem , his ear the size of a small slipper, gazing sleepy- less like a brain than-c-whati-c-some kind of eyed at some form in the distance, some' ghost- snack food, some kind of energy chunk for ge- ly presence. "That's a very nice one," she says nius triathletes. Or an edible product that offers politely. the consumer world peace, space travel, eterni- "Yessir," says Harvey. "Couldn't have been ty. Even today, the Asmat of-Irian Jaya 'believe happier to meet ... " that to consume a brain is to gain the mystical It all seems so anticlimactic, but so appro- essence of another person. But to be absolutely priate. So like, Harvey. And then he's off with honest, I never.thought that, holding Einstein's his suitc~se full of cellophane-wrapped brain, I'd somehow imagine eating it. clothes, caught in a river of people drifting to- "So this is what all the ward the escalators, spilling underground, the fuss is about," says Evelyn: silver tassel of his hair flashing once, then his She pokes at the brain- body going down and down into the cata- nuggets still in the Tup- comb's shadow. perware, laps forrnalde- , It's not until after Evelyn and .I have had hyde on them, A security dinner that we realize the brain is,still with guard walks by and us. In fact, it's still sitting on the car's back glances at us; then keeps seatin its bubble of Tupperware, lit by a walking. There is, I must streetlight, slopping.in formaldehyde. It has admit, something en- been there for three hours, as Evelyn told me tirely bizarre about Eve- over dessert about the ugly schisms and legal lyn messing around with battles inside her family for letters left behind her grandfather's brain, by "Albi~." Given Harvey's well-documented checking his soggyneu- guardianship ~f th~ brain, given the fact that rons. But she seems Einstein seems to be Harvey's invisible friend, more intrigued than it seems impossible that he's just forgotten it, grossed out. , "You but then maybe not. Maybe, through .some could' make a nice unconscious lapse or some odd, oblique act of necklace of this one," she says, hold- , intention, he hasleft it for us. A passing of ing up a circular piece of brain. 'This is pretty the brain to the next generation. My giddi- weird, huh?" , ness is now rivaled only by my sudden para- Watching her in the cast of domelight-an noia. What if it gets ripped off? impression of her sadness returning to me, the "He left the brain?" says Evelyn. "Does he do thrill' of adrenaline confusing everything-I'm , I this often?" , overcome with a desire to make her happy for "Nope," I say, and suddenly we are smiling at a moment. Without thinking, I say, "You each other. ' should take it." Then I remind her that 'Har- We don't look at it right away-right there vey had offered-her a piece earlier but had, in full view of the strolling sidewalk masses- 'never given it to her. "It belongs to you any- ' but drive back to Evelyn's apartment by the way," I say. Weeks later, on the phone, she'll bay. I stop in front of the building with the Sky- tell me, "1 wish I'd taken it." But now, sitting' lark idling. I reach back and take the Tupper- back in the teal velour of the Skylark, she says, , ware in myhands, then unseal the lid, and, in "I couldn't." the domelight of the car, open the container. Instead, she puts the pieces back in the After all these' miles, all these days on the Tupperware, closes it, and hands it to me. She road during which the vengeful gray duffel gets out of the car and heavily walks herself taunted me, I am finally afforded the inspection inside. ' I was deniedback in New Mexico. The, bits of Which leaves just me arid the brain.

FOLIO 57 THE FLAMINGO MOTEL. I am Robert Oppenheimer and Mahatma FEBRUARY 28, 1997. Gandhi, Billie Holiday and Adolf Hitler, . Honus Wagner and Olga Korbut, r am Navajo and Cambodian and T utsi. I am Tupac Amaru e drive the East Shore Freeway to Uni- .and NASA astronaut. I am a scatterling, I am II versity Avenue-skirting the bay, all billionaire, I am a person in a field in North W black and glassed-over, San francisco Dakota about to be abducted by a UFO. It's on the other side like So many lit-up missile si- possible, too, that I am nobody, or rather only los-and then head toward Shattuck Avenue, myself, slightly dazed and confused, curled in a Although I'm exhausted, I suddenly feel very question mark in a pink motel with Einstein's free, have this desire to start driving back brain on the pillow by my head. across America, sans Harvey. On the radio, When I wake the next morning, craving cof- there's a local talk show about UFOs, an expert fee, there is only the world as I know it again- insisting that in February 1954, Eisenhower the desk chair in its place, the wrappered soap disappeared for three days, allegedly making in the shower, the brain sitting demurely on its contact with aliens. pillow, the Flamingo still the Flamingo, with Although there is no convention that we cigarette burns in the rusty rug. There's a sud- know of in Berkeley, we soon find that all the den grand beauty to its shoddiness. inns are .full. All the inns but the Flamingo When I step outside into the bright early- Motel-a pink, cement, L-shaped, Forties- morning sun of California, I have the top off the style two-story with a mod neon rendering of Tupperware. And although later I will return a flamingo. A fleabag. But it's enough. A dou- the brain to Harvey; I am for a brief moment the ble bed, a bathroorn..a rotary phone, Some man with the plan, the keeper of the cosmos. brother partyers have an upstairs room at the Do I feel the thing that all totems and fetishes far end of the motel and are drinking cases of make people feel? Something that I can believe Pabst Blue Ribbon. As I carry the brain up to in? A power larger than myself that I can submit my room, they eye me, then hoot and toss to? Salvation? Have I touched eternity? their crushed cans over the banister into the I'm not sure. The beer cans strewn in the parking lot. . parking lot make out the rough shape of Amer- Insideour room, we are hit with an indus- ica, surrounded by pools of sudsy, gold liquid. trial-size wallop of disinfectant. The room is And the birds have come down out of the sky . the size of a couple of horse stalls with a rust- and they're drinking from it. Even now, the colored unvacuumed shag rug scorched with universe is filling with dark matter. We are cigarette burns. A few stations come in on the slowing down. Snowballs the size of jumbo television, which is bolted high on the wall. trucks are pelting our atmosphere. Perhaps a Nightline is getting to the bottom of the sheep- meteor has just been bumped into a new flight cloning business. It's been a long day, and yet pattern, straight toward Earth, and we won't the brain has got me pumped up. I try to make know anything about it until it explodes us all, a phone call, but the phone is broken. I try to as meteors once exploded the dinosaurs: . write some postcards, but my pen explodes. By But I am here now. In the .now now. Day some trick of the room's mirror, it seems that has come back up from the other side of the there are lights levitating everywhere. Finally, earth, the birds have come down from the sky. pot quite knowing what to do, I go to bed, I Ther~'are flashes of orange light, the air is .put Einstein's brain on one pillow and rest my flooded with honeysuckle. I feel something I own head. on the other one. next to it, fewer can't quite put my finger on, something eu- than four inches away. Just to see. I've come phoric but deeply unsayable. Is it love or just 4,000 miles for this moment, and now all I do not hate? Is it joy or just not sadnessj For a is fall asleep. Light from the road slips over moment, all of time seems to flow through the . ~ ~" , the room-;-a greenish, underwater glow-and Flamingo, its bright edges reflecting the past ~ ;;: ~1", , the traffic noise dims. I can hear beer cans and the present, travelers packing their bags ~" softly pattering down on the pavement, then arid rivering into some farther future. We are " < t -c . , }. nothing. always driving with our secrets in the trunk, ~: ,j \ It's possible that in our dreams we enter a dif- amazed by the cows and rainbows and palm i ~i i ferent dimension of the universe. On this night, trees. And do I dare to think that there will be J it's possible that I suddenly have three wives no ending of the world, of America, of our- . 'i i and ten kids and twelve grandchildren, that selves? I do. I really do. For in some recur- 'I , ~ f I've become Harvey himself, that I open up rence, in some light wave, in some shimmer of ,J 1 '0: .' ({ bodies to find more bodies and open those bod- time, we are out there now, and forever, exist- '4 1 1 j " ies to find that I'm falling through space and ing, even as surely as Einstein himself contin- time. It's possible that, in ,some fifth dimension, ues to exist, here in my hands. _

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OCfOBER 1997 .