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DRIVING MR. ALBERT a Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain by Michael Paterniti

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DRIVING MR. ALBERT a Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain by Michael Paterniti 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 .
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