Love and Other Ways of Dying (16 page)

Another contemporary of Einstein’s, Erwin Schrödinger, claimed that Einstein’s theory of relativity quite simply meant “the dethronement of time as a rigid tyrant,” opening up the possibility that there might be an alternative Master Plan. “And this thought,” he wrote, “is a religious thought, nay I should call it
the
religious thought.” With relativity, Einstein, the original cosmic slacker, was himself touching the mind of a new god, forming a conga line to immortality through some wrinkle in time. “It is quite possible that we can do greater things than Jesus,” he said.

That, finally, was Einstein’s ultimate power and hold on our imagination. Eternity—it would be good to touch that, too.

Kansas City, Missouri. February 19.

Across Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, beneath scudding clouds and clear shots of sunlight, the chill air fragrant with manure and feed. We pass over the chocolate, moiling Mississippi, drive near the towns of Emma and Bellflower, Peruque and Auxvasse. We stealth through shadows thrown by crop dusters and Greyhound buses, up against wobbling fifty-three-foot truck trailers full of movie videos or broccoli or industrial turbines and, at one point, a flatbed with a Vietnam-era helicopter strapped to it. On this bright, windy day, we see the outbuildings and barns of the Midwest, where farmers stand in small circles eyeing their fields like nervous, hand-wringing fathers, repairing their threshers, turning the first soil, pointing to what’s yet invisible, speaking in incantations: feed and fertilizer, moisture content and till depth. With each day’s work, with each fieldside conference and hour alone in the air-conditioned cab of a supertractor, they will silently appeal to the circadian rhythms of some higher power for a perfect calibration of sun and rain, as well as for the perfect ascension of market prices to deliver a bountiful harvest. On the radio, we get the farm reports: Lean hog futures down five-eighths; feeder cattle futures up a half. Corn futures and soybean and cocoa, up an eighth, down a third, even. January sugar and March corn; September rice and December cotton—all of them attached to a momentary price that may right now be making someone rich as it bankrupts someone else.

“Look at that cow!” exclaims Harvey.

And it is quite a cow! On this afternoon together, something is beginning to happen out here among us, the three of us.
Time is slowing, it seems, or expanding to fill a bigger sky, a more open landscape. The got-to-be-there self-importance of the East, its frantic floodlight charge, has given way to a single lit parlor lamp. And under it, a cow or one silver tree in the wind or the rusted remains of an old tiller seems more holy, even mythic. It’s not that the Midwest lacks bustle; it’s just that away from the cities, the deadlines are imposed by the earth and its seasons. I slip off my watch and feel myself beginning to slow into Harvey time.

We are, in fact, retracing Harvey’s route when he came west from New Jersey in the 1960s, after eluding those who desired the brain for themselves. Within weeks of Einstein’s death, after it was reported that the brain had been taken from the body, a group of leading brain researchers met in Washington, D.C. It was an august collection of men: Doctors Webb Haymaker and Hartwig Kuhlenbeck, Clem Fox and Gerhardt von Bonin, Jerzy E. Rose and Walle Nauta. And necessarily among them, but perhaps regarded with a tinge of condescension, this slightly awkward, nervously chuckling half doctor, this Irregular Sock, this pathologist from a small-town hospital connected only by the same name to the hallowed halls and elite eating clubs of Princeton University. When Webb Haymaker, who represented the U.S. Army, demanded the brain, Harvey simply refused to hand it over.
Heh-heh.
When Haymaker got angry, Harvey didn’t budge. And now who laughs last? Who’s dead, each last one of them, and who’s out here busting for California with the brain, inhaling Frosties and baked potatoes, hoovering Denny’s pancakes and green salads and chicken noodle soup?

“Harvey didn’t know his ass from his elbow from the brain,” says Larry Kruger, who at the time was a postdoctoral fellow with Jerzy Rose at Johns Hopkins. “Harvey refused to give up the brain even though he wasn’t a neuropathologist, and then all bets
were off. I mean, what were you going to do with it, anyway? I heard he kept it in his basement and would show it to visitors. I guess some people show off a rare edition of Shakespeare. He would say, ‘Hey, wanna see Einstein’s brain?’ The guy’s a jerk.… He wanted fame and nothing came of it.”
²

Meanwhile, Harvey bristles at such suggestions, regards himself as destiny’s chosen one, the man who forever belongs with Einstein’s brain, for better or for worse. In a way, it is a tale of obsessive love: Humbert Humbert and his Lolita. But Harvey sees it more prosaically: “Yup, I was just so fortunate to be the one to walk in the room that morning,” he repeats again and again. Prior to that April morning in 1955, Harvey’s life hardly augured greatness as much as it did stolid servitude and an abiding curiosity in science. He had met Einstein only once, to take blood from him. Expecting his usual nurse for such a menial chore, the ever-lustful scientist saw Harvey and blurted, “You’ve changed your sex!” Summing up his years as a pathologist, Harvey says, “It was great to try to figure out what killed someone.”

Sawed-off statements like these initially make it easy to, well, feel underwhelmed by Harvey. In part, it is simply Quaker modesty, a respectful reticence, beneath which lies 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, Connecticut, when his father got a good job with an insurance firm. Later, he attended Yale, where he contracted tuberculosis, then spent over a year in a sanatorium, and when he returned to school, he gave up his dreams of doctoring and turned to pathology because
“the hours were less demanding.” He lists that year of sickness and the later revocation of his medical license as among the greatest disappointments of his life. Did he pay a price for the brain? Perhaps. He was soon fired from his job at the hospital and divorced from his first wife. In the next years he drifted through jobs at state psychiatric hospitals and medical labs, another wife, and then picked up and moved west to start a general practice in Weston, Missouri, which eventually folded. Later, he lost his medical license after failing a three-day test and was forced to work the late shift as an extruder at a plastics factory in Lawrence, Kansas. All of it after the brain, perhaps because of the brain.

Nonetheless, a life isn’t one paragraph long, and we might also consider Harvey a happy man, maybe with each move feeling himself to be on to the next adventure, with each wife and child perhaps feeling himself loved. Still, I try to picture him standing before Einstein’s body—in that one naked moment.

Only occasionally can you glimpse, through the embrasures of an otherwise perfectly polite person, the cannons aimed outward; only in a certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins.

Lawrence, Kansas. February 20.

In the heart of America, a psychic vortex. We cruise through a neighborhood of picket fences and leafless trees, parking before a small red house, a four-room once built from a Sears, Roebuck kit, replete with bookcases of paperback horror fiction and wax skulls. Here lives Harvey’s former neighbor, the soon-to-be-late novelist William S. Burroughs. It’s both odd and fitting that the
man who allegedly stole Einstein’s brain once lived with said brain just around the corner from William Burroughs, the strange, kinetic father of the Beats, as if Harvey were an invention of one of his novels.

While their neighborhood encounters didn’t add up to much—Harvey remembers one extended meeting—he treats their reunion with all the gravitas of the Potsdam Conference. Shuffling across the front porch now, Harvey clasps the old writer’s hand, enunciating loudly, believing that the eighty-three-year-old Burroughs is equally deaf, which he isn’t, then climbs up his arm until they are in a startled embrace, the two of them as pale as the marble of a Rodin sculpture. “REAL, REAL GOOD TO SEE YA!” Later, Harvey quaffs glasses of burgundy until he turns bright red; Burroughs, himself a bowed and hollowed cult hero and keeper of the Secret—his cheeks dimpled as if by the tip of a blade, a handgun in a holster over his kidney—drinks five Coke and vodkas after taking his daily dose of methadone.

“Have you ever tried morphine, Doctor?” he asks Harvey.

“NO. NO, I HAVEN’T,” yells Harvey earnestly.

“Unbelievable. In Tangiers, there was a most magnificent, most significant drug … went there just to have the last of it. Last there ever was. Tell me about your addictions, Doctor.”

“WELL, HEH-HEH …” But then Harvey keeps quiet about the brain.

Burroughs lights a joint and offers it to Harvey, who demurs, smoke swirling around his head like a wreath of steam from a Turkish bath.

“DID YOU BECOME ADDICTED BECAUSE YOU FELT PAIN?”

“I wish I could say that, Doctor, but no,” says Burroughs, considering. “I became addicted because I wanted more.”

Later, when the two soused men face each other for a goodbye
on the tippy front porch—for no apparent reason, Burroughs now calls him Dr. Senegal—the writer lowers his voice and delivers a farewell chestnut, one that Harvey receives with a knowing nod, though it isn’t clear he actually hears it. “What keeps the old alive, Dr. Senegal,” advises Burroughs, “is that we learn to be evil.”

And then we are out in the night, in a downpour, Harvey trundling toward the car for what feels like a small eternity. Behind him Burroughs sways, curling and unfurling his arms like elephant trunks, then assumes a position of Buddhist prayer—pale, delirious, still.

Toward Dodge City, Kansas. February 21.

We wake in Lawrence to a nuclear-powered snow, driving horizontally, starring the windows with ice, piling up until the Skylark looks like a soap-flake duck float in a Memorial Day parade gone terribly wrong. Everything is suddenly heaped in the frigid no-smell of winter, cars skidding, then running off roadsides into gulleys. The snow falls in thick sheaves, icicles jag the gutters. It feels like Lawrence is going back to a day, 500,000 years ago, when it was buried under hundreds of feet of ice.

We take shelter in our adjoining rooms at the Westminster Inn, are slow to rise. When we do, Harvey is bright-eyed and spunky as we find the good people of Kansas doing what they do in a blizzard: eating pancakes. The Village Inn Pancake House Restaurant—real name—is packed: college students and retirees, all flannel-shirted, how-are-yas ricocheting everywhere, steak-and-egg specials zooming by on super-white plates. Some of the old men wear Dickies work pants and baseball caps with automotive labels; the undergrads sport caps emblazoned with team names or slogans like
WHATEVER
or
RAGE
or
GOOD TO GO
.
Even in the no-smoking section everyone smokes—one of Harvey’s pet peeves.

Our routine in restaurants follows a familiar pattern: Harvey meditates over the menu, examining it, dissecting, vectoring, and equating what his stomach really wants. I get a newspaper and usually skim through the first section before he’s ready. Even as James Earl Ray is planning to go on
The Montel Williams Show
to plead for a new liver and two teenagers are indicted for the murder and dismemberment of a man in Central Park, there’s an ongoing existential debate raging in Harvey’s head: salty or sweet, eggs or waffles with maple syrup.

Occasionally, after a particularly deliberate order, he’ll deliberately change it. Our waitress is a pathologically smiley KU student, well versed in the dynamics of a breakfast rush, the coffee-craving, 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. “Eggs over easy, bacon, wheat toast, home fries. More coffee?”

This town was once the setting for a Jason Robards made-for-television movie called
The Day After.
In it, the sturdy people of America’s Hometown were blown to smithereens in a nuclear attack, and the few who survived wandered in a postapocalyptic stupor, in rags, bodies flowered with keloid scars. That Lawrence would become connected in the nation’s psyche with nuclear devastation and that Einstein’s brain, the power that unknowingly wrought the bomb, rested here for six or seven years is a small pixel of irony that seems to escape Harvey. When I ask him about it, he says, “Way-ell, I guess that’s true.” And starts laughing.

The truth is that Einstein himself was confounded by the idea that his theory of relativity had opened up a Pandora’s box of mutually assured annihilation. In a 1935 press conference, in
which he was asked about the possibility of an atomic bomb, the physicist said that the likelihood of transforming matter into energy was “something akin to shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are only a few birds.” Four years later, however, the Nazis had invaded Poland, and Einstein, the celebrated pacifist, signed a letter to President Roosevelt advocating the building of an atomic weapon. When the letter was personally delivered to Roosevelt, the president immediately saw the gravity of the situation—that if the Americans had just decided to build a bomb, perhaps the Nazis, with great scientists such as Heisenberg, were well on their way to completing one—and ordered his chief of staff to begin immediate top-secret plans that led to the building of an atomic weapon. Sometime later, on a mesa in New Mexico, rose the Town That Never Was, Los Alamos, and under the guidance of Robert Oppenheimer came Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs that would eventually decimate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively.

Einstein, who was thought to be a Communist sympathizer by the FBI and an untrustworthy, outspoken pacifist by the Roosevelt administration, was not part of Oppenheimer’s team. In fact, he had nothing whatsoever to do with the bomb, though even today his name is connected to it. The letter to Roosevelt haunted him and his family and, in one case, incited a physical attack against Einstein’s son, Hans Albert. Writing to Linus Pauling, Einstein called the letter the “one mistake” of his life. When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima—on August 6, 1945—Einstein heard the news after waking from a nap at Saranac Lake, in upstate New York. “Oy vay,” he said wearily. “Alas.”