Love and Other Ways of Dying (20 page)

From her light-filled living room, you can see the skyline of San Francisco, Angel Island rising from the sun-flecked blue bay, Mount Tamalpais lurking in the distance. Among artifacts and antique clocks, Evelyn offers us seats. We have come a long way—almost four thousand miles, to be exact—and yet it feels like Harvey would like to be anywhere else but here. Evelyn sits down. I fall onto the plush couch, overcome with relief and exhaustion. Harvey remains standing.

Evelyn tells us about what it was like to grow up as an Einstein, how her life became an exercise in navigating the jagged shoals of her family. Her father had inherited a degree of his own father’s cold distance—she refers to her grandfather only as Albert or Albie—and Evelyn found herself shipped off to school in
Switzerland. She came back to Berkeley for college, had a bad marriage, lived for a year on the streets, then later worked as a cop in Berkeley and afterward with cult members and their families. She has very few remembrances of her grandfather. Most of the letters he’d once sent her were stolen.

As she says this, Harvey still stands frozen in the middle of the room, speechless. Evelyn does what she can to politely ignore him, asks me innocuous questions about the trip, waiting for him to sit, too. But he doesn’t. He just stands there, his arms limply at his sides. He breathes more quickly. Somewhere in his head, virulent, radioactive cells of what?—guilt?—proliferate and mushroom. He stands awkwardly in the middle of the room and just won’t sit, can’t sit, holds the brain in its Tupperware, trembling in his left hand. Having arrived here, does he now have second thoughts? Could he ever have imagined, those forty-two years ago when he cut the brain from Einstein’s head, that he would ultimately present himself in the court of Evelyn Einstein’s living room with the contraband in his hands?

The fourth time Evelyn offers him a seat he takes it. He laughs nervously, then clears his throat. “Real good,” he says. Evelyn is talking about cults, how frightening they are and how what’s most frightening about cults is that it’s you and I who end up getting sucked in, how easy mind control really is. “All my friends say I should start one,” she says, joking. “I could channel Albert. I mean, when Linda Evans channels Ramtha she talks like Yul Brynner. It’s just hysterical. If this broad can channel a thirty-thousand-year-old guy, I can channel Albert.”

Having summoned his courage, Harvey abruptly pulls out a sheaf of photographs and slides with cresyl violet stains of axons and glial cells, then plunks the Tupperware on the table. “Ah, brain time,” says Evelyn, and Harvey just begins talking as if he’s talking to the youngsters at Independence High School again.
“This is a picture of the brain from different aspects, olfactory nerve, and so forth.” He pulls out a photo of Einstein. “I like to show this picture because it shows him as a younger man, you know, when he first came over to be an American. So many of the photos you see of him are when he was an older man.”

“I have a lot when he was young,” says Evelyn.

“You do? I’ll trade you some,” says Harvey.

“Did you autopsy the whole body?”

“The whole body.”

“What was that like?”

Harvey pauses a moment, clears his throat. “Why, it made me feel humble and insignificant.”

“Did he have a gallbladder? Or had they taken it out?”

“I think he still had a gallbladder. Heh-heh. Yeah, his diet was his nemesis, you know, because he lived before we knew what cholesterol did to the blood, so he probably walked around with high blood cholesterol, much of it being deposited in his blood vessels. That aorta, that was just full of cholesterol plaque.”

Evelyn nods. “Yeah … well, of course, the European diet … my father and I would fight over fat. When we got a ham, we would cut off the fat and fry it, then fight over it. Bitterly.” Evelyn smiles.

“And all that good goose grease,” chimes in Harvey.

“Oh yeah. Well, in those days goose … well, goose is actually a lot safer than beef, a lot less cholesterol.”

“Oh yeah? I didn’t know that.”

“It’s a family that just adored fat,” she says.

“I used to eat in a little inn up in Metuchen, New Jersey, where your grandfather would spend weekends, and they had these cheeses, you know, full-fat cheeses and nice wines.”

“I don’t know if he was into wines,” says Evelyn.

“I never saw him drink it myself,” says Harvey, forgetting,
then perhaps remembering, that he met Einstein only once. “Well, the innkeeper had a good supply of wine, and I thought it was for your grandfather. Maybe it wasn’t.”

There’s some talk about the size of the brain. Evelyn contends that at 1,230 grams it qualifies as microcephalic—that is, smaller than normal—according to a 1923 edition of
Gray’s Anatomy
in her possession, but Harvey insists that the brain was normal size for a man Einstein’s age, given the fact that brains shrink over time. He lets her see some slides but seems unwilling to open the Tupperware. When I ask him if he’d show us pieces of the brain, he seems a bit put out, uncaps the lid for a moment, then almost immediately lids it. He offers Evelyn a piece—to which she says, “That would be wonderful”—then, curiously, never gives it to her. Evelyn appears perplexed, 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 salt. The words slow as they come from his mouth: something about the fissure of Sylvius, occipital lobe, cingulate gyrus. All of it a part of some abstract painting, some hocus-pocus act. “It took us a while,” he says finally.

And then Harvey abruptly tries to end the meeting. “Way-ell, it’s been a real play-sure,” he says, taking us by surprise. And then he explains: Earlier, in San Jose, unbeknownst to me, he made a call to his eighty-five-year-old cousin in San Mateo and now insists that he must go spend the night there, assuming that I will take him more than halfway back to San Jose in rush-hour traffic. But to come this far for only half an hour? And besides, Evelyn has made reservations for us all to have dinner. But nothing sways Harvey. I suggest that his cousin join us or that we visit
his cousin in the morning after rush hour. Harvey stands firm; then I stand firm. After four thousand miles of driving, I, for one, intend to eat with the daughter-granddaughter of Albert Einstein. Harvey gets on the phone with his cousin and says loudly enough so that I can hear, “The chauffeur won’t give me a ride.”

Ever the rambler, Harvey decides to take public transportation—BART—and then have his cousin pick him up at the station. And so he does. We pile into the Skylark and drive to a nearby station, Harvey in the backseat with the brain. Although Harvey and I will meet again tomorrow for a visit with the neuroanatomist Marian Diamond, and although we will share a heartfelt goodbye as I drop him off at the train station again (he on his way to the airport to fly back home, me off to visit friends), this parting feels like the real end of our trip. At the station, Harvey opens his case and presents Evelyn with a postcard: a black-and-white photo of himself looking pensive in a striped turtleneck, his ear the size of a small slipper, gazing sleepy-eyed at some form in the distance, some ghostly presence. “That’s a very nice one,” she says politely.

“Yessir,” says Harvey. “Couldn’t have been happier to meet …”

It all seems so anticlimactic, but so appropriate. So like Harvey. And then he’s off with his suitcase full of cellophane-wrapped clothes, caught in a river of people drifting toward the escalators, spilling underground, the silver tassel of his hair catching the light, then his body going down and down into the catacomb’s shadow.

It’s not until after Evelyn and I have had dinner that we realize the brain is still with us. In fact, it’s sitting on the car’s backseat in its bubble of Tupperware, lit by a streetlight, slopping in formaldehyde. It has been there for three hours, as Evelyn told me over dessert about the ugly schisms and legal battles inside her family for letters left behind by “Albie.” Given Harvey’s well-documented
guardianship of the brain, it seems impossible that he’s just forgotten it, but then maybe not. Maybe, through some unconscious lapse or some odd, oblique act of intention, he has left it for us. A passing of the brain to the next generation. My giddiness is now rivaled only by my sudden paranoia. What if it gets ripped off?

“He left the brain?” says Evelyn. “Does he do this often?”

“Nope,” I say, and suddenly we are smiling at each other.

We don’t look at it right away—right there in full view of the strolling sidewalk masses—but drive back to Evelyn’s apartment by the bay. I stop in front of the building with the Skylark idling. I reach back and take the Tupperware in my hands, then unseal the lid, and, in the dome light of the car, open the container.

After all these miles, all these days on the road during which I felt taunted by the gray duffel, the big reveal has arrived. Bits of the brain are pouched in a white cloth, floating in formaldehyde. When I unravel the cloth, maybe a dozen golf-ball-sized chunks of the brain spill out—parts from the cerebral cortex and the frontal lobe. The smell of formaldehyde smacks us like a backhand, and for a moment I actually feel as if I might puke. The pieces are sealed in celloidin—the liver-colored blobs of brain rimmed by gold wax. I pick some out of the plastic container and hand a few to Evelyn. They feel squishy, weigh about the same as very light beach stones. We hold them up like jewelers, marveling at how they seem less like a brain than—what?—some kind of snack food, some kind of energy chunk for genius triathletes. Or an edible product that offers the consumer world peace, space travel, eternity. Even today, the Asmat of Irian Jaya believe that to consume a brain is to gain the mystical essence of another person. But to be absolutely honest, I never thought that, holding Einstein’s brain, I’d somehow imagine eating it.

“So this is what all the fuss is about,” says Evelyn. She pokes
at the brain nuggets still in the Tupperware, laps formaldehyde on them. A security guard walks by and glances at us, then keeps walking. There is, I must admit, something entirely bizarre about Evelyn messing around with her grandfather’s brain, checking his soggy neurons. But she seems more intrigued than grossed out. “You could make a nice necklace of this one,” she says, holding up a circular piece of brain. “This is pretty weird, huh?”

Watching her in the cast of dome light—an impression of her sadness returning to me, the thrill of adrenaline confusing everything—I’m overcome with a desire to make her happy for a moment. Without thinking, I say, “You should take it.” Then I remind her that Harvey had offered her a piece earlier but had never given it to her. “It belongs to you anyway,” I say. Weeks later, on the phone, she’ll tell me, “I wish I’d taken it.” But now, sitting back in the teal velour of the Skylark, she says, “I couldn’t.”

Instead, she puts the pieces back in the Tupperware, closes it, and hands it to me. She gets out of the car and heavily walks herself inside.

Which leaves just me and the brain.

The Flamingo Motel. February 28.

We, the brain and I, drive the East Shore Freeway to University Avenue—skirting the bay, all black and glassed-over, San Francisco on the other side like so many lit-up missile silos—and then head toward Shattuck Avenue. Although I’m exhausted, I suddenly feel very free, have this desire to start driving back across America, sans Harvey. On the radio, there’s a local talk show about UFOs, an expert insisting that in February 1954, Eisenhower disappeared for three days, allegedly making contact with aliens.

It would appear, as we go from no vacancy to no vacancy,
that all the inns of Berkeley are full. All the inns but the Flamingo Motel—a pink, concrete, L-shaped, forties-style two-story with a mod neon rendering of a flamingo. A fleabag. But it’s enough. A double bed, a bathroom, a rotary phone. Some brother partyers have an upstairs room at the far end of the motel and are drinking cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon. As I carry the brain up to my room they eye me, then hoot and toss their crushed cans over the banister into the parking lot.

Inside, I’m hit with an industrial-sized wallop of disinfectant. The room is the size of a couple of horse stalls with a rust-colored unvacuumed shag rug scorched with cigarette burns. A few stations come in on the television, which is bolted high on the wall.
Nightline
is getting to the bottom of the sheep cloning business. It’s been a long day, and yet the brain has got me pumped up. I try to make a phone call, but the line is dead. I try to write some postcards, but my pen explodes. By some trick of the room’s mirror, it seems that there are lights levitating everywhere. Finally, not quite knowing what to do, I go to bed. I put Einstein’s brain on one pillow and rest my own head on the other one next to it, fewer than four inches away. Just to see. I’ve come four thousand miles for this moment, and now all I do is fall asleep. Light from the road slips over the room—a greenish, underwater glow—and the traffic noise dims. I can hear beer cans softly pattering down on the pavement, then nothing.

It’s possible that in our dreams we enter a different dimension of the universe. On this night, it’s possible that I suddenly have three wives and ten kids and twelve grandchildren, that I’ve become Harvey himself, that I open up bodies to find more bodies and open those bodies to find that I’m falling through space and time. It’s possible that in some other dimension, I am Robert Oppenheimer and Mahatma Gandhi, Billie Holiday and Adolf Hitler, Honus Wagner and Olga Korbut. I am Navajo and Cambodian
and Tutsi. I am Túpac Amaru and NASA astronaut. I am a scattering, I am a billionaire, I am a person in a field in North Dakota about to be abducted by a UFO. It’s possible, too, that I am nobody, or rather only myself, slightly dazed and confused, curled in a question mark in a pink motel with Einstein’s brain on the pillow by my head.

When I wake the next morning, craving coffee, there is only the world as I know it again—the desk chair in its place, the wrappered soap in the shower, the brain sitting demurely on its pillow, the Flamingo still the Flamingo, with cigarette burns in the rusty rug. There’s a sudden grand beauty to its shoddiness.