Booknotes

Mr. MICHAEL PATERNITI (Author, "Driving Mr. Albert"): The title came from the original Harper's article. And we were sitting in a New York cafe, myself, the deputy editor at Harper's Colin Harrison, and Lewis Lapham, the editor at Harper's, and he said, `We'll call this thing "Driving Mr. Albert,"' and everybody said, `Great.' So...

Mr. PATERNITI: The original article ran in October of 1997. The trip was made at the end of February '97. And the article ran as a folio in Harper's, so it ran at about--almost 19,000 words, which is about four times the normal size of a magazine article.

Mr. PATERNITI: Mr. Albert Einstein is the hero of the story, at least his brain is. And I was the chauffeur on this cross-country trip that took place with Dr. Thomas Harvey, the man who did the autopsy on Albert Einstein in April of 1955 and took Einstein's brain.

Mr. PATERNITI: I heard the urban myth, you know, maybe 10 years ago now, during the Gulf War. A friend mentioned that Einstein's brain had been stolen from his head during the autopsy. It'd been sliced up into about 240, 50 pieces and disseminated around the world, but the mother lode of Einstein's brain was in a garage in Saskatchewan. And I just couldn't believe it. I thought it sounded completely insane. But I kept telling the story over and over to people that I knew. I just kept passing the myth on and adding on to it.

And some years later, I was living in New Mexico and I mentioned it to my landlord at the time and he said, `Yeah. The guy with Einstein's brain lives next to William in Lawrence, Kansas.' And `William' turned out to be William Burroughs, the Beat writer, and his neighbor turned out to be Dr. Thomas Harvey, the man with Einstein's brain.

Mr. PATERNITI: He was good friends with William Burroughs. He'd actually lived with William for four years cooking for him. It was just a completely random occurrence.

Mr. PATERNITI: In New Mexico, I was working as an editor at Outside magazine. After leaving grad school for a time as an editor, I worked at Story magazine, a fiction journal, and then I went to Outside.

Mr. PATERNITI: Darien, Connecticut.

Mr. PATERNITI: I went to college at Middlebury College in Vermont, and went to grad school at the University of Michigan for my MFA in fiction writing.

Mr. PATERNITI: Master of Fine Arts. So it was two years of writing fiction and sort of teaching poetry and fiction to undergrads.

Mr. PATERNITI: That would have been '95 or '6 when he first mentioned it to me.

Mr. PATERNITI: I said, `You've got to be kidding me. I mean, you're putting me on, right?' And he said, `No. I'll get you his number.' So I said, `Yeah, OK, get me his number. Whatever.' I mean, I really didn't believe it. He did get me his number and I jotted it down on a little shred of paper and I pinned it to the wall in my office next to my phone and I just started dialing the number.

Mr. PATERNITI: Dr. Thomas Harvey. And I dialed and dialed and dialed and I literally called that number for probably three months; no answer. And I called at different hours of the day. I don't know why. It was just--the number was there and whenever there was a down moment, I would just dial it. And when I finally was about to give up, I dialed it promising myself that this would be one of the last times and he picked up the phone.

Mr. PATERNITI: He said, `Hello.' And I said, `Hello. Is this Dr. Thomas Harvey?' He said, `Yeah.' And I said, `Is this Dr. Thomas Harvey who has Einstein's brain?' And he said, `Yes, it is.' And I was flabbergasted, really.

Mr. PATERNITI: I would find out that I reached him at his apartment that at the time he was sharing with a grad student in Lawrence.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Nearby, yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: I said, `Would it be all right if I might come visit you sometime?' And he said it'd be fine and that--you know, I was very surprised that he was so open. And then I asked him when might be a good time and I think this was--I was talking to him in the winter--maybe it was the winter or maybe it was '95, and he said, `July would be good.' July was about seven months away, and I said, `All right. July's good. I'll come see you in July.'

Mr. PATERNITI: I told him that I was interested in Einstein's brain.

Mr. PATERNITI: I was interested in him. I was interested in this man who, for over four decades, had kept Einstein's brain and had virtually disappeared with it. He was fired or left his job--depending on who's story you believe--in 1960 from the Princeton Medical Center. And in the intervening years, he took different jobs. He kept moving until he ended up in Lawrence. And I just had these huge questions about this man and his booty, his relic, his raison d'etre. You know, it was--it was the organizing principle of his life. It was the thing he most believed in.

Mr. PATERNITI: Right.

Mr. PATERNITI: The version that I think is the real version was that the employees of the hospital stood up for Dr. Harvey. The board of directors ended up firing him.

Mr. PATERNITI: It's a little cloudy. Partly because of his handling of Einstein's brain and partly because of an alleged affair that he had with a nurse at the hospital.

Mr. PATERNITI: And he had some differences with the director of the hospital.

Mr. PATERNITI: I called him just prior to our supposed meeting time in July, and the line was disconnected. He had disappeared again. So I didn't see him at his apartment in Lawrence. I was lost again. I spent the next four or five months looking for him, and I finally tracked him down. He'd moved back to--just outside of Princeton in Jersey.

Mr. PATERNITI: Well, when he disappeared in July, it was the game. You know, it was, `I have to find this man.' I mean, obviously, there's a reason why he disappeared again and why has he vanished and what's it going to take to find him? I mean, I was just very caught up in--at that point--in following through and meeting him. So...

Mr. PATERNITI: I met him probably around November of '96. Maybe October. Right--right in there. It was autumn.

Mr. PATERNITI: In Princeton. We met in Princeton the first time. Or he lived just outside of Princeton, and I went to the house and he greeted me wearing a plaid shirt and a sport coat and suspenders and his tie had a little price tag from long ago that said $10 on it and he brought me into the house, his girlfriend's house.

Mr. PATERNITI: Her name is Cleora. And we went down into the basement where he had set up a little makeshift office. And we sat by a fire that he'd built and we had drank tea, and he just started telling the story of the brain.

Mr. PATERNITI: I didn't know if it was there, and I didn't ask him right away. In one of our subsequent meetings, I asked to see the brain and I later found out that it wasn't there, that he kept it in a safe house that was some miles away from that house because all sorts of people, perhaps even like me, had inquired over the years about the brain. And I think he felt that, you know, it was a dangerous object and he needed to keep it hidden.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: End of February of '97.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: We met a few times. I would always go down to Princeton, and we sort of--our patterns were similar from meetings we...

Mr. PATERNITI: I was now living in Maine. I had left my editing job in New Mexico, moved back to New England to be closer to family and friends, moved with my girlfriend, Sarah, and we moved to the middle of nowhere really up in Maine.

Mr. PATERNITI: Just outside of Bridgton, Maine.

Mr. PATERNITI: I was 32 at the time of the road trip.

Mr. PATERNITI: Eighty-four.

Mr. PATERNITI: We would go for meals. We drove by 112 Mercer Street, where Einstein used to live. We talked a lot. We spent a lot of time together. Dr. Harvey mentioned that he had to go back to Lawrence, Kansas, because he had been in a little fender bender before he left and he needed to go back to straighten out some insurance matters. But he also wanted to go out and meet some doctors who he'd sent pieces of the brain to. And he kept talking about wanting to get out into America to see some people. And I was listening to him and I just finally said, `You know, I could drive you.' But it--but I said, `I could drive you' only because I was at this place in my life where I wasn't working and I was sort of in between myself. You know, I was trying to figure out what came next for me. So we were sort of two somewhat lost souls. And when he said, you know, `Yes,' we arranged the trip.

Mr. PATERNITI: It was a ranch house. Nothing about it would suggest anything but, you know, really middle-class respectability.

Mr. PATERNITI: Wonderful. A very sweet woman who had been a nurse at Princeton Medical Center at one point, and which is where they first met.

Mr. PATERNITI: Three. And he had 12--I think he has 12 children and stepchildren from those marriages.

Mr. PATERNITI: At this point--initially my interest was very personal. And at this point, I began to think, `I better take notes. I better keep a record because I may--you know, it may be something worth writing about.' And at that point, too, I had mentioned it to Harper's and they were interested. So I thought, `Well, let's see how it goes?'

Mr. PATERNITI: I don't really have much money, no.

Mr. PATERNITI: I don't think he had much, no. I think he--I've heard that he spent a lot of his money on his children. So he was 84 years old living with his girlfriend in her house with an office in the basement. So no, I don't think he...

Mr. PATERNITI: And the brain down the street, yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: I got food poisoning right before we were supposed to leave. So we had to delay it a couple days. I think we left on a--I can't remember, a Monday or a Tuesday.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: '97.

Mr. PATERNITI: Buick Skylark, teal green, velour seats. I rented it.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: He had two bags. He had a plaid bag in which he had clothes and he had a duffel bag, in which I would later find out was parts of the brain put in Tupperware and doused with formaldehyde. So the brain was soaking in this duffel bag in Tupperware, and he put bags in the trunk. He was dressed in a pair of irregular jeans, Calvin Klein jeans that had an X on the label because they were irregular. And he wore a turtleneck and a beret. He had a green beret.

Mr. PATERNITI: Sarah was in the middle of working on a book, and she had been traveling extensively. She'd written a--she was writing about the US women's Olympic basketball team. So she'd been basically traveling the world for that year leading up to the Olympics, and then sat down and started to write it very quickly. So she was trying to finish her book and working very intensely.

And I think she didn't totally believe that all of it was going to happen. I'm not sure that--anytime I mention this to anybody, they often said, `Yeah, that sounds interesting.' Like, `You're completely insane,' and they didn't--you know, they didn't believe. They really didn't believe it until I was in the car with the brain and Harvey, and then I called her from the road and said, `Yeah, it's happening and we've got the brain.'

Mr. PATERNITI: I have never transported famous body parts cross country, no. But--no--I really--I had done some work, some foreign work for--I did a piece for The New York Times Magazine in Vietnam and I did a piece about Burma for Outside magazine. So I was really doing more foreign corresponding than this kind of stuff. But these kinds of stories, these kinds of people, really interest me and they do to this date. So the stories that have come after that story, in particular, have been more like that story in some ways. At least those stories thematically carry the same concerns for me.

Mr. PATERNITI: I think it was a '97.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Eleven days, 4,000 total miles. I left Portland, Maine. So it was from Portland, Maine, until we got to Berkeley, California, it was a 4,000-mile trip, though I picked Dr. Harvey up in Princeton.

Mr. PATERNITI: I thought the goal was to give the brain back to Evelyn Einstein, Albert Einstein's granddaughter--though there's some controversy about that and we can maybe talk about that a little later. But I thought Dr. Harvey was facing down some late-in-life guilt about having taken Einstein's brain at the autopsy. Apparently, when it was reported the day after the autopsy, in April of 1955, that Dr. Harvey had Einstein's brain, Hans Albert, Einstein's son, was quite upset. He had no idea that his father's brain was going to be taken, and the Einstein family was quite upset. And in the years to follow, their anger grew. So I thought Dr. Harvey felt that, at 84, it was time to give the brain back to the Einstein family and we were going to see Evelyn, who was one of the lone survivors.

Mr. PATERNITI: She was adopted by Hans Albert. And there were family rumors--and Evelyn herself isn't totally certain whether or not they're true--that she was the product of a relationship that Albert Einstein had with a--I think a dancer from New York City. And what happened--I think it was four years ago, maybe five years ago now, was a Dr. Charles Boyd got a piece of the brain and tried to match it with Evelyn's skin. He tried to match the DNA. And he was unable to do it because the brain was too denatured. So there is this huge question mark in Evelyn's mind about whether or not she is, in fact, the daughter. And if you see her physically, she looks like an Einstein. She looks like Albert Einstein, especially in the eyes. It's just an uncanny resemblance.

Mr. PATERNITI: I don't think--I'm not sure that we ever signed a contract.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: We went out through Philly and drove straight out through St. Louis, straight on to Kansas City, and then dipped off the interstate...

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: To me, he was just a complete enigma. When he--I think the beret was really the first thing that struck me, not as unusual, but as a sign that this man, at the age of 84, was ready for adventure. Like, this guy was ready to ride. And his enthusiasm, though not completely on the surface, was contagious because I, myself, was ready to ride, too. And yet as we rode--I mean, he remained the enigma that he was from that first phone call to me. I mean, he even now, to me, is this hologram. Depending on how the light falls, he looks different. Some people think he's a hero. Some people think he's a thief.

Mr. PATERNITI: He claims he had permission from the executor of the Einstein estate, Otto Nathan. Otto Nathan, before his death in the '90s, said that he never gave that permission. And though he was present at the autopsy, said he'd had no idea that Dr. Harvey was actually taking the brain out at the time.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Well, the foreskin of Christ is supposedly--was supposedly kept in a church in Italy, but that was stolen. Walt Whitman's brain was dropped in a laboratory at the turn of the century and was thrown out. JFK's brain has gone missing. Thomas Hardy's heart was taken from his body and sent to his wife and was eaten by their dog. So there's a long, strange history of body parts...

Mr. PATERNITI: ...turned into relics.

Mr. PATERNITI: Well, you could say that Napoleon's penis, I think, was supposedly kept and was offered for auction in the '70s, I think.

Mr. PATERNITI: There was so much controversy that the owner took it back. So it's out there somewhere, we just don't know where.

Mr. PATERNITI: I mean, it's a great question. It is as old as the saints. There's something mythological about, especially, the body parts of mythic human beings, I think. They become relics. And in the case of, you know, Buddha, if you travel through Southeast Asia, I mean, every temple you go to there's a--the fingernail of Buddha is encased in tons of gold, and that somehow gives a holiness to these places.

When it comes to the kind of brain craze that seems to occupy doctors and medical researchers in the 19th and 20th century, I think people were really searching for the keys to genius. And so famous brains were collected and studied. Mussolini's brain was studied in America at Walter Reed by a man named Webb Haymaker, who later tried to get Einstein's brain from Dr. Harvey. There are, in these body parts, and especially in Einstein's brain, there is this power, whether real or assumed, that has led to, you know, all kinds of people trying to get the brain and kind of this deep desire to be connected to that kind of genius.

Mr. PATERNITI: Born in 1879 in Germany, grew up, was a decent student, not a floundering student the way some people have said, but didn't speak, really, until he was three. And then when he started speaking, spoke in fully formed sentences. As a baby, he had a big oversized sort of lopsided head that terrified his mother and grandmother. His grandmother, when she first saw him as a baby, yelled, `Too big. Much too big.'

And he grew into kind of a dreamy kid. He was really obsessed with his father and his uncle's factory. They made turbines, and he was really into electricity. So while all the other kids were playing, Einstein wouldn't--he would really never go out and play. And only when he was forced to would he go out and be, like, act as umpire. He wouldn't really engage in competition. He was much more comfortable sort of devouring these science textbooks that they had around the house.

And at the age of 10, he went through this sort of deep religious period where he embraced Judaism, would walk through the streets of the village singing songs to God. But at the age of, I think, 11 or 12, rejected religion as being impossible and full of fake stories because his science training had taught him that the Bible and what existed in the universe didn't corroborate each other.

Mr. PATERNITI: He moved--well, he moved at the age of 60, much later in this life. And he worked and floundered, actually, as a student. And he tried to get a teaching job, worked in the patent office in Switzerland where he penned, in 1905, five ground-breaking papers, the last being this special theory of relativity, really.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. That was--the first paper was 1905. In 1907, he formulated the equation E=mc2.

Mr. PATERNITI: Between 1905 and 1925, Einstein revolutionized science. He tore apart the temple that Newton had built. But after 1925, he really didn't have any more ground-breaking papers. And, really, if he'd left it at 1925, he would have left probably the same scientific legend that he did--or legacy that he did. But in the years after '25, he became a voice of moral authority. He became a known pacifist. And so he was--and during this time, too, he continued to work. He was in pursuit of a unified theory.

Mr. PATERNITI: He moved to Princeton in--I think it would have been 1960--no, no, I mean--I'm sorry, 1950.

Mr. PATERNITI: No, 1940. I'm sorry.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. Yeah. He was actually there a couple years before that. He was naturalized in 1940.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Twice.

Mr. PATERNITI: He had three, but the first daughter --supposedly had a first daughter who may have died. Nobody really knows. It was out of wedlock with his first wife that he had this little girl, and nobody is certain what became of her.

Mr. PATERNITI: Roger Richman in Los Angeles, and he works with Hebrew University, the trustees of the Einstein estate, and he basically monitors the world for any infringements that--anybody using the image of Einstein in an ad without permission, anybody using anything having to do with Einstein really without permission. And then he goes after them and chases them down with letters or pursues them in court.

Mr. PATERNITI: He will not reveal the exact number, but it is somewhere in the millions. And if--I don't know if you've seen the--I think there's a recent Pepsi ad in which Albert Einstein appears. I mean, Albert Einstein appears in ads all the time with Roger Richman's blessing. And that money goes to Hebrew University. Some portion of it goes to Roger Richman so that he can run his business.

Mr. PATERNITI: Well, when I first called him, he thought that the brain was in the Smithsonian and he thought that Dr. Harvey was a crackpot who was just looking for attention by claiming that he had Einstein's brain. But as it turns out, Dr. Harvey was for real. The brain is for real. And I think Roger Richman feels that this is an incredible violation of Einstein the man and Einstein the legend.

Mr. PATERNITI: He did not want to meet with Dr. Harvey. We met. I met with him, but he had no interest in seeing Dr. Harvey. And, in fact, I think what he did for me was begin to rehearse what might be a lawsuit against Harvey in order to get the brain back, one that he hasn't followed through on.

Mr. PATERNITI: I was interested, yeah. I was.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. It was a torment, because I figured once we got in the car with the brain, that I would--there would be a lot of one-on-one brain time where I would actually--Dr. Harvey would reveal the entire story to me and reveal the secrets of Einstein's genius to me, and that didn't happen. Dr. Harvey was not that interested in talking about the brain and not that interested in even acknowledging that it was in the trunk. So with each passing mile, my desire to the see the brain, because I couldn't see it, grew greater and greater, you know, until I was just, you know, crazy to see it.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. There was a point in the road trip after New Mexico where I, out of sheer exhaustion and lack of you know, sleep and contact with other human beings, began to say that we had the brain in the trunk, and the reactions to that were some of what kept me going.

Mr. PATERNITI: Some of them I can't repeat, but some...

Mr. PATERNITI: Because of the language, but...

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: He kept saying, `You know, next, you're going to tell me aliens are landing. There's no way that brain is in your trunk. There's no way.' Other people were really frightened. They thought that I was probably putting them on and tried to get away from me as fast as they could. Other people, you know, jumped right in and said, `You know, let's just bury this brain and be done with the whole debate,' like as if they'd been in on the debate from day one. So it was a really kind of wild range of reactions, and it was interesting, because in a way, it's reflected America back at me. The whole trip did, reflected America, and there was this very easy assumption, I think, that some people made about Einstein, about who he was, about what he discovered without really knowing who he was and what he discovered. It seemed very American to me. You know, we're very kind of quick to--to know it all, but without really knowing it sometimes.

Mr. PATERNITI: Motels.

Mr. PATERNITI: Whatever motel came up on the road when I couldn't drive anymore. I drove the whole way, and Dr. Harvey sat 12 inches to my right the whole way. And I drove as long as I could every day, but some days, you know, we broke off a little earlier, and other days we drove late into the night. But when we left the interstate in Kansas, we drove down on rural highways, and we just stayed in little roadside motels. One place in Dodge City, the Astro Motel, had a big `American owned' sign out front, and it just--I'd never stayed in a place with one of those signs, and I just was wondering, like, what does that sign mean? And we should stay there and just spend the night in a place like this, and we did, and it was--became the subject of a story that I did later about race in America. It was a motel surrounded by two other motels owned by a family from Laos. I mean, they were in a hotel-motel war, and they had put out the `American owned' sign to make sure that everybody knew that they weren't, as they said, "Asiatic." So, you know, we stayed everywhere and we met all kinds of people because of it.

Mr. PATERNITI: They said that...

Mr. PATERNITI: They were American. They had done a great job building their motels up from what they had been, and they've--they basically said, `We're out-Americanizing the American here, and so they have to put up signs like that.' You know, `We're doing a better business than they are. We're putting them out of business.' So they saw it as a desperate move, but there was real animosity there, and it was a real war.

Mr. PATERNITI: Lucas, Kansas, is a place that would register on nobody's radar, but is this amazing little town. The town has a tourist attraction called the Garden of Eden, and there was a man by the name of Dinsmore who built a cement garden and a cement log cabin and cement statues in this town. He was a true eccentric. At the age of 80-something, he took a 20-year-old bride and started having more kids. He tapped into the water main and had this big pool. And the town folk really hated this guy, really thought he was a complete oddball, but he was like this kind of populist hero, Civil War veteran.

And we went to the Garden of Eden. We took the tour and the climax of the tour is when you get let into the sarcophagus in which Dinsmore is kept, and he's kept under glass in a cement sarcophagus, and I think he thought the seal was going to be tighter than it was, because he died in the '30s, and he's dressed in his finest haberdashery, and you walk into this room and there's this skeleton. It's terrifying. And it's Dinsmore, who believed that every time somebody came in, if they left a dollar for him, he would flash them a smile in death. But this guy was not smiling.

And Dr. Harvey, who had been around a lot of dead bodies, took particular delight in Dinsmore's story, because he was such an eccentric and an iconoclast, and I don't know, perhaps it gave him like this sense of relief that when you compare the life of Dr. Harvey to someone like Dinsmore, Harvey looked quite sane. And he was just very tickled by the guy and the fact that in his 80s, he had taken this young bride and had lived ferociously right up until the end.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: William Burroughs is thought of as one of the fathers of the beat movement. Ginsberg, Kerouac, all those writers sort of were of Burroughs' group and time. And that was just one of the best nights of the trip. It was one of the most incredibly surreal nights of the trip. We went to visit William. It was a couple months before he died, and he was--he'd just taken his Methadone. That was the first thing he told us, `I just had my Methadone shot.' Methadone--he was famous, for those who know his work, for celebrating drug culture and for being an addict himself. He had just taken his Methadone. He was drinking Coke and vodkas. He drank five of them. He just downed them.

And he sat in a chair, like a wheelchair, and he just started talking in that sort of famous Burroughs patter. Harvey felt that this was an important meeting. He'd met Burroughs for lunch once before. They lived in proximity to each other, but they didn't really know each other. They only knew about each other. So Harvey felt this was an important meeting, that they were going to--I think he saw it as sort of friends who weren't intimate getting back together, that there was this intimacy.

Mr. PATERNITI: He'd been there, I think, six years.

Mr. PATERNITI: He ended up working as an extruder in a plastics factory, so he had the misfortune of failing a medical exam--a state medical exam that he took in his 70s and then had to take work in a plastics factory, which he claimed to love. He said he loved the work at the factory. But when we went to see William, what happened was Harvey got caught up in William's energy, and there were--in the book, I described how, at one point, William is given a present by somebody, an archaeologist who finds a dinosaur bone, so he opens up this present and it's a dinosaur bone. And Dr. Harvey is just, you know, screaming. He's just--he yelled--as if it were a bomb, he yelled, `It's infiltrated with calcium.' And Burroughs, not responding at all, immediately started telling stories about Afghanistan and about a woman who had been condemned to death and had a rock thrown on her head, and that is how the whole meeting went. They were just talking past each other.

And at one point, headlights came into the room, and Burroughs reached down behind his back and pulled out a handgun that he had in a holster, and he thought that we were being invaded by aliens, and so he went to the window with the gun. And anybody who knows anything about William Burroughs knows that in Mexico City--I think back in the '60s, he put an apple on his wife's head and, pretending to be William Tell, by mistake shot her in the head. So the minute the gun came out, everybody just hit the deck, and...

Mr. PATERNITI: I was worried about everything. And I was certain that someone was going to get shot.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. Yeah. He did. And I was most worried for Dr. Harvey, because I knew that that particular murder would be on my head, you know, like I'd have a hard time explaining...

Mr. PATERNITI: No. So William--one of the people who lived with William and helped him calmed him down, got him back. But it was just this wild, crazy evening. And he started to call Dr. Harvey `Dr. Senegal.' And at the end of the visit, on the front porch, he said, `What keeps the old alive, Dr. Senegal, is that we learn to be evil.' And with that, we went out into the night.

Mr. PATERNITI: The first time I saw the brain was--we went to San Jose, and he gave a talk--Dr. Harvey gave a little talk to a bunch of schoolkids, and he pulled out the Tupperware with the brain in it. But it's the first time I saw it from a distance. Again, I didn't get close to it. I wasn't able to--after the talk, all the kids rushed the podium.

Mr. PATERNITI: The Tupperware was about that big. And he probably had taken a few fistfuls of pieces of the brain and put it in that Tupperware and sealed it.

Mr. PATERNITI: That's a good question. I've actually thought about that. I'm not certain. I mean, I would say a number and it would probably be too high or low. I thought at the time it was like about a tenth of the brain, but that might be more than it was and it might be a little less. I'm not totally certain. But on that particular afternoon, the kids frenzied and I--you know, I just couldn't get near him or the brain or anything. And after the talk, he had it back in the Tupperware, and it went back in the duffel, so I didn't...

Mr. PATERNITI: ...I didn't really see it. I didn't get to see it until the very end of the trip when we went to see Evelyn Einstein.

Mr. PATERNITI: Just outside of Berkeley, California.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yes.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yes.

Mr. PATERNITI: About 88.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah, I did. I talked to him--when the book came out, I talked to him. The book came out in July, the middle of July, and I talked to him a couple weeks after that. He's a--I consider him a friend after this trip, and I consider him somebody who--however one considers his pilgrimage with this brain, I consider him to be a true believer. I mean, he believed in one thing and he stuck to it, so in a way, as crazy as the story sounds, it's his life. And he's used to it. I think he's used to hearing about, you know, his life with the brain.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. And...

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. I did. I called her--I called her a few times from the road. And she was a--I mean, understandably filled with some trepidation about meeting us, Dr. Harvey, the brain, me.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. Yeah. And...

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yep.

Mr. PATERNITI: And all our friends along the way. We'd, you know, been to casinos in Las Vegas and through McDonald's drive-thrus, and we'd put a lot of miles on the Skylark and...

Mr. PATERNITI: He likes the Wendy's baked potatoes, and he's got a little yen for the Frostie.

Mr. PATERNITI: So we get to Evelyn's apartment, which is quite a nice place, looking out over the bay. And she had agreed to meet us finally, because she felt that it was her responsibility to meet us and to accept the brain, if Dr. Harvey was going to give it to her. And when we arrived, it was afternoon. She was wearing a Star Trek pin. She had, in her life, worked as a cult deprogrammer. At one point, she worked as a police woman. She has lived a very full, interesting life...

Mr. PATERNITI: ...not without tragedy. She--no, she's not married. She might have been married once before.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. She had some-- she did and she was treated with steroids, and those created other complications. Now I think she's got some liver problems and some other serious medical problems.

Mr. PATERNITI: I'm not sure they were getting along. I mean, I think they were very civil with each other. They talked for a little while about Einstein's life. There was some conversation about food and the virtues of goose grease. And, you know, there was some random chitchat that I had on my tape recorder that, when I went back and transcribed it, didn't make a lot of sense. But then finally, after a time, Dr. Harvey pulled out the brain--pulled out pieces of the brain and gave a very kind of quick lesson on the brain, basically delivered sort of the same talk that he'd delivered in San Jose to the schoolkids. And Evelyn, who basically had all her letters from her grandfather stolen from her, a lot of her photographs she's lost, who has tried throughout the years to recover something of her grandfather, became quite interested in the brain and really was eager to talk about it.

But after--I don't know--maybe 10 minutes or so, Dr. Harvey decided that that was it. And we had planned to go to dinner with Evelyn, but Dr. Harvey announced that he was instead going to visit a cousin, an 85-year-old cousin of his in San Mateo. And he wanted me to drive him down. So after 11 days and 4,000 miles, I--you know, I put my foot down and I just said, `We're--we really--we're here to see Evelyn and she's, you know, planned this dinner, and so I really--I think we should stay for dinner and then I can drive you down after dinner or they could join us for dinner.' But he was insistent. He wanted to go visit his cousin, and so we ended up driving him to public transportation, to BART--a BART station, and he got out and we said our goodbyes, and Evelyn and I went to dinner. We had spent three hours eating, you know, had salmon and sirloin and had a great--great dinner and a really nice conversation.

Mr. PATERNITI: Well, we come back out to the car, assuming that Dr. Harvey had taken the brain. We sit down in the front seat, and then a pool of street light that was flooding in through the back window, resting on the back velour seat was the Tupperware with the brain in it. And we saw it. And I said to Evelyn--`How could that be? Is that what we think it is?' She's like, `Does he do this--has he done this before?' And I was like, `He guards this thing with his life.' So I actually got quite nervous. I just had--like what if this had gotten stolen while we were in there and what if this gets stolen now? It's my responsibility.

So we drove back to her apartment and parked in front, and we took the brain, opened the Tupperware, and a security guard passed and looked in and then kept moving past, and we stopped a minute and looked up and looked back down, and then I reached in and I took a piece that was sealed in paraffin and looked at it and held it up to the light, and Evelyn took one and held it up and there--you know, they weighed what a light beach stone weighs. It was a very strange moment. It didn't seem at all like this was Einstein's brain. It seemed like some disconnected little jewel of paraffin.

Mr. PATERNITI: Right.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah.

Mr. PATERNITI: You know, that's a great question. There was no conversation about pictures. It would have been, I think, really great for readers to be able to see some of it, and that's part of the brain right there.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. I don't know whose hands those are.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. That's the Tupperware. It's about that big.

Mr. PATERNITI: This is in the basement of his house in New Jersey where he lives with his girlfriend, Cleora. So it's Cleora's house.

Mr. PATERNITI: He's about five-six. He's shrunk a little bit with age.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. Yeah. He's been extremely generous. He's been very nice to me. I think we will never know the story until he writes it himself.

Mr. PATERNITI: That's Cleora and that's Dr. Harvey. Yeah, that's on their back porch.

Mr. PATERNITI: I did.

Mr. PATERNITI: I took some, and I realized after taking the trip that I should have taken a lot more.

Mr. PATERNITI: This would be Dr. Harvey. In the middle is a woman by the name of Sarah Gonzalez from San Jose, who arranged for Dr. Harvey to speak at Independence High School.

Mr. PATERNITI: That's me.

Mr. PATERNITI: Sort of wearing--yes, some sort of a Van Dyk-y scruffy thing.

Mr. PATERNITI: That's Kenji Sugimoto from Japan. He is one of those Einstein disciples. He feels that Einstein was a true god, and he journeyed to America and found Dr. Harvey before I did and was able to get Dr. Harvey to give him a piece of brain. Dr. Harvey took the brain from one of the cookie jars in which he kept it and sliced it with a meat knife and gave Kenji Sugimoto a piece of the brain. And that's William Burroughs with me in the living room to his house in Lawrence.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. I like his work. He made sense to me in the book--in my book more than he makes sense to me as a writer. I mean, I love his work, but nothing in my work, I don't think, resembles what he does, so...

Mr. PATERNITI: Well, the brain has--Dr. Harvey has given up the brain finally.

Mr. PATERNITI: It might have happened, in part, just after the Harper's article. I think he was getting some attention. I think he felt that he had done his job of taking--safeguarding the brain. He knew that perhaps maybe he was at the end of his run with the brain, nearing the end of his own life, and he wanted to make sure it was in the hands of somebody who could take it into the next century. Because one of the stated and unstated purposes of keeping the brain is that someday there might be technology that will help us understand why Einstein was a genius. It could be that they will clone the brain at some point. So Dr. Harvey, if nothing else, kept the brain and kept it intact. It didn't get dropped on a lab floor and thrown out. It hasn't disappeared. And he turned it over to the man who now sits in his old office at Princeton Medical Center. So the brain has come full circle.

Mr. PATERNITI: You know, I don't--I haven't been real focused on that. I hear it's doing all right. I think it's in its fourth printing and I know it's on some lists and things, so...

Mr. PATERNITI: I mean, I'm not sure there is, but there --we have talked to Paramount about it being a movie, and Scott Rudin, who's moving ahead to try to make it a movie.

Mr. PATERNITI: She's now my wife, and we have a baby.

Mr. PATERNITI: He's eight months.

Mr. PATERNITI: Leo.

Mr. PATERNITI: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I've got a few books in me.

Mr. PATERNITI: Well, I feel like I wrote a non-fiction book that felt stranger than fiction, so I'm going to give up and write--I'm in the middle of writing a novel.

Mr. PATERNITI: I wish it had been, yeah, but it's not.

Mr. PATERNITI: That name comes from Italy. And I heard it means 'father of the roundtable,' though I don't know how you get roundtable out of `niti,' so...

Mr. PATERNITI: Portland, Maine.

Mr. PATERNITI: Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure.