Driving Einstein's Brain: The Weirdness Is Brilliant

Albert Einstein's brain floats in formaldehyde in a Tupperware bowl in a duffel bag in the trunk of a Buick barreling across Kansas.

Driving the Buick is Michael Paterniti, a young writer from Maine. Sitting next to him is an 84-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey. Back in 1955, Harvey performed the autopsy on Einstein. He removed the great man's brain and took it home. And chopped it into 200 pieces. Over the years, Harvey gave pieces of the brain to researchers who performed dubious experiments on them. The rest he kept and occasionally displayed, secular relics of a scientific age.

And now Paterniti is driving Harvey and the brain from New Jersey to California, where Harvey will show it to Einstein's granddaughter and some high-school kids. But first, they stop off in Lawrence, Kan., to visit Harvey's old friend William Burroughs, the legendary Beat Generation novelist. Burroughs, 83 years old and six months from death, sits there, wearing a pistol in a holster. He drinks five vodka-and-Cokes, lights up a joint, starts calling Harvey "Dr. Senegal," saying, "What keeps the old alive, Dr. Senegal, is that we learn to be evil." And then . . .

Wait a minute. This can't be true, can it? This is fiction, right?

The story is called "Driving Mr. Albert." It's 24 pages long, the main piece in last month's Harper's, but there's no indication whether it's fiction or nonfiction. I'm guessing fiction. Real life can't possibly be this bizarre. A guy couldn't walk off with Einstein's brain and keep it for 42 years, could he? And even if he did, he wouldn't end up partying with William Burroughs, would he? It's a fascinating story - smart, funny and well told - but I've got to know: Is it fiction? I call Harper's.

"It's reality," says the house PR man. "It was fact-checked and everything." He puts me in touch with Paterniti. "It is true," the author says. "It actually happened just like that." In fact, he adds, he had to play down the Burroughs scene. "It was really much wackier than that."

Which proves again that truth is weirder than fiction. And the universe is stranger than we thought. But Einstein already told us that. So, for that matter, did Burroughs.