Once Upon an Einstein
"Jack Rationales, Dr. Einstein, it's such a wonderful honor and great pleasure to finally meet you sir. I'm a huge fan you know. Oh, my goodness. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for agreeing to meet with me."
"I'm happy to do it," the legendary physicist simply replied, "I like your work. And please, may you call me Albert?"
"Oh yes, sure, of course." I stuttered, sincerely flattered. "Okay then, shall we start?"
"Ja, we can go."
"Dr. Einst..."
"Please, Albert." He interrupted.
"Ah, yes, I'm sorry, I'll try to remember that Dr. Ein...I mean, Albert. Alright here we go, are you ready?"
"Ja, take two.'
It took a moment for his wit to sink in, and when it did he met my pleasantly surprised stare with a devilishly boyish grin.
"My first question is this. For a world famous, Nobel-Prize winning scientist, now a withering but sprightly sixty-six years of age, you seem to have a remarkably modest ego. In fact, in comparison to your lifetime of many accolades and awards, I'd calculate the size of your ego to be practically zero. Can you please explain that to me?"
Instead of answering me right away, Dr. Einstein sent an electrical impulse from his brain to his elbow telling it to lift the tobacco pipe in his hand up to a waiting mouth, and physiologically speaking his plan worked perfectly. Albert took a long drag, and exhaled the incomplete combustion portion of his smoking materials out into the massive air space of his Nobel Prize winning office. As the wafting balloon of sooty aerosols began to dissipate, this famous professor of herculean greatness, in an unassuming German-American accent, began politely answering my query.
"I know my ego's of little consequence, and so to me it's small," he started. "However, the ego lives in a realm unreachable by the five known physical senses, and so she entertains a crazy little life all of her own. I've assigned female gender to the ego, which my colleague Sigmund strongly disapproves of. But obviously he's researched quite extensively and understands quite well the full nature of egos, so may I suggest you speak with him if you want to know more about mine."
He laughed at his own joke, while imagining what his good friend might say about his ego. "And I can arrange that for you too, if you'd like," he added.
"Oh, I'd love that to the moon and back Albert, thank you so much. Perhaps I could even interview you both together sometime? Wow, that would be amazing."
Albert paused, and took another puff of revelation from his favorite Briarwood tube. As he watched the released vapors shrink from fat to thin, thin to thinner, and finally magically disappear, the innocent curiosity of a child pinned itself to his kindly face.
"Oh I love that," he muttered dreamily to himself from some far away place.
Forthwith he returned to my company, and continued.
"Oh yes, it's quite possible, and I'll talk to Ziggy to see what I can do. You know, I've discussed the subject of human ego quite extensively with that pal of mine, and although it's not my chosen area of expertise, I do know a lot more about it than any layman. The ego is unmeasurable in mathematical terms, and because it's unmeasurable it's also immeasruable. However, it can be quantified. Those are some of the basic facts as I see them, facts being proven yet improvable truths, begat by testing and retesting hypotheses. You know, only fools argue with the facts Jack, and reason alone knows I've encountered way too many of those."
He giggled again at his own quip, and thought of one fool in particular.
"Herr Gimble, my sixth-grade physics teacher, believed in the Christian God, and I've never understood how an old, University educated man could carte blanche espouse his personal religious folly whilst in the same breath poo-poo the proven facts of his Science degree. You'd think by that age he'd have learned something. Well, Science and religion don't mix Jack. That's what I've learned. They're like oil and water, forever forced to remain apart."
While I nodded in total acceptance of his words, Dr. Einstein initiated another inhalation from the last burning lump of air-cured Burley, pulling at the tip of his handsome brown and tan pipe like a greedy kid on a sweet sucker.
"Remember Jack and never forget," Albert wheezed, still holding the hit in his lungs, "fools don't decide what's real and what's not."
He released a magnificent smoke ring, and emphasized, "No. Never fools have and never fools shall. That's a scientist's job, and one of the main reasons I became one."
Herr Gimble had actually been our ex-Nazi landlord when we lived in an apartment above his flat next to Grüneburg Park in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. As a Schnapps-soaked drunkard, Mr. Gimble was as affable as a Festzelte beer maid one minute, and as surly as a vituperated meter maid the next.
His cordial nature soured mostly in the evenings, when inebriation occasionally sent him roaring tempestuously up the spiral staircase in the communal entryway of his semidetached Tudorbethan home straight to our family's flat on the second floor. Once there, he would bang furiously on the door, fulminating in his mother tongue until our parents stepped out to calm him down, which usually included offering him a glass of chilled Riesling.
The image of Herr Gimble spluttering in his tighty-whities so savagely one minute and so sloppily genteel the next made me think of my next question.
"What was your most embarrassing moment, Albert?"
"Vut do you mean?" the famed physicist shot back, his eyes lighting up with frolicsome delight.
"In your life, Albert. What was the most embarassing thing that ever happened to you? I mean, if you don't mind my asking."
"I don't mind vun bit," he said. "But of course I vill need some time to sink about it." Puffing silently on a freshly-packed calabash, he looked out across his beloved Saranac Lake, where he had often sailed and rowed boats with his family and friends. His mop of dishelved, wiglike white hair, thick silvery mustache, and deeply suntanned face remined me of Samuel Langhorne Clemens around the same age.
"Eureka!" he suddenly and gleefully chortled, almost leaping from his chair. "I vill tell you about zee time I almost drowned in my skivvies."
I suffered from narcolepsy, and my prescribed amphetamines, which usually prevented an attack during daylight hours, had for some unknown reason, perhaps because of the humongous stress I'd been feeling about interviewing Dr. Einstein, failed me. I awoke on the office settee, in the early evening of the same day, with a cool compress covering my forehead.
"Do you feel better?" Dr. Einstein asked.
His voice startled me, as a large rag had been placed over my eyes obscuring my vision. Weakly, I pulled it off my face.
"I don't know...I... I had the strangest dream," I started. "Yes Dr. Einstein I feel better, thank you. And I'm so sorry Dr. Einstein...so sorry, you see I have narcolepsy...it's a disease that..."
"What's the matter son, did you forget that you may call me Albert?" He intervened, chuckling softly.
Touched by the kindness in his humor, I squinted up at Albert, and there stood a man with the forbearance of a concerned father, complete with an endearing smile adorned by delicately lashed, twinkling eyes.
"A close associate of mine has narcolepsy," he confided in me, "so I understand quite a bit about it. Diseases should never be mocked my dear boy, and I shan't make fun fun of yours. Now, shall we get back to our little chat?"
Narcolepsy is no laughing matter, so hoping to lighten the mood, I said, "Nothing like a palaver with a cadavor."
Einstein looked me straight in the eyes, a sweet but somber expression plastered on his wizened face. "Yah, Yah, I know about your secret relativity," he muttered. "I call it zee What zee Dickens' Doctrine. These are the shadows of the things that have been, ja?"
I nodded affirmingly.
Pulling at the ends of his mussed up, coarsely curled hair with his fingertips, he continued. "But for some reason, I don't seem to mind at all. Und zee funny sing is, none of zis makes any difference to me, eizer. It's so strange! I sink, again, and zerefore I am, again. I must admit I haven't felt like conversing zis much in a very long time, so long in fact zat I can't seem to even remember."
"Would you be willing to talk about your death?" I asked, sitting up on the davenport and setting my bare feet onto an old-fashioned, rust-colored oval rug beneath. "About your last words in German, to be exact?" I had no idea where had my socks gone, but my socks could wait.
"Yah, vee can get to zat. But first, I vas going to tell you about my near drowning." Al plopped his fanny on the threadbare seat cushion of an antiquated armchair next to the grandiose oak credenza given to him by Charlie Chaplin in 1931. He clasped his hands behind his head and stared dreamily past the twig-work facades just outside the row of rectangular windows of Cottage 6 at the Knollwood Club on Shingle Bay. It was August 6, 1945, the day they dropped his bomb on Hiroshima.
"To begin vith, this is not zee story about zee time my sailboat capsized on Lonesome Bay. No, zis is zee story about zee time I drank too much vine and vent skinny-dipping off zee dock on Ampersand Bay."
I'd had a prolonged hypnagogic hallucination, and came frighteningly out of it with Dr. Sigmund Freud standing over me. Of course, he also knew the symptoms.
"You've had a hypnagogic hallucination, Mr. Rationales, and a fretfully long one at that," he informed me. "How do you feel young man, can you speak?"
But upon waking, a bout of sleep paralysis gripped me, and I couldn't speak or move. A face full of anguished fear became the only answer I could give him.
"You're experiencing a bout of sleep paralysis, Mr. Rationales," opined Dr. Freud, "but don't worry, it should pass in a moment. You were out for seventy-two hours sir, and today is Saturday, 2:46 PM. Dr. Einstein brought you to me after your serious narcolepsy attack, well, actually, a few of Dr. Einstein's students brought you to me, if I'm splitting hairs, which I'm quite fond of doing. But you're in my sanitarium now, and you're going to start feeling better son, I promise."
The tight grip of sleep paralysis quickly loosened, and nearly immediately I felt the ability to speak come back to me.
"Wh... where is Dr. Einstein?" I exclaimed. "Is he alright? Has this unexpected flare up of my embarrassingly disabling condition caused him any harm?"
"Albert's just peachy my dear fellow, perfectly fine and dandy, so no need to fret after him." He answered. "But it's you we're worried about my good fellow, and we've both agreed to do everything in our power to help you get back to being your usual fit little fiddle. For now, I've prescribed a medication to help you sleep. Nurse Pamela will be in shortly to administer the drug, and I'll be back later to check up on you. Rest well Mr. Rattionelle, I assure you you're in the best of hands!"
Freud's drugs worked wonders on me. Not to mention the nurse, Pam, who worked her magic on me like a breath of freshly scented air in the stark and stuffy confines of Freud's madhouse. Far from being a snake pit, his rubber room still reeked disturbingly of tortuous and imponderable human debilities, a cornerstone of any poor health and hygeine regimen.
I felt sorry for every patient I met save for one, a humdinger of a cuckoo clock who never seemed to stop hooting and howling until the wee hours of the morning, when per usual Nurse Pam gave the vexatious bedlamite an unauthorized shot of phentobarbital. This put him immediately to sleep, whence Pam dashed back to my room at the end of the hall where we cuddled until the break of dawn.
On my sixth night as a voluntary patient, I decided to tell Pammy about my out-of-the-ordiniary gift of telepathy. A crackerjack in reflexology, she was in the middle of giving me one of her marvelous foot massages, hitting the pressure points in ways that made me want to scream with delight, when out of nowhere I spilled the beans.
"I can talk to famous dead people any time I want."
She tilted her head to one side, her long flossy strawberry blonde hair falling ever so prettily across her right shoulder. The quizzical look on her bewitching, Nurses-of-Vienna face was to die for.
"Vat are you talking about, darling?" she asked, continuing to press her sturdy thumbs against the soles of my feet. "Ah, I sink I know. Zer is somzing very peculiar about zee way Dr. Freud looks at you. And you are zee only person he treats vith such kid gloves."
She stopped massaging and sat down next to me on the edge of the twin bed. "Vat are you, some kind of ghost?" she asked, grabbing a fresh washcloth from the nightstand and wiping eucalyptus oil from her strong but delicate fingers and hands.
