The Unremembered Man

Who today remem­bers the man who car­ried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remem­ber clearly the box (dark wood, var­nished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch?) with Einstein’s head in it, a plas­ter model (was it plas­tic, per­haps? mod­el­ling clay? plas­ticine?)  that the unre­mem­bered man car­ried every­where he went, dur­ing the time of his being in the city, in the down­town area, in a neigh­bour­hood con­sist­ing of hotels (two with beer par­lours), book­stores (two anti­quar­ian, one sci­ence fic­tion, one mys­ter­ies and thrillers), a junk store filled with fur­ni­ture and paper­back nov­els, a copy shop, a rub­ber stamp works, at least one numis­ma­tist, a phi­lat­e­list, three low-grade cafés (the Smile, the Montgomery, the Richard Pender, the White Rose: make that four low-grade cafés), and don’t for­get the Enver Hoxsa Bookstore & Headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), whose premises the unre­mem­bered man may or may not have fre­quented for much of the period in ques­tion, brows­ing among the Stalinist archives beneath fad­ing por­traits of the pre­mier of Albania, until the build­ing, a wooden struc­ture of uncer­tain prove­nance, was put to flame one night dur­ing Ramadan by a dis­grun­tled fol­lower or per­haps a care­less smoker hang­ing out in the alley: the police sur­prised no one when they clas­si­fied the fire as prob­a­bly “not gang-related.” 

Perhaps it was a species of the­atre to the unre­mem­bered man to sit down in beer par­lour or café, to open the hinged door of the box with Einstein’s head in it, to leave it open or to close it again. How to decide? How to remem­ber? Sometimes he sat across the table and opened the door toward him­self and some­times the other way around: what dif­fer­ence did it make? What kind of the­atre would that be? Here too there is a paucity of infor­ma­tion: we recall him turn­ing the box side­ways; that is, ninety degrees from the axis of con­ver­sa­tion, when some­thing already for­got­ten was being said, exchanges of opin­ion lost within moments of their utter­ance, so that patrons at neigh­bour­ing tables might look through the open­ing and regard there the head of Einstein at some dis­tance, with­out notic­ing any­thing in par­tic­u­lar about the pro­pri­etor of the box, a man about whom they would remem­ber noth­ing from that moment on. Perhaps they would be filled with won­der at the object in the box, but never in the White Lunch (over on Hastings Street and not to be con­fused with the White Rose on Pender), whose patrons tended to be filled with anger, not won­der, although no one can know what might have ensued in the White Lunch, erst­while haunt of the Exclusion League and its deeply exclu­sion­ist acolytes and liege­men (embit­tered fedora-wearers whose wives smile grimly in cot­ton frocks in snap­shots taken at pic­nics on the grass near Lost Lagoon under the weep­ing wil­low trees near the laugh­ing waters), had the unre­mem­bered man gone in there with his inter­est­ing bur­den, as it was his fate never to be remem­bered in any event. But every­one remem­bers the box, and the head, about three– quar­ters life-size (or was it full-size, life-size? how big was Einstein’s full-size head in life-size? a cubit? an oval­oid?), and no one would even think of him, the unre­mem­bered man, if it weren’t for the box with Einstein’s head in it, which sooner or later every­one remem­bers, and then we remem­ber it more than once, we remem­ber it sev­eral times before it fades, slowly at first and then more quickly, but always to return again at one time or, if not that time, another time: the mem­ory, the image, the trace of Einstein’s head in a box: once per­ceived it really is impos­si­ble to shake it off. 

But he was cer­tainly there, the unre­mem­bered man, in the neigh­bour­hood of the “down­town area,” whose precincts he haunted for sev­eral weeks, pos­si­bly months, in an early or a later part of the year (one recalls clear skies, white clouds sail­ing through them, a breeze, def­i­nitely a light wind, “brac­ing” in the usage of the day: cer­tainly the trees in Trout Lake park were seen to be flut­ter­ing and stretch­ing, but this was miles away, in another part of the city), although no one can remem­ber how long the unre­mem­bered man might have been known to be in the area so many years, months, or was it only days ago? He may have had a lit­er­ary ambi­tion; cer­tainly it was the com­pany of writ­ers and their hangers-on that he sought out and for whom he would wait at a table near the door in the Niagara beer par­lour and then later in the evening in the beer par­lour at the Marble Arch, hop­ing to draw them over to have a look (again, who could resist? once you had seen Einstein’s head you would sooner or later want to see it again, just to con­firm your ear­lier impres­sions, which were already fad­ing into the limbo of half-remembered dreams) into the wooden box that was his bea­con, a sign if you will of his pres­ence, or should that be his absence for­ever aborn­ing in the moment? He was not unknown to enter rooms with the box held out before him like a lamp in the dark, a hur­ri­cane lamp, per­haps, as if his own life were a metaphor for stormy nights, or should that be a bull’s-eye lamp, with its slid­ing shut­ter so like a metaphor, shut­ting off the light and let­ting it out again? 

He would put the box down on the table or counter or desk or what­ever there was to put it down on and then open the door of the box so you could see the object within, instantly rec­og­niz­able: the wild hair, which we know now to have been tou­sled inten­tion­ally in order to cre­ate the well-known wild-haired effect favoured by pho­tog­ra­phers and fundrais­ers, the deep cor­ru­ga­tions in the fore­head, dark eyes deep in their orbs of flesh; sur­pris­ingly lit­tle eye­brow, a mere hint of brow-thatch; and the long, thin jowls, lank, carved into fur­rows in the cheeks, the slightly swollen nose, really a schnozz, a schnoz­zola even. And the upper lip invis­i­ble, hid­den beneath that great sad over­fall of mous­tache, a real cookie duster dust­ing a long hound dog face of a face; a blood­hound comes to mind, or is it a bas­set hound? What great sad­ness lurks within? What res­ig­na­tion celes­tial? A cer­tain shy­ness too in that famil­iar vis­age: he remem­bers the Cosmological Constant, in fact he can never for­get it: cer­tainly he con­sid­ered it his biggest mis­take, and there were oth­ers who found it use­ful in pos­ing alter­na­tive solu­tions; but could there ever be any doubt about the orig­i­nal of that plas­ter head? Not in anyone’s rec­ol­lec­tion, cer­tainly. This was all thought to have hap­pened years before news of the man who drove across the USA with Einstein’s brain in a jar in the trunk of his Chevrolet, I believe it was, cer­tainly a General Motors product. 

We recall pre­sum­ing the unre­mem­bered man to be from else­where, some­where like Moncton, Pouce Coupe, Valleyview, Ajax, cer­tainly not a local man. He may have been a smoker, but was he ever seen at Smokers’ League meet­ings? The police will have lost the tapes, no doubt. But we may be invent­ing here, for who remem­bers him now, the unre­mem­bered man who appeared among us bear­ing in a wooden box the head of the man who would be named Person of the Century by Time mag­a­zine, to take his place among ear­lier Persons of their respec­tive cen­turies who would have been nom­i­nated had Time mag­a­zine been pub­lish­ing dur­ing all the epochs of the mil­len­nium, as we are assured in a side­bar list­ing the cen­turies past and the Persons whom Time would have named as being of them, had there been time enough: William the Conqueror, of course, Saladin, then Genghis Khan, Giotto (Giotto!), Gutenberg, Queen Elizabeth I, Newton, Jefferson, Edison (surely some mis­take!), but def­i­nitely not Hitler, never Hitler, because, as another Time writer, author of the side­bar “Why Hitler is Not a Person of the Century,” writes: “Evil may be a pow­er­ful force, a seduc­tive idea, but is it more pow­er­ful than genius, cre­ativ­ity, courage or gen­eros­ity?” Certainly a ques­tion of great moment, but who can remem­ber the answer? This much can be said: he appeared among us unher­alded and then van­ished, with Einstein’s head in a box. The past is cov­ered in for­get­ful­ness: we who were there will never know that we knew him, or even that we were there: for how can we know, who can recall to us an unre­mem­bered man of yesteryear?