Frankissstein Read online

  My husband is of this temper. Byron is of the opinion that woman is from man born – his rib, his clay – and I find this singular in a man as intelligent as he. I said, It is strange, is it not, that you approve of the creation story we read in the Bible when you do not believe in God? He smiles and shrugs, explaining – It is a metaphor for the distinctions between men and women. He turns away, assuming I have understood and that is the end of the matter, but I continue, calling him back as he limps away like a Greek god. May we not consult Doctor Polidori here, who, as a physician, must know that since the creation story no living man has yet given birth to anything living? It is you, sir, who are made from us, sir.

  The gentlemen laugh at me indulgently. They respect me, up to a point, but we have arrived at that point.

  We are talking about the animating principle, says Byron, slowly and patiently as if to a child. Not the soil, not the bedding, not the container; the life-spark. The life-spark is male.

  Agreed! said Polidori, and of course if two gentlemen agree that must be enough to settle the matter for any woman.

  Yet I wish I had a cat.

  Vermicelli, said Shelley, later, in bed with me. Men have animated a piece of vermicelli. Are you jealous?

  I was stroking his long, thin arms, my legs over his long, thin legs. He was referring to Doctor Darwin, who seems to have seen some evidence of voluntary motion in a piece of vermicelli.

  Now you are teasing me, I said – and you, a forked biped exhibiting certain signs of involuntary motion at the junction of trunk and bifurcation.

  What is it? he said, softly, kissing my hair. I know his voice when it begins to break like this.

  Your cock, I said, my hand on it as it gained life.

  This is sounder than galvanism, he said. And I wish he had not, for I was distracted then, thinking of Galvani and his electrodes and leaping frogs.

  Why have you stopped? asked my husband.

  What was his name? Galvani’s nephew? The book you have at home?

  Shelley sighed. Yet he is the most patient of men: An Account of the late improvements in Galvanism with a series of curious and interesting experiments performed before the Commissioners of the French National Institute, and Repeated Lately in the Anatomical Theatres of London. To which is added an appendix, containing the author’s experiments conducted on the body of a malefactor executed at Newgate … 1803.

  Yes, that one, I said, resuming my vigour, tho’ my ardour had flowed upwards to my brain.

  With a fine movement Shelley rolled me onto my back and eased himself inside me; a pleasure I did not discourage.

  We have all human life here, he said, to make as we please out of our bodies and our love. What do we want with frogs and vermicelli? With grimacing, twitching corpses and electrical currents?

  Did they not say, in the book, that his eyes opened? The criminal?

  My husband closed his eyes. Tensing himself, he shot into me half-worlds of his to meet half-worlds of mine, and I turned my head to look out of the window where the moon was hanging like a lamp in a brief and clear sky.

  What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

  Sonnet 54, said Shelley.

  Sonnet 53, I said.

  He was spent. We lay looking out of the window together at the scudding clouds that speeded the moon.

  And you in every blessed shape we know.

  The lover’s body imprinted on the world. The world imprinted on the lover’s body.

  On the other side of the wall the sound of Lord Byron spearing Claire Clairmont.

  Such a night of moon and stars. The rain had starved us of these sights and now they seemed more wonderful. The light fell on Shelley’s face. How pale he is!

  I said to him, Do you believe in ghosts? Truly?

  I do, he said, for how can it be that the body is master of the spirit? Our courage, our heroism, yes, even our hatreds, all that we do that shapes the world – is that the body or the spirit? It is the spirit.

  I considered this and replied, If a human being ever succeeded in reanimating a body, by galvanism or some method yet undiscovered, would the spirit return?

  I do not believe so, said Shelley. The body fails and falls. But the body is not the truth of what we are. The spirit will not return to a ruined house.

  How would I love you, my lovely boy, if you had no body?

  Is it my body that you love?

  And how can I say to him that I sit watching him while he sleeps, while his mind is quiet and his lips silent, and that I kiss him for the body I love?

  I cannot divide you, I said.

  He wrapped his long arms around me and rocked me in our damp bed. He said, I would, if I could, when my body fails, cast my mind into a rock or a stream or a cloud. My mind is immortal – I feel it to be.

  Your poems, I said. They are immortal.

  Perhaps, he said. But something more. How can I die? It is impossible. Yet I shall die.

  How warm he is in my arms. How far from death.

  Did you think of a story yet? he said.

  I said, Nothing comes when bidden and I lack the power of imagination.

  The dead or the undead? he said. A ghost or a vampyre; what will you choose?

  What would frighten you most of all?

  He pondered this for a moment, turning on his elbow to face me, his face so close I could breathe him in. He said, A ghost, however awful or ghastly its appearance, however dreadful its utterances, would awe me but would not terrify me, for it has been alive once, as I have, and passed into spirit, as I will, and its material substance is no more. But a vampyre is a filthy thing, a thing that feeds its decayed body on the vital bodies of others. Its flesh is colder than death, and it has no pity, only appetite.

  The Undead, then, I said, and, as I lay with my eyes open wide with thinking, he fell asleep.

  Our first child died when he was born. Cold and tiny I held him in my arms. Soon after I dreamed that he was not dead, and that we rubbed him with brandy and set him by the fire and he returned to life.

  It was his little body I wanted to touch. I would have given him my own blood to restore his life; he had been of my blood, a feeding vampyre, for nine dark months in his hiding place. The Dead. The Undead. Oh, I am used to death and I hate it.

  I got up, too restless to sleep, and, covering my husband, wrapped a shawl round me and stood at the window, looking out over the dark shadows of the hills and the glittering lake.

  Perhaps it would be fine tomorrow.

  My father sent me away for a time to live in Dundee with a cousin, whose company, he hoped, would improve my solitude. But there is something of a lighthousekeeper in me, and I am not afraid of solitude, nor of nature in her wildness.

  I found in those days that my happiest times were outside and alone, inventing stories of every kind, and as far from my real circumstances as possible. I became my own ladder and trapdoor to other worlds. I was my own disguise. The sight of a figure, far off, on some journey of his own, was enough to spark my imagination towards a tragedy or a miracle.

  I was never bored except in the company of others.

  And at home, my father, who had little interest in what was fit or otherwise for a young, motherless girl, allowed me to sit unseen and silent while he entertained his friends, and they spoke of politics, of justice, and more than that too.

  The poet Coleridge was a regular visitor to our house. One evening he read out loud his new poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It begins – how well I recall it –

  It is an ancient Mariner,

  And he stoppeth one of three.

  ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

  Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

  I crouched behind the sofa, a mere girl, enthralled to hear the tale told to the wedding guest and to picture in my mind the awful journey at sea.

  The Mariner is under a curse for killing the friendly bird, the albatross, that follow
ed the ship in better days.

  In a scene most terrible, the ship, with its tattered sails and battered decks, is crewed by its own dead, reanimated in fearful force, unhallowed and dismembered, as the vessel drives forth to the land of ice and snow.

  He has violated life, I thought, then and now. But what is life? The body killed? The mind destroyed? The ruin of Nature? Death is natural. Decay inevitable. There is no new life without death. There can be no death unless there is life.

  The Dead. The Undead.

  The moon was clouded over now. Rain clouds rapidly returned to the clear sky.

  If a corpse returned to life, would it be alive?

  If the doors of the charnel house opened and we dead awakened … then …

  My thoughts are fevered. I hardly know my mind tonight.

  There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.

  What do I fear most? The dead, the undead, or, a stranger thought … that which has never been alive?

  I turned to look at him sleeping, motionless, yet living. The body in sleep is a comfort although it mimics death. If he were dead, how should I live?

  Shelley, too, was a visitor to our house; that is how I met him. I was sixteen. He was twenty-one. A married man.

  It was not a happy marriage. He wrote of his wife, Harriet: I felt as if a dead and living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion.

  It was on a night when he walked forty miles to his father’s house – in that night and dreamlike trance he believed he had already met the female destined to be mine.

  Soon enough we met.

  When my household duties were done, I had the habit of slipping away to my mother’s grave in St Pancras churchyard. There, I pursued my reading, propped against her headstone. Soon Shelley began to meet me in secret; my mother’s blessing on us, I believe, as we sat either side of the grave, talking of poetry and revolution. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of life, he said.

  I used to wonder about her in her coffin below. And I never thought of her as rotted, but as alive as she is in the pencil drawings of her, and more alive yet in her writings. Even so, I wanted to be near to her body. Her poor body no use to her now. And I felt, and I am certain that Shelley felt it too, that we were there all three of us, at the grave. There was comfort in it, and not of God or heaven, but that she was alive to us.

  I loved him for bringing her back to me. He was neither ghoulish nor sentimental. Last resting place. He is my resting place.

  I was aware that my father had secured her body against the diggers and the robbers who take any corpse they can for ready money, and they are rational enough – what use is the body when it is no use at all?

  In dissecting theatres all over London there are bodies of mothers, bodies of husbands, bodies of children, like mine, taken for liver and spleen, to crush the skull, saw the bones, unwind the secret miles of intestine.

  The deadness of the dead, said Polidori, is not what we fear. Rather we fear that they are not dead when we lay them in that last chamber. That they awake to darkness, and suffocation, and so die in agony. I have seen such agony in the faces of some new-buried and brought in for dissection.

  Have you no conscience? I said. No scruples?

  Have you no interest in the future? he said. The light of science burns brightest in a blood-soaked wick.

  The sky above me severed in forked light. The electrical body of a man seemed to be for a second lit up and then dark. Thunder over the lake, then, coming again, the yellow zig and zag of electrical force. From the window I saw a mighty shadow toppling down like a warrior slain. The thud of the fall shook the window. Yes. I see it. A tree hit by lightning.

  Then the rain again like a million miniature drummers drumming.

  My husband stirred but did not wake. In the distance the hotel flashed into view, deserted, blank-windowed and white, like the palace of the dead.

  Strange shadows on you tend …

  I must have gone back to bed, for I woke again, upright, my hair down, my hand clutching the bed curtain.

  I had dreamed. Had I dreamed?

  I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantom of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

  Such success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that the thing which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps, but he is awakened; he opens his eyes, behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

  I opened mine in terror.

  On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story.

  Story: a series of connected events, real or imagined. Imagined or real.

  Imagined

  And

  Real

  Reality bends in the heat.

  I’m looking through a shimmer of heat at buildings whose solid certainties vibrate like sound waves.

  The plane is landing. There’s a billboard:

  Welcome to Memphis, Tennessee.

  I’m here for the global Tec-X-Po on Robotics.

  Name?

  Ry Shelley.

  Exhibitor? Demonstrator? Purchaser?

  Press.

  Yes, I have you here, Mr Shelley.

  It’s Dr Shelley. The Wellcome Trust.

  You’re a doctor?

  I am. I’m here to consider how robots will affect our mental and physical health.

  That is a good question, Dr Shelley. And let’s not forget the Soul.

  I’m not sure that’s my area …

  We all have a Soul. Hallelujah. Now, who are you here to interview?

  Ron Lord.

  (Short pause while the database finds Ron Lord.)

  Yes. Here he is. Exhibitor Class A. Mr Lord will be waiting for you at the Adult Futures Suite. Here is a map. My name is Claire. I am your point of contact today.

  Claire was tall, black, beautiful, well-dressed in a tailored dark green skirt and pale green silk shirt. I felt glad that she was my point of contact today.

  Claire wrote out my name-badge with a brisk, manicured hand. Handwriting – a strangely old-fashioned and touching method of identification at a futuristic tech expo.

  Claire – excuse me – my name – not Ryan, just Ry.

  I apologise, Dr Shelley, I am not familiar with English names – and you are English?

  Yes, I am.

  Cute accent. (I smile. She smiles.)

  Is this your first time in Memphis?

  Yes, it is.

  You like BB King? Johnny Cash? And THE King?

  Martin Luther King?

  Well, sir, I was talking about Elvis – but now you bring it to my attention, we do seem to have a lotta Kings here – maybe something about calling this city Memphis – I guess if you name a place after the capital of Egypt, you gonna see some pharaohs – uh-huh?

  Naming is power, I say to her.

  It sure is. Adam’s task in the Garden of Eden.

  Yes, indeed, to name everything after its kind. Sexbot …

  Pardon me, sir?

  Do you think Adam would have thought of that? Dog, cat, snake, fig tree, sexbot?

  I am thankful he didn’t have to, Dr Shelley.

  Yes, I am sure you are right. So tell me, Claire, why did they call this place Memphis?

  You mean back in 1819? When it was founded?

  As she speaks I see in my mind a young woman looking out of a sodden window across the lake.

  I say to Claire, Yes. 1819. Frankenstein was a year old.

&nbs
p; She frowns. I am not following you, sir.

  The novel Frankenstein – it was published in 1818.

  The guy with the bolt through his neck?

  More or less …

  I saw the TV show.

  It’s why we are here today. (There was a look of confusion on Claire’s face as I said this, so I explained.) I don’t mean existentially Why We Are Here Today – I mean why the Tec-X-Po is here. In Memphis. It’s the kind of thing organisers like; a tie-in between a city and an idea. Memphis and Frankenstein are both two hundred years old.

  Your point?

  Tech. AI. Artificial Intelligence. Frankenstein was a vision of how life might be created – the first non-human intelligence.

  What about angels? (Claire looks at me, serious and certain. I hesitate … What is she saying?)

  Angels?

  That’s right. Angels are non-human intelligence.

  Oh, I see. I meant the first non-human intelligence created by a human.

  I have been visited by an angel, Dr Shelley.

  That’s wonderful, Claire.

  I don’t hold with Man playing God.

  I understand. I hope I haven’t offended you, Claire?

  She shook her head of shiny hair and pointed to the map of the city. You asked me why they called it Memphis, back in 1819 – and the answer is because we are on a river – the Mississippi – and the old Memphis was on the River Nile – you seen Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra?

  Yes, I have.

  You know, she wore her own jewels? Think of that.

  (I thought of it.)

  Yes, all her own jewels, and most of them bought by Richard Burton. He was English.

  Welsh.

  Where is Wales?

  It is in Britain but it isn’t in England.

  I find that confusing.

  United Kingdom: the UK is made up of England, Scotland, a slice of Ireland, and Wales.