Brittle Innings (24 page)

Initially, of course, she did not. Later, however, when the book created a nationwide stir, prompting a writer in
Blackwood
’s to put forward his sincere wishes for the putative author’s “future happiness,” thereby forgiving Mrs. Shelley her unconventional past, it became harder to insist upon her role as an editor and ever more tempting to embrace the work as wholly the product of her own philosophical musings and storytelling proclivities. In 1831, this temptation led her to elaborate upon her husband’s mood-setting fiction of the ghost-story-writing competition at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. Further, she irrevocably acknowledged authorship of
Frankenstein
by allowing the publishers of the revised edition of 1832 to feature prominently on its title page her name. Perhaps the fact that in the fourteen years between the two editions she had published three novels of her own, along with many accomplished incidental writings, effectively obscured for her the actual genesis of the work. Mrs. Shelley suffered much in her heroic life, from the high-minded betrayals of her most cherished loved ones as well as from the untimely deaths of her husband and all but one of her children. Thus, I do not anathematise her for claiming unassisted creatorship of the one title—
The Last Man
, fine as it is, does not qualify—that enrolled her among the immortals.

Quitting Janalach, I blessedly had no foreknowledge of the events that would carry my distorted biography to the world. I wished only to atone for the crimes of my past life and to discover in my second incarnation a place of at least marginal acceptance. The necessity to hide, to make certain salubrious changes in myself as well as discreet contacts among the tribespeople of the ice coasts and the taiga, required discipline and fortitude. I hiked east, sustaining myself on lichens, bog moss, and the leaves and spring fruit of several different kinds of stunted shrubs. I made skis of larchwood and built myself a movable blind of mammoth bones and evergreen foliage. The blind enabled me to skirt the encampments of nomads, and the fluid edges of reindeer herds, without betraying to either man or beast my presence in or near their environs.

After several months’ travel and the overmastering of many hardships, however, two Chukchi hunters caught me traversing a barren expanse of tundra and let fly at me from their compound bows a barrage of arrows. That I dragged a travois and attired myself as a human being enraged rather than conciliated them. I had trespassed their demesne, and my size convicted me as a likely scourge of their hunting grounds.

Two arrows struck home, their walrus-ivory points embedding themselves in my flesh, one above my hip and the other in my calf. I roared bitterly. I menaced the bowmen with broad semaphoring gestures. Uncowed, they muttered unintelligibly, perhaps disappointedly, before retreating out of sight beyond a fluted sastruga.

Thus abandoned, I sought to minister to my wounds. I snapped off the arrow shafts and removed my leggings to expose the embedded points. In this half-naked state, I would have presented a prodigiously vulnerable target, had my Chukchi tormentors returned with reinforcements. I made haste, then, to dislodge the ivory barbs with the tip of a skinning knife. The pain was slight, but a copious oozing of pale blood accompanied this surgery. With spruce resin and rags I dressed my wounds. Then, lame and sore, I drew on my leggings and retreated several miles to an orphaned copse of cedars. Therein I erected a hut of branches and sailcloth in which to mull my outcast state and to recoup my vigour.

This recoupment, although at the time I hardly knew it, protracted into a hibernation akin to my death sleep in the ice cavern far to the west. A blizzard stormed and departed. The twilit autumn turned to night. I may have had some imperfect consciousness of time’s passage, but in my womblike shelter, the lashing of the sleet, the lamentations of the wind, and the brittle starlight strewn above the grove chimed in me as inward rather than outer phenomena. In my stupefaction I reposed much as a salmon, stunned by the cuff of a bear and twitching on a rock, would nonetheless intuit its fate.

Eventually, I awoke to ice, snow, and uncouth Aeolian music. My wounds had healed. Revitalised, I fought clear of my wintry entombment and journeyed again towards the utopia of my innocent fancy . . . .

At dinner, Curriden griped Kizzy’d put baking soda instead of baking powder into her biscuits. (Or vice versa.) They looked like “baby cow flops” and tasted like “carbon-paper ashes.”

“Mrs. Lorrows has had an off day,” Jumbo defended her.

“Uh-uh,” Kizzy said. “But I sometimes has a turrible day when the likes of yall jabbers yo ugly spite.”

“Mr. Curriden has had an off day too,” Jumbo said.

“These biscuits could drop an ox,” Curriden said. “From the inside or out, eaten or thrown.”

“From here on out, Mister Reese,” Kizzy said, pointing a witchy finger at him, “pray God I don’t pyson yo tea.”

I scrambled back upstairs to find my place in Jumbo’s log, and the argument in the kitchen—the feud—got louder. Soon, though, I was hip-deep in Jumbo’s autobiography, and the noisy dipsy-do downstairs might as well’ve originated in Zanzibar. I no longer heard it.

31

My Second Life (Continued)

I
nitially without aim or plan, I wandered the coldest and least-known wildernesses of Siberia, from its northernmost bays to the sparse taiga forests of the Kolyma Mountains, and many other remote locales besides. Why did I live?

At length I found reasons: to atone for the murders I had committed as Frankenstein’s outcast get; to discover a suitable resting place for my late progenitor; to enter human society as a worthy and productive citizen.

Vain hopes!

The cold agreed with me, as I have said, and I had little trouble sustaining myself even on thin soups of such despised vegetable matter as lichens, bark, evergreen needles, moss, and the tubercules and roots of many an unprepossessing shrub. As one item in my continuing penance, I had resolved never to eat flesh again, and had perfectly heeded this self-commandment. Other opportunities for atonement seldom arose, however, and I began to sink into a lonely despondency inimical to my most basic goals.

The body of my creator ever posed a difficulty, acting as an impediment to my travels, aimless though they were. By now, it had suffered much from exposure to the elements and from fluctuations of temperature. Frankenstein’s once handsome face, albeit pallid from inward struggle and his final illness, now resembled that of a tortoise. His nose suggested a beak, his mouth a V-shaped scar, his throat a desiccated wattle. During a brief period of inattention, I had allowed a magpie to pluck out one of his frozen eyeballs; the other had oozed away over days of blinding—nor do I use the word in jest—sunshine.

Owing to the ambient cold (unremitting but for these bright interludes), the decay process in him advanced by staggers. Although his body never emitted an insupportable odour, only on the iciest days was it altogether free of a sickly perfume. At such times, his limbs had the hardness of gun barrels; at the Siberian summer’s height, however, they flopped like a rag doll’s and by such movements wafted their attenuated stench.

“Oh, Frankenstein!” I once apostrophised him. “Is this how I honour you? Is this how I justify myself in your sightless gaze?”

As both thinking creature and nomad, I lacked direction. The place most likely to accept and hallow my progenitor’s bones, the city of Geneva, stood leagues and leagues away. I had no idea how many. It might as well have nestled in a lunar vale, for how, without divine aid, could I reach either Switzerland or the moon?

Often I thought to slip my burden and to pay homage to my maker by setting out his remains on some wind-blown promontory, where eagles or wolves could reverence his spirit through the machinery of their appetites. Frankenstein had loved the Alps, their glacial majesty and their vistas of desolate loveliness. In my creator’s belated obsequies, could not the icescapes and mountains of eastern Siberia serve as either emblems or proxies of the Alps? Although I hoped so, the strictness of my call to atonement argued the reverse.

At length, however, I discovered for him on an inlet of the Chukchi Sea a temporary resting place, a grotto of stone which I further concealed with driftwood and glacial rubbish, where I could safely cache his body during my rambles afield. By this expedient, I preserved not only that which persisted of his corpse, but also my freedom as a moral agent.

Why, my hypothetical reader may inquire, did I remain in the Siberian wilderness without soliciting the companionship of men? In one regard, the question is foolish, for my treatment by the human species, from Victor Frankenstein himself to the Chukchi bowmen of a more recent encounter, had little inclined me to trust it. In another regard, however, the question demands an answer, for I had fixed as one of my goals my own domestication and socialisation. The process could not fulfill itself if, confining my rambles to remote wastelands, I shunned even the most glancing impingement on members of my creator’s race.

Nothing had occurred, I understood, to render my physique or my hideous facial features less alarming to human beings. Indeed, these attributes had turned even Frankenstein against me. His genius had succumbed to his weakness of soul; he had repudiated me almost in the instant of my first emergence into consciousness. I still had a powerful recollection of that moment: the chemical-stained hands of my maker and the flicker of ineffable disgust in his eyes. Unhappily, my deformed countenance, still provoking fear, would prevent others from compassionating me. Even had my face shone as comely as Apollo’s, my great size would always speak to the timid or the wary my undeniable potential for inflicting ruin. The universal policy of men towards me, then, had founded itself on either flight or preemptive recourse to a garbled Golden Rule, namely,
Do unto Frankenstein’s creature what it unquestionably purposes for thee.

Therefore, I practised and took pride in caution. I inwardly celebrated my ability, honed in Switzerland and the Orkneys, to come within a whisper of my human prey without alerting it, or others, to my menacing proximity. Now, however, I intended no threat. I told myself that my stealthiness facilitated observation when, in fact, it had become habitual, a means whereby I evaded natural human commerce and further inured myself to solitude. Intellectual diversion—be it reading, games, debate, or philosophical contemplations—had completely fled my world; day by day, I devolved toward the instinctive mindlessness of the timber wolf or the snow owl.

A fortuitous encounter, involving no human beings at all, put a halt to this bestial slide. As aimlessly I worked my way along the icy palisades on the Bering Strait, I heard the clamorous voices of mating walruses. This passionate baying, at once like the barking of dogs and the squealing of swine, echoed from the cliffside rocks. I sought its source. Before long, I had clambered to a throne of barnacled granite downwind from the sea beasts’ rookery.

From this perch, I had a hidden view of the harem and of the sultanic male treading a young female. He bellowed his triumphant ecstasy. His lovemaking impressed me with both its ardour and its violence, for it hardly seemed that the pinned sultana could derive any pleasure from her paramour’s coercive affections. On the other hand, she may have relished her role as his and the other females’ cynosure; thus, she periodically barked her doubtful rapture. The females unoccupied with either procreation or the establishment of a pecking hierarchy tended their wet-eyed pups.

All this I absorbed with the greatest curiosity, irritation, and excitement. Shamefacedly, I confess that I considered attempting to cuckold the bull with one of his concubines. The feat struck me as possible but riskful: I might incur a tusk wound. If his massiveness were any trustworthy measure, however, the king walrus must weigh five times as much as I. Thus, he had not my nimbleness or speed, and the rookery was large. An ingenious rogue might well swyve a lady or two at sufficient distance from him to escape either interruption or injury.

I seriously entertained this notion, unnatural as my maker or his murdered bride would have adjudged it, because the yearning in my loins had produced a persistent tumidity; I ached with bittersweet excruciations impossible to describe. At last (appalled by the image of myself in coitus with a bewhiskered, legless, fish-eating sloth), I foreswore the temptation and spilled my lavalike seed on a rock.

Call me Onan.

My lust momentarily deflected, I took more acute note of the walrus society apart from the rutting couple. It charmed and enchanted me. The mothers and their pups displayed a sweet, reciprocal affection, the beholding of which retrieved and intensified the rage I had felt in the Orkney Islands at my creator’s destruction of the female companion he had promised to make for me. Like nearly every other sentient being, I had known loneliness well ahead of lust. My desire for friendship, the consoling warmth of a propinquitous body, antedated and so took precedence over the mating urge. With the mothers and pups of this rookery at least, a kindred longing had found at once its natural outlet and its satisfaction. I envied the affectionate creatures.

In my envy, my rage subsided. Frankenstein was dead. How, then, expect him to build me a wife? Furthermore, as I must soon or late acknowledge, no one else could accomplish that same miracle. I must abandon by degrees my self-exile and seek a female companion among the children of men. Or, given the vast unlikelihood of success in that endeavour, I must embrace self-control and reform my character. These changes, I hoped, would lubricate my introduction into the human community. As part of it, my gentleness and honesty established, I might draw to me the companion of all my longings. Or I might not. In either event, I had determined to quit the wilds and to embark upon a career as a devout philanthropist.

I owed this turnabout to a revelation on the edge of a breeding ground of walruses. Perhaps I had shamed myself there, but I had also come into harmony with the repressed aspirations of my higher nature. Who can condemn me? Who can demand more?

The sequent era of my life became the happiest I have yet known. As it unfolded, I lacked the inclination to chronicle even its chief events. Thus, I seldom wrote here of either the people or the quotidian occupations that persuaded me I had found my niche in human society. In truth, what I did write I long ago ripped from this log and sank in a polar-bear skull in Kotzebue Sound, as latter-day Alaskans now call the inlet. I here reprise this part of my earthly career, in an abridgement painful to indite, to shew the connection between my early resurrection self and the semireclusive citizen I later became.

For sixty or seventy years, I dwelt with a small population of alternately maritime and inland Innuit, a people whom the Cossacks and other Europeans call Esquimaux. I reached them by stealing an oomiak, or whaleboat, from a trading outpost on the easternmost tip of the Chukchi Peninsula and sailing it across miles of open water in the Bering Strait to an icy spit near present-day Shishmaref. My creator, exhumed from his grotto on the eastern side, sailed with me, but his limited contributions to our crossing scarcely warrant inscribing him on the manifest as a crewman.

Once across, I hiked westward, dragging my maker on yet another travois, until chancing upon a village near a river southeast of a vast inlet. I had skirted many such villages, but this one recommended itself to me by the cleanliness and symmetry of its houses, fish-drying stands, and sled racks, and by the animation and good humour of its people.

Let me call the village Oongpek for the snowy-owl totem displayed on its chief
kazgi
, or men’s lodge, and the people themselves the Oongpekmut after the name of their village. I have no wish to identify more specifically either the place or its inhabitants, who numbered about forty persons and comprised five or six families related by consanguinity or marriage. Oongpek, I determined, would well serve as my adoptive homeplace, and after many a careful survey of the village, I strove to insinuate myself into it as an ally and denizen.

The Oongpekmut at first regarded me with a suspicion as relentless as that of the Chukchi hunters who had wounded me in Siberia. Dread commingled with this suspicion. The villagers beheld me as if I were an evil spirit given form and substance. I had appeared to them with my travois behind me, and the corpse upon it little advanced my cause. Although I addressed them in Yoopik, their own tongue, pledging to add to their food stores and to protect them from enemies, whether animal or human, my friendly overtures foundered on their startlement and disbelief. I wanted companions, and a place of only moderate esteem in their collective. At length, however, my evident docility and their mounting impatience with my presence gave them courage, and they chased me away with harpoons and clubs.

Insofar as I could do so, I altered my appearance to approximate more closely their own. I cut my hair at the nape and around the ears to resemble the bowl-like coiffures of the men. I perforated my lower face at each lip corner to make possible the insertion of labrets, stone or ivory ornaments curiously evocative of walrus tusks. I made my labrets of creek stones and wore them daily until I could tolerate their chaffing and pull. I retailored my overshirt, leggings, and boots after the local masculine fashion. I made toys of spruce or willow wood for the village children, storyknives for the girls and carven animals for the boys.

On my next visit to Oongpek, I left my dead creator in a tree and appeared to the villagers gift-laden and familiarly dressed. I placed my gifts at Oongpek’s edge and danced in the succulent summer grass a modest dance of appeasement and petition. I meantime chanted the conciliatory words of a song of my own authorship. The children greatly desired to collect their bribes, and some of the younger adults seemed to look upon my renewed overtures with favour, if not with unmitigated delight. The village
angalgook
, or medicine man, who wore as an amulet the mummified remains of a human infant, reviled me as a trickster, an evil bear in the guise of a deranged giant. Two well-respected hunters concurred in supposing it unsafe to allow me any nearer approach. Indeed, the Oongpekmut hectically debated the nature of my identity, agreeing only that trusting my words might invite general destruction.

Asvek, the medicine man, claimed that his counterpart in a distant village had sent me to forestall an attack of the Oongpekmut upon that village. The other angalgook’s people had abducted a local woman in a raid, owing to an ancient feud, and so Asvek contended that the enemy shaman had transformed a diseased bear into the hideous spirit oracle that sought now to deceive Oongpek’s people. After this pronouncement, no one could concede that I might mean my words or that I had come to them free of my imperfect disguise as a man. Once again, then, the villagers whose companionship I desired drove me away.

I persevered. As shortly after my creation I had done with the De Lacey family in Switzerland, I became the secret benefactor of this group of Innuit. I did them various unsolicited kindnesses, from providing them with plant food—at best, a marginal part of their diet—to repairing their fishing nets and sealskin boats. Later, I rescued a small child who had wandered unattended into a kenneling area and fallen between the paws of a hungry sledge dog. Braving the possibility of another attack, I walked the child back into the village to her sisters and cousins. When I passed the smiling child into their care, I reiterated to them and several nearby adults my kindly feelings and my honourable intentions towards all the Oongpekmut. I also disclosed myself as the mysterious benefactor about whom much superstitious speculation had arisen.