Mary Godwin sits at her desk. It is 1816, and she has just finished the first draft of Frankenstein. She had wanted the novel to better fit the prompt: Tell a ghost story. Instead she wrote about a series of corpses stolen, then sutured together to craft a new man. Is that the same as a ghost?
Percy will add the book the flavor it needs, will soften the turns of the chapters. Percy will take her words and curve them so they fit neatly into the void of the reader’s ear.
The monster may not be a ghost, but still it haunts her. Can a form be made from the parts of other forms? And if so, is it ever complete? Do the places where the sutures live never quite meet, or do they, over time, heal enough for the parts to operate as a single body?
. . . . . .
The monster is touching his skin, feeling the places where his flesh has been connected. He is trying to learn if at those clefts he can detect the people who were used to make him. He is convinced that within him he holds on to those people, the threaded-together others. At night while he is trying to sleep, he can sense their hopes and wishes, their fears and anxieties, coalescing inside his organs and bones. He knows he is he, but he is also, somehow, They, and this is what makes him think he might be human.
Because a person who is born is made like that too, he knows. Each person is composed of the parts of others who have morphed to make the people he sees each day. They are themselves, but also they are a beautiful latticework of others, a quilted montage of all the people who came before them, people they, too, would never meet.
. . . . . .
Mary Godwin twists a loop of twine between her hands, lights her lamp. She thinks about her project, then about the dream she had last year. It still haunts her, but she knows that dreaming is the way the body conveys what is harbored in the deep recesses of the mind.
The dream had to do with the death of her first baby. She lost it giving birth, age seventeen, and yet it returned, reanimated, in her slumbering mind. She relived the moment of its death, the sorrow that swelled in her veins. But instead of her wrapping the baby and letting Percy take it away to be buried, as had unfolded in real life, in the dream he took the corpse to the fire and rubbed the tiny body violently until, by some strange logic, the child began to breathe. It reached for her, wept for her. It wanted her again.
Now she stands before the fire and thinks about the story she is writing. It is about how much destruction is required for creation, how much horror lives in the act of birth. It is about who governs that body, who crafts the map to navigate the strange paths of the world, both in the mind and outside the mind too.
. . . . . .
The couple who will know tragedy in the years to come does not know it yet. They have just met, are meeting for the first time on this very evening. They aren’t sure yet that there is anything that could become affection. Not sure there is anything that could ever evolve into love. It is 1978, and they make their way to the cinema from opposite directions, one in a roommate’s car, the other by bike. They are friends, have shared a round after class, but he is thinking of going abroad, and she wants to drop out of school. They could have gone their separate ways tonight, but they felt compelled to meet.
The man will go next week to Europe with his cousin, leave the States forever — unless. Tomorrow the woman will book a ticket for a bus headed to the coast, where she’ll spend her life working for her aunt — unless. They approach the cinema from two different directions and then they meet, smile shyly, offer each other a brief hug. In this way, they begin to seal their fate.
. . . . . .
Mary Godwin stands before the window, rain falling so hard she cannot see. She is struggling with the story’s form. She runs a hand over her stomach, remembers when her body was a world. The baby was lost and Percy had held her, whispered into the nape of her neck that he promised her another, but she does not think she can take her body’s rejections. The machine of her womb’s malfunction is not connected to her mind, she knows, and yet she finds herself convinced it was her doing.
The womb, that primordial space, the cove inside which she herself was formed. All the coves living inside each other, the wombs inside wombs inside wombs.
The story’s form, she thinks. Maybe what she needs is a way of framing. A story inside a story inside a story.
. . . . . .
The monster is at the river, collecting flowers and watching the way the wind crafts ripples along the water’s surface. He is watching the invisible wind conduct its work on the water, and he is plucking flowers. He was not born — he was made — but perhaps humans, he thinks, are kind. Perhaps they’ll find a way to understand him.
The sun dips behind a cloud, and the monster puts his face to the sky and asks the sun to return. Come back, the monster’s face asks, and he closes his eyes, and he feels the wind brush across the face he has been given, been gifted.
He might be close to human. And then the sun emerges from behind the cloud, and the light and warmth — the light is warmth, the warmth light, they are the same — they travel from the sun ninety-three million miles away to meet the monster’s face. And what he does then is this: the monster smiles.
. . . . . .
The couple who will know tragedy in the years to come are not yet married and have not yet given birth to a beautiful child whose life will end too soon because of cruelty. It is 1978, and they are just now entering the cinema. They are just now at the counter, trying to decide whether it’s worth buying something to eat. It is their first decision together, other than the decision to meet here tonight. The man grabs the popcorn, and the woman grabs the box of chocolate candies, and they move toward the screen to take their seats.
The lights are being lowered, and the 1931 production of Frankenstein is beginning now at their town’s local cinema. If only this evening went poorly and they never spoke again. If only they knew what tragedy they are just now inaugurating as they are filing into their seats, and she registers that he smells good, and he wonders whether or not to do it and then does — he slides his hand to her waist to guide her down the aisle.
After the film, they will buy a twelve-pack of cheap beer and go to the park, drink it all while looking up at the full moon and talking about astronomy, their shared major. They love the story, they both admit, loved Frankenstein the first time they read it. That is, in large part, why they’d been drawn together on this night. They will talk about Frankenstein as he is hanging from the monkey bars, as she makes slow revolutions on the merry-go-round. They will talk about astronomy and its history, the way long ago it was linked with astrology. He will push her on the swings until she jumps off, laughing, and she will let him rest his head on her lap on a bench, and they will crack open beer after beer and discuss how it was once believed that the whole of life was mapped out and waiting to unfold based on the day a person chose to be born. They will talk about the sphere of fixed stars, heliocentrism, the Age of Reason, the split between astrology and astronomy in the seventeenth century, then Kepler, The Cure, and Kafka and then their respective plans for leaving this town. Just before two a.m., they will kiss. And when they kiss they will both know it instantly, that there is something between them and before them, and then the route toward What Will Be will have been taken.
. . . . . .
The monster is at the river, and he sees there — a child. There is a child. A girl. He fears then, worries the moment she sees him she will cringe and run. But she does not. What she does instead takes his breath away. She reaches out her hand.
She is so small, and her hand is in his hand, and she is beautiful, like the flowers she is showing him now. She is inviting him into a place of belonging.
And then, for what reason he doesn’t know, the monster feels compelled — for the first time in his life — to echo this other person’s movements. He takes the thing that is beautiful and holds it tightly before gently tossing it on top of the water, where, he learns, the water ripples. The water ripples, but the beautiful thing he’s tossed there does not float.
. . . . . .
The couple is in the cinema, and all they know is right now, in the present. And so they don’t know that the cinema in which they dwell will in several years be gone.
One night in late autumn, the cinema’s heater will turn on long after midnight, and this first kick of heat after so many months will force a spark. That spark will catch a bit of insulation, and that insulation will begin a fire. By morning, the cinema will be a relic, something broken and brittle and utterly unlike what it had been the day before.
The townsfolk will stand around the glowing ruins with their early morning coffee as the firefighters hose down what is left. And afterward, after the firefighters are gone and the space is cooled and all that is left is the smell of smoke and the wet of the ground, the townspeople will step inside, through the front of the building, which is missing, so that it looks like a stage. They will step in and walk around, point and shake their heads, take care with their footing as they step on parts of the ceiling, which will then be the floor.
And in the months thereafter, as the owner is fighting with the insurance company to get the place fixed, what will happen is this: rain from the absent roof soaking the cushions will feed seeds that have been dropped by birds, locked in their stool and released from their feathers and fuzz, until those cushions become homes for moss and plants and eventually small trees. On the floor of the cinema, which is now the ground of Earth, will grow bushes. Bushes will surface, and then grass and eventually flowers. They will grow from the seats of the cinema and the debris on the ground in the aisles, and they will grow from the refuse in front of the screen. Plants and flowers and then, later, small trees will take over that space, and because the front of the building is missing, when people walk by, they will look in at it as if it is artwork. On the walls of the cinema, which are visible from the sidewalk now that the front is gone, there will be posters of all the old films from long ago that the cinema used to show.
They don’t know it yet, but one day, after the tragedy of their daughter has unfolded, when they are in their fifties and have returned to their hometown to visit a sick relative, they will walk by this place, and they will each quietly think there is something monstrous about it, this space that once housed them as they watched a film about science and ambition and men playing at make-believe. This space that had been sanctuary for the beginning of what would become a two-part They.
The man will think that the space looks like a palimpsest from long, long ago, when paper was so rare that people would write and then erase what they had written, write over it. It looks like the park is a cinema that became a park again, and he can’t tell where the cinema ends and the park begins.
The woman will think that the space looks like a matrix — a mother space, a space of becoming. Like when the child is halfway out of the womb, so that the new form isn’t still part of the mother but it’s not yet apart from her, so that it is only of her — the space looks like it’s in a perpetual state of being born.
They’ll both turn away then and remember that first date, that date that is right now, tonight, how they watched Frankenstein and drank a twelve-pack of cheap beer afterward. They will think of their daughter, of washing her hair when she was a baby, the way she’d look up at them and smile as they placed a hand on her forehead to ensure no water got in her eyes. They will think of her paintings of the ocean still lining their walls, her gait en route to ice cream, the cowlick they could never tame, her off-key singing voice. They will think then this place is monstrous, that it launched a destiny bound up with disaster. Then it will start to rain.
But that is all to come. Right now the seats are warm and round, and their bodies are hugged inside their red chairs. And on the screen there is, in black and white, Frankenstein’s monster, trying to learn how to love and when to lose and what it’s doing alone in the world with no one to teach it the way.
. . . . . .
Mary Godwin stands before the fire. Outside, the thunder breaks, and she thinks it sounds like a woman enduring the pain of grief, but then she dismisses this thought, for she is giving nature human characteristics. Nothing in nature loves; nothing in nature lies. There is no art in nature. It is concerned only with being. Being, to its extreme. To its superlative.
The fire before her cracks and the thunder beyond her claps, and Mary Godwin thinks about the strange logic of biology, how it requires that bodies be taken apart so we might learn how they were put together. There must be a gentler way, she thinks. There must be a way to understand without such violence.
. . . . . .
Frankenstein’s monster sits at the edge of a small town, watching a family love one another through the window of their home. He is watching them and thinking: How might I be with them when I am this conglomerate, this collective of others who are dead? How does one who has been crafted in this manner even begin to approach a person and not be taken as a threat?
It has to be the blind man, the monster thinks. That is whom he has to approach — the man who cannot see. He needs to do it quickly but with care. Because a thing crafted from the debris of others and given life through an experiment — it can navigate the world only on the defensive. The monster licks his lips then because they are chapped, and he lifts his hand to his arm, where two bits of dead flesh have been tethered together by the man who built him. He has done things unimaginable in the name of grief and misunderstanding and eventually revenge, and you might think it is because his father dismissed him. But the truth is this: The monster’s sorrow-rage is not because his father would not love him. It is because his father never gave him a name.
. . . . . .
The couple is watching Frankenstein, and eventually the lights will come up, and the couple will leave the cinema and walk to the 7-Eleven, pick up that twelve-pack of cheap beer, and make their way to the park. But that hasn’t happened just yet.
Because time — time is slipping now, moving sideways, then backward — time is growing and branching and blossoming like a stain. Time is escaping the form in which humans best understand it, which is a line or a sequence. Instead, time is like a web.
So the couple is watching the film, but they are also fifty years old, thinking about their dead daughter as they pass the echo of the burned-down cinema. And the couple is watching the film, but they are also holding their daughter close, kissing her and tucking her into bed when she is five. The couple is watching the film, but they are also calling the police when she goes missing at age ten.
They are watching the film, but in the weeks thereafter, they are also mourning the mystery of her disappearance.
They are watching the film, but they are also sitting in their den, listening to the detective tell them their daughter has been found, that she is dead, dumped in a field. Fully clothed, no harm to her other than a deep gash in her head and some bruises on her arms. The woman squeezes shut her eyes at the phrase “no harm to her other than” and the man presses hard on the woman’s thigh not when the detective says “gash” but when he says “bruises.”
“I will tell you,” the detective is telling them, even as they are also not yet parents, not yet married, even as they are watching the film on this very night, their first date, hands just on the precipice of touching, moving closer to the gap in the seats between them. “I will tell you that she fought him off. Her fingernails. Beneath her fingernails, she got some of that monster.”
So this is how the couple is watching the film but also putting the pieces together, doing the math — she must have taken a ride with a stranger, probably thought he was harmless. He likely had said that he knew her parents, that they’d asked him to give her the ride. But why, the couple is asking, why did it take so long to find her? And the detective is saying that she’d been in the morgue for weeks, a Jane Doe. This happens, he is saying. But they are just now trying a new kind of science — deciphering a kind of code inside us, a sequence called DNA — this will eliminate such delays and miscommunications in the future. This science will help them identify these poor souls so they don’t have to wait in the morgue, wait alone and unnamed.
In fact, he is telling them, it’s this science that could help them find these killers. Keep them accountable. DNA — it could help them give these evil people a name.
“But that science — it’s young,” the detective says. “We’re still years out from that kind of quick and easy identification.”
The couple is watching the film — the man is reaching to hold the woman’s hand for the first time, and she is letting him, turning to face him and smiling — but they are also hearing the detective tell them their daughter, aged ten, is dead, and can they come to the morgue to identify her, and thank god he discerned her identity before her time at the morgue ran out.
You know how this goes, then: the couple is watching the film, but the film hasn’t been made yet, and the novel on which it is based hasn’t been written yet, and the long sequence of cause-and-effect events that snake their way toward the couple and in so doing author their tragedy — that sequence hasn’t turned itself in their direction yet.
Because Frankenstein’s monster is not yet Frankenstein’s monster but merely the kernel of an idea in Victor Frankenstein’s head. Victor’s mother is dead, and his grief is overwhelming. It consumes him in waking life so that he cannot leave his bed, and it consumes him in his sleep, giving rise to hideous nightmares. His mother is dead, and he is in his lab at the University of Ingolstadt, and he wants to prove something, wants to show the world that he has worked hard, that he can make things too. Wants to prove this to his mother, who will never see the things he does and makes. Frankenstein’s monster is not even a full idea in Victor’s head, which is Mary Godwin’s head. Right now the monster is just a series of corpses distributed across a graveyard. He hasn’t been assembled yet.
But when the monster gets assembled, when that bolt of electricity runs through him and gives him life, at the moment that he becomes something just short of human, he will have a thought, and that thought will be this: all different kinds of splendor. For he is made from the bodies of others, and those bodies harbored safe thoughts about what they found beautiful. He will think of the thin and delicate hairs on the head of a newborn, though he doesn’t know what a child is yet, doesn’t understand, only harbors this image in what is about to be his mind. He will think of the petals of a flower, the curves of clouds, the taste of warm wine. He will think of the branches of trees and the gut punch of a good story. The feeling of silk between the tips of his fingers and the warmth of an embrace.
The monster will think these things as he is coming into being, and then he will have before him harsh light and the outline of a shape that is a man, and he will lift himself from that table, and he will discover he is in a laboratory. Then he’ll think something that is too difficult for him to understand in that moment, the moment after he has been animated and offered life. It is less a thought than a feeling, and the feeling is this: the feeling is shame.
. . . . . .
Mary Godwin watches the rain fall down in sheets, thinks it looks like pleats in fabric. Percy has promised her they can try again, for a second child. He is married to another, and she has to wait before she can unite her life with his. She is madly, disturbingly, painfully in love with him. It hurts her physical form not to be near him. She has been told this may pass, because — after all — she is only eighteen. This is young love, she is told, but she feels that the life she’s been authoring is also, somehow, his. She wishes her mother were still alive to give her some advice. Her mother, whom Mary knew only for her first eleven days on this planet. Her mother, of the Wollstonecrafts, who died after birthing her.
The monster, Mary thinks, looking out the window at the cold, wet Geneva summer night. He will have to teach himself. He will have to learn the way himself, his father having abandoned him. But that, she thinks, is like all parents — they stir the cosmic chemicals to make you, then they leave you far behind.
. . . . . .
On the screen is Frankenstein’s monster, but it is really just light, translated into these images and projected. And if one were to rise from this scene, lift up above it and look down, one would see the few people in the cinema, see the couple toward the front corner from an aerial perspective, looking down. If one were able to do that, then a question would follow: What keeps those forms so anchored to their seats? What is it about this organized light that instills in them joy and patience and pain and strife? It is just light — isn’t it just light? — but something about it compels them.
And if one were to lift oneself up and gaze down at this drama unfolding, and if one were also to transpose time, allow it to move in all directions, so that there were plural Nows, then down below would be the couple, while over and beneath them, through them and beyond them would also be creeping vines hugging the seats where their bodies sit, cushions home for ferns and flowers where their arms and hands are linked together, branches sprouting from the places where also rest the couple’s touching feet. There would be the couple here and now as well as the aftermath of the forthcoming fire.
If one could do this, one would see it all, and then, of course, would caution the couple about what is to come, invite them to know time differently, so that it isn’t a point in a sequence that moves one way. If one could do this, they would want to teach this couple — still delicately merging — that each Now is a tender axis, around which all other Nows rotate. Every Now has a core, and it morphs everything that came before and everything still to be.
That axis is tender, must be treated with care. Break it, and catastrophe unfolds.
. . . . . .
Victor Frankenstein watches his creation. Here, Victor thinks, here he comes into being. There is lightning, and then there is animation, a body lifting itself from its tray. But he detects inside himself a pulse of sorrow as he watches his creation meet life.
I miss my mother, Victor thinks in the moment the monster turns to face him. I miss my mother, he thinks, and turns away from the atrocity he has formed.
. . . . . .
Mary Godwin has been given a prompt: Write a story that will incite fear. It is three a.m. and storming. She is thinking about a man formed from the parts of other, dead men. She is thinking about a male doctor who puts this man together, who endows it with the vigor of life. A man who gives birth to a man made of other, dead men.
She thinks about the act of cutting up the corpses, choosing the best fragments to assemble carefully. Every act of creation is about the self, she thinks. She imagines the way the bodies are sliced and rearranged, sutured back together. Will it be thought of as grotesque abomination? Or will it be considered art?
She is eighteen years old, and she will marry Percy soon, the moment he’s no longer tethered to his current wife. Mary’s name will change, she knows. But on this manuscript, she’ll put no name. This book will be authored by Anonymous.
She practices her new name on her lips. A name for only her, since her current name — both first and last — she shares with her dead mother. She will no longer be a Godwin. No longer a Wollstonecraft.
Mary Shelley, she mouths. Mary Shelley, she thinks. She mouths the name soundlessly, over and over again.
I will animate the monster, she thinks, and dips her pen in the ink, hovers above the page.
Mary Shelley, she thinks, and the pen is pressed onto the paper to craft the first word.
. . . . . .
The couple who will know tragedy has known it. They have lived it, wept it, damned and feared it, let it control them, then regained control. They are now in their seventies, holding each other in bed.
Today they were told the identity of the man who killed their daughter. He’d spent long years in prison for a similar offense, and died just last year of natural causes. The DNA beneath her fingernails had told them, a story with an ending for which they had to wait thirty years, until the science caught up.
But this news — it has opened a wound rather than sutured one closed.
It is early morning, and the sun is not yet up. But they are awake, have not slept. They are lying in bed, holding each other, their limbs caught around each other, twisting and folding and collapsing into a single They.
And then the man whispers.
The man whispers a thought he has had so very many times in this life.
He’d wanted to go to Europe with his cousin. She’d planned to work for her aunt. That movie. That story. That evening that had launched their life together, and their tragedy.
“What if we’d never—” the man whispers into his lover’s ear, but she puts her hand to his mouth so that he cannot finish. She pulls his head to her chest, and he holds her around her middle. She matches the rhythm of her breathing to his, imagines they are one.
They are one, she thinks then. And that, she thinks, kissing his forehead, holding his form, is both the promise and the curse.
. . . . . .
“Everything must have a beginning . . .” Mary Shelley will write in 1831, “and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. . . . Invention . . . does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos. . . . [I]t can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”
. . . . . .
There now, look there. From above now, look down. Look closer. See what I see: Alone on a hill in the shade of a tree, having just committed his crime, seated and fearing for his future, the monster clears his throat.
