Laurie Sheck

by A Monster's Notes (v5)

  Claire,

  I would send him North. As far away as possible. And in that way I would protect him from myself and my unkindness (always I thought of my dead children). I’d try to set him free. But even as I thought this—those vast irregular plains of ice, bright masses drifting—it occurred to me the ice resembled my glass skin. So I wasn’t really sending him away after all, but exiling him to the site and memory of my own affliction—that vial-trap I’d felt, brittle bitterness and ruthless gleaming. I wanted him to know how it feels to live inside glass skin, have no access to the world but through glass skin. Ice/glass—that feeling of not knowing where one ends and ice begins—he would know how I suffered. But wouldn’t he have known this on his own? Wasn’t that a crucial aspect of his affliction (and at least, unlike him, I had a name), being forced to live always apart, never touching or being touched by (so I thought) another breathing thing? I’d hoped I’d softened … wanted to soften … but I was wrong. Nights as Shelley and I held each other, I’d feel that glass climbing back inside me, small branches, brittle twisted vines. Everything unsafe, on the edge of being atomized maybe. Yet Shelley’s hand on my shoulder was the simplest, most trustworthy thing. It’s not that I was waiting for anything particular, my hours were busy with writing, reading, and then, while they lived, caring for my children. Shelley’s hand on my shoulder—if I could place such a hand on the shoulder of the one who’d read and then left me … But all I had was North, the idea of sending him away, out of reach of my barbed thoughts, and even that, I saw, was flawed. Still, every now and then I’d try again to write him a letter:

  Each time after one of my children dies I hear my voice as if originating from outside my body. It comes from an automaton who looks like me, opens and closes her eyes like me. When I open my mouth I hear metallic words come out: “cloudy today,” or “are you in the mood for potatoes or bread?” or “I’m so sad I don’t know what to do.” Whatever I say the voice is tinny, strange, lives in a world I feel no part of. I wonder if this happens to you … if it happened to you in the graveyard. Sometimes when you read I felt you hated me, that your voice could feel only a programmed hatred for those who touched each other, had families, changed. Yet in my book I put these words into my creature’s mouth: “My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy.” I believe this must be true of you. So why did I come to suspect you hated me? Why did I send my creature into ice so vast it was vivid distrust? After you left I grew glass skin. Do you know how it feels to walk around inside glass skin? Everything hurts, is brittle, and at the same time numb. But maybe you know this, maybe that’s why you walked with that lumbering gait, even though your limbs seemed beautifully made Maybe it was your own skin you hated and that pained you, not mine, your own mind you hated… because it wouldn’t free you, not even after all those books, that reading. Do we both have a North inside our minds? Cold winds that strip the raw voice from the throat, make it shatter—

  Once I came across a copy of Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, its margins filled with the handwritten daily diary of someone else’s life. Only the margins around the account of Mary Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempt were kept blank. Why would a stranger write his life into the margins of another’s?

  Wasn’t I lingering at the edges of another’s life, mixing in my thoughts and longings with hers?

  (Your notes I kept folded. Your notes I didn’t want to get near.)

  Sometimes I considered writing her a letter. Maybe I could do it if I promised myself I wouldn’t send it. Anyway, I wouldn’t have known where it should go; time and place continually shifting. London, Pisa, Naples, Lerici, Rome, children dead, living, then dead.

  You may wonder why I stopped reading

  Right away I crossed this out, knew it was a terrible beginning. There was no way I could explain.

  I tried again:

  You’ve made, your monster capable of vicious, hideous acts. Don’t think I hold this against you. Yet I who partly recognize myself in your pages hobble my voice, keep always to myself. If I could read to you of Theoclea, I’d tell you how she climbed a ladder in air. Her eyes were closed, but she was seeing. “Where are you?” Pythagoras asked. “I’m climbing… I continue climbing.” Then she loosed her black hair and fire was streaming through it but the flames couldn’t harm her. She was listening to him read, she climbed higher, she continued climbing—For many years I’ve been a silent being, the silent e in hide, the silent i in pain and recoil. The silent g in sign. I’ve watched your hand, watched S’s, watched your two hands moving together. Was it wrong of me to do this? If I could move my hand without fear… I live in a glass voicelessness, a silence.

  That night I thought of your laboratory notes, wondered why I kept them. Waited for her hand, but never yours.

  Claire,

  We were in Rome. Two of our children had died, both buried in unmarked graves. How could I have left them like that, and in places we were only passing through? (If I hadn’t been able to sit near my mother’s grave, hadn’t known where she was …) Cattle grazed among ruined columns, marble torsos, scattered, broken heads. Shelley pried a sliver from the wooden door of Tasso’s prison cell, slipped it in his pocket. We traveled over desolate land where just a few years before Lamartine had passed burned carriages and corpses. All the while Shelley was writing mournful poems he never showed me (I found them after his death). Yet we loved each other how is it that our-babies had died, something silent and terrible came into me something not glass or ice at all I wasn’t sure I understood Shelley’s words to Peacock about vacancy and oblivion, only that they felt desolate like my feelings for the one who’d read and then stopped. By thinking constantly of the graveyard, by keeping his presence in me alive, I had peopled my mind with what felt like vacancy and oblivion, or, rather, had kept open in myself areas of vacancy and oblivion active as atoms or the hidden, violent collisions we call thinking. (Claire, I’m telling you this as if you weren’t traveling with us but of course you were there too … there was such a far-awayness in me then that I think of you as elsewhere though you weren’t. I was often angry with you, wished you simply gone.) In Pisa there were chain gangs working in the streets. How could they do such heavy work with chains around their arms and legs? I thought of my two creatures—the one in the graveyard and the one in my book—how each was hobbled in his own particular way, my mind hobbled also, chained to them both. I had wanted to free him, free myself, yet the more I wrote the more the ice built up around me, the more the chains thickened, multiplied, complicating the shadows on every wall I saw. Sometimes I think history is slavery, or at least the record of slavery in its numerous guises—the ways the human mind chains itself and others intricately, cruelly. Piazza dei Miracoli, the river Serchio, Casa Bertini, Bagni di Lucca, Este, the Villa I Cappuccini. My baby Clara’s body somewhere under the sand on a stretch of beach along the Lido. And under it all, the fact of his silence—hole in the world, oblivion, relentlessness, chaos, confusion—

  Our lives are the embodying of quiet—

  Her hand was back (so quiet). I couldn’t tell where she was, saw only those words, not even a window, a desk, part of a wall. Her skin was reddened, worn.

  they say I look fragile but could still pass for a girl. Robinson says I seem sickly. I still hear waves against rock

  my cruelty that last winter, I—

  my face so often turned away

  Hunt says I’m a “torrent of fire under a Hecla of snow” but he knows nothing of me

  grief is quiet loss is quiet

  a living corpse such as I XXX

  If I am to receive even the smallest allowance from Sir Timothy I must agree never to bring S’s name into the public eye and can sign none of my own writings “Shelley”

  (So in a way she was like me, left without a name, and hidden.)

  Dear Claire another landing on this staircase I am climbing his dead body stained blue by the lime

&nbs
p; I hate the sound of the sea

  then they knew it was him from the book of Keats’s poems in the pocket

  She was transcribing his unpublished writings.

  (I have become a cowardly … I agreed not to publish them, but what choice did I have … I can’t)

  I could tell she found the handwriting hard to decipher. She turned the notebooks sideways, upside down:

  the plague ofXXX gold and blood as one whom years deform

  of that cold light whose airs too soon deform

  Her hand paused for several minutes. Did she feel that cold light he wrote of, the ways in which she also felt deformed? I’d seen her write:

  that winter of my alienation … my babies had died … but I believe his heart would have warmed to me again.

  Her hand continued its transcription:

  I have suffered what I wrote … and so my words have seeds of misery

  To [?spare] [me] from words

  To save me from more words

  Must sail alone

  Must sail alone [?toward] [?question] [?]

  After the notebook closed, those words still lingered. To spare me from words … to save me from more words. I waited till they faded. Wondered if I wanted to be saved from words. Tried to think what I would be without them.

  Must sail alone toward question our lives are the embodying of quiet

  Those words remain inside me.

  sail alone toward question

  Isn’t that what I do when I wonder who I am and why you made me?

  That wondering so quiet (our lives are the embodying of quiet). I remember her eyes through the bushes, her small hands.

  Claire,

  North, ice, snow, ashes, immolation—I’d tried to send him away, kill him off or forget him. I promised myself I’d think of something else, banish him from my mind no matter what. This was after Shelley drowned. I was writing a new story. In it Valerius had been dead for hundreds of years, woke to find himself in Rome. Everything strange to him (not unlike how I felt upon my return to England, but of course more extreme). He hated what he saw. Only the Mediterranean (beautiful, blue) seemed unchanged, everything else bore “the marks of servitude and degradation.” What he saw disturbed him so deeply he fell mute: “I became agitated with a thousand emotions. I refused to speak to anybody … I saw the shattered columns and ruined temples of the Campo Vaccino … the Roman Forum degraded and debased … ideas floated in my mind like broken columns … The moon shone through the broken arches and around the fallen walls … and I stayed mute, I uttered not a single word.” After a while a young woman approached him, “You’re unhappy,” she said, “cast upon our modern world without friends or connections. Consider me your daughter, come with me to our house; you’ll be cherished and honored there.” But he couldn’t bring himself to go. He dreamt of shattered walls and towers. Why can’t human language express human thought? Then one day he met a man who, not unlike the young woman, also wanted to help him. They read together—Valerius knew nothing of Virgil, Horace, Ovid or Lucan, Livy, Tacitus or Seneca. All had been born years after his first death. So the man and he read those authors, discussed at length what they read. Yet his companion still felt he couldn’t reach him: “there was a sadness … he wasn’t a being of this earth … his semblance was of life yet he belonged to the dead.” What did this man, then, feel toward Valerius? “I did not feel fear or terror” (remember what I told you of the graveyard, Claire, and what I felt there?), “I loved and revered him, yet mixed with these sensations was another feeling—I cannot call it dread, yet it possessed something allied to that repulsive feeling—a sentiment for which I can find no name.” Claire, I abandoned the story, but these were its last words: “the earthly barrier placed between us.” So you see, I wasn’t writing of the one who read to me, and yet I was. North, ice, ash, snow, it didn’t matter. Why couldn’t I leave him behind? When I was writing I thought I was focusing solely on Valerius, picturing only Valerius, and Rome, broken columns. Not the muteness of the one who’d read and then suddenly stopped. Not those books we shared. Not the pebbles in my sweaty hands, or the mystery of who he was, the sadness I wondered if he felt. Not the not-quite dread (but what was it?) that I couldn’t name, or the barrier—was it within or outside me or both?—for which I had no name—the shattered, the debased, the mute, the ruined … the barrier itself a kind of ruin, partly crumbled partly weakened but still there.

  Theoclea climbed a ladder in air as she listened to Pythagoras reading, until there was no barrier between his voice and her mind anymore, no North in her at all, no place he couldn’t reach—

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m climbing … I continue climbing …”

  Behind her eyes she saw the horrors of the Cambyses, pillaged cities, sacred books thrown into flames,

  slaves walking in chains, charred and gutted animals … heard invisible colors speaking …

  And still she kept climbing—

  “Where are you now?”

  “Fire’s coursing through my hair but the flames can’t hurt me and I’m climbing. A white shape’s gliding by the Fountain of Castalia but I’m far above it now I barely see it. I’m climbing the rungs of your voice and there is no sanctuary there are wars and terrors I can’t name and still I’m climbing there are no gods but I’m climbing …”

  Pythagoras turned the pages of his book as he read to her long into the night and through the next day and the next… for weeks he did this …

  as world upon world formed in Theoclea’s eyes …

  Claire,

  All these years since Shelley drowned, and often I still take out our copybooks, though by now many have been lost, just look at his handwriting and mine. I randomly turn pages, stop for a minute here and there: “I will not attempt to c console you”—this from my Frankenstein, the first draft of volume 1. As though, if I could only stare hard enough, Shelley’s hand will appear in the margins, write: “but I will console you”—or, “explain consolation” or just leave a stray ink spot. I look for where his words mix with mine: “could not extinguish my grief.” I remember when he wrote that.

  He changed my “sometimes amused” to “sometimes lulled.” Such a little thing, yet I go back to it, looking for some clue. My choice more lively, his more dreamy. But he was rarely lulled. Remember his nightmares, his sleep walking, the way he cried out in the night?

  I linger over his “housekeeping marks”—those small, tedious corrections that strengthened my text: commas, periods, the crossing out of “each,” replacing it with “every.” Some changes seemed larger—he changed my “little animals” to “little winged animals,” so one could see the forest more clearly through the monster’s eyes. He had the monster notice cheese at the cottagers’ windows, say that it “allured” him. Often I felt he could sense the monster nearly as vividly as I—his need for warmth, his loneliness, his longing. He let him speak of “sensations of a peculiar & overpowering” love for the cottagers—a mixture “of pain and pleasure such as as I had never experienced either from the hunger or cold, or from or warmth or food … I was unable to bear these emotions.” All that still in my copybook, in his hand. Still I couldn’t speak to him of my confusion, or ask him what it was in me that needed to condemn the one who’d read then left me—

  As I watched her turning light-blue pages, I saw some were torn, others loosed from the notebooks’ careful stitching. Some were soiled, though I couldn’t say from what. Sometimes the ink bled from one page to another—I thought of his vanished hand, its shadow. Quarter-pages were inserted over whole ones. Unexplained lists of numbers showed up oddly in margins. Had Shelley done their accounts at the edges of her story?

  Claire, if I could show you this page I’ve just come to—he wrote: “renew the spirit.” And here: “whom the spoiler has not seized.” And here: “the work of my own hands,” “affirm.” But Claire I’ve got to close this notebook now, I don’t even remember where we bought it, do you? Probably G
eneva. I remember sitting all one long afternoon, penciling in the margin lines, counting the five sewing holes before I even began. The blankness of the pages didn’t scare me. As if by foraging through that blankness I might find him—

  Years later, when she was no longer alive, I came across this passage in a book I found beneath a bench: “We possess nothing in the world—mere chance can strip us of everything—except the power to say ‘I.’ There is absolutely no other free act which it is given us to accomplish—only the destruction of the ‘I.’”

  It went on: “Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the ‘I’ from outside … So long as we ourselves have begun the process of destroying the ‘I,’ we can prevent any affliction from causing harm. For the ‘I’ is not destroyed by external pressure without a violent revolt.”