Frankissstein

by Jeanette Winterson

  There was a pause, short enough but long enough.

  I’m trans, I said. I had top surgery about a year ago. These things take time.

  I am slender. Lightly built with broad shoulders. When I was entirely a woman I was sometimes mistaken for a boy if I tied back my hair. I wore it shoulder-length as a woman. Now it is a little shorter but I still wear it tied back. Women like it. They like me.

  Victor said nothing. Strange and touching in a fluent person. I stood still and let him look at me. My pubic hair is abundant but my body is smooth and not hairy. That didn’t change with the testosterone.

  I looked at him too. The hair on his chest and the line of it down his stomach.

  Your chest hair is full of sand, I said. I moved closer. I brushed it away. I saw him swallow. He took my towel from me and wrapped it around his waist.

  I thought you were a man, he said.

  I am. Anatomically I am also a woman.

  Is that how you feel about yourself?

  Yes. Doubleness is nearer to the truth for me.

  Victor said, I have never met anyone who is trans.

  Most people haven’t.

  He smiled. Weren’t we just saying that in the future we will be able to choose our bodies? And to change them? Think of yourself as future-early.

  I am always late for appointments, I said, and we both laughed. To break the tension.

  Once you are out of the room I will drop this towel and take a shower.

  The thin towel wasn’t hiding much. I said (why did I say this?), Do you want to touch me?

  I’m not gay, he said.

  I know it’s confusing, I said.

  He moved nearer. He ran his long fingers down my forehead and over my nose, parted my lips and rubbed my two front teeth, pulled down my lower lip, passed on over the light stubble of my chin and to my non-existent Adam’s apple, the dip of my throat, then he spread his hand, thumb and fingers on either side of my collarbone. As though he was scanning me.

  With his other hand, flat, he stroked my chest, pausing over the scars. He is not afraid of the scars or their bumpy beauty. To me they are beautiful. A mark of freedom. When I find them in the night, in the dark, I remember what I have done, and I go back to sleep.

  He touched my nipples. My nipples have always been sensitive, now more so since the surgery. My chest is strong and smooth from the weight training I do. The testosterone injections make it easy to build muscle. I like the solid plane of what I have become. We were near to kissing but we didn’t kiss.

  Gently he turned me round, facing away from him. His front to my back. His breath on my neck. His hands exploring the same parts of me: chest, nipples, throat. I could feel his erection under the rough, thin cotton towel.

  He kissed my shoulders, leaning down. He is taller than me. Gentle kisses, the kind given on the top of the head. Then, pressing himself closer against my body, he moved his hand between my legs and began to massage me.

  You’re wet, he said.

  His finger was inside me.

  This is …

  As it always was, I said.

  And this?

  The clitoris gets much bigger with testosterone.

  Is it sensitive?

  I have 8,000 nerves in my clitoris. Your penis gets by on 4,000. Yes, it is sensitive.

  He took it between his finger and thumb, his middle finger inside me.

  Every clitoris gets erect but when you have one 2 inches long it’s obvious.

  Wait …

  I turned to face him. I unknotted his towel and took his penis in my hand, kissing him. I could feel him pulsing.

  What do you want me to do? he said.

  What do you want to do?

  Fuck you.

  We went back into the room. He lay down on his back and pulled me onto him, moving my hips to slide me across his penis for maximum pleasure for me. I come faster than I used to as a woman, and I was excited with the kind of excitement that happens with a stranger.

  I’m coming, I said.

  I watched his eyes, dark, mesmerised, the glowing part of him.

  I fell forward in the throb of it, my body on top of his. He spun me over and went inside me, his forearms on either side of my shoulders, his head in my neck.

  He was done in about three minutes.

  We lay looking at the ceiling. Not speaking. The rain rattled the shutters. I leaned up on my elbow and looked at his face.

  I said, Are you OK?

  You don’t have to look after me just because you were once a woman, he said.

  I am a woman. And I am a man. That’s how it is for me. I am in the body that I prefer. But the past, my past, isn’t subject to surgery. I didn’t do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.

  He rolled over. I don’t know what to say, he said.

  What do you feel? I said.

  Incredibly aroused.

  He took my hand to touch him again.

  I sat on him.

  It was slower this time. As he moved inside me, I touched myself, pulling my clit towards its pleasure. He watched me.

  Why are you so easy in your body? he said.

  Because it really is my body. I had it made for me.

  He smiled. Oh, God …

  What’s the matter?

  What’s going to happen? he said.

  What do you mean?

  I’m a Bayesian.

  Is that a religious cult?

  No! Didn’t you have to take Maths to be a doctor?

  Physics, Chemistry, Biology …

  All right, well, the Reverend Thomas Bayes 1701–1761 was a mathematician and a philosopher. He worked out equations to manage probability. His view was that subjective belief should change to accommodate available evidence. He wrote a powerful piece-called An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances. It’s mathematics meets mysticism. Most people only concern themselves with the maths … But never mind that. What I am calculating is that you are a very unlikely chance in my life – zero probability – but you have occurred. And the thing about probability is that new data continuously alters the outcome.

  I slide off his dick. Is that what I am? New data?

  He kissed me. Delicious new data, but you will affect the outcome.

  What outcome?

  Outside we heard the waitress calling.

  You boys! Y’all right in there?

  Methinks, wrote Byron to the publisher John Murray, it is a wonderful work for a girl of nineteen – not nineteen, indeed, at that time.

  You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being … I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself … It is true we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless, and free from misery I now feel.

  If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again: I will go to the vast wilds of South America … My life will flow quietly away, and, in my dying moments, I shall not curse my maker.

  My husband is out on the lake with Byron. The house is still and hot. As the house dries it steams, and seems filled with apparitions, as our minds shape the steam into forms we fancy we recognise.

  What do we recognise? What do we know?

  In the progress of my story I am educating my monster. My monster is educating me.

  The progress of my story forces me to question what such a being might desire. Might such a being long for a mate? Could such a being reproduce? And would the progeny be ghastly and deformed? Or human? And if not human, then what life form would a life form such as this recreate?

  I feel the like agony of mind of Victor Frankenstein; having created his monster, he cannot uncreate him. Time has no pity. Time cannot unhappen. What is done is done.

  And so it is that I have created my monster and his master. My story has being. I must continue i
t, for it cannot end without me.

  The monster I have made is shunned and feared by humankind. His difference is his downfall. He claims no natural home. He is not human, yet the sum of all he has learned is from humankind.

  Last night I sat up late with Shelley. He had removed his clothes but for his shirt. The whiteness of him glistened in the moonlight. The male body is the perfect form, I believe. And such is the travesty of my monster. In proportion but monstrous.

  I ran my hand along Shelley’s leg from ankle to the top of his thigh, disturbing the folds of his shirt and his concentration. Gently he removed my hand, reserving his pleasure. I am thinking, he said.

  We wondered together about the title for my story. We agreed that it should not contain the word MONSTER.

  I have a hum in my head of a line from a poem of his that I love: Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude. He recites to me, standing up, pacing the room, his legs seem like wings, they propel him at such speed. Wings below the waist? What kind of an angel would he be, my angel?

  Listen to him:

  In lone and silent hours

  When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness

  Like an inspired and desperate alcymist

  Staking his very life on some dark hope,

  Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks

  With my most innocent love …

  On he reads, pacing, pacing …

  to render up the tale/Of what we are

  Should I call it that? Of What We Are?

  But he is already talking about Prometheus. Victor Frankenstein as a modern Prometheus. Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods and pays for it with his liver.

  Should I call it that? The New Prometheus?

  Consider! said Shelley. The punishment of Prometheus is to be chained to a rock without shelter. Each dawn Zeus dispatches an eagle to tear out his liver. Each night the skin grows whole again. Chained to the rock, his skin would be sunburnt, the colour and texture of leather, like an old purse, except for that pale patch, new every day, delicate and soft like the skin of a child.

  Imagine! The eagle perched on his hip-bone, its mighty wings flapping to hold itself thus, as its beak rends the flesh to make away with its soft prize.

  While he is talking, majestic and solemn though the picture is, my mind is wandering to the novels I have lately read. (How like a woman, Byron would say.)

  Samuel Richardson. His Clarissa in seven volumes. And do not forget Pamela. And then, if I turn to Jane Austen, there is Emma, published just now, in 1815, and, if a little homely (she lives in Bath), pleasing enough.

  A title that is a name, then, would be appropriate.

  Shelley! I said. Shelley! I shall call my story FRANKENSTEIN.

  Shelley stopped pacing and reciting. He said, Is that all?

  Yes, my love, that is all.

  He frowned. It lacks something, my heart.

  I frowned in return. Then, my love, shall I call it Victor Frankenstein? (Now I was thinking of Tristram Shandy, an old story indeed, and on my father’s bookshelves at Skinner Street for our diversion.)

  No, said Shelley, for your story is more than the story of one man: there are two who live in each other, do they not? Frankenstein in the monster. The monster in Frankenstein?

  They do, I replied, and therefore the monster has no name, for he has no need of one.

  What father does not name his child? asked Shelley.

  One who is terrified of what he has created, I said.

  Well, then, Mary, it is for you to decide. You are father and mother to this tale. What will you name your creation?

  Yes, I am Mary. My mother’s namesake, my father’s keepsake. I am aware that by not naming the thing that haunts my mind I am repudiating him. But how would we name a new life form?

  Hours pass. Wine drunk. Drunk with wine. Goat’s cheese wrapped in ash. Red radishes. Dark brown bread. Green olive oil. Ham carved off the bone. Tomatoes the size of fists. Oat biscuits. Blue sardines. My candle gone out. Hours pass.

  Night has come and with it the starry sky. Sleep and the silent hours of dreams. The others dream and sleep. The house itself breathes in and out like a phantom. I lie awake with the stars as my cold companions. I think of my monster, lying thus, outside and alone.

  Could my creature create another like itself, if it had a mate? I am repelled by the notion. I will sit my revulsion inside Victor Frankenstein and he shall, at first, commence the awful task of creating a companion for his monster, and at last be convinced that he must destroy such a thing.

  We destroy out of hatred. We destroy out of love.

  Last night Byron declared Prometheus to be a serpent story – by which he suggests a reach for knowledge that must be punished, as it is in the story of the Garden of Eden: Eve eats the apple from the forbidden tree.

  And what about Pandora and her bloody box? said Polidori. Another woman who wouldn’t do as she was told.

  Something of you there, Claire, said Byron, poking her with his lame foot.

  Who is Pandora? said Claire, who does not read Latin or Greek.

  Shelley, ever patient, a natural teacher, explained that Prometheus had a brother called Epimetheus. To punish mankind yet more for the theft of fire, Zeus gave Epimetheus Pandora as his bride. An inquisitive type, she opened a closed jar she should not have opened, and all the ills that beset humankind flew out – illness, sorrow, decay, loss, bitterness, envy, greed … They flew out as moths and butterflies, said Shelley, and laid their eggs on the world.

  This room is damp, said Byron. The very walls are peeling. The heat of the day does not dry it out at all.

  We are on a lake, said Shelley mildly.

  I wish to know, said Claire.

  God help us, muttered Byron.

  I wish TO KNOW why all that ails mankind must be the fault of womankind?

  Women are weak, said Byron.

  Or perhaps men need to believe it is so, I said.

  Hyena, said Byron.

  I must protest! said Shelley.

  Joke, said Byron.

  Perhaps, I said, it is women who bring knowledge into the world quite as much as men do. Eve ate the apple. Pandora opened the box. Had they not done so humankind is what? Automata. Bovine. Contented pig.

  Show me that pig! said Claire. I shall marry that pig! Why must life be suffering?

  Author’s note: THIS IS THE MOST PROFOUND THING CLAIRE HAS SAID IN HER LIFE.

  Just like a woman … said Byron (re suffering). We are purified by suffering.

  (So speaks the Emperor of Indulgence.)

  Purified by suffering? said Claire. Then any woman who has borne children and lost them is purified indeed.

  An animal in the field has suffered likewise, said Byron. Suffering is not of the body but of the soul.

  Try sawing a leg off a man wide awake with half a bottle of brandy inside him and the rest poured over his stump to clean it, said Polidori. I tell you, it’s not his soul that’s screaming.

  I grant he suffers, said Byron, but his suffering will not purify his soul. In any case, it was my endeavour to avoid the woman question. God knows! How they believe they suffer!

  Arse for a face, said Claire, under her breath. She has been drinking all day. He did not hear her.

  I moved to intervene. I said, If we can step aside from the vexed issue of sex, do we uphold the opinion that any advance in knowledge is punishable or punished?

  The Luddites are smashing the looms, said Byron. In England, now, as we drink, as we dine, at home in England they are smashing the looms. The weavers do not want progress.

  No, said Shelley, no, indeed, yet you are one of the few peers in England who has stood for their cause, for the cause of the Luddites, against your own class and kind, when Parliament passed the Frame-Breaking Act.

  The act is just and justified, said Polidori. We cannot tolerate persons disrupting the inevitable order of things – and violently so.

  Are not these new inventions the di
srupting force? I said. Is there not violence in forcing men to work for lower wages in order to compete with a machine?

  Progress! said Polidori. Either we are on the side of progress or we are not.

  It is not so simple, said Byron. Mary is not wrong in her sentiments and it is why I voted against the act.

  I understand those men – and, yes, those women. Their work is their livelihood and their life. They are skilled. The machines are senseless. What man would stand by and see his life destroyed?

  (Each one of us! came my secret answer, in a sudden illumination of the way we live, forever wrecking the good we have for the little we have not. Or clutching at the little we have for the good that would be ours, if we dared …)

  I did not say this. I said, Byron! The march of the machines is now and forever. The box has been opened. What we invent we cannot uninvent. The world is changing.

  Byron looked at me strangely. He who is so passionate about freedom is afraid of fate.

  Where is free will? he said.

  A luxury for a few, I replied.

  We are fortunate, said Shelley, that we can and do enjoy free will. Our life is the life of the mind. No machine can mimic a mind.

  Hear! Hear! said Polidori, barely conscious with drink. (I think to myself, watching him, watching Claire, machines don’t drink.)

  Claire got up and pirouetted a dance with her sewing and the fire irons. She looked dangerous. She stumbled into Byron, standing manly by the fire …

  PussyBabyGeorgie.

  I have warned you not to call me that! He pushed her away. She fell into the armchair, laughing and feigning to hide behind her sewing in fear.

  She said, Machines that mimic a mind! Oh! Suppose such a thing should happen one day! Yes! Yes! Imagine, gentlemen, how you will feel when someone invents a LOOM that writes poetry!