Frankissstein

by Jeanette Winterson

  I thought that was just a concept? I said.

  Everything starts as ‘just’ a concept, said Victor. What ever began that didn’t first begin in our minds? But yes, Babbage started out with a kind of grand calculating machine called the Difference Engine. The Difference Engine was a beautiful thing of cogs and wheels – not unlike Turing’s Colossus. The British government gave him a grant of £17,000 to build it, back in 1820. That was the same amount of money as it would have cost to build and equip two battleships. As the newspapers never tired of reminding the public …

  But Babbage spent the money on another child of his mind – the Analytical Engine. That was a proto-computer. It had memory, processor, hardware, software and an intricate series of feedback loops. True, it would have been gigantic and powered by steam – but the Victorians weren’t at the stage of small is beautiful.

  So we press ahead, Ry, not knowing when the breakthrough will come, but knowing that it will come.

  What breakthrough?

  Artificial intelligence.

  He opened another door. Not locked. The room was vast. He said, This was the central control room. All stripped out now, of course.

  Those doors, I said. The room was lined with doors, like a puzzle, or a nightmare, or a choice.

  Ah, yes. Doors lead somewhere, don’t they, Ry? I’ll show you round. Let’s start with this one.

  He unlocked a flat steel door. Another empty room lay behind it. This one had a window; an internal viewing window like the window onto an aquarium.

  Through the window, bare concrete. Light bulb. Monitor lights glinting weirdly through the dry ice that fills the space. I can see from the thermometer on the outside wall that inside is kept just above freezing. Then I notice motion. Through the icy fog. Running towards me. Towards the glass. How many? Twenty? Thirty?

  Victor pressed a switch and the dry ice swirled away. Now I saw them clearly. On the floor, scuttling. Are they tarantulas?

  No …

  Oh, God, Victor! For God’s sake!

  Hands. Spatulate, conic, broad, hairy, plain, mottled. The hands I had brought him. Moving. Some were still, twitching a single finger. Others stood raised and hesitant on all four fingers and thumb. One walked using its little finger and thumb, the mid-fingers upwards, curious and speculative, like antennae. Most moved quickly, senselessly, incessantly.

  The hands had no sense of each other. They crawled over each other, locked themselves together in blind collision. Some made piles, like a colony of crabs. One, high on its wrist, scratched at the wall.

  I saw a child’s hand, small, crouched, alone.

  Victor said, These are not alive. They certainly aren’t sentient. This is simply an experiment in motion, both for prosthetics, and smart attachments.

  How do they move like that?

  Implants, said Victor. They are responding to an electrical current, that’s all. It may be possible in the case of accident and limb severance to reattach the original and programme it to respond more or less like an existing limb. Similarly, it may be possible to add an artificial digit to an injured hand. Some of the hands you see there are hybrids in that way.

  It’s horrible, I said.

  You’re a doctor, he said. You know how useful horrible is.

  He’s right. I do. Why does this disgust me?

  I say, Why down here? Why not in the open lab?

  Too much money riding on it, he says. The patent.

  I thought you believed in cooperation.

  I do. Others don’t. I have no choice.

  He turns away.

  You leave them like that?

  They don’t need feeding, Ry! These do, though …

  He takes me to a further window.

  Inside there is an arrangement of serried platforms. Jumping from them, and onto them, are a number of broad-legged, furry spiders. Not the kind you want to meet in the bath.

  Victor said, I am using CT scanning and high-speed, high-resolution cameras to create a 3D model of the body structure of these spiders.

  Why?

  A jumping spider like these can leap up to six times its body length, said Victor. The force on the legs at take-off can be up to five times its own weight. I can use these results to create a new class of agile micro-robots. Once we understand the biomechanics we can apply them across the research. I am not the only person using spiders, but I like to think I am using the research in a unique way.

  Where do you get these?

  I breed them, said Victor. I can’t breed body parts. God knows what I’ll do if you have a religious conversion or get a desk job.

  You’ll find someone else, I said.

  He leads me back into the empty echo of the soundproof stripped-out hall. He says, I have never had a lasting relationship. Have you?

  No …

  We’re both freaks.

  Don’t call me a freak because I’m trans.

  He strokes my face. I pull away. He says, That’s not what I meant. I meant that we are freaks according to the behaviour of the world. We’re loners – that’s an anti-evolutionary position. Homo sapiens needed the group. Humans are group animals. Families, clubs, societies, workplaces, schools, the military, institutions of every kind, including the church. We even manage illness in groups. It’s called a hospital. You work in one.

  He stands behind me the way he did in the shower in Arizona. I find this erotic, always, something to do with his touch, and that I can’t see him.

  Would you and I be more productive or wiser or saner or happier if we had long marriages and well-adjusted kids? If we had bought a house and learned to live in it with someone? We’d be different people, that’s all. I have never had a lasting relationship. That does not mean I cannot love.

  One of the things that love is, is lasting, I say to him.

  He laughs. So it is. And I will always love you, even when we are no longer together.

  When people part, they usually hate each other, I say. Or one hates the other.

  That is the conventional way, he says. There are other ways. The point I’m making, Ry, is simple. If we cannot keep this love, there is a place in me that has been changed by this love. And I will honour it. Think of it as a private place of worship, if you like. And sometimes, boarding a plane, or waking up, or walking down the street, or taking a shower (he pauses at the memory), I will recall that place and never regret the time I spent there.

  Why are you talking like this? I said.

  He said, Soon you will leave me.

  I said, You say that so that you can be in control and save yourself from pain. (I don’t blame him. I’m doing the same thing.)

  He said, I suffer when I must suffer – it isn’t that. And if you prove me wrong, so be it. You have upset the equation already. Perhaps you will resolve it altogether differently.

  Does it have to be this complicated?

  Victor shrugged. There is a view that love, because it begins so spontaneously, is also simple. Yet if love engages our whole being and affects our whole world, how can it be simple? The days of simple are done – if they ever existed. Love is not a pristine planet before contaminants and pollutants, before the arrival of Man. Love is a disturbance among the disturbed.

  You find yourself in a long and wide gallery, on either side of which are a large number of little cells where lunatics of every description are shut up, and you can get a sight of these poor creatures, little windows being let into the doors. Many inoffensive madmen walk in the big gallery. On the second floor is a corridor and cells like those on the first floor, and this is the part reserved for dangerous maniacs, most of them being chained and terrible to behold. On holidays numerous persons of both sexes, but belonging generally to the lower classes, visit this hospital and amuse themselves watching these unfortunate wretches, who often give them cause for laughter. On leaving this melancholy abode you are expected by the porter to give him a penny, but if you happen to have no change and give him a silver coin he will keep the whole
sum and return you nothing.

  Bedlam, 1818

  None can know the human mind. No, not if he read every thought man ever wrote. Every word written is like a child striking a flame against the darkness.

  When we are alone it is the darkness that remains.

  We are, I admit, in disarray in this place. The new hospital is scarcely ready, and where it is ready, it is wanting. The upper floors have no glass in the windows. The lower floors have no fuel for the fireplaces. The inmates are cold, hungry, angry or desolate.

  And raving mad.

  This is the most famous madhouse in the world.

  We began.

  How did we begin?

  A hospital called Bethlehem, long back in the years of the Crusades. The common people called the place Bethlem, as it is observed in the English language that, wherever practicable, two syllables are preferred to three. And then, because everything is corrupted by time (even time itself), our Bethlem became Bedlam – the name without number for a world that is mad. The Great Bedlam.

  The Great Bedlam. As we call these British Isles.

  Bedlam was funded as a new hospital, fully finished in 1676, on a site at Moorfields, outside London’s city walls. It was designed by Robert Hooke, polymath, drunk, pupil of Sir Christopher Wren – the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral after the fire of 1666.

  That Bedlam was much praised by foreign visitors to London as the only true palace in the whole city. What a glory of a madhouse! 500 feet wide, 40 feet deep, laid out with turrets, avenues, gardens, courtyards.

  Above the great stone entrance stood two carved figures; one the representation of Melancholia, the other of Raving Madness.

  Yes, and if you had seen it before it fell – that notable monument to charity – you would have wondered at it, made like a vision of Versailles, made for a king without a crown.

  That is what a madman is: a king without a crown.

  The mad slept on straw, iron-shackled at every limb, but their madhouse was a palace. Why did we do that?

  To the glory of God.

  And something else, I think. Something less God-like. Sanity is the thread through the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Once cut, or unravelled, all that lies in wait are gloomy tunnels unfathomable by any map, and what hides there is a beast in human form, wearing our own face.

  We are what we fear.

  And so, the generous donations, the outpouring of compassion that we profess for the mad, what is it but an offering to our secret selves?

  In the other Bedlam it was the fashion for the publick to visit the poor lunaticks confined. Indeed it was a tour to be made, especially by persons of quality. A tour that included London Bridge, Whitehall, the Tower and the zoo. The pacing of mammals is not so different when they are confined – forth and back, back and forth, and always the leg shackles and the bars. The most the captive tyger and the captive man can hope for is a square of sky.

  Our earlier building at Moorfields crumbled and collapsed from the moment its topcoat of plaster was applied. Some said it was the mephitic vapours seeping from the lunaticks themselves that damped and rotted the walls and oozed water through the floors.

  A pretty story! Unscientific. The land the place was built on is not known as the town ditch for nothing. In short, the boggy land shifts, and the building that is all show and no foundations shifts with it.

  The lunaticks within are more stable in their minds than the walls without.

  And yet, and I do believe it, the mad give off some spirit of their own, and their unreason is oft-times most reasonable if not judged by the standards of daily application. If I open a door into a cell I am struck by the force of the unfortunate inmate – even in dejection there is a force. Shall I say it again? A force. And as I walk among the anger and the apathy of the world of men, I wonder if it is only by the greatest downward pressure on our spirits that we maintain our sanity at all?

  I do not wonder that we drink as much as we do, or that the poor, when they can afford it, drink most of all. Wretched conditions may be blamed, or the weight of business, or the urge to power, but our beings struggle in our bodies like light trapped in a jar, and our bodies struggle in this world as a beast of burden chafes its yoke, and this world itself hangs alone on its noose, strung among the indifferent stars.

  Bedlam.

  Uneven walls, buckling floors, a crazy carcass, a satire on life. The old madhouse was left to crumble and ruin and we have tamed our ambitions to be altogether more modest here in our new building at St George’s Fields, Southwark, along the Lambeth Road.

  The County Asylums Act of 1808 has changed the nature of our housing, and of our medical treatments, but it changes nothing of the disease.

  We seek to care and to console. We do not seek to cure. Madness cannot be cured; it is a disease of the soul.

  I am sorry to say that our steam heating is not effective. I am sorry to say that we suffer from dreadful stinks. London is all stink, but ours is its own kind – a disagreeable, persistent effluvia common to madhouses.

  Never mind, never mind. The hour passes. The clock ticks. I must greet my visitor. The fire is lit and hot in my study. The moon that troubles the mad so greatly is bright and round through the window. A silver eye on the dark body of our sorrow.

  Captain Walton?

  Yes! And you are Mr Wakefield?

  I am Mr Wakefield. You are welcome, sir. This is the man?

  This is the man.

  Bring him in.

  Two of my men carried the man on an army stretcher. At my request they placed him by the fire.

  The man lay sleeping. His face untroubled. His limbs composed. Sleep. Ah, sleep. (I myself cannot sleep without laudanum.) The troubles of the world. If we could sleep and awake in a better time …

  Captain Walton is well known to the nation – something of a hero, since his successful exploration of the North-West Passage and his journey to Antarctica.

  He has a confident, upright bearing, and yet he hesitates.

  My story is a strange one.

  Sir! That is the nature of a story. Life, we imagine, is familiar enough until we begin to tell it to another. Then, observe the wonder on their faces – sometimes it is wonder, often it is horror. Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.

  He nods. He takes courage. He begins.

  My crew and I were surrounded by ice which closed in on all sides, scarcely leaving the ship the sea room on which she floated. Our situation was dangerous, especially as we were compassed around by a thick fog.

  About two o’clock the mist cleared away and we beheld, in every direction, vast and irregular planes of ice. Some of my comrades groaned and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention. We perceived a low carriage, fixed to a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice.

  About two hours after this occurrence the ice broke and freed our ship. However, we lay to, until morning, and I profited of this time to rest for a few hours.

  In the morning I went up on deck and found all the sailors busy on one side of the vessel, talking to someone in the sea. It was in fact a sledge like the one we had seen before, which had drifted towards us in the night on a large slab of ice. Only one dog remained alive but there was a human being in the sledge whom the sailors were persuading to enter the vessel. He was not as the other traveller seemed to be; a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but a European.

  I never saw a man in so wretched a condition. We wrapped him up in blankets and placed him near the kitchen stove.

  Two days passed before he was able to speak. His eyes have generally an expression of wildness and even madness. He gnashes his teeth
as if impatient of the weight of woes that oppresses him.

  My lieutenant asked him why he had come so far on the ice in such a strange vehicle?

  His countenance instantly assumed an aspect of the deepest gloom and he said – To seek one who fled from me.

  At this, the man, who had been sleeping, leapt up from his couch, crying, Where is he? He did not perish in the fire. I must find him – do you not know? I must find him.

  The captain and I restrained the man with our bare hands at first – he was agitated but not violent – but still, I insisted we fetch a manacle in order to attach him to the post. Thus fastened he seemed to calm himself, although I believe it was dejection, and not calm. I proposed to administer a sleeping draught.

  Captain Walton nodded his assent, and as the man gulped the wine and the powder it contained, I repeated his words:

  To seek one who flees from me.

  He says it waking and sleeping, said Captain Walton. He is like the Ancient Mariner and his albatross.

  An excellent poem, I said, and yet, and yet …

  And yet? The captain’s eyes questioned me and I replied, Is that not the human condition? To seek one who flees? Or to flee from one who seeks us? Today I am the pursuer. Tomorrow I shall be pursued.

  The captain agreed with me. Yes, it is so, but here it is in the extreme. In this man, the long unravelling of life is tightly wound, and he has but one thought, one wish, one pursuit. Day and night are the same to him. He haunts himself.

  Captain Walton, what do you know of this man?

  Captain Walton answered, His name is Victor Frankenstein.

  He is a doctor. He is from Geneva. He comes from a good family. There is nothing remarkable in his background. But the rest is incredible. He believes that he has created life.