Frankissstein

by Jeanette Winterson

  All of that. More than that. There is the shape of you inside me, amulet-size. The Ry of my heart. My heart. Carbon-based human in a silicon world.

  Are you saying goodbye? I said.

  I am chained to Time, and cannot depart!

  Bedlam 4

  Mr Wakefield, sir!

  I was roused from my sleep by my servant. It was scarcely dawn.

  He held a lantern above him that cast shadows on the panelled walls of my chamber.

  He is gone, sir. Escaped, sir.

  Who is gone? Who is escaped?

  Victor Frankenstein.

  Now I roused myself. My bare feet on the cold floor.

  How is that possible?

  There is no trace of him. No trace of his escape. No trace of his presence.

  I put on my slippers and dressing gown. We made our way in dim lantern light down the long, unheated corridors. On every side we heard the moans of the mad. They do not follow day and night as we do, but obey some rhythm of their own.

  The rooms here are secure.

  Victor Frankenstein, as befits a gentleman, was housed in the private wing. His room was comfortable. He enjoyed a wooden bed and horsehair mattress – no iron and straw for him – and we furnished the room with a writing desk, a comfortable chair, and a lamp of his own. For some months he had been quiet and at peace with himself.

  Since the visit of Mrs Shelley he had seemed quite calm. There were no more sightings of his monster. I had begun to believe that the distemper of his brain was healing and that he might be freed. He had accompanied me on my rounds from time to time, applying valuable physic to the patients in need. His manner was gentle and exemplary. Truly, he seemed no madder than many who are at liberty in London.

  We opened the door to his room.

  Was it locked last night? I said.

  I locked it myself, sir, answered my servant.

  The room was empty. Entirely. The papers and satchel were gone. The clothes were gone. The doctor’s bag. The candlestick. The bed was neatly made.

  I said, Even if the room had been left unlocked by some mischance, how could this man have departed the building? The watchman was at the gates?

  Yes, sir.

  Sober?

  I believe so, sir.

  And the gates were locked?

  They were. They are still.

  What caused you to open his door? I said.

  I saw a light streaming from beneath, said my servant. A strong light, and so I imagined he had set himself on fire.

  A light?

  Intensely so. (He paused.) And …

  Yes? Do not be afraid.

  The door was locked.

  Then he must have escaped earlier in the day. You locked an empty room. There is no other explanation.

  My servant shook his head. Mr Wakefield! You saw him yourself in the exercise yard at dusk.

  I recalled that I had done so … yes. Yes, indeed.

  My servant was afraid. I sought to reassure him … The mad are cunning. He has contrived this carefully. Fear not. We shall recover him, I said.

  Dear Mrs Shelley …

  What am I to say? That a man who does not exist has vanished?

  Dear Mrs Shelley …

  Further to your visit, the man who calls himself Victor Frankenstein, a character in your excellent novel, has …

  Dear Mrs Shelley …

  VANISHED.

  Looking for a lover who won’t blow my cover.

  Why are we sitting in a replica of a 1950s pub drinking warm beer with our feet in water? said Polly.

  It isn’t a replica, I said, it’s the real thing. We’re in a time warp.

  Who knew that the future would look like 1959? said Polly.

  We could play cards, said Ron. To pass the time.

  The overhead lighting is dull and yellow. The tables are small, round, brown-stained, with coasters of RAF aeroplanes. There’s a dartboard, some cards and board games, a dusty piano, an abandoned bar for pulling pints, a photo of Winston Churchill and a girly calendar where the girls keep their clothes on. The 60s haven’t happened yet.

  Anybody know any ghost stories? I said.

  Blank looks.

  Shall I recite one of my poems? said Ron.

  Please don’t, said Claire.

  Claire, said Polly, if you believe you are going to heaven, I presume you wouldn’t look forward to a longer life on earth? Will it be like Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing blood transplants and vaccines? Why would you want gene therapy if it stops you getting to Jesus?

  If you read your Bible, Miss D, said Claire, you would know that the great, godly men of the Old Testament lived long and healthy lives. Methuselah was the oldest man in the Bible and he lived to be 969!

  That’s a lot of birthday cake, I said.

  You may mock, said Claire, but I tell you that the evangelical church of Christ will embrace long life.

  Now I’m nervous. Millions of Bible-belt hellfirers and homophobes living to be 969! Our only hope has always been that the hate-filled old white guys die off and young people are more progressive. But now …

  Speaking as a doctor, I said, nothing we do to the body is without consequences. I wonder how our bodies will respond to any therapy that reverses its process of gradual dissolution?

  I’m trans, and that means a lifetime of hormones. My life will be shorter and it’s likely I will be sicker as I get older. If I were male-to-female, and I had lower surgery to remove my penis, my body would thereafter view my new vagina as a wound. A wound I would have to clean and tend. As it is now, for me, female-to-male, I keep my maleness intact with testosterone but my body knows it wasn’t born this way. The paradox is that I felt in the wrong body but for my body it was the right body. What I have done calms my mind and agitates my chemistry. Few people know what it’s like to live in this way.

  I think you’re brave, actually, said Ron, I do.

  I looked at him in surprise. He’s sweating a bit. I think he’s scared.

  Thanks, Ron.

  If we ever did get out of the body, said Polly, if we were uploads, what would happen to online dating? I mean, there’d be no photographs of what we look like because we wouldn’t look like anything.

  That’s funny, I said. It would be like it was in the past, when there were pen pals but no cameras. There’d be no straight, gay, male, female, cis, trans. What happens to labels when there is no biology?

  How do we even romance without labels? said Polly. We hate them but they’re part of the attraction.

  Maybe not. Maybe we’d get to know someone and when we were ready we’d download ourselves into a form and—

  We’re not someone, though, are we? said Polly. We’re no one.

  Stick with bots, said Ron.

  Ron is right, said Claire. I have come to realise that, as my most important relationship is with an invisible being – God – I don’t need a human being in the old-fashioned way. And you know, a bot is never gonna leave me to raise the children on my own. Never take my cash to clear his gambling debts. I won’t be tiptoeing round the house trying to keep out of his way. Cleaning up after him. Worrying about him. Worrying about what he’ll do next.

  Let me tell you this: love has many faces – but none is bruised. Love has many lives – but none is beaten to death on the stairwell. This gentle thing of circuits, silicon and wires will suit me very well.

  You hear what she’s saying, Ry? said Ron. You never really got it, did you? I read that article you wrote after you interviewed me at the sexpo – well, Mum read it and she explained it to me. All that stuff you wrote about the robots are coming and what happens to human relationships?

  A lot of people will be glad not to have any more crap relationships with crap humans. And how do you know it will be one-way? Bots will learn. That’s what machine learning means.

  A man finds love and is loved in return by an XX-Bot called Eliza. She learns about him. They learn together. He takes her places he wouldn’t go on hi
s own. They drive to the top of the hill in his car and he tells her that this view over the valley and out to sea is life to him. He tells her what it feels like to share it. He asks her if she can understand. She listens. They share the silence. He tells her his heart. And later in the car, with his thermos and sandwiches and the rain driving on the windscreen, he says that this is the first time in his life he has not feared rejection or failure. She listens.

  Time passes and she learns his memories so that they can remember together. She has no independent experiences of her own but that doesn’t matter to her and so it doesn’t matter to him. They live in his world, like on that midnight train to Georgia.

  He sees her every day. He never tires of her. He gets older. She doesn’t. He knows that women like change, so he colours her hair and they experiment with different styles of clothes. They watch movies together and she can talk about them because her software upgrades itself.

  In the summer he takes her to the circus and they do a selfie with a lion.

  He keeps working after retirement age because he likes to buy her things. She’s happy sitting at home all day. He brings her presents and explains what food tastes like. He does the cooking. It feels manly.

  You know … he says, you know …

  YES, she says, I KNOW.

  Eventually he is old and ill and dying and there she is on the bed with him. He can’t wash his pyjamas. His family don’t come round. The house is dirty. He smells. She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t find him disgusting. They hold hands.

  Night comes and the moon through the window. He imagines they are at the top of the hill. She sits up all night with him. She waits.

  He dies. His family come to clear the house. Eliza is there. I AM SORRY, she says.

  They wonder what to do with her. She is a bit of an embarrassment. His son decides to sell her on eBay.

  They forget to wipe her clean. She is confused. Is this a feeling? She says to her new owner: WOULD YOU LIKE A CHOCOLATE MINI-ROLL? SHALL WE WATCH STRICTLY?

  Her new owner isn’t interested in any of that. He’s a fuck-only type. She understands. She wishes she could wipe her own software. I AM SORRY, she says, but she has no tears because big bots don’t cry.

  Nor dies the spirit but new life repeats In other forms and only changes seats.

  Ovid, Metamorphoses

  Reality is … what?

  I lived in Genoa for a year after Shelley died. We had some financial assistance from Byron, who paused in his down-payments for others’ wives and others’ daughters, and allowed us some assistance. Afterwards, with my son Percy, I had to return to England for financial reasons. We have so little money.

  And then in 1824, just two years after the death of my heart, Byron, too, died. He was in Greece fighting for the great cause of liberty and independence. He took fever from which he did not recover. They returned his body to England.

  From my little house in Kentish Town on the outskirts of London, I stood and watched his cortège pass by on its long and lonely wind to Newstead Abbey. Byron, who spent too much, as he did everything too much, had sold his ancestral home but he was to be buried nearby. At Highgate, I am told, the poet Coleridge laid a flower on the coffin.

  A friend said to me, It’s true that Byron has one legitimate child and she has not seen her father since she was born.

  And I recalled our locked-in days on Lake Geneva, impounded by rain, and Byron and Polidori explaining to me why the male principle is more active than the female principle.

  Neither man seemed to consider that being refused an education, being legally the property of a male relative, whether father, husband or brother, having no rights to vote, and no money of her own once married, and being barred from every profession except governess or nurse, and refused every employment except mother, wife or skivvy, and wearing a costume that makes walking or riding impossible, might limit the active principle of a female.

  He was disappointed to have sired a daughter. Little Ada was but eight years old when her famous/infamous father died. The mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron.

  I never met Ada as a child. This evening, though, if I can compress my amplitude into my one good dress, I shall meet her. I admit I am curious.

  She is a young woman of twenty-nine, well-married, wealthy (I hear she gambles), and with three children of her own. Importantly, she is one of the most accomplished mathematicians in England.

  The party is at the house of a man named Babbage. He is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He is a great one for parties, and, as I cannot afford to give parties of my own, I am grateful to be invited – and a little flattered, to be sure, for one must be clever, beautiful or of rank to receive an invitation to a Babbage (as they call them).

  I was beautiful once – but that did not interest me. I believe I am clever. Babbage has invited me because one of the newspapers called him a Logarithmetical Frankenstein.

  I shall take the omnibus as far as I can and walk the remaining distance. I cannot afford a carriage. And in truth, I enjoy the people and the streets. The lives that appear and vanish. Each one a story in human form.

  At the party I am greeted in the hallway with a glass of punch. I drank it off and took another.

  In the room there is no room. The party is a press of men in dusty jackets. The women smoke pipes. As yet, I do not seem to know anybody. This hardly matters as it allows me time to eat. I took a plate of beef and pickles and sat down by what appears to be a collection of cogs and castors stacked in a cabinet.

  What do you think of it?

  Excellent beef! I said to the young woman suddenly kneeling next to me.

  The machine, she said. What do you think of the machine? This is the machine. (She was smiling happily at the cogs and castors.) I have the drawings here also. Would you like me to explain it? You are Mary Shelley, I think?

  The young woman turned out to be Ada. So here she is. The Countess of Lovelace. The ironware in the cabinet is a prototype of what Ada describes as a machine that could (in theory) calculate anything.

  What type of anything? I asked.

  Any type of anything, she replied.

  Ada is like one of those Christian symbols of Temperance or Charity or Forgiveness, except that in her case she is Enthusiasm. She is Enthusiasm in velvet. I like her dark hair and dark eyes. Her generous mouth. I can see her father in her face. It hurts me and moves me and holds me here and takes me back in time to when we were young and alive.

  But Ada cannot read my thoughts, and without any thought of her own she spread her drawings across my knees, showing me the workings of what Babbage calls the Analytical Engine. It can be instructed – programmed, she says is the correct term – by using the card-punch system of the jacquard loom. Whereas the loom-cards instruct on the design of flower patterns on the cloth, the machine-cards are a mathematical language. But essentially this works as does a loom.

  I began to laugh, and when she asked me why I was laughing I told her the story of my stepsister Claire Clairmont imagining a time when a machine might write poetry.

  We were on Lake Geneva, I said, very young, all of us, trapped by rain, bored to death … discussing the Manchester Luddites and the loom smashing – and that our work could never be replaced by a mere machine.

  We were assuring ourselves that humans are the apex of creation, and poetry the apex of humanity, when Claire, who was drunk to the gills with wine, and sick to the stomach of Byron’s indifference towards her, imagined a poem being written by something not unlike a knitting-machine.

  But look at this! said Ada, lying flat on the floor and retrieving a piece of paper from underneath the contraption with castors that is to change the world.

  Yes! Look at this. It will amuse you. It is from Punch magazine – did you not see it, perhaps? It purports to be a letter from Babbage about his latest invention: THE NEW MECHANICAL PATENT NOVEL-WRITER.

  I perused the cartoon, and the spoofs of testimonials from Mr
Bulwer-Lytton and other famous writers:

  I am now able to complete a 3-vol novel of the usual size, in the short space of 48 hours, whereas, before, at least a fortnight’s labour was requisite for that purpose …

  And then below, there it is!

  I am much pleased with Mr Babbage’s Patent Novel-Writer … I have suggested what appears to me to be still more a desideratum, the manufacture of a Patent Poet on the same plan.

  My father would challenge it to a duel! said Ada. He, the foremost poet of his age in competition with a loom.

  Indeed! I replied. Thirty years ago it was all he could do not to set about Claire Clairmont with the fire-tongs. We had to send her to bed to save her.

  What was he like? said Ada. My father?

  Monstrous, I said. Yet I loved him.

  She smiled at me. She said, I wish he had loved me. He loved so many people, did he not? Women and men. Why could he not love his own child?

  I took her hand. Your father, Byron, and my husband, Shelley, were remarkable men, my own father, William Godwin, was a remarkable man (she nodded), yet, my dear, being remarkable is no guarantee of human feeling.

  Babbage is just the same, she said. He upsets everyone and then blames them for their howls of pain.

  Do not be discouraged, I said.

  Oh, I am not, she said, and in truth I too prefer numbers. Numbers have a clarity that humans lack.

  Do you ever read poetry? I asked.

  Oh, yes, she said, though do you know that I was forbidden by Byron, expressly, in his written wishes, to read poetry or be influenced by the life of the imagination in any way, shape or form? My mother was herself a talented mathematician, and she engaged a mathematics tutor for me at an early age. It was hoped that numbers would tame the Byronic blood in my veins.