After four of Walton’s letters, I reached the opening of the life story of a fevered European rescued from the ice by Walton’s sailors. Walton had acted as this man’s secretary, writing down all he said, so even though you got the guy’s whole personal history, you got it in Walton’s handwriting. “I am by birth a Genevese,” the man told him, “and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic.” Of course, I didn’t care rip about his la-di-da family.
So I refolded the letters and tied them up again with a ribbon such as could’ve decorated a ball gown for Napoleon’s Josephine. I was about to jam this sheaf into the journal or log that’d held them, and to stuff the log back into the funny skin bag, and the funny skin bag back into the kayak-when a powerful urge to check out the log overcame me and I thumbed it open at the beginning:
Here I commence a new life. In the wretchedness of the candle-end of my former existence, I hoped only to die. So far into the maw of ruthlessness and depravity had I fallen, albeit at the heartless prodding of my maker, that I now despised myself as the world did. I ached for death, for the surcease of unappealable extinction, and hopefully I commended my spirit to that bleak demesne.
Of a sudden, after who knows how long or wherefore my unwelcome reprieve, I breathe again. My damaged heart thumps in the cave of my chest. My frozen limbs stir. My eyes, moments ago eclipsed by a primordial dark, lift into focus the Arctic stars and the sapphirine ice of a world that yesterday, or centuries past, I all too gladly fled and foreswore. Today, like Christendom’s fabled Son of Man, I am resurrected.
This entry had no date, but it looked-old. It sounded old too. Reading it over, I could hear Jumbo speaking. So I also imagined him, once upon a time, writing them in a fancy hand-in English. He’d shaped his words a lot like Walton’s, almost like he’d used Walton’s for a model.
I carried Jumbo’s log to the school desk at the head of my new bed, where I started copying Jumbo’s story into my bigger notebook. It seemed important to do this-the most important thing I could do to keep Jumbo whole in my mind while I cut him open and laid him out like a lab frog in my crabbed copybook hand:
In homage to the merchant captain who set down in its entirety the story of my tormented maker, I indite in English this account of my final days as his creature. Of my new life subsequent to a perplexing resuscitation I also write. English leaps as readily to my brain, and thence to my hand, as does French. Did my brain once belong to a native of Albion? Whatever the case, I commence my new life with the fresh mental perspective afforded by the tongue of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton.
What I now recollect of my old life is that after fleeing the ship on which had died the author at once of my being and its wretchedness, I could not steel myself to follow Frankenstein into the all-consuming abyss. Nay, I could not slay that which he had animated. Although I had promised Walton, in our unplanned meeting over my father’s corpse, that I would annihilate myself in flames, I temporized. I discovered excuses to sustain my body, that great puppet of patchwork flesh that hauled about the ice my anguish-freighted soul; and with my body, my consciousness.
As I delayed, the weather grew ever more vicious and storm-racked. The northern lights faded behind a veil of tattered and then granitic clouds, from which snow whirled in turbulent blizzards and beneath which the oceans turned to entrapping rock. Walton and his crew could not break their vessel from this white prison, nor did the storms or cold relent to hearten, with even a feeble glimmering of escape, these unhappy men. By mid-October, all aboard the Caliban, Walton’s ship, had perished, frozen, starved, or been slain; previously, however, the captain had bent himself to copying every single word of every unsent letter to his sister, as if this obsessive activity would both warm his bones and free the fast-held Caliban from the ice.
During the winter onslaught, I huddled with my sledge against the elements. I gathered about me my dogs. Around us, I erected a crude but fanciful fortification of ice. Inside the eye-stabbing brightness of this shelter, a dome on the groaning floes, I watched with pitiless interest the decline of my dogs, so cruelly deranged in their discomfort and hunger. They snarled at and bit one another, gnashing their teeth in fury, so that to prevent a massacre among them, I throttled the instigators, as I had throttled the foremost loved ones of my creator.
Even with their insulating fur, the dogs withstood the Arctic cold less well than I, for the howling of the gales invigorated me. Indeed, the continuous whipping of snow and pelletlike surface ice across that desert served only to confirm in me my decision to live.
Frankenstein, in assembling me from the bloodless leftovers of corpses, had unwittingly inured me to the depredations of polar cold. My dogs, however, suffered from it, turning on one another in terrifying fits of rapaciousness. In those same days, I so far forsook my preference for fruits, berries, and nuts that I ate the flesh of one of my animals. Later I distributed a moiety of its substance to the starved survivors.
At the end of these storms, I released from my pitted icehouse the only three dogs yet alive. With cries and menacing gestures, I chased them across that wasteland. They did not understand this eviction. Indeed, one dog sought to recover my affections with a fawning crawl and much ingratiating tail-wagging. At last, though, my unappeasable hostility conveyed itself to this animal and its four-lewed comrades: with a barrage of ice missiles I induced them to retreat.
If I could not die on a self-made funeral pile, perhaps I could take my life by striding over the floes to the pole itself. Unlike Walton, I had no expectation of encountering there an eye of balmy warmth, but rather a ravaging cyclone of such sharp cold that, in the space between heartbeats, it would annihilate me. Hoping for such a fate, I set off from my ice shelter in what I assumed the correct direction. Above me, the sky burned like an alarming white mirror.
At length I spied at some distance the shroud of ropes and canvas that tented an ice-locked ship. I recognized this vessel as the Caliban. What other vessel, at this bleak time of year, had ventured so far into the Arctic wastes? Whether the storm had disoriented me or some inner compass had guided my steps mockingly towards my maker’s wooden tomb, I know not. I knew only that I must complete my unplanned trek and board the ship. I did so with a curiosity greater than my revulsion at the thought of again exposing myself to human enmity.
I need not have trepidated. Every person aboard Walton’s ship, as earlier noted, had died of hunger, frost, or intestine violence among the crew. The Caliban entombed not only Frankenstein, but also Walton and his sailors. I trod, then, a ship of death, and only the decay-postponing steward-ship of the cold kept the odours of rot from checking my headlong inspection of the vessel.
Frankenstein, I should remark, had known a death-sleep longer than that of any other soul on the Caliban. I had no difficulty locating either him or Walton, however, for at some point in their ordeal the most vengefully inclined sailors, perhaps thinking to defile the bodies of those to whom they attributed the full burthen of their predicament, had brought the two men-one dead, one presumably yet alive-abovedecks. Here they had lashed them back to back to the forward mast. Here Walton had died, his body so disposed that he might gaze impotently upon the unfolding mutiny. My creator, meanwhile, faced the blankness of the northern sea, his eyes cracked like small glass balls, his lips the silver-blue of oiled metal. I had slain before, but never had I witnessed at one moment, among creatures purportedly rational, such desolation and carnage, nor had the terrible melancholy of this scene devolved wholly from the blows of wind and frost. Dogs and men, it occurred to me, shared a desperation-fed savagery.