“From here on out, Mister Reese,” Kizzy said, pointing a witchy finger at him, “pray God I don’t pyson yo tea.”
I scrambled back upstairs to find my place in Jumbo’s log, and the argument in the kitchen-the feud-got louder. Soon, though, I was hip-deep in Jumbo’s autobiography, and the noisy dipsy-do downstairs might as well’ve originated in Zanzibar. I no longer heard it.
31
My Second Life (Continued)
Initially without aim or plan, I wandered the coldest and least-known wildernesses of Siberia, from its northernmost bays to the sparse taiga forests of the Kolyma Mountains, and many other remote locales besides. Why did I live?
At length I found reasons: to atone for the murders I had committed as Frankenstein’s outcast get; to discover a suitable resting place for my late progenitor; to enter human society as a worthy and productive citizen.
Vain hopes!
The cold agreed with me, as I have said, and I had little trouble sustaining myself even on thin soups of such despised vegetable matter as lichens, bark, evergreen needles, moss, and the tubercules and roots of many an unprepossessing shrub. As one item in my continuing penance, I had resolved never to eat flesh again, and had perfectly heeded this self-commandment. Other opportunities for atonement seldom arose, however, and I began to sink into a lonely despondency inimical to my most basic goals.
The body of my creator ever posed a difficulty, acting as an impediment to my travels, aimless though they were. By now, it had suffered much from exposure to the elements and from fluctuations of temperature. Frankenstein’s once handsome face, albeit pallid from inward struggle and his final illness, now resembled that of a tortoise. His nose suggested a beak, his mouth a V-shaped scar, his throat a desiccated wattle. During a brief period of inattention, I had allowed a magpie to pluck out one of his frozen eyeballs; the other had oozed away over days of blinding-nor do I use the word in jest-sunshine.
Owing to the ambient cold (unremitting but for these bright interludes), the decay process in him advanced by staggers. Although his body never emitted an insupportable odour, only on the iciest days was it altogether free of a sickly perfume. At such times, his limbs had the hardness of gun barrels; at the Siberian summer’s height, however, they flopped like a rag doll’s and by such movements wafted their attenuated stench.
“Oh, Frankenstein!” I once apostrophised him. “Is this how I honour you? Is this how I justify myself in your sightless gaze?”
As both thinking creature and nomad, I lacked direction. The place most likely to accept and hallow my progenitor’s bones, the city of Geneva, stood leagues and leagues away. I had no idea how many. It might as well have nestled in a lunar vale, for how, without divine aid, could I reach either Switzerland or the moon?
Often I thought to slip my burden and to pay homage to my maker by setting out his remains on some wind-blown promontory, where eagles or wolves could reverence his spirit through the machinery of their appetites. Frankenstein had loved the Alps, their glacial majesty and their vistas of desolate loveliness. In my creator’s belated obsequies, could not the icescapes and mountains of eastern Siberia serve as either emblems or proxies of the Alps? Although I hoped so, the strictness of my call to atonement argued the reverse.
At length, however, I discovered for him on an inlet of the Chukchi Sea a temporary resting place, a grotto of stone which I further concealed with driftwood and glacial rubbish, where I could safely cache his body during my rambles afield. By this expedient, I preserved not only that which persisted of his corpse, but also my freedom as a moral agent.
Why, my hypothetical reader may inquire, did I remain in the Siberian wilderness without soliciting the companionship of men? In one regard, the question is foolish, for my treatment by the human species, from Victor Frankenstein himself to the Chukchi bowmen of a more recent encounter, had little inclined me to trust it. In another regard, however, the question demands an answer, for I had fixed as one of my goals my own domestication and socialisation. The process could not fulfill itself if, confining my rambles to remote wastelands, I shunned even the most glancing impingement on members of my creator’s race.
Nothing had occurred, I understood, to render my physique or my hideous facial features less alarming to human beings. Indeed, these attributes had turned even Frankenstein against me. His genius had succumbed to his weakness of soul; he had repudiated me almost in the instant of my first emergence into consciousness. I still had a powerful recollection of that moment: the chemical-stained hands of my maker and the flicker of ineffable disgust in his eyes. Unhappily, my deformed countenance, still provoking fear, would prevent others from compassionating me. Even had my face shone as comely as Apollo’s, my great size would always speak to the timid or the wary my undeniable potential for inflicting ruin. The universal policy of men towards me, then, bad founded itself on either flight or preemptive recourse to a garbled Golden Rule, namely, Do unto Frankenstein’s creature what it unquestionably purposes for thee.
Therefore, I practised and took pride in caution. I inwardly celebrated my ability, honed in Switzerland and the Orkneys, to come within a whisper of my human prey without alerting it, or others, to my menacing proximity. Now, however, I intended no threat. I told myself that my stealthiness facilitated observation when, in fact, it had become habitual, a means whereby I evaded natural human commerce and further inured myself to solitude. Intellectual diversion-be it reading, games, debate, or philosophical contemplations-had completely fled my world; day by day, I devolved toward the instinctive mindlessness of the timber wolf or the snow owl.
A fortuitous encounter, involving no human beings at all, put a halt to this bestial slide. As aimlessly I worked my way along the icy palisades on the Bering Strait, I heard the clamorous voices of mating walruses. This passionate baying, at once like the barking of dogs and the squealing of swine, echoed from the cliff side rocks, I sought its source. Before long, I had clambered to a throne of barnacled granite downwind from the sea beasts’ rookery.
From this perch, I had a hidden view of the harem and of the sultanic male treading a young female, lie bellowed his triumphant ecstasy. His lovemaking impressed me with both its ardour and its violence, for it hardly seemed that the pinned sultana could derive any pleasure from her paramour’s coercive affections. On the other hand, she may have relished her role as his and the other females’ cynosure; thus, she periodically barked her doubtful rapture. The females unoccupied with either procreation or the establishment of a pecking hierarchy tended their wet-eyed pups.
All this I absorbed with the greatest curiosity, irritation, and excitement. Shamefacedly, I confess that I considered attempting to cuckold the bull with one of his concubines. The feat struck me as possible but riskfuclass="underline" I might incur a tusk wound. If his massiveness were any trustworthy measure, however, the king walrus must weigh five times as much as I. Thus, he had not my nimbleness or speed, and the rookery was large. An ingenious rogue might well swyve a lady or two at sufficient distance from him to escape either interruption or injury.
I seriously entertained this notion, unnatural as my maker or his murdered bride would have adjudged it, because the yearning in my loins had produced a persistent tumidity; I ached with bittersweet excruciations impossible to describe. At last (appalled by the image of myself in coitus with a bewhiskered, legless, fish-eating sloth), I foreswore the temptation and spilled my lavalike seed on a rock.