Hunchback Assistant Tells All

In honor of Mary Shelley's birthday, this long-lost letter in verse to the author of Frankenstein.

HUNCHBACK ASSISTANT TELLS ALL

by Brett Rutherford

 1

My dear Mrs. Shelley —

won’t do — she’s neither ‘mine’ nor dear

To Mary —

sounds like a dedication

when nothing of that sort’s intended

Madame

so cool, polite and very French,

that will do.

Madame —

No doubt you suspect, if you have not heard

of the sensation caused by your romance,

newly translated to our Alpine tongues.

Neither the French nor the German booksellers

can keep enough of Frankenstein,

or The Modern Prometheus.

The bookbinders are up all night

preparing the slender volumes

for the fainting sight of the ladies.

Nothing else is spoken of, and little else read

at our little University.

I have studied your book, Madame Shelley,

and being more intimate than you

— or anyone else yet living —

with the facts in the case of Frankenstein,

I must hasten to write you,

that you might correct the grievous oversight

of omitting my role—my pivotal role

in the great endeavors,

the tragic conflagration.

I am Fritz,

poor old one-eyed, limping Fritz

the hump-backed,

unbaptized son of a priest and a nun,

a throwaway

raised by gypsies.

I will spare you nothing,

for only the sum of what I am

can justify what I was

to Victor, his bride and his monster.

2

You never mention me, Mrs. Shelley,

but I was there from the start.

I saw him at the medical school.

I always went to the dissections

(I have, you see, insatiable interest

in human anatomy.)

I loved to watch those perfect bodies,

naked and cold,

white as marble statues,

opened and disassembled

by the knowing hands of the surgeons.

I took my pad and crayon with me,

drew every line and contour—

the man’s bold lines,

the woman’s curved exterior—

the coiled horrors within,

the entrails unraveling,

the mysteries of the ensorcelled brain!

Then suddenly I noticed him.

His jet-black hair, eyebrows of Jove,

his burning eyes intent upon the scalpel and saw,

absorbing each surgical thrust.

I saw him and knew,

knew from the start as one soul knows another,

that he perceived beyond life and death.

He saw me drawing, and nodded, and smiled.

From that day forward I drew only him,

intent no more upon the surgery,

I sought to capture the fire of his pupils,

the furrow on his brow

as some doubt troubled him,

the gesture his hand made

when his mind made one

great thought from two

of a professor’s ideas.

Cupping a handful of gelatin,

gray and convoluted,

the lecturer shrugged and dropped it,

“Is this the seat of knowledge?—this organ?—

Is this the soul writ here in nerves and ganglia?

No one knows.”

The orbs of Frankenstein replied

“I am the one who will know.”

Hunched in the darkest nook

of the students’ wine cellars

I heard him complain,

“It’s not enough to watch

those well-rehearsed dissections.

If only I had a cadaver—

one of my own—

I must know the inner workings of life!”

How could I bear to hear him suffer,

he who should want nothing?

That night I robbed a mausoleum—

a rich man’s grave easy to plunder,

a simple job of claw and crowbar,

a lumpy sack and a handcart.

I dumped the sack before his door and knocked.

He came in nightshirt, candle in hand,

looked down at me in startlement.

“For you,” I said. “Your own

c—-c——ca—-cadaver,” I stammered.

He did not seem surprised. He took

one end of the heavy burden, let me

come in with the rest of it.

“It’s very fresh,” I assured him.

“He was only interred just yesterday.”

I waited. He stared at me.

“How much do you want?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing!” I answered.

“You must want something for this!”

“I want...I want.” I could not say it.

“Tell me.” He looked a little kind, then.

I think he understood.

“I want to serve you,” I told him.

“Serve you...always.”

3

We worked on happily —

my shovel and cart,

his saw and scalpel.

We found a more remote

and spacious laboratory,

paid for with gold

(how I laughed

as I melted each crucifix,

stripped village churches

of their gilded adornments!)

I turned the wheels

that made small lightning

leap over the ceiling vault.

I bellowed the gas

that lightning condensed

into the glowing elixir

that made life scream

into inanimate matter.

Our workroom was madhouse—

old vellum books and amulets

heaped up with bones of animals,

crystal and astrolabe,

the surgeon’s shining tools,

the charnel pit

of amputated limbs.

In madness we succeeded.

We howled

as tissues dead or rotting

quivered and multiplied,

as hands flew off

in every direction,

eyes rolled

and irises dilated

in lidless horror,

brains roiled

in their captive tanks,

their spine stems twitching

with inexpressible longings.

Then we threw all

into a vat of acid.

“These are but preludes,”

he confided to me.

“What next?” I asked.

“Shall we raise the dead?”

“No, Fritz, I have no use

for the rotting dead. Most men

are little more than animated meat,

unfit for the one life given them.

“We shall make a being new,

a manufactured man.”

So raptured was he,

that saying this,

he fell down senseless.

I put him in bed,

undressed his senseless form,

stroked the white limbs

no scalpel had scarred,

then limped to my corner

where I slept like a dog,

like some great hound

who had found his god.

4

Then she came — Elizabeth.

At first I hated her.

Her finery mocked me, her manners

impeccable, her accent just so.

Though he had never mentioned her,

they were betrothed, in love

since childhood, it seems.

Daily she came for tea,

tried to win me over

with pastries and gingerbread,

plied Victor for news

of his abandoned studies.

As one upon another

each Ingolstadt don

came up for our mockery

(except our idol Waldman)

her awe increased.

I liked her laughter,

the way blond hair exploded

when she threw off her bonnet,

the Alpine sky in her eyes.

Yet I hated to watch

her chaste little kisses

that fell on Victor’s blushing cheeks,

they way their hands

would find each other.

One day we were alone.

I had to make excuses

while Victor dissected

a youthful suicide

we’d fished from a stream,

his copy of Werther

still in his pocket.

Then she told me

she was an orphan too,

her name not Frankenstein

like those who raised her

as Victor’s “cousin,”

but Lavenza.

Frau Frankenstein had found her,

one of five babies in a hovel,

kept by peasants

to whom she’d be

a careworn Cinderella.

She was a fairy child,

raised by the Frankensteins

on music and poetry.

She knew nothing of what we did.

The sight of blood, the surgeon’s saw

would fill her with horror.

How could she hope to companion

this man who walked with gods?

And then it happened.

She touched me.

A passing thing, really.

A piece of gingerbread

from palm to palm,

but then she lingered,

pressed fingers against

my inner palm.

“You are so loyal to Victor,”

she said,

“so you shall be dear to me.”

She never flinched

at my twisted visage.

Her eyes saw past

the hump and its shadow.

Dear to her! Dear to her!

That night I scaled

the boarding house wall,

watched from a tree

as she undressed,

then drank some warm milk

at her bedside.

I watched in slice of moonlight,

her breasts and bosom

in lonely heaving,

her legs this way and that.

Had Victor ever lain with her?

Might I, “dear friend?”

Next night the milk

was tinged with laudanum.

I crept beneath

her silken beddings,

buried my face

in her virgin globes—

oh, I was light upon her,

like the fairies she dreamt of.

Once she cried out,

“Oh, Victor!”

I stole away,

the scent of her golden nape,

those wondrous nipples

with me always.

5

Next night more laudanum

was in Victor’s red wine,

cheap vintage we bought

to celebrate the surgery

by which the suicide’s heart

now beat in a headless torso.

I carried him to bed,

removed the blood-stained smock,

sponged off his fevered brow,

watched him in candlelight

as his features softened,

his eyelids fluttering

in pulse of dream-state.

I lay beside him,

touching, oh! everywhere.

Twice he cried out;

once, he held me

without awakening.

I crept away in bliss,

mad as a moth in a lamp shop.

Now, when they talk of marriage

it is a happy thought.

I can be wed to both of them

as long as the laudanum holds out.

6

Damn the chemist! The sleeping draught

wore off at the worst of times.

The master knows all. He woke from his sleep

as I perched at the foot of his bed.

My nakedness repelled him. He hurled

me out of his window into a haycart,

damned me, warned me never

to return to my room in the cellar.

What could I do? To whom could I go?

I took a whip from the half-wrecked cart,

climbed up the stairs to the empty laboratory.

He would need me when he ascended.

A storm was coming soon. The lifeless shell

up there was nearly ready for animation.

I would hand him the whip.

I’d beg him to punish me, hurt me,

but let me stay for the great work.

I wanted to see his eyes

as his being stood before him,

hear his cry of god-defying blasphemy

as man took control,

and named the day of dead’s arising.

7

My god and punisher returned.

He found the whip, and used it.

For days I lay not moving,

my lacerating flesh alive,

my blood congealing

to the scabs I was proud to wear,

the stripes of his forgiveness.

He sent me out on a sacred quest:

a pair of kidneys but hours dead,

a male, with everything intact.

I understood what was needed.

As I prowled the street for drunkards

I conceived a monstrous jest.

Our being must be superlative,

and I knew just the man.

Jean-Christophe Weiss was the talk

of every student in the beer hall.

He boasted of his conquests,

how women fainted

beneath his exertions.

The Ingolstadt brothel would not admit him

unless he paid a triple rate.

Mothers warned daughers to turn away

when his languid gaze caught them.

Their faces reddened as he shopped the stalls,

one hand on an apple or a load of bread,

the other lifting a veil, or a skirt.

It was said that certain widows

happily opened their doors to him.

One night he leaped from the balcony

of the nunnery of St. Genevieve’s

and what happened there

not one of the sisters would tell.

I did not wait long to find him.

Like me, he knew how

to evade the curfew.

I caught him emerging

from a certain garden gate

(a house with three comely daughters).

One blow to the head

with my crowbar,

then into the sack he went.)

The surgery was flawless.

Once more I watched

as disconnected tissues,

loose veins and nerves

like roots from a flowerpot

quivered, electrified,

sought one another

like amorous eels

and connected,

how the rent flesh closed

beneath the sutures:

weeks of healing

completed in minutes!

If Victor recognized

the organs’ donor,

he never showed it.

I know he looked

again and again

as our pefect being’s

perfect manhood

rose and fell

rose and fell,

as vein and synapse

made their connections.

“Cover him!”

he said at last.

“My God,

what a monster!”

8

“The kites, Fritz! The kites!”

With these words all

was forgiven — he needed me.

The howling storm raged.

Day became night as roiling thunderheads

collided like contending Titans,

black rams butt-heading the Alps

and one another.

The rain came down

in undulating sheets, blown

this way, that way.

Right over us, two airborne lakes

smashed one upon another’s cheek

and fell, exploding. Roulades

of thunder echoed everywhere.

Streams became torrents, meres rose

and swallowed astonished sheep and cattle.

As every shutter in Ingolstadt

clamped shut, we knew the day

was ours. No one would see

the sloping roof of our old mill tower

slide open to the elements,

or how the scaffolding rose up,

and I within it, high as the steeples.

From safe within my insulated cage

I unfurled the kites on their copper wires.

Up they went, hurled eastward,

then back again in gales contrary,

till they soared taut and defiant,

o’erarching the blackened granite hill

whose woods surrounded our workplace.

I did not fear the lightning.

I sang to it, danced it down.

“Strike! Strike!” I screamed.

“Come now, ye flames of Heaven!

Waste not your energy

on those pitiful pines.

I am the bait,

so come for me —

I am King of the Gargoyles —

I am deformity incarnate —

blasphemer since infancy —

robber of graves and churches —

rapist and fornicator!”

I was the spider, the wires

my webs to lure God down.

It came! I howled

as the great light jabbed toward me,

revelled in the thunder’s drum,

exulting as the kites survived

lash after lash, boom upon boom.

Blue, green and amber sparks

spun, danced and plummeted.

I could not see below,

but I knew what was happening:

how Victor captured it all below

in those vast and hungry capacitors,

how the hot wires sparked and smoked

as the current transferred

to the vat of green elixir

in which our creature bathed —

how all its flesh, unable to die

(and yet thus far without the will

to live) would join the ranks of creation.

How long I played there,

tempting with soliloquies

the angry sky,

how long the kites

drew power downward

till they fell in tatters

I cannot tell.

I was deafened and nearly blind

when the master drew me down.

He led me to my corner,

said I would see in a while.

My ears already made out

the master’s song of victory

as he cried out “It’s alive!

It’s alive!”

He robbed the gods

of more than fire or gold —

my master, Frankenstein,

the modern Prometheus!

--From my book, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems.

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SUBJECTS: Frankenstein, hunchback, Mary Shelley, Fritz