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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