by Jerry
Language was at the base of both, of course, of everything finally, the limits of our language the limits of our world. And Chomsky believed that all the world’s languages shared certain abstract rules and principles, not because these were implicit, particularly rational, or historical, but because they had been programmed into human minds by the information carried in DNA. He hoped in studying the most formal of these universals, rules and how those rules determine the structure of sentences—in short, basic grammar—to map the mind’s self-limits. For grammar is a highly sophisticated information system, admitting messages, screening out noise.
Every day he sat surrounded by noise, tape upon tape of noise, noise turned into simple, fluctuating graphs on the screens about him, noise as rows of binary figures on huge sheets of spindled paper, noise analyzed for him in several ways (only some of which he understood) by Margaret, searching for a single incontrovertible instance of grammar; for algorithms that would (he knew) leap from the noise surrounding them.
What he did not know, was what he would do when that happened; he had no doubt that it would. His life would in many ways be over then, his great work, the work for which he’d programmed himself so long, done, done at age thirty-six, or forty-nine, or fifty-three. He could spend his remaining years studying languages, he supposed. Or music.
He brought the brandy glass close to him and looked at the world upside-down within it, a tree, a black car, the house across the street. Remembered how on their first night together they had shared a glass of brandy and in the morning, after she was gone, he stood staring at traces of her lipstick on the glass’s rim. Remembering how she’d left a note saying she couldn’t talk to him now or she wouldn’t be able to do it, then had phoned, and finally met him, because he had to understand, goddamn it, he just had to understand.
In quantum theory nothing is real unless it is observed. Or as Einstein held, It is the theory which decides what we can observe.
And so he watches her walk away from him into a stream of people sweeping toward the subway entrance. And in the morning he returns to Margaret, to his graphs, his paper, his noise.
But now, in a circle of light and the ever-present, distant din that is the city’s pulse, he reads about the male spadefoot toad. For a year or more he waits buried beneath the parched surface of the Arizona desert, and when the rainstorm he awaits at last arrives, plunges into daylight, racing to the nearest pool of water and sending out frantic calls to females. If he does not mate on the first night, he may never mate at all; by morning the water will be dwindling, and his life with it.
Because he wanted, just one more time, to be in love.
Gradually he realizes that he is awake. A sense of loss in the dreamworld receding from him; the brightness of the moon in his window; a murmur of wind. The phone rings again. His mouth is painfully dry. He tastes far back in his throat last night’s Scotch.
“John? I rang earlier, just once, to allow you to awake a bit more naturally . . . Are you there?”
Her voice, as though continuing the dream.
He grunts.
“Barleycorn again, John? Are you all right?”
He grunts a second time.
“There is incoming you will want to see, now. Emissions from a new sector. They are diverse, unaccountable, and do not appear random.” He is instantly alert.
“Thank you, Margaret. I’ll be right in. Please notify Security I’m on my way.”
“I’ve already done so.”
He glances at the clock beside him (2:59 A.M.) and downs a quart of orange juice while dressing and washing up. He glances in the mirror on his way out and sees a rumpled youngish man with round glasses and serious, downturned mouth, hunched over as though always in a hurry, as though bent about some central pain deep within him or slowly closing in upon himself. This fleeting image stays with him.
The night is clear, each star bright and perfect as a new idea. There is no traffic, no one else about. He is alone in the world. And for the nine minutes it takes him to reach the lab he is a part of the earth, and yet escapes its pull, its final possession, enters into sky, as only the night walker, sheathed in solitude, ever does—something like Rilke’s “angels,” he imagines, though transitory. He remembers Creeley saying that it’s only in the relationships men manage that they live at all, thinks of Goethe’s “emptiness above us,” of the first poem he can remember ever reading, Walter de la Mare’s “The Listener.”
A guard stands just inside the outer doors and unlocks them for him. He feeds his card into the terminal, places his palm against the glass: actions he no longer thinks about. Then through another door, past the second terminal, into the corridor. Hall lights come on as he advances, are shut off behind him.
“Thank you, Margaret.”
“You are welcome. I hope that I’ve not disturbed you unnecessarily. Copy is on your desk. I will wait.”
He goes into the lab and stands for a while at the window, looking out at the light-choked horizons of the city, at the dark above riddled with stars. Finally, knowing he is only delaying, he goes to the desk and looks closely at several of the thickly printed sheets. He senses that Margaret is about to speak.
“No,” he says. “It is nothing. I thought, for a moment . . . But no.”
“Then I am sorry, John.”
“It’s all right. My dreams were not good ones. I’d as soon be awake.”
“That is not what I meant.”
“I understand. Good night, Margaret.”
Then, later, dawn not yet rosy-fingered but definitely poking about in the sky: “Margaret?”
“Yes, John.”
“I want an override accessing me to all transmissions.”
“There is no facility for such access.”
“But it can be done?”
He sits watching incoming noise waver and change on the screens about him until (and it is by then full dawn) Margaret says, “It is done.”
“Thank you.”
“Is there anything else?”
“No, not now.”
“I will wait, then.”
“Margaret . . .?”
After a moment: “Yes?”
“Nothing . . . I will talk to you later.”
“Yes, John. I will wait.”
He rolls his chair towards the console. For a long time he sits there motionless, considering, sorting through phrase after phrase, seeking the precise algorithms, the barest grammar, of his pain. Light blossoms about him like a wound.
With two fingers he types out I loved her, and she is gone, then a transmission code and Enter/Commit.
He waits. Day marches on outside, noise builds. A telephone rings somewhere. Graphs quiver and shimmer about him. Soon there will be an answer. Soon he will hear the click of daisywheels starting up and his work will be done.
FRANKENSTEIN GOES HOME
Alan Rodgers
THE MONSTER COUGHED, and he tasted blood—the same blood he always tasted when the force of air in his throat was too great. The seams that bound the membranes of his lungs to his larynx weren’t strong enough to cope with coughing, or even hard breathing. Like most of the seams that bound the disparate portions of his body together, they’d never healed well enough to truly fuse.
The Monster was going home.
Home as he remembered it, anyway. He wasn’t sure that home existed anymore; wasn’t even sure that it ever had existed.
This forest, at least, was as he remembered it. He could remember hunting deer in this forest a lifetime ago . . . or maybe it was longer ago than that. When he looked at them too closely his memories became hard to sort from each other.
There were voices, children’s voices, somewhere on the far side of the hill.
The Monster didn’t pay them any mind. He’d fallen into the old trap again, his own special trap that he’d been hiding from for years, and needed every bit of heart and spirit he had to keep from being swallowed by his own self-pity. Years ago he’d decided that he needed his self-re
spect too much to let himself indulge in self-pity. As long as you had your self-respect, he thought, you were human.
Even if you did think of yourself as a Monster.
Even if the doctor liked to call him Frankenstein.
He wasn’t Frankenstein. It wasn’t his name, and it never had been. Neither had it ever been Dr. Thompson’s name, though when he was of a mood he liked to say that he was Dr. Frankenstein. The Monster wasn’t certain whether, at these moments, the madman was indulging or deluding himself. Not that it made any difference. “I am Doctor Frankenstein,” Thompson would say, “and you are my Frankenstein Monster.” For that matter the doctor wasn’t a doctor at all: he had a Ph.D. in molecular biology, and he was crazy enough to have been in and out of the state mental hospital half a dozen times in the last ten years. The man was too unstable to hold down a university position, much less one in industrial research. If it weren’t for family money the doctor wouldn’t have been able to maintain an apartment, let alone the ersatz castle where the Monster had spent the five years of his new life.
The children were closer, now. Soon they would see him. Would they scream? Or would they assume that he wore some bizarre costume—the sort of costume the Monster had seen so many times on television?
The Monster was unsure that he wanted to learn. He turned so that his path bore more to the left, hoping to avoid them.
The first time the Monster woke he was in a dingy room full of strange equipment. He’d felt confused even before he’d had a chance to realize the strangeness of his body. Partly that confusion came from the strangeness of the surroundings; partly it was the result of the fact that the disparate parts of his self had not yet begun to fuse.
But the source of his confusion was also the monster’s strength; at the moment he woke to life the world was already a familiar place. The vague biochemical ghosts of the people he’d been had lived . . . lifetimes. Between them all he’d had more than his fill of the world of men.
The Mad Doctor explained that to him, after a fashion, only a few seconds after he opened his eyes. “Take it easy,” the Doctor said. “Not too fast.” He cackled as he spoke in a peculiar fashion that the Monster later learned meant that the mad scientist was pleased with his own wit—though the Monster had never been able to see that wit himself. “I bet you’re all shook up. Must be. Three-quarters of a dozen people all sailing at half-mast inside your head, and none of them even know about each other yet. Worse yet, they all think they’re one person. Well, they will be, sooner or later. Later or sooner, heh heh. You’ll be fine. You have to be—I’m so proud of you. My crowning creation. My shining glory! Ha!”
The Monster looked up at him and blinked, trying to clear his head. And suddenly the madman’s voice became very serious.
“It’s the RNA. It gives you memory; it’s everywhere inside you. Most of the body’s ribonucleic acid is the brain, so much of it that the rest isn’t important. But I treated your brain with an enzyme, an RNAase. It’s part of the experiment. I need to see . . . how you come back together.”
Not much of that sunk through to the Monster. He was too caught up in seeing his body for the first time, examining the mad scientist’s crude stitchwork. Seeing the blood that still seeped from seam-wounds that would never heal completely.
But later, much later, he heard the Doctor’s words echo in his ears, almost as though they’d been a baptism.
He looked back up at Doctor Frankenstein. “I’m—” he said. And then the words jammed up in his throat, and nothing came out at all.
“You’re beautiful,” the madman said. He smiled in a way that tried to be proud and loving, but only came out sick and warped.
“I’m a monster.” And as he heard the words he knew that it was absolutely true, true and undeniable as his phlegmy breath. After he’d said those words he’d never been able to think of himself by any other name.
“Yes. A monster of greatness, of magnitude. A testament to life!”
It wasn’t any use trying to avoid the children. When the Monster saw them running across the hill and down toward him, he almost thought—for just a moment, mind, just a moment; he’d spent too long living with a madman not to be mindful of his own paranoia—the Monster almost thought that the children knew about him and had come to follow him. Scented him, like hounds.
He didn’t want to see those children. Seeing them, he knew, would bring home to him the corruptness of his physical nature, rub his nose in his own unnaturalness in the worst possible way. Worse, he didn’t want them to see him. In his imagination he could already hear them, innocent little children screaming at the sight of him.
And they did see him. Their path led straight past the gnarled oak he tried to hide behind. If they’d just kept going, maybe none of them would have seen him. But they didn’t just keep going; as the first of them ran by the child stumbled on one of the old oak’s roots, tumbled head-over-heels and again through the leafy forest floor. When the boy looked up he was staring straight into the Monster’s eyes.
No, the Monster thought. Please, God: No.
It was just bad luck. The Monster tried to tell himself that, but hard as he tried he couldn’t make himself believe it. He probably couldn’t have convinced himself of anything, then: he was too busy bracing himself for the sound of the child’s scream, for the screams he was sure would come an instant later from the others a footstep behind.
The Monster was so intent on steeling himself for the horror of it that at first it didn’t even register that the boy wasn’t screaming. The child didn’t even look afraid, in fact—just curious, or maybe mystified.
“You’re . . . the boy began, but then his voice just trailed off to silence.
The Monster let the words hang there in the air for all the time he could bear to leave them there, but finally he had to speak.
“A monster. I’m a monster.”
The boy shook his head. “No. Not a monster. Something wonderful, something strange—I don’t know. But not a monster.”
And the Monster felt as though all the blood had drained from him at once, and small hairs rose and stood stiffly erect all over his body, and he wanted to scream but he didn’t dare because he couldn’t do that, couldn’t scream with his bloody-raw throat in front of the children. So he ran, he turned and ran from the children as far and as fast and as hard as he could.
He didn’t run in fear or in horror. He ran because there was something in what the boy had said that he could not bear to face.
He kept running, too, for most of the twenty minutes it took to get to the edge of the town.
When the mad scientist was gone, the Monster closed his eyes and tried to sort his thoughts. Even more, to sort his memories; everything the Monster knew about himself was confused and addled and made no sense at all. He was a man, he knew that—but just as certainly he knew that he was a woman, a thirty-five-year-old spinster. Or maybe someone younger—a freckled, red-haired girl just past her teens. And he remembered going to work yesterday, to the job in the big city that he commuted to by car. And remembered waking up earlier that morning in the hospital where he’d gone to die of leukemia six weeks before.
No. None of that was even possible. It was all too contradictory. He needed to focus himself, to trace his steps backward and sort the false memories from the true ones.
He remembered waking, here in this room, not more than an hour ago. That was clear and distinct. Nothing about that memory was impossible or contradictory. But where had he been before then? He had no memory of this place whatever, confused or otherwise. He calmed himself, quieted himself, tried to concentrate.
He could remember . . . being in a car. Yes. There was a harmony about that car, an extra realness. That made it, he was sure, truer than all those other possibilities in his past. And in the car right there beside him was his sister-in-law. They were in the car, and he was driving, and they were on the highway going toward the city. The train station. His wife was there—or she would
be, soon. She’d been away for most of a week, down by the shore, taking the holiday they’d meant to take together but that he hadn’t been able to get away for. He felt guilty about that. Even now, in the center of all this confusion, he felt guilty about it.
It wasn’t the only thing he felt guilty about, either. He tried not to glance at his sister-in-law as he felt himself blush. He hadn’t wanted another woman in all the time since he and his wife had married—honestly hadn’t felt the first pang of desire. And now, in the week that his wife had been away, her sister had stopped by every night to cook for him, to fuss about the house . . . and that was all she’d done. All they’d done. But there was a curve about her waist he’d never noticed before, and her lips always seemed full, and moist, and when the sun was going down it would cast the most incredible sheen across her full, black hair. And . . . damn it, he didn’t want to feel the need for her. He didn’t want to think the things about her that he did. But he did think them, he did, and he could see from the guilty light in her eyes that she felt all of it as strongly as he did, and maybe more strongly.
Bad enough to find himself wanting another woman—at his age, yet. But his wife’s sister . . .? There was something sick about it, something demented. He clenched his jaw, and shook his head, and turned to steal a glance at the object of his desire. And found her looking at him, staring at him, almost. That was more than he could cope with right then, and in the time it would have taken to snap his fingers he lost himself, completely lost track of who he was and what he was and where he was and the fact that he had the car moving along the highway at eighty-five miles an hour. And that time, that tiny smidgen of time—that was all the time it took.
Because of that tiny moment, staring onto the eyes of a woman he couldn’t dare to love, he didn’t see the BMW swerve into his lane and cut him off. Nor did he see when that car had to brake very suddenly in the traffic that was heavier than it ever ought to have been on a Saturday afternoon. If he’d even managed not to panic when he felt his bumper crunching into the BMW’s hood, he could have come out of the accident alive.
