by Jerry
But he did panic. He felt the shock of impact through his feet and his hands and his belly digging its way into the steering wheel, and without even thinking he tried to yank the steering wheel around, to pull himself and the car out of a sequence of events from which the laws of physics would allow no escape. And instead of just rear-ending some fool in an expensive German car, he caused his own car to go spinning around and around and around on the fast, crowded highway. At least five times as the car spun he felt it slam into other vehicles. The sixth hit—or maybe it was the seventh—brought his right rear fender into the grill of a moving van. Then, instead of spinning round, the car was turning over—rolling off the road like a log that had been pushed out of the way. He felt the impact of the car’s roof pounding itself onto the grassy shoulder of the highway, felt it through his skull and his neck and—
—the memory shifted. And he realized, with a touch of horror, why the memory had such harmony, such resonance for him. For her. For the Monster. The Monster didn’t want to think of himself as an it, but for the moment he was tempted to—because the sister-in-law was as much a part of him as the husband was. The Monster remembered the twisted wreckage of her brother-in-law’s car, remembered seeing it from inside the wreck, through her own eyes.
The Monster was upside down, and her neck was twisted at a strange angle—an angle that she knew was farther to the right than any neck ever ought to be able to bend, which meant that her neck was broken and she was going to die soon. She tried to raise her hand to her face and brush away the blood that was leaking into her eye, coming from either her nose or her mouth, she wasn’t sure. But when she tried to move her hand it was like there wasn’t any hand there at all. And she wasn’t breathing anymore, either. That meant that her neck wasn’t just broken; the cords inside it were already tom loose. And even though she was still alive, watching the crushed, bright-red corpse of her sister’s husband, even if she was still alive she was already dead. Her body hadn’t completely caught on to the trick of dying yet, but she was on to it.
It occurred to her that she ought to pray, or see her life scroll before her eyes, or make her peace, or something. But she didn’t have it in her to do any of those things.
Instead she spent the moment she had left thinking about the man who’d spent the last week leering at her. Or, she thought, be fair: trying not to leer. But she’d seen it, watched it all week, and she knew that he was to blame. It was all his fault that she was dead, and even now, remembering, the Monster resented himself for it. Never mind that she had been thinking about him that way a long time before. It didn’t show when she felt that way—she’d been alive for a good long while and she knew that it couldn’t show. It was his fault and he was tempting her and even if she was tempted that was her secret and it was none of his damned business. And the last thing she thought, as the world began to fade to grey all around her, was that she hated that man, hated him, hated his disgusting body—
And then the Monster had awoken, here in this strange place where a madman drooled and sputtered and talked nonsense at him.
And all those shadow memories that writhed and sputtered and shimmered in his head—and lied to him, lied to him, telling him impossible things about where he’d been and what he’d done on days that had to be the same—all of those memories were just as real as anything else about him.
And none of them were real at all.
Because none of them were his. They were the memories of other people, dead people who lived inside his body like parasites. Or maybe they were him—maybe he was all of those people. When he thought about it it was hard to tell which was the case, or whether they both were true—or whether neither was.
The door of the white-white room creaked open slowly, and the crazy man stepped in. He let the door swing closed behind him, crossed the room, and looked the Monster carefully in the eye.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. There was a slight spray from his lips as he asked the question; the Monster felt tiny droplets of spittle landing on his cheeks. He tried to ignore them, to be polite, but it was hard.
“I’m okay,” he said. He looked away, down toward the floor, trying to avoid the spray. “Why are you asking? Are you keeping notes, recording me like an experiment—the way you’d keep track of some frog you were dissecting on the laboratory table?”
He’d expected that to anger the man. Maybe it was foolish to play with the temper of a man who was already half unhinged, but right then the Monster resented the fact of his own being, and it didn’t concern him that the crazy man might do something out-of-hand.
But instead of the angry words or shouting that he’d expected, there was only silence—quiet so still and sad that it left the Monster shaken. He looked up and saw that hurt painted all over the madman’s face, and he knew he’d said something wrong—and not just wrong, but mean.
“No. I wouldn’t probe you that way, not without telling you. Not you. You aren’t just an experiment to me—you’re important, the way a son would be important. Or a daughter.” Dr. Frankenstein sniffled, and rubbed his nose across his sleeve. The Monster pictured himself, for a moment, as a child to the madman, and the idea of it made him feel ill, even if he was also feeling a little sympathy for him. “But it’s more than that. Much more. I didn’t create you just to satisfy my own needs, but the needs of a world: It’s your perspective that’s precious. Your very nature . . . I have a theory. A very interesting theory, one that created the need in me to create you.”
Dr. Frankenstein paused, long and hard, as though he was prompting the Monster to press him for the theory’s details. But the Monster didn’t think he wanted to hear a theory that had made his existence necessary—he wasn’t sure, in fact, that he wanted to hear any of the madman’s theories. So he let the pause stretch on, and finally Dr. Frankenstein filled it himself.
“I believe,” he said, “that all of science’s greatest discoveries, all our greatest inventions—all our truest insights!—have come from the hearts of men. Those amazing revelations that we find in the nature of the universe can only be found in those who have those wonders already in their hearts. And is .not invention always the product of the bent of the inventor? And insight anchored to the eye of the seer? You, my friend, my child, my wonder, are born of the fusion of hearts. And in that fugueing fire is the truest vision this world will ever behold!”
Getting back to the town was an eerie experience for the Monster. He remembered it clearly, down to the smallest detail. Remembered it through at least five different sets of eyes. And yet he knew that he’d never been to the place in his life.
The town had grown more worn in the years since he’d died so many times. But it hadn’t changed, not in any substantial way. He didn’t see any changes that weren’t just wear and tear until he turned off the town’s main road, and passed a house that had once been his.
The door to that house was boarded shut; its windows were bricked over, and the mortar between the bricks was mossy.
The Monster hurried away. There was nothing in the house that drew him; that life was over and done with. That part of him had left behind no unfinished business, no unrighted wrongs. It had left no one behind, in fact—no relatives, no friends. Sometimes the Monster would melancholy over the emptiness of that life. But at other times he was grateful that there was nothing in that part of his past that still called to him.
The way, for instance, the house at the far end of this road called to him—it called to him because the woman who lived inside it was the one who had been both his sister and his wife. Or, at least, she’d been those things to parts of him. He’d been away for so long that there was no way to know that she was still there in that house where they’d lived together for years. But even if there wasn’t any way to be sure, the Monster was certain she’d be there. He’d known her for two lifetimes, and that was long enough, he thought, to know things about her that he could never be sure of. And what he knew was that she’d be waiting fo
r him. Not waiting for him the way she’d hold dinner on those evenings that he’d come home late; she’d have gone on with her life. Waiting, maybe, the way she’d wait for the missing final chapter of a novel.
When he got home he didn’t go right in. That wouldn’t have been right, not now, not after all this time. But he couldn’t just walk up to the house and knock on the door, either; the house was home. He’d lived in it for years, visited it for years—owned it for the best years of a lifetime. So the Monster walked around it for a few minutes, trying to figure out what he should do, or whether he should do anything at all.
That was why he saw his wife and sister for the first time in his life through the kitchen window. She was washing dishes, or maybe drying them. She gave a start when she saw him, and he was expecting that. He was a horror, and he knew it, and he expected the people he knew and loved to jump half out of their skins at the sight of him. But she was important to him, and he watched her carefully, and he saw that she wasn’t screaming or terrified. Just startled, surprised the way anyone would be to see a stranger staring in through a window.
Even a stranger who wasn’t a stranger at all. Especially so.
When her start was over she set down the dish she’d been drying and frowned at him, as though she recognized him but couldn’t quite place him. Finally she shook her head and moved away from the window. A moment later she was coming out the back door of their house, still staring at him, watching him intently, as though he were one of the great mysteries of life come to roost on her doorstep.
She walked toward him until she was close enough that the Monster could smell the quiet scent of her perfume, close enough to reach out and touch him. She did that, too, she raised her hand to his face, and her fingertips on his skin—partly probing, partly caressing—were strange and powerfully electric. He wanted to tell her something, but he didn’t know what it was he had to say, and when he moved his lips a bloody-scratchy sound came from his throat.
Then she said the name, one of the two names that hurt so desperately to see her, and that was wonderful and beautiful and the most horrible thing that had ever happened to him in any life he’d ever lived, because the name she’d said was the sister’s name. And the sister loved her, and needed her, and missed her, but the husband was there, too, and the husband loved his wife as he loved nothing else in the world, and he’d looked at her and tried to speak to her and she’d seen someone else in his eyes. And all of that was there on his face, and he knew it: joy and recognition and response, and the husband’s wound that would never heal—a wound so bad that he wanted to curl up and die right then, right then.
And she saw all of that, the woman who was his sister and his wife did. When she saw her sister’s joy flicker on the Monster’s face she looked for a moment both puzzled and amazed, as though she were witness to a peculiar miracle. But then she saw her husband’s devastation painted on his same features, and the muscles of her jaw went slack, and she said the other name, the husband’s name. And the Monster, all broken and unhinged inside, nodded to answer her before he had a chance to give the act a moment’s thought.
That was the worst thing he could have done. When she’d recognized him, he knew, she’d been off-balance and only guessing that there was someone she knew inside him. And because she was only asking questions in the dark it couldn’t have sunk through to her that her husband and her sister both stood before her in one body.
She screamed, then. The Monster knew that woman well—maybe better than he’d ever known another soul—and because he knew her so well he could tell that she wasn’t screaming at the horribleness of his nature but at the horror that that nature meant to her. It still hurt him powerfully to see the terror on her face, and the sound of her scream hurt him too. When she raised her fists and started pounding out her anger on his chest it hurt him worst of all, though the blows themselves didn’t do his body any damage.
He stood through it all, in spite of the pain, because he felt he had an obligation to. He did his best to honor that obligation; it wasn’t until she broke down sobbing, ran back into the house, and slammed the door behind her that he even let himself cry. When she was finally gone he wandered away from the house, wailing like a banshee.
He managed to keep himself going until he reached the small playground at the far edge of the town. He sat himself on a bench in that playground, and he stayed there—staring into the dirt and not moving a muscle that he didn’t need to breathe—for hours.
Dr. Frankenstein had been right—the Monster did have a special insight. During the five years that he’d spent in the castle, the madman had heaped whole libraries full of books in front of the Monster, and because there was no other thing that could demand the Monster’s attention, he’d taken the reading of those books to heart. The remarkable part was that even though the Monster was in essence only a student, often as he read—very often—he would strike on solutions to the problems that the books posed. Solutions that the authors had never intended, nor even conceived of. The Monster knew, as that happened to him again and again, that there was something to Dr. Frankenstein’s “theory”; that there had to be some special magic in his segmented heart. He knew, certainly, that he wasn’t any true genius; his mind was certainly no better than it had ever been in any of his lives. Only different.
And bothered.
The real reason he kept himself buried in books wasn’t boredom or the need to learn or any of those things. He felt bad for the madman. Sometimes he felt ashamed for him, or even embarrassed. But he wouldn’t have pressed himself into study just because he’d been told to. No. He read because he had to, because there was something from his past that haunted him. And when he concentrated hard enough on the work in front of him, his heart was easier to ignore.
He was reading that afternoon when Dr. Frankenstein finally said the thing that pushed the Monster out of his five-year daze—sitting in the sun in a lounge chair on one of the castle’s terraces, reading a fat, heavy book on the nature of germ plasm. The madman stepped out onto the balcony through the open doorway, and then he stopped. For a long while he just stood there on the grey, sunny stone, staring at the Monster, not saying a word. The Monster could feel the weight in the air from whatever it was the man wanted to say, and he didn’t like the touch of it; he kept reading, and let the man hold his peace. He stood there for five minutes, at least, before he managed to screw up the nerve to get the words through his lips.
“Monster,” he said. It’d taken the man a long while to get used to the idea that the Monster could think of himself by no other name, but once he’d understood he’d respected the Monster’s wishes, and called him by the name he’d chosen for himself. “I love you, Monster, you know that. Don’t you?”
The Monster knew it, all right. But he’d never had to deal with the idea out loud before, and it made him uncomfortable as sin. He nodded, partly to avoid having to say the words himself, partly to answer the question. Nodding only made him more uncomfortable; he tried to imagine that he was someplace else, anywhere, any where else in the world but right there and right then.
“Well, what I need to know is, is this: do you love me, Monster?” A thin line of saliva descended toward his lapel from the comer of his mouth. “I mean: do you love me?”
The Monster tried to make himself quiet inside. He really did. But inside his head there was rushing and roaring and horrible things, and he was afraid—he was a Monster and he knew it and he was afraid—that he’d do something monstrous, something monstrous and horrible and violent and evil.
He didn’t know the answer to the madman’s question. And he didn’t know why the question did to him what it had. He didn’t think he wanted to know either one of those things.
So he set his book, gently as he could, on the lounge table beside him. And got up. And walked away, and hid himself in the deepest, darkest dungeon that the castle had.
He stayed holed up in the dungeon all morning and into the early afternoon
, licking wounds he didn’t understand—and licking wounds he didn’t even truly know he had. As he sat there, curled up in the dusty corner of an ersatz cell, his mind wandered. Wandered, for the first time in his five years, around and toward . . . not Dr. Frankenstein, or his sad, drooling love, but toward those pieces of the Monster’s past that for all of those five years he’d been avoiding. And the thing he thought about most of all was that woman he loved twice over. The woman who’d been wife to one piece of him, and sister to another.
He loved that woman. Loved her like . . . like the whole damned world, and every star and every other thing he could imagine, all together at once. Loved her, and missed her, and needed her, and . . .
But just as he thought those things, felt those things, he knew that she was a person and a life that was behind him. A love of another life; the lover of another life. And he knew that even if he could find her, tell her who he was and love her—if she could love a monster—all he’d be doing would be denying himself and what he’d become. A monster couldn’t love a woman, not as a sister or as a wife, and if he could it wouldn’t be right, anyway. And too: he wasn’t the man who’d loved her. Nor the woman. Not even if he held all that was left of their lives inside him. His heart knew that the worst thing he could do to himself was pretend that he was somebody else.
Or, at least, that’s what he tried to tell himself as he crept out of the dungeon, into the forest. Toward town. And he knew, as he hiked, that all of his reservations were founded. Tellingly so. Still: even though he tried with all his heart to turn away, back toward the castle, all he could do was continue. In his mind’s eye he saw Dr. Frankenstein, drooling at him brokenly, and his heart told him that he was betraying the one real love he had in this life. But that didn’t stop him, either.
The road that the playground was on was the town’s main thoroughfare, and though it was empty because it was unpopular with the town’s children, it was in plain sight of what traffic the town had. All that afternoon as the Monster sat staring at the grass, the people who passed on foot and in car saw him, and they watched him. Twice police cars cruised by him slowly.
