My fear had two sources. First, as stipulated during some tricky negotiations with Vyvyan's employer (a friend of my father-in-law), I was meeting him at night, in a virtually empty office building. The security guard in the downstairs lobby would be of no help if Vyvyan attacked me in my sixth-floor suite. Second, Vyvyan was the biggest man I'd ever seen, bigger than the professional wrestler Andre the Giant. He stood at least eight feet tall. Even sitting, as he sat now in my overwhelmed office chair, he towered.
(Why was Vyvyan worried about what to call me? He could call me, with total impunity, whatever he wanted to.)
Vyvyan's dress did nothing to render him less scary. A beige burn mask (or a tight elastic hood designed to suggest a burn mask) covered his enormous head. His eyes were visible through the mask's eyeholes; they were too small for his head, as glassy-yellow as an alley cat's, and so phlegmy that their continuous discharge had left umber-orange tear tracks on either side of his monstrous nose. His lips showed through an oblong cutout like a pair of helically twisted wisps of licorice, black and oddly glossy.
The tightness of Vyvyan's mask gave me a pretty good idea of the basic shape of his features, which all seemed preternaturally lumpy and swollen. His brow and jaw had such prominence that I wondered if he were suffering, as Abraham Lincoln reputedly had, from acromegaly, the abnormal enlargement of one's face, feet, and hands.
Vyvyan's hands were big enough to support this speculation, but he kept them gloved. Or, rather, mittened. Wool mittens (featuring pine trees and silver sleighbells on a ground of snowy white) like Barbara and I had bought our grandkids last winter. Only their size told against them. Along with the mittens, Vyvyan wore vast denim overalls, a blue-plaid flannel shirt, ebony galoshes with unfastened hasps, and a cream-colored duster such as a cowboy or the driver of an old-time car might have worn. The duster added to, rather than disguised, his bulk.
So I was afraid. Vyvyan could have strangled me or thrown me through a gently quaking pane of glass, and no one would have found my body for hours. Barbara was probably already in bed. Her TV work required a demoralizingly early alarm.
How had I gotten myself into this hazardous fix?
Barbara's father, William Yost, had referred Vyvyan to me, but he had done so through Vyvyan's employer, Van Foxworth, the president of a Norcross-based warehousing firm called CargoCo Unlimited. Vyvyan worked virtually around the clock at a CargoCo storage facility as a stacker and night watchman. In fact, according to my father-in-law, he lived in a room outfitted for him inside this immense, corrugated metal building by Mr. Foxworth himself. He took all his meals in this room, so he'd never have to go out, and ate a strict vegetarian diet. Van Foxworth's nephew, Vinny Fall, delivered his meals via a pass-through from a junk-filled attached office.
The Phantom of the Warehouse, I thought. Apparently, Vyvyan had arrived at this reclusive life style shortly after joining CargoCo in the mid-1970s. Only this kind of thoroughgoing isolation had enabled him to work at all, and now, viewing Mr. Foxworth as his sole friend and benefactor, he insisted on the arrangement.
Of late, though, Vinny Fall had sometimes heard a fearful howling from the warehouse. Several late-night passers-by had also heard it, and the only possible source of the howling was Vyvyan, who, it had become clear, was suffering. On Mr. Foxworth's command, then, Vyvyan had come to me for help.
▼▼▼
"I wish to be as others are," he said. "And I wish to have some salvific distinction in my new-found conformity."
www
That first Thursday night, we felt our way with each other. He told me what he wanted, with no bet-hedging, and I guess he told the truth. I purposely refrained from raising subjects that would plunge him too deep too soon, or suggest that I was in a hurry to conclude and go home to bed. But it didn't seem wrong to ask him point-blank if he were comfortable or to remark on his mask. His comment, "Would that you were blind, Dr. Zylstra," seemed to entitle me.
"Aren't you warm, Vyvyan?"
"Extremes of temperature affect me far less violently than they do the ordinary—the general—run of men."
"Big men usually sweat more than smaller ones." I said this in a bantering way, leaning back in my chair.
"The perspiration drops on your countenance would seem to belie that doubtful observation, Jerrold."
I wiped my face with a handkerchief. "How'd you burn yourself?"
"I beg your pardon."
"The burn mask. Was there an occupational fire? Or were you in a vehicle that rolled and burst into flame?"
"I am physically uninjured. I confess to you that I wear my hood not for any wonderful medical purpose but for concealment."
"Can't you face me without a mask? Doesn't it, uh, interpose a barrier to therapeutic intimacy?" I fisted my handkerchief.
"You are unready for the shock that would attend my unmasking."
"I'm a tough guy. I can take it." What was he trying to tell me? That he resembled the Elephant Man? That he was an AIDS patient with repulsive lesions? That his hood concealed a mangled armature of bone? True, I'd never seen a man his size before, but I doubted that any deformity he had would render me a gibbering loon.
As if mocking me, Vyvyan said, " 'Tough guys'—doctors of heart and fortitude—do not tremble before their patients."
I was trembling. Fear had laid siege to me. "I don't know about that," I said. "All I know is that tough guys—working patients—don't run from what they must face. Your hood has to come off, if not tonight then next week."
Vyvyan's phlegmy yellow eyes examined my office. "Do not famous physicians of your speciality treat a patient's existence pain while the sufferer reclines on a ... a divan?"
"A divan? Oh, you mean a couch."
"I bow to your greater knowledge."
"Freudians like that arrangement—therapist upright in a chair, patient down on the couch. I don't like it. It creates a hierarchic division on the basis of one's position in space. Up or down. High or low. And I'm no Freudian, Vyvyan."
"Do you not presently enforce a similar hierarchic division with the barricade of this desk?" He laid a mitten on it.
"I— But Vyvyan's observation was on target. I do sometimes hide behind, or draw authority from, my desk. "Do you want me to sit facing you without its protection? If you do, I will."
"What I instead propose is that you import for our next session a div—I mean, of course, a couch—for me to lie upon."
"But why? I thought—"
"To create a hierarchic division between us that will purge you of feelings of physical inferiority and thus of fear. Maskless, I would dispose myself on it so as to spare you the troublesome sight of my face."
So he planned to take off his hood. That was progress. He also had a care for my psychic health. Patients who concern themselves on first visit with
the therapist's emotional well-being are as rare as debutantes in a soup kitchen.
Vyvyan rose. My ceiling made him stoop. He withdrew a paperback book from a pocket on his duster, his mittened hand engulfing it, and placed the book on my desk. I picked it up. It was the first Signet Classic edition of Frankenstein, printed in December, 1965, with a childlike cover painting of a blurry goblinesque beast running toward the reader from a copse of moon-entangled trees. The cover's spooky blueness, and the goblin's stick-figure frailty, sent a zigzagging chill down my spine.
"That is my story," he said. "The true history of my career as an animate being—until my long sleep and my second coming."
"This," I said firmly, "is a novel."
"Nay, it is Mrs. Shelley's transcription of a narrative set down in the late seventeen hundreds by a British merchant seaman, Captain Robert Walton. Do you the needful and read it front to back before we talk again." Vyvyan turned toward my door.
"Wait." (But what to say?) "Do you need money for a cab?"
"Oh, I have fare. I husband nearly every penny I earn. But no conveyance will stop for me, especially at night, and so I must go speedily and stealthily
afoot to my warehouse apartment. Fare thee well, Jerrold, until our reunion, Thursday week."
▼▼▼
I had encountered a delusional schizophrenic with the grandiose conviction that he was the monster forged in the Gothic imagination of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley under the hands of that archetypal mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein.
Some delusional schizophrenics believe they are Jesus Christ, or Joan of Arc, or even Vladimir Lenin in silk and nylon drag. One of my most confused patients insisted that she was Imelda Marcos. I put her on medication, and she soon improved, moving from being Imelda to being Imelda's sister, then Imelda's hairdresser, then a Philippine woman with a shoe fetish, and finally herself.
Vyvyan's delusion withstood the medication on which I placed him that first week. (Vinny Fall filled the prescription and dropped it off for him at the warehouse.) I didn't know if I had prescribed an inadequate dosage for his body mass, or if he had incorporated the delusion so early in life, at such a basic psychosomatic level, that he had become what he believed.
Even I was confused. On the night he laid the book on my desk, I had
to admit that Vyvyan had all the most telling physical attributes of the manmade giant in Mrs. Shelley's "transcription." Either I must believe that he was in fact this creature, or I must assume that his physique—a coincidence arranged by a whimsical Creator?—had convinced him of his utter identity with it.
The names Vyvyan and Franklin, I saw, were obvious stand-ins for Victor and Frankenstein. But Goodloss mystified me. Was it his real family name or a sardonic one-word gloss on the spiritual serenity of which his appearance had deprived him?
Between our next session, then, I reread Frankenstein. I also ordered a couch—a huge leather chaise lounge with a plump headrest and mechanisms for raising and lowering its main cushion. To make room for it, I had my desk moved against one wall and my rubber-tree plant carted into the waiting room.
Vyvyan liked the couch. It wasn't long enough for him to lie on without placing the soles of his galoshes on the rug and crooking his knees upward, but this strange posture didn't seem to annoy or cramp him. And getting his head below mine did reduce my unease.
"The burn mask," I said.
He slipped it off. Sitting behind him, I could see only a dense curtain of greasy hair, its blackness like record vinyl and the veins of frost within it like scratches. The head was a phrenologist's wet dream, an oblate globe of bumps and declivities and ridges.
"I should look at you. Otherwise, your gesture means nothing."
"No. Refrain. It was no accident that you sat behind me. Begin you now my therapy. We have a tortuous path to traverse."
I let him have his way. Frankenstein in hand, I began asking questions, and we devoted the session to a detailed reconstruction of Vyvyan's life from the last paragraph of the "novel" to his arrival in Atlanta in the early 1970s and his employment by CargoCo Unlimited in May, 1975. A century and a half in hibernation, in an ice cave on the shore of a Norwegian island just within the Arctic Circle, account for the greatest span of this time. Then, a lightning storm awoke him. I could recount his alleged posthibernation travels, including episodes in the American Northwest when startled trappers or wildlife photographers mistook him for a bigfoot, or his harrowing adventures in the Sun Belt states, where concealment was even harder—but all that he said simply reinforced the Frankenstein delusion.
"Vyvyan, your story suggests that you've bought into a myth that negates your personhood. It relieves you of the need to take charge of your own life."
"Is the hour allotted to my therapy nearly spent?"
I checked my watch. "Yeah, I'm afraid it is."
"Do you ready yourself, then, to behold the visage that descends from and mercilessly drives this 'myth'!"
Vyvyan reared up from the couch. Straddling it backwards in an awkward stoop, he looked straight down into my eyes. I gaped. His eyes I'd already seen, but his naked face was a horror. His flesh was tissue-thin. The muscles, veins, ligaments, and bones under it shone through the mottled tissue like props behind a theater scrim. They all seemed to be ceaselessly moving. Equally alarming, Vyvyan's complexion was hideously pied. His chin was the color of uncooked liver. His lips were a moist black; his cheeks either a dull gray or the pale, pebbly yellow of chicken flesh. It was a face seemingly assembled from transparent lumps of feces-toned, blood- perfused, and fat-slimed Play-Doh. One Victor Frankenstein had conducted an insane scavenger hunt to find the needed parts. Vyvyan's head, presumably like the remainder of his body, was the three-dimensional anatomical equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle; a biological hodgepodge.
I made a bleak noise and glanced away.
"I am the very wretch whom I do swear to be. Do you believe me? Do you acknowledge aught that I have told you?"
"Yes," I said, eyes averted: the only word I could get out.
"Then you must counsel me as that weak-souled man's progeny, not merely as the helpless victim of a crude delusion. Do you agree?"
"Yes," I said.
Vyvyan Franklin Goodloss barked, "Good," and left. Huddled there with my eyes shut, I imagined him slipping with a linebacker's grace through the city's tinsel-hung side streets, an ungainly and archaic shadow against Atlanta's shimmering yuletide glitz.
▼▼▼
I dealt with Vyvyan from that session onward as if he were who he claimed to be. Heal his assumed identity (I rationalized, pretending to listen to a patient during regular office hours or lying beside my sleeping wife), and then you can destroy his grandiose masquerade and heal the obsessed pretender.
I hate lies. I hate false solutions. But with Vyvyan, I decided that indulging his foremost self-deception was the only way to pursue his therapy successfully.
▼▼▼
"You're a murderer," I said at the outset of our third session, grateful that he hadn't removed his hood until lying down.
"I have never— he began vehemently. Then a note of pleasure crept into his rumbling voice: "Yes."
"You started to deny it."
"Nay. What I had intended to deny was that I have injured anyone in my post-resurrection persona."
"But Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein accuses you of murdering three people. It implicates you in the death of two others."
"Yes." I could hear the pleasure in this admission.
"So you're a murderer, Vyvyan. Why does that amuse you?"
He sobered. "I am not entertained by the memory. It was indeed I who committed those crimes, but an 'I' deformed toward a fiendish malignity by the one who spurned and betrayed me. In that pitiable incarnation, I killed for revenge. I am no longer that self."
"Revenge is a great motive, but a lousy justification."
"How to frame this?" said Vyvyan, lifting a mittened hand. "I deplore the deaths effected in the unhappy dawn of my being, but one must own that it was a phase that I had to pursue to a cathartic end."
"Vyvyan," I rebuked him.
"I was good, but my creator and a small-minded contingent of his fellows—your fellows, Jerrold—made me bad."
"You aren't taking responsibility for—"
"Nay, my God-envying father never shouldered the responsibility for me! On the one occasion he strove to lighten my lot—not from any native altruism, but in the hope that I would absent myself from Europe and trouble him no more—he tore apart the beastly Eve that he was creating for my solace. Speak not of my culpability! Despise the failed Monster Builder of Ingolstadt for his!"
Vyvyan sobbed deep in his barrel-like chest. For reassurance, I touched the pistol under my jacket. Still, I had no confidence that if his hatred of his father, and of humanity in general, provoked an attack on me, mere bullets would turn or even slow him.
"For months, he labored over me," Vyvyan raged. "For weeks, he perforce gazed down on my pied and uncomely countenance. How did it happen that only after the primordial life force racked my frame and kindled a rheumy vision in my eyes, this master scientist—this Promethean genius
—saw in me a contemptible monstrosity? Had he labored on me blind? Had he reasoned that, upon awakening, I would plastically transform myself into a voluptuous Cleopatra? Had he, in spite of his Daedalian skills and the overweening ambition of a Roman general, the brain of a pismire and the imagination of a blowfly? Do you now apply yourself to these questions! Do you now confess that I am the unfortunate handiwork of a megalomaniacal halfwit!"
We got little further that night than this denunciation of Victor Frankenstein. If I acknowledged that Vyvyan was the unnatural child of the Swiss chemist (which I did), then I could see the justice of his heartfelt tirade.
I tried to find ore in another vein: "Vyvyan, tell me about your name. Isn't it a variety of falsehood?"
"Falsehood?"
"I mean, it isn't really your name. It's an invention, a game you've played with your creator's initials and also your day-to-day struggle with existence pain."
"Forgive me my presumptuousness, but every name is an invention. Where I part with the general run of humanity is in the demoralizing circumstance that no parent bestowed mine. I had, myself, to invent it. Therefore, I do not regard it as either temporary or deceitful. It is my name as surely, perhaps more surely, as Jerrold Zylstra is yours, for I freely fashioned and self-bestowed it."
"All right. I see."
"Vyvyan means 'living.' Franklin magnanimously honors the father who denied me. Would you prefer me to answer to perjorative epithets like 'monster,' 'fiend,' or 'demon'?"
"Of course not. And Goodloss? Does it reflect the existential irony that I at first supposed?"
"Perhaps. It additionally means that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is my sister. . . ."
▼▼▼
Why had Vyvyan taken to howling in the cavernous solitude of the CargoCo warehouse? After all, if not for this howling, he would not have become my patient.
"I did not realize that this behavior had commenced," he said. "I howled utterly heedless that I was thus sorrowfully engaged."
The Ultimate Frankenstein Page 5
