The Ultimate Frankenstein

by Byron Preiss (ed)

  "I asked first," I shouted, thinking, Jesus, I sound like a ten-year-old kid.

  "Of course not! She had problems, all right? Expensive problems. But she was beautiful, mm-mm, good enough to eat."

  I looked wildly around. Mr. Therapist was still dozing—fabulous way to earn a thousand bucks an hour—and the others had broken up into little groups. Janine was sort of listening, but she was more interested in getting her suntan lotion on evenly.

  "I want to go back," I said. "I want to see Keo again."

  "Totally, like, bullshit," she said, sidling up to me. "You're just, like, externalizing the interior hurt onto a fantasy-object. Like, you need to be in touch with your child, know what I mean?"

  "You're getting your support groups muddled up, hon," Mike said edgily.

  "Hey, Russ, instead of, like, projecting on some past-forgettable female two years back and ten thousand miles away, why don't you, like, fixate on someone a little closer to home? I mean, I've been looking at you. I only joined this support group cause like, support groups are the only place you can find like sensitive guys."

  "Janine, I'm married."

  "So let's have an affair."

  I liked the idea. My marriage to Trisha had mostly been a joke: I'd needed a fresh ornament for cocktail parties and openings; she needed security. We hadn't had much sex; how could we? I was hooked on memory. Perhaps this woman would cure me. And I wanted to be cured so badly because Mike's story had jolted me out of the fantasy that Keo had existed only for me.

  By now it was the 90s, so Janine insisted on a blood test before we did anything. I tested positive. I was scared shitless. Because the only time I'd ever been so careless as to forget to use a condom was . . . that night. And we'd done everything. Plumbed every orifice. Shared every fluid.

  It had been a dance of transformation all right.

  ▼▼▼

  I had nothing to lose. I divorced my wife and sent my kids to an even more expensive school in Connecticut. I was feeling fine. Maybe I'd never come down with anything. I read all the books and articles about it. I didn't tell anyone. I packed a couple of suits and some casual clothes and a supply of bootleg AZT. I was feeling fine. Fine, I told myself. Fine.

  I took the next flight to Bangkok.

  The company was surprised to see me, but I was such a big executive by now they assumed I was doing some kind of internal troubleshooting. They put me up at the Oriental. They gave me a 10,000 baht per diem. In Bangkok you can buy a lot for four hundred bucks. I told them to leave me alone. The investigation didn't concern them. They didn't know what I was investigating, so they feared the worst.

  I went to Silom Road, where Club Pagoda had stood. It was gone. In its stead stood a brand new McDonalds and an airline ticket office. Perhaps Keo was already dead. Wasn't that what I had smelled on her? The odor of crushed flowers, wilting . . . the smell of coming death? And the passion with which she made love. I understood it now. It was the passion of the damned. She had reached out to me from a place between life and death. She had sucked the life from me and given me the virus as a gift of love.

  I strolled through Patpong. Hustlers tugged at my elbows. Fake Rolexes were flashed in my face. It was useless to ask for Keo. There are a million women named Keo. Keo means jewel. It also means glass. In Thai there are many words that are used indiscriminately for reality and artifice. I didn't have a photograph and Keo's beauty was hard to describe. And every girl in Patpong is beautiful. Every night, parading before me in the neon labyrinth, a thousand pairs of lips and eyes, sensuous and infinitely giving. The wrong lips, the wrong eyes.

  There are only a few city blocks in Patpong, but to trudge up and down them in the searing heat, questioning, observing every face for a trace of the remembered grail ... it can age you. I stopped shaving and took recreational drugs. What did it matter anyway?

  But I was still fine, I wasn't coming down with anything.

  I was fine. Fine!

  And then, one day, while paying for a Big Mac, I saw her hands. I was looking down at the counter counting out the money. I heard the computer beep of the cash register and then I saw them: proffering the hamburger in both hands, palms up, like an offering to the gods. The fingers arched upwards, just so, with delicacy and hidden strength. God, I knew those hands. Their delicacy as they skimmed my shoulder blades, as they glided across my testicles just a hair's breadth away from touching. Their strength when she balled up her fist and shoved it into my rectum. Jesus, we'd done everything that night. I dropped my wallet on the counter, I seized those hands and gripped them, burger and all, and I felt the familiar response. Oh, God, I ached.

  "Mister, you want a blowjob?"

  It wasn't her voice. I looked up. It wasn't even a woman.

  I looked back down at the hands. I looked up at the face. They didn't even belong together. It was a pockmarked boy and when he talked to me he stared off into space. There was no relation between the vacuity of his expression and the passion with which those hands caressed my hands.

  "I don't like to do such thing," he said, "but I'm a poor college student and I needing money. So you can come back after 5 p.m. You not be disappointed."

  The fingers kneaded my wrists with the familiarity of one who has touched every part of your body, who has memorized the varicose veins in your left leg and the mole on your right testicle.

  It was obscene. I wrenched my own hands free. I barely remembered to retrieve my wallet before I ran out into the street.

  ▼▼▼

  I had been trying to find Dr. Frances Stone since I arrived, looking through the files at the corporate headquarters, screaming at secretaries. Although the corporation had funded Dr. Stone's project, the records seemed to have been spirited away.

  At last I realized that that was the wrong way to go about it. I remembered what Mike had told me, so the day after the encounter with Keo's hands, I was back in Patpong, asking around for a good V.D. clinic. The most highly regarded one of all turned out to be at the corner of Patpong and Soi Cowboy, above a store that sold pirated software and videotapes.

  I walked up a steep staircase into a tiny room without windows, with a ceiling fan moving the same sweaty air around and around. A receptionist smiled at me. Her eyes had the same vacuity that the boy at McDonalds had possessed. I sat in an unraveling rattan chair and waited, and Dr. Stone summoned me into her office.

  "You've done something with her," I said.

  "Yes." She was shuffling a stack of papers. She had a window; she had an air conditioner blasting away in the direction of all the computers. I was still drenched with sweat.

  The phone rang and she had a brief conversation in Thai that I couldn't catch. "You're angry, of course," she said, putting down the phone. "But it was better than nothing. Better than the cold emptiness of the earth. And she had nothing to lose."

  "She was dying of AIDS! And now I have it!" It was the first time I'd allowed the word to cross my lips. "You killed me!"

  Frances laughed. "My," she said, "aren't we being a little melodramatic? You have the virus, but you haven't actually come down with anything."

  "I'm fine. Fine."

  "Well, why don't you sit down. I'll order up some food. We'll talk."

  She had really gone native. In Thailand it's rude to talk business without ordering up food. Sullenly I sat down while she opened a window and yelled out an order to one of the street vendors.

  "To be honest, Mr. Leibowitz," she said, "we really could use another grant. We had to spend so much of the last one on cloak-and-dagger nonsense, security, bribes, and so on; so little could be spared for research itself ... I mean, look around you . . . I'm not exactly wasting money on luxurious office space, am I?"

  "I saw her hands."

  "Very effective, wasn't it?" The food arrived. It was some kind of noodle thing wrapped in banana leaves and groaning from the weight of chili peppers. She did not eat; instead, she amused herself by rearranging the peppers in the shape of . . . "
The hands, I mean. Beautiful as ever. Vibrant. Sensual. My first breakthrough."

  I started shaking again. I'd read about Dr. Stone's great-grandfather and his graverobbing experiments. Jigsaw corpses brought to life with bolts of lightning. Not life. A simulacrum of life. Could this have happened to Keo? But she was dying. Perhaps it was better than nothing. Perhaps . . .

  "Anyhow. I was hoping you'd arrive soon, Mr. Leibowitz. Because we've made up another grant proposal. I have the papers here. I know that you've become so important now that your signature alone will suffice to bring us ten times the amount you authorized two years ago."

  "I want to see her."

  "Would you like to dance with her? Would you like to see her in the Chui Chai one more time?"

  ▼▼▼

  She led me down a different stairwell. Many flights. I was sure we were below ground level. I knew we were getting nearer to Keo because there was a hint of that rotting flower fragrance in the air. We descended. There was an unnatural chill.

  And then, at last, we reached the laboratory. No shambling Igors or bubbling retorts. Just a clean, well-lit basement room. Cold, like the vault of a morgue. Walls of white tile; ceiling of stucco; fluorescent lamps; the pervasive smell of the not-quite-dead.

  Perspex tanks lined the walls. They were full of fluid and body parts. Arms and legs floating past me. Torsos twirled. A woman's breast peered from between a child's thighs. In another tank, human hearts swirled, each neatly severed at the aorta. There was a tank of eyes. Another of genitalia. A necklace of tongues hung suspended in a third. A mass of intestines writhed in a fourth. Computers drew intricate charts on a bank of monitors. Oscilloscopes beeped. A pet gibbon was chained to a post topped by a human skull. There was something so outlandishly antiseptic about this spectacle that I couldn't feel the horror.

  "I'm sorry about the decor, Russell, but you see, we've had to forgo the usual decoration allowance." The one attempt at dressing up the place was a frayed poster of Young Frankenstein tacked to the far wall. "Please don't be upset at all the body parts," she added. "It's all very macabre, but one gets inured to it in med school; if you feel like losing your lunch, there's a small restroom on your left . . . yes, between the eyes and the tongues." I did not feel sick. I was feeling . . . excited. It was the odor. I knew I was getting closer to Keo.

  She unlocked another door. We stepped into an inner room.

  Keo was there. A cloth was draped over her, but seeing her face after all these years made my heart almost stop beating. The eyes. The parted lips. The hair, streaming upward toward a source of blue light . . . although I felt no wind in the room. "It is an electron wind," said Dr. Stone. "No more waiting for the monsoon lightning. We can get more power from a wall socket than great-grandfather Victor could ever dream of stealing from the sky."

  And she laughed the laughter of mad scientists.

  I saw the boy from McDonalds sitting in a chair. The hands reached out toward me. There were electrodes fastened to his temples. He was naked now, and I saw the scars where the hands had been joined at the wrists to someone else's arms. I saw a woman with Keo's breasts, wired to a pillar of glass, straining, heaving while jags of blue lightning danced about her bonds. I saw her vagina stitched onto the pubis of a dwarf, who lay twitching at the foot of the pillar. Her feet were fastened to the body of a five-year-old boy, transforming their grace to ungainliness as he stomped in circles around the pillar.

  "Jigsaw people!" I said.

  "Of course!" said Dr. Stone. "Do you think I would be so foolish as to bring back people whole? Do you not realize what the consequences would be? The legal redefinition of life and death . . . wills declared void, humans made subservient to walking corpses . . . I'm a scientist, not a philosopher."

  "But who are they now?"

  "They were nobody before. Street kids. Prostitutes. They were dying, Mr. Leibowitz, dying! They were glad to will their bodies to me. And now they're more than human. They're many persons in many bodies. A ge- stalt. I can shuffle them and put them back together, oh, so many different ways . . . and the beautiful Keo. Oh, she wept when she came to me. When she found out she had given you the virus. She loved you. You were the last person she ever loved. I saved her for you. She's been sleeping here, waiting to dance for you, since the day she died. Oh, let us not say died. The day she . . . she ... I am no poet, Mr. Leibowitz. Just a scientist."

  I didn't want to listen to her. All I could see was Keo's face. It all came back to me. Everything we had done. I wanted to relive it. I didn't care if she was dead or undead. I wanted to seize the grail and clutch it in my hands and own it.

  Frances threw a switch. The music started. The shrilling of the pinai, the pounding of the taphon, the tinkling of marimbas and xylophones rang in the Chui Chai music. Then she slipped away unobtrusively. I heard a key turn in a lock. She had left the grant contract lying on the floor. I was alone with all the parts of the woman I'd loved. Slowly I walked toward the draped head. The electron wind surged; the cold blue light intensified. Her eyes opened. Her lips moved as though discovering speech for the first time. . . .

  "Rus . . . sell."

  On the pizzafaced boy, the hands stirred of their own accord. He turned his head from side to side and the hands groped the air, straining to touch my face. Keo's lips were dry. I put my arms around the drape-shrouded body and kissed the dead mouth. I could feel my hair stand on end.

  "I see big emptiness inside you. Come to me. I fill you. We both empty people. Need filling up."

  "Yes. Jesus, yes."

  I hugged her to me. What I embraced was cold and prickly. I whisked away the drape. There was no body. Only a framework of wires and transistors and circuit boards and tubes that fed flasks of flaming reagents.

  "I dance for you now."

  I turned. The hands of the McDonald's boy twisted into graceful patterns. The feet of the child moved in syncopation to the music, dragging the rest of the body with them. The breasts of the chained woman stood firm, waiting for my touch. The music welled up. A contralto voice spun plaintive melismas over the interlocking rhythms of wood and metal. I kissed her. I kissed that severed head and lent my warmth to the cold tongue, awakened passion in her. I kissed her. I could hear chains breaking and wires slithering along the floortiles. There were hands pressed into my spine, rubbing my neck, unfastening my belt. A breast touched my left buttock and a foot trod lightly on my right. I didn't care that these parts were attached to other bodies. They were hers. She was loving me all over. The dwarf that wore her pudenda was climbing up my leg. Every part of her was in love with me. Oh, she danced. We danced together. I was the epicenter of their passion. We were empty people but now we drank our fill. Oh, God, we danced. Oh, it was a grave music, but it contented us.

  And I signed everything, even the codicil.

  ▼▼▼

  Today I am in the AIDS ward of a Beverly Hills hospital. I don't have long to wait. Soon the codicil will come into effect, and my body will be preserved in liquid nitrogen and shipped to Patpong.

  The nurses hate to look at me. They come at me with rubber gloves on so I won't contaminate them, even though they should know better. My insurance policy has disowned me. My children no longer write me letters, though I've paid for them to go to Ivy League colleges. Trisha comes by sometimes. She is happy that we rarely made love.

  One day I will close my eyes and wake up in a dozen other bodies. I will be closer to her than I could ever be in life. In life we are all islands. Only in Dr. Stone's laboratory can we know true intimacy, the mind of one commanding the muscles of another and causing the nerves of a third to tingle with unnamable desires. I hope I shall die soon.

  The living dead are not as you imagine them. There are no dangling innards, no dripping slime. They carry their guts and gore inside them, as do you and I. In the right light they can be beautiful, as when they stand in the cold luminescence of a basement laboratory, waiting for an electron stream to lend them the illusion of lif
e. Fueled by the right fantasy, they become indistinguishable from us. Listen. I know. I've loved them.

  I, MONSTER

  Loren D. Estleman

  ▼▼▼

  I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.

  —The Monster

  IT WAS all so deadly familiar.

  The farmers and innkeepers and harness-makers and their mad wives armed with torches and pitchforks, yammering like red Indians in the demented courage of the pack, the great wrinkled baying hounds loping clumsily, black lips skinned back from parchment-colored fangs as they tore at my tendons, drawing blood on every third lunge, the onlookers too cowardly even to join the mob shrieking orgasmically for my eyes and entrails; and I, the fistulous towering ogre of the collective carnal nightmare, lashed to a great makeshift wooden cross like some mutant Christ, borne straining and bellowing and pitching on a hydrophobic sea toward my fate in the puddle of light in the center of the arena.

  Really, things were getting out of hand. The dogs at least would have to go. Most of the profits were tied up in bandages and iodine.

  ▼▼▼

  I didn't build a pyre.

  Those who have read Robert Walton's letters to his sister recounting details of the polar voyage that brought him into contact with Victor Frankenstein, published as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, will recall that I took my leave of the explorer, and of Frankenstein's corpse still warm upon the deck, with a pledge to remove myself from this plane through a conflagration. I did not lie, but neither did I carry out that design.

  So efficient was the process of thought in the brain which my mortal creator in his fiendish perfectionism had selected, that I had decided against death by fire almost before I left that ice-locked vessel. What was burning but ordinary destruction for the most hideously extraordinary being in the history of the world? Had I journeyed all this way to the earth's ceiling in search of a venue unlike all others only to end my wretched existence in the same manner that fishwives employed to dispose of their kitchen refuse? The answer, shouted back at me mockingly by the frozen cliffs, was a resounding negative.