by Melanie Tem
Someone came anyway. There were purposeful footsteps and harsh, rapid breathing. Mary tried to speak her relief and gratitude, and to tell what it was she wanted. For some reason, she was afraid. For some reason, she was weeping, and she herself could scarcely make sense of the guttural sounds that came from her throat.
It was not kind Jane come to do her bidding, nor her son. It was not Shelley at her door, inside her cold room with the sunrise, at her deathbed, although she had more than half expected him as guide. It was not any of the spectral women who had appeared to her earlier. She knew, suddenly, who it was.
“Monster!” she whispered, and knew that no one listening would comprehend the greeting.
It was her Monster, first given form in that long-ago, tumultuous, companionable summer at Diodati when everything had seemed possible if only fate could be avoided. Death and grief, then, had been mere words, with no true echo in her heart, although she, like the others, had thought she knew all the grand emotions of the world. After the first nightmare and the subsequent fugue-like fever of creation, Mary had come to think of the Monster as idle, foolish fancy, nothing more than a toy of a girl’s Imagination. Now here it was, more real than she was; she was aware of an odd tingling sensation in the parts of her body that had been paralyzed by the touch of her mother’s shade, and of a terrifying warmth in the icy region around her heart.
The Monster made as if to touch her, to caress or attack. Mary tried to shrink away, but the Monster was very close, as if their feet were attached, or the tops of their heads, or—like the infant Siamese twins she and Shelley had seen in a traveling freakshow one autumn in Genoa—their breastbones, sharing one swollen heart.
Mary rubbed her eyes with her right fist and tried clumsily to shake her head. Although the light in the room was steadily growing brighter as the sun rose over ice, she could hardly see. But the peculiar and oddly familiar odor of the Monster overlay the old-woman’s-sickroom smell, a mix of acrid human sweat and chemical bitterness unexpectedly, disorientingly, lightened by a flowery fragrance.
She stared, and the Monster took form before her. The boundaries of her body were no longer clear. The Monster was so near to her now that it might have been inside her.
As always, the limbs of the Monster were perfectly proportioned, the features beautiful. Cumbersomely, Mary surveyed her own body and visualized her own face, first as in a mirror and then from the inside out. She had always thought of herself as plain, and years without Shelley had made her ugly; although she could not specify an appendage or a feature out of place, she had long thought of herself as deformed.
The pearly yellow skin of the Monster lightly, almost delicately covered the network underneath of muscles and arteries. Mary was able to lift her right hand enough to inspect it. Her own skin was grayish, wrinkled, mottled, stretched too tightly in some spots and hanging loosely in others; the underlying bone structure and pattern of blood vessels looked wrong, as though they could not possibly function, and, indeed, on the other, distant side of her body they no longer did.
The creature’s hair was lustrous black, and flowing. Mary twisted her head crookedly on the hot pillow, and remembered that her own hair was tangled, dirty, dulled by age and sickness and too much sorrow.
All these characteristics of the Monster were familiar to her. She remembered dreaming them, imagining them, writing them down, reading them aloud to her appreciative if somewhat distracted first audience. But there was something new this time. Creation, once turned loose upon her chaos, had not stopped. Horror had vivified. During its ice-bound exile the Monster had changed much as she had changed; its long period of corruption had dropped its disguise and exposed an entirely new face. The mask of the Monster had rotted away. Shelley’s heart must have always known:
… he hath awakened from the dream of life …
Now she knew what had always been true: her Monster was female. She had not created the pendulous breasts, the delicate hands, the shadowy and concave region between the thighs; she would never have been able to bring herself to allow such thoughts into her mind, much less to set them down on paper or, dear God, read them aloud to the three intense young men who had not in the first place truly regarded women as real. But her Monster was and had always been female, a woman like herself, and Mary did not know how she could bear this revelation.
And she knew why the Monster had come to her now. If she did not somehow protect Shelley’s heart, the Monster—her own orphaned creation, the one so long denied—would discover and devour it, would claim it as her own. But how could one protect a heart?
“Go away from me!” It was more a wail than a shout, more a plea than a command.
The Monster drew back a little, her beautiful face contorted with the bitterness of the eternal outcast. Mary had imagined that the Monster’s face would look like that to Victor Frankenstein but she had never expected herself to be the agent of such unhappiness. She knew her own features were twisted, too, and she could not smooth them anymore.
“Why are you here? Why have you come to me now?” It was a senseless question, for she knew the answer, but she held her breath painfully for the other’s reply.
“You summoned me,” the creature said, and Mary recognized the voice as more like hers than hers was now.
She did not deny it. “Go away, then. I have changed my mind.”
“I have nowhere else to go. I belong to you. I am your creature. No one else will have me.”
“I will not have you, either, you hideous thing.” Her own cruelty amazed her and was, she saw, utterly ineffectual.
“I am your creature.” The Monster pounded her chest. “And I am empty. I am in need of…” She stopped, her neck turning awkwardly as she gazed about Mary’s room.
Mary stopped herself from finishing the plea, and said instead, audaciously, “Bring me that bound poem on the mantel, then. There is a linen-wrapped parcel inside. Bring me my husband’s heart.”
Her Monster smiled in childlike pleasure at being asked to do something for her, and Mary’s stomach turned. The Monster did not seem surprised by the request, or in the least confused. She turned stiffly and made her way directly to the mantel, her strides much longer than Mary’s would have been so that she crossed the room in two steps. Her hands around the bundle were steady; Mary could hardly bear to see them there and, indeed, could see only their outline in the icy brightness of the room.
The Monster lifted the package from the mantel, pivoted, and brought it to her. Mary could raise only one hand to take it and the Monster would not release it to her, as if knowing she would drop it and the contents would spill. She bent from the waist and set the bundle on Mary’s lap. It was remarkably light. That was distressing. Poems should be heavy, Mary thought, and Imagination. Shelley’s heart should be heaviest of all.
My spirit’s bark is driven far from the shore …
Mary fumbled with the brittle pages of the “Adonais.” The beautiful lines tore beneath her trembling fingers and she wept.… fed with true love tears instead of dew …
The linen bindings were stiff and tight from the years, and with only one hand she had no hope of manipulating them. One with trembling hands clasps his cold head …
The Monster put her hand over Mary’s and Mary recoiled, but she was held fast, and the Monster’s longer, stronger fingers pried apart the linen, carrying Mary’s fingers with them like shadows. A tear some dream has loosened from his brain.
Mary could not see inside the stiff old cloth. Its shadows had deepened, its wrinkles roughened. Her probing fingers felt nothing but grit and dust. She looked at her Monster, and for a long moment they were both motionless and silent. Grief returns with the revolving year …
Mary cried out. The Monster cried out. The cloth was empty. Shelley’s heart was gone.
Mary scrambled for an explanation. Perhaps the heart had never been there. Perhaps Hunt, aided by her own mad fantasies, had tricked her, or Trelawney been crazed by his own grief;
perhaps all these years she had kept herself in the unmindful presence of an empty piece of cloth.
More likely, the heart had simply disintegrated. Like everything else in her life, it had likely faded away from her, been reclaimed, altered its form and substance so thoroughly that she couldn’t recognize it anymore. The Monster was weeping, her hot tears melting Mary’s flesh.
Or someone had taken it.
Mary and her Monster shrieked at each other at the same time, “You have stolen the heart!”
The Monster’s hands came around Mary’s throat. The powerful thumbs pressed into her vocal chords so that she had no hope of crying out. The Monster’s frenzied thoughts exploded in her own brain, and her whole body was paralyzed now, although she seemed to be moving very fast. Her heart was being consumed by the Monster’s flame, as Shelley’s had not been; there was a curious sensation of wholeness and warmth. As she hurtled into the dark caverns of this new journey, her Monster came with her, holding high the torch.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley died in her London residence on the first day of February, 1851. Paralysis had set in during the last month of her illness. She was buried at St. Peter’s Church, Bournemouth, in a tomb with her father William Godwin, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Shelley’s heart.
MASK OF THE HERO
—for Mark
Mark wasn’t sure they were dreams.
He did not, in fact, believe they were dreams, although he knew everyone else would think so. They came to him at night when he was asleep, pretending to be dreams, but when he woke himself up and turned on the bedside light, got to his feet and walked around his room, they were still there. Grinning at him. Nodding at him. Weeping. Snarling. Crowding around him.
Masks.
Bodiless heads.
Bodies without spirits. Or, he thought, spirits without bodies.
They always made an eerie sound, a humming on the very edge of what he could hear, sometimes high-pitched and thin as a hair, sometimes full-bodied and low. The music always came to him before the masks did and lingered long after they’d disappeared. By the time he was eighteen years old, Mark was hearing the music almost all the time.
Sometimes he’d reach out in an attempt to touch the masks. When he was a child, he’d thought they were toys, or friends, or monsters come to eat him alive, or the faces of his parents whom he remembered so dimly he thought they probably had been dreams, too. Sometimes he did touch the masks—the corner of one’s eye, or the mouth hole. When that happened, both the mask in his hand and his hand on the mask showed themselves to be made of small bits and pieces, building blocks, he supposed they were molecules—smaller hands, smaller and smaller masks.
When the masks disappeared altogether, as they always did, without revealing what was behind them, Mark would raise his hands to touch his own face. Every time, his face came off, peeled away. Sometimes the pain made him cry out, and sometimes there was no pain. Either way, no one heard him. Then he would hold his face in his hands for as long as he could while the music hummed high and low.
By the time he was eighteen, Mark had come to think of himself secretly as the Prince of Masks.
In the real world, which didn’t always seem very real to him, Mark went to school, went to work, went home to the group home. Now and then he fell in love with a girl, but he always talked too much or didn’t talk enough or said the wrong thing. At school he had to think about things that really weren’t very important. He could get interested in a poem or a science experiment, but then he’d find he’d discover hidden meanings in the way the words were used, secret questions in the data so that when the experiment was finished you had hundreds more hypotheses to test than when you’d started. A few teachers tried to talk to him about what he was going to do when he graduated; sometimes Mark thought about nothing else, and sometimes he couldn’t bring himself to think about it at all.
The group home was okay. Although none of the counselors understood him, most of them were kind, and although the other boys weren’t his friends he didn’t have any trouble with them as long as he stayed away from them. There were times, though—across the dinner table, watching the game on TV in the living room, shooting pool in the basement—when he’d look up and see the masks they were all wearing.
One wore a mask of a wolf, which showed he couldn’t be trusted. Another wore a mask of a bird with lifted feathers; she was gone in a week. They all thought they were wearing masks to conceal their real selves, but Mark was the Prince of Masks and he knew that the masks revealed who they really were.
Then their faces would go back to normal. The wolf-man would be just some guy who thought he was cool, baring his pretty white teeth in a smile that was supposed to be friendly but made Mark sick. The bird-lady would be looking down in a way that was supposed to keep people from hurting her or she would fly away. As far as Mark knew, nobody hurt her here, but she flew away anyway.
Mark’s job as a bicycle messenger took him to parts of the city he’d never known existed and brought him into contact with people he would never have met. He got lost a lot; he was sure he was going to get fired. Almost every day he came close to having an accident; he’d be riding along as fast as he could, zipping through crowds waiting for the bus, leaping over curbs, and suddenly there’d be a car right in front of him or an old lady slowly pulling a two-wheeled cart with grocery sacks in it. Mark would swerve and drag his heels to stop, and the driver would blast the horn or the old lady would glare at him over her shoulder, and Mark would see that they were wearing masks.
On the Sixteenth Street Mall one afternoon, a lady in a gray business suit and carrying a briefcase waited with him at a corner. Mark was thinking about quarterback Joe Montana, who never felt out of place, who belonged in this world, ruled this world. It was a long light. The lady half-turned toward him, the sunshine struck her face from a different angle, and Mark saw her mask. She lifted her hand as though to smooth her hair, which hadn’t moved at all in the slight breeze, but instead she slipped her oval pink nails under the edge of her mask, peeled it off, and put it into her briefcase. The face underneath was rosy and younger; with it, she smiled at Mark as though they shared a secret now, and then the light changed and he lost her in the rush hour crowd.
“Hey, kid,” said a man in a dirty flannel shirt, stepping in front of him as he went up the steps of an office building he’d finally found on Champa Street. “Spare a quarter for the bus?”
Mark gave him a quarter, even though he couldn’t spare it. The bum grinned at him and held out his hand. Not knowing what else to do, Mark took it. The bum shook his hand hard and for a long time, and when he finally let go he left a tiny mask in the cup of Mark’s palm, a mask so tiny that it had no features except glittery little eyes.
Mark had been thinking about Diana, whether she was really going to break up with Rick, and he didn’t know what to do about the mask in his hand. The bum was shuffling off down the sidewalk now, muttering to himself and looking for somebody else to hit up for “bus money.” Finally, Mark rubbed his hand on his jeans and the mask fell off onto the concrete like a fingernail paring or a piece of his own skin. He wondered what the man would leave in the hand of the next stranger who didn’t just ignore him or tell him to go to hell.
Mark’s boss was Dave, a tall man with many chins. Dave always hired boys from the group home, so you were representing the whole program every day you went to work, and he talked loudly about how he was giving these boys a chance to turn their lives around. He also talked loudly about why he fired them, so Mark knew that Jake had stolen money and Bobby had gotten high on his lunch break and it had turned out that Kevin couldn’t read so he’d delivered stuff to all the wrong addresses. Kevin had only lasted three days. Mark wondered what Dave was saying about him. He did get lost a lot, because he’d be thinking about Diana or about Joe Montana or about what he was going to do when he emancipated from the group home next summer. Also because sometimes when he looked at the l
etters on street signs or the numbers on buildings all he could see was that they were symbols for something else, codes, masks over some other meaning that he couldn’t grasp anymore.
It took several months for Mark to get a look at Dave’s mask. The man smiled a lot. He clapped your shoulder and said your name a lot. He thought his mask of friendliness hid how he really felt about the boys from the group home, but the open mouth and squinty eyes and puffed-out cheeks just accentuated his contempt. Realizing that each of Dave’s chins was the chin of a mask, Mark wondered how far down you’d have to go to get to the face.
“Hey, son, how ya doin’?” Dave greeted him when he came in one chilly Saturday morning.
“Okay.”
“Got a LoDo run for you. Warehouse down there under the 23rd Street Viaduct. Think you can find it?”
“Sure,” Mark said, although he’d never been into Lower Downtown, had no idea where 23rd Street was, and didn’t know what the term “viaduct” meant. The package to be delivered was an oversized manila envelope, very lightweight and a little stiff.
The downtown streets weren’t busy on a Saturday morning. Mark pedaled briskly along the Mall through the crisp sunshine and shadows, weaving among the mostly-deserted benches and empty waist-high flowerpots. He was nervous about finding this place. He was nervous about what to do now that Diana had broken up with Rick and was obviously expecting him to ask her out; he really didn’t think they had very much in common, although he often fantasized about marrying her, making love to her, spending the rest of his life with her. He was nervous about what he’d do when he emancipated, where he’d live, how he’d support himself, whether he’d ever have any friends. There was a guy playing saxophone in the streaked shadow of the bank building with all the black glass; as Mark went past he nodded, and his horn glinted sweetly, and Mark didn’t see any evidence of a mask. Maybe, he thought, the music was a mask, concealing and revealing the guy’s true self.
