Frankissstein

by Jeanette Winterson

You are also a human being. (Stroke my hair.)

  That is a stage on the way for you …

  He puts his arms around me. Holds me close. He smells of basil and lime. He says, What does it matter? Humans evolved. Humans are evolving. The only difference here is that we are a thinking and designing part of our own evolution. Time – evolutionary time – is speeding up. We’re not waiting for Mother Nature any more. We all have to grow up. Even an entire species has to grow up. It’s not survival of the fittest – it’s survival of the smartest. We are the smartest. No other species can tinker with its own destiny. And you, Ry, gorgeous boy/girl, whatever you are, you had a sex change. You chose to intervene in your own evolution. You accelerated your portfolio of possibilities. That attracts me. How could it not? You are both exotic and real. The here and now, and a harbinger of the future.

  I want to argue, but he excites me, and I want him.

  Now it’s my turn to use him. I like him half-hard against my 2-inch clitoris. I ride above him, looking at the gorilla buying the banana. My orgasms still happen in waves, like a woman’s, not in explosions, like a man’s, and they last longer than his. When I first started taking testosterone in the doses that would change me, my orgasms were painful, too intense, too short and uncontrollable, like being hit. I tried to avoid them, and couldn’t. The drive for sex was too strong. Gradually that balanced again. But I still want it/need it. And with him.

  I’m coming against him. The semi-blackout. The seconds of the sex-drug. I forget myself. I move on him, softer now, pushing out the last of the direct sensation.

  I like your dick, I tell him. You’ll miss it when you’re just a brain in a box.

  I’ll miss it or you’ll miss it? He pushes me off and tucks himself neatly into his trousers, adjusting to the left. He says, Sex happens in the head.

  You could have fooled me. I thought it was happening in your dick.

  Pleasure receptors can be anywhere, he said. Even for a brain in a box.

  OK. Let’s imagine that’s what you are, just for a game, I said, what body would you choose for yourself, in order to experience the world?

  He says, I like being in a male body. I wouldn’t change that – at least not until I don’t need a body at all. But if I do have one, well, the one modification I would make: I would prefer to have wings.

  I try not to laugh but I can’t help it.

  Wings? Like an angel?

  Yes, like an angel. Imagine the power of it. Imagine the presence of it.

  What colour wings?

  Not gold! I’d look like Liberace. I’m not gay.

  Is that right? I said, squeezing his balls.

  I am not gay, he said, any more than you are.

  I don’t think of myself as part of the binary, I said.

  You’re not. He shook his head.

  No, I’m not. But you are. Wings or no wings, angel or human, you don’t want to be gay, do you, Victor?

  He goes to comb his hair in the mirror on the wall. He doesn’t like this conversation. He says, It’s not about what I want – like buying a new car. It’s about who I am – identity. We make love, and you don’t feel like a man to me when we make love.

  How would you know? You haven’t made love to a man … have you?

  He doesn’t answer.

  Anyway, I say, I look like a man.

  He smiles at me in the mirror. I can see myself behind him in the mirror too. We are a pose.

  He says, You look like a boy who’s a girl who’s a girl who’s a boy.

  Maybe I do (I know I do), but when we are out together, like it or not, as far as the world is concerned, you are out with a man.

  You don’t have a penis.

  You sound like Ron Lord!

  That reminds me – I need to call him. Listen, I have said this before but I will say it again – if you did have a penis, then what happened between us in the shower in Arizona …

  And after the shower when you fucked me …

  He puts his finger to my lips to shush me. Would never have happened.

  He walks to the coffee machine and starts fiddling with the water container.

  I said, If the body is provisional, interchangeable, even, why does it matter so much what I am?

  He didn’t answer. He had his head in the cupboard looking for Nespresso pods. I didn’t want to let him off the hook.

  I said, So, Victor, if I decide to have lower surgery and come home with a dick of my own, you’re saying that you won’t want me?

  He stood up, turned towards me.

  Five hundred a year and a dick of my own …

  What are you talking about, Victor?

  You are so ill-read, he said. I suppose it’s because you did science.

  You did science!

  I’m teasing you, Ry. You don’t read. I like reading. It’s the only way to understand what is happening in programming. It is as though we are fulfilling something that has been foretold. The shape-shifting. The disembodied future. Eternal life. The all–powerful gods not subject to the decay of nature.

  Oh, shut up, you wanker! I was trying to say something real.

  He ignored me. He said, So, to be specific (he wasn’t going to shut up), Virginia Woolf wrote an essay titled A Room of One’s Own. She argued that to fulfil their creativity, women need their own room and their own money.

  She’s right, I said.

  Did you know, said Victor, that she wrote the first trans novel too? It’s called Orlando. I’ll buy it for you in a lovely hardback edition.

  You think I’m a toy, don’t you?

  I don’t know what I think. I told you that the first time in Arizona; you have unbalanced the equation.

  What equation?

  My equation.

  I don’t say anything because he is the centre of his world. I have affected him and he never wonders how he has affected me. He is in control of what he creates. He hasn’t created me and so he feels uncertain.

  Then his shoulders sag. He looks lost, hunted; he actually looks over his sagging shoulder, at the door, as though he expects … What?

  He says, And yet I do love you! It won’t last but it is now. Yes, it is real. Yes, it is now.

  Why won’t it last? Why the pessimism?

  It’s not pessimism, he says. It’s probability.

  How so?

  He says, In the history of the world 107 billion people have lived and died. Currently there are 7.6 billion people alive. That means that ninety-three per cent of humans ever born are dead.

  That’s sobering and a little sad, but so what? I say.

  Oh, the current vogue for magical thinking. All those dating sites, pulp romances, sentimental love, the strange idea of the soulmate. Mr Right. The One. Let’s hope there is no such thing as The One because using numbers, rather than magical thinking, your special One is probably dead. Cut off from you by time you can’t travel.

  I’m not cut off from you, I say, looking at the bag of body parts.

  Ah, but where is your heart, Ry? Is it in that bag?

  You want me to give you my heart?

  Give it? No. I’d like to take it.

  (I am uneasy. His hand rests on my chest over my heart.)

  And what would you do with it?

  Examine it. Isn’t it the seat of love?

  So they say …

  So they do. They never say, I love you with all my kidneys. I love you with my liver. They never say, my gall bladder is yours and yours alone. No one says, she broke my appendix.

  When it stops, we die, I say. The heart is the heart of us.

  Think what it will be like, he says, when non-biological life forms, without hearts, seek to win ours.

  Will they?

  I believe so, said Victor. All life forms are capable of attachment.

  Based on what?

  Not reproduction. Not economic necessity. Not scarcity. Not patriarchy. Not gender. Not fear. It could be wonderful!

  Are you saying, Victor, that non-biologic
al life forms might get closer to love – in its purest form – than we can?

  I have no idea, said Victor. Don’t ask me. Love is not my special subject. All I am saying is that love is not exclusively human – the higher animals demonstrate it – and more crucially we are instructed that God is Love. Allah is Love. God and Allah are not human. Love as the highest value is not an anthropomorphic principle.

  What exactly are you saying?

  I am saying this, only this: love is not limit. Love is not this far and no further. What the future is bringing will also be the future of love.

  He goes to the window, watches the buses up and down Oxford Road, carrying their cargo of people who aren’t thinking about the future beyond teatime or tomorrow or their next holiday or whatever fear is the fear that waits for them in the dark. It’s raining. That’s what most people are thinking about. The size of our lives hems us in but protects us too. Our little lives, small enough to make it through the gap under the door as it closes.

  He says, Imagine us. In another world. Another time. Imagine us: I am ambitious. You are beautiful. We marry. You are ambitious, I am unstable. We live in a small town. I am neglectful. You have an affair. I am a doctor. You are a writer. I am a philosopher, you are a poet. I am your father. You run away. I am your mother. I die in childbirth. You invent me. I can’t die. You die young. We read a book about ourselves and wonder if we have ever existed. You hold out your hand. I take it in mine. You say, this is the world in little. The tiny globe of you is my sphere. I am what you know. We were together once and always. We are inseparable. We can only live apart.

  Is this a love story? I ask him.

  And as the rain runs down the window I believe him.

  As the rain runs down the window, I hope that, drop by drop, we will make a life together.

  He holds me close. Like mine, his body is about sixty per cent water. The body is flow. That is, the healthy body is flow. The bodies I meet are thickened, clotted, sclerotic, stalled, impeded, engorged, halted, fat-clogged, undredged, blocked, bloated and, finally, slow-pooled in their own cooling blood.

  We could disappear, he said, and start again somewhere, an island, perhaps, go fishing, open a restaurant on the beach, lie in the same hammock and look at the stars.

  We won’t do that, I said, because you are ambitious.

  Perhaps I could change, he said. Perhaps I have done enough.

  Your body will decay and die, I said. You won’t like that.

  We could die together. It’s unlikely I will live long enough to set myself free.

  Is that what this race is?

  Yes. It is a race against time. I want to live long enough to reach the future.

  I studied him. With Victor there is the sense of a life kept to itself. I feel like I am reading him in a foreign language. How much of the meaning do I miss?

  I said to him, All these body parts …

  Yes … thank you.

  What do you do with them all?

  My nanobots play with them. My mini-doctors. My lovely computer programs with curious sensors that run over every inch of skin and map it.

  And what else, Victor?

  He looks at me as if to speak and then he doesn’t speak. I say, Why do you need me to be your personal Burke and Hare? Your nineteenth-century shovel and sack? Why is it so secret? So mysterious?

  Must you ask me? he says. Don’t forget the story of Bluebeard. There is always one door that should not be opened.

  In my mind I see a steel door slamming shut.

  Tell me, Victor.

  He pauses. He hesitates. He fixes me with his wild, bright, nocturnal eyes. He says, I have another laboratory, not here, not in the university. It’s underground. Manchester has a series of deep tunnels. You could say there is Manchester beneath Manchester.

  Who knows about this?

  About my work? A few. Not many. Who needs to know? Things are so scrutinised, monitored, peer-reviewed, collaborated on, so many forms to fill in, grants awarded, progress reports, overseers, evaluators, assessors, committees, audits, plus public interest, not to mention the press. Sometimes things need to be done a little more circumspectly. Behind closed doors.

  Why? I ask. What have you got to hide?

  What is the difference between privacy and secrecy?

  Come on, Victor! No word games.

  What is it you want to know?

  What’s going on.

  Would you like to see for yourself?

  Yes, I would.

  Very well. Only, remember, that time can’t unhappen. What you know you will know.

  He took his coat from the peg. He’s not Superman. I’m not Lois Lane. He’s not Batman. I’m not Robin. Is he Jekyll? Is he Hyde? Only Count Dracula lives forever.

  What disgusts us about vampires, said Victor, is not that they live forever, but that they feed on those who do not.

  How did you know what I was thinking? I said.

  He didn’t answer that. He said, Vampires are like coal-fired power stations. My version of eternal life uses clean energy.

  He looked out of the window. We’ll have to go out the back way. That bloody woman is there again.

  What bloody woman?

  The journalist.

  I stood by him. Yes. In the rain across the road, sheltering. Polly D.

  She doesn’t give up, does she? Why don’t you just let her have an interview with you?

  Victor looked at me, uncertainly. Has she been in touch with you, Ry?

  Why would she?

  He shrugged. Let’s go.

  In the rain we left his office and lab, nicely housed in the bio-tech buildings of the university, and took a cab down Oxford Road to George Street.

  Victor said, The tunnels and bunkers I am going to show you were built in the 1950s with money from NATO. The sum was huge back then – around £4 million. The labyrinth housed a secure communications network designed to survive an atomic-bomb blast capable of flattening the city. Down below there are generators, fuel tanks, food supplies, dormitories, even a local pub. There are identical structures in London and Birmingham. It was all part of the NATO Cold War strategy.

  All that wasted money, I said. Europe needed rebuilding. Manchester still had derelict bomb sites in the 1960s.

  Yes, said Victor. The fight against fascism had been won, but it was the fight against communism that really motivated Britain and America. The world’s great capitalist democracies were not interested in any ideology except the rights of markets.

  You’re an unlikely communist, I said.

  I am not a communist, said Victor, and science is immensely – depressingly – competitive, but I am sympathetic to the human spirit. It interests me that it was Marx’s time in Manchester, and his friendship with Engels, who owned a factory here, that gave Marx the material he needed for the Communist Manifesto.

  Do you know that in Manchester, in the nineteenth century, there were 15,000 windowless basement dwellings without water or sewerage – and those men, women and children worked twelve-hour days spinning the wealth of the world’s richest city – and were going home to disease, hunger, cold and a life expectancy of thirty years? Communism must have seemed like the best possible solution.

  It is the best possible solution, I said, but human beings can’t share. We can’t even share free bicycles.

  We were passing a canal with yet another orange bike upended in the green water.

  Humans: so many good ideas. So many failed ideals.

  The taxi dropped us off. A rusty but sturdy gate sat square in a blackened brick wall. Victor fiddled in his pocket, pulled out a key and opened the gate. He held up the key, smiling. Ry, sometimes the best technology is the simplest.

  How did you get the keys for this place?

  I have backers, he said, as easy and as mysterious as ever.

  Behind the gated wall was a series of blank doors. More keys. Victor opened the third door and stepped immediately down a steep set of stairs. The light
was automatic.

  Be careful! It’s a long way down.

  I followed him, listening to our echoing footsteps and the sound of the rain fading above us.

  Think about it, he said. If that Cold War bomb had gone off we’d have been about seventy years away from the biggest breakthrough in human history – and we would have had to start again with sticks and stones.

  I wasn’t really listening. I was counting the steps down, down, down. 100, 110, 120.

  It’s very dry down here, I said; paper-dry. No damp, no mildew, no drips.

  It’s weatherproof and ventilated, said Victor. He could hear my breathing – a little too fast and shallow. He turned to reassure me.

  Not far now, Ry. Just a hundred yards along this corridor. Don’t be uneasy. I know it seems empty and a little spooky. Think of this place teeming with scientists and programmers. Manchester was the computing hub of the world after the Second World War, and every possible effort was made to develop computer technology fast enough to eavesdrop on, and outwit, the Soviets. Jodrell Bank itself, that giant telescope, was a listening device.

  He stopped and looked back at me. I was afraid. Do I mean I was afraid of him?

  Where are we now?

  My world, said Victor. A poor thing but mine own.

  He opened the door. Valves, wires, vacuum tubes. Rows of steel, miles of cable. Dials and needles.

  Recognise it? There’s one in the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry. This is a model I built. The world’s first storage computer. Manchester Mark 1. The memory is vacuum storage. The transistor wasn’t invented until 1947. By 1958 the first integrated circuit had six transistors. By 2013, we were fitting 183,888,888 transistors in roughly the same space. Moore’s Law: computing power doubles every two years.

  The fascinating thing for me is that the world might have had a computer much earlier. A hundred years earlier. You’ve heard of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine?