Laurie Sheck Read online

  ALSO BY LAURIE SHECK

  Captivity

  Black Series

  The Willow Grove

  Io at Night

  Amaranth

  a cognizant original v5 release october 10 2010

  “Crosswriting” in an 1834 letter from Claire Clairemont to Mary Shelley. Courtesy of Lord Abinger and the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  For my friends

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  A Letter

  Notes

  Ice Diary

  Notes

  Dream of the Red Chamber

  Notes

  Metropolis/The Ruins at Luna

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREFACE

  I long for some circumstance that may assure me that I am not utterly disjointed from my species

  these hauntings of the mind and very tenderly to prove

  My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—Will you come you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid

  into the regions of frost crushed by fortune—I am nothing—

  It became necessary that I should conceal myself

  But I am not confined to my own identity I am still here still thinking still existing

  I shrank from the monster—he held out his hand but I couldn’t touch it Yours tenderly Your Exiled, I am &c &c Addio Cara Mia

  I am, Sir

  Your obedient Srv’

  Mary Shelley

  London, Milan, Naples, Pisa, Marlow, Geneva, Leghorn, Florence, Genoa, Rome, Cadenabbia, Paris … The handwriting in gray or chestnut ink, in the early years sometimes accompanied by her husband’s; sometimes the letters are turned sidewise, the text continuing over the first in the practice of cross-writing used to save paper in the nineteenth century. Of her Frankenstein copybooks, the first, “Notebook A,” as it’s now known, survives as seventy-seven leaves of laid paper with a light blue tint and five sewing holes along the side. The paper was probably purchased in Geneva. The second, Notebook “B,” consists of seventy-five surviving pages on thicker, British, cream-colored paper. The bindings and covers of both notebooks have long since disappeared. On the first notebook’s pages she penciled in a left-hand margin, and there Percy Shelley left his comments and marks. Picture two hands moving side by side, she writing “creature,” he (in some impulse of tenderness, kindness?) crossing it out, replacing it with “being.”

  I open one of her letters and a clear envelope containing a lock of auburn hair falls out. A lock she’d sent to her friend Hogg. Often the paper is thin and worn, and many of the letters are held within larger envelopes stamped with an auction-house purchase number and date of sale. This strange condition of ownership, what would her monster have thought of it? And she, who was often short of money.

  By the time she died of a brain tumor at age fifty-four, twenty-nine years after her husband’s drowning, and thirty-four years after the writing of Frankenstein, erratic undiagnosed symptoms had mostly kept her from writing for over a decade. Her monster long behind her by then, and all but one of her children long dead.

  So much of a life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who’s lived it—maybe especially to the one who’s lived it. Why should it be otherwise? I didn’t seek to find her, wandered instead within and among her fragments of language—notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds like spinning planets, lived in their cold light and burning light, wondering where I was, where they might take me. Curious, I heard a monster’s voice and followed—

  NYC, MAY 31, 2008

  A Letter

  June 30, 2007

  Dear Mr. Emilson,

  This is to inform you that the final closing on your building on East Street was successfully completed at 10:15 this morning. I have deposited the check as you instructed. The new owners will begin renovations tomorrow. In our previous communications, I asserted that the structure, now in great disrepair, was completely abandoned. However, yesterday afternoon as I made my last walk-through, I found on the second floor a short note, a manuscript wrapped in a rubber band, and an old computer. As these technically belong to you, please let me know if you would like them forwarded to your London address. I have not unbound the manuscript, but reproduce for you here the short note left on top:

  So much blurs … I write then forget what I write … walk these streets, a stranger to myself and others … Then sometimes it all suddenly flares back—my breath catches, my brain aches. How long have I wandered, talking in my thoughts to the one who made me from dead, discarded things, then left me? Why did he need to see me as frightful, misbegotten? I know he’ll never hear, never answer.

  Walking, I remember the other ones as well, those three I watched though none of them could see me. Isn’t seeing a wounding and caressing both? All of them gone now, though once I held them with my secret eyes and in my own way loved them. Mary, Claire, Clerval … All those hours they visited me in air, came to me as voices made of flesh, ripe with shades of meaning, though in the end all that’s left of them is absence.

  Why did she need to portray me as she did? For so long I tried not to think of our days in the graveyard the clicking of pebbles in her hands as she sat near the bushes, listening while I read. Even now the details grow faint… I try to forget… banish it all from my mind… though part of me wants only to remember. She was a child of eight sitting by her mother’s grave. I sat behind the bushes with my books. Once we briefly spoke. Mostly I read to her, that’s all. And her stepsister Claire, how strange that she came to me years later, long after I’d been wandering, heading north, far off in the Arctic by then. Why did she need to come to me, or was it I who needed her? And Clerval, that gentle man who everyone thought dead—in fact he traveled east as he’d wanted. Even now I sometimes picture his hand moving in patient transcription as day after day he translated the Dream of the Red Chamber in his house at the foot of Xiangshan Hill, and wrote letters to his friend in Aosta.

  Isn’t any voice largely mute and partial, even those that speak openly and plainly (though of course I mostly hide). Why do I leave this? These words absorbed into the garbage dumps, the flames—

  NOTES

  Notes on the Earth Seen from Space

  Over and over the word fragile.

  “It looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart.” This from James Irwin, crew member of Apollo 15.

  Astronaut Loren Acton spoke of seeing it “contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere.”

  To Aleksei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, the Earth looked “touchingly alone.”

  And when Vitali Sevastyanov was asked by ground control what he saw, he replied, “Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can see it all. The Earth is so small.”

  Neil Armstrong said, “I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

  And Ulf Merbold: “For the first time in my life I saw the horizon line as curved, accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.”

  (Is this what frightened you, is this what you sought to combat and to flee? This fragility, this somehow-knowledge even then before anyone had ever left the Earth or seen it from a distance, of how small it is and delicate, as we are too, how finite, how beside-the-point, how fleeting.)

  (Might this partly account for my monstrous proportions, as if you were building a shield, a fortress of flesh, as if the vertiginous wings of blood in us could somehow be made to
tremble less. But I’m a blunt and narrow piece of materiality. Imprinting and imprinted. As were you. Footprints, strands of broken hair dropped here and there.)

  On March 18, 1965, Alexei Leonov exited the main capsule of Voskohod 2 by pushing himself headfirst out of the opening. A sixteen-foot lifeline held him to the ship. If it broke he would drift off forever. Although the spacecraft traveled at great speed, there was no air rushing past to let him feel it. He spun slowly for ten minutes. But when the copilot Belyayev told him to come back he didn’t want to return.

  (He didn’t want to return. And yet it seems a lonely thing—that feeling of nothing pushing back.)

  Several months later, Edward White walked in space for twenty minutes, though the term is deceptive as the motion is of free fall or floating. Seen from 120 miles away, Earth was nearly featureless. When he returned to the spaceship he had lost five kilograms of body mass, and two kilograms of perspiration had collected in his boots.

  But he, too, didn’t want to return to the capsule.

  When told to come back to the spacecraft he said, “This is the saddest moment of my life.”

  His copilot pulled him back in.

  (And you will work in sorrow the fields … As if your laboratory were a field, a wound always to be worked, a rivenness of mind needing to be healed. But when he floated there, in that region without weight or mass or shadow, all fields fell away, all shattering turned soft and pliant, there was no need anymore either to build or to destroy—)

  (But how my mind builds and destroys you over and over.)

  On January 27, 1967, two years after his space walk, Edward White died in a fire on Launch Complex 34 at the Cape Canaveral Air Station. He had entered Apollo 1 for a simulated countdown along with Command Pilot Gus Grissom and Pilot Roger Chaffee when the fire broke out.

  Years later White’s wife took her own life.

  (How strange to see the Earth from the sky and then come back… to float in space like that, barely tethered, Earth a modest uncrowned thing. “So peaceful and so fragile,” one said of it. The size of a marble or a pearl “hanging delicately,” said another. And another: “But I did not see the Great Wall.”)

  Still, there are many practicalities to be addressed “as you would have known even from your rudimentary laboratory). “It’s a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize one’s safety factor’s been determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract,” the astronaut Alan Shepard pointed out.

  And Neil Armstrong spoke of a feeling that was “complex, unforgiving.”

  Lyndon Johnson said, “It’s too bad, but the way the American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they’ll probably just piss it away.”

  (But what would it mean to take advantage?)

  (And what of how small, and of how fragile …)

  (Over and over the word fragile describing this world that has taught me such resistance, the hard of it and brutal, and yet, still—)

  Numerous inventions made for space have been adapted by private industry, resulting in studless snow tires, scratchproof eyeglasses (White needed to shield his eyes from the extreme glare of sunlight), the five-year flashlight and cordless power tools.

  The U.S. Space Walk of Fame Foundation was formed in the 1990s as a “major component of a redevelopment master plan designed for Titusville’s urban waterfront.” There you can “visit the gift shop at the museum and treat yourself, a friend or a relative to a truly unique space-related gift.”

  (When Leonov and White floated in space they didn’t want to come back. They couldn’t have known this beforehand. What is a footstep then, after that, and the feeling of Earth—so fragile, so small—beneath a shoe, or the thin tether of breath, or a name, or a day, a boundary, a theory, a bond—)

  Notes on an Interview with Dr. Anne Foerst

  Q. “What exactly do people do at this laboratory?”

  A. “We are trying to build robots that are social and embodied.”

  (As if I’m an abbreviation of something else, something I can’t know. I look out over this frozen sea and can’t tell where land begins, if there is land. Shore is a distant idea. In this frozen world I can’t know which step will take me from land to sea or back again. What appears as land is instead a floating ice shelf. I raise my arm, I open my eyes on so much whiteness, and cannot…)

  Q. “Why is a theologian here in this particular laboratory?”

  A. “When you build a humanoid you must think about the cultural and spiritual dimensions. What do you build into them? And what are the ethics here? Why should I treat someone else like a human, with dignity, when it is just a mechanistic thing? Yet I can benefit from doing just that.

  One question we often discuss: What will happen when robots cross a threshold of development where you can’t switch them off anymore? When does a creature deserve to be treated as intrinsically valuable?”

  (Those first weeks in the forest I lay on leaf-moist ground, my voice different from the birds’, and this difference confused me. I didn’t know what I was. Yet I’d glimpsed your hands before you fled, knew mine looked like yours. I couldn’t know then how you’d made me out of pieces of dead things, discarded things—only sensed I was something embodied whose one clear task was to continue to exist. Back then I had no words for what I felt and yet I felt that. What’s resemblance? What does it mean to belong or not belong? Isn’t resemblance or its lack often misleading, more complex, subtle, tricky, than we think? I look out on this stark sky, this white land the color of loneliness, or—)

  Q. “When do you think a robot should be treated as intrinsically valuable?”

  A. “Those who build it must decide, since they won’t be blinded by fears of the seemingly human qualities of the machines. They will know what is inside them. The builders could become the creatures’ strongest advocates. That moment is probably fifty years down the road.”

  (But who isn’t blinded by fear? And you who knew what was inside me, did that knowledge make you any less blind to what I am? After all this time I don’t even know whether to say who or what I am. If I could see inside my body, into my own cells, would my mind be any less mysterious to me? The mind deeply private, largely hidden even from oneself. So how could you begin to know me?)

  Q. “What makes these robots so advanced?”

  A. “They are embodied. Intelligence can’t be abstracted from the body. In previous attempts abstract human features were programmed into a machine: chess playing, language processing, mathematical-theorem proving. But we feel that the body—the way it moves, grows, digests, gets older—is inseparable from how a person thinks. These robots have body feelings similar to ours. They experience balance problems, sensations of friction, gravity, and weight.”

  (This heavy body I carry with me always, these awkward, baffled limbs.)

  Q. “Is this robot a she?”

  A. “Robots are its. But I think of it as she. Only when you treat the machines as if they possess our social characteristics will they ever get them. In this laboratory this is what we believe. You need to create that circle.”

  (I can see no circles in the ice—)

  Notes on Time

  (The more I think of it the more it perplexes me—)

  Aristotle asked, “What is time?” And answered, “It is the measure of change … but time is not change itself, for change may be faster or slower, but not time.”

  To Epicurus it was an “accident of accidents.”

  To Democritus, “an appearance presenting itself under the aspect of day and night.”

  And, of course, Heraclitus wrote, “You can’t step into the same river twice.”

  “Everything will eventually return in the self-same numerical order, and I shall converse with you staff in hand, and you will sit as you are sitting now, and so it will be in everything else, and it is reasonable to assume that time too will be the same.”—this from Eudemus of Rhodes

  (Eudemus
speaks in a comforting voice. He sits beside me on a bench, staff in hand. There’s no past or present or future on my skin, but something else I have no words for. What does it mean to be a living thing? The garden flares, shivering its fragrant blooms. Is this where I’ve been all along? Each mind a curious, uncertain space, able to grasp so little of what is.)

  Aristotle said, “Whether if mind did not exist, time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted …”

  (How limited I am, even with this large and lumbering body. A speck, an ignorance, a something made of matter, wondering, unwise. So how can I grasp time?)