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"Why do I not have your grace? You walk like water flows downhill in the riverbed at Ingolstadt, dancing over stones and laughing at the sweeps and curves of it. Such ease. You are beautiful, like nature is beautiful, like the simplest things in the world, the great and small, the blazing sun or a small golden flower petal. You run like the Arctic wind howls, in bounds and leaps that have no start or end. Not I. I move like a locomotive, all fits and starts and cacophony."
"It is because you are not natural," he tells me, voice as icy as the wind.
"And who is to blame for that?" I crunch through the snow to him and press my face to his, let my spittle fly. "Tell me! Who?"
Frankenstein tilts his head away from mine, but doesn't step back.
"I gave you life," he says, though that is no answer.
It makes me angry. He makes me angry. He gave me life, but what then? "When Elizabeth planted seeds in her little flower garden, did she not water them? Tend them? Carefully root out weeds that might choke the seedlings? Protect them if the sun were too hot or the rain too harsh?" I ask. He wanders away from me, flinching at my first mention of Elizabeth's name, but I see understanding in the slope of his shoulders. Maybe there is guilt in the way he takes each step a little more stiffly than usual. Or maybe he is simply tired from all the journeying. "Those seedlings grow into sunflowers. Beautiful and proud, arcing up towards the sun. I am the weed, pulled out without a second thought, thrown upon a pile of waste. A straggly weed with feeble roots. I was always hungry, you know. The old man fed me, but he had barely enough for himself. Always hungry," I add, more to myself this time, because I am imagining a world in which there is warmth and food aplenty, and for a moment my imagination is so vivid I can smell it, taste it, feel the warmth in my belly.
"I did not know," Frankenstein says, as though that absolves him.
"You should have known. Elizabeth knew how each of her seedlings fared. Do I not deserve better than a mindless, unthinking plant? A thing that has no awareness, no purpose in living."
"Do you?" Frankenstein asks, rushing back at me. He steps in so close that I smell our last meal on his breath — raw seal meat and red wine — and then he shakes his head. "At least a flower gives pleasure to people, to the planter and anyone who passes by. It does not try to kill the one who planted it."
"You think I would have tried to kill you if you had cared for me? Taught me? Protected me from the people who would do nothing but hate and harm me?"
"I think you would."
"You think I was born evil. De Lacey did not think so, but you do."
"Yes, I do. Look at you." He picks up the silver plate he ate off, and rubs the back of it with his sleeve until it shines and then he holds it up to my face. I want to turn away, but I won't. "Look at yourself. You have seen beauty, true beauty and goodness. You knew Elizabeth and her kindness. Her innocence. How can you see that hideous reflection and believe that you are anything other than evil?"
I used to think my creator knew everything. I pored over his journal and memorised every word, so eager was I to learn about the man who made me, the genius, the god. I wanted to sit at his feet and learn from him. I believed I would be awestruck by his wisdom, his understanding.
But he is wrong. I was innocent too, as innocent as Elizabeth. I found joy in the world around me, in singing like the birds, in the simple pleasure of eating warm food. I was glad when I helped the cottagers, Felix and Agatha, beautiful Agatha, picking up stones through the night and catching fish in the streams for them. I found happiness in their delight.
I was not evil. Not at first.
"Then you chose evil for me, for you fashioned my outside to be so hideous."
I take the plate from him and pack it away out of sight. I do not need to look at my reflection to know my appearance.
I want to catch him in his foolish reasoning, make him understand that he is caught. "I keep killing for you," I say, one night when the sun has vanished and I can no longer see the look in his eyes. "I killed this seal for you. It is a creature, is it not? A creation of God. And yet you do not condemn its death like you did William's or Elizabeth's."
"It is not a reasoning creature. God gave man the animals for food, to live."
"I am a reasoning creature, though, am I not? You know that I am. You have heard my reasoning, been astonished by it. I would make a grand orator, if anyone could stand to watch and listen to me. If I had paper, I might become a poet instead. And yet you would kill me, extinguish the spark of life that animates me."
"Perhaps man is not meant to give life. Perhaps I went too far. Perhaps it was a test from God, to give me the power and the understanding to create life but not the wisdom to know that I should not."
This is a new humility for Frankenstein.
"So you regret making me," I say. I must hear him say it.
"Every waking moment, and in my dreams too. Yes, I regret it. I must," he adds, though whether he is convincing me or himself I am unsure.
"And yet you are proud, still." The pride is there in those two last words he spoke. "Not of me, never proud of me, but that you have the genius to make me alive."
"It is my weakness," he admits heavily.
"Who was he? What was his name?" I ask the sky.
Frankenstein stirs and lifts his head. There is frost on his hair and his eyelashes, and his skin is blue. He is not so fine-looking any more, no longer such a perfect specimen of manhood, a man that a beautiful woman like Elizabeth would desire. I did not think he was awake to hear my question — he sleeps often now, and wakes with difficulty.
"Who?" he asks, though I am certain he must have some inkling of whom I speak.
I gesture to myself. My body: arms, legs, torso. My face last of all. "The man who became me. Was he a good man?"
"There were many. I didn't know their names, or who they were or what they did. Some may have been good men while alive, or thieves or murderers, wise men or idiots. I did not ask those questions."
"What questions did you ask?"
"If the man was healthy. How he died. If he was injured."
"And that is it?"
"That was all that was necessary."
"Did you never wonder?" I ask. I would have wanted to know what manner of men I dealt with, whose hand would come to hold a pen again, whose foot walk on dry land, whose prick rise up eagerly and slide once more between warm thighs.
"No," Frankenstein says softly, and I think maybe he is wondering now for the very first time. The creature is teaching his master, and his master begins to listen.
It was an accident. God in heaven is my witness, though no one else is there to speak for me afterwards. I did not wish this upon my creator, my poor creator.
It had been many days since I killed the last seal, and the meat was all gone. Frankenstein did not complain, or ask for food, but I could see it in the slowness of his gait, the hollow of his cheeks. So I chased away an animal feasting on a frozen carcass — a wolverine, Frankenstein told me afterwards, speech awkward as mine through his pain — and claimed the meat as ours. The animal did not concede easily, though, and before I could shout a warning or pull my creator out of its way, it had swiped open-clawed across Frankenstein's face.
I cleaned up his blood as best I could, fearful that it would be a call to other creatures, larger or even bolder than the wolverine. And I stitched him up, smoothed down the flaps of skin across his brow, and put in a neat row of stitches with cold, clumsy fingers. My work was not beautiful, and yet to me it made him more desirable. It made him resemble me, and God forgive me that I rejoiced over that visible kinship, at the same time as I mourned for him the loss of his sight. I could do nothing for his eyes — the damage there was beyond the repair of a simple needle, and I think even a skilled doctor could not have rescued his sight, even had we not been days, week, months from such.
He slept but fitfully for days and nights after that, wracked in pain but silent through it, feverish for a while. I fed him the frozen meat from the stolen carcass and the last of the wine to ease his pain and help him sleep a little. I did not know if he would survive, but somehow he healed, empty-eyed and with a brow full of dark stitches, and cheeks even more sunken than before. Eventually, we walked on; I led the way and we continued our charade that it was a chase.
Now, I am never more than a few steps away, always close enough for him to hear me. I sing sometimes, songs I heard Agatha and Felix sing while they worked in the fields. They sound out of place in this wilderness of snow and ice, but they warm my heart, and Frankenstein does not tell me to stop, even though my singing is as clumsy as my speech.
When we stop at night, we make camp side by side. Our camp is meagre, but I do not feel the cold like Frankenstein does. He shivers once we stop tramping, as though it is the only way he can keep his blood moving around his body.
"Is your blood different to mine?" I ask him. "More or less viscous, more or less in quantity, better or poorer in some way than mine?"
He shakes his head, too tired, I think, for many words.
"Then why do you feel so cold, and I not?" I take his hand and try to warm it in mine — he lets me do such acts for him now, when once he would have thrust me away.
"I do not know," he says, and I can tell it pains him that he does not have the answers, that he is so tired that he cannot think well enough to try to understand, to make sense of what his life has become.
I do the only thing I can, which is to hold him until his shivers subside, and then wrap myself around him while he sleeps. I will not deny that I find a comfort in this act. To whom could I deny it? It is something good that I do for him, and if there is a final balance at the end of our days, a tally of our good versus our evil, then it is a measure of good to help offset the wrong that I have done.
It is easier to do good now. There are no men and women and children around to shout hate at me, to throw stones. No one but my poor blind creator who is only half-hearted now when he says he despises me. I do not know if his hatred is faded by time or diminished by the cold or tempered by the care I give him, or if he genuinely feels a degree of fondness for me, but I bask in every not-unkind word.
We move north, always north. It gets no colder, but the days are shorter and seals are harder to find. Often we travel on empty bellies.
"Do you see her?" Frankenstein asks. He holds out his hand, fingers curling as though he's pulling someone towards him. He is blind, and yet he gazes out in front of him as though he can see.
I have heard voices in the wind. De Lacey's, reciting from memory broken fragments of poems I read out loud to him as I first learned to read; the dying choked-off howls of the lovely, cruel Agatha. I have heard William chide me, and the broken moans of Elizabeth as I opened her soft thighs and pressed my hard prick inside her. And, in the dark, in my brief sleeping hours, I see their faces. Twisted, and as ugly as mine: not from any change in their features, but from the harsh look in their eyes, the cruel curl of their mouths. Uglier than me, even, for De Lacey once said that a smile makes all men beautiful. Though what would he know — he was blind. An old, blind, foolish man who thought I could be loved.
I see no one now, though, but for him, my whole world. Nothing but white snow and a cold blue sky, tracks behind us and unbroken snow ahead.
"Can a man dream while he is awake?" I ask, pressing Frankenstein's hands back down to his side. I kneel beside him, pick up the fur mitten that has fallen from his hand, kiss his fingers. They are very cold, so I hold them to my face for a while before I slip them back inside the mitten.
"The only thing I am sure of anymore is my dreams," he answers. "At least those I know are false. Everything else I must question."
He need not question whether I will remain by his side, but I think he knows that. No need for clumsy words to express what my every breath and action says.
"Why did you not kill me when you found me with Elizabeth?" I ask.
Frankenstein throws his plate on the ground, picks up the reins of his sledge, and stomps off into the night. It is the first time he has gone ahead and left me behind.
I gather up our meagre meal and pack it away in my sack — there is too little to waste — and follow him.
He walks for hours, his steps slower and more laboured as the earth turns and the night moves along; I wonder if he, like De Lacey, knows when night has replaced day. There are no nightingales. Eventually his steps stutter to a halt and I find him collapsed in a soft drift of snow. A few hours' snowfall, and he would vanish from sight.
I sit down beside him and keep watch while he sleeps. Or so I think — I am startled when he speaks, his words husky at first. I give him water, melted in a flask against my body, and he swallows eagerly. He speaks again, his words audible this time.
"I should have done so," he says, and I know instantly of what he speaks though our conversation was many hours earlier. "Why?" he asks, throwing my question back at me.
I think of the poets I've read, the lives I've watched from behind walls; I remember the ways in which Frankenstein has offered answers to questions I have not asked while keeping his lips closed against the information I have sought. "You abandoned me, but my birth was not as with a child born of woman. You were not there watching my flailing limbs pierce the womb you encased me in, and you were not there when I clawed my way free and saw light, felt the touch of air. You did not experience the wild surge of love you would for a baby as you watch it struggle out of its mother. You did not fall in love with me when you saw me. You saw only a horror, an abomination." I do not excuse him with my words. And I cannot forgive him. I thought revenge would make me able to forgive, killing his wife as he killed mine, but it did not. And yet, even though I cannot forgive, and in return he does not forgive me, there is some strange bond between us, creator and created. And perhaps that night three years later in his bridal bedchamber was the moment he first felt it, cloaked as it was in hatred, that I was his.
He loves me as his creation, his child. A love that owes nothing to fondness or pride, but is a type of love nonetheless.
I tell him. "Because you love me," I say.
There is a long silence before he speaks. "I fear that must be true," he says eventually, and with that admission and understanding stark in our minds, neither of us sleeps again that night.
"If we stay here, you will not survive another year," I tell him. We have travelled as far north as we can. From here, everywhere is south again, though Frankenstein tells me that this is not the true pole, but the magnetic pole. There is still much for me to learn — I wish to live and learn more, about this strange earth we live on, about the God who makes creatures who can be so wonderful and so terrible, about humans and what makes them so very contradictory, so glorious and so irrational. I wish to live, and yet my creator looks so very tired and near to death.
"It will not matter. My diary is burned, my father promised me that, and you will die with me. All knowledge of this foolish endeavour will die with us, and no one will be able to make the mistakes I made. It is best it ends this way."
"Do you not want to live? I want to live, even such a miserable creature as I am. Frankenstein, do you not want to live?" I ask, begging him with each soft word to say yes. To want us both to live.
He drops his face into his hands, a habit he still has even though he cannot see. "Yes," he says, so quietly that I barely hear the word. "The Lord forgive me, but yes, even with all I have done, even with all that my living would mean, I still wish to live."
And in that moment, I think that my creator does not entirely regret me. Maybe it is easier for him to love me now that he can no longer see me. Now that my words are smoother and my speech nearer human. Maybe he begins to forget what I became for a while. Now that he too is something of a monster, would be stared at in the streets, feel the pitiless gaze of strangers and their unfounded hatred. He runs his fingers across the scars sometimes, and then across mine. "The creator has become like his creation," I said to him the first time he did that, and he did not disagree.
Maybe we can all be redeemed, if we wish it enough.
We travel south.