When the great doctor's assistant — Fritz
or Igor, some hunchbacked henchman — beheld
the row of preserved brains afloat in glass,
did he pause to consider the irony
of such delicacy housed by potential harm
before he let drop the jar marked "Genius"?
First the shatter, then the spill, then the plop
rather like a peeled orange dropped and opening
a little, swirl of corpus callosum stretched
between tilted hemispheres. Panic,
then he picked another: not the abnormal
brain of a murderer, frontal lobe dented
with insufficient fissures (as Whale filmed),
but what he read as "Abby Normal,"
a brain atrophied, mottled with grey lesions
visible only when sliced in the autopsy theatre.
Mine was the one jar that did not break,
and I sloshed against its walls with each lurch
of the hunchback's pitching, tilting ramble.
Nobody sliced me; I was too precious
whole, tight bundle of tissue disembodied,
"just resting, waiting for a new life to come,"
said Dr. F. He didn't know how much I'd like
to rest, stay out of bodies for a while.
Alas, now I work this body
as best I can. The monster (how I hate
what they call us, but I suppose it's true)
presented no symptoms at first, capable
of strength to match his proportions,
performing feats of violence when provoked
in his chamber. It was all going so well,
I nearly forgot about our illness. Then
he began dribbling his trouser fronts (too
humiliating for me to acknowledge
personally) and we took a while
to recall the simplest words: "fire" fell
to nothing, then, "f . . ., f . . ., f . . ., fancy? fast?"
Which made Fritz think we liked the torch's dance.
Torture. We did away with him, yes, but
perhaps I just didn't know our own strength.
It took some getting used to, as I had
formerly inhabited the cranium
of a cripple who willed her corpse to science.
Just when things began working smoothly, brain
and body as one, the body began
to cave to the ills I had brought it.
The legs moved less freely. Our feet felt heavy,
as though they wore sixty-pound boots. I hear
that was Karloff's trick to imitate our gait.
That man got it right, a very good likeness,
probably because he more than anyone
comprehended the absolute effort
needed to heave one foot forward, and the next.
Laughing villagers toddled along roadsides,
saying we walked like a duck. Echoes
of the cripple's life. Quacks, taunts. No duck,
but a monster too weak to chase them down.
Torso before feet, we shook only the earth,
tipping into the woods. Left Arm, pale hand
stitched to deep brown wrist, tried to pull a limb
from a tree to use as a walking stick,
but the fingers would not tighten as I
intended. Right Arm assisted, but could not
force it from the trunk. We plucked a flower, limp
hand round the bloom, not the stem. Petals and phlox
sifted through our weakened fingers
to the ground. What else to do but plod on?
We learned to lean into trees for support,
the way a drunk would lean against walls
following a night's consolation. The creatures
in the eaves fled our advance, left us alone
with our sensations, or lack of them.
All along I thought this might happen.
With grief more than horror I've greeted
each fresh apathy in our limbs. I dare
not share this with Dr. F., or my toes.
They'd be so numbly . . . disappointed.
Within me, though, I feel something changing:
not the spread of lesions, more a tremble
in my cortex, as though this broad skull
sutured shut is not enough to contain me.
When we look down to our trailing feet below,
it happens, that theremin playing
our abdomen down to trill in our legs,
and I'm close to bursting. Curse the skies that watch
us buckle, the shock of our birth night's storm
now played out from within, as L'hermitte
discovered and named. I want to say
there is no discovery, only repetition
and return. And the rage that pulses down
this monster body, frail and more fierce than fire.
