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“Do you remember that time, Victor, one when we were so small, on how you covered your face with ice?” William says wistfully, lounging himself after a hard’s day work on Victor’s chair, each syllable uttered dripping with a yearning for their past, “You told me then you were struck by lightning by an evil wizard, and here you are now, trying to catch the same lightning for your creation.”
The pen abruptly halts in its submission to paralysis, the outlines of the pronator teres all the way to the extensor pollicis longus halt in its carbon formation on the canvas. The pinprick pain of memory throbbing: the hippocampus wiring the submerged memory into surface through his cortical regions. His amygdala recognises these long-buried memories, flickers through several nerves, kindling them and sending beacons and beacons of light through his nervous system. He is deeply aware of the fact that there is no threat in the room, but the act of forcibly resurrecting a memory through mere choice of words alone has his heart violently trying to break free from its ivory cage.
Nescient towards his older brother’s intensifying distress, William’s words carry off like the day’s eye into the room—bouncing off of walls and reverberating through Victor’s flesh and bones. A gust of physical dithers mold its way onto his skin, “I remember it now, so clearly. On the porcelain tiles of our bathroom you sat, and I remember asking you then why you held a handful of ice fast to your cheek.”
“Yes.” Victor merely answers, blankly and by reflex alone. He can see what William is trying to enunciate into existence: the summer-like recollection of his innocence becomes a damning forest fire for Victor.
And, oh, he remembers it vividly. How on that unfortunate day as were the next, it had slipped from his mind the specific function of the trigeminal ganglion housed within the cave that belonged to Meckel. A sea of cerebrospinal fluid between two parallel buoys of dura mater that hovers over the temporal bone.
“Though, I forgot, brother. What exactly did you say back then?” William’s eyes are closed, swimming in his blissful ignorance. The memory alone providing him a source of gratification that he lived before with a family, with his brother. That in that graveyard of a house, there were still happy memories to be found. Victor, on the other hand, is certain that this is merely false illusions conjured by the mind to compensate for the turbulence of his childhood.
“And I answered of the dark wizard who uses Nature for all his gain and intent. How he disapproved of my actions,” Victor breathes, seeing in his peripheral his younger self and his father. The white cane held in the then baron’s hand, sliding down in between lumbricals and to his palmar, the volar plates of his father’s hand already assessing the strength it will use upon his punishment. Leopold has always believed in practical learning, and it was through the crack of lightning against the side of his face, the sting spreading swiftly from above his eye to his jawline that he remembers the function of the trigeminal ganglion, his trigeminal nerve branches consisting of the opthalmic, maxillary and mandibular all singing in unison: a hymnal of pain journeying back to its home, the trigeminal ganglion, merging into one, desperately relaying its testimony to its’ judge, his brain stem that it is a witness to Victor’s unbecoming. “And how he struck me with lightning in return, a consequence of my misdeeds.”
“Yes, yes! I do remember you opening your arms to me, telling me of this tale even when you were in pain. Brother, you’ve—” William starts after a while of silence, opening his eyes to see the air rush out of Victor’s lungs, the smile on William’s lips falling like brittle snowflakes on a searing ground. But Victor ignores this, and proves to be faster even in response and in language.
“Enough.” The young baron declares, the cut of his words becoming like small knives into the cordoned afternoon air. Victor shakes his head once again, his own hand working on its own by memory as it closes his journal. This singular movement becomes the final verdict of their conversation, the reminiscing cut, only to be sealed, bolted and fastened away forever. “In fact, William, I think it is growing late for you. Must you stay here and dawdle? Herr Harlander will stay in lieu of you, so you need not worry.” His hand trembles, only slightly masked by his gloved hand and the shooing gesture he throws at William’s way. He dares not look at his younger brother and see the disappointment so evident in his face. He knew this was to come, he knew of William’s greed for familial affection, the dolorous clinging to his brother to proved that he belonged somewhere, that he is someone else’s brother. And to all of these desires, Victor staunchly either rejects or ignores.
Someone who courts death has no place amongst the living. The curse of the Frankenstein family started with his birth, after all. And it shall die with him. William must keep living on, even if life requires for the blond man to forget everything there is about his older brother, whatever little memories he still has preserved in his mind: a tree dappled his outstretched hands with the shadow of a dream.
“Why?” William has suddenly moved while Victor lay in his own thoughts, from the chair he has occupied to nearing the window Victor rests his head on. Anger and disappointment have always been familiar to Victor, that and frustration. The prefrontal cortex of his brain blinks, his parasympathetic nervous system finally regulating his sympathetic nervous system as he regains his bearings for the first time in this conversation. A conversation that should’ve ended seconds ago. “Why is that you act like I’m a nuisance to you, Victor? Have I not done everything you asked of me?”
“Oh, please, William.” The dark-haired man scoffs, the name being uttered in a mockery of a song. Already, Victor finds himself standing to better defend himself. To gain control what is slipping between his fingers. “What, do you wish me to kiss the ground on where you walk? Act like your existence alone is a scientific miracle?” Victor’s tongue becomes the handle of the blade, the words becoming its sharp edge, “Even a dullard from across the street can do what you’ve accomplished. Would you like me to kiss your knuckles and thank you? Praise you every time you do something you were trusted with?”
“No!” Becomes William’s piercing reply, a tone he has never used before, not with Victor, or with anyone. The corners of his eyes filling with tears that he swallows down as he continues, voice cold and biting, “You deliberately put words into my mouth and you are well aware that isn’t my intention at all. For God’s sake, Victor, why can’t you behave like a proper older brother? Why do I need to be angry in order to get a point across, in order for you to listen?”
“Do you think your words are important enough for me to listen to? You become successful and it enlarges your already swelling ego, William. Have you forgotten who the head of the household is, of this family? I do not need to conduct myself as you see fit just for your benefit alone. I am not our father.” The older brother grits his teeth, jaw hardening—reflecting William’s resentment. The mirth of the summer-like memory fades into something more acrid, bitter. A bite into a fruit that has long expired as they glare at one another from their ends of the room.
“But you act like him.” William mutters, fingers clenched into fists at his sides. Leaping across the gap that Victor continues to wedge through, and takes the spear for himself. To drive them further apart even if it goes against his own wishes. “You are not our Father, you are my brother.” The sun dips lower, coating the room in a darkened orange haze, the scene becoming either a dream or a nightmare they were both having. Victor weighs in the words of what William articulates, and considers a way of murdering without the act of it consummated. To have him be put to the side, compared to their father, that weakling of a man and a failure all woven together? He is more than his father can ever hope to be, and he implores William to see as he does.
He stares into William’s blues, the depths of his torment becoming the world to him, burning all around him. Victor takes the smoldering flame of his indignation and feels it similar to his. The rift between them continues to grow, and Victor does what he does best: to add to it, until there is no turning back. Until the distance is too far that it rivals the aftermath of Orpheus looking back at Eurydice.
No longer will they call each other brother after this. He is certain of it.
It is Victor who steps closer to his younger brother, his heels clacking into the room shaped into the coffin of their childhood. A finger probes at William’s chest, emphasising the dominance Victor has over this particular conversation and how he wants it to end. “You continue suffocating me with the way you seek for brotherly affection, William. You’re a grown man. You have no need for such a thing anymore. What you would’ve done is that you should’ve stayed away and you’d live a life away from all this misery. All this self-loathing, all this constant drive for love. It’s pathetic, and incongruous for one who carries the Frankenstein name.” Victor pulls his hand away, his eyes fixated on his brother. The quivering of his body, whether from drowning to stop his own tears or from the fury he feels for Victor, his brother does not know. “I suggest you stop pursuing these figments that belong to nothing but daydreaming. Wake up.”
Victor is aware. He is highly aware of how William has no memory of what his life was before Vienna that he began to create landscapes, cities and streets that are sculpted from the substance of his longing. He crafted the neighborhood in his mind, house by house, street by street, and the people who walked them or gazed down at them from their windows. In this evocation of his, he barely knows some of the people, but has become well-acquainted with their stories the more time he spent conversing with them. In this new homeland he has known as a child, he has playmates, perhaps, friends and enemies. But the young baron knows this to be untrue, there is no comfort to be found in their Geneva Estate, and there never will be. It has to be him that becomes the nightmare that wakes William from this make-believe of his: that it can only happen if William continues to exist in a space without his own family, that to create his own, he has to murder what little he knew of his past life.
“No, Victor.” William begins to speak, with Victor already turned and half a step away from removing himself. “You need to wake up. For as long as I can remember, you have this vexing habit of driving people away, and it becomes far greater when it is your younger brother you speak to. So what is it? What have I done to deserve all this? Did I do something to you that I’ve forgotten? Pray tell, so that I can understand where this is all coming from.”
Another beat of silence. Victor’s throat turns dry, his tongue shifting quickly from silver to lead. His mouth closes, forming a thin line while he feels the hills of aggravation on the gap between his eyebrows.
“Why do you think it’s always about you, William?” It takes a while to get the words across, the tone of venom slowly gaining its course through his speech, “Must you always think that the world revolves around you?”
“No, Victor, but I’m entirely lost on how to have something as light as a conversation with you! Even being in the same room becomes damning when you judge me with every blink of an eye that I make, or every oxygen that I consume. So what is it? Say it to me simply, as though I was a half-wit on the street. Do you hate me so?”
What answer could he possibly give? Victor thinks he should relent instead to the rage that he has housed for more than three decades, to wound William as much as possible so he no longer would seek him. That in all his hatred of him, he will slaughter whatever memory he has of his brother, and bury it eternally in a place where it will rot and disappear from its subsistence. He will become a gruesome recollection, a phantom that haunts the house, or a make-believe brother William speaks of fondly but never really known. Isn’t that what a memory is, after all? A manifestation of one’s longing?
He doesn’t know in which way William’s dream should end. He’s quite uncertain himself if he wishes for it to end. For all his talk of reality, his own existence has been usurped from him that he has no definite proof that he himself exists, save except for William and his dreams. What is the present, the reality if it weren’t relative to the past and the future? What becomes of this reality if Victor vigorously tries to erase the ruins of their past, only for the future to look after? What then, becomes of them? But whatever it is, whether dreams or reality, it only has one direction it needs to go.
It has to end. Everything must come to an end. Just sand slipping from between their fingers, and in the death of Victor’s existence will come a new beginning for William. Perhaps, to trust in the fact that there will always be a beginning after an end puts Victor’s doubts to silence. This has to end.
The older brother is about to speak, mincing words about to escape his lips when the door flies open— the hinges creaking as the wooden door itself bangs against the thin walls of his bedroom and study.
“Oh dear.” Herr Harlander’s face appears at the doorway, carrying with him his daguerrotype camera and his cane. His shrewd eyes shift from one brother to the other and then, in the most lightest yet uncaring of tones, he utters in a lyrical manner: “I would say this seems like a bad time, but really, aren’t you supposed to come back home to Elizabeth, William?” He steps on the room riddled with melancholy and ire, yet ignoring it all the same as he continues, “I don’t think leaving a young lady such as herself for a long period of time is advisable. One would think you’d ran off with another lady, or her with another man.”
William’s blue eyes never once left Victor’s face, transfixed, as though memorising his brother’s face in this moment. Does he see something in Victor’s face that Victor isn’t aware of? His hardened jaw relaxes, a breath reeling itself only to be expunged from his lungs until his forehead smooths. He placates himself enough to look at Elizabeth’s uncle, a smile already on those lips, a scar of sunlight, but the remains of his anger still blaze in his eyes.
“Herr Harlander.” William does not acknowledge the older man’s presence, but what he does instead is highlight Victor’s absence, his voice regaining its composure. Back to the reliable and cheerful William that everyone knows of. “My apologies, it seems that I’ve lost track of time. But I’ll be on my way, unless there’s something else you need of me?”
“I’ve had enough, actually.” Harlander responds without bothering to even look at who he’s talking to. Victor, for his part, retreats back to his window, the low-settting sun’s light skimming through the grass outside. “Thought you two were about to kill each other, a pity if you had. After all the work we’ve all done, it’s a shame to have it all go to a waste…”
“I’ll take my leave, then.” William tells Harlander, nodding at his direction before he turns to Victor, “It was nice to see you, brother. Despite everything. Take care, both of you, please.”
William’s back becomes like a ship setting on a distant voyage. Victor wonders why he doesn’t miss William the way the other misses him, adore him the way he is so adored, after he has vanished from his sight. A part of him knows of all this and feels it, but it is locked away, deeper than any memory that even his hippocampus has trouble making it come to the shore. His brain acts like a toddler with object permanence: when he no longer sees his little brother, he ceases to exist for him. What nostalgia he had for him also ceases to exist, and perhaps if what he feels nostalgia for does not exist, then the feeling is in relationship to nothing.
Harlander continues to occupy the space where William has once sat, his face full of cheer and clear from any sorrow. His hands drift to his instruments, mouth warbling into a constant babble that he pays no heed to. Victor comes to a darkening realisation then, as he slumps on the glass, that it is not just William he misses, but the times where things were simpler and less complicated. When the world narrowed down to just him and his brother.
His forehead meets the window, watching as a figure of a man passes by, surrounded by two draft horses and two men sitting on top of a carriage. He looks at the ship of his brother’s back, preparing to set sail and then….. disappear over the horizon. And when it does, Victor forgets the feeling that has wormed its way to his chest. He stands, greeting Harlander as if he weren’t there for some time now, and he tells him he is ready to work, to put his creation into existence. The older man is only thrilled by this, running a hand down Victor’s back, and patting him reassuringly, the glee in his mouth showing more teeth of his malice than genuine curiosity. Both men move, Victor carrying his journal while Harlander carries his camera. The door to Victor’s room closes, and replaces the sunlight with perpetual darkness.
All things must come to an end.
*
A small boy lounges on top of cool linoleum tiles, the nest of his raven curl pressed against the porcelain bathtub, back in the form of a crescent moon facing the door, the shadow of his hair covers most of his face, and the only sound to pierce through the silence is those of water dripping on the floor, and a noise that is laden with travail.
From beyond the window, clouds begin to part to offer the child a glimpse of sunlight—almost as if to comfort the misery-filled youth with the embrace of sunlight on his back. The boy moves his legs to avoid the prick of numbness he’ll feel later: his head angled slightly to see where to stretch his legs, revealing the angry welt of red on his cheek that is barely covered by a white cloth wrapped around in small portions of ice. The droplets of water from the melting ice drip from his terminal phalanges down to his proximal phalanges and twisting itself towards his carpal delta, eventually reaching to find the slowly forming minuscule pond.
Raven eyes stare back at the boy from the reflection of the small body of water on the floor. His eyes look empty, the sclera of his eyes are surrounded with dwarfish crimson branches, dilated blood vessels that have been exacerbated due to his inability to control his composure, the stream from his eyes once more joining the growing lake beneath him. The sounds of his quiet hics bounces on the porcelain tub and reverberates in the room. He is then hit with the sudden memory of red and his mother, Claire. The one who would always have the cloth of ice prepared for him after his lessons with his father, her reassurance that all this pain will be of use one day, and that it will lead towards his own salvation.
What results his own composure led to was more secrecy. The burrowing of his own emotions until his nails are dirty and bleeding, the swallowing of his cries so he can face Willliam with a smile instead and continue the lies of their Father. The drowning of the self in baptism to be renewed into this empty man that can continue the cursed family name.
His hands tighten around the cloth, nails digging into his cheeks—serving nothing but to intensify the pain. He grits his teeth, his lips forming into a mighty line as the woe he feels from deep within turns into something dark and ugly. He presses his forehead more into the bathtub, the lines of red beginning to for as he thinks on how unfair everything is. How his mother had to leave him, how he wasn’t spared still from his father’s wrath even after the birth of little William, or how, even with how these thoughts have transpired, he still remembers how his mother clutched onto her pristine sheets, the pool of blood underneath her being one with the silk canopy of her bed. Her pleas for her withering life left unheard by his father whom operated methodically on the premature baby.
The whir of something far away, his father’s shoulders pulling back and pushing forward. The gush of blood, unholy sounds of flesh against the roar of metal, the continuous screams, shadows dancing on the Archangel Michael’s face, his face of victory morphing into sorrow. His own hands covering his ears, the cries and screams becoming warbled beneath his palms, until—
A bang!
“Victor?” A small voice calls out, seeping itself into the chaos of Victor’s mind and forcing the dark-haired boy to calm down as a muscle reaction, his hics abruptly ending and the expression on his face smoothing into that of neutrality. “Victor, are you there?”
It takes him a second to clear his throat, veiling it instead as that of a sigh instead of several minutes spent in a terrible concoction of grief and longing. Now, he assumes his role of big brother: perfection, protector, teacher, bringer of relief and encouragement, counsellor, mother, father and brother. He slips into this role smoothly, marginally whirling his head to perceive a quarter of William’s face on the narrow space between the open door and its frame. His blue eyes a mirror of a summer sky, tilted in a gesture of worry on why his brother is spending his free time brooding in their bathroom.
“Yes, William?” Victor halts himself from bearing down another sigh, instead forcing a small smile on his lips, his hair scarcely enshrouding the evidence of his father’s sins on his face.
A heartbeat passes. Another. “Mmm…” William hums, his voice tiny and whiny. “Can I please come in, brother?”
“You can, but will I permit you to?” Victor answers with another question, the exhilaration escaping the shackles of his lungs and ferrying it into the open air. “Try again.”
Like a match to a candle’s wick, the thought is immediately grasped by William. “May I please enter the room, brother?”
Victor foregoes a verbal answer, instead gesturing William, with the hand that is not holding the fabric, to come towards him. An answer to his query. Victor does not move from where he has sat, instead spreading his legs and bending them so his little brother can make himself a home in the middle.
“What is that?” William asks, situating himself in the core of his older brother’s knees, the dewdrops from the melting ice descends quietly on the back of William, turning the navy-blue coat into something far darker. “It’s cold!” William exclaims, but Victor's mind is already somewhere else.
This is the Frankenstein curse he is destined to carry, he thinks to himself.
“Victor?” His little brother’s voice becomes like reigns to his racing thoughts, once more pulling his older brother to the present when he turns around. “Why do you look like that? The cloth? Are you all right?”
He feels a tiny hand on his forehead, the same way he does to William whenever he catches a cold or a fever frequently during the winter months. The cold does no favours for the blond boy, and it is their father’s advice to often keep his little brother indoors and warm, as though he is some sort of a prized animal meant to be spoiled and isolated.
Bred for perfection.
“I am all right.” Victor rests his head on William’s own head, the angle quite uncomfortable, Victor’s curls are partly on the eye of the smiling boy.
“Then what is that?” William points towards the already-disappearing ice in the cloth, “Why do you put it on your cheek? And what happened to your face?”
A gentle hum escapes Victor, pulling away to take the cloth from his face and revealing the angry red on his face. He takes a small piece of ice from the fabric and presses it against William’s nape, the smaller boy jumping up— his body reacting to the cold and shaking his limbs as a reflex to wade the crackle of synapses away. William giggles, loud and unabashedly, and Victor being Victor, huffs a laughter to join his carefree brother. “It is called ice.” The dark-haired boy informs his brother, observing him make the name familiar on his tongue. “So many questions for one small child. I’m afraid I can only muster enough energy to answer one.”
“Oh, well….” He watches William weigh his options, the habit of his eye moving skyward making Victor scoff. Like God Himself is handing him the script for his own decisions. “Can you please tell me what happened?”
“Good work.” Victor praises, ruffling the younger one’s hair with his wrinkled hand, “Are you sure you wish to hear of how I attained such….. punishment?”
“Yes!” The reply comes instantaneously, the eager desire to know written clear as day on his brother’s face as the older brother hums thoughtfully in quite an exaggerated way. But of course, he always relents. For this is William, the younger brother he has read to during nights he was kept safe inside their mother’s womb, the subject of Claire’s hums during the late nights she could not be whisked away to slumber.
“I wish for you to picture your brother, brave and true, face the sky and challenge it.” He opens his web of lies with a softer tone and a lower pitch, his hands rising to gesture towards the sky. ‘The lightning has made my brother unsettled the past night,’ I declared unto the cloud-filled skies, ‘I wish to control this lightning to douse away my brother’s fears!’” His voice booms across the bathroom tiles, earning a gasp from the young blond boy who has now twisted enough to fully face his older brother.
“And?” William asks, “Did Nature do that to you?” His voice is tinged with impatience and fear. He wishes to know now if the root of Victor’s pain is still him, because he cried and screamed that one late evening. It is written all over his youthful countenance, how he is so worried for his brother already.
“Ah,” Victor tuts him, “You should never rush a storyteller, William, lest the storyteller forgets.”
“I’m sorry.” William tucks his chin and looks up at him with his sky-hued eyes. His hair and his eyes reminding of Victor of the world outside where they are right now, how William himself is the personification of a summer’s day, yet ironically enough, was born during the bitter winds of winter.
“The clouds darkened.” Victor continues, his voice turning into a low-edge blade that hinted of danger and gloom. “A man with hair as pale as snow, and with eyes as harsh as winter appeared in the horizon, carrying with him a cane.” Another gasp erupts from William’s mouth. Victor carries on. “With his grey top hat and his robes outlined with the sun, moon and stars, he beckoned to me.” Victor mimics the same gesture Leopold did to him the first time he took the small pearl-white cane out of the standing desk, “‘You!’ The wizard almost yells, a finger pointed towards me when I refused to step forward.” He mimics Leopold’s voice a bit, especially in his throes of anger whenever he had a fight with Claire about her money, when she refused to sign the paper every time. “‘You dare control Nature? Take her away from me?!’ He slams his cane down, and before I know it,”
He claps his hands together, earning a jump from his younger brother. “He was right in front of me!”
“How did he do that?” William murmurs, his fingers curved and covering his hands, a phantom blanket covering him.
“I do not know either,” Victor shakes his head sullenly, “What he does is against all laws of science. But I do know this: he does not wish for me to control Nature.”
“But why?” Curiosity drips from those two words, William’s voice increasingly becoming nasally and high as he tries to put the pieces together in his head. His eyebrows are furrowed, eyes far away.
“People are selfish,” Victor’s theatrical voice drops, transforms itself into an aloof tone instead, yet forces himself to bring the drama once more, “And this wizard does not wish for other people to control Nature. So what he did, he summoned the Lightning.” Victor raises his hand and makes a krrr-krrssshhh and sffpoomm! sounds, motioning the lightning that struck his face and the thunder that accompanied it. “And when I look back, he was gone. See? The clouds still cover the fair welkin, only showing us the Sun in strips and glimpses.” His hands fall to the floor flamboyantly, shoulders sloped and sighing to drive his defeat home. “That is how I got this, and I was still fortunate to only have this wound.”
“That’s impossible.” William sounds uncertain, masking it with a small laugh. “There were no lightning or thunder a while ago.”
“Oh, where were you then?” Victor asks, dipping his head to the side to take a look at his brother.
“At the pantry,” William confesses, eyes cast downwards. “Asking for food.”
“With Mathilda?” Victor smiles, putting the cloth beside him and then resting his chin on William’s head, a hum on his throat before he wraps his arms around William. William sighs and rests his back on Victor’s chest, his heartbeat becoming a source of comfort for him.
“With Mathilda.” The golden boy concedes, closing his eyes to the sound of Victor’s soft hums. The world darkening, vowing himself to commit this to memory.
"Yes," Victor responds minutes after, seeing the slow and soft rise and fall of William's chest, "There was no lightning. But there was our Father."