hadn’t that disarranged my mind, set aflame the cold table in my mind?) Maybe I could send him North, as far away as I could manage. Maybe then my thoughts wouldn’t stab him. On the other hand, if I killed him maybe that would be best, I’d be rid of him completely, his voice and inexplicable silence finally dying. Or would he live on inside my mind? Might I even in some odd way miss him? In his notebooks Shelley drew firecracker trees, suns, mountains, huge X’s over the contents of entire pages. I thought of Shelley’s phrase, “the human love that lulls.” Wondered if that was something I could offer my creature—
William, North can be a verb I hadn’t known this—So one can say “gently northing” or “I northed until he couldn’t see me”—Or “northing and flaming, traveling far from where I meant to get to”—I said I wasn’t cold but I’m cold— I remember my trip to Norway, Sweden, Denmark. I sent letters back to Imlay, then turned them into a travel book for Joseph Johnson—It seemed I never knew what my life was without turning it into a book—In those frigid villages the women spinning, the men weaving, anything to keep out the cold—The same cruelty there as here. They had no slaves, but still the man in charge was allowed to beat the others—I northed, William, I flamed— “Cold as charity” Lamb wrote. Isn’t there a cold that drives itself almost out of itself, the way steel crystals bend and disarrange under pressure? That steel changes itself, William—All those days in Sweden a slow fever. In Denmark I looked out on stretches of cold land, imagined in a million or two years all of it covered with people—What will humans do when the earth is used up by our breathing, our construction, and can no longer feed us—In that time of my fever I saw a body burning in the snow—This really happened—There had been an execution. Women and children in pretty dresses walking slowly back, grown tired of watching—Where is my baby is she hungry?—I said I wasn’t cold but I’m cold— This north in me watches I’m northing away, trees flame in my brain, red leaves and yellow, their trunks and branches white ice.
Claire,
I would send him North. As far away as possible. And in that way I would protect him from myself and my unkindness (always I thought of my dead children). I’d try to set him free. But even as I thought this—those vast irregular plains of ice, bright masses drifting—it occurred to me the ice resembled my glass skin. So I wasn’t really sending him away after all, but exiling him to the site and memory of my own affliction—that vial-trap I’d felt, brittle bitterness and ruthless gleaming. I wanted him to know how it feels to live inside glass skin, have no access to the world but through glass skin. Ice/glass—that feeling of not knowing where one ends and ice begins—he would know how I suffered. But wouldn’t he have known this on his own? Wasn’t that a crucial aspect of his affliction (and at least, unlike him, I had a name), being forced to live always apart, never touching or being touched by (so I thought) another breathing thing? I’d hoped I’d softened … wanted to soften … but I was wrong. Nights as Shelley and I held each other, I’d feel that glass climbing back inside me, small branches, brittle twisted vines. Everything unsafe, on the edge of being atomized maybe. Yet Shelley’s hand on my shoulder was the simplest, most trustworthy thing. It’s not that I was waiting for anything particular, my hours were busy with writing, reading, and then, while they lived, caring for my children. Shelley’s hand on my shoulder—if I could place such a hand on the shoulder of the one who’d read and then left me … But all I had was North, the idea of sending him away, out of reach of my barbed thoughts, and even that, I saw, was flawed. Still, every now and then I’d try again to write him a letter:
Each time after one of my children dies I hear my voice as if originating from outside my body. It comes from an automaton who looks like me, opens and closes her eyes like me. When I open my mouth I hear metallic words come out: “cloudy today,” or “are you in the mood for potatoes or bread?”