have an odd authority, as if they knew us. Mary’s leg was taken off and given to me. My arm was removed and a machine clamped it onto Clare. Other body parts were exchanged. But even though our body parts were being exchanged I still felt different from them, and alone. There was no blood. How would Godwin recognize us? And how would Shelley know who Mary was, which one? When I tried to speak I didn’t know whose voice would come out of my mouth and this frightened me. There was a drowned woman too who was brought in and she, too, exchanged body parts with us. A man had cut the white dress off her and hung it in a closet. It was dry and unspoiled as if newly cleaned. I looked over at Clare or was it Mary? I was suddenly very hungry. But if I asked for some toast I would have to hear the voice from my mouth and so said nothing.
That’s all, Fanny. Nothing more left.
“A cold fire envelops me,” Lomonosov wrote. This is what I feel when Claire’s hand doesn’t come, sometimes for days, sometimes weeks.
I know she’s going to have a child, but nothing of where she is or what she’s feeling. Not who the father is or if she loves him. (Her hand’s left no trace of this.) Will she care for the child alone?
(And you who made me in secret, and abandoned me in secret.)
Fanny’s voice a shut place now. And Claire, where is she? Will she come back?
The revving of engines on the airstrip. Fighter planes practicing maneuvers overhead.
Fanny,
I’m thinking today of the plainness of things. The plain facts of things. The burnt corner of the note you left behind. Your small gold watch. Why do people have to turn such things into symbols? Make them mean? It’s strange enough to breathe and to have eyes. Just to look and to have eyes, and that we will be gone (as you’re already gone) and others will appear, and this cottage in Bath where I’ve come to have my baby will be here with its faint smell of wood-rot and wisteria. The cracks in this table, this frayed sleeve.
Pitcher. Chair. These objects I touch daily. The little weed that smells like mineral oil—I don’t know what it’s called.
Soot.
Loneliness.
Skinner Street. St. Pancras.
For weeks Shelley knew I was going to have a child, but neither he nor I told Mary (she has a baby of her own now, William). Now Mary knows and I think she’s not pleased with me. Shelley’s drawn up a new will, left money for me and the baby. On the way here from Geneva we stopped at Chamonix where Shelley wrote in Greek in the inn’s guest book “I am a lover of mankind, democrat, and atheist.” All that feels far away. Amid the thousand thousand lines of human life branching and intersecting in endless and infinite directions, I think now there’s not one that leads to safety.
Lately I remember those long hours at boarding school with my French books when I seemed both I and not I as I read in that other language and sometimes thought of home.
I don’t know how to think about what home is.
Awkwardness.
Breath.
The word “if.” My shoes in the corner. The word “despite.”
Claire writes to Fanny of objects she touches each day—a pitcher, a chair. What do I touch? Ice. Can opener. Boots. The Chinese stick I found at Archangel. Knapsack. Stray pages picked up here and there. In one of my books: “The mind’s aliment is wonder, search, ambiguity.”
Sometimes I see mountains and islands over the ice, then the light changes or the temperature drops and they’re not there. Yesterday I watched for an hour a white Moorish city of onion-domed temples and walled streets. Is my voice also a mirage that crumbles and drifts off?
My affections are few and therefore strong—the extreme solitude in which I live has concentrated them to one point and that point is my child. We sleep together and if you knew the extreme Happiness
So Claire has had her child and is happy…
But this cold has many turns in it.
Olaus Magnus made this list:
Cold burns the eyes of animals and stiffens their hairs.
Cold makes wolves fiercer.
Cold makes hares, foxes, and ermines change color.
Cold causes copper, glass, and earthenware vessels to break.
Cold causes damp clothes to stick to iron if they graze it.